Edgar’s pizza of choice this time was olive and anchovy. Amber honestly wasn’t sure if he was doing this to mess with her, if his tastes were really that terrible, or if this was his really lazy way of getting Tom and Alley a treat. While Amber and Edgar sat on the couch to eat and discuss the Chloe situation, he would sneak little pieces of anchovy to the cats who were sitting under the coffee table. Amber pretended she didn’t notice.
“Do you think the same spell I used on Alan’s business card will work on these?” Amber asked, pointing to the photograph of Lilith and the rock pinning the picture’s corner to the table.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because the rock is from the shore of the lake where her car plunged into the water, it doesn’t mean that the energy in it is Lilith’s. Any number of traumatic things could have happened there—things even more powerful, energy-wise, than what happened to her. But maybe a memory spell isn’t what we need at all.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, wiping her greasy fingers on a napkin she then swiped across her mouth.
“Remember: time magic is part of your birthright as a Henbane, too,” Edgar said.
“Aren’t they kind of the same thing?”
“Memory spells are all about the specifics,” Edgar said, casually dropping a small piece of anchovy on the floor. Tom pounced on it. “Reliving a memory isn’t really about time itself, as a memory is something specific to a person. When you’re experiencing a memory through a spell, you’re tapping into that particular person’s energy to see a snapshot of the past from their perspective. If you had relived the night of the fire through Belle’s energy, rather than Theo’s, the majority of the details would be the same, but they’d feel and look different because you’d be seeing it through a different lens. That’s why you need personal objects from a person to experience their memory, because you need their energy in order to see through that lens.”
Amber nodded. “Okay. So what makes time spells different?”
“You’ll still end up seeing a snapshot of the past—or future or present—with time spells, but the lens is a bit of a free-for-all,” Edgar said. “With time spells, you’re transporting your consciousness to a specific time and then you just … see what you see. I think the energy we need to grab hold of is Lake Lirkaldy’s. We need to get your magic to sync with the energy of the place, give it a certain time to take you to, and then cross our fingers that you’re shown something helpful.”
“And that I don’t get stuck there,” she joked.
“And that,” he said without a hint of humor.
Amber swallowed.
“It’s relatively safe,” he said. “Whereas you need specifics for memory spells, you need to go a bit broader with time spells. So the fact that we don’t know the exact time of the accident is actually a good thing.”
Amber’s stomach churned.
Apparently sensing that, Edgar awkwardly patted her shoulder. “I won’t let anything happen to you, cousin. Who would be there to annoy the crap out of me and buy me pizza?”
“No one,” she said, “because you’re very grumpy.”
He grinned at her. “All right,” he said, clapping once and then rubbing his hands together. “We need a picture of the lake for you to focus on in addition to the one of Lilith.”
Amber closed the lid of Edgar’s horrible pizza, fetched her laptop, and then placed it on top of the box. She did an image search of the lake in January, and pulled up one that featured snow-covered pines, a snowy shore, and a pristine blue-gray lake stretching out beyond the trees, the weak sunlight reflecting off the surface as if it were made of glass. Amber tried not to think about how cold that water must have been when Lilith plunged into it.
While Amber had been searching for a suitable picture of the lake, Edgar had been flipping through a grimoire. Once he found a spell for revealing a truth, Amber set to work crafting something that better suited her needs. Edgar told her to let instinct aid her—that her affinity for time magic would act as a guide. It took nearly two hours, but eventually the words written before her burned a faint orange before returning to black, signifying that the spell was complete.
Amber sat back on the couch with a huff; she was already exhausted and the real work hadn’t even begun yet. Without needing to discuss it, they layered her studio apartment in cloaking spells.
“So this one is likely going to knock you on your butt,” said Edgar once they were done. “I recommend reciting the spell, then lying down. You’ll sort of semi-pass out anyway if this works.”
“You’re supposed to tell me these things sooner!”
“Why? It’s not like it would make you change your mind,” he said.
