House of Stone

by T. K. Thorne

  He grunts. “Well, don’t just stand there. Close the door behind you.”

  The door is glass. It’s not exactly privacy, but at least other people can’t hear us.

  “Sit.”

  I do.

  For a long moment, he regards me. I’m silent, waiting. Finally, he grunts. “Well, what is it?”

  “I’d like your advice.”

  “That would be a novelty around here. On what subject?”

  “Investigation.”

  He leans back and knits his stubby fingers together over the pouch of his belly. “About?”

  “A case. I’d rather not get specific.”

  “Okay, then get general. I can’t give advice about nothing, and I’ve got a stack of reports to go through as thick as—never mind.”

  “I have a homicide victim and a possible suspect, and I’m looking for a way tie them together.” I add quickly, “I’ve already tried social media. What would you do?”

  “And the reason you came to me and not Lieutenant Faraday?”

  I glance down at my own hands, long fingers laced on my lap, and lie. “I don’t want to give her the impression that I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “Which you don’t.”

  I stay silent.

  He sighs. “Not your fault the idiots upstairs swept you off the street before you had any experience.”

  Four months of experience is not enough to count in his book, I know. I continue to keep my mouth shut against its natural tendency to open at the wrong time.

  To my disgust, but not surprise, he pulls out a can of tobacco and stuffs a piece in his mouth. I quietly hope that he will dispense any knowledge before it’s time to spit.

  “You got a dead person and you need info on who his or her connections are?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, you can get a search warrant on phone records, emails, etc., pretty easily on the victim. I’m assuming, however, you don’t have probable cause to get that for the suspect.”

  I nod. “Probable cause” is the standard level of evidence required for arrests and search warrants. It is based on a reasonable person’s conclusions given the totality of circumstances. Like pornography, it is difficult to define, but in law enforcement, you know it when you see it. In terms of certainty, it resides between “reasonable suspicion,” which can justify a stop and questioning, and “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is the standard for conviction in a court. A search warrant requires articulable probable cause.

  “Until you do, then, you’ll have to make do with what connections you can find with the victim, whether he made any calls to your suspect—that’s the easiest way to start.”

  “Umm, how do I go about getting the phone records?”

  “Used to be a lot easier, but unless you have exigent circumstances, an emergency, you need a warrant for that.” He squints at me. “I heard they paired you up with Lohan. He’ll have the forms for that and you need to write up an affidavit with it explaining your probable cause.”

  “Lohan is qualifying at the firing range. I’d like to have it done when he gets back.” I give him my best attempt at a respectful-request smile. “Any way you could get me a copy of the form I need?”

  Chapter Ten

  At my knock, a woman dressed in a kimono with large pink chrysanthemums on dark blue silk opens the door. Wrinkles map her mouth and filmy blue-gray eyes. After an inch, the dark roots of her hair abruptly transform into a bright orange-red halo.

  “Hello,” she says. “How can I help you?”

  “Mrs. Crompton?”

  “Yes. Valinda Crompton.”

  I show her my badge. “Detective Brighton with Birmingham Police. I’m investigating your husband’s death.” Just saying those words makes me feel guilty, like I’m the one betraying Tracey. But he’s the one hiding something. He takes some kind of martial arts class on Mondays and Thursdays. I don’t expect him to pop back in the office or be looking for me after he’s finished at the firing range.

  Her hand goes to her throat. “Oh.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course, but don’t mind the house. Since Ben died, I haven’t felt like cleaning up, and the maid doesn’t come until Thursday.”

  “I understand.”

  “How about some peppermint tea?” she says. “I made it fresh.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Well, you sit down in the living room. Move anything in your way aside, okay?”

  It’s a large house in the adjacent over-the-mountain city of Mountain Brook, the destination on the southern flank of Red Mountain for wealthy white flight from Birmingham. If a driver doesn’t know his way or have GPS, he is likely to get lost on the winding maze of streets flanked by towering trees and perfectly manicured lawns now dotted with blooming white dogwoods and early azaleas. I’m not surprised that a professor of Benjamin Crompton’s stature lives here.

  She serves the tea in glasses of ice with a sprig of mint. Of course. I’ve been drinking Alice’s hot tea, and it slipped my mind that for most of the Southern world, “tea” means over ice with lots of sugar.

  “Thank you,” I say, taking my glass and sipping the sweet drink. “It’s good.”

  She takes the other glass. “Now before business, come and see my garden.”

  “Sorry?”

  “My garden.”

  I follow her out the kitchen door and down some steps.

  “Wow,” I say and mean it. We walk through an archway into a beautiful garden of tulips, dogwoods, rhododendrons, azaleas and ferns of every description.

  “Do you do this yourself?”

  “Oh, no. I don’t dig the holes, if that’s what you mean, but I plan it. I’m the maestro. Benjamin never cared anything about it. He was selfish with his time.”

  I imagine some of his time, other than that devoted to a mistress, was spent trying to find a cure for an awful disease, but I try to look compassionate.

