by Geonn Cannon
Ari grunted. “God, can you imagine? Not just a whole different species, but we look like anyone else. ‘Ten Signs That Your Neighbor Is a Werewolf’ articles all over the internet.”
“Human Pride Facebook groups. I would never do that to you. So I can’t imagine whoever Magnusson used for his study was a willing subject. I can do a little more research, but... I was also thinking maybe we could use another perspective on it. An older wolf’s perspective. And maybe a European wolf...”
“Have anyone in mind?” Ari asked sarcastically.
“Hey, isn’t your mother still dating a wolf from somewhere around Europe?”
Ari smiled. “As a matter of fact, she is. Is my girlfriend trying to get me to tell Mom about Isaac Hayden’s arrival in the city?”
“As a matter of fact, she is. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just ask them over for dinner. We’re overdue for that anyway. Have you even seen her since you got the wolf back?”
“No. I think Milo got her wolf back recently, too.”
“Yeah, it would’ve only taken a couple of months for her arm to heal.”
Ari sighed. “I’ll call her and see when they’re free.”
Dale nodded. “Good. How did things go with the Burroughs twin, besides crashing our belief in the helpfulness of Fitz Anstartz?”
“It went great. So far she’s my favorite member of the family. I beat her at pool. She asked if we were up for a threesome. It was a fun conversation.”
Dale sat up straighter. “Hey, Miss Bury-the-Lede. What was that about a threesome?”
“We were a little flirtatious. She asked me out, I told her I was with you, she said that wasn’t a deal breaker.” She shrugged. “I told her no.”
“Why? Not that I’m disagreeing. Although never say never. But why did you shoot it down so quickly?”
“Because she asked without knowing anything about you. She was only interested in me, and you would have been... I don’t know, extra. An afterthought. I didn’t appreciate that.”
“Aw, puppy.” Dale got up and came around the desk, setting herself on Ari’s lap. She bent down to kiss her, one hand on the back of Ari’s head. “I appreciate that. And just for the record,” she lowered her voice and leaned in close to Ari’s ear. “I’m not completely averse to the idea. In principle.”
Ari slipped an arm around Dale’s waist. “Yeah?”
Dale grinned and kissed Ari again before getting off her lap. “Just something to keep in mind. I’m not saying run out there and grab the first hot babe you see on the street, but... you know. Some day.”
“Noted,” Ari said.
“So what’s the plan for tonight?”
Ari groaned and rolled her head back on her shoulders. “I guess I’ll head back over to the Burroughs house and see if I can find any evidence of a thief. Preston kind of screws that up, though, because now I have to wonder if anything I find is from the thief or from him squatting there the past few nights.”
“He’s kind of a blessing in disguise, though. Right? At least you know the thief didn’t strike during those hours.”
Ari shrugged. “I’m not willing to go that far. But I guess it does clear up some potential theft times. But here’s what I don’t get. Preston said he hasn’t stolen anything. I’m willing to believe that until I have evidence otherwise. But why wouldn’t the tapestry thief take anything else? Why would you break into a house like that and focus on one thing in one room?”
“Maybe they didn’t,” Dale said. “The kids haven’t been in the house for a long time, except for Preston. Would any of them really notice if some trinket was missing?”
“I think Preston would,” Ari said, “but at this point, who’s to say? We can’t even trust videotape in this case. Hey, go through those essays again. If Magnusson proved ghosts exists, we’ll just pin it on one of them. Thief was invisible and walked through walls. Case closed.”
Dale smiled. “Werewolf versus ghost. That was my favorite Scooby-Doo.”
Ari stood and leaned across the desk to kiss Dale. “I’ll go over to the Burroughs house now. I’ll call the lawyer to see if he can let me in. If not, I’ll see if I can use Preston’s method, see how easy it can be done by a non-family member.”
“Good luck, mutt.”
Ari flinched, her shoulders hunching. “Oof, no. Sorry, babe, not... no. I don’t like that.”
“Oh, okay. Sorry. Don’t get arrested, puppy.”
“Much better. Okay, see you soon.”
Ari took her jacket and left. Dale started the video again and focused on the now-familiar street corner outside the Burroughs property.
“Show yourself, ghost,” she muttered, resting her chin on her hand as she watched the day scroll by. She had been watching at double-speed, but now she’d slowed down to look for seams where recording stopped and started. They might not be able to see the thief, but she could at least try to see if she could find the windows of opportunity.
###
Timothy Dodd, the executor, was more than happy to let Ari into the house, and happened to be free when she called. She arrived before he did and took the opportunity to walk the property. She’d seen it from the wolf’s point of view, but it never hurt to let the human side take a look as well. There were no obvious signs of passage, which didn’t mean anything because she also wasn’t seeing evidence of Preston going in and out every night. The ground was too hard and dry for people to leave footprints.
She heard the car pull up out front and went to meet Timothy on the walkway. He was in a suit and tie, but he had the relaxed air of someone on his way home from work rather than on a break. He smiled politely when he saw her.
“Miss Willow. Judging by the tone of your call, I assume you haven’t made any breakthroughs on the case.”