She shrugged; he wasn’t wrong.
Armed with the spell, her laptop, the photo of Lilith, and the rock, Amber climbed onto her bed, her back against the wall at the head of her bed. With her computer perched on her lap and the screen still open to the icy picture of Lake Lirkaldy, she crossed her feet at the ankles. She laid out the spell on her keyboard and then held the Lilith photograph in one hand and grasped the rock in the other.
Edgar stood beside the bed, arms crossed, as he stared down at her. “Instead of keeping the image of a person in your mind like you’re used to, focus on the location and the date. I’m right here if things get iffy.”
Blowing out a steadying breath, Amber recited the spell, speaking slowly and enunciating each word with care. Her magic thrummed and she clutched the rock a little tighter, her palm growing clammy against the smooth surface. She tried to imagine the biting, icy air stinging her nose and cheeks; her boots sinking into freezing-cold slush; the creak of branches under the heavy weight of snow. Was the stone in her hand growing warmer, or was her own body heat just seeping into it?
As Amber’s eyes slipped closed, she thought of Lilith Reed, of little Chloe in her womb, and of the date January 12th. She could have sworn she heard wind whistling through the trees, the freezing air pulling goose pumps up on her skin. She wanted to rub a warm palm over the pebbled flesh, but her hands were occupied. A drowsiness even more powerful than the one that came after the consumption of a premonition tincture pressed her body into the bed. Her head felt like a bowling ball balanced on a toothpick. She couldn’t possibly stay awake.
Her magic, on the other hand, was frenzied. It coursed beneath her skin like a river, a flood, a torrent. Amber felt as if her body was the rock in her hand, and her magic was water rushing around it. It would drown her. It would rush up over her head like a tsunami and she would be swallowed up and carried away.
And then she was there.
She stood on a slight hill, surrounded by snow and the occasional pine tree. Given the waning light, she guessed it to be near dusk. Wind occasionally whispered through the branches, but otherwise it was silent. The lake stretched out before her. On the other side, she could see a road that wove between the trees. Around a bend came a pair of headlights. They were there and not there as the car passed behind the trees, like a staccato flash of a strobe light. It was hard to tell how fast the car was going given the distance from her to the other side of the lake. But then a second car came around the bend, this one moving much faster. The first car accelerated.
Amber watched as the cars drove faster and faster, following the shore of the lake. She lost sight of them for a moment given her vantage point on the hill, but she turned and looked up the short incline behind her. She could just make out the edge of the road a few hundred feet away. The cars were zipping up the road near her now. There was a bang—metal on metal. Engines revved. Another bang. A screech. Bang. Amber flinched, then charged up the short incline, her boots slipping and crunching in the snow. She stopped at the edge of the road.
Bang. From her right, she saw a pair of headlights barreling toward her.
The car swerved left, then right.
Bang.
Bang.
The car fishtailed, tires squealing.
It was feet away from Amber now, and she could see the whites of Lilith’s eyes as they flicked up to her rear-view mirror. The second car slammed into Lilith’s car again and she screamed, the sound silent to Amber’s ears. Lilith’s head jerked forward and smacked into the steering wheel. Her head lolled.
Bang.
The car spun and spun and slipped off the road and down the snowy hill and into the water below with a deafening crash. The driver of the second car slammed on its brakes and threw open the driver’s side door.
Amber swallowed hard, her heart racing as the large man stalked down the slight slope. He was bald and barrel-chested. Amber wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the man had played football in high school. Even though she knew this giant, burly man couldn’t see her, she pulled her head toward her shoulders anyway.
