“You don’t know anything about him!” Lily’s cheeks flushed with heat, and she told herself to calm down. Raven had been through hell. His mom had been shot in cold blood and a strange woman had moved into his house, torturing him in a way he still couldn’t explain. He had good reason to be distrustful of strangers. “After we’ve laid my mother to rest, I’ll have you and your dad over, okay? You can both meet him, and make sure I’m being taken care of. Right now, we need to find my mother’s killer.”

“She’s right,” Jack said, touching Raven’s arm. “Why don’t you come over to my house and we can talk in private? Go over what we’ve learned?”

Here, Jack’s gaze flicked to Lily, and Lily heard everything she wasn’t saying. They both had files to go over. Suspects to discover. And Lily in particular had one file to dispose of, especially now that Raven was getting suspicious of her dad.

She pulled out her phone and texted her dad rather than returning to the house: Need to go back to Raven’s for a bit. Forgot something. See you at dinner? She knew if she went back inside the house, he would pull her into his arms again and start crying, and she’d have to explain things she didn’t know how to explain.

This was better.

“Let me know if you think of anything important,” Lily said, as Raven and Jack headed off the grounds, Jack’s fingers still brushing Raven’s arm. His gaze still darting to the house. “We need to clear Belle’s name, and that means giving the police another suspect. A better suspect.”

She let the comment hang. It sounded perfectly innocent, but clearly, Jack sensed the threat underneath. Her head snapped toward Lily, and they held each other’s eyes for a minute.

Then Jack turned away, wrapping an arm around Raven’s shoulder.

It took a couple of minutes for them to reach the end of the street, where Raven had parked his father’s car. Once they’d driven off, Lily looped around the house, retrieving her bike. She guided it to the sidewalk. It wasn’t until she’d swung onto the seat that she remembered she was still holding the rusty gardening shears. She slid them into her purse, then set the purse in the bike’s basket.

She had a feeling she would need them.

Three hours later, Lily was pacing in her bedroom, angry enough to slide those dull, rusted shears over someone’s skin. She should’ve looked for her father’s file the second she’d gotten home. Instead, she’d wasted the afternoon poring over the files Jack had copied at her mother’s office. She’d found nothing suspicious, until she’d gone to retrieve Andrew Kane’s file from her bedside table.