“What?”
“I feel like I’ve been invited to breakfast by the Spider Queen,” he said.
She flushed and then laughed. “I’m wearing a lot of webs, am I? You do realize you’re not much better? I’ll run and clean up before I contaminate our food. There’s another bathroom in the hall. Washcloths and towels and soap are in the little wicker cabinet.”
“Thank you. I suppose that was rude. As you pointed out, I probably don’t look any better than you.”
He turned to head for the downstairs bathroom and Mo went scampering up the stairs.
When she saw herself in the mirror, she shuddered at how ghoulish she looked. She took a three-minute shower and washed her hair. Within another three minutes she was dressed and hurrying downstairs.
He saw her shiny-clean wet hair and grimaced. “Cheater,” he said.
She smiled. “You look like you cleaned up okay.”
“Ah, but it’s not as good as clean clothes and clean hair.” He sighed. “The coffee’s ready. I poured you a cup. I would’ve whipped up the omelets, but it would have felt rude rifling through your kitchen.”
“A cook, too?” she asked.
“I live alone. And I don’t like processed, microwaved food. It’s all about necessity, not talent.” She took out the ingredients and cracked eggs into a bowl, then added milk. She stirred the mixture and tipped it into butter sizzling in the frying pan.
“What can I do?” he asked.
“Plates, I guess. They’re in the cabinets. And silverware—”
“In the silverware drawer.”
“Quick learner! No wonder you’re an investigator,” she said, shaking grated cheese onto the eggs.
It was nice, preparing breakfast with him moving around in her kitchen. Despite the deaths that had occurred, their last night had been a victory. They hadn’t had any sleep and surely needed some, but this felt like a strange and even light moment between them.
“Oh, and juice is—” she began.
“In the refrigerator. As you’ve already discovered, I’m not an investigator for nothing,” he finished.
A few minutes later, the table had been set and everything was on it—omelets, toast and fresh coffee.
“You must be really hungry,” he said. “I interrupted your late dinner.”
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“It wasn’t that hard. I knew they’d reopened the attractions. I assumed you’d be with Grace. I got the info on where Grace worked, checked that out and learned from one of her bosses that some of the crew hit the café at night.”
“Sounds like a lot of effort.”
“Took about five minutes.” He hesitated, his fork halfway to his mouth. “I also wanted to find you,” he told her.
She hesitated, too, staring down at her omelet.
“How do you do it?” he asked quietly. “How did you determine where the bodies were? Where J.J. was? Good as Rollo is, I know it’s not just him.”
“I explained my reasoning to you,” she said. “It’s unlikely that someone could hack up bodies like that in one place and then move them to another, a hotel room or public location.”
“There are warehouses around, other venues.”
“But the bodies were found at the cemetery, and that’s the other part of my rationale. We—most people—don’t disturb the dead.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that unless someone’s just died and is being entombed, no one has any real reason to go into the old vaults.”
“That’s it?” he asked. “That’s all there is to it?”
“Logic,” she said with a shrug. “The likelihood of being found in a long-forgotten vault while cutting up bodies is pretty much nil.”
“So, you worked out that the actual murders—certainly the mutilations—took place in a vault, in a cemetery. Because that’s where the bodies were found.”
She frowned. “Whoever did this had to know the area well. I knew about the old vaults—and that some of them were long decayed and forgotten—but you have to be really familiar with this area to know that.”
“And this morning,” he asked. “How did you find J.J?”
“I...I didn’t. Rollo did.”
“Rollo was spectacular. But you found the vault.”
“I was in the right place at the right time.”
He stared at her for a moment, clearly skeptical. She leaned forward, irritated. “We found him alive. What else matters? And it had nothing to do with speaking to the dead.”
“So you do speak with the dead.”
“The only way people ever recognize that possibility is if they speak with the dead,” she said.
“Whatever I had,” he told her, “I don’t have now.”
“We were lucky, and timing is definitely part of it. We found J.J. alive.”
“And he might not have lasted much longer. You have something more than logic and a smart dog,” Aidan said. “Even more than good instincts or intuition or whatever you want to call it. You have more than I ever had.” She felt again as if he were observing the behavior of an exotic animal or studying a new species.