Book of Night(46)

She shook her head. “I’m going out anyhow. Katelynn, remember?”

He got his coat. Kissed her on the mouth and then at the edge of her jaw. A kiss that obviously meant something, but whether it was apology or promise, she wasn’t sure.

After he left, she stared at her bedroom door. If he hadn’t gotten called in to work, he might have given her answers. And she knew that any newspaper advice columnist would tell her that she should wait, respect his privacy, and ask him more when he returned.

She made it fifteen minutes before she got up and made a show of stretching. “Well, I’m going to take a quick nap before I go out.”

“Hold on,” Posey said. “I was waiting for him to leave. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Charlie did not want to hear more about DMT and how it was absolutely necessary to steal some for Posey’s let’s-experiment-on-ourselves-in-the-woods retreat. “I won’t be long.”

In the bedroom, with the door firmly closed, Charlie looked around. Tangled sheets. Clothes and shoes scattered on the floor. A dresser cluttered with yellowed paperback books and pots of makeup and a vase stuffed with receipts.

When she looked down at her hands, she was surprised to find them shaking.

Charlie ripped the bedding all the way off, then pushed the mattress up against the wall. It was heavy and wobbled, but she got it up. Things got hidden under beds in movies. Which meant that people who watched movies hid things under beds.

But beneath the mattress, all she found was a pair of underwear she’d lost, a crumpled tissue, plus something gross and fuzzy and flat that might have once been one of Lucipurrr’s hairballs.

She thought of her mother, looking for evidence of another woman, in drawers, in pockets. Impossibly trying to prove a negative. Hoping for nothing, and knowing that nothing only meant you weren’t looking hard enough. Charlie swore that she would never wind up like that.

Yet here she was.

Charlie moved on to Vince’s half of the dresser, shoving her hands all the way to the back, then taking everything out and turning over the drawers. Vince was tidy—never left his clothes on the floor, never left his hair in the sink—so it was a surprise to find shirts and jeans thrown together haphazardly. She hoped there was no system to the chaos, because she’d never be able to re-create it. If he left five balls of socks in a particular order to detect snooping, she was screwed.

But she found nothing of interest. Nothing incriminating.

She went to the closet next. Most of the stuff in there was hers, but he had a winter coat and a pair of boots shoved deep in on the left side. She wriggled her hands into the pockets and took out two receipts. One for gas, another for milk, bread, and eggs. Both paid in cash.

Peering into the darkness, she noticed an empty-looking black duffel bag on the floor, past the boots. She dragged it out and unzipped it.

At the bottom she found a metal disc about the size of a nickel, and a driver’s license. She turned the bag over and shook everything onto the floor, but nothing else fell out.

She picked up the small metal disc. It was thick and heavier than she expected, almost like a watch battery, but without any markings. A part to something electronic? A piece in a game? She tucked it into her pocket.

Then she looked at the driver’s license. The picture was of a younger Vincent, smiling wide, with neatly barbered hair that someone had used product on, a collared shirt just visible along the bottom of the image. An address in Springfield, with an apartment number. And over the state capital, an entirely different name.

Edmund Vincent Carver.

For a dizzying moment, she thought she was looking at a fake ID. But the card had uniform edges and bended right, and when she held it to the light, the tell-tale metallized kinegram shone over his picture.

Lionel Salt’s grandson. The one who’d stolen the Liber Noctem. The one who was supposed to be dead.

Lionel Salt’s heir, lying beside her in the dark.

Charlie found it hard to catch her breath. She was pretty sure this was a full-blown panic attack, and that if she kept inhaling so quickly and shallowly, she’d bruise her lungs.

She took out her phone and snapped a picture of his license, amazed to find that she could manage it. Everything seemed to be happening too fast. But she still made herself go to her laptop and open her search engine. She typed “Edmund Carver” and “Springfield.”

The first hit was an article that came up from last summer, printed in The Republican:

SPRINGFIELD—The burnt remains of two bodies were discovered in a car two blocks from the MGM casino in the downtown area in the early-morning hours of Monday.

Police have identified one as belonging to Edmund “Remy” Carver, 27, socialite and grandson of Lionel Salt. The other was Rose Allaband, 23, who had been reported missing after disappearing from her apartment in Worcester four months ago. Early forensics suggest a murder-suicide.

The sheriff’s office is not looking for additional suspects at this time.



Charlie’s heart sped.

A few more clicks and she found Vince’s picture with a dozen other young, broad-shouldered men on the New York University fencing team. He wore a collared white bodysuit, arms folded across his chest, hair shorter than on the license, faded close to his scalp on the sides. He looked like he was in a costume, except for the way he was smiling at the camera, as though he believed the world was made for people like him.