Donn's Shadow

by Caryn Larrinaga

  “Next Wednesday.”

  “I’m sorry. That must be hard. Will you be able to go visit her soon?”

  She finished loading the dishwasher and turned back around to face me. Her lower lip was trembling.

  “Oh, no.” I slid off my stool and rushed around the counter to squeeze her shoulder. Amari must have broken things off. “What happened?”

  Kit shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Mac.”

  “For what?”

  She brushed my hand from her shoulder and took a deep breath. “Ugh, this is so hard.” She balled her hands into fists a couple times, shook them out, and then looked me dead in the eyes. “Amari asked me to help on her new show.”

  I gulped. “And you said…?”

  “I haven’t answered her yet.”

  “Are you leaning one way or the other?”

  “Honestly… I’m not sure. I know this is crazy. We haven’t been dating long—”

  That was one hell of an understatement, but I didn’t interrupt her.

  “And the thought of leaving Dad to produce the show on his own scares me, and the thought of leaving Donn’s Hill scares me even more. But when I’m with Amari… I don’t know.” She bit her lip. “I’m crazy about her. I’ve never felt this way about anybody. And thinking about her going back to L.A. without me and not seeing her every day, that scares me more than anything else.”

  For some reason, I burst out laughing.

  “What?” she demanded.

  My laughter rose to a shriek and I doubled over, gripping the counter for support. Every time I came close to settling down, the stupidity of the situation struck me again, and I let out another squeal of panicked mirth.

  Finally, my laughter subsided, and I brushed the tears from my cheeks.

  “I don’t get the joke,” Kit said.

  “Neither do I.” I wiped my eyes and sighed. “It’s just so typical of my life right now. Everything feels weird, my head hurts, Mark quit, and now you might follow him. It’s just perfect in the worst way, you know?”

  Her cheeks reddened. “I haven’t decided yet or anything.”

  “That’s the funniest part. You’re so conflicted and just completely tortured by this decision, I can’t even be mad at you.” I grinned at her. “Honestly, I feel cheated.”

  The flush in her face dissipated, and she sagged against the dishwasher in relief. “You’re not mad?”

  I shook my head, and she sighed.

  “Good,” she said. “Look, I won’t do anything rash. I just wanted to give you a head’s up.”

  “I appreciate it. Keep me posted, okay?”

  She nodded, and I fled the kitchen, racing up the stairs to my apartment against the ticking time bomb in my chest. The burst of laughter couldn’t have come at a better time; I’d been on the verge of tears when it came.

  I wanted to be angry that she was considering leaving, but there wasn’t any room for anger. My heart was too busy breaking to feel anything else. I was sure she’d leave with Amari. And even if—if—the show somehow survived her departure, where would that leave me? What was I supposed to do without my best friend?

  My bed was a comfortable place to cry; I’d shed many tears here since moving to Donn’s Hill. But I never thought I’d be crying about Kit leaving me behind.

  Striker emerged from beneath the mattress with a ball of paper in her jaws. She leapt onto the bed and dropped it beside my face like a gift, trilling softly.

  “That better not be a letter of resignation,” I told her. “If Amari tries to hire you as their mascot or something, you say no.”

  When Graham returned a few hours later, I was too terrified of bursting into tears again to tell him Kit was considering leaving Donn’s Hill. He fell asleep quickly, unburdened by the knowledge that my life was on the verge of imploding. As he dozed beside me, I reflected on the many ways Raziel had ruined everything.

  First, he’d derailed the cabin cleansing. It was clear now; things would have gone better if he hadn’t crashed the séance. I didn’t know how, exactly, but I certainly wouldn’t have tried to punch anybody that night if he hadn’t been there.

  Then, he’d been killed. And while that part wasn’t technically his fault, if he hadn’t goaded me into lunging at him, Sheriff Harris wouldn’t think I was some unhinged, violent murder suspect.

  Now, from beyond the grave, he was tearing apart the Soul Searchers team. I gathered up the blanket into my fists, twisting and squeezing at the fabric as I imagined Kit telling me she’d told Amari “yes.”

  She’d been so sure Raziel posed a threat to the show. I’d thought she was being dramatic, but she’d proven herself right.

  There was a strong chance the death of the Soul Searchers was another part of the curse brought on by that damn haunted jewelry box. But even that could be laid at Raziel’s feet; if he hadn’t come to Donn’s Hill, if he hadn’t stayed in the Oracle Inn and been killed there, I’d have never held a séance in that attic. Horace would never have appeared to me, and I wouldn’t have had any reason to agree to help him, so I would never have dug that cursed thing up from its resting place in the clearing.

  Every time I thought about the box, my headache grew more painful. This had all started with Raziel, but everything had gotten worse since I’d gone to Cambion’s Camp. And it wasn’t just my life the box impacted; even Striker had gotten hurt. Who would be next?

  Beside me, Graham’s chest rose and fell in time with his gentle snores. He was the only person left who hadn’t suffered some kind of misfortune. If I did nothing, it was only a matter of time before the box got him too.

