“The only intoxicant I indulge in is alcohol.”
“Cigarette smoking–”
“Not my pipe! I only smoke it once a month. Sometimes twice.”
“Extreme cold or emotional stress,” she finished.
He jerked upright on the bed, the blood rushing to his face. “Are you telling me that scoundrel nearly frightened me to death?”
“Mr. Pivens, you should be resting.” The doctor laid a hand on his chest and gently pressed him into the mattress.
“I have never been so humiliated in my life.”
“Maybe I should go,” I said and regretted the suggestion at once. I couldn’t leave him alone with… her.
“No, Ms. Bonheim,” he said. “I may be embarrassed, but I know my duty. Stay, and we’ll solve this puzzle together.”
The doctor raised a brow. “Puzzle?”
I bit my lip and willed him to say nothing. I didn’t know how or if any of this was connected to her, but I didn’t want to take the risk it was.
“A treasure hunt, my good Doctor,” he said airily. “Now how much longer must I remain your prisoner?”
“At least another day or two. We’d like to keep you for observation, and you are recovering from a heart attack, even if it was mild. This is serious, Mr. Pivens.”
“Very well,” he said. “I shall stay calm and eat my oatmeal.”
She smiled. “You do that.” She nodded to me. “Lenore.”
I forced a smile in return. “Doctor.”
She left, the curtains rustling behind her, and my limbs loosened.
He pointed a shaky hand at the laminate wardrobe. “My clothing. The key to Mike’s house is in the pocket of my trousers. Would you retrieve it?”
Bemused, I opened the cheap, faux-wooden door and found his trousers, clamped into a hanger. I rummaged inside the pockets and drew out a small key ring. “These?” I turned and showed him.
“Yes. I want you to keep them.”
“But the house doesn’t belong to me.”
“Please, just keep them. I don’t like the idea of them falling into the wrong hands, and you have every right to be in that house. Your property is inside it – quite valuable property, I might add. But if you must go inside, I suggest you don’t go alone.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t quite a lie. He’d only suggested I not go inside.
The lawyer and I chewed over the mystery of the books. He was reluctant to believe someone might have killed Mike. But the burglar had been after something bookish Mike had possessed.
Mr. Pivens’s middle-aged daughter strode into the hospital room. “Dad! What happened?”
I left, worried and no wiser. But the doctor had no reason to harm Mr. Pivens. If Mike had been killed because of a valuable book, then she wasn’t involved. And I couldn’t imagine any book, at any price, she cared about. Doyle was her storybook plaything, and we were her characters.
When I emerged in the hospital parking lot, the temperature had dropped but the light was still bright. I got into my Volvo and wound down the hill towards the main highway.
Something large and brown shifted between the pines. I braked hard, startled. “Bear!” I shouted to no one.
A black-and-white patchwork cow ambled onto the road.
Embarrassed, I unclenched my jaw. A bear? Really? At least Connor hadn’t been around to witness my panic.
The cow lumbered up the hill and vanished into the thick trees.
I continued on, thinking hard as I threaded the Volvo around hairpin curves and over steep slopes. The bookstore storeroom and Mike’s house had scratches around their locks. That implied someone without a key. Peter and Gretel had a key, but they could have scratched the knobs to make it appear like a regular break-in.
And then there was the rare bookdealer, Heath Van Oss. I scrunched my shoulders, my hands opening and closing on the wheel. The hotel he was staying at cost over two hundred bucks a night. If he really thought his book of folklore was only worth a few thousand, he was eating into his profits. Was the book an excuse? Or was he after the million-dollar mystery as well?
Could Toeller have been involved? My pulse sped at the thought. If she was involved, then her pattern had changed, and our assumptions were dangerously off. She’d been on the scene right after Mike had died. But I couldn’t see a reason for her to want Mike dead. She wouldn’t care about the book or the money, and Mike was no threat.
