Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(30)
We’d swallowed the story at the time, like a bitter tincture of truth, but now it seemed glaringly false. Gory as a Grimm fairy tale. A story meant to scare a child, to urge us never to dig deeper.
“But this doesn’t make any sense,” Malina murmured, echoing my thoughts. “I thought Mama had to leave everything behind.”
“Exactly. And it’s not just that. I saw someone today, and remembered something that happened to us once. Do you remember two women coming to see us, about four years ago? A brunette and a blonde, Sorai and Naisha?”
She shook her head and frowned as I described the memory to her, chewing on her index finger. “I don’t know, Riss . . . I want to say I almost remember, but I think it’s just because you’re telling it so well. Animal prints on a naked chick’s skin, in the middle of Arms Square? I think I’d remember that. But I don’t, I’m sorry.”
Huffing with frustration, I set the chessboard aside. “Why don’t you see if you can find anything else? Weird things like this, or something missing, like my sculpture from the café? I’ll finish up in here.”
Once I was done rummaging through Mama’s closet, I riffled through her drawers too, and dipped my fingers beneath her mattress and under her pillows. But there was nothing.
It seemed wrong, somehow, to leave the room in such chaos, so I rehung the clothes and made her bed, then stacked up the velveteen pillows lining her window nook. Beside it lay the stained and crumpled dove-gray sheath she’d worn, and I picked that up too. A corner of it sagged in my grip. Frowning, I worked my hand into the hidden pockets. The left was empty, but the right held something cold and long, its end ridged beneath my fingertips.
A key, attached to a little magnetic fob.
I carefully worked it free as it snagged on the pocket’s silken inner lining. It was heavy and ornate, the bow molded into the lion’s head and fleur-de-lis I’d seen many times—the sigil of the Hotel Cattaro in the Arms Square of Old Town.
“Lina,” I called out, twirling the blade of the key between my fingers, “I think I found something.”
“Me too,” she called back. “My violin, Riss. It’s gone.”
ELEVEN
“BUT WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN WANT IT?” MALINA ASKED as she trotted next to me across the ?kurda bridge. There’d been nothing else out of place at home, no new things or ones missing that should have been there. We’d called the detective to let him know about the stolen violin, but everything had careened so far from the mundane that I couldn’t imagine what the police could possibly do for us now. What else would I have told him, anyway? Look out for tiger-striped witches, Detective? Beware of perfumes that smell like commands?
Any answers we wanted to find, we’d have to hunt down ourselves.
“It was just a Stagg, nothing special,” she continued. “Not like anyone was going to mistake it for a vintage Stainer or Guarnerius or anything.”
“Why would anyone want to take my glasswork from the café, either? Or, more to the point, karate-chop Mama to the heart?” Malina sucked in a breath, and I cursed myself silently. Just because being a callous shithead made it somehow less horrible to me, something I could begin to handle, didn’t mean this was true for her. “I’m sorry, bunny. I didn’t mean that. Let’s just see what we find at the hotel.”
The Hotel Cattaro had once been the Rector’s Palace, built in the seventeenth century to shore up the western side of the Arms Square, back when the square had actually been used to make and store munitions for the city’s defense. A gleaming suit of armor glowered in one corner of the reception area, plush wingback chairs were scattered around the lobby, and the polished wood of the reception desk stood wide and round like a ship’s hull. Wearing gladiator sandals twined up to my knees and missing half of their studded spikes, and the black tunic with cutout shoulders I’d changed into back at home, I felt painfully out of place in this baroque haven of cream and gold.
The clerk behind the reception greeted us with an achingly sympathetic expression on his ruddy face, nodding to us each in turn as he smoothed back his sparse, combed-over dark hair. “Please accept my condolences. I was desperately sorry to hear about your mother. Wonderful woman, and that wonderful café—it’s a terrible loss to us all. And most of all to you, of course.”
So that was what the police were telling everyone else. That she was already dead.
If that was the tale they were spreading, of course everyone had already heard by now. The clerk’s earnestness and his conviction that Mama was dead—that she was gone forever—made the truth all that much more terrible to bear. I bit the inside of my cheek hard, trying to gather myself. “Thank you. That’s good of you. But there’s something—we’re hoping you could help us.”
He spread his sunspotted hands over the reception desk’s smooth surface. “Of course. Anything. What can I do for you?”
I steeled myself. “Do you know how our mother died?”
That took him aback. “I’d heard it was an accident, a terrible . . .” He trailed off, brow furrowed.
So the police were keeping the details contained. That was good; I needed the weight of shock on my side. “She was murdered. Someone killed her, sir. And the day before it happened, she had this in her pocket.”