Chapter 17 #2
I nodded once, then tried to speak, tried again to tell her what I learned. It was impossible. Whatever force controlled what happened here would not allow me to tell her what I knew.
Rhiannon’s lips pressed together as her eyes narrowed.
I had to hope that she was sorting out that something was wrong, as I had no way to tell her.
With her eyes still narrowed, she picked up one of the blank legal pads that had been on Magnus’ desk, and showed me her chicken scratches.
I could make neither heads nor tails of it.
I shrugged, which caused one corner of her mouth to quirk up.
“Magnus was getting money from somewhere other than the tithes, and it was going somewhere else—not to the Consulate.” I raised an eyebrow.
Surely that would have been obvious, even to me.
But I had thought something looked off about it.
Rhiannon continued, “It was in tiny amounts. And so randomly done, it would have appeared to be someone over-tithing.”
My breath caught. Of course. It would be easy to hide money in the tithes.
Some folks gave more in abundant months, tiding them over for the lean times so the Consulate wouldn’t send their people out to collect the difference.
It was something Ares and I always made sure to look the other way on, and most of the other Trinity leaders throughout the Three Cities were the same.
The tithes weren’t meant as a punishment for our people, after all.
They were to make sure the Consulate kept running.
Without it, problematic as it was, there would be no mediation between us and the Authority.
That was too dangerous—imperfect as it was, the days before the Consulate grasped as much power as it had now had been harrowing for parapsychs.
I tried not to think about my parents, turning back to the figures at hand. Magnus had been smart to hide what he was doing in the tithes. Few people would notice the discrepancy there.
Rhiannon showed me a column of numbers, running along the months of the year for three years.
She had traced a red line to show the general shape of the tithes.
“This is the real over and under-tithing,” she said.
“More or less anyway. Some months it was hard to parse out from Magnus’ deception.
But you can see, it moves in cyclical patterns over the years. ”
I wasn’t sure I saw what she referred to clearly, but I caught enough to understand why I’d been suspicious.
Rhiannon tapped one month in particular.
“This was the year of the Cities’ Fair. You can see how in the months before the Fair, tithing went down.
Then, in the months during and after, it slowly went up.
There are similar ebbs and flows in other years. ”
Rhiannon pointed out similar rises and falls in tithing patterns.
“Now look at the way the lines change when you just look at what actually went into the bank before the tithes were delivered to Ember.” She turned back to the desk and brought the ledger closest to her onto her lap and traced her nail down the new lines. “See?”
The shape of the tithes was similar, but not identical, and it no longer showed the natural ebbs and flows from before. The difference was very subtle, but it was there. Magnus had manipulated the numbers, but failed to recognize the real ways our people lived and tithed.
He’d made a mistake that almost no one would notice. But Rhiannon had. She was the kind of smart that could figure things like this out. It was like the push and pull between us. We knew when to let the other lead, and when to follow, almost by instinct. We made a good team.
Rhiannon closed the ledger and leaned back in the chair. “The unwise believe that life is random, uncontrolled. But people move in patterns. In waves. Every action elicits a reaction, and we move together, whether we believe we do or not.”
She wasn’t just smart, she had the wisdom of thousands of years, and two separate lifetimes. My admiration for her grew. I nodded, turning my attention back to the problem at hand. “Where was the money coming from? Can you tell?”
Rhiannon shook her head. “No. He was very good at hiding it. There’s no evidence of the source here.
We’ve run into another dead end.” Her arms went around her waist, like she was hugging herself.
The look of helplessness in her eyes troubled me.
That wasn’t how Rhiannon typically operated. She didn’t give up.
When she spoke again, my concern was allayed, but only a little. “How do you think Cassandra got the key to the Ossuary? Shouldn’t Roman have had it?”
I sucked a deep breath in, creating more space in my mind.
Being around Rhiannon made me want to push the boundaries of how I thought about things.
With Ares, I was always wary of being wrong.
He was the one who’d brought us out of hard times again and again.
