“And now they assume you can pay.”
Will flicked his wrist in irritation. “Oh, of course. I’m a legendary timeseer. I’m rolling in royals, just like all police officers!” He made a face. “It doesn’t seem to matter how many times you tell someone that you’re a Crown employee and wear a blasted uniform to work. They make up your mind about who you are before you can tell them otherwise. Gods, I’m some kind of idiot, aren’t I? Showing all my cards like that.”
“Try not to blame yourself, Will. They would have recognized you eventually!”
“But maybe not before the sale.” Will sighed. He leaned back on his elbows. “I’m sorry, Chris,” he said.
Chris’s chest felt heavy. “So am I,” he replied softly.
He had his own memories of the old Cartwright home. They were patchy, confusing, and swathed in fog thicker than the incense Will burned for his ghost-seeking clients, but they were precious. The old grand piano. The lush, expansive gardens. Will’s boyhood bedroom with its plush blue carpet and the floor covered in toy trains. And, of course, the room where Doctor Graham Cartwright had done his experiments on one Christopher Buckley.
“I’m still absolutely certain that my father’s research is still hidden in that estate, but hells if I can get to it.”
“So…” Chris brushed the hair off his forehead, trying to sound anything but frustrated, or judgemental, or desperate. “You’re giving up?”
“Hells, no!” Will straightened all at once, fixing Chris with the evil eye. “Father and Elder take the bastards. That’s my estate. That’s my father’s legacy. Bugger me if I’m going to leave it in someone else’s hands.” Chris tried very hard not to consider Will’s impassioned, forceful voice when he said bugger me. “You saw that weepy idiot I had in here,” Will continued, unaware of the way Chris’s heart had started beating faster. “I’m taking more appointments. Work is slow at the precinct? Fine. I’ll be the link to the afterlife for every grieving fool in Tarland so long as they’re offering royals. I know that I’m being extorted by the cheats who are sitting in my house, but it’s difficult to do anything about it when every single body involved in the law in Tarland wants my hide tanned.”
Chris had learned to stop apologizing for his part in William’s fall from grace in the legal system. He hadn’t learned to stop silently feeling responsible. “So you’ll pay? That seems….”
“It’s a crock of shit,” Will said, sounding almost cheerful. Chris, who actually rather hated foul language, smiled despite himself. It wasn’t the words, it was… Will. “But what else is there for it? Nothing. There’s so much in that house I need. No, stop with that that face—it isn’t about you. It isn’t about my father’s notes. That’s part of it, of course, but it’s…” Will sighed. He rubbed his hands on his trousers. Chris wondered if Will sweated nervously like he himself did when they were together. “It’s what was taken away from me.” Will’s voice had become very quiet. “It’s like a damned picture of everything we lost that night. You understand?” His eyes were oddly bright when he looked back up at Chris, and Gods did Chris ever understand.
He nodded.
Will nodded back.
Unsaid things filled the air again. Chris found himself looking with too much interest at Will’s pouting mouth, and he licked his own lips. “Will…” he murmured.
But Will stood up, still rubbing his palms on his pants. “I have another appointment,” he said quietly. “You really should be back at the office.”
“We don’t have a case right now,” Chris protested. He sounded pathetic to his own ears.
“Well. All the same. You know Olivia. You shouldn’t test her patience.”
Not so much time had passed, really. But he understood what Will was doing. The tension that flowed back and forth between them pulled taut. If he stayed much longer, something would happen, and it would end as it always did. Chris would hate himself, and Will would hate him for hating himself.
He climbed to his feet, fighting his own reluctance. “I suppose,” he murmured.
Will blessed him with one of his rare genuine smiles and ducked his head almost shyly. “I can show you to the door if you want.”
Chris swallowed hard. He looked down at Will. Rubbed the back of his neck. “I know it isn’t about me,” he blurted. “I know it isn’t about my ability, or your father’s research on aberrant proficiencies, or my mother, or—or any of it. Anything to do with me at all. But… that doesn’t mean I don’t adore you for doing it.”
