by Faith Hunter
Liz had no idea what hours developers kept, but she nodded, understanding security measures.
“Her boss called the house the next morning. Mom had missed an important meeting. Which she never did. Never.”
Liz had to wonder if that had been a problem to Layla growing up. Maybe growing up second to the job.
“So I went by there. Mom’s house looked perfect, as always. Except her clothes, the ones she wore when we had lunch the day before, were scattered everywhere, like they’d been thrown. Carelessly. There is nothing careless about my mother. So I went to the police.” She wiped her face again. “And they made me wait until this morning to file a missing-person report. They think she was having a fling and took off with some man,” Layla said, her tone bitter. “My mother doesn’t have time for a man in her life. Trust me. She works fourteen hours a day. Every day. Always has.”
Cia nudged her, and Liz knew her twin was thinking along the same lines. Abandonment issues, much? It might explain a lot about Layla, growing up. Not that having issues made them forgive her. Not gonna happen.
“Her keys? Purse? Cell?” Liz asked.
“All on the floor with her clothes.” Fresh tears gathered in Layla’s eyes and she bent over the goat. It nudged her jaw and licked her chin. “I don’t know what to do. Can you help me? Can you find her?”
Cia and Liz shared looks that said, No. Yes. No. Maybe. No.
Layla eased the goat back into the crook of her arm, placed the expensive pocketbook on the table, and opened the flap. “I can pay.” She pulled out a stack of hundred-dollar bills and pushed it across the table toward them. Neither twin looked at the money, but they both saw it. More money than they made in tips in a month. Maybe two.
Cia’s magic rose again, like a wave at high tide, hard and powerful and angry. She leaned forward and said, “We can try. Trying is a flat fee of a thousand. Success is another two thousand. Nonnegotiable.” When Liz started to debate the amount, Cia said, “That’s Jane Yellowrock’s fee for a PI job. And she doesn’t have magic. And”—she looked hard at Layla—“if we get your mom back, the fee is required, no matter what shape your mom is in.”
Liz sucked in a slow, painful breath. Layla gasped, her face paling. The comment was blunt enough to be worthy of Jane Yellowrock herself, and the rogue-vampire hunter was honest to the point of being brusque. Cia meant that Layla’s mom could be dead. She was the gentler twin. Usually. Suddenly Liz remembered what it had felt like to be the brunt of Layla’s cruelty—the goading, the taunting. And that one time . . . In that single indrawn breath, the memory descended, full, complete, and awful.
“Boadecia,” Layla had hissed. “Stupid name for a stupid girl. Some people think the twins have some kind of power. I just think they’re ugly.” A shove, hidden from the teachers by the group of girls surrounding them. “Stupid and ugly. Ugly red hair and ugly freckles. When Mother Nature messes up, she messes up bad. She made two of them.” Another shove. A yank of hair.
The moon had been full that day, making Cia less stable, more reckless, like stormy waves on an icy ocean, pushed by a full-moon tide. Fear had grown up inside Liz, like frozen rocks hanging on a cliff face, ready to fall.
Not fear of the taunting girls, but fear of themselves, fear of losing control. Fear that one of them would erupt and pull the other into her magical reaction through the twin bond. Fear that they would misuse their gifts and pay the price. Then the bell had sounded. They had gotten away, barely, before one of them lost control and they hurt the girls.
Liz blew out her breath. Yeah. Okay. Cia was right. That girl who hurt them back in high school was the woman facing them. To an enemy, their services shouldn’t be offered as a gift freely given, the way they were supposed to be for one in need. “What she said. That’s our price.”
“No matter what,” Layla said. Her hands trembling, she counted out thirty hundred-dollar bills. “I pay up front. You do your best.” She stood, tucking the goat into the crook of her arm and soothing it with an absentminded caress.
“We need to see the house,” Cia said, her tone still hard. “We’ll need to take something your mother was wearing the day she disappeared. To do a working to find her.”
Layla opened her pocketbook and removed an expensive-looking pen and planner. She wrote her mother’s address down and tore off the sheet. Then she tossed down a business card, glossy and dark, with her contact info on it. “Call me.”
