Chapter 17

Tamarind steered me to the secret courtyard. “I don’t want to frighten the students with talk about dead authors. They’re stressed out enough with only a few days left in the semester.”

Rain was no longer falling, but the stones and benches were slick with rainwater.

“To find out what happened to Rick,” I said, “we have to follow the clues he laid out for me. I think we know more than we think we do. If we start with the Serpent King—”

“Um, Jaya. It’s time for me to stage an intervention.”

“You have somewhere else you need to go?”

Her nostrils flared. “Rick Coronado is dead, Jaya. Someone killed him and tried to scare you off. The police are looking into Rick’s murder. The intervention is for you.”

“He’s dead because of me.” I looked away. I couldn’t face her. “He was coming to see me. I hadn’t figured out enough—”

“He was manipulating you.” She grabbed my shoulders and spun me around. “Go home. Get some rest before I make a big plate of enchiladas for dinner. Everything will seem better with good food and great friends. Do you want to invite Lane too?”

“Definitely not. I’m too emotional. That’s been the problem with our relationship from the start. I’ve been making decisions when there’s some crisis throwing us together.”

“Which doesn’t make for the best decisions. I get it. But there are only two days left in the semester. You told me you’re totally behind. Rick isn’t your concern. Not anymore. You need to be more concerned about Naveen Veeran. You know he wants to steal tenure out from under you.”

“I can handle Naveen.”

“Maybe. But just because a handsome celebrity had a wild theory he convinced someone was worth killing over—”

“It’s not just a theory.”

“Seriously, Jaya. Go home and get some rest. You’re totally messing with my image of myself if I need to be the responsible one in our friendship.”

“I can’t go home.”

Tamarind gasped. “You think they’ve gotten to your house?”

“What? No. It’s freezing at my place—” I broke off and we both started laughing hysterically.

“I’m glad you didn’t start bawling,” Tamarind said in between hiccups of laughter. “I was primed for any emotional outburst.”

“You’re right. I’ll go home. I didn’t find anything in the archives before anyway.”

“You got through the newspaper archives already? You weren’t here for that long before.”

“The digitized archives make it fast to look things up.”

Tamarind frowned. “Our digital archives are behind the times and don’t have images linked yet. But you miss the photos if you don’t look at the microfiche scans. Dammit. Your eyes just lit up. Why did I say that?”

“Because your librarian genes make it impossible for you not to.”

“Stay where I can see you,” she called after me as I ran back inside the library.

  

Two hours later I was still looking through images of old newspapers. Text searches of old materials that had been digitized made a lot of research easier, but it couldn’t tell you everything. When Tamarind came to remind me the library was closing soon, I was staring at the photograph. I couldn’t quite believe what I’d found.

I’d already searched for snakes, naga, cobra, and the Serpent King. Those key words weren’t in the text of any of the articles, but something was in the photos from the time when Beauregard Delacroix was pushed down the stairs. The mansion. The one with the serpentine art nouveau designs on the facade.

“The mansion,” I whispered. “The mansion is real.”

Rick had altered the names and the story to hide the real history, but he’d described the house exactly as he’d seen it.

“Shut. Up.” She looked over my shoulder. “That’s the house Gabriela Glass described. The Durants. He didn’t change the name that much. The Durant family, who suffered tragedies across generations.”

“Beaumont Durant, who broke his neck when he fell down the stairs in the mansion his grandfather Aristide built, shortly before Christmas in 1950. His wife Daphne, a celebrated artist who slipped in the same spot a year later. Their grandson Marc, traumatized by the family curse so he got drunk on the fateful anniversary and fell down the same stairs.”

“Huh,” Tamarind said. “No mention of the woo-woo ghost story or of Marc being raised from the dead after being strangled. He was just a lush who slipped on the stairs. Closest we get to the ghost is this quote from a cop who showed up and was scared of being at a haunted house.”

“Look at the timing of the most recent death,” I said. “It’s not a new crime like in a Gabriela Glass story. It was seven years ago. Seven years ago, Tamarind.”

“You don’t think—”

“I do. Marc Durant was killed shortly before Rick Coronado disappeared for six weeks. Marc died in a supposed accident at his ancestral home in Paris. Rick Coronado thought it was murder.”

Tamarind swore. “This is big.”

I scanned the rest of the article and searched for others now that I had a name. There was speculation that depression ran in the family and that these were all suicides, because no evidence of murder came up in any of the cases. No reputable news sources mentioned a ghost.

“Don’t you think they would have realized those were some dangerous stairs and built new ones?” Tamarind mused. “Though I suppose if we believe Rick Coronado’s manuscript, they did take precautions.”

“By leaving the house on the fateful anniversary when they expected the ghost to strike, you mean?”

“Yeah, since they believed that was the only day of the year the ghost was a danger to them.” Tamarind frowned. “It’s so sad. All of this took place right before Christmas.”

“There’s nothing mentioned about them leaving the house two nights before Christmas each year, but they wouldn’t have broadcast to the press, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re freaked out by our family ghost so we’re leaving our home full of riches on the same night each year.’ So we don’t know if the real life Delacroix’s—the Durants—weren’t as superstitious as their fictional counterparts.”

The lights overhead flickered. I stared at Tamarind.

“The alert that the library is closing in ten minutes,” she said. “Though pretty good timing, right?”

“We need to hurry.”

“As in hurry our little butts to the police station, right? Okay, fine. You’re right. I know you’re the only one with a little butt.” She rested her hands on her ample hips.

“We can’t tell anyone what we’ve discovered.”

“Why not?”

“Rick wasn’t just killed because he was going after a real-life treasure,” I said, feeling a tremor emerge from my voice as I spoke. “He knew that someone had murdered Marc Durant in Paris. Someone smart enough to have covered their tracks got away with a murder seven years ago. If that person finds out we know what Rick’s been trying to tell us—”

“I don’t want to go into Witness Protection. Does that even work anymore with facial recognition technology?” Tamarind’s chest heaved with distressed breaths. “OMG will I have to disguise myself with boring hair and no piercings? I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I can handle that.”

“Nobody is going into Witness Protection.”

“Really?” Tamarind’s breathing calmed slightly. “Why not?”

“Because we’re not going to wait for multi-jurisdictional police forces to be convinced our story is true and catch whoever killed Marc and Rick. Rick said the Serpent King statue was the key to solving Marc’s murder. It’s the key to solving Rick’s murder too. That’s one thing Gabriela Glass and I have in common that we do better than the police—we can find missing pieces of history.”

The library plunged into darkness.