Chapter 6
C H A P T E R
S I X
pain will be a mercy
There was always a glut of desperate young lawyers looking for jobs. Cal was neither desperate, nor in particular need of a job, and that, plus his Harvard degree and prestigious-sounding legacy, were enough to secure him a six-figure salary while the ink on his diploma was still wet.
When the partners of Stafford he never did. “Lunch?”
“I’d be happy to.” Cal’s phone lit up again. “Right after I deal with this.”
No, his sister had written. But I see her running all over town before she goes back to Jessica Mayhew’s. She seems to be setting up base with that holier-than-thou freak. I bet she’d talk to me.
Don’t you dare, he responded, schooling his face with a glance at his boss. I’ll handle her.
From the way she looks at you, his sister taunted, I thought you already had.
“Client?” Stafford raised an eyebrow.
“My sister.” Cal placed the phone down deliberately down on the desk. “My parents don’t know how to deal with her, so the burden often falls to me.”
“There’s one of those in every family.” Jack turned on the heel of his polished loafers, tossing off over his shoulder, “I’ll meet you downstairs when you’re ready.”
Cal nodded in acknowledgement, staring down unseeingly at the back of his phone. He was going to have to go up there and put a stop to this—whatever this was. Clearly, Odessa could not be trusted to not go around poking wasps’ nests and provoking Ben. And as for Nadine—
Well. Right now, she wanted to find her sister.
She just thought they were cold and unfeeling, but if she kept disturbing the dead, soon she would think they were far more than that.
And after writing her those letters, he felt responsible for her.
If she was living under their roof, he could keep a better eye on her.
Monitor her comings and goings. Who she spoke to—and why.
Better he control the narrative than Jessica Mayhew poison her mind with half-truths and lies and she became so compromised that his father had no choice but to intervene.
He didn’t think Jessica’s house was particularly safe, either.
That little cottage had lost part of its roof during one of last year’s intense summer storms. Jessica had spent the whole summer treating and replacing all of that rotten wood, piling the detritus in front of her house for the sanitation men to haul away.
Like many of the townsfolk in Argentum, Jessica was barely scraping by, holding on for tourist season.
She’d almost certainly cut corners. It was probably all mildew beneath those carpeted floors.
Real estate law was not Cal’s specialty but he had been peripherally involved with enough appraisals to know what detracted from value—and what made things uninhabitable and unsafe.
His parents often had people over to Ravensgate to inspect the property for termites and rot.
Everything had to be up to code and they didn’t even rent.
Cal paused, his eyes flicking briefly in the direction his boss had taken. He opened up a new browser tab and typed in “California Rental Regulations for Quality.”
A dark smile flickered over his mouth as he picked up his phone.
???????
The drive back to Argentum changed something in him. As the live oaks yielded to evergreens and the ground darkened into that familiar bloody pyrite-red, Cal could feel the wildness inside him surge like an animal pulling at its tethers.
Ravensgate was oppressive, but it was home.
“Welcome back, sir,” Thomas said, already waiting to greet him in the foyer as he shrugged out of the light suit coat that was perfectly suited to San Francisco weather and already close to boiling here. “Shall I have some coffee brought into the library for you?”
Cal folded his coat carefully over his arm. “No, that’s fine. Is my sister here?”
“No.” An unreadable flicker of emotion passed through the butler’s eyes. “Miss Cullraven is out.”
“And my brother? My father?”
“In their rooms, I would imagine.” The older man looked at him piercingly. “I can inform them of your arrival.”
“I’m sure they already know,” Cal said dryly. “Thanks, Thomas. That will be all.”
The overly formal dismissal earned him a grimace and a nod. A suitable exchange, Cal thought, for that distant ‘sir’ tinged as always with the faintest suggestion of disrespect.
He dropped his briefcase on his bed and loosened the neck of his shirt, sighing in relief.
Ravensgate was an old house. It groaned in the dead of night as the sun-soaked woods expanded in the cooling night air.
Old brass pipes rattled and banged within the depths of the solid walls of pine, and the shutters knocked against the windows like hollow bones in the wind.
But it was also a house of silences and dead air. There was a certain sort of quiet one experienced while hunting, after the first shot was fired and all the birds had flown.
The stillness of death.
Cal felt that stillness thickening the air, forming a weight between his shoulder blades that made it effortful to breathe.
He had planned to work in his bedroom but the library seemed like a good idea, after all.
Like a shadow, he slipped through the house unseen, his feet following a silent path over the old and squeaky floorboards.
He even startled one of the maids, who took one look at him and fled.
What had she seen in his face to make her run?
Whatever it was, Nadine saw it, too.
Argentum changed people. The history here was oppressive; people could feel the weight of it just the same as if it were a millstone dangling from their necks.
That history was marked in the ancient trees that clustered around the town like pagans converging on an ancient ritual, and it was in the silent lake that gleamed like a mirror from his bedroom window.
It was even in the ghost pipes that sprouted from the ground, streaked with the rusty color of old blood.
Ravensgate had been carved out of the forest itself and sometimes Cal imagined that it was the house looking out at him from the glassy eyes of his family’s various kills, as if each orb was a window into something liminal and chthonic.
Cal shut himself up in the library and phoned his most recent client, who was just as pleasant as his initial email suggested he would be, which was not at all.
He allowed a bit of his real self to bleed through his ruthlessly cultivated facade, the deep echo of his voice sounding loud and overly distorted in the small, enclosed space.
Other voices layered beneath his own in shallow ripples. At first he thought it a curious effect of the architecture, but Ravensgate was built of old lumber and the solid wood absorbed most sounds. But Cal had yet to meet a tree durable enough to take on Odessa Cullraven at maximum volume.
He muted the phone and flung open the office door and was greeted immediately by the sight of his smirking older sister and a rather terrified-looking Nadine.
“—they liked to pretend married couples didn’t ever fuck,” she concluded, looking up at him with a feigned and unbothered innocence. “Oh, hi, Baby Cal. Are you fighting with your clients again, or is that sourpuss look for me?”
“What is she doing here?”