Chapter 21
Heathcliff
Iset a glass of wine in front of a dejected Mina.
She, Morrie, and Quoth arrived home from London a few minutes ago, which is just as well because I’d already kicked out the gawkers and spent the day’s takings on three bottles of mid-priced wine (gawkers buy a lot of books), and if they hadn’t got back soon, I’d have drunk the lot.
Customers are irksome. It’s annoying that they are required to keep Grimalkin in the manner to which she has become accustomed.
I’ve barely poured another glass before Morrie swipes it. He leans back in the velvet chair like the bloody, annoyingly suave villain he is and raises the glass to his lips.
“I take it the investigation went well?” This is what people get for leaving the shop to go on a wild goose chase – they didn’t even bring home any geese.
“If it wasn’t Holly, who could it be?” Mina bangs her head against my desk.
“It could still be Holly,” Morrie says, tapping annoyingly on his phone. “She probably hired someone.”
“I don’t believe that.” Quoth swings his legs off the edge of the table.
He’s wearing a new set of clothes, which I suppose is at least thoughtful and discreet of him, but I’m not about to ask where he got them.
They look distinctly like something Mina would choose for him, which makes me think about Mina choosing him, which is worse than the customer whose child threw up on the Railroad History shelf.
“A hired assassin wouldn’t have used that knife, or done the deed in the shop while we were upstairs, or left the drawing behind. ”
Morrie glances up, his eyes sparkling. “You’re right. My genius is rubbing off on you.”
“I’ve been reading a book about assassins, actually.
It’s fascinating. Did you know that in ancient India, women called vishkanya dosed themselves with poison a bit at a time until they built up an immunity to it, and then got themselves invited into the presence of a rival king to cook and feed him poisoned food? ”
“That’s fascinating,” I say. It’s not, and I make sure my eyebrows convey that message. “But it does not help with the mystery in front of us.”
“I want to know more about these vishkanya.” Mina’s voice is muffled by the stack of paper on my desk.
“Quoth knows all sorts of useless facts.” Morrie tap-tap-taps the screen of his phone. “Useless facts for a useless animal.”
A moment later, a beleaguered raven takes up towards the stairs, followed by a playful black cat.
Normally, I’d be hurling myself at Morrie, ready to eviscerate him.
No one gets to be cruel to Quoth except me.
But I don’t like how good the birdie looks in his Mina clothes, like they belong together.
I kick the crumpled pile under the table and reach for the wine, pointedly not coming to Quoth’s defence.
The bottle jerks out of my hand as Mina shoves the desk into me and flings herself at Morrie.
“Why did you say that?” She yanks Morrie’s phone out of his hand. “You hurt his feelings.”
I snort as I slosh the rest of the bottle into my glass. “Emotions are a human fault, and Quoth isn’t human.”
“Relax, gorgeous. We say stuff like that all the time. Quoth knows we’re kidding.” Morrie reaches for his phone, but Mina holds it behind her back. Above our heads, tiny footsteps patter across the floor as Grimalkin chases Quoth around the Sociology shelves. Serves him right for being beautiful.
“Yeah? Well, maybe you couldn’t see how that comment affected him, because you’re both insensitive wankers, but I did.”
“I only said it because it’s true,” Morrie shoots back. “Quoth can’t get upset about the truth – that would be impractical. You saw what he did today – he can’t even control his shift. He doesn’t go outside or work a job or help Heathcliff in the shop.”
Damn right he doesn’t. It’s me down here against the onslaught of humanity.
Morrie isn’t finished. “Quoth doesn’t even know how to talk to another human. All he does is hide up in the attic, drawing and reading, or flaps around down here pooping on the furniture.”
The Napoleon of Crime makes valid points.
“Croooooak!” Quoth yells from upstairs. Something smashes, and Grimalkin howls.
Mina tosses Morrie’s phone on the desk. “I’m going to talk to him.”
“Don’t get between those two, or you’ll end up in hospital,” Morrie warns. “Quoth will settle down. He’s heard it all before. You can’t judge him by your standards, Mina. Heathcliff spoke the truth – Quoth isn’t human.”
Mina cringes as another crash emanates from upstairs, followed by a yowl and the sound of several books thumping onto the floor.
Don’t concern yourself with me, Mina. Quoth’s voice pops into my head. I’ve got that bastard cat right where I want her.
“See?” Morrie grins at each of us, since we can all hear him. “He’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
Mina rubs her temples. She’s still not used to the random intrusions of bird thoughts. She glares between Morrie and the ceiling, indecision etched into her features. Finally, she slumps back into my chair and picks up her wine.
“I managed to get hold of Ribald’s office,” I offer in an attempt to get her thinking about helpful Heathcliff instead of the poor, sad birdie.
“He wouldn’t come to the phone, but his assistant said he had back-to-back appointments and chortled when I suggested he might be in Martha’s Vineyard. So we know your friend lied.”
“She’s not my friend,” Mina corrects me, waving her empty glass for me to refill.
“Don’t you think it’s odd that the first drawing hasn’t appeared in the media yet?” I refill both our glasses. “If someone is paying money for these designs, wouldn’t they want to leak them as soon as possible?”
“Not necessarily. It depends on what they were going to do with them. Anyone paying Ashley that much money isn’t just wanting to leak the designs to the press – they want to add the garments to their own lines.
But with Paris Fashion Week in January, they’re going to be scrambling to finish in time.
