“Right. Did you enter the mansion?”
“No, the hole you jumped out of is impossible to climb back up without a ladder or any gear; there’s no way in.”
“Well, somebody was inside. What about the rowboat?”
“It’s still there at the pier on the mainland; been there for over a decade. Andy, are you sure of what you saw? You guys were inhaling gases, running, climbing—maybe you saw a ghost.”
“A ghost doesn’t go around leaving notes,” Andy argued. “Someone’s been fucking with us since we arrived; find who he is. And check if RH lost an inspector in the gold mine.”
“We checked that already—they didn’t.”
“Then who the fuck was Simon Jaffa?” Andy blurted, drawing out the ID card and slapping it on Joey’s uniform.
“Hang on.” Copperseed pulled the party to a stop. He read the ID, then questioned Al. “That weasel lawyer who defended Wickley. Wasn’t his name Jaffa?”
“Wickley?” Andy echoed. “Wickley was defended by a corporate lawyer?”
“That guy, a corporate lawyer?” sneered the deputy. “He was an ambulance chaser. He took the case after reading your story in the Telegraph.”
Andy casually peeked through the door to the next classroom. It was time for the next meeting.
“Are the Blooms still living here?”
“He is; she left him,” Joey said.
“Could you please go to their house and borrow the acidity test kit for their pool?” she asked Captain Al. “Kerri needs it for her lab work. And, Deputy, can you check your files, confirm it’s the same Jaffa?”
“What can I do?” Joey offered.
“Get Kerri a Coke.”
“Is that for the lab work too?”
“Yeah, I guess. Go.”
She watched the three men march down the hallway, then she knocked on the classroom door, opened it, and ushered Tim inside.
“Hey, Nate.”
Nate deminodded, eyes trapped on the half-fossilized book open on the teacher’s table. The blackboard behind him and a second one on wheels he had placed to his right, forming a corner, were covered in mystic symbols and right-to-left script.
“Don’t worry, I’m keeping my mouth shut,” he said, flipping over a stiff, calcified page.
“What’s that on the blackboard?”
“Protective spells. Just in case.”
Rare evening light that only frequently detained pupils are familiar with seeped through the windows. Andy knew it well.
“We saw him, Andy,” Nate muttered. “He was standing right there.”
“It was a guy in a costume, Nate. Same as always.”
She checked the page Nate was studying: scribbled pieces of younger yellow paper were clipped to the margins of the arcane parchment.
Andy had a rare inspiration. She delved into her pockets, retrieved the farewell note that the bad guy had left them inside the mansion, and laid it on the open book.
“Do you think it’s the same handwriting?” she asked.
Nate examined the brief missive and compared it with the notations in the book. The latter were testimony of a time of valued penmanship, romantically slanted, embellished by experience rather than whim. The capitals in the farewell note were straight, high, and narrow, but overall ordinary.
“It’s not the same,” he ruled. “But that doesn’t prove anything. The Debo?n who wrote these notes is not the same that came back.”
“One is Damian, one is Daniel?”
“Not exactly. One was alive; the other was brought back to life. From his essential salts. I’m not sure he can even get a real body.”
“But we saw a man in the window.”
“You called it ‘a guy in a costume’ before. I’d rather err on the side of caution and say ‘something in a cloak.’?”
The phrase was vague enough for the possibilities to make Andy’s skin crawl.
“What does your friend in Arkham say?”
“I can’t talk to him; they rescinded his phone privileges. Apparently he tried to reproduce the Seal of Zur and accidentally set fire to the curtains.”
Andy nodded appreciatively, pondering that one of the areas the Blyton Summer Detective Club should try to improve in the future was its network of outside consultants.
“Okay. Get the book,” she ordered, going for the door and fingersnapping the Weimaraner to attention.
“Why? Where are we going?”
“To see the second-best expert we have.”
Nate gathered the book and his own notes and carried them out of the classroom and through the school doors, assured and somewhat satisfied that the big dark book was intimately annoyed by sunlight. The amber Chevy Vega glistened at them like a smiling Rock Hudson—the only four-wheeled vehicle parked in front of the elementary school. Tim jumped into the backseat and Nate rode shotgun. Andy started the engine, skidded onto the road, and turned north for Owl Hill.
“Hey, look there,” Peter said, sticking his perfect face to the window. “Dr. Thewlis’s clinic closed down.”
Everyone in the car ignored him or pretended to ignore him.
“Dr. Thewlis? The dentist?” Peter insisted. “He was nice. One of the best doctors I’ve been to.”
“Simon Jaffa was not RH,” Andy said to entertain on the trip. “He was Wickley’s lawyer.”
“Really?” Nate frowned, thinking what that implied, but his cache memory was too busy and waved him to leave the pending task on the tray. “Not a very good one, was he? In fact, I always wondered how he got thirteen years for—”
“Wickley just pleaded guilty,” Andy said. “He told me.”
Nate looked at her for the first time in this chapter.
“You talked to Wickley? When? Where?”
“Before going to New York for Kerri.”
“Oh. So, how did he look?”
“Uh…fine, I guess,” she summarized, swerving onto Klondike Street. “Until the moment when he started speaking in tongues while I was squeezing his neck.”
Nate registered that, then loosened the grip on the grimoire a little as Andy pulled over in front of Mrs. Morris’s house.
“That was interesting,” Nate judged as they stepped out of the car. “Is there a way to know Wickley’s whereabouts?”
“Yes. Copperseed can phone Wickley’s parole officer and ask whether he’s failed to touch base in the last forty-eight hours. Why? Do you think he might be the cloaked man?”
“No, I was just planning to mock your knowledge of the penitentiary system if you knew that.”
Their pace was naturally slowed down by the narrow garden path and the untamed nature hindering the way. Andy rang the bell. A green light glowed in the bay window.
“She’s going to love having us back,” Nate predicted.
Steps approached, latches clacked, a door opened the whole four inches the chain allowed.
“You again?” Dunia greeted them through the crack.
“Mrs. Morris, we need your help,” Andy said in her good-cop voice.
The woman unbolted the chain, let the door open just wide enough for Tim to parade in, his tail semaphoring, Is that fresh tea I smell? Dunia focused on blocking the other two. Andy noticed what she was wearing—something irrelevant, but Andy registered it nonetheless.