The man stalked past her without so much as a glance. He wore a thick red flannel jacket, heavy pants, and black boots. He crunched his way to the shore. Amber slowly followed, telling herself that she needed to commit his face to memory. When she was close enough to study his profile, what stood out to her more than anything was the complete lack of emotion on his face. He lit a cigarette and savored it, taking his time, as he watched Lilith’s car slowly fill with water, and then sink. When the vehicle made its last gurgle and released an explosion of bubbles, he said, “Good riddance, Lilith. You will not be missed.” He took a long draw on his cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly. “Thanks in advance for the half-million, though. It’ll come in handy. Looks like I’m going to need a new car.” He laughed and tossed his unfinished cigarette into the snow, the lit end going out instantly with a little hiss.
Amber darted ahead, her boots slipping on the snow. She committed his license plate to memory just before he drove away. She stood on the side of the road, watching the red of his taillights as they grew smaller and smaller before disappearing and leaving her alone in the quiet once more. She wished she could run to the water’s edge, dive in, and swim her way to Lilith’s car—to pull her body from the vehicle and wrap her in a blanket and bring her back to Chloe and Frank. But she couldn’t do anything other than wait for this vision to end.
When it did, it was so abrupt, she gasped as if waking from a dream. Her apartment and her bed were so warm in contrast to that snowy scene from seventeen years ago, it almost hurt. As if she’d been the one frozen and was now rapidly thawing.
Edgar’s face swam into view before her and she stifled a gasp. “Did it work?” he asked. “You were shaking really hard at one point, but I couldn’t tell if it was a bad reaction to the spell or if you were cold—I wasn’t sure if I should snap you out of it.”
“It worked,” she breathed. “And I think I know why Sean took Chloe.”
It took Amber an hour to recover from the spell. The first twenty minutes had been spent guzzling the glasses of water Edgar brought her. Then he encouraged her to eat two more slices of pizza. After a very long shower and a few more glasses of water, Amber sat down on the bed again and then went into her vision in detail.
“All right,” Edgar said, from his seated position on the floor, once she was done. Tom lay before him on his back, his paws flopped onto his chest while Edgar scratched under his chin. “It’s been a long time since I’ve needed to work multiple jobs, but if Lilith really was taking under-the-table gigs as a way to keep a low profile, I’m thinking it’s pretty impossible that she’d stashed away half a million dollars in a sock drawer just from scrubbing toilets and washing dishes, right? So where does a small-town girl get that much money?”
“Sean very clearly ran her off the road with the intention of killing her,” Amber said, shuddering a little at the memory. “What if her death needed to happen in order for him to get the money?”
“Life insurance?” Edgar asked. “And if he needs Chloe to be eighteen, does that mean money from the policy isn’t released until she’s legal? Can you even name a minor as a beneficiary? I’m guessing this isn’t the first case where something like this has happened: a parent names their kid as the beneficiary, but then the parent dies before the kid can legally claim the money. Are there contingencies in place for stuff like this?”
Amber propped one leg on the bed and pulled her laptop in front of her. The image of Lake Lirkaldy filled the screen. She could still hear the sound of Sean’s car slamming into the back of Lilith’s. The deafening silence as the car seemed to be suspended in the air after it went off the incline before careening into the lake, the splash loud and jarring. She closed the tab.
Several searches about life insurance told her that even if a child was named beneficiary to a life insurance policy, there needed to be an adult custodian and/or guardian named—someone who would be the keeper of the money until the minor was of age, as well as someone who would be the child’s caretaker if the parent were to die before the child was legal. Often the custodian and guardian were the same person.
“If Chloe had been named the beneficiary, who was named guardian? Frank seems clueless. Sean wouldn’t have been keeping tabs on Chloe all this time, only to snatch her when she was a week from being legal if he had been named the guardian,” Amber said.
“What about her aunt … Lilith’s sister?” Edgar asked.
“Karen Reed,” Amber said slowly. “But as far as I’ve been able to tell, Chloe didn’t even know she had an aunt—and if she did, she figured that out very recently. Why would Karen stay out of Chloe’s life if she’d been named guardian?”
Edgar shrugged helplessly. “Maybe that PI friend of yours would know. If the lady was just a callous jerk like Sean, she wouldn’t put in all this money to help find Chloe, right?”