  I didn’t have time to find a way to banish whatever haunted the jewelry box. And I felt a nagging suspicion that Horace knew more about the spirit than he’d told me. Wild theories sprung into my mind—Horace could be haunting the attic and the box at the same time, he could have buried that box in the clearing himself for someone to eventually find, or the spirit trapped in the box could be his aunt, furious for decades about the theft of her wedding rings—but none of them rang true enough to take hold.

  Horace would know the answers, I could feel it. And he claimed to know who’d really murdered Raziel in that attic. If I did as he’d asked, if I took him that box, I could fix everything all at once.

  And if I went right now, while everyone around me still slept, I wouldn’t have to put anyone else at risk.

  Acting before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed Graham’s keys from the bowl in his living room and crept down the stairs. Feeling eyes on the back of my head, I whipped around halfway down to the foyer.

  A tiny tortoiseshell cat limped behind me on silent paws.

  “Striker!”

  Her whiskers bristled and surprise flooded her round, yellow eyes.

  I thought about picking her up and locking her back in Graham’s apartment but didn’t want to risk making any more noise in the house than necessary. Besides, the box had already gotten to Striker. I felt like that made her immune to further misfortune, at least for a while.

  “Okay,” I told her. “You can come. Probably best if you’re with me, anyway.”

  Together we slipped through the kitchen and into the backyard. Above us, thick clouds covered the moon and the stars. Only the light from the streetlamp at the end of the driveway lit our way. I strode toward the garage with a straight spine, projecting a confidence I didn’t yet feel.

  Once inside, I flipped on the fluorescent overhead lights, illuminating the near-empty tables and shelves that waited for Graham to refill them. At the back of the space, a bank of utility cupboards lined the wall. This was where Graham stored his supplies, including a locked cabinet for his cashbox.

  I didn’t need his keys. The cupboard was unlocked, and—apart from the small metal cashbox—it was empty.

  The jewelry box had disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A deputy from the Driscoll County Sheriff’s Department stood in front of the garage with us, tak
ing our statements about the robbery in the misty light of dawn. I was glad Deputy Wallace wasn’t with him. I still didn’t know where I stood with her, but I trusted her enough that I wouldn’t have been able to resist sounding like I’d lost my mind. She was normally receptive to my supernaturally charged theories, but given my current status as a “person of interest” in Raziel’s case, I didn’t think she’d want to hear me tell her the box had stolen itself.

  To this stony-faced deputy, it was easier to stick to the mundane. I didn’t color my account with any details about the ghost who’d been wreaking havoc on my life from inside the tiny jewelry box or the nonstop headache and the sensation of being watched. Instead, I claimed I’d been awakened by an odd noise and had gone outside to investigate. Concerned about Graham’s cashbox, I’d checked the garage to make sure it was still there.

  “But the cashbox wasn’t taken, correct?” The deputy flipped backward through his small notebook to check something. “All four-hundred and thirty-seven dollars are intact?”

  “That’s right.” Graham stood beside me and looked straight ahead, watching the deputy.

  Striker watched the exchange from atop the tall toolbox with its many drawers, one of which often held her favorite brand of kitty treats. She hunched uncomfortably on the cold, hard metal; her hips poked sharply away from her body like fins as she eyed the uniformed stranger in her territory.

  The deputy made a mark in his notebook. “All that was taken was the wooden crate which contained some kind of antique jewelry box?”

  “Correct,” Graham confirmed.

  “Okay.” The deputy flipped his notebook closed and jerked a thumb toward the posters on the back wall of the ceramic studio. “Let’s see the video.”

  “Video?” I whispered to Graham as we led the deputy into the kitchen. “Since when have you had a camera in the garage?”

  “Since always.” He was doing an even better job averting my gaze than Mark had done and kept his eyes fixed on the back door. “Insurance is cheaper with a security system.”

  In all my time in the garage, I’d never noticed a camera. “Where is it?”

  “Behind the wall clock.”

  Inside the house, Graham accessed his security system’s cloud storage from a laptop on the kitchen counter. There were hundreds of video clips on the first page alone, all date and time stamped within the last week. Graham clicked on the clips from that night, and we watched in silence as the black-and-white night vision footage played through at a multiplied speed.

  The view of the garage was from the side, and the fisheye angle captured the overhead doors on the left and the bank of storage shelves and cupboards on the right. The long tables of sculptures filled the space in between. Just after the timestamp flipped past midnight, a crack of light flared from the garage’s side door. The crack widened, and two men stepped inside.

  One was so tall he needed to bend down to get through the door. The other was shorter and, despite his rotund build, moved smoothly across the frame like a cat. Both wore dark ski masks that covered their faces, and I watched in horror as they rummaged through the cupboards. They carefully set any object they moved back in its original place without speaking. Eventually, they huddled around the single locked door and broke it open. Ignoring the cashbox, they retrieved the wooden crate and fled the garage.

  “Recognize either of them?” the deputy asked.

  Something about them was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t figure out why. It was an occurrence that’d been happening frustratingly often lately. Graham and I both shook our heads. The video played on, and not five minutes later, it showed me walk into the garage and flip on the lights. A muscle in Graham’s cheek twitched.

