by Jayne Castle
Together they surveyed the chaos that had overtaken the tiny living room. The carpet had been rolled up and shoved to one side. Foam spilled out of ripped cushions on the sofa. Books had been swept off the shelves and dumped unceremoniously onto the floor.
“They were certainly looking for something,” Lydia said ominously.
“Leftover Chartreuse, like I said.”
“Maybe.” She directed her own light at a dismembered sofa. “But there’s another possibility.”
He glanced at her. “You think they wanted to see if he left some clue about whatever it was he wanted to tell you? Don’t go there, Lydia. We don’t need any conspiracy theories to explain this search. Maltby did drugs, remember? Odds are this was done by a couple of opportunists looking for some free dope.”
“You’ve got to admit that Maltby’s accidental overdose today, the very day he chose to leave a message saying he had something important to tell me, is what you might call a very interesting coincidence.”
“It’s a coincidence. Period.” Resigned, he led the way back to the study.
“I really hate when you get that tone in your voice,” she said, hurrying after him.
“What tone?”
“The tone that says you know I’m right but you don’t want to admit it.”
“I’m a bigger person than that,” he said. “I can admit when you’re right.”
“Really? Try it sometime when I’ve got a rez-corder handy.”
She peered over his shoulder while he aimed the light into the room. “Jeez, they really made a mess in here, didn’t they? Look, they even pulled up a couple of floorboards.”
There was no denying that the study was in far worse shape than the other room. The drawers had been removed from the desk, the contents dumped on the floor. The reading chair had been overturned, the underside ripped open.
“Let’s make this fast,” he said, moving to the desk. “Someone else may decide to stop by tonight.”
“We’re looking for anything that has to do with Amber Hills Dairy.” Lydia studied the floor. “I wonder if he had a hidden safe.”
“If whoever was here ahead of us didn’t find it, I doubt that we’ll get lucky,” he warned. “The intruders obviously spent a lot of time taking this place apart.”
“You know what your problem is, Emmett? You’re a worst-case scenario type of guy.” She pushed aside some tumbled books to take a closer look at a seam in the floorboards. “You’ve got to learn to think positive.”
“The beauty of planning for the worst-case scenario is that I’m rarely disappointed.” He picked up a heavy textbook and flipped through it. There were hand-scribbled notes on every page. “Looks like Maltby never lost his interest in his old profession, in spite of the drugs.”
“I told you, once upon a time, he was considered an expert in his field.”
Ten minutes later Lydia gave up on the bookcase and stood looking around, her hands on her hips. “I hate to say it, but you may be right. Whoever got here ahead of us had a chance to search this room very thoroughly.”
He resisted the temptation to sayI told you so. “I agree.”
“But they were still here when we arrived,” she added thoughtfully. “Starting in on the living room, from the looks of it. Which implies that they did not find whatever it was they were looking for.”
“Maybe there were no drugs left to find.”
“Okay, let’s say that the intruders were looking for Chartreuse.” She folded her arms. “If that was the case, they wouldn’t have had any interest in whatever it was that Maltby wanted to tell me. Which means his secrets are still here.”
“Honey, there is nothing here that has anything to do with a dairy,” he said as gently as possible.
“A milk carton,” she whispered.
“What?”
“The poor man was dying. Maybe he wasn’t trying to write a cryptic note in code. Maybe he was simply attempting to get an obvious message across to me.” She unfolded her arms and rushed back out into the short hall.
“Now what?” he said to Fuzz.
They followed her into the small kitchen. She opened the door of the refrigerator. The interior light illuminated her face. He saw her eyes widen with excitement.
Moving closer he looked over her shoulder. There was half of a sandwich covered in mold and some unidentifiable sliced meat that had turned fuzzy and gray.
A carton of Amber Hills Dairy milk stood on the top shelf.
Lydia picked it up with great care. “Empty, I think.” She hesitated and smiled slowly. “No, not quite.”
He picked up a tiny tingle of psi energy.
“Trapped?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes.” Gingerly she opened the top of the carton and peered inside. “No milk, just a very nasty little illusion trap. Well, well, well. Wonder what it’s hiding?”
“Don’t try to de-rez it now. Let’s get out of here.”
“Fine by me.” She closed the top of the carton with satisfaction. “I’ve got what I came here for.”
He switched off his flashlight, went to the front door, and checked the corridor through the cloudy peephole. No one stood in the hall.
He eased the door open and moved out of the apartment with Fuzz on his shoulder. Lydia followed silently, cradling the milk carton.
Without warning the door directly across the corridor opened a bare three inches. The chain rattled. A slice of a face appeared.
“You’re the new Guild boss, ain’t ya?” the man rasped. “Saw your picture in the papers tonight.”
One of the many downsides of his new position was the very high profile that came with it, Emmett thought. On the other hand occasionally it could be useful.
“I’m Emmett London,” he said. He did not introduce Lydia who was standing very quietly in the hallway.
“Thought so. Name’s Cornish.” He squinted at Emmett. “This thing with Maltby. Guild matter, huh?”
