Chapter 25 #2
I break seven traffic laws getting back to Kingston Manor.
There’s a squad car out in front when I arrive. The one time I actually need Ashwood’s finest to move slowly, they decide efficiency is an A-1 priority.
Voices reach me the moment I’m through the door—Maverick’s flat Midwestern interrogation tone, Alexandru’s aristocratic rumble. I take the stairs two steps at a time up to the dining hall.
Maverick and Officer Wright are seated on the side of the stupidly long dining table, looking uncomfortable beneath the iron chandelier. Alexandru occupies the head of the table, a king granting audience.
Maverick’s got his cop notepad out. Officer Wright is staring up at the pugilistic chandelier. He’s got questions.
Alexandru’s lip quirks. “Ms. Renfield, how fortuitous. Officers Cooper and Wright were just inquiring about our recent visitor.”
“Ah!” I paste on a smile that hopefully reads as cooperative citizen rather than person hiding something. “Hi, Maverick. Officer Wright.”
Maverick gives me a quick nod, never breaking the chomptastic rhythm of his ever-present gum. Wright tears his attention from the chandelier. “Ma’am.”
Gregor stands in a shadowy corner like a naughty yet eerie schoolboy.
Okay, I tell myself. Be chill. Everything’s chill.
I grab a chair and bring it to the corner of the table between Alexandru and Maverick. It’s a weird thing to do, but we are a ways past weird now.
Maverick says, “We were just discussing Jerome Goodwin. His GPS puts him on the premises yesterday for about forty-five minutes, but Alexandru here seems fuzzy on the details. He’s telling me…
” Here Maverick looks down at his notebook.
“I do not keep a guest book for persons of no consequence.” He eyes Alexandru.
“That’s really what you want to go with? ”
“Jerome was here for me.” There’s no point lying; Maverick will find out eventually. “He was scared. He thought someone hacked his computer and that they were trying to frame him.”
“Really.” Maverick’s gum-chewing slows. “Frame him for what?”
“Obviously the crossbow murders. He said they planted searches, making it look like he was doing them and then deleting them.”
“And you believed him?”
“It’s Jerome!” Maverick knows him as well as I do.
“That’s not an answer,” Maverick says.
“Ms. Renfield is a very loyal human,” Alexandru puts in somewhat unhelpfully.
Maverick eyes me. “Yes, so loyal that she didn’t think to contact the police.”
“Excuse me?” I say. “I’m sorry, I seem to recall the other day when I floated the theory that maybe Dooley didn’t commit the original murder, you didn’t want to hear it.”
A muscle twitches in Maverick’s jaw. “I believe I told you to stay out of the investigation.”
“He’s an old friend who wanted my help.”
Maverick contemplates this a bit. “And were you able to determine whether he was hacked?”
“I’ll tell you what I told him,” I say. “I don’t have those kinds of resources here. It’s not as if I work at InovaSpire anymore.”
Maverick considers this. “Did you get a look at his computer?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t tell if he was hacked or not.
I wasn’t exactly on the technical side of InovaSpire.
I was more about the overall organization of things.
And then he took his computer and left.” I leave out the part where I made a copy of his hard drive for Irina.
It’s not an outright lie, though it is a lie of omission.
“Hmm.” Maverick gazes at a stained-glass window. “Any idea where he might’ve gone off to? Who might be helping him?”
“He was scared and he left. I don’t know where he went and I haven’t been in contact with him since.”
Maverick’s jaw tightens. “So he came with his computer, telling you he was worried he’d been hacked, and you took a look at it and sent him back off on his merry way.”
“That’s about it,” I say.
Maverick turns to me. There’s something in his eyes that might be concern. “This is an active murder investigation, Harriet. If you’re hiding something—”
“I’m not.”
“—or if he is—” He jerks his chin toward Alexandru. “—I will find out.”
“I have no doubt,” Alexandru says pleasantly. “You seem a most diligent investigator.”
“If you hear anything, and I mean anything, I’m telling you right now to contact me. Understand?”
“Sounds good,” I say.
Maverick stands and jerks his head at Officer Wright, who scrambles up from the table.
Gregor takes this opportunity to materialize weirdly from the shadowy corner.
Maverick snaps his pad closed. “We’re good. We’ll see ourselves out.”