“Unfortunately not,” she said. “I’m hoping today could shed a little light on the situation.”
He held up the keys. “Let us hope.”
“Lead the way,” she said, stepping aside to let him pass her.
When they reached the porch, he bent over the latch and looked back at her. “I have to admit, I have mixed feelings about your involvement in this situation.”
“Oh?”
Timothy pushed the door open and Ari followed him inside. Already the house felt abandoned, left behind, as if it had a spirit which knew its owner had passed on so it felt free to hibernate.
“Naturally,” Timothy said, “the firm is grateful to have a private investigator involved given how things turned out the other morning. But initially, I was a bit annoyed when Vivian told me she planned to give you the key for safekeeping. I thought it meant she didn’t fully trust me. Granted, I’ve only been working with her for about six months, but holding the key should have been my job. But then she told me why she had chosen you, and it made a lot of sense. People say you were responsible for GG&M crumbling. Not many fans of Cecily Parrish in our offices. Thanks for that.”
“Oh. You’re welcome.”
He stood at the foot of the stairs and looked into the parlor, then twisted at the waist to look toward the kitchen. “Okay, well. You’re the detective so I assume you’ll need the run of the house. I’ll try to stay out of your way down here and you just let me know when you’re ready to leave.”
“Will do. Thanks, Mr. Dodd.”
He went into the parlor and Ari headed upstairs. She let herself into the study and looked at the empty space on the wall. Just a few weeks ago she had stood there and stared at Crossing-Over Place. She could have touched it. Now it was gone, just gone, and she had no idea where it was or how it had been taken. She had a lot riding on the answer to those questions.
Last time she’d been in the room, Vivian Burroughs had also been alive. Ari didn’t understand that absence, either. Yes, she’d thought of suicide in a vague way, but how could someone just wake up and think, “Today, this is my final day, my last morning”? Vivian had not only known, she’d planned. She’d brought her children back into th
e fold to say their final goodbyes. She tied up her loose ends. In a way, that was the ideal ending.
The room felt smaller this time. She walked the perimeter, letting her hand skim along the shelves. She’d already established there weren’t any secret passages because there was no space for them anywhere. The floor was solid. The ceiling had no cracks or breaks. The door was as impenetrable as a prison cell. Without the key, no one was getting in or out.
She dropped her hand from the shelf and wiped it against her thigh. Looked down. Looked at her hand. Looked at the shelf. She ran her hand along the edge again, and her fingers came back clean. She reached higher, to the top shelf, and looked again. Her fingers were clean, which meant the shelf had been dusted, a shelf much higher than a woman in a wheelchair could reach.
“Mr. Dodd!” she called. “Did Vivian have a maid?”
“She had a woman who came in once a month,” Timothy called up from the ground floor.
Ari went to the door of the study and tried not to get her hopes up as she called, “Might she have had a key to this room?”
Chapter Eleven
The housekeeper was a woman named Florence Warner. Ari got her number from the Rolodex in Vivian’s downstairs office. Yes, she had a key to all the rooms in the house. Yes, she had been there to clean a week before Vivian passed away (and oh, wasn’t that just such a sad thing). No, she hadn’t kept any of the keys. She’d turned them in when she left because it was the last time she would be needed at the house. She’d left the right next to the Rolodex, a few feet from where Ari was standing.
“What did it look like?” Ari asked, not seeing any keys at all on the desktop. She assumed it was a ring with multiple keys. She opened one of the drawers.
“It was a long skinny key. With one tooth. Right on the end.”
Ari frowned. “One tooth...? It opened every door in the house? Like a skeleton key.”
“Oh my goodness, yes. That’s what she said it was called. I couldn’t remember and thought she’d called it a bone key, but it was obviously made of metal so I didn’t know why it would have that name.”
“And you left it here, in the office on the first floor. That was... when?”
“A week ago tomorrow. I remember because Vivian offered me a glass of tea so we could have one final conversation.” Her voice broke. “I still can’t believe she’s gone. She was such a lovely person.” She sniffled. “I’m sorry, I won’t blubber in your ear.”
Ari smiled. “It’s okay. It seemed as though Vivian inspired blubbering. I only met her the one time and I still feel like I lost a friend.”
“She was like that.”
Not according to her kids...
Ari thanked her, and Florence wished her luck in finding the key. Its absence from the desk didn’t mean anything, but now she had a new lead. There was a second key out there, a skeleton key, one Vivian might not have even remembered existed, and it had been in the house in the days after she died. The door had just been blasted off their locked room mystery and the entire theft seemed a lot less impossible than it had that morning.
She searched the rest of the house for the skeleton key, but this time not finding what she was searching for was a good thing. If it wasn’t in the house, someone must have taken it, and that person would have had access to the crime scene. It didn’t get her any closer to figuring out who the thief might be, but at least she was chipping away at the impossibility of the theft.
The key was left on Friday. That meant all the kids had access to it, but Preston was the most likely culprit. He had to be getting in and out of the house somehow, and she got the impression he wasn’t exactly careful about where he left his keys. She would have to track him down again and have another conversation.
