The Last Orphan
Chapter 50

Evan drove to the Seabrooks’ house in the long-suffering Hertz Buick Regal he’d left in the free parking lot at Hanscom Field.

At the top of the walkway, he took a moment to admire the stolid Colonial. It looked like a house was supposed to look, a good safe place to grow a family.

Candy answered the door before he could ring. Her long blond hair was straightened and worn up in a twist skewered by a single black-lacquered chopstick. A bustier showed off her chest and a slice of bare stomach. The back dipped low at the hem, covering her scars. Glazed lipstick coated her plush lips, a shimmer of berry and bronze.

“OxiClean,” she said.

“What?”

“To get b***d out of carpet.”

She breezed past him, smelling of sweetness and sunlight, and Evan wondered just how in hell she’d managed to put herself together like that within hours of disposing of a corpse. She was halfway to his car when he caught up.

“Still need me to keep an eye on the safe house?” She threw back the line over her shoulder.

“Just for a bit.”

“Where will you be?”

“Figuring out my next move.”

Evan unlocked the car and held the passenger door for her. She paused before getting in, their faces close. “Will it involve me?”

“Depends how violent it gets.”

She poured herself into the car, her lashes dipping slyly. She was a hard woman to read—the hardest—but Evan could have sworn she seemed flattered.

The Seabrooks’ safe house that Joey had arranged was a historic brownstone in Jamaica Plain. Evan stood in full view of the call-box camera, Candy behind him. They were buzzed in from a room to the interior, the three Seabrooks staying out of the foyer as instructed. Candy held back, assessing the locks on the front windows.

Evan came around the corner to replace Ruby, Mason, and Deborah perched nervously on stools around a breakfast-bar extension of the ugly tiled kitchen counter. Mason was dressed for the day, but Deborah still wore her bathrobe and slippers and Ruby had on a too-big Wellesley High Baseball sweatshirt. Since Evan had instructed them to leave their phones at their house, he’d provided them a burner, which rested on the counter before them. The shelves were bare, the place spartan, utilitarian, ready for quick turnovers. A fine enough space, but certainly not a home. The Seabrooks looked as temporary as the decorative glass flour and sugar canisters sitting empty beneath a built-in microwave.

“Is everything all right?” Deborah asked.

“Yes,” Evan said. “I’m still looking into things. I’m going to have someone watch over you until it’s done.”

Candy stepped into view, h**s on tilt, left leg knee-locked and kicked to the side. At the sight of her, all three Seabrooks rose, their faces frozen in something like astonishment.

Candy surveyed the windows and rear door, barely taking note of the family.

Striding past them, she tapped at Deborah’s bathrobe pocket, withdrew the hidden pack of Glamour Super Slim Amber 100s, and snicked up a single stick with a flick of her wrist. She tweaked a knob on the stovetop, bent to the flame, and lit up. As she straightened back up, she checked the cam lock on the window over the sink, her expression making clear it was not to her liking. She swiped an index finger across her front teeth to check for smeared lipstick, then turned to face the Seabrooks, one arm crossed at her hourglass waist, the opposing elbow resting upon it, cigarette hand flared to the side of her cheek.

The Seabrooks still had not moved. Or spoken.

“You’ll be fine,” Evan said. “Feed her red meat and stay out of her way.”

“I love her,” Ruby said breathlessly. “I want to be her.”

“Oh, honey …” Candy blew a smoke ring, shot another smaller one through it. With a slender cardinal-red fingernail, she dimpled the top of the second ring as it floated forward, turning it into a heart an instant before it dissipated gracefully on the space between Ruby’s eyes.

Ruby looked like she might die in a stroke of ecstatic rapture.

Candy smiled. “Don’t even try.”