Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
A new lead… Maybe
Declan
After Gideon left, I flopped back on my bed and grinned at the ceiling. I felt like a teenager who’d just discovered sex for the first time. Somewhere in the intervening years from my first fumbling attempts at blow jobs to now, I’d forgotten how fucking brilliant sex could be.
Then again, I suspected a large part of my newfound awe of sex was because of Gideon’s amazingness.
If heart-eyes existed in real life, I would totally be wearing them right now.
A slow thud of footsteps on the stairs leading to the apartment warned me of Elwood’s arrival before I heard the door open.
I scrambled to throw on my clothes. Then, I quickly combed my fingers through my hair.
It was short enough that it never got very messy.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to detour quickly to the bathroom to splash some cold water on my heated face.
The minute I stepped into the bathroom, I caught my reflection in the mirror. Oh boy. I adjusted my glasses and looked again. A bit of water wasn’t going to help with the beard burn or my swollen lips. And what the…?
I tilted my head to the side and leaned closer to the mirror. Fuck. Was that a mark on my neck, too?
Gideon hadn’t been nearly so marked up when he’d left. I’d have to fix that next time.
Because there would be a next time. There was no question about it.
For now, though, every single person who saw me would know I’d been well fucked. I braced myself against the counter. Well, I wasn’t going to hide in here all night, so I should go out and be done with it.
“Declan? You in there?” Elwood knocked on the door.
As soon as I opened it, Elwood took one look at me and barked out a laugh. “You look like you were mauled by a wolf.”
“Yeah, yeah…” I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t stop grinning as I pushed by him.
“So, I take it you spent some time with Gideon this afternoon.” Elwood trailed after me as I headed to the kitchen.
“What was your first clue?”
“The sexual energy is so potent up here that it’s seeped into the shop.”
Could he really sense things like that, or was he teasing? I looked at him. Nope. He wasn’t just teasing. My grandfather was sensing the sexual… um… oomph—yeah, I didn’t know what to call it—that Gideon and I had generated.
“Oh, God,” I muttered and covered my face with my hands. That realization made this moment so much more awkward. My face was suddenly so hot my glasses fogged up. “Really?”
Elwood just laughed again.
I yanked open the fridge and grabbed the milk. Milk was supposed to help cool you down, right? Or was that only when you ate hot peppers? Whatever. I downed a glass of milk in one gulp because it really couldn’t make anything worse.
“Things are moving quickly between you two. Are you his mate?”
I blinked at Elwood. “His what?”
“Huh. I guess you two were too busy to talk, hey?”
I set the glass on the counter a little harder than I’d meant to. “I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot I don’t know. About my magic. About wolf shifters. About…” I waved my hand through the air. “Pretty much everything in Ravenstone.”
“It isn’t a secret. Being someone’s mate means about what you’d expect it to mean. Fated mates. Soulmates. Humans use the same types of words.” Elwood shrugged.
“Soulmates?” I bit my bottom lip. I mean, yes, I was drawn to Gideon, but soulmates was next level.
“From what I understand, shifters can sense if someone’s their mate almost instantly. Something about their…” His words trailed off, and his face turned thoughtful. He rubbed his chin. “Hmm… I wonder…”
“Wonder what? You can’t just say a bunch of half-sentences and leave it like that.”
Elwood shook his head. “Never mind about all that. It isn’t like you and Gideon don’t have time to get to know one another if you’re moving here. You don’t need to have answers to everything already.”
“Grandfather…”
Elwood scowled at me. Yeah. He hated that moniker. That’s why I used it. He knew he was annoying me, so I’d decided to annoy him, too.
“We should get downstairs before Tulip packs up all the water-related objects and nothing else,” Elwood said, turning toward the door that led to the stairs.
“Water-related…” I mumbled as I followed after him. “What does that even mean?”
“Chalices, talismans made from shells, anything blue, silver, or turquoise…” Elwood listed a dozen more things as we descended the stairs. “She’s also firmly committed to making sure every house in Ravenstone has a mermaid figurine. She forgets not everyone is as enthralled with water as she is.”
We arrived at the store to find Tulip doing exactly that.
“I made a list of things that were popular at the festival today,” Elwood said as he hurried to the counter. He scooped up a ratty-looking piece of paper and ripped it in two. He gave half to me. “You should find most of these things over there.”
I grabbed a box and moved to the section he’d indicated. Everything in this area had a more earthy feel that reminded me a bit of Gideon. Weird that I’d never noticed things like that before. Was this progress in my magical education? I hoped so.
I’d nearly filled the box when movement outside the window caught my eye. Paula, Jim’s employee, had parked a van outside Winston’s building next door. Perfect! I had so many questions for her.
“I’ll be right back.” I didn’t wait for Elwood or Tulip to answer before I rushed into the street.
Paula was fitting a key into the lock on the front door of the Nook when I reached her side. She spun toward me and put her hands on her hips.
“The police said I could be here.” She punctuated her words with a snarl.
I held up my hands. “I’m not here to stop you. I just want to ask you a few questions.”
“Well, Grady called and said he knew we’d need the equipment and that they were done processing the… the…” She swallowed hard. “The scene.”
“Of course.” I nodded.
She pivoted away from me and turned the key with a shaky hand. “The rest of the crew said they’d come to help, but… I couldn’t do that to them, you know? As the project manager, I needed to step up.”
“Project manager, hey? You must be familiar with the ins and outs of what was going on here then.”
She pushed open the door. She sucked in a deep breath and stepped inside. I followed her. Both of our gazes went immediately to the bloodstain on the floor.
Paula cursed under her breath.
