Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Harriet
Josie Galindo swirls her champagne cocktail, processing my news. “My best friend has two new half sisters and a half brother?”
“Crazy, right?”
“Amazing,” she says.
We’re at Tres Hermanas, the wonderfully retro steak and seafood restaurant founded by Josie’s great-grandparents in the 1930s.
The Galindos own half of downtown Ashwood, and Josie got elected as a councilperson last year. She’ll be mayor someday, of that I have no doubt, cementing the Galindo power.
“And here you worried it would be a horsehair trinket or something,” she says. “That is far better than money, don’t you think?”
“For sure.”
“Also? Data mining, a lawyer for Interpol, and the youngest-ever head of Special Collections at the Austrian National Library? You guys are like mutant high achievers.”
Mutant something, I think, scooping up a blob of artichoke dip with a bit of French bread, remembering how the four of us attacked the chaos of that library like our lives depended on it.
I look up and find her staring at me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Just tired. It’s been hard to catch up on everything.”
This is not exactly true. I’ve barely slept in the week since I’ve been back.
Running Alexandru’s empire while working at InovaSpire is almost too much even for me.
It doesn’t help that I’m completely paranoid about not fulfilling the terms of the contract.
I can feel him out there, just waiting for me to slip up.
Josie’s mother, Rita, comes by, and I give her a hug. Rita has been like a second mother to me for as long as I can remember. I practically lived at their house for the months after James vanished.
“I’m so very sorry about your father,” Rita says.
“I didn’t really know him.”
“Even so.”
Josie urges me to tell her mother about Karsovia and meeting my half-siblings, and she’s genuinely excited for me. “You should keep up with them. Family is everything.”
“I plan to,” I say. The truth.
Josie leans in once her mother’s gone. “Did you learn anything about your dad? Or, you know, his condition?”
“You mean the bug eating?”
She winces. I’d told her about that after my first trip all those years ago. She immediately texted me three possible diagnoses and reassured me it probably wasn’t genetic.
I take a long sip of my cocktail. “He was… older than he looked.”
“Huh.”
“And he had a boss,” I add. “Someone he was very dedicated to.”
She tilts her head. “His boss was at the memorial gathering?”
“Basically, yeah.” I don’t elaborate. I don’t even know how I would.
Naturally, she senses I’m holding back something big.
“Like… a hot boss?”
“No! I mean, yes, technically he’s hot, but he’s not somebody you’d want to know.”
Josie watches me too closely. “How come?”
I draw a deep breath. What am I supposed to say? Because he dropped my siblings into a pit of bones? Because I stabbed him clean through the neck with a sword, and he healed in real time because he’s a literal vampire?
“Cone zone,” she adds, because we dubbed this booth the “sacred cone of silence” booth, though somewhere along the way it got shortened to “cone zone.”
I sigh. This booth has held so many of our big life moments, it might as well have a plaque. She told me about her engagement here. I told her about Serena’s job offer here. We’ve fought, cried, made up, and made plans.
I want to tell her everything, but it all feels too dangerous. And would she even believe me?
I say, “He’s kind of a jerk, is all.”
She waits. Doesn’t push.
“Okay, and don’t be mad, but I agreed to help him manage his business affairs.”
“What? You took on another job? To help out a jerk? Serena already runs you ragged.”
“It won’t be much. And I couldn’t resist. I mean, my father had the man operating like it was 1949. You wouldn’t believe it.”
She watches me carefully. “You have no responsibility to your father’s boss.”
“Well, I agreed, so,” I say. “I know what it sounds like, but it’s under control. It was unavoidable.”
“Was it, though? What kind of a jackass makes his employee’s grieving daughter take over her dead father’s duties?”
“I’m not really grieving.”
“He doesn’t know that, does he?” She grabs a piece of bread and tears it in half.
Back at home, Granabelle is standing on a stepladder under the chandelier display, striking a pose in an ankle-length velvet coat and feathered turban.
As usual, Mom is serving as her reluctant photographer.
“Oh, thank heavens,” Granabelle says. “Lorna, give the girl the phone.”
I put down my bag and take up photography duty. “The angle is a problem,” I tell Granabelle. “You’re not gonna like anything shot from this low an angle.”
“But my head needs to be in the chandeliers,” Granabelle says.
“Okay, okay.” I snap the photos as she works it.
“Laverne DeRue can suck it,” she says.
Laverne is her new over-seventy influencer enemy. “Laverne is like a fast-food chain,” she opines. “Her success comes from being everywhere, not from having the juiciest burgers in town.”
“Work it, Juicy!” I say. “Three more shots.”
Granabelle makes it count; she opens her mouth wide and crinkles her eyes like she’s having fun. She still has a huge scar on her forearm from where the runaway dirty dishes cart smashed into her during that suspicious wedding accident.
It pisses me off every time I see it. Who goes around deliberately causing accidents at weddings and hurting innocent people like that?
I get a couple of amazing shots and help her down.
