Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Harriet
Istop by the antique store on my lunch break the next day, hoping for the latest buzz on the killing, but mostly I’m hoping for a sanity break from Chez Dracul.
Do I get it? Not so much.
Granabelle’s wearing something that looks very Betsy Ross—not a good look for her, to be honest—and she’s placed herself in the middle of the early American era display; her phone is mounted on a tripod nearby.
Her curmudgeonly handyman “friend,” Denny Cole, stands by, arms folded across his chest.
A man kneels beside her; when I get a better view, I see that it’s Gregor, seeming to fix an overturned chair.
He’s removed his long dark green coat—which I’ve never seen him do. I spot it hung neatly over a display case. In his shirtsleeves, the severe military cut of his clothing is more pronounced. He’s applying something to the chair’s joints with a small brush, his movements confident.
A double boiler sits on a hot plate beside him, the smell of something earthy and faintly live-stock-ish rising from it.
I go up next to Denny. “What’s going on?”
“That’s hide glue,” he says. “My grandfather used to make it just like that. You can’t buy it anymore, not the real stuff.”
Granabelle is suddenly talking to the camera about her special guest demonstrating the lost arts. “And, ladies, yes, he is single.”
Gregor simply continues his work.
“Tell them how he’s heating it,” Denny calls out. “Has to be the right temperature. Too hot and it breaks down. Too cold and it won’t flow. Most people don’t have the patience for it anymore.”
Granabelle wags her finger at the camera. “Don’t worry, darlings, I’m not pivoting to home improvement. Though I could watch this all day.”
“Yeah, real riveting.” Mom comes up next to me. “A man making his own glue. What will they think of next?”
“Lorna, hush,” Granabelle says, adjusting her bonnet. “My followers are going to eat this up. ‘Antique Restoration: The Old Way.’ I’m thinking a whole series.”
“That’ll bring in the customers.”
Gregor reaches into a small cloth roll beside him and produces a wooden peg.
“Just in case you’re wondering,” Mom says to me in a low voice, “Gregor made that peg.”
If Gregor heard, he doesn’t show it. He holds the peg up to the light to examine it, then he fits it into one of the chair’s joints.
“He’s not using any metal fasteners at all,” Denny marvels. “You know, the original craftsmen who made these chairs in 1910? They would’ve done it exactly like this.”
Mom makes a disgusted noise, her coral-painted lips pressed together in a thin line of something that isn’t quite disapproval.
“The bones are good,” Gregor says quietly, not looking up. “But this work...” He makes a small sound of disapproval. “The apprentice who made these pegs did not wait for the wood to cure.”
Granabelle claps. “Where is that apprentice? Off with his head!”
Denny says, “A hundred years ago, and Gregor can still tell the quality. Man knows his stuff.”
“The wood remembers,” Gregor says. He taps a peg into place with a wooden mallet, the sound soft and hollow.
“He’s been at this for an hour,” Mom says under her breath.
“He was up there fixing the roof, and your grandmother invited him to ‘consult’ on that chair we couldn’t sell because it wobbled, and now suddenly it’s a whole production.
” She snorts. “Fashioning his own pegs. Next, he’ll be out back fashioning wooden teeth for people. ”
I take another look at her as it sinks in that she is wearing lipstick. Since when does Mom wear lipstick? But I don’t say anything, because Mom would be weird about something like that.
Instead, I ask her about Nick Lernov’s killing. “Have you heard anything new? Are they looking at Dooley for it?”
“I was wondering about that myself. Who knows? Things are pretty quiet.”
“Careful,” Granabelle calls out, zooming in on Gregor’s hands. “Careful, careful—oh, that’s beautiful.”
Gregor glances up briefly, and for just a moment, something almost like satisfaction flickers across his weathered face. Then it’s gone, buried again under his usual grim expression.
Mom doesn’t take her eyes from him. “He is the strangest man I have ever met, and I say that as someone who met your father.”
“Yeah,” I say noncommittally. I have lots of thoughts about my father right now, but not a lot I can share with Mom.
Mom sniffs. “Better keep him out of the hammer-and-nails section of Hardware Sam’s or he’s liable to have a full-on heart attack. Is it possible this is how they do things in Karsovia?”
“The most modern thing they had in that castle was a 1940s rotary phone there, no lie,” I say.
I leave out that Alexandru once seriously proposed tying scrolls to the throats of carrier pigeons as a superior alternative to email. He also threw a perfectly good Jitterbug phone into the fire because it made a sound he didn’t like.
“Has he been here fixing stuff all day?” I ask.
“Yes. I thought you knew.”
“The boss sent him again?”
“He did,” Mom says. “And all kidding aside, there is a reason they invented the nail. I mean is this the level of workmanship Prince Cravat demands?”
“Yeah, they have a weird relationship.”
Mom looks at me. “Gregor here calls him overlord. What’s up with that?”
“Uh…Inside joke. Sort of.”
“I’m not sold on that boss of yours, Harriet. He took advantage of your mentally enfeebled father. I don’t feature it.”
“Apparently dear old Dad wasn’t mentally enfeebled when he first began working for Alexandru. Or even when you met him on that train that night.”
“You’re saying the prince kept your father on out of pity?”
“Who knows?” I say. “Anyway, off to do some reconciling.” I grab the ledger books and head to the back nook where we do the accounts.
The nook is barely bigger than a closet.
There’s a little desk with a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade and an ancient adding machine Mom refuses to throw away.
I settle into the creaky chair, open the ledger, and take a deep, centering breath.
Numbers. Columns. Debits and credits that will, eventually, balance.
Exactly what I need.
