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Someone in bed next to me stirred, and I pushed the last of the sleep out of my head. I was in Calvin’s bedroom, in Calvin’s bed. And that was him lying there just a few inches away from me, all that glorious long black hair of his spread across the white pillowcase.
Holy moly.
I wanted to drink him in — and let myself lie there and recall all the spectacular details of last night’s lovemaking — but my phone wouldn’t let me do that. It briefly went silent, as if it had rolled into voicemail, and then began to ring again.
“Better answer that,” Calvin said, his voice husky with sleep and somehow sexier than ever.
Right. I pushed myself up to a sitting position, one hand holding the sheets and blanket and quilt against my chest so I wasn’t utterly exposed. Alarm flared through me when I lifted the phone and saw that it was my mother calling.
She would never call me at seven-something in the morning unless it was an emergency.
Had there been another attack?
But they had Brant there to help them out. He was an expert in these sorts of matters…supposedly.
I touched the green button to accept the call. “Mom? What is it?”
“Selena, we need you.”
Her voice sounded tight, worried, but still in control. “Um, I’m still in bed….”
Still in Calvin’s bed, I thought, with a change of clothes fifteen minutes away.
“I know it’s early,” she said. “But we need you to come over. There’s been an accident.”
“‘An accident’?” I echoed. Everything in my body seemed to clench, as if it knew in advance what she was about to say.
“Tom found Brant Thoreau’s body this morning. It looks like he fell down the stairs.”
6
Suspicious Minds
Chief Lewis’s police cruiser was parked in the driveway as I pulled up to the Bigelow mansion. Brant’s Subaru sat off to one side, looking forlorn, as if it somehow knew its owner wouldn’t be driving it anywhere ever again.
I parked close enough to the police car that I wasn’t blocking the garage, but not so close that Chief Lewis wouldn’t be able to get around my VW when the time came to leave. Had my mother called the police before she called me, or was it just that I’d taken way too long to get here? There was no way I could have come over still wearing my outfit from the night before, so I’d briefly told Calvin what was going on, kissed him goodbye, and then drove way too fast back to my apartment. Naturally, Archie had been waiting at the door, ready to read me the riot act for pulling a disappearing act like that, but I brushed off his complaints as I hurried into my room so I could take off my skirt and top and jam myself into a pair of jeans and a fresh T-shirt before I hurried out the door again.
As I all but ran up the front steps of the mansion, I told myself I needed to keep calm and do my best not to let Henry Lewis rile me. The two of us got along like oil and water, and the last thing I needed to do was alienate him even further.
Too bad the house was located squarely inside Globe’s town limits; it would have been a lot easier — if awkward — to have Calvin handling the case, rather than Chief Lewis.
I rang the doorbell and waited. A moment later, Tom opened the door. He looked tired, but he was freshly shaven and wore a crisp pair of khakis and one of his numerous polo shirts, this one dark blue. Most likely, he and my mother had gotten up and gotten dressed before even coming down to breakfast, figuring it probably wasn’t a great idea to be wandering around the place in their bathrobes when they had a house guest.
“Hi, Selena,” he said, his tone subdued. “We’re talking with Chief Lewis in the living room.”
I followed him to the room in question, where my mother was sitting on the couch and Chief Lewis was perched uncomfortably on the edge of the armchair that faced her. Like Tom, she was dressed and looked relatively put together, although her face was pale.
As soon as I entered the room, Chief Lewis’s jaw tightened, and I saw how his aura spiked with irritated bile green before it faded out again.
Well, the feeling was mutual.
Ignoring him, I said, “Are you okay, Mom?”
“I’m fine,” she replied. “I’ve just had a shock.”
That was for sure. Between the murders of Lucien Dumond and Lilith Black, the erstwhile Instagram witch who’d descended on Globe back in June, only to be dispatched by her own assistant, I’d had enough disturbing experiences to last me a lifetime. I could only imagine what my mother must be going through right now.
She reached for the cup of coffee that sat on the table in front of her with a hand that shook slightly. Sounding just as annoyed as his aura had looked, Chief Lewis said, “Can we get on with this?”
