“Jo’s giving us actual permission to meddle in affairs best left to our upstanding boys and girls in blue?” Morrie leaned forward. “Sign me up.”
“It’s not much of an investigation.” Heathcliff shoved one foot into his trousers, hopping around as he pulled up the leg. “We know who killed her. He’s living right across the street, probably perving on Morrie’s pale ass through the window.”
“Of course he’s looking. This ass is a haunted house; it makes people scream when they’re inside it.” Morrie wiggled his bare ass at the window.
“More like it’s full of demons and things that’ll kill you,” Heathcliff muttered into his drink.
I rubbed my temples, feeling the onset of a headache. “Jo doesn’t know about Dracula, so it gives us the perfect excuse to get information from her. For example, it only took three G&Ts tonight to discover the women who were killed could have all been in possession of Romanian soil. That’s four women and four containers of soil. Now he’s got all he needs, so we have to find and destroy the last of his stash quickly. I also know that Fiona stored her soil in an inlaid wooden box, and another victim, Dana, was probably trying to sell hers online. Well, not the dirt, but the artifacts in the dirt. It’swild—”
“Let’s not discuss this down here. We don’t know who might be listening at the windows.” Morrie leaped to his feet and pointed to the stairs. “To the murder room.”
“Sssshhhh.” I held my fingers to my lips. “Try not to wake any of our guests. Victor’s light is still on under the cellar door, and I saw the Headless Horseman going to visit his horse, but we don’t exactly need input from Socrates or Robin. I’ll go wake Quoth up and—what?”
Even in the darkness, I couldn’t miss the strained look between Heathcliff and Morrie.
“Quoth’s at the art studio,” Heathcliff said. “He left after dinner.”
His words punched me in the gut. I was beyond happy Quoth felt ready to display his work for the art-buying public, and I loved the way he’d thrown himself into the exhibition with his whole being, but I missed him. When he was here he acted as if stopping Dracula was the most important thing in the world, but when he was overcome with his art-making, he forgot everyone and everything outside his own head, including me.
He should be here.
But that wasn’t fair. Quoth needed this exhibition. He needed to believe in himself as much as I believed in him. And I wouldn’t let Dracula destroy Quoth’s chance for happiness.
“I’ll text him.” I sent off a quick message. If Quoth knew what was going on, he’d want to come home and help, I was sure of it.
We crowded into the storage room. Robin Hood poked his head around the door. “Did I hear you say something about murder? Because if you need men of good character to fight alongside you, I volunteer my bow to help you catch this fiend.”
“That’s very nice of you, Robin, but it’s something we have to deal with by ourselves right now.” I wasn’t above asking Robin for help, but for now, I didn’t want to put him in danger.
“Oh.” His shoulders sagged. “But of course, I understand I am but a stranger to your bookshop…”
My heart went out to him. It couldn’t be easy to be torn from an adventure story where you were the hero saving fair maidens left and right to become an afterthought in someone else’s. But I didn’t have time to smooth ruffled egos – I had my hands full with Morrie and Heathcliff. “I promise I’ll tell you if we need your skills.”
I tried to shut the door, but Robin stopped it with his leather boot. “I wanted to inform you that another fellow showed up. He calls himself Puck, and he speaks in an odd tongue, keeps saying he’ll lead me about a round, through a bog, a brush, a brier—”
I groaned.Great. Just what we need.“Thanks, Robin. In that case, I do need your help. Make Puck up a bed in the Philosophy room. I showed you where we keep the spare sheets. And if you wake up tomorrow with the head of a donkey, then, um…don’t panic.”
Robin nodded, his mouth tight with worry. He opened the door a crack to let Grimalkin through, then shut it behind him. I checked the lock twice and pulled a heavy box in front of it to keep out any other problems.
We crowded into the occult room. While Morrie mixed martinis (because we couldn’t have a secret murder room without a bar), I pulled up the Argleton Gazette website and searched the articles about each murder. While my phone read out the information and I added the details I learned from Jo, Morrie scribbled notes and Heathcliff looked moody.
“I don’t see why we need to do this.” Heathcliff grabbed a second martini from Morrie’s hand. “We know exactly who murdered these women. All we need to do is march over there and stake his heart and chop his head off—”
“Not until we’ve got rid of all the dirt,” I said. “We have to find these final four caches. We know what Fiona’s box looks like and—”
“—and I can confirm that Dana Hill’s artifacts are from a Romanian archaeological site. An Ottoman scholar has identified them as stolen from a dig three years ago.” Morrie held up an image from an online marketplace. “Look at this – a visual. She’s put them all in this scuffed-uppálinkabox. Some people have no respect.”
I refrained from pointing out we were the ones snooping into the private lives of these victims. “What about Miriam? Jo said she’d been hiking in the Carpathians, but it’s not as if that means she’s carrying around a rucksack filled with dirt.”
“One swipe through her social media and I have the answer.” Morrie held out his phone in triumph. “Miriam keeps a small glass jar filled with dirt from every place she hikes. She has a wall filled with them in her house. She says she accidentally forgot to pack her glass jar on this hike, so before she left the hiking trail she filled up her shoe with dirt. So we’re looking for a smelly shoe filled with dirt. Delightful. The third victim, Jenna, is proving elusive. I’m scrolling her socials now and I doubt she’s ever left Argleton, let alone traveled to the misty foreign climes. I’ll run a full background check, of course.”
“She might not have collected the dirt herself,” I remind him. “Someone could have gifted her dirt, or…or…maybe Dracula coerced her into having some shipped here. The other question I have is, how did Dracula know about these dirt stashes? Jo said Fiona hadn’t shown the contents of that box to anyone else. She said the only other person who might’ve seen it was the customs officer who checked the contents.”
Morrie swiped his drink back from Heathcliff. “What’s that about?”
“Fiona didn’t want to risk the airport security refusing her entry for the box,” I said. “So she shipped it to herself from Bucharest. Apparently, all she had to do was get a special biosecurity sticker and it was fine.”
“How does any of this help us?” Heathcliff had finished his martini and was eyeing up the gin bottle. “It doesn’t matter how the boxes got here, only where they arenow. No new properties have popped up on the app. Dracula could have hidden them anywhere.”
