“He said he did it as a public service. Maybe he doesn’t take payment?”
Heathcliff raised an eyebrow. “Morrie never does anything out of the goodness of his heart.”
I thought back to the pain in Morrie’s eyes after Heathcliff rejected his kiss, and I wondered if Heathcliff was being deliberately callous. “Anyway, I think the husband might be involved,” I declared. “Write that up, Quoth.”
“Let me at this suspect,” Grimalkin purred, looking up from her fish to inspect her red-painted nails. “A handsome widower mourning his greatest love, so grim and gaunt and vulnerable. I’ll get him to tell us his darkest, filthiest secrets.”
“You’re not going anywhere near him,” I said. “He’s not your type.”
“How do you know?”
“He has two legs and doesn’t lick his own arsehole. As far as I know.”
Grimalkin hissed. Quoth wrote ‘husband’ on the board. “Who else?”
“Anyone who was with her during the wilderness weekend might’ve seen something. Kate didn’t just return to England – she went back to the place where she faked her death. That has to mean something. Maybe someone from her job was blackmailing Kate to keep quiet about her fake death, and she came back to finish them off so she could keep her new life. They fought, and she lost.”
“Or maybe she told a friend in confidence and that friend decided to blackmail her,” Heathcliff growled. “Or she was the floozy of one of Morrie’s gang buddies. Or she went walking in the woods and slipped over and fell on her own letter opener. I hate to quote Morrie’s ex here, but we’re grasping at straws trying to theorize without facts. Morrie’s the one who figures these things out, and he did that by hacking into personal records and digging up the dirt. We’ve got no dirt.”
“Exactly. Thepointis that Morrie’s not here, and I don’t trust Sherlock to do it. So it falls on us. Maybe we don’t have Morrie’s hacking skills—” I glanced over at his computer station in the alcove beside the kitchen, where the three screens still shone, blinking with lines of code “—but we’ve got our own methods. I’ll distract the husband while Quoth flies in a window and searches his room. Easy as pie.”
Grimalkin poked her head up from underneath the table, licking the last morsels of fish from her lips. “There’s pie?”
“What about the Wilderness Survival School?” Quoth asked. “As you said, that was where this thing started and ended. Maybe someone who works there is responsible. Or at least, they might have seen something.”
“Good idea,” I smiled at him. Quoth beamed at my praise. “We need to get on that crime scene.”
“You’re only saying that because you want an excuse to go back out there and check on Morrie,” pointed out Heathcliff.
“Damn right.” The thought of what Morrie and Sherlock might be up to cramped in that tiny cabin sent a sickly jolt through my veins. “Even if it means I have to pretend I like the outdoors.”
“Count me out.” Heathcliff folded his arms.
“Come on, you’ll love it. I bet they do all kinds of outdoor activities – rambling, foraging, archery… you’re always saying how much you miss the moors. This isn’t exactly the same, but at least it’s out in nature.”
“Hayes and Wilson are already going to be looking closely at us as potential co-conspirators,” Heathcliff pointed out. “We shouldn’t do anything out of the ordinary, like head off into the countryside to the exact location where Morrie supposedly killed this bint.”
“True.” I tapped my chin with my finger, not even realizing until after I’d done it that it was a Morrie-ish gesture. “We’ll just tell them we’re going somewhere else. We can think up a convincing lie. If we make sure we’re not seen at Wild Oats, they won’t even have to know we were there.”
“And who would run the shop while we’re gallivanting around the woods communing with nature?”
I raised an eyebrow. “What about Mum? She doesn’t have a job at the moment since she blew up Sylvia’s shop with one of their soap-making kits, and she’s between pyramid schemes, so she wouldn’t be compelled to turn the World History room into a recruitment center.”
“Are you actually suggesting yourmotherbe made responsible for the shop?” Heathcliff scoffed. “What about the time-travel bedroom? What about the occult room or the Classics shelves bringing book characters to life or the fact she’s bug-nuts crazy?”
“Simple. We lock the door to the bedroom and pile a bunch of boxes in front of the occult room. That will keep her out of Nevermore’s magical corners. She got rid of all the soap kits, so I doubt she can do much damage in a couple of days.”And it would help make her feel more included in my life.
Mum was doing an admirable job letting me get on with my life and make my own decisions, even though it made her crazy. She was already on her high horse about me moving in with the guys, especially since I refused to officially declare which one of them was my boyfriend. Getting her to help out in the shop would be a great way to make her feel included.
“What about if we gave her a trial run?” Quoth suggested. “You’ve got your appointment with the guide dog trainer tomorrow. Helen could watch the shop while we’re in Crookshollow.”
“Oh, yes, the mangy mutt.” Grimalkin sighed. “How could you be so cruel as to introduce such an uncouth creature into this house of learning?”
That’s right.In all the madness of the last day, I’d completely forgotten that tomorrow I’d be meeting my new guide dog for the first time. We’d arranged for Morrie to mind the shop while Heathcliff and Quoth went with me to the guide dog training center in the village of Crookshollow, in the next shire over. Heathcliff always had dogs at Wuthering Heights, so it made sense that he come to check out the pup. And we needed to know that any dog we had in the shop could handle the presence of a shapeshifting raven.
A sliver of anger shot through my body – meeting my dog was supposed to be a wonderful experience. I’d always wanted a pet, but we couldn’t have one at our flat on the housing estate. Getting a guide dog was the one bright spot of going blind, something I was actually excited about. But Sherlock bloody Holmes had to show up and kidnap Morrie and ruin it all.
And part of me knew it wasn’t Sherlock’s fault, but the fault of whoever killed Kate Danvers. And Morrie had to take some blame for opening this stupid fake death business in the first place. But the part of me that knew this was across the village at the pub. And the part left behind wanted to smash Sherlock’s hawkish nose.