Or was he? I grimaced. He’d kept his interest in the occult well hidden. Why? Why keep his second business from me? He’d known I was interested in shamanism and would be fascinated by his occult collection.
Mike wouldn’t have hidden his business from me out of embarrassment. Not in California in this day and age. Besides, he could always pass off his interest as academic. But had it been? Had Mike been a practitioner? I hadn’t seen any signs in his house, but I’d only seen the library and lower rooms. What if there were other hidden spaces, upstairs, for rituals, or–
A man in loose jeans appeared in the middle of the highway as if conjured out of thin air.
Swearing, I slammed on my brakes, rocking forward. The brakes squealed, the back of my car slewing sideways. An odd noise emerged from my throat.
Casually, he turned his head.
I gasped at the map of scars crossing his face. It was the man I’d seen in Mike’s library. The man who hadn’t helped me when I’d been struggling to save Mr. Pivens because he wasn’t a man.
I squinted. He didn’t look quite dead either. This man was something else, and my gaze clouded with confusion, the sense of connection to him growing stronger. It was like seeing someone you thought was an old lover, and who then turned his head and revealed he was someone else entirely.
Our gazes locked, and I was falling. An apple orchard and a blizzard of white petals. Rusted prison bars. Bones on an ancient battlefield.
Are you willing?
A car honked behind me, and I jumped in my seat, the belt scraping against my neck.
The man was gone.
Shaken, I pulled off the road. What the hell. What the hell?
“Lenore?”
I gasped and jerked away from the voice.
Connor bent toward the open window. “What’s wrong? I thought we were going to meet at your bookstore.”
“We are.” Dazed, I peered past him.
I was off the highway. Way off the highway and parked beside a tangle of woods and the old, Moorish wellhouse. Had I been driving on auto-pilot again? My insides writhed. I wasn’t supposed to drift and drive, and shame heated my cheeks.
My mouth went dry. I couldn’t have gotten here on autopilot. I’d traveled miles in moments.
“Are you okay?” Connor asked, his voice warm with concern.
I cleared my throat. “Fine. I just came from seeing Mr. Pivens.” Something had happened. Something magic. Something big. And I’d sensed nothing. Had I teleported? Or had someone teleported me? And an entire Volvo? What kind of big magic would that take?
“How is he?” Connor braced his hand on the roof of my car. “I’m planning on going over tomorrow to take his statement. I didn’t want to bother him today.”
This sort of thing had never happened to me before… But it had happened to Jayce last year. She’d been having a vision inside my house and ended up in her coffee shop, scared witless. Not that she’d ever admitted to fear.
“Lenore?” he asked.
I blinked, returning to earth. “What? Oh. He’s okay, I think. I’m sure he’ll enjoy the visit.”
He frowned. “What are you doing out here?”
If only someone could enlighten me. “I was… curious about the wellhouse. The Historical Society has taken it over, haven’t they? They planned to fix it up,” I babbled.
His brow creased. “I don’t think it’s theirs yet. Why are you interested?”
Um… “Readings,” I said.
“Readings?”
“I thought it would make a nice spot for poetry readings an
d… stuff,” I fumbled.
“It would be easier to sell books afterward at the store, wouldn’t it?”
Damn. He wasn’t just listening to me. Connor was really thinking about what I was saying. And I was talking complete garbage. “Yeah. You’re right. It’s a bad idea.”
“No.” His smile curved. “It’s a creative idea. I like it. If they’re going to fix this place up, they’re going to need to do something with it. Readings sound good.”
“Thanks.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to make it tonight. I have to pull a double shift.”
“Oh,” I said, ignoring the twist of disappointment in my gut. “It’s fine. What are you doing here?”
“We got a complaint some kids were fooling around out here. You know how dangerous that wellhouse is. It’s falling apart. Of course, by the time I got here, all I found were some empty beer cans.”
“Oh.”
He leaned closer, and I caught a whiff of his cologne, spicy and seductive. “Lenore, are you sure you’re okay?”
“Sure,” I chirped.
