These Hills Called Home | ONC 2024

[13] On the Right Side

    "Want anything? We have coffee."

    Though Nadine's office was larger than Jacob's, its cluttered layout conspired to conceal that fact behind a veil of organised chaos. Tall windows spanned its rear wall to bless the space with light, yet every captured sunbeam plummeted into labyrinths of cabinets, archive boxes, and extra office chairs. Below the sole ceiling light, a broad, sturdy desk shielded the office's resident behind a fence of miscellaneous equipment.

    Gemma's thighs and spine screamed in concert under the relentless assault of her provided seat's stone-solid cushioning. "Coffee would be great," she struggled to say through her dry mouth.

    "Actually, you're not allowed hot beverages while we're holding you," the man poised over her shoulder said. Though he had followed them into Nadine's office, Gemma had not caught his name on the way, nor did his cornflower blue shirt bear any obvious name label. "You know, for security reasons. Hot coffee's a nasty weapon in the wrong hands."

    "I can take this from here." Resting her elbows on her desk, Nadine eyeballed the man over her wall of defensive clutter. A dense silence filled the room, its slogging dominance eventually broken by Nadine's terse scoff. "That means leave, Baker."

    Visibly stuck between warring instincts, Baker wrung his hands together and stammered before speaking. "But the interview guidelines say –"

    "Get out." Nadine thumped the desk, yet the whip of her tongue delivered a far more potent strike. As the man scurried out into the connecting corridor, her face fell into her hands, clawing her vicious expression away to expose the tip of an exhausted iceberg. "I need a holiday."

    The pretence of procedural questioning dissolved with Nadine's weary sigh, joining the patchy dust that coated the room's surfaces. No longer under close observation, Gemma drew her hostile chair closer to the desk and cleared her throat. "Where are Vee and Nate? I didn't see where your people took them."

    A wry smile graced Nadine's bleary face, and she let her chair spin her around its juddering axle. "I'd guess your friends are back home already," she said as she paid a confirmatory look at her wristwatch. "Kids mess around on private property all the time. We can brush that off no problem. Assaulting our client, however, is a whole different issue."

    "What about your client murdering my brother, one of your co-workers?" Gemma's shout shook through her overworked sinews, wresting Nadine from her relaxed posture. In a breath, the surrounding furniture shrank from the limits of Gemma's vision to pile its bulk around Nadine's tense form. "Hell, with all the sketchy shit inside that house, the town should be paying you to lock the Coxes up. Haven't you been in there?"

    "No." Uttering the single world knocked the wind from Nadine's chest, and she wilted under her overhead lamp's intense glare. Though she held her head low, faint traces of a mournful look winged their way across the desk. "Brookbank Grange isn't a Cox property, so it's not Silverlake's concern. Even I was only there as Edmund's personal security, and that brat told me to wait outside."

    With a shake of her head, Gemma pushed down the sickness that billowed within her as she recalled the scene. "It's a mess, I'm telling you. Everything's been smashed up in the kitchen like there was a huge fight, and there's...blood all over the place," she said, and her feet dug into the ground to combat the airy lightness that threatened to carry her consciousness out of her body. "That house is where my brother was...where he died. I can feel it."

    Nadine straightened her posture, and the lines of her face hardened in the lamplight. "It's possible. We've both seen Jacob's body. He definitely didn't go quietly," she stated, swiping her dangling braids out of her eyes. "But he had no reason to be there. Like I said, we don't operate around that house."