Posey got up even later than usual, around four. She looked ragged as she staggered into the kitchen and filled a cereal bowl with all the remaining coffee, then stuck it in the microwave.
Charlie had dated a fellow burglar for a couple of months, before he skipped town with a pair of earrings she’d managed to convince him were set with diamonds. He’d told her that when he’d first started breaking into houses, he’d thought rich people would keep their really expensive stuff in safes, but it turned out that people mostly kept things where they could see them. Wealthy people kept a key under the mat like everyone else, because they misplaced their keys too. They wound up locking away birth certificates, marriage licenses, and legal paperwork instead of valuables. Jewelry was in the primary bedroom closet, even the really good stuff, because people wanted to wear it. Laptops were on desks or sofas. TV on the wall. Expensive liquor on the bar cart. Guns in the first drawer of the nightstand.
People like their stuff close by, including their secrets. What makes you feel safe when you go to sleep at night? Being able to check and see that your secrets are still hidden.
If there was something for Charlie to find, there was a good chance Vince kept it in their bedroom.
Once she had the thought, it caught like a burr.
She needed to get him out of the house—and soon, before temptation overwhelmed her common sense and she went through his stuff while he was likely to walk in on her.
An hour later, Vince came inside, his hands sooty. By then, she had her story ready.
“Katelynn wants me to meet her for coffee tonight,” Charlie said, trying to sound offhanded.
He washed his hands in the sink, soap all the way to his elbows. “The tattooist. With the moth-eating cousin.”
“Right,” she said, unnerved. She hadn’t noticed them talking at the party. “I’m thinking about getting something new.”
“Oh yeah?” he asked, wiping his wet hands on his black jeans.
The expression on his face—slight smile, seemingly honest interest, no judgment for the trouble of the previous night—unnerved her as well. He really seemed to care for her. He’d killed someone to save her.
She wanted to trust him.
“Vince?” She took his hand and looked up into his pale gray eyes. “How did you lose your shadow? For real this time.”
His gaze slid away from her. “I didn’t. I—” He stopped, then started again. “I didn’t understand the danger we were in.”
He wasn’t necessarily lying. The truth was often complicated and hard to explain. “What danger?”
He shook his head and picked up their compost bucket—bought by Posey, online, in an effort for them to be better environmentalists, now filled with slimy cucumber remains and other fridge remnants, plus a lot of coffee grounds.
“That’s not an answer,” she called after him.
But whatever she’d been looking for, she didn’t get it. He only went outside to dump the compost into a weird worm bin that none of them was sure was working. With all the coffee grounds they added, the only thing Charlie was certain of was that those worms were wired. If a bird ate one, it was going to fly directly into the sun.
By the time he came back in, he had his phone to his ear. He’d been called in for a job. A residential double homicide.
“I can stay if you want,” he said to her, turning the phone away from his mouth. Faintly, she could hear his boss yelling at someone. Before that moment, she hadn’t been sure if Vince had faked the call, just to avoid talking.
She shook her head. “I’m going out anyhow. Katelynn, remember?”
He got his coat. Kissed her on the mouth and then at the edge of her jaw. A kiss that obviously meant something, but whether it was apology or promise, she wasn’t sure.
After he left, she stared at her bedroom door. If he hadn’t gotten called in to work, he might have given her answers. And she knew that any newspaper advice columnist would tell her that she should wait, respect his privacy, and ask him more when he returned.
She made it fifteen minutes before she got up and made a show of stretching. “Well, I’m going to take a quick nap before I go out.”
“Hold on,” Posey said. “I was waiting for him to leave. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Charlie did not want to hear more about DMT and how it was absolutely necessary to steal some for Posey’s let’s-experiment-on-ourselves-in-the-woods retreat. “I won’t be long.”
In the bedroom, with the door firmly closed, Charlie looked around. Tangled sheets. Clothes and shoes scattered on the floor. A dresser cluttered with yellowed paperback books and pots of makeup and a vase stuffed with receipts.
When she looked down at her hands, she was surprised to find them shaking.
Charlie ripped the bedding all the way off, then pushed the mattress up against the wall. It was heavy and wobbled, but she got it up. Things got hidden under beds in movies. Which meant that people who watched movies hid things under beds.
But beneath the mattress, all she found was a pair of underwear she’d lost, a crumpled tissue, plus something gross and fuzzy and flat that might have once been one of Lucipurrr’s hairballs.
She thought of her mother, looking for evidence of another woman, in drawers, in pockets. Impossibly trying to prove a negative. Hoping for nothing, and knowing that nothing only meant you weren’t looking hard enough. Charlie swore that she would never wind up like that.
Yet here she was.
Charlie moved on to Vince’s half of the dresser, shoving her hands all the way to the back, then taking everything out and turning over the drawers. Vince was tidy—never left his clothes on the floor, never left his hair in the sink—so it was a surprise to find shirts and jeans thrown together haphazardly. She hoped there was no system to the chaos, because she’d never be able to re-create it. If he left five balls of socks in a particular order to detect snooping, she was screwed.
But she found nothing of interest. Nothing incriminating.
She went to the closet next. Most of the stuff in there was hers, but he had a winter coat and a pair of boots shoved deep in on the left side. She wriggled her hands into the pockets and took out two receipts. One for gas, another for milk, bread, and eggs. Both paid in cash.
Peering into the darkness, she noticed an empty-looking black duffel bag on the floor, past the boots. She dragged it out and unzipped it.
At the bottom she found a metal disc about the size of a nickel, and a driver’s license. She turned the bag over and shook everything onto the floor, but nothing else fell out.
She picked up the small metal disc. It was thick and heavier than she expected, almost like a watch battery, but without any markings. A part to something electronic? A piece in a game? She tucked it into her pocket.
Then she looked at the driver’s license. The picture was of a younger Vincent, smiling wide, with neatly barbered hair that someone had used product on, a collared shirt just visible along the bottom of the image. An address in Springfield, with an apartment number. And over the state capital, an entirely different name.
Edmund Vincent Carver.
For a dizzying moment, she thought she was looking at a fake ID. But the card had uniform edges and bended right, and when she held it to the light, the tell-tale metallized kinegram shone over his picture.
Lionel Salt’s grandson. The one who’d stolen the Liber Noctem. The one who was supposed to be dead.
Lionel Salt’s heir, lying beside her in the dark.
Charlie found it hard to catch her breath. She was pretty sure this was a full-blown panic attack, and that if she kept inhaling so quickly and shallowly, she’d bruise her lungs.
She took out her phone and snapped a picture of his license, amazed to find that she could manage it. Everything seemed to be happening too fast. But she still made herself go to her laptop and open her search engine. She typed “Edmund Carver” and “Springfield.”