Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Harriet
The following afternoon, I’m reorganizing my library shelves, re-sorting by publication date within subject when my phone buzzes with a news alert: brEAKING: Man killed outside Hawthorne Hills Apartments.
Hawthorne Hills is a senior apartment complex in Creighton. I scan the article. What catches my eye immediately: the weapon was a crossbow.
I pull up social media and there’s an avalanche of information.
The victim is Nick Lernov, a retired history teacher. No suspect was found, but they did recover the weapon: a crossbow identical to the ones used in the previous two murders.
Mr. Lernov had last been seen stepping outside at around 1:00 p.m.. A groundskeeper found his body.
I piece together more from the comments on the article. He’d taught at Creighton for twenty-two years. Students describe him as demanding but fair, the kind of teacher who’d stay after school to help anyone who asked. He’d coached the Quiz Bowl team for two decades.
And of course, there is speculation: Has to be Dooley Brogan. Three crossbow murders? Come on.
I set up some news alerts and go up to the library to find Alexandru.
I pause at the door. He’s in his usual chair by the fire, absorbed in one of his antique atlases. I think this one is the Ottoman cartographer one. He just stares at the maps for a really long time.
Granabelle sometimes reminisces about old Ashwood with her friends. They’ll remind each other of the deli that used to be on River Road, or how Sloane’s stationery shop was once a malt shop where she and Grandpa had their first date. Things like that.
Is that what Alexandru does with his maps?
I want to ask him. But he’s been such a jerk about Jerome, dismissing my judgment like I’m some naive idiot. I don’t want him thinking I’m interested in what he’s doing or his opinion or anything.
Even though some pathetic part of me still wants him to trust me. To see me as a partner, not just an easily replaced servant from a family he mortally hates for reasons he won’t explain.
“Another murder?” He doesn’t look up from his atlas.
“How do you know?”
He turns a page. “Your heartbeat quickens when you are on the chase.” Dark eyes lift, assessing me with predatory focus. “You are hot on the chase, Ms. Renfield.”
I stroll in, casual as you please, and lean against the cool marble side of the hearth. The firelight glints in his unruly dark hair. An errant strand falls over his brow, softening the sharp angles of his face. He looks like a human man. Of the annoyingly attractive kind.
“Tell me,” he commands.
And I do. Despite everything, I enjoy telling him, enjoy his sharp questions, the way his mind works through the puzzle, even though he treats it all like an armchair game.
“You will research this teacher as you have done the others,” he commands. “You will discover what connection he has to Jerome and to Dooley.”
“Obviously I was going to do that.”
“Go, then. Do not dawdle.”
“Yeah, I’m going. And I don’t dawdle,” I say hotly.
He picks up his book, a clear dismissal.
I turn and leave, gritting my teeth.
I head out to InovaSpire without inviting him. I pull out every tool at my disposal—cross-referencing databases, social media deep dives, financial records. I even use one of KC’s experimental graph visualization apps that maps degrees of separation.
There is absolutely no connection between Dooley and Mr. Lernov, and no connection between Jerome and Mr. Lernov, either. They lived in neighboring towns, but that’s it.
The three names on Jerome’s list yield three deeply awkward phone calls and precisely nothing useful. I stop by Hardware Sam’s and neither he nor Pilar have heard anything. I text Josie. She hasn’t heard any city council gossip.
I head back home and flop into the chair next to Alexandru’s by the fire. “Nothing.”
Alexandru closes his book. “No connections at all?”
“I looked high, low, and sideways. Maverick is keeping things weirdly quiet, too. Maybe they’re chasing down alibis. Maybe they’re as baffled as we are. Why this teacher?”
“Misdirection, perhaps?”
I consider this. “Like if Dooley’s doing these killings to thank Jerome, maybe this is how he protects him? Kill someone random to break the pattern and prove it’s not about Jerome’s enemies?”
“Exactly. Or Jerome is directing this, he told Dooley to kill someone unconnected to get him off the hook.”
“How am I not surprised you’d say that?”
“Because you know I am an excellent tactician.”
“That’s it,” I say.
“Or perhaps Jerome is doing all the killing himself and framing Dooley. Perhaps he freed Dooley specifically to use him as a scapegoat. Who better to blame than an ex-convict with the same MO?”
“And then kill a random person as misdirection?”
Alexandru smiles. “The plot thickens.”
