Unraveled

by Jennifer Estep

  She tossed the note back onto the table and opened her mouth, but I held my finger up to my lips in warning, and Bria bit back the rest of her snarky words.

  “Well, then,” I said, “let’s get settled and see if Roxy left us any other . . . surprises.”

  The others nodded, picking up on my real meaning, and we all went to work, discreetly checking our respective suitcases and suites for hidden cameras, listening devices, and rune traps. Just in case Roxy had coated something with her Fire magic to try to kill us in our rooms.

  “Anything?” Owen asked about ten minutes later.

  I peered a final time into the air vent that was set low in the wall and got to my feet. “Nope. We’re good.”

  We stepped through the open connecting doors back into Finn and Bria’s suite. The two of them were sitting on one of the couches in the living room, typing away on their laptops on the coffee table in front of them.

  “Any creepy crawly things in here?” I asked.

  Finn shook his head. “No cameras or listening devices. The room’s clean.”

  “So is ours,” I said. “Roxy knows that the jewels aren’t in here, so she didn’t bother to bug our rooms. She must have just told her people to watch us when we’re out in the hotel and theme park.”

  Bria hit some more keys on her laptop. “Did you know that the resort has its own webpage devoted to the treasure hunt? There’s even a place where people can post about all the places they’ve looked in the theme park. There are hundreds of comments here and just as many pictures.”

  Finn shook his head again. “Forget about the theme park. Deirdre wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like that. More important, she wouldn’t have stashed those jewels anywhere she couldn’t get her hands on them in a matter of minutes.”

  Owen crossed his arms over his chest. “You think they’re here in the hotel somewhere?”

  Finn nodded, never taking his eyes off his laptop screen. “They have to be.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, wouldn’t Deirdre have kept them in her own suite?” Owen said.

  “And no doubt that’s the first place Roxy and Brody searched and came up empty,” I said. “But we haven’t looked there yet. Maybe we’ll find something they missed.”

  “Which is why I’m pulling up the hotel schematics right now,” Finn said. “I want to make sure that Deirdre didn’t have any false walls added to her suite or anywhere else in the hotel.”

  This suite had its own printer, and Finn asked Owen to help him hook his laptop up to it. Bria kept surfing, scribbling down all the places that folks had already looked for the jewels, concentrating on the hotel locations.

  While the others worked, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and called Silvio. He answered on the second ring. In the background, I could hear him typing away as fast and furiously as ever, even though I had no clue as to what he could be working on since I wasn’t even in Ashland right now.

  “I thought that you were going to have a nice, relaxing weekend while I was gone.”

  “And I thought that you were going to do the same. In trouble already?” Silvio countered in a dry, knowing voice.

  “Is that any way to talk to your boss?”

  “It certainly is when that boss is you. What’s going on?”

  I huffed at his tone, but I told him everything that had happened, including our search for Sweet Sally Sue’s jewels.

  “So let me get this straight,” Silvio said when I finished. “You’ve only been at the resort for, what, three hours now? And you’ve already got people trying to kidnap and kill you? I think that’s a new record even for you, Gin.”

  “Roxy and Brody want to torture and murder us after we find the gems,” I corrected. “It doesn’t make any sense for them to kill us before then.”

  For a moment, Silvio stopped typing, and there was complete silence. “Your optimism never ceases to amaze me.”

  I didn’t think that it was optimism so much as it was fatalism, but I didn’t argue with him. In the background, the typing noises started up again, with every rapid-fire keystroke sounding like a tiny gun going off in my ear.

  “Hmm,” Silvio murmured. “I’ve pulled up the hotel website. Looks like the four of you have a lot of ground to cover. Do you need me to come down there? It might not hurt for you to have some backup.”

  He was right. My friends and I were severely outnumbered, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have Silvio waiting in the wings. Still, I hesitated. I didn’t want to endanger another of my friends. And I really had wanted the vampire to have a nice, relaxing weekend, free from all the blood, bodies, destruction, and drama that went along with working for me.

