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She shook her head. “No, but I’ve got a pretty good memory. I know what to ask.”
The path leading to the house was cobblestone. The yard was neatly tended, almost to the point of where it felt too tidy. I glanced around, looking for any sign of disorder, any sign of the wildness that a lot of Fae households possessed. Our own yard was a profusion of plants and grasses and mossy patches, but Harish apparently either hired a gardener or he was obsessive about keeping things neat.
The house was the same way. The siding sparkled with a suspicious lack of dirt for being in an area that only had sixty-some clear days a year, with the rest overcast and—often—drizzly or pouring. Everything looked perfect. I knocked on the door as Camille and Delilah flanked my sides.
After a moment, the door opened a crack, and a lithe young man peered out. He was an elf, all right, but he was an elf who wore glasses and who had apparently decided that the Miami Vice costumers had it right. He looked like a pretty boy, a platinum blond version of Don Johnson. He gave us the once-over and opened the door a bit wider.
“Yes, may I help you?” Neutral tone. Not friendly, not unfriendly.
“Are you Harish?”
“Yes,” he said, the door edging open a few more inches. “What do you want?”
“We’re looking for Sabele Olahava,” I said slowly. “We thought you might know where she is.”
That stopped him cold. The bored affectation washed off his face; the expression behind it was stark and bleak.
“She’s not here,” he said, starting to close the door.
“Wait—please. We need to know where she is. Can you just give us ten minutes?” Delilah stepped up, at her most winsome.
Harish looked at her for a moment, then let out a long sigh. “Very well. But I’m not inviting you in—not with her along,” he said, pointing to me. “I’ll come out on the porch and sit with you.”
“How rude—” Delilah started to say, but I touched her arm and shook my head. He was just protecting his home, and he had every right to be concerned.
“He’s right,” I said. “It’s so not a good idea to invite strange vampires into your house—not at all.” I turned back to him. “Fair enough. Shall we sit on the porch?”
We settled on the covered porch, with Delilah still glaring at him, but I wasn’t offended. Harish would take a great chance by inviting me into his house, and he knew it. I knew it. If it made him uncomfortable, then he had every right to keep me outside. It would have been the same if I’d opened the door to some big bruiser I didn’t know.
“I’m Menolly D’Artigo, and these are my sisters, Camille and Delilah.”
After we sat down, he let out another sigh and leaned back against the railing, pushing the cuffed sleeves of his summer blazer up his arms. “Why are you asking about Sabele?”
“She used to tend bar at the Wayfarer. I’m the new owner. I took over when Jocko was murdered.” I kept my gaze fixed on him.
His eyebrow jumped a little. “I haven’t thought of that bar in a while. Since Sabele disappeared, I can’t bring myself to go past it.”
“Disappeared?” Camille leaned in. “When? We thought she might be here, married to you.”
His expression did jump then. “Married? Why the hell would you think that? We were engaged, but apparently she couldn’t stomach the thought of marrying me. She left in the night without saying good-bye. I spent a year mourning, then a year wondering what I did wrong. This past year I’ve finally managed to shove her rejection out of my mind, and now here you are, dredging it up again.”
I glanced at Camille, who was watching him closely. Our glamour didn’t work on elves the same way it worked on FBHs, so we couldn’t compel him to tell the truth, but elves weren’t all that good at lying, either. They fudged the truth just fine, and obfuscated facts they didn’t want you to know. But lying—it wasn’t really inherent within their nature.
“Her diary said you were engaged,” Camille said. “She was very much in love with you, according to what she wrote.”
Harish paled, and for the first time, emotion broke through the composed facade he’d erected. “Diary?” His voice fell to a whisper. “You found her diary? Sabele never let anyone touch that journal. She’d never leave it behind.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” I said, slowly withdrawing the box with the locket and curl of hair from my pocket. I opened it and handed it to him. “Do you recognize this?”
As the elf slowly lifted the locket by its chain, his expression went from worried to broken. “I gave her this the week before she vanished. It was an engagement gift. And the hair—it’s her mother’s. She’d never, ever let this out of her possession. Her mother died shortly after she first came over Earthside. Her father sent her a lock of her mother’s hair, since she couldn’t go home for the funeral rites.”
“You really thought she would leave without telling you?” I asked, hating to pry. But something had happened, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. “Why would she do that? You were engaged.”
“Yes,” he said quietly, fingering the locket. “We were planning a big wedding back in Elqaneve. When I gave her the locket, she put my picture in it and said she’d treasure it always,” he said, his voice catching. In the light shimmering down from the sconce by the door, I could see that his eyes were a pale blue, and they shone with tears. “Then, not long after that, she disappeared.”
“But you tried to find her?” Delilah leaned forward, her voice breathless. She had recently discovered the Brontë sisters, when Camille had cajoled her into reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and that sparked off a flurry of old tragic love stories. Lately, romance movies had replaced Jerry Springer every Friday night.
“Of course I tried,” he said. “What did you think? That I just chalked it up to Oops, lost my fiancée and moved on without scouring the city for her? Don’t add insult to my pain, please.”