He hadn’t meant to say adore. He’d meant to say admire. Or respect. Or appreciate. But adore was what had come out, and Will gazed up at him with longing, frustrated wonder for just one moment before his expression shuttered.
“If you don’t want me to kiss you,” he ground out, “then don’t say that sort of thing.”
Chris watched Will move for the door with a burning in his chest. He pictured himself grabbing his arm, pulling him close, covering his mouth. His fingers twitched. But he didn’t move.
Will turned on his heel. “You haven’t used it, have you?” he asked. There was a pinch between his eyebrows.
Chris swallowed the rush of indignation. “No!” he insisted and sounded defensive regardless. “I haven’t used it.”
Will nodded. “Good.” He turned away again. “Because whatever this thing between us is, it’s absolutely bloody over if you play around inside of anyone’s head without their say ever again.”
livia didn’t look up when Chris entered the office. She was wearing a dress that was a decade out of fashion. It had an outrageously sized bustle, and as she bent over the file cabinet, it waved most obscenely in the air. Chris shook his head, shutting the door on the brisk, windy day he’d escaped from. It was one of her only fashion choices he just hated. Twenty years out of style was vintage. Ten years out of style was just dated.
“Is he getting the house?” she asked, her voice muffled by papers.
He hadn’t told her that he was going to see William, but he’d stopped finding this sort of thing uncanny. “Ah. No. The current owners don’t want to sell. Or rather, they’d be perfectly happy to sell for considerably more royals than the place is worth. It seems they realize there’s sentimental value at play and want to take Will for all he’s worth.”
“This is why,” Olivia pronounced, “I always hold exactly zero sentimentality towards anything.”
“You say that.”
“Pish and you doubt me. Monstrous!” She straightened triumphantly, producing a familiar bundle of paper. Chris tried to read the heading. CONTRACTUAL BUSINESS AGREEMENT.
Oh—dear.
Chris whirled, heat in his cheeks. A clean-shaven string bean of a man wearing ratty clothes sat in one of Olivia’s beautiful velvet upholstered wingbacks. “A client,” he said weakly.
“Yes, Christopher. A client,” Olivia said patiently. She pushed the contract against his chest as she breezed by, and he stared at it, befuddled, before experience kicked in and he headed to his desk, already weaving in the empty fields with the information he knew.
Anxieties brewed a veritable word soup on the page.
“This is Eric Kellystone,” Olivia said, settling into another chair. “He came right here after finding his brother dead in an alley!”
“Ah. I… I see. My condolences, Mister Kellystone. Father guide his soul.”
“Yes, of course, all of that.” Olivia waved him off. “The deceased had a note of money owed pinned to his chest. Woven. Uniform style, so no mental handwriting to analyze.” She brandished a page of plain, white paper, from which Chris could glean onto the impression of tight, professional weaving before she disappeared it again. “Eric here had already been getting calls with the amounts in question from a whole variety of loan sharks, hadn’t you, Eric?”
“Mister Kellystone, if you please,” the man said, his expression pained.
Olivia tsked. “Oh, no, absolutely not. That will be damnably confusing with the other, dead
Mister Kellystone, won’t it? Eric is a perfectly lovely name. In any case, some creditor is responsible for the murder. One who thinks that a brother might have bollocks amenable for squeezing post-mortem payouts?”
Chris folded his lips. “Have you tried a Mister Rayner Kolston?” he asked testily.
Olivia snorted.
Mister Kellystone just looked confused. “I don’t recognize that….”
“Of course you don’t. My assistant has this damnable verbal tic, it’s so inconvenient.” Olivia crossed one leg over the other, very tidy. “And your brother did have debts?”
Mister Kellystone nodded, looking rather miserable. “Loads of them, I’m afraid,” he said. “And he just kept borrowing.”
“Gambling?”
