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We got back to town around tea time, Officer Thorn with her gruesome discovery in her arms. It wasn’t perhaps the most official way a victim has been transported to a police station, but it was practical. Officer Thorn was very strong, and more than that, she knew her limits—under her uniform she wore a back brace which helped support her on the trip down the trail.
I, too, knew my limits. I declined to help with any more investigations that night. Thorn would need to identify the body before Guild procedure allowed her to do much more, in any case, and I didn’t feel like tagging along to check on Olivia, Trent, and Jack. Instead, I stopped by my shop to check on William, and then I just kept walking.
Luca’s bookstore was a block south of Market Square. It was a straight shot; I knew the path by heart at this point. It was raining again, and I hid under my umbrella rather than greet the other folks on the street walking home or out to dinner. I wasn’t in the most friendly of moods.
The chime on the bookshop door put me more at ease. Aside from Luca’s festive seasonal displays, the bookstore had remained much the same since the first moment I arrived in Belville. The rows of shelves were stacked high and chaotically, and the lighting was shadowy at best. To one side of the door a large desk served as a sales counter. Usually the place smelled like old parchment and dust, but today I detected an undertone of chocolate.
Frank, a wizened old mink, was curled atop the desk. His plush white fur and beady black eyes gleamed in the glow of a nearby lamp. Though he looked exactly the same as any other mink—aside from the fact that he was missing one back leg—Frank had lived for thousands of years, and sometime during that lifespan, had acquired the ability to talk. It was uncommon but not unheard of in Beyond for animals to acquire magic, and it went a long way to explaining why most people ate largely vegetarian diets.
Frank’s general reluctance to deal with strangers didn’t feel uncommon these days, though. I’d always wondered why he decided to take up residence in a shop if he didn’t like people.
“Oh, it’s you,” he told me, with a yawn.
“Yep,” I agreed. I hung up my cloak and set my umbrella in a stand by the door. When Frank offered no further insight, I added, “Do you know where I can find Luca?”
There was a pause, and in that pause, my heart skipped a beat. But then he said, “He’s in the back room researching cold cases.”
“Oh.” Of course. “I’ll just head back there, then.”
“Go on. Tell him I’m locking up in a minute,” Frank said, calling over his shoulder as I moved past him. His croaky voice sounded a little warmer then. I smiled faintly. Talking about Luca did have that effect on people.
Perhaps that’s why Frank settled here, I decided, as I moved past towers of books.
The back room was technically where children’s books were kept. But there was a nice roaring fire in the hearth there, and Luca often used it as a sort of work room when business was slow. I found him sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning over old journals and books, while the rain tapped at the windows above. An empty mug of hot chocolate sat beside him.
“Sakura should offer you discounts on cocoa, at the rate you’re going,” I said by way of hello.
“Or dental care, more likely,” he replied, turning to look up at me with an easy grin. “I’d offer you some, but I ran out. Want to sit with me a while? Or did you want to go somewhere?”
“I want to sit.” I collapsed next to him with a heavy sigh. After a moment, I leaned my head on his shoulder while he continued reading.
At this, he glanced over again. “Not a good day?”
“Very long and emotional day,” I said. “Officer Thorn and Trent needed an intervention about Jack, which you knew, and then there was Lavender’s story, which I guess I told you about earlier. Then at lunchtime Thorn came by again asking about the Lost River Outlook, so we went there too. We found an apartment hidden at the very top.”
“Whoa. You went all the way up?”
“Yeah. And we found someone murdered in the hidden space.”
“Seriously?” Luca sat up straight, though I refused to be dislodged.
“Seriously,” I confirmed. “No idea who it was, but she had a marketer’s coin in her wallet, from the grocer here in town. So Thorn’s working on identifying her now.”
“That would mean she was living somewhat as a local. Jack appeared as a total stranger, but somebody must know this other person,” Luca reasoned.
I nodded against his shoulder, watching the flames in the fireplace. “That seems to be Officer Thorn’s thought. I thought maybe though that she was only a merchant at the market a long time ago. She looked like she could be pretty old.”
“I guess that’s possible . . . people do carry keepsakes.” Luca’s voice was thoughtful. He shifted to put his arm around me. “Was it very bad?”
“Not as bad as it could have been. I think it’s the randomness of it that really gets to me. Plus I am tired,” I admitted.
“Hopefully with more investigation the randomness will seem a lot less random,” Luca said. “But as for tiredness, that makes sense, what with all the work—and homework—you’ve been doing lately.”
“Ha ha,” I said weakly, though I did smile. “I haven’t even started the project Paracelsus sent. Aside from asking Rhys. It’s more just—worry, I think. And being cooped up doesn’t help.”
“The weather, you mean?” Luca glanced up at the windows. “I can see that. It sure is cozy, though, don’t you think?”
I sighed again, more softly this time. “It is.”
Luca tightened his arm around my side. “How about dinner in tonight? I had promised Frank I’d get him a pizza sometime. He might be willing to go pick it up.”
“Can minks eat pizza?” I asked skeptically.
“I figure he’s lived long enough he can eat whatever he wants,” Luca joked. “After all, I’m not his keeper. Just his employer-slash-landlord.”
“I think you mean friend,” I told him.
“Well, obviously that. Come on, it’s probably been forever since you ate. What toppings do you want?”