Amber grabbed her cell phone off her bed and dialed Alan.
He answered almost immediately. “Peterson.”
“Hi. It’s Amber Blackwood.”
“I know,” he said. “What’s up?”
She told him her life insurance theory, as well as dropping the name “Sean Merrill” to see if Alan had ever heard of him. He hadn’t.
“Has Karen given you any indication that she’s been named Chloe’s guardian?” Amber asked.
Alan sounded truly perplexed as he said, “No. The impression I got is that someone got in contact with her about three weeks ago—so a little over a week before Chloe went missing—and said, ‘You should keep a better eye on your niece. She’s not safe in Edgehill.’ Karen hadn’t ever heard of Edgehill, let alone know anything about her niece. Then a week later, she goes missing. She called me the day of and said something like, ‘Someone in Edgehill, Oregon, kidnapped Chloe Deidrick. I need you to find her. I was warned a week ago that something would happen to her and I thought it was a hoax. Now she’s missing.’ Then she muttered something under her breath to the effect of, ‘Dang it, Lilith. This is a lot of responsibility for someone I’ve never met.’”
“What does Lilith have to do with it?” Amber asked.
“Karen has been very sparse on the details. Without you, I probably still wouldn’t know her name,” Alan said. “There’s more she’s not telling me, but I don’t know what. Maybe she’s as scared of Sean Merrill as Frank is. If Sean was the one who put in the warning phone call to Karen, he did it for a reason. He wanted Chloe on her radar. We have to figure out why.”
Amber mulled that over for a moment. “Oh! I have one more thing for you. I know a kid who’s active on Scuttle and he thinks he’s narrowed down the Sean handle to four. I figured you could do your own research into those to see if there’s one that sticks out to you as suspicious?”
“That would be great,” he said.
She disconnected the call after she rattled off the four names. When she looked at Edgar, she found him watching her, his head cocked.
“What?” she asked, her cheeks heating for some reason.
“You aren’t a relentless pest with just me, huh?” Then his expression softened. “Chloe is lucky to have someone like you looking out for her.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I just hope we can find her.”
Edgar went home half an hour later and suggested that they skip Sunday’s breakfast next week since he’d need at least two weeks to recover from today’s double venture into town. Amber hadn’t told him yet, but she planned to get him out of the house on Saturday for the Hair Ball. She would need to do it soon; she couldn’t imagine Edgar Henbane had anything in his closet that remotely resembled “formal wear.” Neither of them was skilled enough at glamour spells to create something that could last him all evening, either.
Amber shuddered at the thought of having to escort Edgar on a shopping trip. If he was grumpy now, how awful would he be after trying on his third pair of slacks?
The following day, Amber dropped by the station during her lunch break to give the chief the license plate number she found in her vision, as well as tell him about her life insurance idea. She could have called him last night but hadn’t wanted to bug him at such a late hour when there was a new baby in the house—especially when his wife had heard the affair rumors.
Amber waved at Dolores as Amber walked past her desk, but stopped dead in her tracks when she heard, “He’s in a meeting.” Amber slowly turned toward Sour Face; these were the first words she’d ever said directly to Amber. Without looking at her, nor halting her typing, Dolores said, “Wait in the lobby and he’ll be with you shortly.”
Immediately turning around, Amber plopped down on the saggy couch in the lobby. The water cooler gave a glug in greeting. Twenty minutes later, the chief, Carl, and Garcia emerged down the hall from the chief’s office. The trio talked for another minute, then the two officers headed for the front door, waving at Amber as they went.
The chief made eye contact with Amber, squinted slightly, and said, “C’mon back, Miss Blackwood.”
Once they were in his office and he closed the door behind him, Amber started in right away. “Are you in contact with Karen Reed? Alan thinks she’s hiding—”
“Who is Alan?”
Amber winced, forgetting that the chief didn’t know about her alliance with the PI. “What?”
“Amber, don’t play coy. You know I don’t like that.”