Liar, the scarred man whispered in my ear.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the mountains, the sky is darker, and the stars are closer, more numerous. You can trace the path of the Milky Way, the bowl of Earth’s atmosphere. But as I lay in an adirondack chair on my aunt’s back porch, I didn’t see the stars. I saw the vast spaces in between and felt my insignificance. My limbs grew heavy. Why hadn’t Mike told me about his secret life?
I’d thought of him like a second father. I drew a shuddering breath. But I hadn’t known him, and he hadn’t trusted me.
He had left me the business, though. He’d wanted me to see it all at last.
I didn’t understand.
A bat spiraled above, blotting out the stars behind its papery wings. I imagined its path was a poem, seemingly random but with an inner meaning. For the bat at least.
I checked my phone. It was almost eleven, and Jayce wasn’t home yet. This was normal for Jayce on a weekend, but not a Monday night. Something scuttled beneath the branches of the fallen oak, and I jerked upright on the chair, my heart pounding.
A small animal scampered past the overturned birdbath. I sat back in the chair. I hadn’t called to get the tree removed yet, and the fallen oak was an ideal hiding place for woodland creatures.
Sighing, I walked inside and locked the door behind me. I wouldn’t call Jayce. She’d probably met up with her boyfriend, Brayden, and was spending the night.
Restless, I prowled the house, then went upstairs to my room on the second floor. I paused outside my door, then continued down the hallway.
A knotted rope hung from the trapdoor to the attic.
I stared, indecisive. How many times had I rummaged in that attic, searching for some clue to defeating our unseelie enemy? It was futile, I knew. Our aunt had searched that attic for answers longer than I.
But I grasped the rope, rough against my palm, and tugged. The door in the ceiling opened, and a ladder rattled part of the way down. Grasping it, I pulled it to the floor and climbed into the attic.
The air was hot, unmoving. I fumbled for the switches and flipped both on, illuminating neat rows of boxes, a rough wooden floor, a sloping roof. The ceiling fan groaned, barely stirring the air.
Dead Hex emerged from the trapdoor and meowed, plaintive.
“I can’t pet you. And I can’t feed you. You really need to go to the light.”
He strolled to our aunt’s antique secretary desk and sat in front of its glass-fronted bookcase.
“Trust me,” I said. “There’s nothing in there that will help.” I’d practically memorized every damn line of the magical spell books inside. Aunt Ellen had refused to call them grimoires. They were her recipe books. No fancy airs for our Aunt Ellen.
I opened an attic window and leaned out, inhaling the scent of the sage in the garden below, enjoying the cooler air on my skin.
Pulling myself from the window, I walked down a corridor of cardboard boxes and stopped in front of a section I hadn’t yet exhumed.
The calico cat followed, his tail lashing.
My family’s history lay buried inside this attic. I hoped maybe, maybe, there was something here that Ellen had missed, something that could show us a way out from the under this curse. There had to be a way to break it, and Karin’s pregnancy put us on a deadline.
My throat tightened. I pulled a box to the floor and tore open the neatly folded box lid. A cloud of dust puffed into the air, and I coughed.
Old clothes.
Hex pawed at the box.
“Are you giving me a sign here, or do you just want to be in on the action?”
I pulled out a navy swing dress with embroidered roses and a net collar.
Hex rolled onto his back and batted ineffectually at the hem.
Black, high-waist women’s slacks. I held them to my hips. Scratch that, they were pedal pushers. Karin would love these, when she could fit into this size again. A wave of sadness swamped me.
If she could fit into it again.
Downstairs, a door slammed.
I closed the box and left it where I’d found it so I could continue my excavation later. “Jayce?” I shut the window, turned off the light and fan, and climbed down to the second floor.
“Here!” she shouted from downstairs.
I found her in the kitchen, scrabbling in the refrigerator.
