CHAPTER 17 JAMESON
JAMESON
Jameson’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t fully asleep. In the Tuscan countryside, in the back seat of a private car, he wasn’t dreaming. He was remembering:
“How’s Tuscany?” Avery asks.
Even with an ocean between, the sound of her voice makes Jameson want to play.
“The birthplace of the Italian Renaissance? Full of winding roads, hills and valleys, where a morning mist rolls out in the distance, and the forests are littered with leaves so golden red that the entire world feels like it’s on fire in the best way? That Tuscany?”
“Yes. That Tuscany.”
“I’ve seen better.”
“Jameson!”
The part of Jameson that wasn’t asleep felt the car come to a stop, but he refused to let go of the memory—of Avery.
“Give him a moment.” That was Xander, addressing their driver. “He’s communing with the beast.” Xander, in typical Xander fashion, did not specify what the beast was.
“I was thinking,” Jameson corrected, opening his eyes and taking in the sight outside the car: the rolling hills; the world-on-fire trees; the vineyard—and the villa. It was one of a handful of Hawthorne vacation homes that Avery had not divested herself of yet.
Jameson climbed out of the car and walked toward the gate—not a grand gate like the one at Hawthorne House, but a simple one that came up only to Jameson’s waist. It was surrounded by much taller hedges, and as Jameson stepped through the gate and onto the property, he made a mental note: I didn’t search the hedges before.
Xander stepped through after him and looked up at the stone villa, two-thirds covered in ivy.
“Seventeenth century,” Jameson told him.
“What are we looking for?” Xander rocked back on his heels. It was the first time he’d asked, despite the conversation he’d overheard Jameson have with Alisa on the way here.
“Follow me.” Jameson made his way into the villa, which was unlocked—Alisa’s doing, no doubt, since Jameson had made good on his promise to keep her up to date on his progress.
Inside, there was no real foyer to speak of, so it didn’t take Jameson long to reach the room with the hearth.
A massive stone fireplace took up nearly an entire wall.
Overhead, wood rafters met stone walls. To Jameson’s right, a wooden staircase led up to the second floor, but right now, Jameson wasn’t concerned with the steps or the rafters or the kitchen visible through a stone archway to his left.
He hopped up onto the hearth and ducked into the fireplace. “Two years ago,” he told Xander, “I found something in here.”
Somewhere in Jameson’s memory, Avery responded to him telling her that. A clue? she’d said.
Probably, Jameson had told her. But to what puzzle?
At the time, Jameson had been focused on a different mystery. But now, he knew. The old man had left that mirror for Alice. A love letter. A game, telling her what he knew.
What he’d been able—somehow—to uncover about secrets he definitely was not supposed to know.
Inside the fireplace, it was pitch black. Jameson turned three hundred sixty degrees and ran his hands over the stone. His fingers found the remnants of the glue that had once held a small object in place, hidden.
“A triangular mirror,” Jameson said out loud.
“That’s what you asked Alisa to fetch from the House and send you.” The closeness of Xander’s voice was the only warning Jameson got before his brother popped up inside the fireplace next to him.
Even a massive fireplace was a tight fit for two Hawthornes.
“Our favorite lawyer will have it here as soon as she can,” Jameson told Xander. “And as discreetly as she can. In the meantime, you and I are going to search this house from top to bottom to see if we can turn up anything else.”
Where there was one object in a Hawthorne game, there could be others.
“Roger that,” Xander replied.
Finding nothing else inside the fireplace, Jameson ducked out of it, stepping onto the hearth and jumping to the floor.
“How big was the mirror you found before?” Xander asked, landing beside him.
“About like this.” Jameson made a triangle with his forefingers and thumbs. “Equilateral, and I could hold it in one hand.”
“Mirrored on both sides or just one?”
“Both.”
“Aluminum coating or silver?” Xander was clearly just winding up. “And did you try to scratch the coating off?”
“Silver. And no, I didn’t.” In the two years since he’d found the mirror, Jameson had barely paid it any attention at all. “At the time, I got distracted.”
By Eve. Jameson didn’t say that out loud. Unlike Grayson, he’d never trusted Eve. She’d reminded him too much of Emily, right from the start.
“How thoroughly did you search the rest of the house two years ago?” Xander asked.
Jameson walked over to inspect a Renaissance painting on the wall. “I’d give it a nine out of ten.” He removed the painting from the wall and popped off its frame.
“Full throttle this time?” Xander looked up at the soaring ceiling.
Jameson crouched and executed a series of probes of the seam where wall met floor. “We hold nothing back,” he confirmed. “For Avery.”
“For Avery,” Xander echoed. “Race you to the rafters.”
There was more than one room in the villa with rafters.
Jameson dropped down from searching the ones in an east-facing bedroom and landed in a crouch.
The room was sparsely and simply furnished, an iron bed the only item in it aside from an old-fashioned light fixture that hung from the ceiling and cast minimal light on a herringbone brick floor.
Jameson thoroughly examined the bed, the light fixture, and each and every brick. Nothing. He walked to the window, examined its thick wooden framing, and then threw it open. “Let there be light.”
Said light fell on the floor just so, and Jameson examined the pattern. Nothing. Again.
And so it went: room after room, rafters after rafters, window after window, until Jameson and Xander were done—with the inside of the villa at least.
They turned their attention to the terrace next.
Located on the side of the house, it offered an unvarnished view of miles and miles of countryside, but Jameson directed his gaze upward instead of outward.
Greenage covered the terrace rafters, reminding him that the hedges still needed searching as well.
“Alley-oop!” Xander practically ran up Jameson’s back, then launched himself at the rafters.
As his brother searched above, Jameson turned his own attention to the terrace door.
The color of the surrounding bricks suggested that this portion of the villa had been updated—perhaps more than once over the years, given the pattern of wear and tear.
The doorway was arched, and beside it hung a bell made of aged copper.
Jameson probed at the bell—first the outside, then the interior, then the ringer that hung dead center, the last of which gave Jameson pause, because it was seamed.
By the time Jameson got the metal ball out of the bell, Xander had finished with the rafters. He leapt down beside Jameson.
“Gimme,” Xander said. Jameson complied only because Xander had always had a way with mechanical things. Turning the ringer over and over in his hands at rapid speed, like he was working a Rubik’s Cube, Xander began humming the Star Wars theme under his breath.
“Got it!” Xander didn’t even try to keep the ringer in his possession once it popped open.
Jameson went straight for the object inside. Copper wires. As Jameson withdrew them, the wires uncoiled, forming a shape. A circle.
“A triangle. A circle.” Jameson was hit with a feeling somewhere between déjà vu and the electric, hair-raising anticipation of an imminent lightning strike.
The two objects he’d found in this villa were almost certainly part of the same game, the game the old man had left for his Alice.
My love, my love, my one and only love. As his grandfather’s voice echoed in his head, Jameson gave into the siren’s call of picturing Avery standing right there beside him. He willed himself to hear her voice.
A copper circle, her voice said in his head, the energy in her tone palpable, the way it always was when the two of them were standing on the verge of something. And a triangular mirror.
They’re connected, Heiress. Jameson imagined bringing his lips within half a centimeter of hers, and then, without warning, the daydream shattered, leaving Jameson staring at the objects, his mind utterly devoid of Avery’s voice.
He didn’t have the luxury of feeling bereft.
A copper circle. Jameson forced himself to think the words. A triangular mirror. Connected. All he had to figure out was how.