  “I thought that you had plans,” I said, trying to talk him out of coming down here. “You know, finally having coffee with that cute younger gentleman you’ve been flirting with for the last few weeks at the Pork Pit?”

  Silvio huffed. “I’m too old to flirt with anyone. That cute younger gentleman and I just happen to share some of the same interests.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Besides, he can wait. I can be down there in a few hours. Just give me the word, and I’ll load my electronics into the car.”

  I would load up the car with knives, guns, and other assorted weapons, but then again, I supposed that electronics were Silvio’s weapons of choice. So I decided to let him do some damage with them. “Actually, I need you to stay put for the moment. I want everything you can dig up on Roxy Wyatt and Brody Dalton. Criminal histories, credit reports, where they went to elementary school. I want to know every little detail about them. They work for Tucker, but I’m guessing that they haven’t been nearly as careful as the vampire.”

  “You think that they’ve left a trail behind that you can follow back to Tucker and the Circle,” Silvio said, picking up on my train of thought.

  “Maybe. At the very least, it sounded like they’d dropped several bodies for Tucker. I want to know who’s been on the vampire’s hit list. It might give me some clue about him or the other members of the Circle or at least what their business interests are.”

  “Done. I’ll have an update for you tonight, or first thing in the morning at the very latest. And I’ll go ahead and load up the car anyway. Just in case.”

  “You don’t have to do that. I can take care of myself, you know. I am an assassin after all. People actually fear me and stuff.” I sighed. “Normal, sane people, anyway.”

  “Uh-huh. Talk to you soon, Gin.”

  Silvio hung up on me. I thought about calling him back and ordering him to stay put in Ashland, but I knew that he wouldn’t answer. Not when he was hot on the trail of Roxy and Brody. Even if he did pick up, I could talk until I was blue in the face and he’d just ignore my protests.

  Sometimes I thought that Silvio Sanchez was more the boss of me than the other way around.

  * * *

  Finn finished surveying the hotel schematics, but he didn’t find any obvious hiding places where Deirdre might have stashed the jewels. So we decided to check out her suite for ourselves.

  The four of us walked down the hallway to Deirdre’s door. Finn slowly hefted the skeleton key in his hand, as though it were as heavy as a brick. After a moment, he curled his fingers around it, slid the key into the lock, and turned it.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said, opening the door and stepping through to the other side.

  The suite was massive, even larger than Deirdre’s penthouse at the Peach Blossom apartment building back in Ashland. We moved through the foyer and stepped down into a sunken living room that featured white leather couches and chairs, glass-and-chrome tables, and black-and-white Persian rugs. No cowboy or Western decor was in sight, although a ten-foot-tall white Christmas tree stood in the corner, with a couple of open plastic boxes filled with decorations scattered around it. Floor-to-­ceiling windows lined th
e back wall of the suite, showing off a lovely view of the surrounding trees and ridges and Bullet Pointe Lake in the distance.

  A large kitchen lay off to one side of the main space, although it was immaculate, and all the white marble countertops and chrome appliances gleamed, as though no one had ever cooked anything in there. Deirdre certainly hadn’t. When I’d been spying on her in Ashland, she’d ordered room service for every single meal. I hadn’t seen her make so much as a sandwich in all the time I’d watched her.

  “I never thought that I would admire Deirdre’s decorating style, but I gotta say that I’m glad there are no boots or lassos in here,” Bria said.

  “It looks exactly like her other apartment.” Finn paced from one side of the living room to the other and back again, looking over everything. “There’s nothing here. Nothing. I don’t even see a magazine.”

  Bria looked at me, and I shrugged back at her. My sister stepped in front of Finn, cutting off his rapid pacing. “You don’t know that yet. Let’s take a look around. Maybe you know something or will see something that Tucker and the others missed. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Finn muttered.

