Crystal Vision

by Patricia Rice

  By morning, she was telling herself that she ought to get used to it. He really had to return to Scotland to settle his family’s situation—one she had caused. She feared his family might be harmed even more before this was over, since two of their murder suspects were relations of his.

  She ought to suspect Keegan, as she had at first, but she just couldn’t. In this case, she’d rather be wrong than right.

  Trolling for information without computers was probably purposeless, but she wasn’t touching Teddy’s laptop again. If what she recalled from the info dump was correct, their villains were into seriously dangerous territory. She didn’t want it touching Hillvale. If they could pin Daisy’s death on Edison, Wainwright, or Gabriel, that ought to stop the bastards.

  Back to hunting criminals without any clue. . .

  She pulled on her usual hiking shorts, vest, and work boots. She left her long black hair unbraided and tied in two pigtails down her front since she wouldn’t be serving food today. Feeling as if she was off to battle trolls, she missed her dagger, but the geek topknot was too identifiable. She really wanted to stay invisible as long as she could.

  Sam met her at the café door with a large cup of coffee and a stack of posters she’d already printed. “The reporters aren’t here yet. They partied half the night according to Dinah. They’re probably sleeping it off in Baskerville.”

  “They need lives if solving one stupid puzzle requires celebration.” Mariah sipped her coffee and studied the poster. “This ought to really give them something to chew on.”

  “Oh, wait until you see what Lance is putting together. He has all those old portraits he painted of the commune members and anyone else who crossed his path over the years.” Sam leaned in to whisper, “And I sent Val to explore Daisy’s stash for more.”

  “You are a conniving temptress. Val will eat poor Lance alive.” Someone else’s romantic tragedy revived her spirits somewhat. She refused to ask where Keegan had spent the night.

  Because she knew. Damn, if she didn’t know exactly what the Mountain Man had done. She loved Cass but couldn’t trust the wily old woman further than a toad could fly. But Keegan—was the most direct, straight-forward, honest. . . void. . . she’d ever known.

  Feeling slightly better, Mariah began the task of nailing and tacking Sam’s posters all over town. By the time she’d covered the outer walls, shops were opening up, and she asked to hang more posters inside.

  Explaining only part of what they meant to do took half the morning. Amber wanted to read her cards to judge the chance of success. Aaron snorted and told her to hang the poster anywhere she liked, then asked what she’d done with Keegan.

  “Ate him,” Mariah responded, checking her ghostcatchers while she was there, since her knee felt better.

  He studied the poster she taped to his counter. “Why don’t you just erect a circus tent?”

  “No money,” she said cheerfully. “Why don’t you wear a turban and bring your crystal ball?”

  He looked serious. “Don’t forget I have uses.”

  Mariah stopped to study the antique dealer. “I don’t trust easily,” she admitted. “But it would be awesome if you joined us. Empathy and psychometry aren’t acceptable in court, but if you and Teddy could steer Walker in the right direction, it might speed the process.”

  He had a long angular face that leant itself to gravity. “I want to find Daisy’s killer as much as anyone. I’ll be there.”

  Nulls like the grocer and the ice cream parlor manager didn’t ask questions. One more festivity added to the art walk simply meant more business as far as they were concerned.

  Tullah took her poster and narrowed her eyes. “Cass know about this?”

  “Is there anything Cass doesn’t know?” Mariah countered. “It’s what she admits to knowing that matters.”

  Tullah almost cackled as she taped the poster on the back of her register. “I want to see her and Carmel in the same room. If this don’t do it, nothing will.”

  “I hadn’t even considered that. Maybe we can persuade Kurt to send his mother back to Hawaii. That kind of explosion—”

  “Will make an excellent distraction,” Tullah said with her best superior attitude.

  “Remind me never to cross you.” Mariah marched out, trying to work a catfight into the ugly scenario already playing in her head.

  She let it go the instant she entered the meeting hall to see what Lance had done. The hall wasn’t huge, space wise. It just had no walls preventing seeing from one end of the building to the other. Lucinda’s priceless triptych held the place of honor at the far end of a space made narrow by partitions across the far corners. Lance had started hanging photographs on the partitions, which weren’t strong enough for heavy frames.

