Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 92668 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92668 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
I’d paid for two hours of parking and since parking cost at least an ovary these days, I walked down to the beach to eat my lunch and think over how and when I should approach Steph.
Thanks to my sleuthing, I knew her address, and I hoped it wouldn’t be as weird if I showed up there as it was yesterday when I arrived at Noah’s.
Granted, I was going to accuse her of murder, so it couldn’t not be weird.
Sigh.
I was a mess.
Chances are she’d be out during the day, so maybe going over this evening was a better idea. I didn’t want to drive all the way to her house only for her to not be there, so that gave me the rest of the afternoon to get my stuff done.
I formulated my plan as I ate.
Eat.
Find a surveyor for the bed and breakfast.
Get back to cleaning.
Then, later on, head over to Steph’s.
My plan for the day went off without a hitch. After trying and failing to find a surveyor, I’d gone into the law firm and asked the receptionist if she knew where I could start. She’d recognised me from the reading of Grandpa’s will and happily handed over the number of two separate conveyancing companies in the area. I’d booked them both since I figured two opinions were better than one.
That, and I had no idea what I was doing. As far as I was concerned, the more information I had, the better.
I’d spent the rest of the afternoon at the bed and breakfast getting stuck into the gardening side of things. The sign was now free of ivy and other climbing weeds that were going to quickly become the bane of my existence, and I’d managed to cut a good portion of the grass before the lawn mower had run out of petrol.
I had petrol.
Dad just hadn’t shown me how to fill it, and I was a bit scared to do that on my own, if I was honest. The mower was pretty big and heavy, and I didn’t want to break it, so I’d rolled it into the shed he’d found several days ago and left it there for later.
It was tomorrow’s problem now.
It was amazing how much better the bed and breakfast looked with a bit of minor TLC on the outside. Today was the first time I felt like I’d really made some progress, and the physical aspect of being outside and working hard had done wonders for my emotional state, too.
I felt so much better, and that was a little secret I was going to keep to myself. If I told my parents that, I’d have to endure the rest of my life with them saying, “I told you so.”
No, thank you.
It was dinnertime, which meant it was time for me to get to the bottom of my theory.
Did I think Steph would admit to killing Declan? No, probably not, even if she was guilty.
Was I going to ask anyway?
Yes.
Yes, I was.
I pulled her address up on my phone and set the Google Maps GPS for that location, then put it in the centre console as I headed out in that direction. The woman in the phone told me which direction to turn, and I followed all her instructions. They took me all the way through Fox Point, up onto the residential part of town on the cliffs, and beyond the main estates.
The houses along the winding coastal road slowly got bigger the further away from town I went. The bigger they were, the more space they had between… I don’t know, groupings of properties, right until the voice in my phone told me to take the next left, which I did. This road led me down to a small, exclusive-looking estate of very large houses, and panic fluttered through me.
Was this gated?
Could I even get in?
I got my answer quickly. No, it wasn’t gated, and yes, I could get in.
Identifying the house was going to be a lot harder than it was last night with Noah’s. Thankfully, the houses all looked slightly different, and I knew that the Tierney property had a triple garage.
With a little hope that it’d be the only one, I slowly drove through the estate, trying not to arouse suspicion. My car didn’t exactly fit here—anyone who could afford these houses was not driving a ten-year-old Ford Focus with a questionable knock over the front left wheel.
I’d get it in the garage eventually.
Probably when the MOT was due. Or it broke down. Whichever one came first.
My loop around the estate was a lucky one. Only one house had three garage doors that I could see, so I was going to take a punt on that being Steph’s house.
I pulled up outside the house, slotting in against the kerb. I cancelled the navigation on my phone and put it in my bag, then tossed my keys in after I was out of my car and had locked it.