In Plain View

By Naomi Kelsey

She went to bed with an ex…and woke up to a murder.

Professor Thea Vance is running from a broken heart…and straight into the arms of her college boyfriend, it turns out. And he's got a tantalizing job offer for her to go with some sizzling makeup sex.

But what's he doing here in her hideaway? Turns out this sleepy bedroom community is hiding scandals and secrets--some of which someone will kill to keep buried.

The clues take Thea through the halls of academia to mysterious secret societies, into the world of virtual reality…and finally to the dangerous truth.

Has she risked her heart…and her life?

One-click this heart-pounding dark academia thriller for a ride you won't soon forget!

Note to the reader: this book was previously published as "Again".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naomi Kelsey
• Release date: Jan 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9798215356067

Book preview

Chapter 1

The night was crisp and cold, with clouds scudding across the moon, a perfect night for a ghost tour.

Davit was gone. He wasn’t coming back from the store with coffee and rolls. He wasn’t staying up late to play pool and drink a little recklessly with her and fall into bed to talk with lazy thick voices until they drifted off to sleep, limbs draped over each other. He wasn’t rubbing her leg with his foot as he woke up, or coming up behind her as she dressed, kissing her nape and smiling at her in the mirror.

Completely, totally and permanently gone. Thea had made sure of that when his I need a few days to think this over had turned into months of her not returning his calls or emails and freezing him out. Over a job, of all things. The two-body problem of academia taking one of its ugliest forms: two bodies, one job. Two lovers, one job.

One day, much too long after Davit left, the beautiful hammered-silver and raw-diamond ring that caught the light just so, slipped off Thea’s finger and onto the counter. And she let it sit there, collecting dust. She had tried to find another home for it, but every time she tried, she found her hands trembled too much and she set the ring back down, telling herself she’d just do it another day.

Morning, a few months after that day, in the fragile autumn light of Richard’s immaculate chef’s kitchen, Thea sipped her coffee and brooded about Davit. Across the table, Richard, her closest friend from college, attended to his eggs briefly and then consulted the local throwaway weekly paper.

You need to get out. Richard looked at her from under his brow, a signature look. You look like hell, lovie. All this moping over Davit isn’t doing you any favors, babe, he said.

Richard, god. I know. Don’t rub it in. Thea sipped her coffee and attempted a smile.

I came here to be by myself, not to socialize. Come on. Thea gave him what she hoped was a stifling look, which he roundly ignored.

Oh, okay. We’re going to this. Tonight at 8, he said.

He turned the paper around to face Thea and indicated an ad for a ghost tour of the town’s historical mansions and the nearby graveyard.

Well, I give you that it’s a good fit for my mood. She cracked.

Thea, look. I will never push you to ‘get over it’. That’s the worst, believe me I know that. It just hurts me to see you so upset. Let me take your mind off things for one night. He begged.

Thea surrendered and nodded, and Richard sat back in his chair with a satisfied grin.

It’s been six months. How many invites to bucolic, autumnal, pastoral upstate am I going to issue before you say yes? Because the next one is going to come with a straight jacket and some little men in white coats! Richard had asked her after a particularly fragmented conversation a few weeks before, where Thea spent most of the call alternately sipping vodka straight from the bottle and crying.

I realize there’s not much to do out here, but that’s part of the charm. New York City means Davit, and you need to move on, not scuttle around bars and coffee shops and conferences like someone from a bad spy movie trying to avoid your ex. You can finally get over him in a place that doesn’t smack you in the face with reminders of what could have been and should have been. He continued.

Richard was part of a venture capital investment group that had struck it rich with several wise investments and his country house, The Farm, was tucked in an upstate New York town called Brooks.

Richard, I can’t just leave town and work, Thea said.

You can. The job that you’re not going to take because it cost you your relationship. That job? Richard asked sharply.

Look, he softened his tone, I’m between boyfriends, like always, and I could use a shoulder to cry on and someone to make bad choices with. Come to Brooks, come to The Farm. We’ll take care of each other.

Now, just a few days before Halloween, as Thea reached for her keys to lock up, Richard caught her shoulders and looked into her face directly.

You can bail. Maybe a ghost tour isn’t the right vibe for someone who’s barely recovered from a really hairy breakup-thing. He was in a rare serious mood.

Richard! I’m dressed, with my keys in my hand! The time to offer the life vest of bailage was two hours ago. And as you pointed out recently, it’s been six months. Thea smiled.

Okay. Just checking, he said.

He wiggled a flask into the back pocket of his fashionably tight jeans and wound his arm around her waist.

