Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
To Do:
- Call Mom every fifteen minutes
- Re-calibrate motion sensors
- Email that doggy daycare
Claire awoke with a start. Why was it so dark in here? Had the smog of Los Angeles finally completely blacked out the moon? Hang on, was she standing? Oh, boy.
She moved her right elbow and banged into something wooden. Okay, there was a door behind her. At least she was indoors. What was that in her hand? It was heavy and long. She dropped it on the ground. A metallic thud shook the floor. Must be the baseball bat she kept under the bed. And something crumbly was in her other hand. She sniffed cautiously. That was the unmistakable aroma of Mindy’s legendary chocolate chip cookies, freshly stress-baked after both sisters had reported their houses were secure. There was no point in wasting it.
Cookie devoured, she slid to the right like she was doing the Cha Cha Slide. Crash . Something hit the floor. She screeched and jumped backward. The wall gave way behind her, and she landed flat on her back in the middle of Luke’s foyer.
Oof. The impact stunned her lungs. A pinched, shallow breath offered little relief. She glanced up. The folding door to the coat closet stood ajar.
“Claire?” Footsteps thundered down the stairs. Luke, shirtless and panicked-looking, jumped into the foyer. A gun was clutched in his hand, and he swung it from side to side like a cop on TV. “Is someone here? What the hell are you doing? And what are you wearing?”
Claire glanced down. A red, sequined evening gown glittered in the half-light. She had packed it with the intention of wearing it to Bri’s premiere. Now it was sure to be covered in six-month-old dust and dirt.
Luke seemed to be staring at her head. She reached up and felt around. Something was stuck to her head. She wrenched back and forth. A spray of bobby pins pinged out of her hair, and a top hat appeared in her hand. A dozen objects slid out and clattered onto the floor. Zip ties.
“Huh.” She dropped it onto the herringbone tile. Where in the hell had she found a top hat? That wasn’t one of her disguises. “Everything’s fine. I think I was just sleepwalking again.”
Luke swore. “You need to email Dr. Goulding.” His voice was like stone.
“I will. In the morning.” She sat up. Her head throbbed. Was it from the wine or falling through a closet door?
At that moment, Mindy charged down the stairs, hoisting a wooden chair overhead. “If there’s someone in this house, I swear I’ll ram this entire chair up your ass,” she called in a voice much deeper than usual.
“It’s fine. There’s no one here,” Claire said from the floor.
“What are you doing on the floor?” Mindy asked, setting the chair down and helping Claire up.
“Oh, you know. I just thought I’d try to see things from the dog’s perspective. Ouch. What is—” She lifted the hem of her cocktail dress. Her Swiss Army Knife was duct taped to the inside of her thigh.
“You’re insane,” Luke said, disappearing back upstairs with the gun.
“At least my sleepwalking sessions are more tactical now. I had two weapons with me.” Three if you counted the cookie.
Mindy sighed and dropped into the chair.
“Sorry for waking you up.”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway.” Mindy drew her legs up, hugging them to her chest. “I can’t stop thinking about your mom.”
“Me neither,” Claire said. “This is so much worse than when it was just Barney. The worst he ever did was break into Luke’s house and paw print Rosie. Well, aside from then trying to kill me. Where are the dogs?” She sat bolt upright.
“They’re in your room. I already checked.”
“Thank god.” She really needed to stop leaving them alone. They had passed a doggy daycare business five minutes from the house. If they had sufficient security protocols, she was going to have no choice but to enroll Rosie and Winston.
“Well, since we’re up, maybe we should take another look at the murder board,” Mindy suggested. She stood and walked into the living room.
Claire followed her. It was safer than falling asleep again. Anyone who messed with her mom was going to pay the consequences. She would hunt them to the end of the earth…if she could find them.
She picked up her laptop and flopped onto the leather couch. She typed “Epsilon Sigma Alpha” into the search bar. Pages she had perused a thousand times already populated. The top result was a news article about Venor’s fraternity getting shut down when all the members were arrested for attempted abduction.
There had to be answers somewhere in this sea of information. Claire opened the spreadsheet Nicole had put together with all the branches of ESA and scrolled down to California. Two colleges in LA listed ESA chapters. She typed them both into the search bar, but all the links were dead ends. ESA had been effectively scrubbed from the internet.
Losing the West Haven chapter must have spooked them enough to send them underground. Where could they go from here? There wasn’t any time to visit the abandoned fraternity houses, but maybe they didn’t have a choice.
Luke walked into the living room.
“There’s a cobweb in your hair,” Claire noted.