This is haute couture. These garments are made from the finest natural fibres, hand-dyed and hand-stitched.
Every single bead is attached by hand. That’s not the kind of thing you can just recreate in an afternoon. ”
“Maybe the idea wasn’t to recreate the pieces, but to blackmail this Ribald character?
” Morrie suggests. Of course, he goes immediately to blackmail.
“That’s what I would do if I had these drawings in my possession.
I’d dig up some dirt on this guy and force him to pay me cash and design my next collection to keep me quiet.
And who better to blackmail him than his intern, who knows all the intricate details of his personal life? ”
Something passes over Mina’s face as she considers this. Morrie smirks at me, and I know.
Something happened between the three of them on this London trip.
And not one of them has told me.
The hurt is a sharp pain in my chest, a knife carving their betrayal into my heart.
I search for Quoth’s thoughts, to see if I can confirm my worst fears through him, but his thoughts currently consist of big scary cat fly away cloud pretty so I’m not getting anything there.
Morrie licks his upper lip, and all I can see is his hands all over Mina, his mouth on her mouth, or on other places, her eyes rolling back in her head as she screams his name…
…that wasn’t what you were thinking when he had you up against that wall, Quoth’s voice penetrates my thoughts. He’s obviously talking to Mina.
CRACK.
I look down and see that I’ve broken the stem of the wine glass with my fist. I polish off the rest of the booze and toss the broken glass into the rubbish bin before Mina sees. Morrie studies me with a mix of triumph and pity that has me seeing red splotches.
“What wall?” I glare at Mina. She turns away from me, hiding her face with her hair. She’s thinking something only Quoth can hear. Damn that birdie—
Is that really the reason? Quoth asks. Or is it that you can’t choose between them?
“Not a difficult choice,” Morrie says without looking up from his phone. “Brains over brawn every time.”
“What are you choosing?” I growl. “What’s that bloody bird talking about?”
“Stay out of my head!” Mina yells at the ceiling.
“Croak!” comes the audible reply.
“So…there might be something to this blackmail,” Mina laughs stiffly, trying to change the subject. “But how would we find out? I’m not going to have to talk to Marcus, am I?”
Mina and Morrie discuss a Cayman Island bank account in Marcus’ name that Morrie has just uncovered, and I imagine several satisfying ways to separate Morrie’s head from his body.
I hate the easy way the pair of them volley ideas on the case back and forth.
I’ve never felt at ease around anyone, not even Cathy, until Mina.
But I’ll never be able to give her what she has with Morrie or Quoth. Morrie engages her intellect. In Quoth, she has a kindred artistic soul. But there’s nothing in me for Mina to find a home in. All I can offer is mud and pain.
It’s better this way.
Then why does my foolish black heart continue to hope?
Why am I wishing that Quoth was talking about Mina choosing me?
“—but I don’t understand why Ashley was killed,” Mina is saying, oblivious to my torment. “She’s not the blackmailer. I just can’t see her setting up a Cayman Island account.”
“I deduce one of three things happened. One, your dear friend was involved in this blackmail operation in some capacity, then decided she wanted out of the ring. She tried to leave, and our blackmailer killed her to protect her identity. Two, your beloved Marcus Ribald hired someone to pose as the buyer and he killed Ashley to close the loop. Three, Ashley was working for Marcus all along, and she was killed because she threatened to report the blackmail. That’s usually how these things end.
” Morrie finishes his wine with a delighted smack of his lips.
“Not that I have any close personal experience with blackmail.”
“No, not at all.” Mina looks at him as if she can’t quite believe he’s real. The rage inside me seethes.
“This is going to take me a little longer to break,” Morrie mutters, his fingers flying over his phone screen. “These Cayman banks are always tight with security.”
Mina turns to me, eyes wide with hope. “Is this a ‘send out for pizza’ situation, or does he mean that he’s going to be working all night?”
“Make mine a meatsplosion,” Morrie says without looking up. “I bet I’ll have this hacked by the time dinner arrives.”
“You’re on,” Mina grins. “Loser buys the next bottle of wine.”
“Deal. I hope you’ve been saving your pennies, gorgeous, because I have expensive taste.”
And just like that, the tension that’s crackled in the air since they returned has dissipated, returning the shop to normal and my rage to its usual state of aggravated torpor.
I pick up the phone to order. “Quoth,” I yell. “You want your usual?”
“Croak!”
I endure a tedious conversation with the lady at the takeaway shop because she doesn’t believe my name is really Heathcliff, but when I hang up, I have placed an order for pizza, chips, and garlic bread. Mina slumps down beside me on the sofa, her closeness warm and wretched.
“It’s odd to think of the Heathcliff I know – the one from Wuthering Heights – eating pizza,” Mina says.
“We all of us agree one thing that’s improved from our fictional worlds is the cuisine,” I say gruffly, not wanting to betray how happy her presence makes me.
“Nelly was a fair cook, but she cannot hold a candle to Tony’s Pizzeria.
I’m grateful to never see another mutton pie for the rest of my days. ”
Mina worries her lower lip. I know she has questions about the world I’ve come from, the world of my book where I was a rotten scoundrel with a heart made of spite.
But I don’t want her to ask, because until she came along, I believed that maybe, if I kept my head down and didn’t come to care for any other human, I might not turn into the monster that bears my name.
And now I feel the monster growing inside me, twisting my friendships with Morrie and Quoth into something sinister, and all because I yearn for what I can never have.