Chapter 31: Greenwich
The email notification pinged at 6:47 AM.
I'd been monitoring Peach's inbox through the night, half-awake on my couch, waiting for confirmation of her LA flight details. Instead, I got something that made my stomach drop.
From: Peach Salinger To: Helena Mansfield Subject: Change of plans
H—
Taking a detour before LA. Going to the Greenwich house for the weekend. Need to clear my head, organize my thoughts. Can't walk into a meeting with Candace Stone scattered and emotional.
Family estate, just me, no staff this time of year. Will leave Friday, back Monday, then straight to LAX.
If you don't hear from me by Tuesday, something went wrong.
P
I read the email three times, each pass making the situation worse.
Greenwich. The Salinger family estate. Isolated. No staff. Solo weekend in a property that probably sat on acres of private land with no neighbors in shouting distance.
Peach thought she was giving herself space to prepare. What she was actually doing was creating the perfect hunting ground.
I pulled up everything I could find on the Greenwich property.
The Salinger estate dated back to the 1920s—old money, old architecture, old traditions. Photos from real estate listings of similar properties showed the type: stone walls, long driveways, mature trees blocking sightlines from any road. The kind of place designed for privacy.
Privacy meant no witnesses. Privacy meant response times measured in tens of minutes instead of seconds. Privacy meant Joe could take his time.
My surveillance feed on Joe's online activity confirmed my fears within hours.
He'd searched Greenwich train schedules. Greenwich property records. Weather forecasts for coastal Connecticut this weekend. His browser history read like a planning document—methodical, organized, the digital footprint of someone preparing for a specific operation.
The Detection flared cold even through the secondhand observation. Joe wasn't researching out of curiosity. He was researching because he'd decided Peach was dying this weekend.
I had options. None of them were good.
Option one: Warn Peach directly. Tell her not to go, tell her Joe was planning something, tell her the danger was real and immediate. The problem was credibility. I'd already warned her once, vaguely. Escalating to "don't go to your family home because your friend's boyfriend might murder you there" would sound insane. She might dismiss me entirely, and I'd lose any ability to influence the situation.
Option two: Call the police. Report suspicious activity, try to get someone to check on the property. But suspicious activity by who? I had no evidence Joe was planning anything. Browser history wasn't a crime. Traveling to Connecticut wasn't a crime. The cops would take a statement and do nothing.
Option three: Prevent the trip somehow. Manufacture an emergency that kept Peach in the city. But emergencies could be postponed. And anything urgent enough to change her plans might also alert Joe that something was wrong.
Option four: Follow them both. Be there when it happened. Intervene if necessary.
The fourth option was the only one that gave me any control.
I packed a bag while the morning light strengthened outside my window.
Burner phone, fully charged. Cash—three hundred in small bills, enough for contingencies. Protein bars and bottled water. Dark clothing, layers for cold nights. A small flashlight. The binoculars I'd been using for surveillance.
The bag felt too light for what I was planning. Too improvised, too amateur.
You're not a professional, I reminded myself. You're a transmigrator in a dead man's body, trying to stop a killer with powers that barely work.
But I was what Peach had. The alternative was leaving her alone with Joe in an isolated location, and that wasn't an alternative at all.
I checked the train schedule to Greenwich. Multiple options from Grand Central. I'd leave Friday morning, arrive before Peach, establish position before Joe even knew the weekend had started.
The plan was thin. The execution would be improvised. Everything could go wrong.
But everything going wrong was still better than doing nothing and knowing exactly how it would end.
Thursday passed in tense preparation.
I maintained my normal patterns enough to avoid suspicion—attended the workshop, talked to Beck, kept my cover intact. But my mind was already in Connecticut, already running scenarios, already mapping the Salinger estate from satellite imagery and real estate photos.
Beck noticed something was off.
"You seem distracted," she said at The Printer's Devil, nursing her usual wine. "Everything okay?"
"Just a thing with my writing," I lied. "Stuck on a project. Sometimes the only solution is to get away from it for a bit."
"Take a trip. That's what I do when I'm blocked. Change of scenery helps."
"Yeah. Maybe this weekend."
She smiled, unaware that I was planning to spend that weekend in the woods outside her best friend's family estate, watching for the man she loved to show up with murder in mind.
The layers of deception were getting hard to track.
Friday morning, I left for Grand Central.
The train to Greenwich took just over an hour—close enough to New York for weekend retreats, far enough to feel like another world. I watched the scenery transition from urban density to suburban sprawl to something approaching rural, the trees growing thicker, the properties growing larger, the distance between houses growing wider.
Isolation had its own aesthetic. The wealthy paid premium prices for the privilege of not seeing their neighbors.
At the Greenwich station, I rented a car from a local agency. Cash deposit, fake name from a prepared ID the original Fin Coulson had kept in a drawer for reasons I didn't want to examine. The clerk didn't ask questions.
The drive to the Salinger estate took twenty minutes through winding roads lined with stone walls and autumn-bare trees. I passed the property without stopping—just another car on a country road—and noted the details.
Long driveway. Iron gates, currently open. Stone house visible through the trees, three stories, traditional New England architecture. No visible security cameras, no guard house, no signs of staff presence.
Isolated. Private. Perfect.
I continued past, found a turnaround a half-mile down the road, and drove back to look for a surveillance position.
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