She searched the house again looking for anything out of place or any glaring absences. A looted house usually had tell-tale signs: brackets were speakers had once hung, empty display stands, voids where there had once been a viper’s nest of wires. Unfortunately, Vivian seemed to be a near-Luddite. Ari found a stereo and a laptop, and the television was upstairs in a small room off the den which seemed to be as pristine and untouched as a museum display. She found a phone charger in the TV room, but hadn’t seen any indication of the device which went with it.
“Mr. Dodd!” Her voice echoed off the walls, bouncing down the stairs. “Did Vivian have a cell phone?”
“Much to her chagrin,” he called back, his voice small having traveled from the other side of the house. “She didn’t seem to care much for it.”
Ari had a hunch the phone had found its way into Preston’s pocket, but she would confirm that when she asked him about the key. She stood in the hallway and looked down the hall to the bedrooms. She took a moment to brace herself for the invasion of privacy, then walked to the nearest door. She’d given these rooms a cursory look the day before, when the theft was first discovered, but she wanted to take her time and give them a second glance.
The air in the room was too cold to be stale. It was a typical girl’s room, another museum display, likely untouched since its resident headed off to greener pastures. The bookshelf was full of books about dragons, King Arthur, Robin Hood. The window over the bed looked out onto the front lawn. There were no obvious signs about whose room it was, so it could have belonged to any of the girls until she went across the hall and saw two beds in it.
“Oldest Eleanor got her own room, the twins had to share,” Ari said. “I guess that makes sense.”
One bed was against the wall directly across from the door, with the other on the far wall. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf separated the room into two distinct halves, although the desk in the corner was set up so they could work next to each other. One sister seemed to like birds and the other liked whales judging by how they’d chosen to decorate their sides of the room. The wallpaper was dark blue, as was the rug, and the curtains were heavy enough to block out the light even though the setting sun was currently aimed straight at it.
She left the rooms and went to the other side of the house. Preston’s room was right next to the master bedroom. She wondered if that was a conscious choice on Vivian’s part. Her baby, her only boy, kept close by while the girls were put at the other end of the house. She opened the door and saw the first evidence of a room in use. Preston was apparently sleeping in his own bed, and a bag of clothes was standing open near the door. The room also reeked in a way that the others hadn’t. Someone had spent hours in this room, and very recently, and the wolf could smell it in every stitch of fabric.
Ari scanned the room carefully. The bookshelves had as many model airplanes as books. A basketball hoop was hooked over the top of the closet door, and she saw a tennis racket propped up in the far corner. The girls’ rooms had looked like... well, like rooms where kids had grown up. Preston’s seemed more like a movie set for a Boy’s Room. It was hard to believe anyone had actually lived here. The models were the only personal touch, but she couldn’t imagine the man she’d met putting them together and displaying them so proudly.
She wanted to give this room more than a cursory once-over, since someone had been staying in it. Elizabeth claimed she was the one who knew every potential escape route, but Ari suspected a teenage boy would have had a few secret exits of his own. There was also a possibility he had taken the tapestry and stashed it somewhere in his room where he could retrieve it later when the heat died down.
Ari got onto the floor and peered under the bed. Other than three pairs of shoes lined up under the opposite side, the space under the mattress was littered with fast food bags and empty cans of energy drinks. Preston was very clearly a boy used to having a maid clean up after him. She went to the wardrobe and opened it to find rows of empty hangers. She even pushed on the back to make sure it wasn’t a doorway to another dimension.
“Miss Willow?” Timothy sounded like he was at the top of the stairs.
“In here.”
He appeared in the doorway. “It’s getting a littl
e late. Do you think you’ll be much longer?”
“I just want to check Vivian’s room.” He stepped aside and followed her to the room at the end of the hall. He waited outside when she went in.
It was magnificent. There was an actual four-poster bed with curtains opened to reveal a sprawling mattress with a nest of pillows against the headboard. There was a reading area next to a window seat which looked out over the backyard. She went to the bed and crouched down to look underneath. Nothing. This room looked even faker than Preston’s, but she could understand that. Vivian had known the end was coming and would have removed anything she didn’t want people to find after she was gone.
“Have you scheduled the reading of the will?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Timothy said, “it will be Saturday at noon. I’m hopeful this situation will be settled by then.”
Ari said, “Who gets the house?”
He stared at her, brow furrowed. “I’m not...”
She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “If one of the kids is involved, they might know the house is theirs. Vivian might have told them during the one-on-one dinners they had together last week. A house like this isn’t just something you dump on one of your kids, especially if they live in another state. Vivian was practical. She would have tested the waters to be sure the recipient actually wanted it before putting it in the will. If they knew, and if they suspected the tapestry wasn’t part of the deal, they only had to hide it somewhere in the house and wait until they took ownership. So... who gets the house?”
“Preston. He is not aware. Vivian offered it to Eleanor but, as you said, she wasn’t interested in the hassle. So Vivian decided to leave it to the person who needed it the most.” He stopped, but Ari could tell he wanted to say more. She let the silence grow until he continued. “I don’t think she’s doing him any favors. A person with Mr. Burroughs’ income will never be able to maintain a home like this.”