Spirit and Dust

9


I COULDN’T EXPLAIN why I jumped to do what Carson said, except that I trusted Lauren less than I trusted him. Blocked from her view, I whisked the velvet-lined tray into the safe. I started to put the pearls back as well, but Mrs. Hardwicke’s voice stopped me.

“Take me with you.”

What? I asked her silently, my hand poised at the back of my neck. Why?

“I know what you are,” she said, in a weird mix of plea and direct order. “You must help Alexis. I can help you do that.”

From the other side of the suite I heard Carson say to Lauren, “It took them longer than I thought to get a warrant.”

He meant the FBI, and a lightning strike of hope lit my heart. Agent Taylor—the cavalry—was on his way.

I closed the safe and swung the painting to cover it, my brain running double time. If Lauren’s spell was working, Taylor still thought I was asleep on that smelly couch in the office. I needed to give him some kind of heads-up. Not for myself, but for my family. If anything happened to me, he would have to protect them from Maguire.

Could I leave him a clue and get my message across? Taylor hadn’t ever shown any sign of ESP, but he had instincts that were almost as good. While I had the chance, I unlooped the pearls from around my neck and unfastened the chain I was wearing in the same movement. The pearls I slipped into my skirt pocket, feeling Grandmama Hardwicke fade to a bare psychic stirring. My own necklace and pendant I hid in my hand, just as Lauren called to me.

“Stop stalling, Red,” she snapped. “If you haven’t found anything by now, you’re not going to.”

I dropped the necklace—Saint Gertrude’s medal gleaming up at me—beside the bureau and hoped the detectives were thorough in their search. Then I hurried toward the door before Lauren or Carson came looking for me.

“Where are we going?” I asked warily. Maguire needed to stash me while the FBI was there, and I did not put it past him to have a dungeon.

“Out,” said Carson, giving me a nudge.

I followed Lauren into the hall. Carson lagged behind, and I hoped he still had the mausoleum key. Surely he would know it was important even if I hadn’t yet told him why.

“You two are going to check Alexis’s dorm room again,” Lauren told me. “Just don’t get caught. You can’t find Alexis if you’re in federal custody.”

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” said Carson, sliding out of the bedroom and closing the door firmly. Lauren gave him a talk-to-the-hand wave and disappeared to tend to her own duties, which worried me for Taylor’s sake. She’d better not put another spell on him.

Carson, meanwhile, took my arm and hustled me toward a back staircase, which led down to an enormous kitchen. Bertram was waiting with two coats and a set of keys. “It’s got a full tank,” said the butler, “and a six-pack of soda in the back, as you requested.”

“Thanks, Bertram.” Carson pocketed the car keys and slipped into one of the coats. He grabbed the second one, and when I didn’t move fast enough, wrapped it around me and shoved me toward the back door.

We froze at a sound from the front of the house—one of the goons answering the door, then the familiar murmur of Agent Taylor’s voice and the harder crack of Gerard’s demand.

I drew a breath to yell to him. Drew it, held it, my tongue making the T in Taylor. Then the geas jerked on my leash with boot-to-the-chest force. My shout came out as nothing but air and a grunting wheeze.

Black fireworks splashed over my vision as I tried to make my diaphragm work, to pull breath back into my lungs. I grabbed at a wall to keep from falling over, but it turned out to be Carson. “Daisy?” he asked, sounding genuinely alarmed.

This was why Maguire had bound me to a task I would have done freely. I couldn’t call out to the agents because they would stop me from looking for Alexis. If Taylor didn’t ship me back to Texas for my safety, Gerard would arrest me for interfering with a federal investigation.

By accident I staggered toward the door, and the iron band around my chest loosened. I took another step and was able to gasp, “Let’s go.”

Carson didn’t argue, just ushered me out. The biting cold of the Minnesota night snatched away the breath I’d just caught. I stumbled into the garage with Carson, wrestled my arms into the sleeves of the coat, and fell into the passenger seat of a sedan as soon as he unlocked it.

“A Taurus?” I asked as he started the engine. There were four other cars in the garage and all of them were more … well, more everything than the beige Ford.

“We’re going for unremarkable.” He hit a button on the remote clipped to the visor and the garage lights went dark. “What would you pick?”

Not the one that looked like a car from Tron, I guess. He was right; blah was better.

Another button, and the door in front of us lifted. Headlights off, Carson pulled out of the garage and crept the car along the unlit drive as it curved through the surrounding woods. I could see the front of the house through the trees, and the two uniformed officers posted there, leaning against a squad car, watching for anyone sneaking away. Like us.

I could have jumped out of the car and made a run for it, or rolled down the window and shouted to the cops. But the memory of the geas’s donkey-kick in the kitchen kept me still and silent, sunk low in the seat.