“Alan Peterson the PI?” she said, one eye squinting slightly. “We’re kind of … sharing intel.”
The chief just stared at her.
“I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d get mad!”
He released a slow, controlled breath out of his nose. “Coronary.”
“Karen Reed is who hired Alan,” Amber said, explaining what little Alan knew about his client. “What we can’t figure out is why Sean essentially warned Karen about the kidnapping. Why did he want her to start looking into Chloe’s disappearance?”
The chief chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, then slid his attention to his computer and keyed in a few things. Then he plucked his phone out of its cradle, dialed a number, and pressed the receiver to his ear. After a minute, he said, “Hello, Karen Reed. This is Owen Brown, chief of police in Edgehill, Oregon. I have a few questions I wanted to ask you. If you could call me back at your earliest convenience, that would be greatly appreciated.”
Once he had relayed his number and hung up, Amber told him about her vision and fished a piece of paper out of her purse that had Sean’s license plate written on it. “It’s from eighteen years ago, so who knows how many other cars he’s had since then, but maybe this will help get you DMV records?”
The chief nodded, picking up the paper. “Thanks, this could be really—”
He was interrupted by his phone ringing. He hit a button and said, “Hi, Dolores.”
“I have a Karen Reed on the line for you, sir,” came the woman’s gravelly reply through the phone’s speakers.
“Put her through.” After hitting another button, he said, “Hi, Karen, this is Chief Brown. Thank you for calling back so quickly.”
“No problem,” the woman said, her voice ringing out in the room. “I was glad to hear from you. Is … is there any news about Chloe?”
“We’re chasing down several leads,” the chief said. “What I wanted to ask you about is related to your sister Lilith. Would that be okay?”
The pause was long. “Sure,” came the soft reply. “I don’t know how much help I’ll be, though.”
“What can you tell me about Sean Merrill?”
Karen let out a sharp, short laugh. “Wow, I haven’t heard that name in years. He was someone Lilith dated for a while in her twenties. A cop, if I remember. I think he may have been abusive, but Lilith didn’t really talk to me about him. She’d never been very good about keeping up with family. Once she left after high school, it was a miracle if she showed up for holidays. Just a really flighty person. Years went by without me knowing where she’d been—and then I get a call that she was … that she’d died.”
However bitter Karen was, the fact that she still loved her sister was evident in the way her voice broke on that last word.
“When did you find out she’d had Chloe?” he asked.
“Not until after Lilith died,” Karen said, bitterness creeping back in. “I got a letter in the mail letting me know I was both the custodian and personal guardian of Chloe Deidrick and her assets, as Chloe was the sole beneficiary of a life insurance policy, but she couldn’t make a claim on it until she was eighteen. Lilith left me in charge of Chloe’s money, yet I didn’t know until that letter that Chloe even existed.”
“Why haven’t you tried to find her if you’re her guardian?” Amber asked before she realized she was going to say the words out loud. Her eyes widened.
The chief shot her a pointed look. “That’s my associate, Cassie Westbottom. She’s a consultant on the case.”
“I don’t mean to sound judgmental,” Amber said now in Cassie’s voice. “We’re just trying to figure out who Chloe’s inner circle is and who she’s been in contact with.”
“Lilith had a will in addition to the life insurance policy. In it, she asked that I not contact Chloe until she was eighteen,” Karen said. “She said Chloe was safe with her adoptive father, Frank Deidrick, and she didn’t want Chloe’s childhood to be tainted with the truth of her parentage. That was her phrase, not mine: ‘truth of parentage.’ She said it was vital that I let Chloe live her life blissfully unaware, and that if I ever cared about her, then I would do this for her. She didn’t explain herself beyond that but that was just how Lilith was—very private until she needed something. Even when it was her family.”
Amber mulled this over.
“If I can ask …” Karen said, “what does Sean have to do with Chloe and her disappearance?” The slight quaver to her voice made it clear she already had a pretty good guess.
