Smoke and Mirrors (38 page)

Habit replayed the scene. “That ballroom's got glass all down one wall. Okay, it's February so the windows are closed, but you'd think someone would have tried tossing a music stand or something.”

“Yeah. You'd think.” Then he waited.

Cops learned two things early on. The first was that, occasionally, coincidences were just that. No more and no less than the laws of probability winning out. A suspect with both motive and opportunity wasn't automatically guilty. The second was that while a suspect with both motive and opportunity wasn't
automatically
guilty, the odds were good. Coincidence be damned.

“You're seeing a link between what happened to the Kranbys and the earlier deaths, aren't you?”

“Man with an ax. Ballroom music. Weird piling on weird.”

“You need some sleep.”

The corners of his mouth twisted up into a fair approximation of a smile. “Not arguing. There's people who say that Caulfield House is haunted.”

“There's people who say the moon landings never happened.” She shoved her chair out and stood. “There's people who swear to all kinds of strange shit. Some of them are even straight at the time. Come on, let's get out of here.”

“I . . .” Jack stared at his monitor a moment then he shrugged and shut down. “Yeah, you're right.”

“I often am.” Waving good night to the team processing a very stoned hooker, Geetha herded her partner out of the squad room. “Mind you, I'm not arguing that it's weird, all those deaths in the one house.”

“That wasn't all of them. In the twenties, Creighton Caulfield's aunt, who inherited the house, died, along with a visitor, after drinking cyanide-laced tea.” A pause to sign out with the desk sergeant, then Jack continued as they headed out the door and across the street to the lot for personal vehicles. “In 1906, one of Caulfield's maids, a Lucy Lewis, shoved a male servant down the stairs and then hung herself.”

“Hanged.”

“What?”

“I think that when people do it to each other or themselves, it's hanged.”

“Okay, hanged herself.”

She grinned, hearing his eyes roll in the tone of his voice. “That's a lot of dead people. Why isn't this better known?”

Standing by his truck, Jack rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. “Money talks. Money also tells you to shut the fuck up.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Geetha unlocked her driver's door—probably the only car on the lot without an electronic key—and paused, one foot up on the running board. “What happened in the teens?”

Jack leaned out and stared at her over the top of the driver's side door, hair and skin the same pale gold under the security light. “When?”

“The nineteen-teens. Death every decade up to the seventies except for in the teens.”

“Right. Well, according to Constable Luitan's notes, in 1917, a year after his only son died—of natural causes,” he added quickly before Geetha could ask, “Creighton Caulfield disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

Jack nodded.

She snorted. “Well, that's clichéd.” When he clearly had no idea of why, she rolled her eyes. “For a haunted house.”

“Who said the house was haunted?”

“You . . .” Her brows dipped as she ran over the conversation. “Okay. Fine. Get some sleep, Jack.”

“And you.”

But she sat in her car for a moment, watched him drive away, and remembered the expression on Tony Foster's face when Jack had jokingly asked if he thought the house was haunted.

Knew that Jack remembered that expression too.

Tony hadn't liked the library when he'd gone into it earlier and he liked it less now. There were shadows lingering in corners and on empty shelves that had nothing to do with the light thrown by his open laptop sitting on the hearth. After last spring's adventure, lingering shadows were not on his list of favorite things. These weren't the same kind of shadows. And that didn't help. Hell, if even Mouse could sense bad shit in the library, where did that leave him?

Sweat ran down his sides and the pattern burned into his chest itched under the onslaught of damp salt.

“I am Oz, the great and powerful!”

The library seemed unimpressed.

“Right. And don't look at the man behind the curtain.” He had no idea of just what exactly he was doing, but at least, this time, he was only risking himself.

To give Peter credit, he didn't pretend not to know.

A raised hand had cut him off.
“I get it.”

“
No idea, but if it's got half a brain, it'll go after the . . . the um . . .”

“The nonwizard.”
Peter nodded.
“Very likely.”

“Come on, Peter, you can't . . .
” Tony went back over the conversation.
“Wait; no argument?”

The lights came up—midafternoon by the lines of sunlight not pouring through the matte-black window glass—and Tony could hear convulsing and china shattering next door in the drawing room. There were books on the shelves, but the room looked dusty, unused. Felt unwelcoming. Not to the Amityville
“Get out!”
level, but it wasn't a room he'd linger in by choice.

With
A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between John Dee and Some Spirits
snuggled up next to
The Confessions of St. Augustine,
he suspected the shelving would give an actual librarian heart failure. He wouldn't have minded taking a look at a scuffed copy of
Letters on Natural Magic,
but his fingers passed through the spine as though it wasn't there. Or more specifically, he wasn't there.

During the previous replay, while dance music had filled the house and he'd had to force himself to stop moving to the beat—“Night and Day” was back at the top of the play list—the shelves had been filled with leather-bound books on law and business. Anything that might have belonged to Creighton Caulfield was long gone. Anything except the huge mahogany desk that continued to dominate the far end of the room.

