The Van Alen Legacy

She’d kicked the door so hard it had clattered to the floor, making a tremendous noise. But afterward, all was silent. There was no reply to her challenge. Mimi crept up against the doorway, feeling along the edge of the wall for a light switch. When she turned it on, she saw that she was standing in a filthy mess; everything in the place was ransacked and disorderly. “Um, like, ew?” Mimi said, making a face at Kingsley, who in turn was surveying the squalor with a flinty stare. Mimi held her nose and tried not to breathe. “What is that?” she asked, almost choking. It smelled sweet and rancid. Like something left to rot.

Kingsley shook his head. Mimi decided she didn’t really want to know.

She could hear the Lennox brothers breaking down the other door. They edged around the explosion of clutter.

There was something pathological about the scope of the disaster, from the upturned sofa, where someone had hacked at the cushions, leaving a mess of feathers everywhere, to every drawer in every table and bureau being wrenched open, contents spilling out onto the floor. There were empty bottles and newspapers scattered all around, remnants of food—plastic wrappers, dirty paper plates, a half-empty bag of M&M’s, unopened cans of Red Bull.

Something about the disarray looked familiar. Mimi realized she had seen it before—the Force’s town house had been burglarized a few years ago, and her parents’ rooms had been ransacked in just this manner: everything turned over, upside down, everything picked through. She remembered how odd it had been to see Trinity’s jewelry box in the middle of the bed, broken and empty, among the jumble of clothing and old family photographs that the thieves had unearthed from the closet.

This was the same: the methodical way every item in the room had been assessed and discarded. Someone had been looking for something.

Kingsley signaled to Mimi to keep moving, and they continued to inch along the hallway. They found two bedrooms, both just as messy and overturned as the rest of the house. Sam and Ted came in from the kitchen.

“Anything?” Kingsley asked, still holding his weapon at the ready.

“Nothing, Cap.”

“This isn’t that old,” Kingsley said, picking up a paper bag with the McDonald’s logo. “It’s still warm. Eyes up,” he said, ordering them to stay sharp.

Mimi continued to look around. During their burglary in New York, the thieves had made off with four million dollars’ worth of her mother’s diamonds. But the robbery hadn’t been the worst of it. She remembered how violated she had felt, to think that strangers had been in their house. One of them had left a coffee cup on the dining room table, leaving an ugly ring on the wood.

It wasn’t so much the loss of the stones, although Mimi had been upset not to inherit the jewels—it was the principle of the thing: to know that someone had been in your space. An uninvited, unwelcome someone who had used your house as their own personal playground. There had been a muddy footprint on her headboard, cookie crumbs on the white rug, a smear of chocolate (Mimi hoped it had been chocolate) on her silk bedspread.

The police had come, taken fingerprints, and filed a re-port—not that anything ever came of it, of course. Charles had said most of the jewel thieves dealt with the black market, where pieces were broken down, the stones disguised and laundered through the system, sold to shady dealers on Fifth Avenue. Luckily, insurance had covered most of the damage, as well as the stones, so there was no real financial loss, just sentimental value and a nagging feeling of injustice.

Mimi’s parents had had the whole apartment repainted that night and over the weekend. The housekeepers put every thing to rights. Once the insurance check came in, Trinity had kept Harry Winston and several auction houses on their toes. After a few months, Mimi had completely forgotten about it: life went on.

But seeing the momentous mess the Silver Bloods had made took her back to that awful night. Charles looking ashen, Trinity tearing up a bit, and Jack punching his fist into a couch pillow. Mimi had taken one look at the rape and pillage of their beautiful home and declared, “I’m getting us a suite at the St. Regis.”

What could they have possibly been looking for here? Mimi wondered. This was a shack in the middle of the jungle. What on earth could it possibly have that was of any value to anyone? And where was Jordan? If they had taken her here, why were they looking for something? Mimi knelt down and rummaged through the disorder, trying to make sense of things. She pushed away a pile of rotten cardboard and unearthed a strange pattern on the carpet.

Footprints.

Small ones.