He hopped up onto the hearth and duckedintothe fireplace. “Two years ago,” he told Xander, “I found something in here.”
Somewhere in Jameson’s memory, Avery responded to him telling her that.A clue?she’d said.
Probably, Jameson had told her.But to what puzzle?
At the time, Jameson had been focused on a different mystery. But now, he knew. The old man had left that mirror for Alice. A love letter. A game, telling her what he knew.
What he’d been able—somehow—to uncover about secrets he definitely was not supposed to know.
Inside the fireplace, it was pitch black. Jameson turned three hundredsixty degrees and ran his hands over the stone. His fingers found the remnants of the glue that had once held a small object in place, hidden.
“A triangular mirror,” Jameson said out loud.
“That’s what you asked Alisa to fetch from the House and send you.” The closeness of Xander’s voice was the only warning Jameson got before his brother popped up inside the fireplace next to him.
Even a massive fireplace was a tight fit for two Hawthornes.
“Our favorite lawyer will have it here as soon as she can,” Jameson told Xander. “And asdiscreetlyas she can. In the meantime, you and I are going to search this house from top to bottom to see if we can turn up anything else.”
Where there was one object in a Hawthorne game, there could be others.
“Roger that,” Xander replied.
Finding nothing else inside the fireplace, Jameson ducked out of it, stepping onto the hearth and jumping to the floor.
“How big was the mirror you found before?” Xander asked, landing beside him.
“About like this.” Jameson made a triangle with his forefingers and thumbs. “Equilateral, and I could hold it in one hand.”
“Mirrored on both sides or just one?”
“Both.”
“Aluminum coating or silver?” Xander was clearly just winding up. “And did you try to scratch the coating off?”
“Silver. And no, I didn’t.” In the two years since he’d found the mirror, Jameson had barely paid it any attention at all. “At the time, I got distracted.”
By Eve.Jameson didn’t say that out loud. Unlike Grayson, he’d never trusted Eve. She’d reminded him too much of Emily, right from the start.
“How thoroughly did you search the rest of the house two years ago?” Xander asked.
Jameson walked over to inspect a Renaissance painting on the wall.“I’d give it a nine out of ten.” He removed the painting from the wall and popped off its frame.
“Full throttle this time?” Xander looked up at the soaring ceiling.
Jameson crouched and executed a series of probes of the seam where wall met floor. “We hold nothing back,” he confirmed. “For Avery.”
“For Avery,” Xander echoed. “Race you to the rafters.”
There was more than one room in the villa with rafters. Jameson dropped down from searching the ones in an east-facing bedroom and landed in a crouch. The room was sparsely and simply furnished, an iron bed the only item in it aside from an old-fashioned light fixture that hung from the ceiling and cast minimal light on a herringbone brick floor.
Jameson thoroughly examined the bed, the light fixture, and each and every brick.Nothing.He walked to the window, examined its thick wooden framing, and then threw it open. “Let there be light.”
Said light fell on the floor just so, and Jameson examined the pattern.Nothing. Again.
And so it went: room after room, rafters after rafters, window after window, until Jameson and Xander were done—with the inside of the villa at least.
They turned their attention to the terrace next. Located on the side of the house, it offered an unvarnished view of miles and miles of countryside, but Jameson directed his gaze upward instead of outward. Greenage covered the terrace rafters, reminding him that the hedges still needed searching as well.
