3. Paul #3
My father’s desk was his island, no one else’s, and he always kept what was most precious to him on it. That included several photos of our whole family and us kids individually—even Jackson—in gilded photo frames, his books, his coaster, a model plane that Chris had put together, and our diplomas.
Over the years, there had been other bits and bobs, as there usually was with kids as they grew. If he’d kept all of them on his desk, he wouldn’t have had any room to work, so he occasionally rotated things out of his drawers.
“Left side business, right side what matters,” I murmured to myself before sitting in the exact chair I’d found my father in.
Probably a bit macabre, but in some way, it grounded me. Yes, I had seen something truly awful, something scarring, but it wasn’t there anymore. Things had been cleaned, my father had been cold-selected for an autopsy, and soon I would bury him. The chair was just a chair; he wasn’t still in it.
With that thought in mind, I opened the drawer to my right and looked down at his treasures.
I saw a terrible origami crane I’d once attempted in the fifth grade, housed in a little acrylic container slightly yellowed with age.
A little wooden figure of a duck Luther likely whittled before I was born.
There was a picture frame about the size of my hand covered in decades-old pasta, ribbons, and other little crafty bits with a photo of my father and Penelope within it.
It looked like it might have been her first day at the boarding school all us VanMarches went to from kindergarten to senior year.
Beneath all those little bits and bobs from our kids were the special pieces that belonged to my mother.
“He never forgot about you,” I murmured, as I thought about Aisling VanMarche and the short life she had lived. My only solace was that my parents were finally reunited, and maybe my father would become the Caspian he had been before he lost his mate far too early in life.
Part of me felt like I was crossing some sort of personal boundary, but another part of me longed for a connection that had been so unfairly ripped away from us.
So, I told myself I was just picking out what items my father would want to be buried with.
Even though the man had been fairly closed off ever since Mother passed, I knew right down to my bones that he would want to be interred with his most-prized possessions.
Some of the items I had already known about, like my mother’s engagement ring and the bonding necklace he’d given her when they had become eternal mates, but there were a few pieces that surprised me, such as the faded and curled gardening magazine, which I remembered my mother poring over happily every time the winter blues got a little too strong and her craving for seed starting picked up.
“You used to love keeping the grounds,” I said. I’d never had a habit of talking to the dead before, but suddenly I had a three-hundred-percent increase in the number of loved ones I’d lost. Verbalizing things was stopping me from feeling particularly adrift.
Grounding. I’m just grounding myself.
Not quite peace, serenity, and control, but it didn’t need to be. It felt right.
“We have staff for that now—you probably know that—but Father made sure they kept up with things and always planted your favorites.”
Sometimes it was hard to reconcile the romantic, caring man with the strict, particular, and often cold alpha. I’d had eight years with him before his greatest heartbreak, which was more than my brother Jackson could say.
I continued to mention certain things to my mother, sometimes to my father.
Nothing of substance, but it did help me feel less lost in the moment.
However, my monologuing petered out when I came to a double-page ad smack dab in the middle of the gardening magazine.
It wasn’t that advertisements in magazines were all that shocking, but I was fascinated by the glamour of it and the elegant woman at its center.
Ophelia Donmoue of Haus de Donmoue, Psychic Extraordinaire!
The ad went on to make a lot of amazing claims about her and what she could do for her clients, as well as some famous predictions she made. Memories floated to the surface. I’d seen her ads on TV back in the day. Mostly during Saturday morning cartoons.
Hmm…
Even with a full police investigation going on, surely it couldn’t hurt to ask the help of someone more mystical, right? Even though magical folks were now in law enforcement, and there were several working on the case, no one had mentioned seeking out an oracle.
Maybe that was a mistake.
Maybe this Ophelia could divine who had killed my father, my brother, and their entire security detail.
Maybe she would be able to tell me where they were.
Maybe she could confirm whether I was just a paranoid fuck or if someone was really trying to kill the rest of us before the investigation was over.
Even if she couldn’t do anything, I didn’t see any harm in it beyond some disappointment. Which, considering everything toiling in me, wouldn’t be that hard to deal with.
Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea at all.