“There’s a signal here?” She dusted off her coat and jeans and inched to the cliff edge, a safe distance from where the car had gone over.
“Very occasionally you get lucky, but no. The wi-fi isn’t showing up from here, either. We’ll ring from the house.”
“I can’t even see the car through the fog. Wait, there it is. Oh god, someone’s moving around down there.”
“Are you sure?” He walked towards her.
“They must think someone’s in the car. It’s okay, we’re okay!” she yelled. “We’re up here! We’re fine. Oh shit,” she said, dropping volume, “they have—” Amelia plowed her shoulder into Tom’s chest, shoving him back from the edge. As they flailed backwards, an ear-splitting bang reverberated around the cliff. “They have a gun!”
Chapter 10
Amelia
“This way,” Tom hissed, grabbing Amelia’s hand and bolting for the trees.
“We’re going to the house?” She stumbled a little as she tried to keep up. “Won’t they follow?”
“We’ll get just close enough to pick up a wi-fi signal, call the police, and find a safe place to lay low. We have a head start. Did you get a good look at the person?”
“No, just the body shape, and then the gun. What if the police think we hallucinated the gunshots? And the shooter? I would be suspicious of us!”
“Sergeant Kamdar knows me well enough to give me the benefit of the doubt, brandy or no brandy. The figure you saw on the road… Was it—he, she, whatever—carrying a gun?”
“Definitely not a rifle, like that one. Those bangs I heard when the car was stuck in the tree… I thought it was something to do with the car, but … someone was shooting at us? What the hell?”
“My thoughts exactly,” he said, sidestepping a fallen tree, and steering her clear of it. “This must all be connected with what we saw last night.”
“A deep-sea fish and a cyclops?”
His hand tightened, and hers pinched in pain, not that she was about to complain. It felt like the only thing anchoring her to reality. “Not just that. Remember I brought that robot vac up from the basement? After you left, I found something in it. A clump of gray hair, with streaks of dried blood in it.”
“No way.”
“Those things pick up a lot of hair, but this was a sizable clump. Like a clump that had been yanked out in one go.”
“Like the hair we could see at the top of the rug?”
“Exactly like that.” He slowed and checked their surroundings. She could see nothing in any direction but silver trunks, droopy gray papery leaves, and bare earth sprinkled with decaying leaf litter. He dropped her hand and pulled something from his jeans pocket. “There was also this—an emerald. Looks like it’s from an earring. Yours?”
She absentmindedly touched her own tiny diamond earrings, a thirtieth-birthday gift from her grandparents. “Not mine. Something to do with the body?”
“Can’t be Duncan’s. He doesn’t even wear his wedding band when he’s working, and he’s always working.” Tom pocketed it. “More likely it was lost on the stairs a century ago and you dislodged it when you fell. That was probably the last time they had a proper clean.”
“It could belong to the kill—” She stopped herself. “To someone else. But the hair… So this person was killed in the basement last night? Maybe there was a fight, and that’s how the emerald came to be there. It would take a lot of force to pull out a big clump of hair. When you went to get the vacuum this morning, did you see anything out of place down there—aside from my demolition project yesterday?”
“I didn’t really look, but nothing stood out. I went straight to the vacuum dock next to the stairs and brought it up into thelight to open it. There is that old rug. I didn’t notice whether it was still there.”
“It’s not the same one we saw in our ‘hallucination.’ Or whatever that was.”
“You’re sure?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Of course, you’re sure.”
“The one in the basement is the Thomas Moore, remember? You people have no respect for antique carpet! Though it’s probably better off there than in full sun, and at least it’s dry and cool. Why am I even thinking about carpet preservation?”
He stepped closer, examining her eyebrow. She’d forgotten she had a cut there, but as he looked, it started to throb.
