The Inheritances Game (Jameson Hawthorne)

After Math

I sat on the couch stunned from everything that happened, Avery almost got shot.

"We're so close now," Jameson murmured from next to me. "I can feel it." There was an energy in his voice, like the buzzing of a neon light. "Someone obviously didn't want us looking at that tree."

"You think someone shot at Avery because of a tree?" I asked, the words getting caught in my throat. "Not, per say, the fortune Avery inherited that people would like to get their hands on?"

"Don't think about that," Jameson whispered, "Think about Toby's name carved into that tree. Infinity carved into the bridge." I turned to him, my brain finally starting up again. "What if what the puzzle is trying to tell us is that my uncle isn't dead?" He is insane was all I could think.

"Oren just pulled a chunk of wood out of Avery" I said, my voice low, "and if things had worked out a little differently, he could have been pulling out a bullet." I said looking to him. "And all you can think about is the puzzle" I looked to the door to see Rebecca entering the room.

"Cal! This is great! Imagine what my grandfather is trying to tell us!"

Mrs. Laughlin rushed over to her and whispered something before Rebecca walked into the room Avery had gone into not moments before. I looked at Rebecca's boots they were covered in mud, where had she been? I turned back to Jameson, "is that puzzle all you can think about!"

"This is huge. My uncle could be alive, someone doesn't want us to know."

"Jameson! Avery is in the bathroom cleaning off blood, think of something other than the puzzle for now!" I turned away from him, leaning back on the couch.

Avery's Pov

"My grandmother sent me to check on you." Rebecca's voice was soft and hesitant.

"I'm okay," I said, and I almost meant it. I had to be okay.

"Gran said you were shot." Rebecca stayed in the doorway, like she was afraid to come any closer.

"Shot at," I clarified.

"I'm glad," Rebecca said, and then she looked mortified. "I mean, that you weren't shot. It's good, right, getting shot at instead of shot?" Her gaze darted nervously from me toward the twin beds, the quilts.

"Emily would have told you to simplify and say that you were shot." Rebecca sounded surer of herself telling me what Emily would have said than trying to summon an appropriate response herself. "There was a bullet. You were wounded. Emily would have said you were entitled to a little melodrama." I was entitled to look at everyone like they were a suspect. I was entitled to an adrenaline-fueled lapse in judgment. And maybe I was entitled, just this once, to push for answers.

"You and Emily shared this room?" I said. That was obvious now, when I looked at the twin beds. When Rebecca and Emily came to visit their grandparents, they stayed here. "Was purple your favorite color as a kid or hers?"

"Hers," Rebecca said. She gave me a very small shrug. "She used to tell me that my favorite color was purple, too." In the picture I'd seen of the two of them, Emily had been looking directly at the camera, dead center; Rebecca had been on the fringes, looking away. "I feel like I should warn you." Rebecca wasn't even facing me anymore. She walked over to one of the beds.

"Warn me about what?" I asked, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I registered the mud on her boots—and the fact that she'd been on the premises, but not with her grandparents, when I'd been shot at. Just because she doesn't feel like a threat doesn't mean she isn't one. But when Rebecca started talking again, it wasn't about the shooting. "I'm supposed to say that my sister was wonderful." She acted like that wasn't a change of subject, like Emily was what she was warning me about. "And she was, when she wanted to be. Her smile was contagious. Her laugh was worse, and when she said something was a good idea, people believed her. She was good to me, almost all the time." Rebecca met my gaze, head on. "But she wasn't nearly as good to those boys." Boys, plural.