I didn’t miss the fact that I’d been bothering Thorn with the same observations that morning. Knowing that he was probably right, I helped decide on a white pizza with broccoli before lapsing back into comfortable silence while Frank and Luca made the arrangements.
After Frank had darted off into the night, Luca started organizing all his research into stacks—the better to make room for dinner. I watched this with interest. “Find anything useful?”
“I did actually find some things related to Lavender’s story,” he answered. “Once I knew to look for ‘Violetta’ and ‘Kieran,’ it was a lot easier. The Still Missing book from a few years ago includes their case—it has a few quotes and reprints from local papers at the time. But the closest paper in those days was in Pine.”
Pine, the county seat for Pastoria, was across the lake—near enough when we needed something, but far enough that their reporters probably had not been ‘on scene’ at the time of the disappearance. I pursed my lips. “What did they say?”
“Nothing to contradict what Lavender said,” Luca replied, “but nothing much more, either. Except, um—”
He hesitated, and I sat up, concerned. “What is it?”
“I think Kieran may have been Drus,” he said at last, his eyes on the carpet.
I blinked as I thought this over. Lavender had said that Kieran had plant magic, and that he was a local elf . . . so that did make sense. And at the same time, it was strange. Luca himself came from the group of local forest-dwelling elves who called themselves the Drus—in fact, he was the only one we knew of who still lived in Belville. I was so accustomed to thinking of it being his heritage alone that this possibility had never occurred to me.
I shifted forward so that I could look at his face. “How do you feel about that?”
“Well, I appreciate you asking.” Luca’s smile flashed momentarily before he became thoughtful again. “But I’m not really sure. It’s not like I remember him or anything—what with everything that’s happened since, my memory of that time is still a little hazy anyway. It’s just strange to think about it at all. I don’t think it has any connection to what happened . . . Every reporter or researcher is fairly certain, like Lavender, that the sorcerer is the one responsible. Vesper is the name she told the town, but I saw one scholar say that might have been a pseudonym from the beginning. Anyway, she and the child, Purslane, disappeared at the same time. There’s never any mention of Drus politics or anything. Maybe Kieran had chosen to distance himself from that.”
“I certainly wouldn’t blame him if he did,” I commented. “But if everyone is so certain they know what happened, why were Purslane and Vesper never found?’
“They talk about that in this one,” Luca said, fishing a book titled Mysteries in the Mountains out of his pile. He flipped through the encyclopedic pages until he came to one with the heading “Beloved Child Disappears.” “This writer spent a lot of time looking at Police Guild reports from back then,” he explained. “At the time, there was only the station in Pine. Some people have theorized that the police officer assigned to the case just didn’t like coming up to Belville . . . but it’s probably more than that. For one thing, Vesper was a sorcerer. Even if her magic was faint, like she told Lavender.”
“Wait, is there an explanation for that?” I asked. The only sorcerers I knew were powerful to the point of egotism—and one outlier whose magic had suffered because of a punishment imposed by the sorcerer community.
“Not exactly,” Luca said, meeting my gaze and no doubt referring to the case on my mind. “Of course we can’t say for sure, but most people think she was just quite old and sick. The person who wrote the book about her potential pseudonyms pointed out that her magic was probably fading just as her physical strength was fading—that’s not necessarily always how magic works, but it does happen, especially with some illnesses.”
“Okay, but I can’t imagine Vesper was going around telling everyone that,” I said, again thinking of what little I knew about sorcerers. It took a certain temperament to dedicate one’s life to learning arcane spells from ancient texts. “I can see how Lavender and Violetta would have found out, but everyone else?”
“No, it sounds like she just told a few people, people she thought might be able to help her. Like Lavender,” Luca agreed, his eyes troubled. “Lavender’s not mentioned by name, but reports do indicate she was running the inn and Vesper told her why she’d come to stay. Basically, she was traveling around looking for ways to bring back her magic and extend her life.”
I pondered this. “Vesper definitely wouldn’t be the first to want something like that. That in itself doesn’t seem nefarious. But I don’t see how kidnapping a little kid would help that.”
“No, I don’t think she came to Belville expecting to become a criminal.” Briefly, Luca’s eyes crinkled as he smiled. “But it does seem like she was, in general, very focused and determined . . . and most sources do agree she fell in love with Violetta.”
“Still not a reason to kidnap someone’s kid,” I said.
“Well, I don’t think reason comes into it, exactly,” Luca returned.
“Fair enough.” I smiled wearily at him. “This sounds like a lot of interesting stuff, though, Luca. What a long day it’s been, all round.”
“True,” he sighed. He leaned back on his hands and stretched his legs out to the fire, books forgotten once more.
“At least your brochure project will probably be put on hold,” I said, as the thought suddenly occurred to me. “I doubt they’ll want any tourists up there while it’s a crime scene.”
“What? Oh, right,” Luca murmured.
He opened his mouth to say something more, but whatever it was, the shop chime drowned it out. In a waft of garlicky air, Frank had returned, bearing an oversize pizza box.
The less-than-social mink quickly stole a few slices for himself and disappeared to his quarters upstairs, leaving Luca and me to ourselves. As we sat there with our warm dinner and our fire, and the rain still falling outside, all thoughts of crime were set aside.