  Normally, track lighting illuminated the triptych. This morning, Lance was rearranging the lighting to focus on the long walls.

  Mariah tacked posters on the front door and the reception desk, then wandered in to study the portraits he’d accumulated.

  Lance watched her anxiously as he worked from the ladder. “Is this what you wanted?”

  “Don’t blame this one on me. This is all Walker. He has a wicked evil mind,” Mariah protested, stopping before a familiar face. “This painting looks like Keegan’s relation from the mural.”

  The skinny artist nodded nervously. “Trevor Gabriel. Lars captured him better in the mural, just using tempera. Gabriel’s features always eluded me. I could never really pin him down.”

  “Hard to pin slime, so I’d say that’s pretty perceptive of you. Lars took him at face value. You saw the lie beneath the pretty features.”

  Not that Mariah could actually see that in Lance’s portrait of a young man with dark curls and a charming smile. She just knew who Gabriel was, and Lance looked reassured at her assessment. She knew what it was like not to have effort recognized, so she always tried to offer acknowledgement of talent and hard work.

  “Monty said he was bringing more photos, so I left lots of space.” Lance clambered down to remove the ladder to the next fixture.

  “The mayor is in on this too? How ducky. What about Kurt?” Mariah asked a little too casually.

  Lance’s head bobbed on his skinny neck. “He was up all night with that nice Scot, smashing rocks. So Monty said he’d do the photographs. Val found more photos in the bunker. She took them over to Cass.” Lance sounded disappointed about that.

  “I think we have a real draw here,” Mariah said, visiting the next few paintings. “Here’s Representative Edison himself and his son, Caldwell, very nice. And I see Susannah let you hang the oil showing everyone at the farm house, including Lucinda’s. . . What was Ralph? Her nephew?”

  “He was a Wainwright. That’s all I remember hearing. He was looking for a journal he thought Lucinda may have taken from the family library. That’s right, he called her his aunt. More likely a great-aunt.” He stopped to peer at the oil more closely. “Carmel brought him to the farm, I believe. That was back when she liked playing hostess and having parties. She changed after Geoffrey died.”

  “It had to have been hard on her, running the resort and raising two boys alone.” Mariah tried not to sound dismissive of Lance’s sister, who had wealth and family and could have just asked for help—and hadn’t, because Carmel was a controlling bitch. Not that she was judgmental or anything. “So Carmel knew Gabriel, Edison, and Wainwright.”

  “They were all friends of Lars and Geoffrey. Well, Wainwright wasn’t. That’s Cass’s family, but our world was small back then. Everyone knew each other, one way or another.”

  Mayor Monty entered, his golden-brown hair falling in his eyes as usual. He carried an enormous box that he held up for inspection. “Who gets to arrange Val’s photo collection?”

  Mariah and Lance gathered around the box to pick through photos on stiff backing. “Are they labeled?” she asked.

  Lance chose one and looked on the back. “Robert Gabriel. So that goes on Trevor’s part
of the wall, yes?”

  The old black-and-white, artistically posed photo of a young man in a field looked vaguely like Daisy’s sketch, probably because Robert had Trevor’s square jaw. But another thought gripped her. “Dolores Menendez! Are any of these photos ones she took?” Mariah asked eagerly. “Do we need to ask Harvey about her?”

  Monty set the box down on a chair. “Val claims some of the early photos from her family album are from Dolores. And Susannah said she’d ask her husband for photos. They may just provide snapshots and put them all on one board. I’ve never seen so many members of Hillvale working together on a project—but Harvey is going to kill you.”

  “Did you know he was a Menendez?” Mariah asked accusingly.

  “I don’t tell people who you are,” Monty retorted.

  “Fair enough.” The mayor was a decent sort, for a Null. Grudgingly, she relented as she sorted through photos from the past half a century. “Does Walker think his minions can produce the biographical index in time?”

