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“Drywall dust,” he corrected.
I checked the floor in other areas, but the dust was only located in the one spot. When I looked up from my crouched position, I could see the faintest bubbling in the carpet where the graffiti was painted.
“How the hell did you see that?” I stood and aimed the phone at the gap.
“Isn’t that why you called me? Because I can see things like that?”
He was absolutely right. “Thank you. Do you want to see what it is?”
Yawning again, he smiled faintly at the screen, possibly unaware I could still see his face. It wasn’t like him to show any kind of emotion. Unless annoyance counted.
“No. You do your thing. ” The screen went black before I had a chance to thank him a second time.
Chapter Twenty-One
I peeled back the carpet, exposing a panel of plain white drywall behind it. The drywall flaked more as I picked at it with my fingernail, sending a new rain of dust to the floor.
“He hid something here,” I told Maxime and Holden, as if they hadn’t been listening to my entire discussion with Keaty.
Finding a notch in the drywall, I dug my finger in and tugged. The panel groaned forward an inch but was held in place by the carpeting. Remembering the spider, the last thing I wanted to do was stick my hand into a dark hole in the wall, but if I was going to find what Sutherland had hidden, I didn’t have much of a choice.
The hole felt endless. I got my arm in all the way up to my shoulder, and my fingers were groping at nothingness. There had to be something in there.
“For fuck’s sake,” I grumbled, trying to get a new angle. I pressed my palm against the inside of the panel for support, and my fingers grazed something metallic.
The vampires must have seen my eyes widen because Maxime asked, “Did you find something?”
“I-I don’t know. I think so?” I grasped at the object and tugged hard. It came free easily, causing me to almost drop it in my overeager attempt to wrench it loose.
Retrieving my arm from the wall, I dusted myself off and opened my hand up to see what I’d found.
“It’s a key,” Holden said, like we hadn’t been able to suss that out on our own.
The key wasn’t fancy by any means, a simple Victorian-style design which might have once been silver—not real silver though, or it would have burned me—but was now a tarnished brass color. I turned it over in my palm, trying to spot any engravings or mysterious signs that might indicate what it was for.
“Any ideas?” I held it level so they could get a better look.
“It’s old,” Maxime observed, since we were all in the habit of stating the obvious tonight. “If he was looking for something at the Winchester Mansion, perhaps the key belongs there. ”
I thought of the pictures Maxime had shown us of the mansion, and all the doors and secret passages, all the hundreds and hundreds of locks this key might belong to, and I sighed. The problem was, he was likely spot-on. The key didn’t belong here, and the most probable place to find the lock it fit to was to take it to the Win
chester Mansion.
All roads led to a big haunted house in San Jose.
I’d been hoping to find answers here, but all I’d gotten was another mystery.
When we left the building, a pair of men hung back in the shadows, whispering to one another while exchanging a series of small packages for a large wad of bills. They kept an eye on us but did nothing to mask their transaction.
A shopping cart full of cans and bottles sat in the middle of the alley, no sign of the homeless man who’d formerly attended it. Something about his absence rankled me, giving me the same uneasy feeling in my gut as I’d had before we went in.
I was starting to get paranoid, imagining everyone was a potential threat. These men, the dark-alley dwellers, they weren’t dangerous to me. They might pose problems for others, but I had no reason to fear them. I reminded myself of that over and over while staring at the abandoned cart.
Blueprints confused the hell out of me.
I couldn’t tell the difference between a wall and a window, and looking at the layout of Winchester Mansion didn’t make things any easier for me. As far as I could tell the whole thing was written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Clutching a wineglass full of warm blood, I sat cross-legged on a huge wood table in the council warehouse. Galen had found someone who’d meticulously mapped out the interior of the mansion, and the blueprints had been couriered to us. Holden was perched on a stool, his chin resting on one fisted hand, while he took in the layout with a serious expression.
