Chapter Fifty-One
Ethan
Flashlight beams sliced through the darkness as Maggie raced the shadows, trying to get to Eleanor’s office before...
Well, Ethan didn’t know what—or who—Maggie was trying to outrun. He just knew he couldn’t let her go alone. She was like a
ghost, floating down halls and around corners, toward the door that probably should have been locked at some point, but Ethan
had already kicked it open once and, let’s face it, that wouldn’t have stopped Maggie anyway.
Nothing was going to stop Maggie.
Ethan smiled a little in spite of the hour and the circumstances and the fact that this mission had pulled him from a very
warm, very pleasant bed.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was standing on a ledge now, not sure if he was about to fall or jump—and no longer
sure of the difference. He just knew that when he looked at her, his stomach dropped. It was like skydiving on the ground,
and Ethan was half afraid to pull his chute.
By the time they reached the office, Maggie wasn’t running anymore. She stood in the center of the room, flashlight like a
searchlight sweeping over mountains of clutter and piles of books and then settling on the little table with its stack of
mail.
“There!” Maggie exclaimed, pointing. “See? No envelope.”
“You mean the envelope the color of my eyes ?” His favorite thing in the world was teasing this woman, but she was too excited to even notice.
“It was right there... It was...” She was turning, searching. Desperate.
“I think it was from a doctor’s office or lab or something. It had the swirly-snaky-logo thing.” Maggie’s voice turned soft
and almost fragile. “That’s why I noticed it. I was worried...”
“You think Eleanor might be sick?”
She kept her gaze turned down but shrugged. “Maybe? I mean it could have just been about her fall, but... I don’t know.
It’s just that, looking back, Cece seemed especially eager to take the mail but Eleanor seemed just as insistent about keeping
it.”
“Not to mention, if Eleanor is sick and the new niece isn’t in the will yet, the new niece would want to know.”
“Exactly.”
“Let’s ask James in the morning, okay? Maybe he knows where it went. At the very least, he should know if Eleanor’s health
is failing. Okay?” He tucked that rebellious piece of hair behind her ear again.
“Okay.”
He let go of her shoulders and slipped his hand into hers and was just starting to lead her from the room when she stopped
moving.
For a long time, Maggie just stood there, frozen—the beam of her flashlight shining through the doorway, a spotlight on those
shelves full of prisms and magnifying glasses and crystals of every shape and size—catching the light and sending it splitting
and bending until rainbows and spots that looked like diamonds filled the darkness. It was like standing in a kaleidoscope,
watching the light turn colors and change shapes. Seeing everything differently.
Even the one little light that didn’t change at all.
“Maggie?”
“ The Nursery Crimes. ” She took a slow step forward, trancelike as she inched toward the shelves and the one dot of light that was tiny and blue
and invisible until that moment. That little dot wasn’t the way light looked when refracted through a prism—it was the way
light looks when reflected through a camera .
“Maggie—”
“Don’t tell me you never read The Nursery Crimes .” She spun on him like that was the real tragedy of the last few days. “A woman catches her own killer using a nanny cam
just”—she reached for the digital clock on the shelf—“like”—she turned it over to reveal the USB drive in the back—“this.”