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“It’s possible, but from the way you described him leaving in such a hurry that last night, I think he stored it somewhere else. A safe, even a hidden one, isn’t that hard to find with the right equipment.” Gunner stood and paced the length of the room, bare feet silent on the soft carpet. “If he was fleeing, and obsessed with returning it to where it came from, why wouldn’t he take it with him? My gut is saying it wasn’t in the house that night, which makes it extremely unlikely it’s there now. The safe was probably where he stored it when he was at home.”
I mulled that information over, rolling it around in my mind. “What I don’t get is why he didn’t just give it back to Dark Hand, or ditch it somewhere and tell them where he left it. Wouldn’t that have gotten him off the hook?”
Gunner grunted. “Maybe, but there’s also the possibility that Shadow would have had him killed anyway for betraying him. Geoff seems to think that Trevor had some kind of mental breakdown, and it stopped being about the money, eventually. All he wanted was to get the thing back to the tomb it came from, or something along those lines.”
“He really was leading an entirely separate life from the one he shared with me. I—” my words faltered briefly. “He really messed up my life, and for what? Money? No, because it’s not like he was getting a pay day for flying that stupid thing across the ocean to take it back to its home.” I closed my eyes, blowing out a slow breath. “He really used me, and in the end, it was still pointless.”
“I don’t know if it makes you feel any better, but from what my brother-in-law said, the idea was always to leave the artifact with you if shit hit the fan. The fact that he didn’t, and that he never told you about his actual job, makes me think he cared about you more than he intended to.”
I could lie back down on the bed and pull a pillow over my face, daydream and reminisce about our first meeting on that unnaturally green lawn, or the quieter nights when he asked about my hopes, dreams, and what I wanted out of life. Even his proposal, and the hundreds upon hundreds of candles. Was it worth it, knowing what I knew now?
It was an impossible question to answer. If I decided that yes, the love I shared with Trevor and the good times were worth my current trouble, then losing him was all the more tragic. But if I painted it in my memory as fake, then it just became comically sad.
I was saved from my melancholy by someone knocking at the door. Gunner and I both tensed until the voice of what sounded like a teenage boy yelled, “Room service!”
“Leave it in the hall and we’ll get it in a second,” Gunner boomed, and the kid chirped back an immediate, “Yes, sir!”
Watching him approach the door with a pistol in one hand made me feel uneasy, but I understood we couldn’t take any chances. He pulled the cart into the room, shutting the door and locking it behind him, and then the slightly fraught moment was over with.
“Come eat,” he told me, motioning me over.
I hopped off the bed and meandered over to the cart of food. As soon as the smell of it all hit my nose, I was ravenous, not having eaten since the day before. I was infinitely glad I got a variety of things.
I took a buttery, oversized croissant, a handful of fruit, and, on a whim, a side plate of macaroni and cheese. I considered going back to my home base on the bed to eat, but not wanting to make a mess of things, I went to the dining table instead.
As I passed Gunner, who was waiting at a distance to give me the first choice of everything, I got a few of those leathery scent notes, and with Maestro’s advice at the forefront of my mind, I brushed his upper arm with the fingers of my closest hand.
“Pardon me,” I told him, and while he started minutely at my touch, he recovered quickly.
When he joined me at the table, I knew we had to talk about the plans for the next day or so, but this dreamy alternate reality where I was in a hotel suite with a man I was almost uncomfortably attracted was so much more enjoyable than the reality that he was, in a weird way, my hired bodyguard and we were being hunted.
“You’re feeling off,” he commented as he sat. “I can see on your face that you’re about to disengage from the present any minute now.”
I scowled, like he’d physically burst my daydream bubble. “How do you know that?”
“It’s normal. Don’t worry about it. Civilians aren’t hard-wired to keep functioning constantly in situations like these. Why don’t we eat, talk a little about what to do next, and then you can take a nap?”
“Hmm. Maybe. I don’t know if I’ll be able to relax, but we’ll see.” I ripped into the pastry, popping a piece into my mouth, where it melted like a golden, buttery piece of heaven.
We decided to hide out in the hotel for the rest of the day. Gunner mentioned having one of his employees swap out with him while he assessed everything as it stood right now, but the wild look on my face at possibly being left with a stranger made him rescind the idea.
Tomorrow, we’d go back to the house, check the safe, and tear the entire place apart if need be. I hated the idea of the beautiful wood floors being pulled up to look for any hidden storage areas, but if that was what had to happen, so be it. If all that failed, there was a university library nearby with a decent amount of hard-to-find Ancient Egyptian literature. Gunner floated the idea that maybe Trevor managed to get the Anubis statue shipped back to Egypt and returned to where it was originally stolen from.
While that would put a wrench in our plans, it was at least information we could give to the Dark Hand to prove that I wasn’t hiding the thing somewhere out of malice or greed. They would undoubtedly be pissed, but it wasn’t like they could demand a model to go and rob an Egyptian tomb. The statue didn’t have any personal significance to them. It was all about it having been stolen from them and, according to Gunner, the Dark Hand Syndicate’s leader, Shadow, had a fondness for occult items. If it was still stateside, he’d more than likely want to keep it for his own personal collection; the supposed curse would just make it more desirable to someone like that.
I brought up something that had been bothering me since I found out the truth of Trevor’s deception: would I be doing the wrong thing handing the Anubis statue over to the Dark Hand Syndicate? It was such a precious and historically significant item. Gunner cut off any of my concerns right there, telling me that so much of the world’s most precious art pieces move throughout the globe in the hands of smugglers and thieves.
Art-related crime was some of the most profitable, because the wealthy would never tire of displaying things that were rare, ancient, and desirable, because it made them stand out from the crowd. Everyone wanted a Van Gogh or something of the sort, so even if I handed the statue to a museum, there was a good chance in the next decade it would tumble right back into the black market, and I would have put myself in more danger for nothing.
With our plates empty, Gunner grabbed us two cups of coffee, laughing at the amount of sugar I poured into mine, and the conversation changed gear into more personal things.
“What do you plan to do when this is all done with?” he asked. “Let me preface by saying that I only looked you up for research purposes–” I snorted, but he continued undeterred, “Most of your work seems to be centered in Los Angeles. Do you plan on staying in Lace Elm, or even Texas, for long?”
“Lace Elm, I don’t know. It’s a cute little town, but I feel like my heart is in the city. If, and this is a big if, all of Trevor’s accounts that he left me eventually clear and the money can be moved into my own bank account, I’ll probably keep the Lace Elm house as a getaway spot, or for nostalgia. Something like that. I don’t mind traveling for work, but living in solitude isn’t for me, I don’t think.” I sipped my coffee, thinking. “I’ve considered trying to make the house work for me, filling it with friends and family all the time, but it’s pretty tainted with memories. Uncomfortable ones, now.”
“Why not just rent an apartment in Dallas and give yourself some time to think?”
“I don’t know. I had this weird compulsion to stay in the house, like something was holding me there, but now I think it’s pretty clear it wasn’t missing Trevor that made me want to stay.” I shook my head, hair brushing my cheeks. “I was trying to salvage the choice that I made to move to that place with Trevor. Force my hopes and dreams to adapt to living within those four walls, because I didn’t want to admit that I’d have to basically call the last two years of my life a wash, you know?”
