by Mari Carr
Lancelot gave her an easygoing wink. “You know, if you want to find her again, I happen to know a pretty awesome investigator…”
Sylvia laughed at his offer, then took them both by surprise when she said, “Actually, I know where she is.”
“You…do?” Lancelot asked slowly, as if he was doubting his understanding of the language.
“Yes. Well, sort of.”
“Sort of?” Lancelot asked.
Sylvia flushed. “I was worried about her, losing her husband like she had. I checked and there was just an obituary, but no funeral information. I stopped by her place countless times—hoping she would return, but she was never there. I texted, even emailed. No response, so…”
“So?” Hugo prompted.
“I hope you won’t think badly of me for this, but I sort of did a little snooping around.”
Lancelot shot him an amused glance. It wasn’t likely either of them would judge her for that, considering they’d just ransacked Alicia’s entire house.
“You’re speaking to my investigator’s heart. What sort of snooping?” Lancelot asked.
“My brother knew I was worried, so he tracked her down for me.”
Hugo wondered how solid this lead was. “How did he track her down?”
“Oscar is a computer genius. There’s pretty much no one he can’t find with just a few clicks on the keyboard. I guess you can tell we’re opposites when it comes to technology. I’m not sure I remember ever seeing a pen in Oscar’s hand. If he can’t beat the words or some fancy computer code out on his keyboard, he figures it’s not worth writing down.”
“He must not have been able to find her, though, if you haven’t maintained your correspondence,” Lancelot said carefully.
Sylvia shook her head. “Oh, he found her. He just said she was okay, and then asked if I wanted to know where she was. I said no.”
Lancelot’s eyelid twitched. “Why would you say no?”
“I just wanted to know she was okay, not stalk her,” she said defensively.
“So your brother is the one with the investigator’s spirit. Maybe I could chat with him, compare notes.”
Sylvia was grinning. “My brother is very good at what he does. He probably tried to tell me in great technological detail how he’d found her, but all that stuff is Greek to me. I shouldn’t tell you this, but I think he hacked into something he shouldn’t have. Like I said, all I really wanted to know was that she was all right.”
Sylvia frowned and looked at her watch. “Oh dear. Speaking of Oscar, I promised my mom I’d check in on him today. He’s had a nasty head cold the past few days, but he’s terrible about taking care of himself. I’ve been stopping by every couple of days to boost him full of medicine, vitamins, and chicken noodle soup. I hate to cut this short, but I should probably head out to his place.”
Hugo stood. “I understand. We’ve interrupted your plans for the day. We’re going to be in Charleston for a few days more. I hope we can—”
“Can we come?” Lancelot asked.
Sylvia blinked in surprise.
“I want to meet this tech-investigator genius. Talk shop. Maybe offer him a job.”
At that, Sylvia laughed. “Of course you can come. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet. It’s just so wonderful to see you, Hugo.”
“I feel the same.” He truly did.
“I didn’t expect our paths to ever cross again. I was actually going to see if the two of you would be interested in having a local play tour guide for you while you’re here.”
Hugo smiled. “You’re too kind. We don’t want to impose.”
“No imposition. I’ll show you the sights on our way to my brother’s place.”
The gnawing fear that the conversation with the fleet admiral had instilled in Hugo melted away. If Oscar could tell them where Alicia was, they’d go pick her up and be on their way home within a matter of days.
And in the meantime, he was going to enjoy this chance to reconnect with Sylvia.
Chapter Six
Lancelot had offered to drive, but Sylvia insisted they join her in her Nissan LEAF. Lancelot took the front passenger seat—claiming he needed more leg room—leaving Hugo in the back. He took the middle spot and leaned forward, forearms braced against the front seats so he would still be able to converse.
Sylvia looked around her seat, then said, “Hold on, I forgot my tote. I’ll be right back.” She opened the door and dashed into the house.
Lancelot twisted in his seat, face grim. “This is too easy. I don’t trust it.”
“It or her?” Hugo ducked his head to look at where Sylvia was letting herself into the house. “You can’t seriously be concerned that she’s a threat.”
Lancelot grunted. “We just need to be careful. The postmark on that letter was from four months ago. Before Alicia killed Derrick and quit her job, so that part checks out. You don’t know this brother of hers, do you?”
Hugo shook his head. “No. I knew she was close with her family, but no details.”
“If the Trinity Masters are setting us up…” Lancelot tapped his fingers on the dashboard.
“You’ve set up a silent alarm on the safe house. If they start looking around, we’ll know.”
Lancelot took no comfort from that reminder. “One of us should drive our car and follow. Otherwise we have no way to get out.”
Sylvia stepped back out of the house, peered into the tote she was holding, shook her head, and went back inside.
Hugo clicked his tongue. “Ah yes, you’re right. Perhaps you should do that. Because that wouldn’t look suspicious to Sylvia at all.”
Lancelot bared his teeth. “We need to be cautious.”
“Then go,” Hugo said amiably. The other man’s paranoia would mean Hugo would get the front seat, though he’d have a devil of a time coming up with some reason for Lancelot following in a separate vehicle.
