Chapter 10 #2
There’s a worn teddy bear tucked in the back of the vanity, as if Other Elodie was embarrassed to have held on to it but didn’t want to chuck it either.
Three boxes of hair dye in vivid colors sit under the sink, waiting for her to work up the courage to apply them.
I know from looking back through years of selfies that she’s never gone for anything other than subtle highlights.
No hidden compartments reveal themselves to my searching fingers. No proof emerges of sketchy dealings. Not even the tickle of ephemera over my skin reveals anything unexpected.
I return to the middle of the room and inhale slowly to settle my mind. It’s too bad dowsing doesn’t actually work unless you know exactly what you’re dowsing for.
Maybe I have a better tool. I might not be the same Elodie, but in some ways she was still me. Our lives were built on the same early foundations, no matter how far off they veered from that beginning.
Where would I have hidden a secret I didn’t want my family finding?
There were things I didn’t talk to Mom about. Irritations and longings and other emotions I knew would make her feel guilty about the life she couldn’t give me. The first pangs of crushes and the pain of never being good enough.
I found this thick, dull-looking tome of a book—something about the history of sediment—at a rummage sale, brought it home, and hollowed it out to fit my journal inside.
Stuck it on my bookcase amid all the other books I’d scrounged up over the years, like it was simply another part of the collection.
Other Elodie has a narrow bookcase next to the desk, half of the space taken up by trinkets rather than reading material. Not much of a bookworm. I check the largest texts and then give even the few paperback novels a little shake to see if anything drifts out. Nope.
Okay, then what’s the Other Elodie equivalent of my books? Something she had a lot of, so she could use one for a covert purpose without it sticking out. Something you could easily conceal another object in.
Ah.
I flick on the light in the walk-in closet. The artificial beams glow off the racks of dresses and blouses, the poised rows of shoes… and the double ring of shelving just above my head, where dozens of purses and clutches wait to be paired with the right outfit.
I’m prepared to search them one by one, but as my gaze slides over them, it catches on one mid-sized handbag tucked into a corner of the shelf.
The brown suede surface is mostly hidden by the bags on either side. The fixtures gleam gunmetal gray amid shinier gold and silver. Nothing about the color or the shape would draw any attention or make it appealing enough for someone to ask to borrow it.
It’s dull, like my book on sediment.
I kick the stepstool over to that corner and clamber up to ease the purse out of its nook.
The moment I lift it, I can tell I’ve hit the jackpot. An empty purse wouldn’t weigh this much.
As I hop up to sit on the central island cross-legged, my pulse thumps faster. I yank at the zipper and open the bag.
A mini tablet in a plain gray case tilts against the silky lining.
I set the bag aside and flip the case open with the tablet balanced on my knee. The screen blinks on automatically to a generic lockscreen.
There’s a moment’s pause during which my heart stops, and then the facial recognition kicks in.
The home screen is sparse, just standard apps like Notes and Photos. I click through to Photos first, since that’s where Other Elodie’s regular phone provided me with the most material.
The single folder holds only twenty-eight files, mostly still images: outdoor shots from around the city.
A few show the side of a maroon brick building with decorative concrete fronds protruding from the edge of the wall.
A few others capture a different, boxy-looking building with neon graffiti streaked across its black siding.
There are shots of maybe seven buildings in total, though some might be different angles of the same location—it’s hard to tell when none of them show a full view of the front.
About half of them include people shown at a stealthy distance: descending a steel staircase down the side wall, standing together in apparent conversation, walking by with a slight blur of movement.
Other than some of the passers-by and a few people who are visible mostly from behind, the faces are blurred too. My stomach twists into a knot.
I don’t think Elodie anonymized them. There’s a hazy quality to the blur that I recognize.
When a lucent is up to something they don’t want any record of, they can work magic over any distinguishing features—a spell that only affects camera lenses. You won’t know they’re disguised if you glance at them with your eyes, but photos and video footage of them will turn out like this.
Who was my double taking covert photos of who’d be so protective of their identity? The only time I ever encountered this effect was in the briefings for my missions with Uncle Nik.
Of course, I wasn’t exactly going around snapping tons of pics on my phone in my everyday life. Maybe it’s more common among the upper crust than I realized.
A few of the photos show only a black sedan cruising down a street that looks vaguely familiar—I think it’s near Luminary. But the license plate is blurred in the same hazy way as the faces, and nothing else about the car stands out.
I flip over to Notes to see if those will provide any enlightenment.
The page that’s already open looks like a jumble of letters and numbers.
Studying it, I determine that some of the numbers are probably dates and times, one or two each month going back to last fall, a bunch more in March and early April.
The times are all in the late afternoon onward other than a couple in the very early morning.
Outside of class times. Is this what Other Elodie was up to when she was ditching her friends?
Even if I have a when, I still don’t have a what. Some of the newer and most of the older notations are marked with the letters DVB. The recent ones include TEC and GG and other seemingly random combinations. There are also additions like 3x iv and left on ds.
