CHAPTER TEN PRESENT DAY
Jesse stands, barely an outline in the dark. “Follow me.”
I keep my gaze trained away from the shifting shadows behind him. “Where are we going?”
“Downstairs.” He only gets a step to the door before I shoot to my feet and grab his arm. “What? Isn’t downstairs where the mortuary is?”
A long pause. Jesse pries my fingers from his arm. “Stay close.”
Silence cloaks the house, muffling the sound of my panicked breath. Mr. Talbot hasn’t come home yet, but who knows when he might be back?
The stairs groan as we descend. When we reach the first floor, I come to a halt, rubbing the heel of my hand against my chest. “Does your dad own a defibrillator?”
Jesse leans against the banister and treats me to his signature eye-roll. “Who would he use it on? The corpses?”
“I hope you keep your sense of humor when I have a heart attack in about, oh, ten minutes.”
Jesse sighs, shifting to the head of the stairs leading into the mortuary. “Come on, Mansour. I know you and your friends have gossiped about what’s at the bottom of the Talbot house. Don’t you want to finally find out?”
I pause, caught. “We don’t gossip.” Much. “We exchange pertinent social information.”
He grins, his lips a vicious slash in the dark. “Consider this another piece of pertinent social information.”
Before I can cobble together another protest, Jesse disappears down the stairs.
I linger next to the head of the narrow tunnel of stairs. Sweat beads along my forehead. The prospect of following him fills me with dread, but I can’t stay up here alone.
My damp palm finds the banister and holds on for dear life. Just a set of stairs. Stairs aren’t scary for anyone above the age of three.
A mocking voice drifts from the stairwell. “Do you need me to come up there and hold your hand?”
Unbearable, unmannered, smug little jerk. I put my other hand on the banister and begin my shuffling descent.
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” I sing.
A hums floats through the darkness. I pause, squinting in the direction of the sound. Is he … harmonizing with me?
I shake my head, too amused to remember my impending cardiac arrest. At least whatever’s wrong with him is funny.
The temperature dips the farther we descend. I clutch the railing, trying not to wince each time a metal step whines beneath my weight.
After an eternity, the stairs flatten into a long hallway pulled straight out of the eighties.
Faux wood paneling runs along one side, rounded doorways on the other.
The long yellow bulbs lining the center of the ceiling emit a low buzz when Jesse flips the light switch.
The tubes are scorched at the ends, flickering with the last of their life force.
I clutch my backpack a little closer and remind myself that if Jesse wanted to kill me, he wouldn’t do it on his own property.
“What are these rooms for?” I nod at the doors.
“Storage, mostly. You could probably nick a lipstick or something if you want. We have stacks of the stuff.”
Aside from the fact that I’m not eager to steal from the town mortician, “Why does he have stacks of lipstick?” I pause. “What does a mortician do, exactly?”
“The internet is free, Mansour.”
Jesse turns to a door as nondescript as the other six we’ve passed. I hold my breath as he twists the handle, leading us into the belly of …
An office.
“Oh.”
Jesse glances over his shoulder, arching a brow. “Something wrong?”
Since I’d prefer to cartwheel into an open flame than admit to Jesse I’d been imagining walking into a room of dead bodies, I merely lift my chin and follow him inside.
Compared to the rest of the Talbot house, the office is shockingly modern.
A mahogany desk the size of three pianos consumes most of the room.
Rows upon rows of polished wooden shelves line the walls behind it.
A rolling drink cart in the corner holds dozens of expensive glass bottles, but only one tumbler.
A leather-bound book lies open on the desk. I inch closer, peering at what appears to be the anatomic image of a girl’s spleen.
Jesse rounds the desk, dropping onto the plush leather chair. He adjusts one of the two giant monitors stationed in front of the keyboard. “This is my dad’s study.”
“Are we allowed to be in here?”
It’s an absurd question, since the answer is obviously not, and Jesse does me the favor of ignoring it. “I’ve been doing some research,” he says instead.
He stands, dragging the chair in front of his dad’s desk to the other side. When I hesitate, he makes a show of dusting it off with his sleeve. “A throne for Her Majesty.”
“Has anyone ever told you to pursue a career in comedy?” I ask, poking his arm away from the chair and perching on the edge.
“Not yet.”
“Take that as a sign.”
Jesse grins, as he always does whenever I say something especially mean. He seems to thrive on my bad attitude. “Noted.”
With a swipe of the mouse, the monitors flicker on. The glow washes the shelves behind us blue.
