The Strangest Forms (The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Book 1) by Gregory Ashe

Author:Gregory Ashe [Ashe, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodgkin & Blount
Published: 2023-02-23T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Holloway Holmes Throws Shade

Holmes insisted no one would be watching the cottage, and he was right. I parked under the carport and got out of the truck. Holmes caught up with me on the porch. He was shivering as I unlocked the front door, and a part of my brain wondered how it had been to hike thirteen or fourteen miles in shorts and a tank top and a fleece jacket, in the middle of the night, without a compass or a map, just hoping someone would pick you up and take you the rest of the way. Because a guy you’d met a few days before sent you one text.

When the door swung open, I said, “I’m sorry.”

Holmes furrowed his brow. “For what?”

“For being an asshole. Never mind, it’ll take too long to explain. Come on, you’ve got to be freezing.”

He trailed me into the house, looking around. I focused on the disaster zone that had previously been my home. The deputies had torn it apart—in some cases, literally. Drawers and cabinets hung open. Furniture had been moved away from the wall. Fingerprint powder covered everything, a fine black dust that I could already tell was going to be impossible to clean up completely. Muddy footprints tracked across the linoleum and carpet. In the kitchen, they’d dumped out the silverware, the Krusteaz, Mom’s cookbooks, spatulas and turners and those weird silicone brushes we never used for anything—all of it piled in the middle of the floor. In the living room, they’d turned Dad’s recliner on its side and cut away the dust cover. In case he’d been hiding something, I guessed. And the bitter part of it was that they hadn’t been wrong; they’d found the zannies after all.

Maybe a half a minute went by before I trusted my voice enough to say, “Sorry it’s a bit of a mess; I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“You can file a complaint,” Holmes said. “Possibly a lawsuit. This is not how an appropriate search is conducted, and it suggests a degree of personal animosity that might be actionable.”

I nodded along with his words, my head on a string. I wasn’t really hearing anything. Moving deeper into the house, I continued to inspect the damage. The bathroom was actually ok—they’d tossed everything from the sink and medicine cabinet into the tub, but at least they hadn’t taken the toilet as evidence. Dad’s room looked like a tornado had gone through it. I stared at the chaos from where I stood in the hall, and then I shut the door. I’d deal with it later.

My room was almost as bad. My desk was upside down, and they’d staved in the bottoms of two of the drawers and broken one of the legs. Most of my clothes had already been on the floor, but now they were everywhere. My mattress and box spring were standing against the wall, both of them cut open—the box spring’s dust cover gone, and the mattress slit open on one side.

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