“And she can’t live somewhere else for the time being?”
“No.”
Oren didn’t like that, but he didn’t waste time on unnecessary commentary. “You’ll go nowhere without me,” Oren told me, steel in his voice. “Not on the estate, not in the House. Nowhere, you understand? I was always close by. Now I get to play visible deterrent.”
Beside me, Alisa narrowed her eyes at Oren. “What do you know that I don’t?”
There was a single moment’s pause, then my bodyguard answered the question. “I had my people check the armory. Nothing is missing. In all likelihood, the weapon fired at Avery wasn’t a Hawthorne gun, but I had my men pull the security footage from the past few days anyway.”
I was too busy trying to wrap my mind around the fact that Hawthorne House had anarmoryto process the rest.
“The armory had a visitor?” Alisa asked, her voice almost too calm.
“Two of them.” Oren seemed like he might stop there, for my benefit, but he pressed on. “Jameson and Grayson. Both have alibis—but both were looking at rifles.”
“Hawthorne House has anarmory?” That was all I could manage to say.
“This is Texas,” Oren replied. “The whole family grew up shooting, and Mr. Hawthorne was a collector.”
“Aguncollector,” I clarified. I hadn’t been a fan of firearmsbeforeI’d almost been shot.
“If you’d read the binder I left you detailing your assets,” Alisa interjected, “you’d know that Mr. Hawthorne had the world’s largest collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Winchester rifles, several of which are valued at upward of four hundred thousand dollars.”
The idea that anyone would pay that much for a rifle was mind-boggling, but I barely batted an eye at the price tag, because I was too busy thinking that there was a reason Jameson and Grayson had both made visits to the armory to look at rifles—one that had nothing to do with shooting me.
Jameson’s middle name wasWinchester.
CHAPTER 57
Even though it was the dead of night, I made Oren take me to the armory. Following him through twisting hallway after hallway, all I could think was that someone could hide forever in this house.
And that wasn’t counting the secret passages.
Eventually, Oren came to a stop in a long corridor. “This is it.” He stood in front of an ornate gold mirror. As I watched, he ran his hand along the side of the frame. I heard aclick, and then the mirror swung out into the hallway, like a door. Behind it, there was steel.
Oren stepped up, and I saw a line of red go down over his face. “Facial recognition,” he informed me. “It’s really only meant as a backup security measure. The best way to keep intruders from breaking into a safe is to make sure they don’t even know it’s there.”
Hence, the mirror. He pushed the door inward. “The entire armory is lined with reinforced steel.” He stepped through, and I followed.
When I’d heard the wordarmory, I’d pictured something out of a movie: copious amounts of black and Rambo-style cartridges on the walls. What I got looked more like a country club. The walls were lined with cabinets of a deep cherry–colored wood. There was an intricately carved table in the center of the room, complete with a marble top.
“Thisis the armory?” I said. There was a rug on the floor. A plush, expensive rug that looked like it belonged in a dining room.
“Not what you were expecting?” Oren closed the door behind us. It clicked into place, and then he flipped three additional dead bolts in quick succession. “There are safe rooms scattered throughout the house. This doubles as one—a tornado shelter, too. I’ll show you the locations of the others later, just in case.”
In case someone tries to kill me.Rather than dwelling on that, I focused on the reason I’d come here. “Where are the Winchesters?” I asked.
“There are at least thirty Winchester rifles in the collection.” Oren nodded toward a wall of display cases. “Any particular reason you wanted to see them?”
A day earlier, I might have kept this secret, but Jameson hadn’t told me that he’d looked for—possibly found—the clue corresponding to his own middle name. I didn’t owe him any secrecy now.
“I’m looking for something,” I told Oren. “A message from Tobias Hawthorne—a clue. A carving, most likely of a number or symbol.”
The etching on the tree in the Black Wood had been neither. Mid-kiss, Jameson had seemed convinced that Toby’s name was the next clue—but I wasn’t so sure. The writing hadn’t been a match for the carving at the bridge. It had been uneven, childlike. What if Toby had carved it himself, as a kid? What if the real clue was still out there in the woods?
I can’t go back. Not until we know who the shooter is.Oren could clear a room and tell me it was safe. He couldn’t clear a whole forest.
Pushing back against the echo of gunshots—and everything that had come after—I opened one of the cabinets. “Any thoughts on where your former employer might have hidden a message?” I asked Oren, my focus intense. “Which gun? Which part of the gun?”