Come on, beautiful. Richard grinned. It was his habit to drape his body over, around, and on top of his friends’, without giving it any thought, but tonight it made Thea twitch just a little. It hurt to have someone other than Davit touch her with affection. It also hurt to realize that.

The two headed over to Main Street, three blocks away. On the way there, Richard kept up a light, and slightly scurrilous patter of outrageous client stories, mostly involving the neon-lit highways of Tokyo and its environs.

Brooks was a patent-medicine-fortune-built shell of a town in just-bearable commuting distance from the nearby small liberal arts college, Magdalena. About 100 years ago, elegant Victorian and Edwardian mansions lined the main streets, and at the half century mark, a group of artists had used it a case study for modernism, and built a town hall, library, church and a handful of houses in a clean, modern, artistic style that contrasted nicely with the fringe of slightly shabby houses and mansions just then beginning to fall into decay.

Now the fresh, modern buildings that had once looked so crisp and hopeful seemed like relics of another era, and almost all of the once-grand mansions were either completely tumbledown or converted to apartments or Law Offices. The real ghost was the town itself.

The first house was Asbury Place, a dignified pile that served as the parsonage for the huge, graceful Protestant Church where anybody who was anybody in 1902 had attended services.

Thea drifted behind the group, running her hand along the dado, and letting her mind wander. She took in the beautiful, faded rugs, the second-rate paintings, the towering plants in the corner, the lights reflected in the mullioned windows.

An upstairs group was coming down the kitchen stairs, with a gabble of talk as they exited the back door to continue the tour with Pennsylvania Street Commons, a supposedly haunted printing press and book bindery a few hundred feet down the street.

She lingered, waiting for Richard to finish the tour, and as she did so, she saw a flash of silver-gilt hair and the hint of a tall, slim body just sliding out the back door. She held her body very still and took a deep breath. It could not be him.

Richard appeared, smelling a little of mint and bourbon, and slung his arm around her shoulders to pull her in so he could kiss her forehead.

Did I mention you look divine with that hair cut? He smiled, his large deep blue eyes sparkling with happiness and drink.

Only about 50 times since you got here. Thea was distracted by what she thought she saw, but she firmly put it out of her mind.

At Penn Commons, as it was called by locals, there were three stories, with a balcony running the length of the second story, allowing the view of the printing floor. Thea scanned the upper stories.

At the far end, lit and hidden by the shadows of the balcony and the moldings, was the elegant, unmistakable figure of Roman Masters. He was most recognizable by his otherworldly hair—hair she knew to be pale blond by nature and heightened to a platinum snow-white by art.

He was wearing jeans and a button down white shirt, with a plaid barn jacket over this, and a black wool scarf, and each single item looked as if it were tailor made for him, the fit was so perfect and the materials so fine. Roman always did have a way of wearing his clothes that made everyone around him look like they picked up worn laundry off the floor and threw it on.

Thea grabbed Richard’s arm and he wobbled off his feet for a second.

Hey! What? Richard had been people watching and looking for potential networking contacts; he was never not working.

Don’t look. But I think I saw Roman, she said.

WHAT? Richard was the master of the whisper-scream and he employed it expertly here. A few members of the tour group turned around and glared.

As you can SEE… the tour guide raised her voice and Thea put her hand on Richard’s arm, holding the two back a few paces.

Up on the second floor. Last door. She whispered to Richard.

Richard obediently looked and of course there was nothing. He gave Thea a deeply pitying look.

It was clear he assumed that in her grief addled state over Davit, she was conjuring up a different, and much friendlier, ex-lover—Roman.

He’s not there NOW. He’s with that other group! Thea hissed as their group filed into a room-sized safe riddled with bullet holes.

Tell me in a second. Richard said.

Richard had spotted the head of Owl Capital and was now in full twinkle mode, as he shouldered his way through the crowd to get to his next victim. Apart from being trapped on a slowly sinking pleasure cruise, or a stalled elevator, this was one of the most ideal ways to casually get to know a potential client. Oh, hi, just happened to be in this tiny little space next to you, nowhere to go, how about that?

Thea, who had an intense dislike for small contained spaces, stayed out of the safe, and lounged in the doorway, hoping to catch a glimpse of Roman and confirm that it was indeed him.

Last she knew he was in Dubai, and before that Korea, so what on earth was he doing in Brooks? Sure enough, as the other group left the building, Thea saw just a slice of him—he was in front of a family group that included what appeared to be a Viking warrior, his wench, and their extremely hardy children so it was hard to see him. Roman was tall but had the frame of a greyhound and Thea felt a flash of anger mixed with longing as she remembered how she would tease him. You can turn to the side and just disappear.