“Hey, Gideon and I can do this for you, if you want.” Yes, I was speaking for Gideon without asking him first, but I didn’t think he’d mind. “We weren’t as close to Jim as you were. This has to be difficult for you.”
“No.” She brushed aside my offer. “I can do it. I want to make sure I get everything, so we never have to come back here.”
“Fair enough, but at least let me help.”
“Fine. You can ask your questions while we haul all this shit out,” Paula agreed.
I grabbed the extension cord that was snaking across the floor and started coiling it as she walked through the site and collected the drills, a saw, and who knew what else.
“So, when did you last see Jim yesterday?”
She bristled. “You accusing me of something?”
“No.” I shook my head quickly. “We’re just trying to figure out a timeline.”
“Like in those police shows on TV?”
“Exactly!”
She pulled out her phone and scrolled through it.
“Must have been about three? I remember… I’d just found him by the work van.
He was talking to someone on his phone. He was making plans to meet them.
Man, I wish I knew who he’d been talking to, you know?
I keep wondering if they know something that could help find his killer.
Anyway, I was going to wait to talk to him, but then I got this text from Leon…
” She nodded and flashed the screen of her phone toward me.
“See there? Says the text came in at three-oh-two.”
“What did Leon want?” Had he been making himself an alibi? Just because he’d sent the text, it didn’t mean he was at the festival.
“Some asswipe showed up with a cotton candy machine, and Leon thought I could magic up a power outlet at the table the idiot had been assigned. I went over to deal with it, and then Leon dragged me into dealing with one thing after the other until it was six o’clock and I realized I hadn’t seen Jim all afternoon. ”
She’d spent the whole afternoon with Leon. Son of a…
That meant he had a damn alibi for Jim’s murder, didn’t it? I stomped outside with the extension cord and flung it into the back of the van. And yes, I may have scowled at Leon’s shop across the street. I’d been so sure he was the murderer. How could I have been so wrong?
But even if he hadn’t killed anyone, I bet he was still hiding something.
I saw Gideon slip out of Leon’s store across the street. I pushed my glasses up and admired him for a moment. God, he was sexy. The way he moved. The way he filled out his jeans. The cute way he’d blushed when I’d complimented him on his cuddling skills earlier.
He was looking down at his phone, so he didn’t see me. Wait a minute. Why was he at Leon’s? I bet he’d gone to talk to the Sweater-Vest King without me.
I supposed I couldn’t blame him. I never would’ve believed in Leon’s innocence if I hadn’t heard it from Paula. Still, that only cleared Leon of Jim’s murder. He still could have killed Winston.
Was it better to think there might be two murderers in town? Probably not.
And if Leon had an alibi… Shit. Someone must have grabbed the dagger from Leon’s displays when he was running around helping everyone set up for the festival, just like Gideon had suggested. They might have walked right by us, and we hadn’t known.
We really needed to find the murderer before they killed again. I hurried back inside to find Paula lugging a portable cement mixer from a back room.
“Out of curiosity,” I said as soon as I saw her, “were you working here the night Winston told Jim to stop?”
“Yeah. That guy was an asshat. Told us to quit after he’d just told us he wouldn’t pay us until we finished.” She scowled at the corner. “And look at that mess over there. We didn’t leave the place looking like that. I bet he was trying to do shit so he wouldn’t have to pay us to do it for him.”
It was the same corner where Eugene had found that bright fiber, though, so it could be significant. “Are you sure that wasn’t like that when you left?”
“Absolutely.” Then she pushed the mixer through the door and over to the van.
Right. I should do more than gawk and speculate. I tossed a bunch of utility knives and hammers into a box. The crew probably had a better way of organizing the equipment, but I figured speed was more important than organization at this point.
When she came back in, I was ready with my next question.
“Is anything missing or different from the last time you were here?”
Paula scanned the room, then turned to gape at me. “Shit. How the hell did I forget about the damn cameras? We don’t typically use them, but this is a big project. We have a lot of supplies on site, so Jim picked some up.”
“Wow, really?” This was it! We’d finally know what happened. “Where are they? I bet they recorded what happened—”
Paula darted around the room. When she returned empty-handed, my heart sank. “They’re gone.”
Well, damn. That would’ve been too easy, wouldn’t it?
“Maybe the police took them,” she said, wringing her hands.
“If that was the case, wouldn’t they have arrested someone already?”
“Yeah. You’re right. Do you think the murderer took them?” She shuddered. “I need to get out of here. This place is messing with my head, you know?” She bolted for the back room as if chased by Winston and Jim’s ghosts.
I sighed and grabbed a big bucket of screws to haul out to the van.
It was either spectacularly heavy, or I was spectacularly out of shape.
I was still panting by the time I returned to the store.
As soon as I was inside again, Paula approached me.
Her face was pale as she glanced toward the street, as if to check if anyone was close.
She leaned close and whispered, “The cameras were supposed to back up to the cloud.”
“Really?” Did that mean the evidence might still be there? I felt like I was on a freaking roller coaster.
Paula nodded. “I don’t have the link on my phone, but I can check on the computer back at the office. I mean, it should be there, but it might not be. Jim wasn’t the most technologically savvy guy in the world, you know?”
“Can you still check?”
“Absolutely. Winston was a dick, but he didn’t deserve to die.
And Jim, fuck…” Her eyes welled up with tears.
“He definitely didn’t deserve to die. He was one of the good ones, you know?
He was going to propose to his girlfriend.
It was all he could talk about for the last month or so.
” She wiped the tears with the back of her hand.
“Fuck. Okay. Enough of that. Let’s get the rest of this packed up. I want to get out of here.”
I helped her load up the van. And my mind was reeling the whole time. If she found those recordings, we’d finally know what had happened. We’d finally know who the murderer was.