She turned on the heel of the Manolo and left the café, the icy spring wind whipping inside.
“She wanted us to sacrifice a goat kid.”
“She’s an idiot. She called us by our full names, as if we’re fae and can be commanded.”
“Not our full names,” Liz said.
“Nope. I’m not sure we ever told anyone our full names. But I’d kill for those boots,” Cia said.
“I’d fight you for them.”
Her twin gave her a hard slash of smile and said, “Good idea on Jane’s prices, huh?”
Liz nodded and opened her mouth to tell Cia that Jane Yellowrock was in town for the hearing about the day their sister died. About the day Jane had killed her to save human lives. But she closed it on the words. Some things needed to die peacefully, things like the memory of their sister being put out of her insane, raving, psychotic, demon-drunk misery on live TV. So far she had been able to keep the news from her twin. Why spoil it?
Cia handed Liz the address and card and said, “Let’s get set up for lunch. I have the kitchen, and while the soups aren’t demanding, the salads and bread are.” Cia sashayed toward the back. “As soon as we’re done here for the afternoon,” she added, “let’s go by the mom’s house and get this over with.”
“Evangelina never had trouble handling the kitchen,” Liz grumbled. “Why can’t we get the knack? We need to hire a chef.”
“On it,” Cia said from behind the kitchen bar. “Résumés in a stack.” She waved a sheaf of papers in the air. “Maybe we should have a cook-off.”
Liz snorted and headed to the back to wash the breakfast dishes. A café didn’t run by itself.
—
The Subaru idled at the curb as the twins studied the house. It was a small home in the Montford Historic District, two-story, traditional, steeply gabled, slate-roofed, painted in shades of charcoal, pale gray, and white. The windows were new, triple-paned replacements, glinting in the cold sunlight. The winter plantings were tasteful, and a batch of early spring jonquils pushed up through the soil on the south side of the house. The white picket fence was newly painted. The bare branches of a small oak tree stretched over the Lexus parked in the short gravel drive.
“Looks okay,” Liz said.
“Looks expensive.”
“Is expensive. Probably goes for nearly seven-fifty in today’s market.” Liz could see her sister adding the necessary zeros to her housing cost figure.
“We could buy a place,” Cia said. “Not this nice, but we could buy a place somewhere else. We have the money from Evie’s estate. If we combined it—”
“No way. When you marry that guitar-playing, long-haired hippie you’re dating and start having all the six kids he wants, what happens to me?”
“You get to babysit, Sis.”
“Babysitting I can handle. It’s life as a live-in nanny I’m not interested in.”
“That long-haired hippie is rich as Midas. If Ray and I get married someday, we’ll get our own place and you can have our house.” Cia sounded part smug, part smitten, part unsure, the way she always did when she talked about Ray, the country singer who had fallen head over heels the first time he saw her and who had made a habit of sending flowers and candy and presents to get her attention.
A red car passed them slowly. “She’s here.” Liz couldn’t hide the bitterness in her words.
The vintage T-bird rolled into the drive and nestled into
the small space behind the Lexus. When their archenemy stepped from the car, she was once again holding the baby goat. And it was wearing a diaper. Cia breathed out a giggle, but oddly, Layla didn’t look ridiculous. More like a socialite with a chic, pampered lapdog. Lap goat. Liz resisted a smile.
“Does it look to you like she’s making a pet of the kid?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Cia said. Unspoken but understood was the phrase that’s weird. “Can you house-train them?”
“No. And they’ll eat literally anything and everything. Shoes. Fancy pocketbooks.”
Cia laughed softly and shared a glance, both of them imagining the scene of the goat eating the pricey bag. Layla screaming and stomping her feet.
“And their poop stinks. Like, really bad,” Liz added.
“I see a rude awakening on the horizon,” Cia said with barely restrained glee. “Hope it’s today so I can watch.”