Officer Wright hesitates. “Mav.”
“What?”
Wright gestures up at the chandelier. “Does a fella need a permit for some of that?”
“Some of what?” Maverick turns his gaze up at the chandelier and his gum-chomping slows, which I suppose means that he has discerned that the giant weird, twisted iron chandelier is in fact studded with swords, maces, axes, and guns.
The whole thing bristles with weaponry. “Now what in the Sam Hill is that?”
“It’s a chandelier,” Alexandru says, sounding more English than usual.
“Is it, now?” Maverick says, sounding very cop-like.
Officer Wright says, “I feel like some of those firearms could be functional. Isn’t that a Colt Python? And look—an M14.”
“That M14 was used by a peasant in the Carpathian Mountains to try to end my life. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out. The sculptor Emil Van Horn incorporated it into this chandelier he created for me, alongside a host of other weapons, all of them used—”
“Used in all kinds of battles!” I interrupt before Alexandru can complete his explanation—that all of those weapons were once used to try to kill him through the years. “It’s quite expressive, don’t you think? A very evocative commentary on the futility of conflict!”
Maverick stares at it. “Are you into the fighting arts, Prince Miramonte?”
“I did a bit of sword work in my time. Jousting. A spot of archery. The occasional battle-axe.”
Maverick eyes him. “You a fan of the Rennaissance Festival, then?”
“Oh, he is, very much so!” I say. “And the great battles of history, and he decided that all the horrible weaponry should be fused into a work of art instead of used for war. I think it’s amazing!”
“Real homey,” Maverick says.
Alexandru waves. “See them out, Gregor.”
Gregor leaves with the men, and I sink into one of the chairs—one of two positioned near the hearth, mercifully far from the main table and its overhead armory. “That went well.”
“I thought so.” Alexandru settles into the chair across from mine.
“He’ll be back,” I say. “With more questions.”
Something shifts in his eyes—something old and amused and not entirely human. “I have dealt with more formidable investigators than Officer Maverick Cooper.”
I don’t doubt it. Alexandru has centuries of practice evading authorities of all kinds. “I thought you did a really good job of not antagonizing him. More or less.”
“Thank you.”
Five days until the absolute limit of his hunger. He has to be feeling it, but he’s hiding it well. “How is your hunger level?”
He says, “We should have kept Jerome in the dungeon. If and when Irina gets back to you about the computer being hacked, that would’ve been convenient.”
“I honestly can’t imagine he even knows how to operate a crossbow.”
Alexandru sighs.
I hold up a hand. “I know, I know. Everybody can be a murderer. Humans are despicable little creatures.”
“Not all of them.”
“Oh my God, has hell frozen over?”
Alexandru studies me with an unfamiliar expression. The usual Italian-menswear-model menace is absent. He looks…disquieted.
“Something on your mind?” I ask.
“Your errand to town. Did it settle anything?”
“I seem to recall telling you that whole subject is off the table.”
“This distress of yours. The ice cream shop. I need to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I find your suffering—” His jaw tightens, like he’s swallowing something distasteful. “I do not wish it.”
That stops me.
“This from the man who thinks an example of outstanding service from my father is using his dying breath to crawl uphill in agony to finish a delivery for you?”
“Your father’s suffering was merely pathetic. It did not...” Something flickers across his face. “It did not reach me as yours does.”
Oh.
Suddenly I’m thinking about the intensity with which he kissed my palm last month. The rawness in his voice when he vowed that the man who hurt me must die. I’d told myself it was ownership. Control. Something transactional.
This feels different.
“Alexandru, have you come down with a case of empathy?”
“Hardly,” he growls.
But I think he’s lying. And I think this is new territory for him.
“Look, it’s not really about the ice cream shop. Or, in a way, it is.” I take a breath. I find that I want to tell him. I want him to know. “I have a little brother. His name is James, and he’s four years younger than me.”
“A brother?”
“Not a Renfield, obviously. Different father—some loser boyfriend of my mom’s I barely remember. But James was amazing. He was the light of my life. I loved him so much. Mom did too, and Granabelle…”
Alexandru’s tone sounds dangerous. “What happened?”
The whole story tumbles out of me—how I would pick James up at the grade school on my way home from middle school and we’d walk home together.