It felt easier to simply leave the deeper strategy to him. To let him lead alone.
He didn’t ask for it to be that way. Alone here with Rhiannon, unknotting the tangles in this mess my family had created, I wondered if I’d made a mistake by assuming he’d wanted to carry so much of the burden alone. My thoughts rearranged, but it didn’t seem I had the answer she was looking for.
Typically, with Ares and Av, in a situation like this, I would step back.
Let the two of them think things through alone, assuming they didn’t need my interference.
Now, I changed tack—after all, things were different between me and her—and maybe that was a good change to have in my life.
“Maybe. But the note in Triomphe would suggest that she took it from Magnus, and that someone else knew that she was looking for it. Whoever the ‘L’ was from the note.”
I held my breath, feeling the unhelpfulness of my words deep in my bones. Why had I even said anything? To my surprise, Rhiannon’s eyes went wide and a bit soft. “Yes,” she breathed, as though my words had unlocked some idea within her. “This must all connect somehow. I just can’t quite see how.”
It wasn’t a breakthrough. Not in the traditional sense. We hadn’t come to some stunning conclusion and solved the mystery, but something shifted within me. I felt different when I was alone with her, free to think more deeply, to offer my own opinion.
It wasn’t Ares that stopped me from sharing my ideas—I’d been holding myself back. Unsettled by the thought, I stood, going to the window. It looked out over the garden, but also gave me a sliver of a view of Hemlock House.
A flash of the mansion’s snow-covered roof reminded me that the real world was still out there. That it was the dead of winter, and the people we loved were probably worried sick about not having heard from us for Saints knew how long.
“Cassandra had the key to her desk hidden in the library,” I mused. We didn’t have a pinboard, like Rhiannon and the Maere had set up during the heist, but we could gather our information all the same.
“A library full of books that would have been utterly unimportant to a man like Magnus, if I am correct in my remembrance of him,” Rhiannon added.
My stomach clenched. “You are.”
“I think we can assume she stole the Ossuary key, and that she stole it from Magnus himself, since she hid it in the locked part of her desk.”
“In a secret compartment,” I added. She was right. We were both right, I corrected myself. This was adding up to something. I glanced back at her.
Rhiannon’s long fingers closed around the arms of the wooden desk chair, her knuckles going white. “The basement door is locked, but we can assume the door to the Ossuary is down there somewhere, or at least access to it is.”
And that the access to it was what was important here.
What was in the Ossuary? I turned back to the window.
The trees in the garden moved into their usual pattern of looping.
The black cat came around the corner. The newspaper disappeared from the table.
“Yes,” I agreed. “And Magnus was taking money from someone.”
Rhiannon took a deep breath. “Typically, I like evidence-based hypotheses. In this case though, I am going to…”
“Speculate?” I offered, turning to look at her again. She stared at the spot on the floor where I’d seen the menacing shadow in my dream, humming an assent.
“Magnus underestimated Cassandra,” Rhiannon continued. My eyes drifted to the place in the wallpaper the shadow had appeared to point to.
“Whatever he was up to, he never thought she’d figure it out.”
There was nothing there.
“But she did.”
My eyes returned to the floor.
“She figured out what he was doing and she took the key from him.”
I connected the dots between the spaces where the shadow’s head had stopped and where it pointed, in the air, and then let my eyes scan the room at that exact latitude. There it was. Right above the desk, an anomaly in the wallpaper pattern so slight I never would have noticed it.
Rhiannon’s breath hitched as I leaned over, reaching over her shoulder to press the spot in the wall just beneath the anomaly in the wallpaper. “What are you—”
Another invisible panel popped open and my body warmed in the ambient heat of her skin. Do not touch her, I cautioned myself. Right now wasn’t the time for that. Do not even think of touching her.
The sound she made was soft, her lips forming just one small word, “Oh.”
Her arm moved beneath mine, and gently she reached inside the dark panel, pulling out a skeleton key that was just the right size for the basement door. She handed it to me. “I don’t think we should use it yet.”
I frowned. “Why not?”