Down the Rabbit Hole

“Don’t go all Irish on me.”


“In the blood and bone. Still.” He laid his hands on her shoulders, sensing her frustration. “I see where you’re going, and it makes perfect sense. She got herself overly involved here, and it maybe fell under the influence of someone not just illegitimate but dangerous. But how could that influence be so strong, Eve, to have her kill the brother she loved, and herself?”

“I don’t know yet. But it’s an angle. She had a good life here. You can feel it.” She poked at him when he lifted his eyebrows. “That’s not psychic mumbo. You just have to look around, and you get it. She had a good life here, a man she loved, work she loved, family, a place. She took a kick to the gut, I get that, too. Either grief twisted her up to the point she had a psychotic break, or someone twisted her up in it.”

“You’ll find out which.”

“Yeah. Either way, she won’t be crossing the bridge and coming through the portal to tell me. We work it.”

She rebagged her evidence.

“Got another hour in you?” she asked with a glance up.

“What did you have in mind?”

“I want to go through the rest of it before Henry comes back. Plus, I didn’t find any snazzy jewelry, and she’s bound to have it, which means a safe. You find the safe, and I’ll go through the rest of the place.”

“And finding it, do I open it?”

“Yeah, you open it.”

He flashed a grin. “This is much more fun than sleeping alone.”





CHAPTER FIVE




She dropped into bed at two a.m., with the muttered request that Roarke wake her at six if she slept through. He was better than any alarm.

With a low fire simmering, the cat curled into the small of her back, and Roarke’s arm wrapped around her, she tumbled straight into sleep.

The dead had a lot to say. In dreams, she thought, dreaming. And that was different from believing you could walk over some magic golden bridge into the afterlife and have conversations with vics.

No golden bridge for her. She sat in Interview A, with Marcus and Darlene Fitzwilliams seated on the other side of the scarred table.

“What gives?” she asked.

“I love my brother. I’d never hurt him.”

“It’s pretty clear you did.”

“I’ve never hurt anyone in my life, not on purpose. You were in my house. What did you see?”

“It’s all right, Darli.” Marcus draped an arm around her shoulders, pressed his lips to her temple.

She’d seen that, Eve remembered. A photograph of just that, in a frame. Another when they’d been teenagers—Darlene riding on Marcus’s shoulders as he hammed it up. Her in a bikini, Eve remembered, him in swim trunks, up to his waist in a blue sea.

Other photos, many photos. The siblings, the parents, Darlene and Henry, Marcus and Henry. Holiday photos, casual photos, formal photos.

A life in frames.

“You had secrets,” Eve said.

“Everyone has secrets.”

“And some people kill to protect them.”

“Do I look like a killer?”

“Mostly killers look like everybody else. You jammed scissors in your brother’s heart.”

“I couldn’t.” Darlene gripped the handle of the shears now buried deep in her brother’s chest. Yanked them free. “I’d kill myself first.”

“You killed yourself second,” Eve pointed out. “Grief can mess you up.”

“How do you know? You’ve never lost anyone. You don’t know my grief, you don’t know my sorrow. My parents were angels. Yours were monsters.”

Darlene drove the bloody points into the table. “You’re surrounded by evil. How can you see through it to what’s good?”

“You just have to look hard enough.”

“Then look! I was going to have what you have. I just wanted answers. That’s no different than you. I wanted what you want.”

Eve opened her eyes and looked into Roarke’s. “This. She wanted this.”

“You’ve a few minutes left to sleep, but you dream so hard.”