They got out of their car and moved across the street to the house, Cia in front, as if to protect her weaker sister. Cia’s dress blew back in the slow wind, the shifting shades of color mimicking the silver-pinkish hues of moonlight on orchids. She wore a long vintage wool coat from the sixties, gray with tan lapel and cuffs, unbuttoned so the dress would show. Her red hair, dyed to a deep wine, was pulled into a chignon that looked smooth and chic. Her boots, never worn until today—never worn despite her boot fetish—struck the pavement with steady force. She looked classy and quirky and expensive, like the rich man’s toy that Ray might want to make her.
Cia hadn’t been wearing the Old Gringo boots, the coat, or the moonlight dress when they left the house this morning. The pricey buff-colored boots, hand-stitched with scarlet dragons climbing each side, had been Ray’s gift, one she hadn’t felt like she could wear, and she had kept them in the box, under her bed. Until today. She had put aside her uncertainty about accepting Ray’s present to show off to Layla.
Liz looked down at her own well-worn hiking boots, old jeans, and warm sweater crocheted by Evangelina last winter, before she started consorting with demons. It wasn’t often that the twins’ clothing choices were so dissimilar.
She frowned, not liking the change in her sister but powerless to affect it. The fear reaction to the loss of Evangelina had been stimulating Cia’s aggressive tendencies for months, and this close to the full moon, Liz was going to be able only to mitigate her twin’s reaction, not stop it. Getting through the loss of their sister would take time, and though it might be helped along by Liz getting well and strong again, that wasn’t going to happen overnight.
Liz followed in Cia’s wake, walking more slowly, taking in the house the way she had seen their friend—if their sister’s killer could be called that—Jane Yellowrock do. None of the perfectly placed rocks beside the drive had been moved out of position. No leaves had been allowed to catch in the nooks and crannies of roots and winter plants. The gravel beside the Lexus looked undisturbed, no signs of struggle anywhere.
The small front porch where Layla waited was freshly painted and the door was locked. Liz made sure to search for signs of problems, like, say, a size twelve boot print and a busted door, or overturned flowerpots. There was nothing. “Wait,” Liz said. She walked around the porch, tilting back the clay pots until she found the extra key. Brass, shiny, looking new, it sat on the painted boards, an invitation of sorts. It had taken her less than fifteen seconds to find it. If anyone had wanted inside, they could have unlocked the door and walked in with no trouble. Layla looked horrified, her eyes wide.
“I’m going to walk around the house,” Liz said, planting the key in Layla’s palm.
Cia stared hard at her for a moment and then nodded in understanding. “Yeah. Okay.” Leaving Layla—who entered the house without them—Liz led the way and Cia followed, her boots drumming on the carefully placed stepping-stones that ringed the house. The yard to the left side of the house was shadowed, chilly, and narrow, and the gate in the picket fence at the back edge of the house was unlocked. There were no broken windows or any obvious damage. The backyard was deeper than it was wide, and not fenced. Deer tracks and scat indicated that wildlife was welcome out back. The back door was closed, locked, and looked undisturbed. There were no broken windows that a kidnapper or burglar might have used.
On the south side of the house there was a small greenhouse filled with bags of soil, fertilizer, and yard tools, and a gate, identical to the one on the other side. It too was unlocked, with only a tiny catch. Near the front corner of the house was the patch of green pushing up through the soil, the jonquils looking cheerful.
“Nothing,” Cia said.
“Yeah.” They went back up the short flight of steps to the door and it opened before they could knock, Layla watching through the door’s leaded-glass window. She stepped aside and the twins entered, drawing together, as usual, in the unfamiliar place.
The air was warm inside, the heat at a comfortable level, not a lower setting. Most people might decrease the setting of the central heat when planning an extended out-of-town stay, and the comfortable temps seemed significant. Liz unbuttoned her sweater and tucked her hands into her jeans pockets, thinking about fingerprints. Even though she wasn’t looking, Cia put her hands in her jacket pockets, too. Twin stuff.
The house had wide-board hardwood floors, creamy painted walls hung with framed art, painted floor moldings and ceiling moldings. Ten-foot ceilings. Antique furniture juxtaposed with designer pieces. The living room boasted an Oriental rug in wine and blues to match the navy leather couch and burgundy upholstered chairs. The dining room sported navy-and-wine-striped fabric on the dining chairs and a floral rug under the antique table for ten. Perfect. The kitchen was clean, not a dish out of place on the granite-topped cabinets. The stovetop looked as if it had never been used.