“Yes, it is.”
Emmett sensed rather than saw Lydia’s surprise and disapproval, but he paid no attention. He hadn’t lied to the old man. As far as he was concerned, as long as Lydia was involved in this mess, itwas a Guild matter. After all, she was sleeping with him and he was running the Cadence Guild. It was a simple enough equation.
“Maltby was murdered, wasn’t he?” Cornish grunted, as if something he had been thinking all along had just been independently confirmed. “Knew he didn’t accidentally OD. He didn’t always resonate on what you’d call well-tuned amber but he was no fool when it came to his Chartreuse. He knew how to handle the stuff. Been using for years, y’know.”
Lydia moved forward. “We’re trying to find out what, exactly, happened here today. Can you help us?”
“Me? Nah.” Cornish shook his head very fast. “I didn’t see nothin’. Just heard a lotta noise out in the hall late this morning. Next thing I know there’s you and the new Guild chief and a bunch of cops and medics cluttering up the place. Then I seen ’em carry out poor old Maltby.”
“There were two people inside Maltby’s apartment when we arrived tonight.” Emmett reached for his wallet and deliberately took out a couple of bills. “Did you happen to see them enter?”
Cornish examined the cash with great longing. “Well, now—”
“Like I said, this is a Guild matter,” Emmett said evenly. “I’m only in the market for the right answers.”
Cornish hesitated, obviously pondering the risks of lying to the new boss of the Cadence Guild. Then he sighed heavily and shook his head with deep regret.
“Didn’t see anyone go in the front door,” he said. “Must’ve used the alley window. Heard ’em tearing the place up but never got a look at ’em.”
“Thanks.” Emmett handed the cash through the crack in the door. “The Guild appreciates your honesty, Mr. Cornish.”
Cornish brightened at the realization that he was going to be paid, even though he hadn’t been able to supply any useful information.
Cornish made to close his door.
“Wait, please,” Lydia said urgently. “I have one more question. Did Professor Maltby have any visitors recently? Say, in the past two or three days?”
“Not that I seen.” Cornish paused, pondering. “Didn’t hear anyone knock on his door yesterday or the day before for that matter. But—”
“Yes?” Lydia prompted.
“Maltby went out the night before he took a little too much Chartreuse or whatever it was that really happened.” Cornish shifted slightly, one shoulder bunching in a shrug. “There was nothing unusual about that, though. Long as I knew him he went out two, sometimes three times a week, always at night.”
“To buy his drugs?” Lydia asked.
“Nah. Gone too long for that. Besides, he got his Chartreuse from the same guy who sells me—” Cornish stopped in midsentence, belatedly aware that he was about to implicate himself. “Uh, what I mean is, everyone around here knows that a Chartreuse buy don’t take more than about sixty seconds. Dealers don’t like to stand around chatting with the customers.”
“How long did Maltby stay out at night?” Lydia asked.
“Hours,” Cornish said. “Sometimes he didn’t get back until damn near dawn.”
Emmett removed some more cash from his wallet. “Any idea where Maltby went at night?”
“Sure. He had himself a secret hole-in-the-wall. Went down into the catacombs all by himself to hunt for relics. Didn’t even take a hunter to watch out for ghosts. He was a tangler, a real good one. Worked on plenty of legal excavation teams back when he was a professor at some college. He knew how to find the good pieces and he knew the galleries on Ruin Row that would buy ’em without askin’ too many questions.”
“Maltby dealt in illegal antiquities?” Emmett asked.
Cornish shrugged again. “That was how he paid for his Chartreuse.”
7
LYDIA WALKED INTOher small living room and set the milk carton down very carefully on the low table.
“Poor Maltby.” She kicked off her shoes. “He was no doubt hoping to make a spectacular antiquities find down in the catacombs and use it to try to regain his professional reputation. I know just how he must have felt.”
Fuzz bounced onto the table and leaned forward to sniff cautiously at the milk carton. He backed away immediately, growling.
Emmett slung his leather jacket over the back of an armchair. “It would have been incredibly dangerous for Maltby to work alone underground all those years.”
“The risks have never stopped the ruin rats from going into the catacombs, you know that. Besides, Maltby was an excellent trap tangler and a fine P-A in his day.”
“Traps aren’t the only hazards down below.” Emmett stood behind the sofa, strong hands lightly braced on the back. He studied the innocent-looking milk carton. “Wonder how he avoided getting fried by a stray ghost all these years.”
“Everyone knows you can outrun a ghost if necessary,” she reminded him.
“Only if you see it coming in time and only if it doesn’t corner you.” He showed her a few teeth in a dangerous smile. “Come on, admit it, you fancy, elite academic types need us low-class hunters when you go underground and you know it.”
She made a face. Tanglers, in general, preferred to play down the dangers of the highly unpredictable energy ghosts primarily because of the long-standing rivalry with ghost-hunters. The relationship between the two types of para-resonators often reverted to a brains-versus-brawn thing.