Once we’d reached some distance from the house, Carson put his foot down and the Taurus slipped along the dark drive like a moon shadow. It wasn’t until we’d reached the county road and turned onto it, free and clear, that the knot in my chest finally loosened.

I sat up and looked out the window, realizing how bright the night really was. Full moon, beige car … “How did those officers not see us?”

Carson turned on the headlights and settled into a more comfortable position behind the wheel. I could make out his silhouette, and he seemed to debate his answer before admitting, “That was a little sleight of hand on my part.”

He said it so calmly that it took a second for me to realize what he meant. “Hang on,” I said, rearranging my brain to fit in this new information. “You do magic, too?”

Another pause, another debate. I’d assumed it was a yes-or-no question. “Not spells or anything like Lauren does,” he explained, sounding almost sheepish. “It’s more like a talent.”

Okay, I didn’t even know where to put that in my file cabinet of supernatural information. “You mean like Jedi mind powers? ‘This is not the Taurus you’re looking for’? That kind of talent?”

“Not exactly.” He was definitely looking sorry he’d admitted anything. “Not mind powers.”

“Does Maguire know about this?” I asked, gnawing on the question like a dog on a bone, trying to get to the marrow of it. Or maybe just of him. I had to know how much to trust him.

I could see his knuckles flex on the steering wheel. “This has nothing to do with finding Alexis. Let’s stick to our job.”

“How about this, then.” I didn’t like unknowns, especially where they intersected with me. “Maguire has his normal resources, his criminal ones, plus you and Lauren, the Wonder Twins. Why do you need me?”

He let slip a millisecond of uncertainty before answering. “The boss is one for covering all bases. Maguire saw you on the news, and it was too good an opportunity to waste.”

“So he sent you to pick me up like a loaf of bread from the market.” I sank into my seat, not even bothering to get indignant over well-trod indignities.

“What the boss wants, he gets.”

After the guillotine finality of that statement, we drove the next mile in silence. I spent the time trying to sort out my tangled thoughts. God knew what Carson was thinking. But after a few minutes he broke the quiet. “Can I ask you a question?”

I sighed and answered, “I was born this way.”

“That explains a lot, but it wasn’t my question.” We’d reached a state highway, and cruising speed. “Who is St. Gertrude?”

I fought a wary fidget and played it cool. “The patron saint of the recently dead. And of people afraid of mice, oddly enough. Apparently she had a lot of cats.”

My worry was justified. Carson reached under his coat into his shirt pocket and pulled out my necklace, Saint Gertrude’s medal dangling in the dashboard light. “Then you might miss this.”

It was too dim to make out the saintly nun in her habit, cat cradled in her arms. But I imagined her scowling in disapproval, not because I’d blown the chance to send Taylor a message, but because I’d almost forgotten whose side Carson was on.

I snatched the pendant from his fingers, furious with him and me both. “Jackass.”

A muscle flexed in his jaw, but I didn’t know him well enough to know what that meant. I found out an instant later, when he swerved onto the shoulder, stopped the car, and twisted in the seat. Suddenly he was in my space, with a hand on the dash and another on the headrest, beside my ear. He moved so fast I hadn’t even seen him unbuckle his seat belt. I drew back against the passenger door. It didn’t occur to me to open it; I was that sure he’d stop me if I tried. But really it was the leashed anger in his gaze that trapped me there.

“Yeah,” he said. “I am a jackass. But let me tell you about the guy I work for. If your Agent Taylor interferes with the boss’s plan—any of his plans, but especially any involving Alexis—Maguire will make him wish he’d never been born.”

Hearing their names in Carson’s whipcord threat raised their specters in the cold darkness of the desolate road. My pulse beat so hard that it was difficult to swallow, but I had to before I could speak. With courage as thin as my breath, I challenged, “If you mean a long swim in the river, just say so.”

“The big man doesn’t kill people very often. He just makes them wish they were dead.” Bitterness honed the razor edge of his voice. “At the very least, he will make sure your boy loses his career before it even starts.”

I got his point. Maguire needed me alive and cooperative. But Taylor was expendable, and I had put him in danger by trying to leave him a clue. Worse, Maguire would add him to the list of ways to punish me if I pissed him off.

I have a big family. It’s a long list. Carson couldn’t have struck closer to my heart if he tried. I started to think maybe I should be worried about how well he aimed.

Warm air poured from the car vents, but my insides were icy. “If he’s such a bad man,” I asked, “what does that make you for working for him?”

I’d shot blind, but scored a hit as well. The specters in his gaze flinched, though he didn’t move for a long moment. Then, wordlessly, he took the necklace from my hand and fastened it around my neck.