Liz pointed up the stairs and Layla shrugged. The twins went up alone and found two guest rooms with a Jack-and-Jill bath between, and a sewing room/craft room/extra super-neat junk room behind a closed door. Theirs were the only footprints on the neutral carpet. Having learned nothing, they went back downstairs.
The house was free of dust, piles of mail, and accumulated rubbish. There were no coats tossed over chair backs. No shoes in a corner or slippers by the front door or gloves on a side table. No clutter. The framed art consisted of impersonal prints that a decorator might have chosen. There were no photos or mementos anywhere. No plants to water. No dog or cat bowls. The house was something for a magazine shoot, not a place to relax, to live.
Until Layla, still silent and watching them with curious and sober eyes, led them into the master suite. Which was totally different.
The suite looked like it had been hit by a whirlwind. The king-sized bed was unmade, the covers and comforter in a heap on the floor. Clothes were everywhere. A bottle of wine was open on a side table near a sitting area, a single long-stemmed glass beside it. Wine ringed the glass, partially evaporated. One glass. Not two, as one might expect if she’d met a man, had a tryst, and taken off with him, as the police seemed to think. Jewelry was in a pile on the bureau, diamonds and gold. A lot of both. The marble bath en suite was clean and untouched, Evelyn’s makeup in a white leather travel case, open but well organized, the contents in sizes accepted by airlines and strict travel security. Larger sizes of shampoos, conditioners, and lotions were arranged in a cabinet that Liz opened with a pocketed hand. Towels were perfectly folded, as were washcloths. Even the laundry basket’s contents were already separated, colors in one side, whites in the other.
“Everything is neat. As close to perfect as it’s possible to be and still be a real home. But the bedroom?” Liz said, making it a question as she walked back into that room.
“It’s never looked like this before. Ever,” Layla said grimly. “My mother is OCD about her stuff. Impossibly OCD.”
Another reason to think that Layla had not had a cheery childhood.
Liz t
ook in the room’s disarray. The clothes on the floor seemed weird somehow, as if they had been dropped in a circle. As if Evelyn had stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly around, dropping her clothes as she undressed. Grabbing the bedcovers and pulling them with her, then dropping them, too. The fabrics and clothing formed a spiral.
To get a better feel for the layout, Liz stepped inside the bare space on the floor and turned around. Yeah. A spiral. Facing one corner of the room, Evelyn had started disrobing while turning in a slow circle, releasing her clothes in a nearly circular, doughnut-shaped pile. Coat, then scarf, gloves, jacket, shirt, bra, boots, dress pants, leggings, and undies, dropped in that order. “Except . . . ,” Liz said, studying the clothing, “there’s only one boot.”
Cia, who had been watching, walked slowly around the room, checking corners. Her hands still in her pockets, she opened the door beside the bath to reveal a huge walk-in closet. She flipped the light switch, illuminating the rows of designer clothes, arranged by color and season. “What kind of boot?” she asked.
Liz bent and studied it. “Christian Louboutin, a five-inch spike-heeled black suede boot with fringe down the back seam. Size six and a half. A right boot.” Liz almost smiled, feeling her sister’s desire through the air and the twin bond. Cia loved boots. Like, really loved them. It was a miracle she hadn’t worn her boyfriend’s gift until today. She owned dozens of vintage boots, which took up most of the closet floor in their rental house. And they both wore size six and a half.
“No single left boot in here,” Cia said, “by any designer.” The light clicked off.
Liz tilted her head, studying the fringed boot and the floor beneath it. “There’s something under it.” Using only forefinger and thumb, Liz lifted the boot and knelt to see the floor. Beneath the boot, there was a small spatter of . . . dried blood. The drops were so tiny she might have missed them had she not looked extra closely. But blood could mean either foul play or black magic used against the missing woman. And either one would mean that this was a police case—local human law enforcement or PsyLED, the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division.