I’m sure they meant something to my doppelganger, but I haven’t got a clue what they stand for. Cross-referencing them with the info on the photos, it looks like some of them line up, but that’s not enough of an explanation.
Is this a schedule—appointments Other Elodie made, arrangements to meet up with people? To do what?
What kinds of trouble do bored rich kids normally get up to? I list out the usual suspects.
She could have gotten into some kind of magically-enhanced drugs. The dates and times could be when she’d have a chance to meet her dealer.
That could explain the secrecy—and the sudden increase in activity in the past month could mean she’d started dealing as well. Are the other notations customers?
And then… she was taking photos of her clients or her supplier? Drug peddlers would definitely be the type to want to obscure their faces.
I don’t know why she’d want photos of them, though. Maybe some kind of insurance in case they wanted to tattle on her, but I don’t see how that would work out with their identities blurred.
Could she have gotten wrapped up in some other kind of criminal activity? If it was anything related to the lucent mafias, Salvatore would probably have hinted at it, but there’s plenty of smaller scale magical misdoings. Petty theft, minor extortion rackets…
What would be the point, though? It’s not like Other Elodie needed money.
Another possibility: she struck up an illicit relationship she knew her friends and family wouldn’t approve of. Someone from the wrong side of the tracks? Or someone powerful but off-limits… and she decided to stalk them and their associates?
So many possibilities that could have led to her murder.
It’s possible no one knows the truth but the dead woman who was lying mangled in Aunt Daphne’s workroom four nights ago.
I flick at the screen to look at the main list of Notes files. There’s only one other, with a preview that’s written in actual words but no less confusing to see than the first.
How can I keep smiling along when I know everything around me is a bunch of garbage? All I’ve done—
Staring, I tap through to the full note.
How can I keep smiling along when I know everything around me is a bunch of garbage? All I’ve done is listen to my family and be the Devine heir they want me to be. We have so much and I’ve never lifted a finger for any of it.
Mom would have hated this. I hate that I can hardly remember her anymore. Her face, her voice…
Why did Dad let them take all the pictures of her out of the house? It’s HIS fucking house. Our house.
Would it really do any good to burn it all down, though? Where would I go? What would I do?
This is how you play the game. This is how you get ahead. When you’ve got enough of a lead, you can start doing your own thing without anyone tripping you up.
Unless we don’t even know who’s in front of us. What shit they’re doing.
Am I even making sense? I can’t tell anymore. I know my lines and I say them and it’s way too easy.
I want to do something different. I want to be someone different. There’s got to be more than this cage.
I’m trying to open my eyes, but sometimes what I think I see scares me.
There are several more rambling confessional screeds like that, not dated but separated from each other by a few dashes.
No specifics, just venting about her family, the superficialities of her friends, how much she hates feeling alone, how much she craves something different.
Laced through it all is a thread of paranoia about the wrongdoings of unknown figures.
I finish reading in a daze and then start over again in case I missed something. I never saw any hint of this angst in my double’s more public record of her life.
Clearly Aunt Daphne and her friends didn’t have a clue. Dad hasn’t seemed especially concerned about his daughter’s mental state.
Was Other Elodie really bottling all this up, or was this more like a rich-girl tantrum, pouting that she didn’t get that trip to Fiji or both of the new pairs of shoes she wanted and posing her pain as something deep and meaningful?
Or could these rants have been purposefully faked as some kind of justification if anyone found out what she was doing with the photographs and on those dates?
Maybe she wrote that stuff when she was drunk or high—or both—and her head wasn’t on straight.
I don’t know what I believe is most likely… but it’s hard to dismiss her distress completely. Bits and pieces of it resonate with my own frustrations more than I like.
She still thought about Mom, still noticed how unfairly the Devines treated her. She could see enough to question the life she had, however much she meant the complaints she wrote down.
I lean back, clutching the tablet to my chest. Should I show this to Daphne, see if she can make any sense of it?
Every muscle in my body balks after the way she reacted to my tentative question earlier. I doubt there’s much chance Daphne would recognize the records of activities her niece obviously kept very hidden… and I don’t think she’s ready to accept just how far Other Elodie might have tumbled.
She might get upset and take the tablet away. Delete the evidence she doesn’t like. This is a woman who hauled me across universes to play detective in my own murder—I can’t count on her to be rational.
No, I’ll wait until I have a definite story with undeniable proof.
Because there was clearly more to this Elodie Devine than the snobby socialite she presented herself as to the world. She was a hell of a lot more messed up than she let anyone realize.
If I can piece together these clues, I’d bet El Dorado they’ll lead to the person who killed her.
They might also uncover a dark underbelly to the shiny upper-crust facade that not even the Devines will be able to deny.
And I’ll go home knowing that no matter how huge her house is or how high she ranked at the academy, this Elodie’s life wasn’t any less fucked up than mine.