Tanglers considered themselves the scholarly, intellectual side of the research teams. They were usually well-educated, multi-degreed, professional para-archaeologists who took pride in their academic status. Hunters, on the other hand, traditionally had no more than Guild training in the techniques of handling ghosts and other safety issues in the catacombs. In short, they were merely bodyguards as far as tanglers were concerned.
But the truth was that the ghosts, technically known as unstable dissonance energy manifestations or UDEMs, were a serious problem because they appeared at random and with very little warning. It only took the slightest of brushes against the green energy fields to knock you unconscious and land you in an emergency room. A more extensive encounter could kill. Only a person with a natural talent for resonating with the chaotic psi energy that formed ghosts could summon or destroy a UDEM.
“Okay, okay.” She sank back into the sofa cushions and flung her arms out to the sides along the top. “I’ll agree that ghost-hunters have their uses underground.”
He leaned slightly over the back of the sofa. She felt his fingers on the nape of her neck. A shiver of awareness went through her.
“I got the impression somewhere along the line that you find me useful occasionally aboveground as well,” he said softly.
She hid a smile. “I’ve been testing the old saying about hunters being very good in bed. You make an excellent research subject.”
“Yeah?” He traced a design on her nape. “Come to any conclusions?”
“I’m still doing the research.” The hair was stirring pleasantly on the back of her neck now. “I expect it will take me a while. I plan to do a lot of extensive tests.”
He removed his fingers from her skin, walked deliberately around the sofa, and stopped on the opposite side of the low table. He regarded her with a disturbing intensity.
“So long as I’m your only test subject, I don’t mind a lot of extensive research,” he said. “But if that’s not going to be the case, I need to know now.”
Something hard and grim had slipped into his voice. She knew him well enough to know that he rarely used that tone, at least not with her. She swallowed uneasily.
“Emmett?”
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all, just cool and determined. “This probably isn’t the right time for this conversation but given the circumstances, we’re going to have to have it soon so we might as well get it over with tonight.”
She stilled. “Are you talking about a trip to the dentist or our relationship?”
His smile was brief and humorless but at least his hard mouth curved slightly. “Our relationship.”
“I see.”
It was a subject they had both managed to avoid discussing openly. After all, they were only a few weeks into this affair, she reminded herself. They were still exploring new ground here. There had been no need to rush into decisions or commitments. There were issues. No one had said anything about love. They needed time.
Blah, blah, blah.
But there had also been a couple of underlying assumptions in their current arrangement, at least as far as she was concerned. One of them was that as long as they were seeing each other, neither of them would sleep with anyone else.
Maybe they should have talked about that assumption earlier, she thought.
“The problem is,” Emmett continued in that same too-even tone, “because of this situation with Wyatt and the Guild, I’m going to be busy for a while. I won’t have time to play the game the way you’ve got every right to expect me to play it.”
Her mouth went dry. “I don’t consider our relationship agame, for heaven’s sake.”
“Bad choice of words. Look, I don’t consider it a game, either. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some expectations and conventions that apply to our present arrangement.”
She felt the first flicker of temper. “Expectations?”
He moved one hand in a negligent, open-handed gesture. “Flowers, dinners out, theater tickets, long walks by the river. You know, all the stuff that goes with being involved in an affair.”
“Sure. Right. Expectations.” It only went to show how little she knew about having affairs, she mused. She hadn’t even thought about t
heir relationship in terms of expectations. Maybe she had been afraid to look at it in such specific terms because some part of her had been afraid that it wasn’t going to last very long.
“What I’m trying to get at here,” Emmett said, “is that I won’t be able to spend a lot of time with you until Wyatt takes back his old job. I’m going to be tied up in meetings during the day and I’ll be working late most evenings.”
She sat up on the edge of the sofa, knees pressed tightly together. “For goodness sake, Emmett, I don’t expect you to entertain me constantly.”
“I know that.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “I’m not talking about entertainment, damn it. I’m talking about making sure that you and I have the same understanding of our current arrangement.”
“Arrangement,” she repeated neutrally. Something told her that she was going to learn to hate that word.
He gave her a brooding look. “I’m not handling this very well, am I?”
“You do seem to be floundering. Why don’t you try being a little more direct? You’re usually pretty good with direct.”
“All right, I want to be sure we both agree that what we’ve got going between us is an exclusive—”
“Arrangement?” she finished icily.
“Yes.”
“Hey, no problem, London.” She gave him her brightest, most polished smile. “As it happens, I’m pretty busy myself these days. I’ve got my new private client and I’m still working full time for Shrimpton. And then there’s this business of trying to figure out why Professor Maltby sent for me the day he died. Yep, I think it’s safe to say that I won’t have a lot of spare time available to hop into bed with other men.”
He rounded the table in two long strides, clamped his hands over her shoulders, and hauled her to her feet.
“If you give a single, solitary damn about me,” he muttered, “you won’t joke about sleeping with other men.”
Stunned by his fierce reaction she splayed her fingers across his broad chest and searched his face. A sense of wonder unfurled within her.