  “I’m sorry for your loss. Did he . . . leave you vulnerable?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean financially. Are you going to be able to keep the house and this wonderful garden?”

  “Oh yes. I imagine so.”

  “He left you life insurance?” I make it a question.

  She narrows her eyes. “That seems a personal question. But I suppose it’s legitimate, given you are a police detective, and he is dead.”

  I wait.

  “No, he didn’t leave any life insurance. We discussed it with our financial planner—I can give you his name if you’d like—and decided that it wasn’t necessary at our ages. Ben was working out of choice.”

  That takes care of one obvious motivation, unless he left some money to his lover. But Mrs. Crompton doesn’t seem too broken up about his death, more resentful that he spent time away from her. Or perhaps that he didn’t appreciate her gardening efforts.

  I follow her back inside, and she sits in a flower-patterned chair, directing me to the matching couch. “Now, what do you want to talk about?”

  I set my iced tea on a coaster obviously placed there for this purpose. I have to laugh inwardly at what she calls bad housekeeping. Not a thing I can see is out of place, and I bet it would pass a white glove test.

  “What do you know about your husband’s work?” I ask.

  She waves her hands as if the breeze they stir will push me back. “Little to nothing. He never talked to me about it. Something to do with diabetes, I think. He had diabetes, you know. Type 1.”

  “I know.”

  “Had to take insulin regularly. But he gave himself the shots. I can’t do needles. It’s a good thing he was the one with it because he would have had to give me shots, and he wasn’t home enough to do that.” Her gaze drifts. “He won’t have to worry about do
ing that anymore, will he?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Are you really a policeman?” she says suddenly and before I answer, amends, “Oh, I mean a police lady, of course.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I mean you are quite pretty. You could be a model. Have you ever shot anyone?”

  I freeze.

  She waits for my answer, her face merely polite and curious, and I realize she doesn’t know that I have, indeed, shot someone. Not to mention frying someone alive with magic.

  “I need to ask you some questions, if that’s alright,” I say.

  “Of course. Never mind me. You go right ahead.”

  “Do you know if your husband knew a policeman named Tracey Lohan?”

  She shakes her head. “Not that I can recall.”

  Dead end there. “What about a Laurie Stokes, Mr. Crompton’s . . . assistant?” I didn’t mean to hesitate at the word, but it just happened, and her face tightens.

  “The little blonde?”

  I clear my throat. “She is blond.”

  “If you’re going to tell me she was having an affair with my husband, save your breath. I know about it. I knew about all of them.”

  “All of them?”

  “Oh, not at the same time. But over the years. He’s a handsome man, you know. All the aliens are.”

  I blink. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said they’re all handsome.” She enunciates the words carefully.

  “I thought you said ‘aliens.’” I laugh and try to make it a cough.

  “I did.”

  “You’re saying that your husband was an alien? Like from another country?”

  “No, like from another planet.”

  “Another planet,” I repeat.

  “Absolutely. No one believes me, of course.” She leans forward, a gleam in her eyes. “But I know. I’ve been watching him for forty years.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It’s Saturday morning. Alice and I are the only ones awake. Still groggy from one of my familiar nightmares—a dark room, the looming threat of an electric prod at my neck—I join her in the kitchen, side-stepping a toy dinosaur and a dump truck.

  “I fixed you tea,” Alice says as she sets a delicate china cup on the kitchen table. Alice does not believe in mugs. “We’ll have breakfast when Daniel and Becca wake up. Nora doesn’t like breakfast.”

  I look at the steaming tea apprehensively. As always, she made it with fresh mint from her garden and lemon or cream, depending on her mood. But it’s not the tea that worries me. Alice seems to be in an especially cheery mood, and that is a warning she wants “a talk.”

  Alexander, Alice’s solid black cat, sniffs my leg. He has been the least friendly, which is fine with me. I give him his space, and he gives me mine.

  “What do you want to know?” I ask, continuing to stand.

  Alice sits at the table’s end with her own steaming cup. “Everything, of course. Tell me.”

  “You mean about my case?” I told her previously about the vision, but not what’s worrying me about my partner.

  “No, you already told me about that.”

  “Then what specifically?”

  She purses her lips. “Rose, you know perfectly well what I want to know. I didn’t bring it up before because you were so upset about that dead man.”

  “I wasn’t upset about the dead man. That’s my job. I was upset about seeing him animate and relive his last moments backward.”

  She frowns and ignores my sarcasm. “That man on the porch the other day was House of Iron, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh. That.”

  It isn’t easy to hide anything from Alice. I don’t know if she had a premonition or looked out the window. She believes every warlock of House of Iron is as evil as Theophalus Blackwell was. That is one death on my shoulders I do not regret.

  “Yes,” I say, “the man on the porch was Jason Blackwell of House of Iron.”

  “What did he want?”

  I sit and take a sip of the tea she put at my usual place—the chair with the back to the kitchen cabinets. No police officer is comfortable with his or her back to the door, and the kitchen opens up into the living room and front door. I decide to answer her honestly.

  “Justin Blackwell wants me.”