He brushed it away. “I was checking the attic. Just in case.”
“Any bad guys? Or girls. Feminism.” Mindy added as an afterthought.
Luke shook his head. “No. What are we doing?”
“Internet stalking ESA,” Claire said. “Or trying to. Everything is still pulled down, and the cached links are just news articles about bake sales and highway cleanups.”
Mindy looked up from her tablet. “The chapter in Miami went dark too.”
Luke sat on the couch next to Claire. He appeared to be deep in thought. “So they went underground when West Haven went under.”
“It seems that way. Do you think we could get alumni lists from the universities?” Mindy asked.
Claire shook her head. “I can’t imagine they would just give us those. Remember how long it took us to get a freakin’ yearbook from Barney’s high school? But I’ll mention it to Jack. They can’t say no to the FBI. I can’t believe they haven’t looked into it already.”
There was silence for a moment. There were ghosts of so many chapters of ESA online. Two dozen at least spread across fifteen states.
“Are we sure that all branches of this frat were really murderers in training?” Claire asked. It seemed insane. How did this many murderous individuals even find each other without raising suspicion?
“How could we know?” Mindy said. “Still, the fact that all these active branches are locking down is very suspicious. They wouldn’t do that for no reason.”
“You’re right.” Luke pulled one of his signature tiny notebooks off the end table. He flipped to a new page. “So what do we know about them?”
“They hate powerful women,” Claire began. “It seems like they think they’re a threat to men in the workplace. Barney said there’s only five acceptable careers for women, and they’re all stereotypical fields. Maybe I need to go talk to him again.”
“No,” Luke and Mindy said quickly.
“Let him rot,” Mindy followed up.
“Maybe if we could get the answer to his riddle, we could find the next body and then he’d open up about ESA.”
“I totally forgot about the stupid riddle,” Mindy said, turning back to the board. “What was it again?”
Claire recited it from memory. “She’s buried where William Hickory paid the ultimate price.”
“But what does that mean? Who’s William Hickory?”
“I have no idea. I’ve Googled it a hundred times,” Claire said, shaking her head. “There’s no record of a William Hickory living in West Haven or any of the surrounding areas. Hickory is a kind of tree, but there are probably a million hickory trees in Pennsylvania.” She leaned back on the couch. No matter what angle they looked at, they hit a dead end. “Maybe we should go back to bed. We’re not getting anywhere with this, and we have to attempt another run-through tomorrow.”
“Not to mention you’re bamboozling Charlie into meeting Bri at lunch tomorrow, right?”
Claire nodded. It was probably going to be a disaster, but with a threat looming on the horizon, they stood a better chance if they stood together. Surely the threat to the family would squash Charlie’s temper at being introduced to her half sister.
Claire had barely edged into the hallway when Mindy gasped.
“What is it?” She ran back into the living room, Swiss Army Knife in hand.
Mindy turned to her with wide eyes. “Holy fucking shit.”
Claire’s stomach twisted. “What? Did you find something?”
Mindy spun her laptop around. “They found him.”
Shock froze Claire to the spot. She snapped out of it and sprinted for the laptop screen. Luke jostled for position. Even Rosie hopped up to look.
Dr. William Taylor, head of the West Haven chapter of ESA and all-around douchebag, glowered from a picture. His hair and mustache had been dyed jet black, but there was no mistaking the ice in those blue eyes.
“Where?” Claire asked breathlessly.
“LA. This was taken outside the Whole Foods on Fairfax.”
Luke sighed. Both women turned to look at him.
“What?” Claire asked.
“You’re not doing it.” He crossed his arms and made steady eye contact.
“Doing what?”
“Another stakeout. Call Jack and tell him. Leave it at that. It’s one thing to sit at home and play armchair detective, but these guys are dangerous. Your mom was almost abducted. I’m not going to allow you to put yourself in danger again.”
Mindy grimaced and shrank back into the couch.
Claire stood up. “Oh, you’re not going to allow me? Is this the 1920s? You don’t get to tell me what to do. These men are threatening my family, Luke. I don’t know how much time we have until they escalate. Something terrible is going to happen. I can feel it, and I’m not going to wait around for the FBI.”
“Yes, you are,” he shouted.
Claire flinched. Luke took a deep breath. Several seconds passed.
“I’m sorry for raising my voice,” he finally said, “but I’m not budging on this. Call Jack and move on.”
“Fine,” Claire sniped. She left the room and nearly tripped on the end of her glittering red gown. There was no way she was going to let this go. Not when the professor was in the same city. It was time for her to end this, no matter what Luke said.