Lancelot rubbed his knuckles along his jaw. “No. You’re right. We can’t risk losing her trust. Right now, Sylvia and her brother, Oscar, are our best chance at finding Alicia. If this is a trap, springing it could be our best lead.”
Hugo was still watching the porch. “You have perhaps thirty seconds to decide.”
Lancelot glanced at Sylvia as she stepped off the porch. Even in the shade of the big tree rooted in the front lawn, her hair and skin seemed to catch the sunlight, throwing back rays of gold.
“I’ll stay,” Lancelot murmured.
Sylvia hopped back into the car, carelessly handing her tote back to Hugo. “Would you put that on the seat for me?”
“Of course.” Hugo set it down, sneaking a peek as he did. There were several journals, a small pen case, and a larger spiral-bound sketch pad inside. In addition, there was a box of medicine, a reusable container of liquid secured inside a plastic bag, and a small pack of tissues.
They had plenty of time to converse because though they only had about thirty kilometers to go, it took them nearly an hour. Not only did everyone, including Sylvia, drive oh so slowly, but they stopped quite a bit. At one point, they were stuck at a four-way stop while Sylvia and the other driver motioned at one another. Lancelot’s shoulders were so knotted, they were up around his ears. Hugo wasn’t sure if the other man’s stress was because he was still worried this was some sort of trap, or if he wanted to lean over and force Sylvia to step on the gas.
Their conversation flowed easily, with Sylvia occasionally pointing out areas of historic interest. As a political scientist, he would have loved to discuss how the Civil War battles she was casually mentioning, and other historical events, shaped the current political landscape and leanings of the area, but something about the way the sun warmed the inside of the car, and her voice flowing smooth and slow as honey, kept him silent.
“See that over there? That’s the pink house. A Charleston landmark,” she said, practically coming to a stop in the middle of the road to give them time to look.
She twisted to look back at Hug
o. The impact of her gaze all but took his breath away. She was an intelligent, beautiful, sensuous woman, and he was…dammit…he was attracted to her. He was definitely going to have to tuck that away.
“This is the city’s French Quarter. I think just about every city in the South has a French Quarter.”
“It looks a bit like parts of Paris, if more colorful.” Here the buildings were two and three stories, and narrow, many of them sharing common walls. There were black iron balconies, pretty slatted shutters, and wrought-iron hanging baskets full of flowers all around. The houses were painted the colors of Easter-time sweets—pink, pale yellow, blue, green, with the occasional white or brick abode thrown in the mix.
“I think the car behind us is waiting for you to go,” Lancelot murmured.
“Oh, they’re fine. Being in a rush never helped anyone.”
Hugo smothered a snicker at the way the corner of Lancelot’s mouth twitched.
Sylvia waved at the car behind them, and then started driving again.
Once out of the city, they found themselves in a marshland of green-brown grasses and waterways. They merged onto a highway, where they picked up speed, and Lancelot seemed to relax a little, though Hugo could see him taking note of everything around them, probably checking for landmarks in case they needed to find their way back.
They crossed two bridges, and based on the signs, they were heading toward James Island. Once off the large four-lane road that connected to the bridge, they were on narrow roads in an area Hugo would categorize as rural, though he didn’t see any placid livestock. There were no footpaths or even hedges lining the roads, just a gravel shoulder. Driveways were long and unpaved. The houses were mostly single story, and the trees not much taller than that, with a tilt to their trunks giving testament to the wind that whipped in from the Atlantic Ocean.
“This is James Island,” she said. “I did some of my growing up here, back when land out this way was cheaper than anything in Charleston. My parents never sold it, even after they moved into the city to be closer to Exeter when I was in school.”
Hugo leaned forward a bit more, seizing the conversational opening. “Exeter is a residential school?”
“Yes, for high school it is. They have a middle school, too, but that’s not residential.”
“I wasn’t aware that America had boarding schools.”
“They’re fairly rare, but have gotten more popular since the Harry Potter books came out.”
“Since your family lived close by, did you see them often?”
“Every weekend, and some weeknights, but at Exeter we were really learning all the time—even after the official school day ended. We’d have dinner with our teachers. I normally ate at Mrs. Rutherford’s table. That’s how she and I got so close.”
“You had to talk about that day’s lessons during dinner?” Lancelot asked. “Didn’t you need a break from it?”
“Sometimes, but mostly we talked about life and about people. Mrs. Rutherford was a student of human nature. She taught me how to see past what people say to what they mean. Past what they did, to who they were.”
“That sounds like psychology,” Hugo said. “I thought she taught English?”
“She did, but English is stories, and stories are people. ‘I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.’”
“A quote?” Lancelot asked.
“Sylvia Plath. I was named after her, so I went through a phase of being obsessed. I learned everything I could about her, read all her books and journals.”
“She wrote The Bell Jar,” Hugo said.
“Yes, she did. You know I’m afraid I don’t know many French poets, except the most famous. Perhaps you could recommend a few to me.” Her eyes met his through the rearview mirror.
“I could, though my favorite contemporary poet is an American.”
She grinned at his compliment.
“I’ve read poetry,” Lancelot mumbled.