  The deputy had Graham send him links to the videos and gave us each his card. “We’ll do what we can to recover your property. In the meantime, let me know if anything else comes to mind.”

  After the deputy left, I collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table and stared out the window. My mind churned. Striker prowled restlessly across the kitchen floor hunting for mice or spiders along the baseboards. Graham lowered himself slowly into the chair across from me and I glanced up, surprised he didn’t have mugs of coffee or cocoa in his hands. His normal reaction to a stressful situation was to make something hot to drink.

  I was on the verge of making a joke about it when his expression finally registered in my brain. His jaw was set, and his features were hard and closed off. He still didn’t look at me. He just glared at the wall a few feet to the side of my head.

  “Are you okay?” I finally asked.

  “Honestly?” He blinked and shifted his cold eyes to mine. “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  A humorless smile twitched at the corner of his mouth for an instant, replaced immediately by his stony-but-neutral expression. “You mean apart from burglars invading my studio? Oh, and the fact that you heard something in the backyard and instead of waking me up”—his voice rose—“you went outside alone?”

  I stared at him, unable to do anything more than state the obvious. “You’re angry.”

  His reaction surprised me. He was usually Mr. Placid, always calm and quiet. Now, two pink spots burned in his cheeks and a vein of tension protruded above the nose of his glasses. His arms were folded across his chest so tightly it looked like he might snap himself in half.

  “Of course I’m angry. I’m pissed. What if those guys had still been in the garage when you went out there? You could’ve been killed! Or taken! All while I slept upstairs like an idiot.” He flexed a fist against his bicep. “When I saw them on the video, all I could think about was what it would’ve been like come downstairs in the morning and find you hurt—or worse—on the studio floor.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, hating to see him this way. “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t wake you because I didn’t actually hear anything outside. I sort of lied to the deputy.”

  He stared at me with wide eyes. “Great. About what, exactly? And why?”

  “I don’t know.” I really didn’t. When asked why I’d been in the garage, the lie about hearing a noise had come easily to me and had oozed out of my mouth without my help. “I wasn’t thinking. I was in shock, I guess. But I didn’t hear anything in the yard, okay? I didn’t realize there was something going on.”

  “Then why were you outside in the middle of the night?”

  “I was going to take the box.” I shifted my weight, sliding my hands beneath my backside to punish them for the theft they’d almost committed. “I was going to take it to Horace.”

  Graham’s incredulous gaze pierced into me for several long, silent minutes. When he finally spoke again, his voice was quieter but somehow angrier than before. “Even though you told Yuri you weren’t going to.”

  I looked down at the napkin holder on the table and nodded.

  “You were going to take the box and then go over to the inn in the dead of night and present it to that lunatic ghost like an offering?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again, rubbing the aching spot at the back of my skull. “I just… I don’t know. I’ve been so tired.”

  “You scare me sometimes, you know that? What if, somehow, the sheriff figures out you lied to that deputy just now?”

  “I don’t know how—”

  He didn’t let me finish. “If they catch you in one lie, even about something stupid, they’ll assume you’re lying about everything else. And if the box had been in the cabinet, you would’ve gone back to the scene of the crime, by yourself, in the middle of the night?” He stared at me for a few moments. “It’s been over a week since they brought you in for questioning. Obviously, there’s no evidence for them to find that can tie you to the murder, so for a minute there, I stupidly thought you would be okay. But I should’ve known you’d do what you always do.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Despite my desperate desire to de-escalate this conversation, I found myself glaring at him across the table. “And
what’s that?”

  “Recklessly dive into things all by yourself, like you don’t care about your own safety.”

  “I do care.”

  “You don’t act like it.” He pointed to the scar on my neck. “Didn’t you learn anything from that?”

  Heat flooded my face. I hated being treated like a child. Was it my fault I’d nearly been killed the spring before? Was I supposed to stay locked in my apartment, never going anywhere or doing anything for fear that someone might jump out of the shadows and attack me?

  I asked Graham, since he clearly thought he was smarter than me. “What do you want from me here? I said I was sorry for scaring you. What else can I do?”

  “I want you to stop acting like you’re alone in everything. I want you to talk to me, or Kit, or someone when you decide to go out in the middle of the night or try to summon a spirit.” A brief flicker of sadness touched his eyes. “I want you to trust me.”

  The implication that I didn’t already trust him was more than I could take. I stood and pushed my chair beneath the table, gripping its back with my hands. “I do trust you. The real problem is that you don’t trust me. But I’m too exhausted to fight about this anymore, so I’m going to bed.”

  He and Striker followed me out of the kitchen and up the stairs. When I continued past the second-floor landing toward the third, he asked, “Where are you going?”

  “I think I’ll sleep at my place.”

  He sighed. “Do whatever you want, Mac. Like always.”

  I expected him to storm into his apartment, but he just folded his arms and stared at me. Striker sat beside his feet, and together they watched as I climbed the stairs to the third floor. Only when I opened the door to Number 8 did Graham finally turn around and walk into his apartment.

  Striker’s yellow eyes burned at me a moment longer before she slowly turned her back on me too.

  Chapter Thirty-Two