“Truly random murders are actually the hardest to solve because there’s no logical thread connecting victim to killer.
But they’re also the rarest; most killers have some reason, even if it’s a twisted one.
True random violence is usually impulsive; not methodical.
But this killer is methodical.” I pull up my spreadsheet and stare at the grid of names and dates and circumstances. “What am I not seeing?”
“Whatever it is, you will discern it eventually.”
I appreciate his faith in my abilities more than I want to admit, but the spreadsheet feels so inadequate. Like I’m trying to solve a 3D puzzle on a piece of paper.
Variables swim before my eyes. Timeline, motive, opportunity, connections.
And that’s when the ledgers surface in my mind again.
My father’s ancient black books filled with symbols that weren’t math and weren’t language or anything I could name, except that some part of me understood them anyway.
I’d ordered them shipped back to Karsovia.
Alexandru had overruled me. They’re somewhere in this house, and when I’m stuck like this, I can feel them like a low hum through the walls. We know. Come look.
“Can I ask you something? When my father first came to work for you, was he into it?”
Alexandru closes his book. “I thought you never wanted to hear about your father.”
“The things you told me about my father were a bit disturbing, but they were all when he had been serving you for forever. You never talk about my father when he first came. When he was a more normal person. What was he like? You said he was a London-born lawyer?”
“Indeed he was. He was eager to serve me. He saw it as an interesting challenge, and a puzzle. He liked the international aspect of my business. I believe he was bored in London, working mostly on petty real estate cases. Like you, he thought his parents’ books were in utter disarray.”
“So he was good with just dropping everything and coming to live in your castle for an indeterminant amount of time?”
“I suppose he saw it as temporary at first.”
“So he tried to leave after a while.”
“You all try to leave.”
I spent a lot of time demonizing my deadbeat father, but now I feel this wave of compassion for him. He was probably a decent person when he first arrived.
“And you wouldn’t let him leave. And you punished him and you broke his mind.”
“I grow weary of your moralizing.”
“I grow weary of your medieval-horror-show personality.”
“You would not say that if you knew what your line is truly like.”
“Why don’t you enlighten me. What is my line truly like?”
“You do not want to know,” he says.
“I think you do not want to tell me.”
“Not particularly.”
“Usually people get to find out what their crime was before they’re punished for it.”
He turns a page. Is he seriously reading right now?
“And what’s up with the ledgers?”
He looks up. The firelight catches the copper in his hair. “You track and manage my business with them.”
“You know I’m not talking about the accounts ledgers. The mystical ones. What did my father do with them? Did he talk about them to you?”
“He asked about them a good deal, just as you are asking.”
“And?”
Alexandru ponders a long time, perhaps weighing what to tell me. “The ledgers are bound to the Renfield bloodline.”
“Like it’s a Renfield practice to write strange mystical symbols in ledgers and be weirdly drawn to them?”
“I do not pretend to know how to read them. The ledgers cannot be destroyed. Or more, they can be destroyed, but once destroyed, a Renfield will instantly set about recreating them, like termites rebuilding their termite hills over and over. The scribbled symbols are a quirk of your family left over from the days when you practiced the dark arts.”
If there was a thought bubble above my head at this point, it would be filled with exclamation marks.
“Sooo…. those ledgers are dark arts things? A hobby of the Renfields?”
He inclines his head.
“Who tried to destroy them?”
“It’s not important who.”
“It’s important to me.”
He shrugs.
The dark arts?
The mystical ledgers don’t feel like spellbooks or anything like that. It’s more like they track and describe things in dimensions a regular spreadsheet can’t reach. But beyond that, I can only grasp the edges.
“Does that whole dark arts thing have something to do with why you’re so angry at us Renfields?”
“The Renfields are despicable for so many reasons. Reasons that predate your father, your grandfather, and a dozen generations before them.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he agrees. “It is not.” This he says with a finality that I have come to know. I will get no more from him tonight.
My head is spinning with all this new information, though.
I return to my more mundane spreadsheets with names, crimes, connections, circumstances. Sometimes the answer is in the noise between the data points.
But I keep going back to our conversation. And those other ledgers.
I catch myself wondering where Alexandru keeps them. Whether they’re in the east wing vault, or his private study, or what. And what exactly can they do? Can they help me see more? Could they help me better solve this mystery?
Could they help me find James?