“… Coca,” Mister Kellystone admitted, voice low and gravelly. “For most of his life, but he always had it under control. He was a banker. A fine, decent sumfinder and he made it work. Used the stuff like medicine. Who was I to push him? But it got worse and worse, and then the bank couldn’t maintain its upkeep costs and closed, and he just disappeared into the stuff. And the money he needed to pay for it.” The man sniffed and quickly wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“You came here instead of the police… why?” Olivia’s cases were all filtered through the police, of course, but there were two kinds—cases she was assigned from the police, and those brought to her by citizens first. The former were by far more common, especially for the working class sort of gent Mister Kellystone appeared to be.
Mister Kellystone’s face twisted. He turned as if to spit, and then, seeing their pleasant surroundings, thought better of it. “They kept me waiting over an hour just to file a report. It seems coppers haven’t got any interest in an addict with a postage stamp flat, debts, and nothing else. I thought I might try my luck cutting them out of it entirely.”
Chris recalled what Olivia had said four days ago, on his birthday. The world is finally in the midst of falling apart in earnest.
Olivia glanced his way. “Is the contract ready, then?”
“Ah,” Chris said. He looked down. An itemized list of all his confusions looked back at him. “I… need to recopy it. Some errors. But yes, it shouldn’t take a moment.”
“Excellent,” Olivia pronounced. “Then we can be on our way to see Mister Kellystone’s—that is, the dead Mister Kellystone’s—flat.”
The carriage rattled up to the crumbling tenement house like it was a wheelbarrow being pushed over broken glass. Olivia hadn’t been able to flag a single one with the umber glow of a gnome’s smoothing binding around its wheels, and Chris felt as though his teeth were about to rattle out of his skull as he jumped out to help Olivia down. Her ludicrous skirt didn’t allow for much in the way of range of movement. It was the gentlemanly thing to do.
“Good Gods,” Olivia muttered, looking up at the old building. “I’m not sure we should go in. As much as I’d regret missing out on the toxic mold.”
“How are we going to investigate if we don’t go inside?” Chris pulled his greatcoat tighter. The day itself was pleasantly cool, but the whipping wind had a bite that could take a chunk out of a man.
“Ugh,” Olivia sighed, stepping into place beside him. She raised her hand as a visor against the sun. “I hate how right you are. All right, then. Up we go.”
A sign informed them that the stairs had, worryingly, collapsed recently. It instructed that they use the lift. Chris glanced about nervously as the entire contraption rattled and banged, the cloudling glow flickering and sparks rolling out of the corners. “You might have been right,” he murmured to Olivia, which made her smile faintly.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I rather feel as if we’re about to die, don’t you?”
Somehow, they made it out of the lift, down the mouldering, crumbling hall, and to the flat their client had informed them was his brother’s. There was no puzzle lock on the door; it had probably stopped working ages ago. An old-fashioned key fit into the lock instead, and they entered the residence of the deceased Mister Kellystone.
Imagining a human being living here could kill a soul, just a little.
Olivia lifted a quart of sour milk off the stained stove, making a face. “It would seem he’d checked out of living long before he died,” she said mildly.
Chris took two long strides from the door and ended up practically in the bed. It was rumpled, stained, discoloured, and he was fairly sure it would give him fleas or bedbugs if he sat on it. He’d seen wardrobes with more room. He glanced around. “Goodness,” he said. “Where is the water closet?”
“I imagine there’s a communal one down the hall where Mister Kellystone was expected to evacuate.” Olivia shuddered, shuffling through a stack of scrawled and illegible papers on a table beneath a bright spot of wall that probably denoted where the magic mirror had been before it had presumably been pawned for coca. “What a miserable existence.”
“I don’t think it’s that uncommon of one,” Chris said. “Not anymore. Eric Kellystone said his brother had been a successful banker.”
Olivia snorted, her attention mostly on the pages. “A successful banker with a serious drug habit.”
“Fernand always said that coca was a plague among sumfinders.” Sometimes, it didn’t even ache anymore when he talked about the man who had partially raised him. “He said more of them were on it than not.”