“Sean is Chloe’s biological father,” the chief said. “And he was, in fact, abusive. So much so that it’s what made Lilith change her name and essentially go into hiding. She distanced herself from her family to protect them and Chloe from Sean.”
Karen let out a choked sob. Her voice was very soft when she asked, “Did he kill her? Lilith, I mean?”
Amber watched the chief’s face as he clearly debated how to answer this.
“We think so, yes,” he finally said.
Another sob. “And is he who has Chloe now?”
The chief sighed. “He’s on the top of our list of suspects, yes.”
“Oh my God,” Karen whimpered. “That poor girl.” Then she gasped. “Is that who called me to tell me Chloe was in trouble?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “Do you have any idea why he would have called you to tip you off?”
“I didn’t have any clue until just now …” Karen paused for so long, the chief looked up at Amber and shrugged. “If Sean really did kill Lilith, my guess is he thought he was on the policy as the beneficiary. You can’t name a minor without there being a guardian listed, and by then, Lilith had cut herself off from family, so he probably thought he was a sure bet as to who was listed—maybe she told him he was the beneficiary and he was operating under incorrect information. When she died, he wasn’t notified about benefits—I was—so he must have realized then that he hadn’t been named. When he called me, he asked, ‘Are you Chloe Deidrick’s guardian?’ He’d sounded so formal, I thought maybe it was the police—I mean who else would know I was Chloe’s guardian, when Lilith made me promise from the great beyond that I would keep this secret to myself? So I said yes and asked where she was and if she was okay. He said, ‘She’s in Edgehill’ and from my reaction, it was clear I had no idea where that was. Then he told me she was in danger and hung up. Do you suppose he knew I would try to find her once I knew she was in trouble?”
“Maybe,” Amber said. “Perhaps he’d been hoping you’d come to Edgehill personally so he could go after you instead. It seems like he’d figured out along the way that you’re the one listed as Chloe’s guardian. He could have been trying to lure you here—you’re unfamiliar with the town; you confirmed that for him. Maybe he assumed you would have been worried enough that you’d drop everything to come find her, possibly leaving your family behind. You’d be in a new place without your support system. Hiring a PI might have been a really good call for your own safety.”
“Is it … my fault he took Chloe?” Karen asked, her voice strained. “He called me several days before he took Chloe. Did he take her instead of me because she was a closer target?”
“None of this is anyone’s fault but Sean’s,” the chief said. “Do not blame yourself for any of this. You abided by your late sister’s wishes and you made a really smart call in sending in someone experienced to investigate the situation. Sean is not the type of man a civilian should interact with.”
The chief shot a pointed look at Amber when he said that last part. As if Amber wanted anything to do with the man. The snippet of memory she’d seen of Sean with his flat eyes had been more than enough for her.
Karen cried softly.
Frowning to himself, the chief said, “You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Reed. If he contacts you again in any way, please let me know. Or if you think of anything that might help us find Chloe.”
“I will,” she said, sniffling. “Thank you for calling me.”
The chief cradled the phone and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed. He and Amber sat in his quiet office, each staring off in different directions. The reality of the situation sunk in. A father had kidnapped his own daughter because of money. He didn’t care about her well-being, nor did he care that the man who had raised her was worried sick about her.
“Even though Isabelle is only days old, I already know I would move heaven and earth for that girl,” the chief said softly. “I knew it the moment I saw her. How can Sean do this to Chloe? How could he even think it, let alone do it? I’ve seen horrible things on this job, but the crimes parents inflict on their children are always the hardest to wrap my mind around.”
What Amber feared most was what Sean would do once he got the money he wanted. He’d run Lilith off the road when he decided that she would be more beneficial to him dead than alive. A woman who had helped him get back on his feet after he’d been shot, had dropped out of school, and given up on her dreams when his medical bills had overwhelmed them, and who had given him a beautiful little girl.
What would he do to his daughter once she’d served her purpose?