Book of Night(48)

There was a profile on his estate in West Springfield, apparently bought for $8.9 million in 2001, along with some links to his name associated with ongoing legal cases. As soon as she saw a photograph of the house, Charlie’s palms started to sweat.

It looked just like the palace she remembered.





14

A SWARM OF BLACK FLIES




Posey was slurping up ramen doctored with a ton of chili garlic sauce when Charlie emerged from the bedroom.

Dressed in leggings and an oversized shirt, Posey had pulled her brown hair into a single braid. Normal, except she was also wearing eyeliner, lip gloss, and calf-high zip-up boots. She was planning on going somewhere. Charlie just hoped it wasn’t a lab.

“Okay, so you wanted to talk to me without Vince around,” Charlie said, forcing herself to concentrate on this conversation and not everything she’d learned. “What for?”

Posey poked at her bowl. “You’re not going to tell me why you trashed your bedroom?”

Maybe she should get a tarot reading, like saps everywhere. Maybe she needed to hear someone else say it: He’s no good. “You go ahead with your thing first.”

“Fine. So last night, I was talking to this guy…”

Charlie abruptly wished she’d said a lot less the night before. “You told me you wouldn’t.”

“I stopped arguing with you,” Posey said. “I never actually agreed to do what you said.”

With one stupid phone call, Charlie had almost gotten herself killed. What would happen if Salt somehow heard Posey’s story and linked it to Hermes?

“I was careful,” Posey insisted.

“Take it down. Whatever you put out there—take it down.” Charlie looked around for Posey’s laptop as though she could toss it into Nashawannuck Pond and somehow that would remove what she’d posted from the internet.

“It wasn’t online,” Posey insisted. “It was an encrypted chat that deletes everything after it’s read.”

Charlie sat down at the table. Her head was throbbing. The events of the last twenty-four hours were too much. She wanted to curl up in a dark hole and maybe engage in some screaming therapy.

“Forget about all that for a minute,” Posey said. “Because that’s not the part I want to talk to you about.”

“Fuck,” Charlie said, lacking any more coherent response.

“There’s a graduate student over at UMass. Madurai Malhar Iyer. He’s been working on a doctoral dissertation on quickening shadows. The guy who told me about him had been trying to get Malhar to talk to him for ages, but Malhar kept blowing him off.”

Charlie had a feeling she knew what was coming next, and that she was going to hate it.

“I knew you weren’t going to agree to meet him, so I wrote to him and said all that stuff that happened to you happened to me. Only…”

Charlie stared at her unhelpfully.

“Only I can’t go alone,” Posey finished.

“Why not?”

“Because it didn’t happen to me,” Posey said, as though that should be obvious.

Charlie stuck a fork into her sister’s ramen and let the hot chili sear her mouth as she ate it. “That sounds like a big problem for you.”

“I told him we could meet him at the UMass library tonight to talk,” Posey finished, voice lilting up in the manner of someone who wants to ask something without asking it. “Tonight.”

“No—no,” Charlie said, holding up her hands. “No way am I going. That’s not happening.”

Posey narrowed her eyes. “Busy with something? Planning on ransacking the living room?”

Charlie got up. “Last night was real bad and I definitely don’t want to discuss it with a stranger today.”

“You lied about meeting Katelynn. I know you did. You were looking for something and you didn’t want Vince to be here when you did it.” Her threat was implied, but effective nonetheless.

They stood staring at one another. Charlie’s hands had unconsciously curled into fists so tightly that her nails were pressing into her palms. “Don’t do this.”

“I don’t have a car. At least drive me,” Posey said. “Please.”

Charlie groaned and headed for her room.

“Where are you going?” Posey called after her.

“To get my coat.”

She passed Lucipurrr, tail lashing, staring at one of the walls near the bathroom. Sometimes you could hear mice scrabbling in there, and it set the cat on edge. She supposed they were all on edge, these days.

Back in the bedroom, Charlie tried to put it into a semblance of order—making up the mattress with new sheets to give her the alibi of cleaning if anything was out of place.

As they pulled out of the driveway, Charlie’s thoughts were a jumble of memories of Salt’s murder of Rand and the ease with which Vince had covered up a murder the night before. Had he killed for his grandfather? Had he killed that girl they found dead in his car for Salt? Had he killed her for himself?

Vince had been careful, and thorough, and unnervingly competent—but he hadn’t seemed as though he’d liked murder or was eager to do it again. She had a hard time imagining him hurting someone for fun.

Of course, it’s not as though she would have easily imagined him standing in the middle of the sort of gala that she’d only seen on television, wearing an outfit likely to cost more than her car, and guzzling Champagne that was allowed to use the capital C because it came from the right region of France. It was possible that Charlie had a severely stunted imagination.