“Mn.” Olivia lifted a page and looked closely at it. Then she set it aside and sighed. “I don’t know why I’m trying to argue with you,” she said. “You’re completely right, and that’s the truth of it. In another time, the less fortunate Mister Kellystone would have continued as a functioning addict, investing and embezzling other peoples’ money, living his life.” She shook her head. “And frankly, I’m a better Deathsniffer than one who wastes her time trying to find out which loan shark knifed a default client.”
Chris thought of the deceased’s brother wiping his eyes and bit down on a harsh retort. “Doesn’t he deserve justice as much as anyone?”
Olivia waved him off. “Of course he does,” she said. “I’m hardly saying otherwise. I am saying that this is boring. I’ll chase boring leads to boring conclusions and then have Maris arrest a boring perp. I’m wasted on this. I shouldn’t have taken it.”
“Then why did you?”
She half-turned and gave him a small, tight smile. “Because,” she admitted, “he came to me, and I couldn’t just flip him back on the police, and… and he was clearly distraught. I felt… rather badly, just turning him out.”
Chris swallowed and turned away. He could at least do the decent thing and not look her in the eye as she admitted that. “Oh,” he said.
Olivia sniffed delicately, picked out a small stack of papers, and then deposited them into her valise. “It seems as if Mister Kellystone maintained admirably exhaustive notes, once you can make sense of the hen scratch,” she said. “There are several obvious suspects already, just based on these. It’s strange that the responsible party didn’t search his flat and seize the incriminating documents, but then,” she snorted, looking down at the remaining piles of paper, “these hardly look like documents. More like… a madman’s drunken grocery lists.”
Chris walked up behind her, peered over her shoulder, and tried to parse the writing. He couldn’t make out so much as a letter. Some miracle of truthsniffing was doubtless needed to make any sense of it.
“I think it was kind of you to accept his case,” he said quietly. They stood close enough that he felt her tense, then relax.
“Kindness. A state I can honestly claim that I have never once aspired to.” She shook her head. “Well, if I get bored enough, I can turn over everything I’ve learned to Maris. Put a new ‘sniffer on it. And then the poor sod doesn’t have to think someone else has swept his brother’s death away.” She made a face. “Though that would require talking to Maris…” She looked over her shoulder and met his eyes. “In any case, it’s all a lot of altruistic non
sense.” Her lips quirked. “You’ve done things to me, Christopher.”
She spoke with such exhausted, timeworn sincerity that Chris found himself momentarily speechless. In the absence of any way to respond with the appropriate gravity, he found something absolutely horrifying come out of his mouth, instead: “Only in your wildest dreams, Miss Faraday.”
She froze. He froze. Her eyes went wide, and he felt his own jaw drop, and then she burst into delighted laughter, bending at the waist and grabbing hold of his shoulder to keep herself upright. He stood stock-still, mortified, incapable of explaining what had come over him. When she straightened, red-faced and wiping tears and looking up at him like he’d hung the moon, she patted his cheek. “It appears,” she said, her voice glowing, “that I’ve done things to you, as well.” And then she winked.
Chris watched her move, stunned at himself. Gods, where had that come from? He’d turn her down flat even if she offered!
She had changed him.
“Now,” Olivia said, still wiping mirthful tears as she twirled to survey the tiny flat. “I suspect that Mister Kellystone was the sort of man who would hide things beneath his bed. The question is: do either of us have either as much courage or as little sense as it would take to actually put hands on that thing?”
Chris turned the photograph Emilia had given him over in his fingers. Rosemary smiled out at him, so full of life that she seemed about to flow out of her monochrome confines and burst into blazing colour. Had she ever looked so brilliant or so vivacious standing before him?
“I am sorry, Mister Buckley,” Rachel Albany murmured on the other side of the mirror.
“It’s fine,” he responded. It wasn’t fine, not really.
“She doesn’t mean anything by it, truly. As I said, one of her friends only just lost a father, and she’s been very concerned with trying to comfort the girl. With that atop her full schedule, I think it just slipped away from her.”
The Heartreader's Secret Page 4