I sort last week’s receipts. The familiar rhythm of bookkeeping for the shop settles something in my chest. By the time I’ve worked through the week’s transactions and confirmed that yes, the drawer was six dollars over on Tuesday, my shoulders have dropped from my ears and my breathing has slowed.
I sit there and enjoy the moment. Things may be careening out of control with Alexandru and the mystery, but at least I have this nailed down—no dark arts needed.
When I go back out, I find that poor Mom has gotten conscripted into ye ol’ Early American streaming event. I decline the opportunity to don a wig and be “hot Martha Washington” and head across to Hardware Sam’s.
The Hardware Sam grapevine does not disappoint. There’s big news: Dooley has an ironclad alibi.
“You’re sure?” I say to Pilar. She’s holding the ladder for Sam, who’s busy putting up a summer sale banner.
“It turns out that Dooley was up in Cleveland applying for a job in one of the mechanics shops there. Big shiny corporate place with security footage and everything. He was literally on film thirty miles away during the entire window when the murder would’ve taken place.”
“So it’s impossible that he could’ve done it,” I muse. “Do they have any other suspects?”
“Our network’s big, but it’s not that big,” Pilar says. “I don’t think there have been any arrests, though.”
“Nothing that we’ve heard,” Sam says.
I go straight to my office when I get home, not wanting to tell Alexandru about Dooley’s alibi for the new murder. He’ll definitely think Jerome did it now.
I hate that he’ll think it. I hate that Jerome looks so guilty now. Most of all, I hate that small, treacherous part of my brain that’s whispering: what if he’s right?
If Jerome could do this—Jerome, who cared about ethics and kindness back at the high school newspaper, who was one of the few people who understood why I held up that story even when he disagreed—then what does that say about anyone?
Does everybody have darkness lurking in their hearts?
Alexandru fills my doorway, one shoulder against the frame, hair slightly tousled, perfectly at home in his gorgeous cashmere suit. I think he arranges himself in these poses without knowing he’s doing it, the way spiders don’t know their webs are beautiful.
I focus back down on my laptop. “Thanks for sending Gregor to the antique store again. You really don’t have to.”
“It keeps him occupied.”
“I’ll say. He’s using weirdly old-fashioned methods, as in pegs that he carves and glue he makes himself. Does he not know modern techniques?”
“Of course he knows them.”
“Then why—”
“I prefer the old ways.”
“But it takes three times as long.”
Alexandru’s shoulder lifts in an elegant shrug. “A man needs purpose.”
I look up. “Are you punishing his family as well? Or is it just Gregor himself?”
“It is not what you think.” He pushes off from the doorframe and moves into my office, but not toward me.
Instead, he traces one finger along the spines of my bookshelf, taking inventory of my territory.
A predator circling. When he finally stops, it’s behind my chair, and I have to choose whether to turn and acknowledge him or pretend I don’t feel the weight of his presence.
I stay put.
“Now, then,” he says, lips near my ear. “Tell me what you have learned.”
“How do you know I’ve learned anything?”
A pause. When he speaks again, his voice is closer than I expected, low and thoughtful. “Your pulse is elevated. Your skin has flushed with heat.”
Another pause. What now? Is he tasting the air?
“You have found something. I can always tell. The hunt suits you, Renfield. You become...vivid.”
Something flutters in my chest. I like the vivid thing. I do feel kind of vivid. “You think that’s going to make me tell you?”
“You will tell me one way or another.”
“Oh, is that so?”
His hands settle on the armrests of my chair, and slowly—so slowly—he rotates me to face him. Now we’re at eye level, his face close to mine, and I can’t roll away. He’s not being threatening; he’s simply there, gazing into my eyes.
And somehow, it’s impossible to breathe.
“It is so. The puzzle is everything to you. You cannot stand an unclosed loop.”
“Fine.” The word comes out breathier than I intended. I clear my throat. “Dooley didn’t do this last murder. He has an alibi.”
Alexandru doesn’t move. Doesn’t blink. “Well, well, well.”
“And I know what you’re about to say, so don’t bother.”
“What am I about to say, little Renfield?”
“That Jerome for sure did it.”
“Not for sure, but I would admit it as more of a possibility. Wouldn’t you?”
I grit my teeth. My heart is beating like mad, and I know he can hear it. I know he can feel everything, being this close.
“Your loyalty does you credit,” Alexandru says. “But you are no fool. You see what he might be. You simply hope otherwise.”
“He’s a good person.”
He nods.
But even good people have it in them to kill. He’s said it before, and I know it’s true.
How many people have tried to kill him in the past? What is it like to be an object of terror?
Right then, it hits me: I miss the feeling of being allies. I miss working through clues with him. And that strange sense of triumph when we make a leap.
He continues to study me with those dark eyes.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to do some kind of whammy on me.”
The corner of his mouth ticks up. “If only.”
“Okay, fine,” I hear myself saying. “I’ll admit it could be Jerome. Obviously, it could be him. But you have to admit it might not be him.”
The sharp planes of his face soften. “I will admit that.”
The air between us seems to thicken. Neither of us moves.
His gaze drops to my mouth. Just for a moment. Just long enough for my breath to catch, for me to become aware of the exact distance between us. Just long enough for my pulse to spike... and I don’t care if he knows.
The sound of weird old chimes breaks the spell.
Alexandru straightens. “Expecting someone?”
“No.”
“Nor am I. Gregor is not here. You will have to get that.”
Oh-kay, I think. Back to overlord-and-underling mode.
Probably for the best.
I get up and pass by him, careful not to brush against him, and head down the hall past the fire-hazard-lighting-and-gruesome-art display.
I pull open the creaky door, and I’m face to face with Jerome, laptop clutched under his arm. “I need your help,” he says. “They’re framing me.”