But one afternoon I saw a boy I had a crush on go into the ice cream shop across the street, and I told James to wait and play some more while I went to say hello.
Alexandru sits perfectly still, watching me.
“In normal times it wouldn’t have been such a terrible sin,” I say, “but the Cuyahoga Killer was active in the area, snatching little boys all over eastern Ohio. I knew about it, and I still left him there so I could talk to a boy. I left him there even though I saw a strange car parked nearby. It was shiny and black and boxy, and something about it seemed odd to me.”
“And still you went,” he says softly.
“And that was the last time I saw James.” My voice catches, but I push through.
“He vanished. Eight years old. It was horrible. Everyone thought he’d been taken by the Cuyahoga Killer, of course.
There were search parties sent out, combing high and low for days.
Even this place, back when it was still a ruin.
” I look around Alexandru’s living room, remembering it gutted and crumbling, volunteers calling James’s name through empty windows.
“I was so scared for him, and it was all my fault.”
Alexandru doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t offer platitudes. Some quality in his stillness makes it easy to keep talking.
I tell him about the grimness that settled over our family. How Mom couldn’t function for years afterwards. The way Granabelle became a little untethered, putting this weird bright face on everything. How I stayed at Josie’s house a lot. How I blamed myself for all of it.
“You were a little girl,” Alexandru says. “You were twelve.”
“Old enough to know better. We were all completely paranoid about the Cuyahoga Killer. How could I have done such a thing? But at the same time, I don’t think it was the Cuyahoga Killer who took him—if anyone even took him.
The Cuyahoga Killer was a rural type with a big beard, and he was wearing overalls with a rip in the knee, and he drove a white van.
But there was something about that black car I saw that day.
It was gone when I came out of the ice cream shop and discovered James missing, and something in my gut said he’d been taken away in it.
A shiny black car. Everyone said it was probably just a tourist.”
I pause, gathering the threads. Alexandru waits. It strikes me that I’ve never told anyone the whole thing like this—not in one piece, not without being argued with.
“Hardware Sam’s mother, Alma Washington—she was a teacher at the grade school back then, a year before she retired.
She walked home every day, and she said she passed a man—a tourist wearing a brown jacket who looked like he didn’t belong.
No other details.” I toy with the key around my neck.
“People ignored it because a lot of the tourists who come here are well dressed, and it was jacket weather that day. But I’ve always thought it was something. ”
“Is that why you went to see her today? To talk about this tourist who did not belong?”
“Yes. She thought maybe he wasn’t a tourist at all.
Because tourists do belong here.” I let out a breath.
“Mom thinks Alma just reaches out to me because she’s lonely.
But I trust her intuition. And honestly, I don’t think it’s exactly intuition.
I think she saw something that wasn’t right about that man—something she couldn’t articulate.
Same with me and the car. I saw something off—I know I did. ”
Alexandru’s dark eyes hold mine. “You are a Renfield. You see below the surface. If your instinct says the black car was off, then the black car was off.”
His belief shouldn’t mean this much. But nobody—not Mom, not Josie, not Maverick—has ever just said yes, you saw what you saw.
“But...the whole town thinks it’s a delusion. Like it’s a way for my mind to relieve itself of the guilt, by me telling myself he might still be alive.”
Alexandru growls deep in his throat. “They think that because they do not understand you.”
“I feel sure he’s still alive.”
“Did they ever find this Cuyahoga Killer?”
“Yes, but not before he hanged himself—wearing those overalls, just like in all the pictures. They dug up his property and found five skeletons in the yard. Boys from all over Pennsylvania and Ohio.” I swallow hard.
“But none of them were James. There were ten missing boys in total, and the theory is that the guy had another burial ground somewhere that they’ve never been able to find.
And he probably does, but James isn’t in there.
He can’t be. I know in my heart he’s still alive. ”
Alexandru doesn’t tell me I’m in denial. Doesn’t suggest therapy or acceptance or moving on. He simply inclines his head, as if my certainty is good enough for him.
“I imagine you are working on this mystery as well. I presume you have a spreadsheet.”
“That and more. But there’s not much in it. It’s as if someone plucked him out of the world without leaving a mark.”
We sit there for a while, not speaking. The fire settles. The rain keeps on. And for the first time in twenty years, the weight of it feels like something I’m not carrying alone.