Dozens of tabs open on the screen. More than I can count. It’s a miracle his server hasn’t completely crashed.
“I had to switch languages and click on some questionable links, but I finally found a thread about your family in El Agamy. I followed it down a rabbit hole that may or may not have been totally legal,” Jesse says. “Have you heard of the Egyptian House of Archives?”
My brows furrow. “No.” It comes out vaguely waspish. I hate it when someone asks me something about Masr and I can’t answer. It makes me feel like a fraud.
If Jesse notices, he doesn’t let on. “That’s probably for the best,” he mutters. “Can’t be implicated if you don’t know, right?”
An old article appears, fuzzy and scanned at a poor angle. “I had to put it through a PDF converter app,” he says. “It didn’t translate all of it.”
“I can read Arabic.” As long as the letters have the necessary tashkeel, I can usually figure out any words I don’t understand from context. “But let me try the translation first.”
NASHRA: NORTH COAST
FAMILY PURCHASES TWENTY ACRES IN WESTERN ALEXANDRIA.
The largest real estate purchase in Western Alexandria’s history recently closed between Bamba Haikal and local municipalities.
Government officials expressed their hope that the sale would catch the eye of commercial developers, leading to population and industrial growth along the shoreline.
Is the tide changing for this beautiful and underutilized section of the Alexandria coast?
“Yeah, my aunt mentioned we’ve been in El Agamy for a long time,” I murmur. I hadn’t expected that to mean over two hundred years, though. “My however-many-great-grandparents must’ve been loaded.”
“The wealth actually started with the first Haikal matriarch.” Another swipe. A black-and-white painting fills the screen. In it, a polished older woman lounges on a velvet parlor chair. She stares at the artist unsmilingly, her hands folded over the rounded arms of the parlor chair.
Pain cleaves my head, sudden and vicious. “I know her,” I gasp, and the pain grows teeth.
“Know her?” Jesse narrows his eyes. “Mansour, this woman is the Haikal family’s first matriarch. She’s been dead for over a century.”
A woman kneels in a mud-covered road, her tattered gown blowing in the storm. Dirt streaks her arms and forehead. Lightning cracks above her. She rocks back and forth, lips moving.
I shake my head, rubbing my temples. The memory makes no sense. “Maybe I saw a picture somewhere in my aunt’s house?”
The pressed suit and combed hair in the painting bear no resemblance to the bedraggled woman in my mind, but their eyes … the same flat, merciless brown.
“According to every article I could find, Bamba Haikal came into her fortune out of nowhere. She was an orphan without a home for most of her life. After she built the villa, the newspapers called her Sayida Bamba and vacationers started flooding El Agamy.”
“Bamba means pink in Arabic.” I offer the information seriously, as if it might contain a case-cracking clue.
“Good to know,” Jesse says. The second opportunity he’s had to mock me, and the second time he hasn’t taken it.
“Bamba was responsible for most of the development in El Agamy. She built her home there and worked with schools and business owners to draw families into the area. But then children started to disappear, and people got spooked. The trickle of life dried up, and El Agamy stayed mostly empty until Bamba died. Her daughters took up the mantle to develop the area into a place families would want to start their lives.”
Jesse clicks his mouse, and a photo of a nauseatingly familiar villa replaces Bamba’s picture. The paint is much fresher, and the garden appears to be in bloom, but it’s otherwise the same.
“That’s the house,” I say. “The Haikal villa.”
“I was afraid you would say that.” Jesse swipes both hands through his hair, knitting his fingers behind his neck as he leans back in the chair. A stray lock of hair catches on his eyelashes, and before I know what’s happening, I reach for it.
Jesse and I freeze. A dark gaze fastens on my face as I curl my fingers away at the last second. “Just a strand, uh, in your eyes.”
Without looking away from me, he tilts his chin back, and the troublesome strand slides to his temple. “Better?” His voice sounds gravelly, borderline rough. I don’t need a mirror to know my cheeks are warming.
“You were saying?” I clear my throat.
His lips twist, as though hearing a joke only he can understand.
His gaze finally returns to the computer.
“As I was saying, generations of Haikals lived in the villa Bamba built. Lots of them also left. There are Haikals scattered all over the world. The ones who remained in the Haikal house were constantly struggling to make their neighborhood a place where people wanted to live. Bamba’s second granddaughter is quoted calling the tourists ‘idiots chasing the next coast like a cat chasing the end of a string.’ “ Jesse snorts.