Roman came into her life years ago and had established himself as a kind of mold from which all other men and lovers would be judged. They’d met when he applied to live in her communal house. About two minutes into the interview, she knew she had to get him into the house. Where she could work on him—although in a stroke of grace it turned out she didn’t need to work on him at all. This silver spun creature actually liked her, just for who she was.

The silver spun creature did have feet of clay, however. He had a way of never really ending things, just sort of drifting away slowly, leaving the other party to go crazier and crazier analyzing their last few conversations, picking over the scraps of talk to try to figure out what went wrong, berating themselves for having so carelessly laid aside such a lovely thing.

It wasn’t them. It was him.

Roman came from what older novels would call genteel poverty; his family had once been part of a rarified group of society luminaries, nestled easily among names like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. Several generations of wastrels, bad marriages, and worse investments had left only the gilded paint on what used to be a solid-gold fortune. There was just enough money to launch Roman to college and a little bit leftover, which Roman tucked away for a rainy day, determined to make every day sunny.

He was careful, guarded, and his ease, Thea discovered, was only the thinnest veneer over a very conservative, cautious man. He always had an angle, and an unkind estimation of his character might conclude that he used people as much as he gave back to them. He did give—throwaway smiles and kisses, his extraordinary body, what felt like love. But in the end, there was something…missing. Something he kept in the safe next to that little pile of family cash that he would never spend.

After a year of being together, or what Thea thought was together, Roman moved out one night and Thea spent three increasingly frantic days trying to track him down before discovering through friends that he’d moved to San Francisco to pursue an irresistible internship opportunity with a start-up.

Thea was nobody’s fool, and she decided that her dignity was worth more than Roman’s love, which was clearly not up for grabs anyway. She closed the door in her mind firmly and set him aside, lesson learned.

What lesson, though?

Davit had been a dark copy of Roman. Beautiful and from money, although in Davit’s case considerably more and more recently acquired. Thea kept falling in love with men who kept disappearing.

The group made their way to the next stop on the ghost walk, which was a pub. The pub in question was a little café and bar, a narrow space with subway tiled floors, one long counter and a few two-top tables along the far wall which was about 10 feet away from the bar. The bar was backed with a mirror, and the facing wall was painted black, for a rather disorienting effect, it was like stepping into a bar that had been sheared in half and then put back together the wrong way. It was also jammed—clearly all the regulars were there, and at least two other tour groups.

Thea and Richard squeezed in and made their way to the far end of the bar, from which they could see the entire crowd, and Thea saw that Roman wasn’t there. So maybe she was imagining things.

She brushed the curly, wild hair back from her face and gave her reflection in the mirror a grimace. The short haircut she’d gotten recently was flattering, but she had unmistakable dark circles under her light eyes, and her face was very pale. Thank goodness she had dashed on some red lipstick on her way out the door—she could almost pass as a hip academic type who deliberately went for the West Village circa 1957 look.

As she turned, she saw Roman again, this time, only a few people away from her, ordering an Old Fashioned. He looked directly at her in the mirror and gave her a half smile, almost as if he didn’t recognize her but was being polite to a stranger, which was both baffling and infuriating.

Thea set her jaw and tried to figure out what to do, and nudged Richard hard. Richard turned and spotted Roman, and his eyes widened, and he set down his drink roughly, clearly about to give Roman a piece of his mind.

Thea grabbed Richard’s arm and shook her head. Roman had turned away and Thea wanted to think about what to do before doing it. For once.

Roman finished his Old Fashioned in two slow, precise swallows and set it down, then, as graceful as a big cat, he slipped out of the café and onto the street, where he leaned against the building, clearly waiting for the group to catch up.

Thea spoke softly into Richard’s ear, I’m going out there.

Thea wiggled her way across the room and out the door. Roman was still there, outside.

I was waiting for you. Roman spoke first.

He had a low, gravelly voice which contrasted startlingly with his fair hair and angelic appearance, making him a delicious mix of saint and sinner.

Thea reverted to the thing that had served her well in unknown or risky situations: silence. She gave him a rather hard look, and, annoyingly, this seemed to only increase his interest.

I was hoping I would see you here. Roman purred.

Here I am, she said softly.

She let her gaze linger on his face, he was truly a beautiful creature.

He stepped forward and reached his hand out, palm slightly down. Before she could think about it, she let him take her hand and pull her closer. She could smell the light citrus and deeper salt smell of his skin, and as soon as he touched her, a rush of memories came to her that was unsettling and welcome at the same time.

I missed you. Roman let his