She emerged with a bottle of beer. “Ugh, you wouldn’t believe my day.” She shoved the door shut with her heel. Slim necklaces looped over her loose, red tank. “The contractor got the wrong tiles. Well, some of them were right, but half of them were wrong, and you can’t have two different types of bathroom tile on the floor. So guess who had to return the tiles and get the correct ones? Me.” She popped off the bottle cap and took a slug of beer. “Waste. Of. Time. When I got back, they’d pulled everything out of the front planter boxes and chopped the jade plants into pieces. I loved those plants!”
“Why’d they do that?”
She shrugged. “They thought I wanted them to. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery.” She took another gulp of beer. “I think I can salvage the clippings. Was your day better than mine?”
Frustrated, I rubbed the back of my neck. “Someone broke into Mike’s house when the lawyer and I were there. Mr. Pivens had a heart attack, and the burglar got away.”
She thunked the beer onto the butcherblock island and gaped. “What? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Something shifted outside the kitchen window, and I turned. Flat, silvery eyes glowed against the glass.
My heart seized, and I took a leapt backwards, banging into the butcher block work island. A knife clattered to the floor.
Jayce swore. “Picatrix!” She shot into the hallway.
The front door clicked open, and I scowled at Dead Hex, now perched on the counter by the sink. The calico wore a smug look. “Really?” I whispered. “Is that how you’re playing this?”
“Picatrix?” my sister called.
The door slammed shut.
Shaking her head, she returned empty-handed a few minutes later. “I don’t get that cat. She had no problem taking over my old apartment, but she refuses to come inside the house.”
Hex leapt gracefully from the counter. Tail high, he sauntered from the kitchen.
“And the racoons keep eating all the food I leave for her on the porch,” Jayce continued.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that—”
“I’ve heard burglars target houses of the recently deceased,” she said hastily. “Maybe the burglary was random?”
Since I didn’t want to talk about our ghost cat any more than Jayce wanted to talk about the rampaging racoons she’d attracted, I let her change the subject. “I don’t think it’s that. Some of Mike’s private collection is more valuable than I knew.” I told her about the letter from the auction house.
>
Her jade eyes widened. “A million dollars?”
“That was the minimum bid.”
“Over a million dollars?”
“That’s not all. A bookdealer claims he gave Mike a book on American folktales to assess, but I can’t find it anywhere.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Claims?”
“I found a record of a book of American folklore the dealer sold to Mike. And he didn’t show me a receipt, and Mike was pretty good about keeping records.”
“You think he’s lying?”
“He’s lying about something,” I said. “He told me the book wasn’t worth much, but he’s been hanging around Doyle, staying in the local hotel, at least since Mike died.”
“You think he broke into Mike’s house.”
“He would have fit the build of the burglar. But so would Peter.”
She leaned her hip against the counter. “And I wouldn’t put it past Peter, though a break-in seems more Gretel’s style. They’re both weasels.” She opened the refrigerator and grabbed another beer, handed it to me. “Your need is greater.”
Lowering my head, I unscrewed the top and took a sip. It was a local brew, a blond, and tasted faintly of peach but more of bitterness. I wrinkled my nose. Life would be cheaper if I liked beer. “I just don’t understand why Mike didn’t tell me.”
“About the folktale book?”
“About any of it. He knew I was interested in shamanism.”
She raised a brow. “Only interested? You are a shaman.”
Okay, maybe I hadn’t told him everything about my life either. “Still, he should have known I wouldn’t judge him for having an interest in rare, occult books. I’d have loved to get my hands on them.”
“And now you will. He left the business to you. He wanted you to know about it.”
“Right, after he was dead.” I gulped the beer to hide my hurt.
“All right, let’s channel Karin and be logical. If you didn’t know about his rare book business, what are the odds someone else did?”
“His clients had to know.”
“But would Peter and Gretel?” she asked.
“Maybe. And a book worth over a million dollars makes a great motive for murder. What if Van Oss’s folklore book is just an excuse? What if he’s after this valuable book, and that’s why he’s in town? That’s why he broke into Mike’s house?”
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