People had clearly died in the drawing room years earlier than they'd died dancing since these books were obviously Caulfield's. There were as many in French and German as in English and a depressing number of them looked like journals. Who'd notice one more? The perfect hiding place. Tony was up on the ladder peering at the badly worn titles on a set of three dark-red volumes when the lights went out.

Fade out the past. Fade in the present.

“Ready camera one,” he sighed as he climbed carefully to the floor. “Take two.”

It seemed a safe assumption that the darkness lingered where the really nasty books had been. Most of them were clumped around Caulfield's desk—which emanated a distinct nasty all of its own. Retrieving his laptop and setting it down on the seat of the desk chair, Tony told himself he'd best make the most of the ten minutes or so he had until Lucy's replay and his one chance to find the journal during its own time.

The top of the desk and the drawer fronts had all been refinished to a high gloss and as he reached for the center drawer's ornate brass pull, his reflection shot him a look that clearly asked if he was sure he wanted to do that.

“I'm sure I don't.”

The drawer was locked. Using the cheap pocket knife attached to his key ring, he applied lessons learned a lifetime ago at juvie and jimmied it open. There may have been a spell on the laptop that wouldn't scratch the finish, but he didn't have the time.

Didn't care much about the scratches either.

The drawer was empty.

All the drawers were empty.

No secret compartments. Nothing taped to the bottoms.

He stuck his head into the empty right side. Nothing. Left side. Something gleamed. Fingertips identified it as a square of glossy paper. It had probably fallen from a higher drawer and moisture or time or both had stuck it to the side wall. Edge of the knife behind it . . .

He caught it as it fell and held it by the monitor.

Photograph. A smiling woman sitting on the front step of the house, one hand raised to push dark hair off her face, the other holding a laughing baby on her lap. Most of the writing on the back had been lost against the side of the desk. The only word Tony could read clearly was Karl.

Up in the nursery, Karl stopped crying.

“Crap.”

He shoved the picture in his pocket as the lights came up.

“Son of a . . .”

Eyes closed, stomach heaving, he scrambled backward away from the desk, bouncing off discarded drawers and the chair. He didn't stop until his shoulder blades slammed into the lower edge of the nearest bookshelf.

During all of the other replays the house had apparently been empty of everyone but the dying. Not this time.

Tony opened his eyes.

There was no one at the desk.

Except that he'd seen Creighton Caulfield sitting there. His head had practically been in the man's lap. Tony's left shoulder and Caulfield's left leg had been occupying the same space.

Vomiting was still an option as he stood.

Caulfield
had
been at the desk. He'd been . . .

“Fuck!”

He'd been writing.

In the journal?

No way of knowing.
Sure, now I want to see him, where is he? This is worse than Stephen and . . .

He ran for the hearth and the mirror.

In his present, a light film of dust covered the glass. Here, in a memory of 1906, it gleamed. It was about a third the size of the gilt-framed mirror in the drawing room and appeared no more metaphysically revealing.

Deep breath. One foot up on the hearth. Left hand flat against the stone just to one side of the inset mantle. Tony arranged himself so that he wouldn't be staring at his own reflection, and looked into the glass.

Creighton Caulfield sat at his desk writing in what could be a journal. The distance and the angle made it difficult to tell for sure. Frowning in concentration, Tony leaned a little closer.

And Creighton Caulfield looked up.

Tony jerked back instinctively and glanced toward the other end of the room. No one. Heart pounding, positive Caulfield had been staring right at him, Tony took another cautious look in the mirror.

Nothing had changed.

Caulfield continued to sit, pen motionless over the page, staring toward the hearth.

His head cocked at a sound Tony couldn't hear—actually, he couldn't hear much of anything over the damned dance music—Caulfield smiled and placed his pen back in what looked remarkably like the inkwell that had gone missing from Raymond Dark's desk. He closed his journal and stood. Tony adjusted his angle. Picked up the journal, still smiling, and headed . . .

Tony backed up as far as he could and still maintain the reflection.

For the hearth. His face filled the mirror. His eyes were a pale, pale blue with the same edge-of-insanity stare a husky had. Tony was not a big fan of crazy-looking dogs. Liked crazy-looking people a lot less, though. Even ones who'd been dead for decades.

The sudden vertigo was unexpected. The library twisted and pitched, slid several degrees sideways, and the floor came up to slam Tony in the knees.

Where he already had bruises from his visit with Lucy.

The actual vomiting was new, though.

Fortunately, his last meal had been some time ago and the puddle of warm bile barely covered a square foot of floor. He was still kneeling, back arched, dry heaving like a cat horking a hairball when the lights went out.

Suddenly, forcing his stomach up his esophagus became less important.

His laptop was at the far end of the room.

There was a limit to how far the light from even a magical laptop could travel.

He was alone, in a haunted library, in the dark.