  “Since you apparently provided most of the material—” Monty glared at her, returning her accusation. “It’s just a matter of printing one copy and putting a copy on our website for the reporters to peruse.”

  Mariah smiled in satisfaction. “Let them pursue someone else besides me.”

  “You’d better see what that man of yours is doing,” Monty advised. “He must have spent the night ordering online and paying for special delivery. Mom’s pitching a fit about the delivery trucks in the parking lot and the mess in the conference room.”

  Mariah’s heart soared at this confirmation of Keegan’s whereabouts. “Oh goody,” she said, keeping her cool. “You want me to breathe fire back at her? My pleasure.” She started for the door, happy with any excuse to see Mountain Man and tick off Carmel.

  “Try not to burn down the lodge,” Monty called back. “It’s the only income we have right now.”

  “I’ll tell her Lance has her portrait hung in the place of honor, shall I?” she called back.

  Monty’s shout of alarm did her jaded heart good.

  She did so love to wreak havoc. Maybe she was the coyote around here.

  Keegan hopped off the delivery van in the parking lot, waved thanks at the driver, and aimed for the café. He saw Mariah-Zoe before he reached it.

  Zoe, who had wreaked devastation on his family. Zoe, who had exposed sunny Brianna’s relation to her dodgy grandfather. Keegan had spent the night smashing rocks and wishing they were Wainwright’s head. Grudgingly, he had come to terms with the correlation between scorned physicist, Bri’s greed, and family disaster. That it had been Zoe who had forged those links was a bitter pill, but logically, he had to admit that she had simply uncovered what others had done.

  Watching Mariah-who-flies-with-the-hawk come toward him made his unruly heart soar and his brain say uh-oh. It would be easier if he could blame her. He had to save his family first and foremost. And it would be wise not to involve Mariah’s too-perceptive brilliance in the job ahead of him.

  But he couldn’t help filling with pleasure at her presence, even when she scowled at him.

  “We’re building a nuclear bomb. What have you and Kurt accomplished?” she demanded.

  “Nuclear bomb? Figurative, I trust?” he asked warily.

  She gestured at a colorful poster. “We’re having a reception for the original members of the commune and their families, and the public is invited. We have paintings and photographs of as many as we could find. We’ve added a biography on the dirty dozen to Hillvale’s website. Daisy’s biography doesn’t exist or we’d have all thirteen from the mural. We have an IT guy who says he can display pages from the bio on a screen for the public to read.”

  He frowned. “And exactly what will this accomplish?”

  “We didn’t want to wait until Edison and company returned next month, so we’re hoping to draw them up here this weekend. And unleash the reporters.”

  “You’re asking them to come here?” Keegan tried not to shout, but he might be expiring as they spoke. This was the kind of disaster vengeful Zoe promoted. He grabbed her elbow and began hauling her toward her place. “They may be killers!”

  “Don’t bully me, Keegan.” She yanked her arm from his grip and stopped at Dinah’s. “I need food and there isn’t any in the house.”

  “Did you even read that material you dumped on Expoleaks and Teddy’s website?” he whispered harshly as he followed her inside Dinah’s.

  “Most of it? No,” she said insouciantly. “Who has time?” She continued past the counter, into the kitchen. “Dinah, I’m famished, and I know I haven’t worked all day. And I’m broker than broke because of this bum knee. . .”

  Keegan waved cash.

  Dinah rolled her eyes. “You two go do what you need to do and don’t hassle me. I’ll send up a box of whatever when it’s ready.”

  Mariah kissed Dinah’s cheek, gave Keegan a haughty look, and marched out. She definitely wasn’t smiling, and that was his fault.

  It was better that way. Since food was imminent, Keegan followed her back out.

  “We suspect Edison, Wainwright, and Gabriel are up to their chinny chin chins in a criminal enterprise,” she said grimly as they headed up the lane. “We’ve discovered they own a shady company called EWG. We don’t know why they are meeting here, except to assume they don’t want anyone to know they’re meeting.”

