I went back inside, locked the front door behind me, and wedged a heavy chair under the knob for good measure. Then I turned on more lights, going through the rooms one by one to see if anything was missing.
But the rest of the house was undisturbed, and the only mess was the one we’d made fighting in the den. It seemed as though Santos had come in through the front door, gone straight down the hallway, and headed into the den to wait for me. No doubt, he would have stayed in there all night, then casually stepped up to the doorjamb and shot me as I went into the kitchen for breakfast. It was a good plan, and it would have worked, if my nightmare hadn’t already startled me awake enough to hear his faint creeping through the house.
I frowned again as another, more troubling thought occurred to me. Fletcher’s house was a labyrinth, given all the rooms and additions that had been tacked onto the original structure over the years. So how had Santos known exactly where to go? How had he realized that the den was the closest room to the kitchen and the best place for him to wait to kill me? Santos had never been in here before.
But Deirdre had.
She’d certainly spent many hours with Fletcher here, both before and after Finn was born. Even if her memories were fuzzy, which I doubted, it would have been easy enough for her to draw a crude map for Santos and suggest where he might lie in wait to murder me.
Deirdre could have done this. But had she?
Santos hadn’t looked to her for help when the bank robbery went sideways, and he hadn’t hesitated to shoot her. Not exactly the actions of a minion. Sure, he’d never been inside the house before, but he could have easily walked the perimeter and peered in through the windows, scouting out the best place to lie in wait for me. Maybe my bias against Deirdre was clouding my judgment and making me think that she was at the center of some grand conspiracy when she wasn’t.
Because I was biased against her. Even if Fletcher hadn’t left me that warning letter, I still would have questioned any person who just showed up out of the blue after thirty-some years. People didn’t do things for no reason. Especially not in Ashland, where practically everyone had at least one ulterior motive, along with two angles they were working from at any given time. Deirdre had to want something. I just had to figure out what it was.
Too bad I had absolutely nothing to help me do that.
I didn’t have Santos, much less a confession about whom, if anyone, he might be working for. I didn’t have anything, not so much as a single scrap of proof linking him to Deirdre. All I had were smashed picture frames littering the floor, muddy boot prints from where Santos had stepped on the coffee table, and a ceiling fan drooping down at a sad angle from where his weight had pulled it loose.
I waded through the shards of glass and melting bits of elemental Ice and picked up one of the rune drawings—a pig holding a platter of food. The same sign hung over the front door of the Pork Pit, and the sketch was my way of memorializing Fletcher and everything that the old man and his restaurant had meant to me.
I picked the rest of the broken glass out of the frame and tossed it aside, then ran my fingers over the paper.
“I’m going to get to the bottom of this, Fletcher,” I whispered. “I promise you that.”
As soon as I finished speaking, a gust of winter wind howled around the house, hard enough to rattle the windows in their frames. Just as quickly as it started, the wind died down, and a still, heavy silence settled over the house again. I didn’t much believe in omens, but I was going to take that as a sign of Fletcher’s approval.
But there was nothing else I could do tonight, so I placed the rune drawings back on the mantel, snapped off the lights, and went to bed.
12
The next morning, I cleaned up the mess in the den and went to work at the Pork Pit as usual. All the while, I kept stewing about Santos and how he’d escaped. If only I’d been quicker, faster, stronger, I could have nabbed him and cut him open for answers about the bank robbery and why he’d tried to kill me in my own home. Instead, I was back to square one, with no clue to what was really going on.
At least, until Deirdre showed up this afternoon.
I got started on the day’s cooking by whipping up a batch of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce. Smelling its rich blend of cumin, black pepper, and other spices bubbling away was my own sort of aromatherapy, and it soothed me, the way it always did. While I stirred the sauce, I thought about all the angles I could work and how I could get to the bottom of things.
Silvio came in early, an hour before the restaurant was set to open, knowing that I would want to have a private chat with him. A great assistant in addition to being a good friend.