  So the four of us went through the suite, opening and closing the coffee-table drawers, looking under the couch cushions, and even rifling through the empty pots and pans in the kitchen cabinets. I also kept an eye out for any hidden cameras, listening devices, and rune traps, but there was nothing in the front two rooms, so we walked down a hallway to the master bedroom and bathroom in the back, where things finally got a little more interesting.

  Apparently, Deirdre had spent far more time here than she’d led Finn to believe because the bedroom was brimming with her stuff. Pantsuits, cocktail dresses, and ball gowns filled one side of the enormous walk-in closet, all neatly hung on racks and organized according to color, from lightest to darkest. The other side of the closet featured shelves full of hats, purses, and stilettos—more ­stiletto heels, pumps, and boots than any one woman could possibly wear in a lifetime.

  But I was most interested in the closet’s back wall, since all the shelves there were lined with white velvet, making that area its own freestanding jewelry box. Deirdre had had a lot of jewelry. Necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings, watches, hairpins, tiaras—dozens and dozens of each of those perched prettily on the white velvet shelves, once again organized according to color, from light to dark stones. Black velvet bags and boxes were also lined up on the shelves, so she could transport her baubles from place to place. It looked as though Deirdre had had a different piece of bling for every single day of the year—and then some.

  I moved from one side of the wall to the other and back again, carefully examining each shelf and all the jewelry on it in turn, wondering if perhaps Deirdre had stashed Sweet Sally Sue’s jewels in here with her own. I also reached out with my Stone magic, listening to all the gems. Whether it was a diamond, sapphire, or ruby, the more expensive a gemstone was, the louder it would sing about its sparkling beauty.

  But no loose stones were lying around, and the gems only murmured softly—if they even murmured at all. Some of the pieces were completely quiet, telling me that they were made of glass instead of precious stones. I snorted. Of course Deirdre’s jewelry would be as fake as she was. She had made everyone in Ashland think that she was rolling in dough, even though she was completely broke. This was yet another of her many smoke screens.

  Still, even with the few genuine pieces of jewelry that I spotted, the gemstones didn’t sing all that loudly. Oh, they were nice enough bling, but not in the same league as Sweet Sally Sue’s jewels. Not even close. All these shelves full of rings and necklaces, and you’d be lucky to get ten grand if you hocked everything.

  So I moved on to the bathroom, which contained a variety of expensive soaps, shampoos, lotions, face creams, makeup, and perfumes, along with a whole rack of champagne bottles. Deirdre must have used those to mix her extravagant bubble baths, just like she had back in Ashland.

  Looking through all her stuff in the closet and bathroom was interesting, but it was still just stuff. There were no computers, phones, tablets, or flash drives lying around that would tell us anything more about Deirdre Shaw than what we already knew.

  “Nothing,” Finn growled, throwing down another empty beaded clutch. “There’s nothing here. Not one bloody thing about her, the Circle, or anything else.”

  He looked around at the mess we’d made pulling Deirdre’s clothes, shoes, hats, and purses out of her closet and dumping them in the middle of the bedroom floor. Disgust filled his face, and he whipped around on his heel and stalked back to the living room.

  “I’ll go after him,” Bria said.

  She walked out of the bedroom, leaving Owen and me standing in a sea of sparkling sequined dresses and stiletto shoes. Owen glanced over the piles of clothes to check if we’d left anything untouched, while I went back into the closet, knocking softly on the walls, the floor, and even the ceiling, in case we’d missed a hidden panel.

  But there was nothing, just like Finn had said. No loose panels, no hidden cubbyholes, no secret wall safes, nothing but clothes and shoes and fake jewelry. Frustration surged through me, along with sadness and disappointment for Finn. He’d come here hoping for answers, and it didn’t look like he was going to get a single one.

  And neither was I.

  “Roxy and Brody really cleaned this place out, didn’t they?” Owen called out.

  I went back to the bedroom and kicked a black stiletto out of my way. “What do you mean?”