  Which coincided with that niggling thought he’d ignored the other day—Hillvale was a place for people to hide themselves or what they were doing. No cell reception, or even public cameras, made it far less likely that anyone’s presence was recorded.

  “I don’t suppose you understand quantum physics,” he said as they reached her cottage.

  She eyed him warily. “Only what I’ve read in novels. Did you find the secrets of physics in Expoleaks?”

  He shook his head as she let him in. “No, I just read a lot in my area of research. And so I’ve been performing a few experiments on that malleable rock from the canyon.”

  “Malleable?” She pulled coffee beans out of the freezer to grind. “The rock you turned to a diamond?”

  Talking it out with someone who understood diminished his helpless rage. He filled the coffeemaker with water. “The crystals have malleable molecular structures. If any of our unholy triumvirate has my abilities, he will have discovered this. They apparently know about the cave in the canyon. It’s possible they’ve had years to discover the properties of those rocks.”

  “While this was happening, one assumes Wainwright was also having a nice time selling synthetic diamonds,” she said cynically. “Was he looking for another source of artificial gems?”

  “I can hope that’s all they’re doing,” he said glumly. “But from what I can tell, Wainwright’s knowledge isn’t limited to selling diamonds. He’s a physicist who may have my abilities and be bankrolling a larger operation.”

  A knock at the door interrupted this admission. With relief, Keegan answered it. Harvey thrust a fragrant sack at him. “Thanks for nothing, Ace. Walker’s been questioning me all morning.”

  The musician spun on his boot heel, but Mariah yelled, “That was me, Menendez. Keegan didn’t say a word. Really, you’re not that invisible.”

  Harvey turned and glared. “I’m not my family.”

  Keegan crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb. “Sure you are, just as Sam and I are part of our families. That doesn’t mean we follow in their footsteps.”

  “Your family isn’t on your doorstep. Mine are right down the road, plotting who knows what. Only my grandfather and I got the music genes. The rest inherited avarice. You don’t think my Uncle Carlos married Susanna out of the generosity of his heart, do you? That’s why she’s up here alone. Carlos won’t come near Cass.”

  “Maybe you better come inside, cowboy,” Mariah said. “You just may be the trigger for our nuclear bomb.”

  Twenty-nine

  July 14: Saturday m
orning

  “Do you think we’ll ever start drawing enough business for Dinah to actually hire a waitress?” Mariah called from Teddy’s kitchen, where she was hiding by making a fresh pot of coffee. “I don’t think I can work there anymore.”

  “Cluck-cluck,” Teddy called back. “Wear a sack over your head.”

  “Would customers be offended if I wore war paint?” Mariah carried two mugs to Teddy’s empty shop. It was a good thing Teddy sold her jewelry designs on-line and in real stores because the shop didn’t have enough customers to support itself.

  “Is that what you’re planning on doing tonight? You do realize reporters are already crawling the streets, looking for anyone who resembles the pictures in the gallery?” Teddy strung one of her gems among a line of crystals and admired the effect.

  “Why do you think I’m hiding? Although if they’re hunting potential killers, maybe they’ll not notice a notorious hacker. Can you believe Val produced those photos of the archery contest?” Sipping her coffee, Mariah kept a wary eye on the street outside.

  “Doesn’t do much good unless we know which of those kids in the contest grew up to become bow hunters. None of them appear to be related to our suspects. They were just friends of Val and Susannah and whoever else happened to be around at the time. I’d hate to believe any of them grew up to kill Daisy.”

  Mariah grimaced. “I wish Daisy had been more communicative.”

  She wanted to smack herself in the head the minute she said it. She was the one not communicating what she knew—because it was dangerous and she wasn’t certain it was relevant. Just exactly the problem Daisy must have had, except Daisy’s mind was a confusing place to start with. Mariah’s wasn’t.

  Or shouldn’t be. She just wasn’t accustomed to wallowing in emotional uncertainty. Computers didn’t require deciphering what was right or wrong. She just wrote the code and it worked or it didn’t. She didn’t have to worry about a hard drive’s feelings.