Mom catches me up on how the roofing crew is progressing on the roof. They should be finished in a few days.
My phone pings, and I check it.
It’s a text, a picture from Magda. We have a Renfield sibling group chat now, and I’m pleased to see that Magda’s up in the Alps, beaming at the camera. When we were imprisoned, climbing this peak was something she promised herself to do if we ever got free.
I heart it and write, Niiiiiiiice!
Stefan writes words of encouragement. Irina is probably asleep by now. I told them most of what happened at the castle once I was safely back home. They were extremely relieved and kind of shocked at what I pulled off, and they all pledged their help.
“Did you hear?” Mom says. “Somebody’s actually rehabbing Kingston Manor!”
“No. What? Really?”
“Really,” Granabelle says. “Candace told me at mahjong.”
I push my glasses up my nose. “Kingston Manor? How is that possible? And what is there even left to rehab? It’s like a rotting playground for woodland creatures, and the backyard is a cliff.”
Granabelle holds up her hands in surrender. “Someone’s doing it. They’ve already rebuilt the entire foundation. Crews are there day and night.”
I blink. I have been seeing a lot of cement trucks. “Did they actually look at it before purchasing it?”
“No shit,” Mom says. “Some people have too much money.”
“No clue who it is?” I say.
“You should try and find out from Josie,” Mom says.
I give Mom a sly smile. She’s in a decent mood today, which makes me happy. “I will find out and you’ll be the first to know,” I assure her.
We leave Granabelle in charge of the store and trudge upstairs to the kitchen.
I grab a bag of Bugles and pour some into a bowl for us.
Mom takes one and leans on the counter. You can see the silver strands in her brown bob, which she parts severely to the side, a style I’ve always thought of as vaguely French.
“I live in fear of the day she gets in a real rumble with one of these online foes of hers,” she says. “You don’t know what these people are made of.”
I pop a Bugle into my mouth. “Here’s hoping they all stay behind their screens.”
I update her on a situation with some rabbit tea towels she wanted me to order, and she updates me on sales. The first groups of tourists have been trickling into town, and our store sales numbers are starting to reflect that.
Mom catches me up on the latest gossip about the Jansons, the family that lives two doors down in one of the few Victorian houses that haven’t yet been rehabbed.
Sally Janson wrecked Mom’s book club some years back. It started with their scorched-earth disagreement about Life of Pi, which Sally constantly came back to month after month, no matter what book was under discussion. Mom finally stormed out.
Now Sally Janson serves as Mom’s main source of schadenfreude, thanks to Sally’s two adult sons: one living in Bangkok doing something sketchy involving webcams and cryptocurrency, and the other who has joined the local motorcycle club, the Snag Tooth Riders.
I listen to her, shaking my head, but I’m really thinking about Kingston Manor.
It’s very Alexandru to buy a place like that, but I can’t imagine him undertaking such a massive project without my knowing. I’ve got my fingers everywhere in his financials, and I’m in contact with the point people for all of his operations.
No way can it be him.
I text Josie to see if she knows. As an Ashwood councilperson, she sometimes gets insider info on building activities.
She has no idea.
Later that night, I do a deep and somewhat invasive scan of Alexandru’s financial activity and poke around in his personal accounts.
Nothing.
There’s just no way he could secretly pull this off.
It has to be some family I’ll never know. They’ll send their kids to one of the private schools in Creighton or all the way to Cleveland and run in circles with the town muckety-mucks.
Kingston Manor is one of the five original mansions that overlook Ashwood from the heights of Summit Place—a once-grand road carved into the bluff above Ashwood. The houses were built in the mid-1800s by river tycoons and timber barons. For a time, Summit Place was the pinnacle of the area.
Eventually, the river trade dried up. The families left, and the money left. The houses stayed.
By the 1970s, the area was all graffiti and squatters.
Then, in the late 1990s, Ashwood started a revitalization process. Boutique shops sprang up. Tourists started coming around. The mansions got snapped up and restored.
All except Kingston Manor.
In its day, Kingston Manor was the largest of the Summit Place mansions, perched highest on the bluff where the wind hit hardest, a grand Gothic residence with a wonderful spire.
Back in grade school, James, Josie, and I—and a rotating cast of equally brave or foolish town kids—used to sneak up to Kingston Manor.
We’d slip through broken windows, climb rotting staircases, and scavenge for treasure.
Once, I found a crystal the size of a plum from a long-gone chandelier.
James pocketed a doll’s hand. He said it was part of a haunted doll and tried to get Josie to trade it for her Snack Pack.
But then our friend Kenny fell through a floor and had to be rescued. A chainlink fence went up a week later.
None of us ever went back.
Kenny’s accident happened the summer before James disappeared. They included Kingston Manor as one of the prime search areas, but he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t anywhere.
My mind goes back to Kingston Manor repeatedly in the following weeks, always with a sense of dread.
Really, is it so impossible that some normal person could look at that ruin and see beauty and want to pour money into it? I should be excited about this new stage in our little town’s evolution.