He clasped the chain over my hair, getting it on the first try, before I even thought of protesting the invasion of my space. Before I thought anything, other than that he smelled really nice for an apprentice criminal.

When he sat back, he was cool and in control. “It makes me a bad man who doesn’t want anything bad to happen to you.” Mood shifting, he turned and put the sedan in gear. “So let’s get to work.”

That was the best idea I’d heard all night. I exhaled my own tension, happy to have a goal. Or the idea of a goal, since I didn’t know what to do next.

“I didn’t read anything at Alexis’s dorm,” I said, dropping the oval pendant under my shirt while Carson pulled back onto the empty state highway. And when I say empty, I mean empty. I’d seen no other cars while we were stopped. “Her bodyguard didn’t have much useful to say. He was escorting her out to the car to take her to a party and”—I didn’t go into detail, just made a fake gun with my fingers and a pistol-shot noise—“that’s all she wrote.”

Carson drove like he knew where he was headed. “I don’t know why Walters—that’s the bodyguard—was driving her last night. He was taken off that duty after Alexis complained about him. I always figured he would go down in a bar brawl if the coke didn’t rot his brain first.” He glanced at me with chagrin. “Not that I’d wish a bullet on anyone.”

I didn’t think he would. There was iron determination under his surface calm, but no stone-cold killer. And no accusing remnants, either. Whatever haunted him was figurative.

“Any chance Walters was in on it and got double-crossed?” Carson asked. He might not be stone cold, but he was pragmatic.

“No,” I answered. “His surprise was genuine.”

“He couldn’t have been lying? Walters wasn’t exactly a stand-up human being.”

I shook my head, then realized he was looking at the road. “Trust me; deception was not the last thing on his mind.”

And yet I was sure I was missing something really obvious. It nagged at me, and I sifted through all the pieces of the long, confusing day trying to find it.

Think, Daisy. What would Taylor do? The investigators would go through the mountain of paper and avalanche of books in Alexis’s dorm room, looking for clues. They would interview her dorm mates and friends and review video from the security cameras.

What could I do that they couldn’t?

I could talk to the dead.

“I am an idiot,” I said, and reached into my pocket for Mrs. Hardwicke’s pearls.

“Yes, you are,” agreed her shade, from the general vicinity of the backseat. Though she had no physical form, she sat in prim disapproval. “You should never agree to ride in an automobile with a boy you just met.”

Well, she had that right.

“What’s going on?” asked Carson, looking from me to the rearview mirror and relaxing slightly when he saw nothing there. “Is Grandma back?”

“Grandma?” she echoed, and the temperature in the car plummeted. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he murmured, turning up the heater.

“Be nice,” I said. “We need her. And the key in your pocket. It is in your pocket, right?”

He took one hand off the wheel and dug into his trousers, pulling out the heavy antique. “Are you finally going to tell me what this is?”

“It’s a clue.” I braced myself before I took it from him. The metal was warm from his body, a living energy that dampened the graveyard’s effect. “I don’t know where Alexis is, but we can go where she’s been.”

Carson glanced at me, the blue glow of the dashboard lights giving him a faux ghostly aura. “And where is that?”

“The Hardwicke mausoleum.” I glanced at the shade in the backseat. “You can give us directions to it, right?”

“Of course I can,” she said. “I visited Spring Creek regularly to pay my respects to Mr. Hardwicke.”

“Is that the name of the town?” I asked. “Spring Creek?”

“I know where Spring Creek is,” Carson told me, checking the rearview mirror again. “But a mausoleum … That’s where they inter the dead. Are you up for that, Sunshine?”

“Don’t call me that.” I was Daisy Goodnight, kick-ass speaker for the dead. I would not be overwhelmed by this situation. “If I’m not up for it, then who is?”

That didn’t sound quite as kick-ass as I would have liked, but the statement stood. Maybe this was what I was meant to do. No one else would have gotten the inside info from Mrs. Hardwicke on what the key unlocked.

I held the key up between us. “Alexis hid this, so it’s important. We should see why. Maybe we’ll find the jackal in the crypt, or some clue to what Alexis was involved in, or why someone would want to kidnap her.”

“Okay, okay.” Carson slowed the car, safely this time. “I’m convinced. Spring Creek, Minnesota, here we come.”

He was serious. Serious enough to execute a tidy U-turn in the middle of the empty highway. “That’s it? No argument why we should continue with the search-the-dorm-again plan?”

“That was a lousy plan. This is better.” He glanced over, letting me see a trace of wry humor. “Besides, you’re the go-to girl when it comes to dead things. I’d be a fool not to take your advice. I’m not a nice guy, but I’m also not a fool.”

Mrs. Hardwicke gave a snort from the backseat, but I didn’t see any reason to spoil the moment by passing that on.