  He threw his hands out wide. “Look at all this stuff. There are thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of designer clothes here. Not to mention those ridiculously expensive shoes and purses and all that overpriced champagne in the bathroom.”

  “So?”

  “So this looks like it was Deirdre’s home base. There’s certainly a lot more of her stuff here than there was in that penthouse in Ashland.”

  “But . . .”

  Owen shook his head. “But there’s not a single piece of paper anywhere in the suite. I have papers all over my house, even if it’s just a receipt from where I bought gas on my way home. But Deirdre? She doesn’t even have so much as a room-service slip in here. Roxy and Brody must have taken it all, every last scrap.”

  I’d been so focused on Deirdre’s clothes and jewelry that I hadn’t thought about something as simple as receipts, but Owen was right. Everybody had paper. Some people, like Ira Morris, had far too much, but Deirdre seemed to have none at all.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m going to go check on Finn and Bria. You coming?”

  “In a minute.”

  Owen nodded and walked down the hallway, disappearing from sight.

  I looked out over the bedroom again with a far more critical eye. It wasn’t just paper that was missing. There were no knickknacks, no mementos, no odds and ends of any kind—nothing personal. Not so much as a crumpled wrapper in the trash can that would tell me what kind of gum Deirdre had liked to chew.

  Oh, I hadn’t thought that Deirdre would have a collection of ceramic dolls or a secret love of macramé, but she’d had photos of Fletcher, Finn, and herself. She’d had to have kept those somewhere before she came to Ashland. And you would think that there would be more pictures here, even if they were only of herself.

  But Owen was right, and Roxy and Brody had taken it all, probably on Tucker’s orders, searching for clues about the gems. I had to admire how efficiently and completely they’d sanitized her suite of anything important. Roxy and Brody had stripped this place bare better than a pair of locusts.

  Still, the longer I stared at the haphazard heaps of Deirdre’s clothes and shoes, the angrier I got. This had been nothing but a gigantic waste of time. Tucker had probably told Roxy and Brody exactly what to leave behind in the suite, just to get our hopes up, just so we would think that we were finally getting
somewhere. The vampire kept dangling carrots of information in front of me, and like a stupid fool, I kept trying to get them, even though he snatched them away from me every single time.

  Once again, Hugh Tucker was playing a game with me—and I was losing badly.

  13

  Disgusted, I went back out into the main part of the suite where the others were.

  Finn was standing by the windows, his arms crossed over his chest, staring out at the view and brooding. Bria and Owen were going through all the drawers and cabinets again, searching for false bottoms and secret panels, just in case we’d missed something. I looked at my sister, who shook her head, telling me that Finn was still upset and to give him some space. Well, he wasn’t the only one who was angry, but I decided to channel my frustration into something productive. So I joined Bria and Owen in their renewed search, and the three of us left Finn to his own thoughts.

  I ended up at the white Christmas tree in the corner. It was one of those artificial, pre-wired trees, so I plugged it in, just to see if it actually worked. The lights immediately flared to life, going from white to pink to green to blue and back again, and casting out pretty patterns on the glass windows. No ornaments hung on the tree, though. I supposed that Deirdre hadn’t had time to decorate it—or order someone at the resort to do it for her—before she’d come to Ashland. So I sat down on the floor and started going through the boxes of ornaments, curious as to what kind of decorations she would have.

  Just like with the rest of Deirdre’s things, they were designer—elaborate swirls, loops, and towers of silver, gold, crystal, and stained glass, hammered into snowflakes, wreaths, icicles, and gingerbread men. They were all lovely, if totally impersonal. No Baby’s First Christmas, no handmade snowmen, no tacky mementos from places Deirdre had visited. All the decorations were jumbled together, telling me that Roxy and Brody had already pawed through them the way they had everything else in the suite. Still, going through the ornaments was a pleasant enough pastime, so I kept pulling them out, examining each one, and then setting them aside.