  Her eyes narrow. “To do what?”

  “To be his lover.” I blow on the tea and try another sip, though it’s very hot.

  Her spine snaps straight. “How impertinent!”

  She catches me mid-swallow. I can’t help a sputtering laugh. “I guess, but there’s more to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I have dreaded this conversation, put it off. Suddenly, there is nothing funny about anything. I put my hand to my forehead.

  Immediately, her expression changes. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She reaches for my head, but I pull back. “I’m fine, Alice. The doctors released me, and you checked me out, remember?”

  Alice’s healing powers don’t work on me, but she can scan me in some way and diagnose what she “sees” or “feels” is wrong. I guess that makes her a kind of walking MRI machine. In addition, for part of her long past, she was a doctor.

  “Rose, I know you’ve had more dizzy spells than you have admitted.”

  I sigh. Like I said, it’s hard to keep anything from my great aunt. But my dizzy spells are a symptom of the panic attacks. They’re nothing physical that can be detected by medical scans or probably even a witch. They’re “in my head.”

  “I have a checkup scheduled in a few days. They won’t find anything.”

  The doctor’s appointment is scheduled during my lunch hour. I can’t take sick time for my first year. Fortunately, since I was technically responding to a felony in progress (kidnapping) during the Ordeal, I was considered “on duty,” so recovering from my injuries was handled through workman’s comp. The doctors and shrinks have cleared me. The less people who know about the panic attacks, the better, even Alice. She might start pushing me to get counseling, and that might reignite the whole competency issue.

  Alice purses her lips, not happy about my refusal to let her check me out. “You seem to have something else to say about that Iron man.”

  “Jason. His name is Jason.”

  She sniffs.

  “It’s not just a regular kind of attraction between us.”

  “Between you?” Her silver brows lift. “You have . . . feelings for him?”

  “Yes. No, not exactly. I—” This is as difficult as I thought it would be. I try a different starting place. “Alice, when Theophalus Blackwell thought he was going to kill me, he told me some things.”

  “About?”

  I clear my throat. “About your sister, my grandmother.”

  “You already told me you thought she had an affair with an Iron man. Is there more?”

  Her index finger wrapped around the teacup goes white. This is clearly a subject she would rather avoid.

  “I’m pretty sure my grandmother and a man from House of Iron felt the same thing that Jason and I feel. Our magics pull us together. It’s amazingly intense.”

  “Oh my.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You know who it was?” She hesitates. “The man my sister—?”

  “I do.”

  Her face is suddenly vulnerable. “It wasn’t Theophalus Blackwell, was it?” she asks. She almost chokes on the name.

  “No, it was the former head of House of Iron. A man named Adam. I think they loved each other.”

  “Do you love this man, Jason Blackwell?”

  I swallow. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. It’s crazy. It’s hard to say what I feel. Everything is overwhelming when I’m near him.”


  “Maybe,” she says quietly, “maybe you shouldn’t say no.”

  “What?”

  “It was House of Iron that forbade the mixing of bloods, not House of Rose.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “It’s not an easy thing to say. It’s such a burden and unfair to you.”

  Somehow, everything has flipped. I thought I was the one who had to tell her something she didn’t want to hear.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We are the last of our House.”

  “I know that.”

  “But it is more than that.”

  “I wish you would make sense.”

  “I’m trying, dear. I just wish I didn’t have to put this on you.”

  “Alice, please! Just spit it out.”

  “No, I think I need to back up a bit.”

  “How far?” I ask with suspicion.

  “The beginning would be good.”

  “You mean like a Genesis beginning?”

  She chuckles, an uncomfortable laughter. “Possibly. I’ve often wondered if our people could have been the half-angel, half-human creatures in that story. But, regardless, the history of our people is a long one, probably as old as mankind. We evolved additional ways to obtain the energy that feeds our abilities in order to help us survive. Physical strength, the ability to see the immediate future in an emergency, healing, and manipulating other creatures are all survival tools that developed along with the cerebral cortex.” She takes a breath. “Which, in turn, evolved on top of our reptilian flight-or-fight brain to help us imagine and plan.”

  I fidget, but I know to let her work her way around to wherever she is going.

  She drums her fingers on the table. “The important thing is that those abilities existed, as they do now, in various degrees and combinations. Based on the ancient stories and what we know of evolution, we can hypothesize that eventually we recognized each other and came together as tribes, with all the multiple abilities that made them suspect or possibly outcasts from other human tribes.”

  “Before there were Houses?”

  “Yes, the tribes were just clusters of people who had additional different abilities. They would have been the forerunners of Houses. Being in tribes obviously had advantages, but the flip side was that the children came into pubescence with their extra abilities later than normal. Also, the adults weren’t able to reproduce as quickly or in the same numbers as the rest of the human population who feared our people’s abilities and hunted us. Eventually numbers won out, and the tribes were forced into hiding, so to speak, to blend into society. For hundreds of years, our ancestors thrived that way, keeping our Family groups secret and held together by an acknowledged ruler.”