“Here we are.” Sylvia turned the car off the road onto a gravel drive flanked by trees. There was a quaint wooden mailbox, and then a less quaint large steel box that looked like the package box in Hugo’s building, where the postman left items too large for a letter slot.
They bounced down the drive, gravel crunching. To their left was a straight line of trees that was probably the property line. To the right was a large grassy area, far too large to be a front garden, though that was apparently what it was, given the pretty white house that sat nearly fifty meters from the road. A branch off the driveway led to a small gravel lot beside the white house, but Sylvia kept driving past it.
What he’d taken to be woods behind the house was actually a copse of trees. Once they passed through those, they came upon a rather unexpected sight. It looked like this area might have once been a farmyard of some kind—there was a tall red barn with white trim, horse stables with a covered arena, and two more small houses, painted the same white as the front house, plus numerous buildings that might be called sheds.
What gave Hugo pause was the massive satellite dish mounted in concrete beside one of the houses, and the plethora of wires leading from a telephone pole to the northernmost house. Hugo peered at the horse arena—was that a massive Tesla coil in the middle of the manicured dirt?
Lancelot cursed and he whipped around to face forward just in time to see a drone drop out of the sky to hover in front of the car for a moment, before zipping up into the blue above.
Lancelot looked grim, and for the first time, Hugo slanted an uneasy glance at Sylvia. She kept inching the car forward, skirting around a pile of what looked like copper coils and finally parking in front of the house with all the wires leading into it.
“Your, ah, brother, lives here?” Lancelot asked.
“Yep. This is his Batcave. Can I have my tote?”
Hugo passed it up, trying to convince himself that her easygoing attitude meant they weren’t about to become victims of some insane American serial killer or captives of the Trinity Masters. While Franco had appeared harmless, Hugo wouldn’t want to find himself in a dark alley with Sebastian.
“And you’re sure he’s home?” Lancelot asked.
“Yep, I checked.” She tapped her watch.
Apparently, her brother was always home at this time of day. Hugo shrugged and got out on the driver’s side.
Sylvia shot him a smile and then started for the steps that led up to the small covered porch. Unlike her own, this porch lacked any inviting seating. What it did have was a handprint scanner and a large camera mounted above the door. Out of the corner of his eye, Hugo saw Lancelot detour back toward the pile of scrap metal they’d driven around. When he came jogging up to join them, he had one arm down at his side and slightly behind him.
Hugo had a sneaky suspicion the knight was hiding something behind his leg—a pole or board that could be used as a weapon.
Sylvia tried to turn the doorknob, and then made a disgusted sound when it proved to be locked. She put her hand on the palm-print scanner.
“Welcome, sister of the great inventor,” a mechanical voice said. “His brilliance is home and accepting petitioners.”
Hugo blinked in surprise. “Is that the voice of C3PO?”
Sylvia sighed and looked at Hugo. “Do you have siblings?”
“I do.”
“Then please, don’t tell him if you think that’s impressive. It will only make him worse.”
Sylvia opened the door, which had unlocked, and stepped in. Hugo glanced back at Lancelot, and then with a shrug, followed her in. Lancelot kept his eye on the video camera above the door, pausing briefly before entering. When he did, both hands were empty.
“Oscar!” Sylvia called out. “I’m here. I have guests.”
“The voices in your head aren’t guests!” a male voice boomed from somewhere in the house. “I’m pretty sure they’re permanent, Sylvia.”
Sylvia rolled her eyes, in the way only a sis
ter could. They were standing crammed together in a small foyer. There was a small parlor to their left, but it was devoid of furniture. Instead, there was a yoga mat and stationary bike. Straight ahead was a dim hallway, with several closed doors leading off it.
“Where are you?” Sylvia called out.
“Workroom,” came the booming answer.
“Where else?” she muttered. “Come on,” she said to them.
Single file, Lancelot in the rear, they went down the hall to the last door on the right.
“You better have pants on,” Sylvia yelled as she opened the door.
Hugo followed her in. He’d expected something odd—maybe a tubby young man sitting on a beanbag chair playing video games, or a space that looked like the cluttered backroom of an electronics store.
Instead, he walked into what felt like mission control for NASA.
The room must have been an addition on the back of the house because it was huge, in comparison to the proportions of the rest of the home. Easily five meters wide and long, the room’s walls and ceiling were painted dark blue. The floor was dark industrial tile. There was a single huge picture window that looked out on the copse of trees they’d passed through. Light came down from some recessed fixtures, but even more was provided from the dozens of screens. There were screens mounted on the walls, multiple screens on the large U-shaped desk in the center of the room. A counter ran the entire length of the wall with the window. Along the counter were the electronic bits and guts he’d expected to see, but everything was neatly labeled and spotless.
“Ahem.” Sylvia started unpacking her bag, setting the soup, medicine, and Kleenex on the big desk.
“Just a second, let me finish soldering this.”
Hugo leaned to the side to see around one of the massive monitors on the center desk. A man sat on a rolling stool, hunched over the counter, soldering wand in hand, a huge magnifying glass mounted on a movable arm, positioned between his face and whatever he was working on.
There was a small hissing sound, and then the man—presumably Oscar, her brother—settled the soldering iron into its metal mount and rose up.
