“So we’ve got the house to ourselves for the rest of the night.”
“I mean…” He looked up toward the third floor. “Grandma’s apartment is pretty messed up, but the windows are all open now. It’ll have to be professionally cleaned, but there was no actual fire, at least.” He shook his head. “They said the smoke should clear out enough in the next few hours.”
I nodded, shrugging off the blanket. The night seemed strangely warm anyway, probably the adrenaline kicking in. A sheriff’s officer came looking for Max to get some kind of official statement, and they wandered off together, leaving Claire and Steve standing with me. Only Claire wasn’t looking at us. She was looking up to where the third floor was now brightly lit, smoke still drifting away from it.
“Who’s that?” she asked, squinting.
Standing at the window of Grandma Kate’s apartment was Aunt Emily.
An unexpected bolt of rage surged through me. “I’ve had just about enough of that bitch,” I muttered. I gestured curtly to Claire. “Come on. Steve, sorry, this is girls only.”
He gave a low, amused snort. “No problem.”
Claire, wide-eyed, looked again to where Max and John Bell were standing talking with the sheriff’s officers, but she gamely walked with me. The blunderbuss was now in the hands of one of the deputies, and John was gesturing wildly, clearly trying toexplain that the ancient weapon had been fired multiple times, but nobody seemed to know by whom. Ithadn’tbeen him, though. Apparently, guns didn’t usually spontaneously go off on their own.
They didn’t even notice us heading for the house, and that was okay. There were a few last things I needed to understand about what was going on here, and only Claire could help me out with that.
We stopped in the kitchen so I could rewash my face, though the EMTs had cleaned me up pretty well. Claire looked uneasy. “Why is she up there in the grandma’s rooms? That seems kind of rude, don’t you think?”
“Rude is a particular skillset of Emily’s. You’ll get used to it.” I glanced at her. “She’s Emily Winslow, if you know the name.”
She blinked at me. “FromThe Family Five?”
“Oh great, you know it. Let’s go.”
I’d half expected Emily to have fled the smoke-heavy third floor by the time we headed up, but her room was empty, the door left open. A quick peek inside was enough to convince us not to explore further.
“It looks like a lingerie bomb went off in there,” Claire whispered, awed. “Does she have an extremely needy boyfriend or something?”
I thought about Joe in his paper-crowded lake cottage. “I think she likes to keep herself busy. Shopping’s one of the ways she does that.”
“I guess,” Claire said. “This is all primo stuff, though. So either she’s got a deal on shipping, or she spends a lot of time somewhere other than Hooperton.”
I thought about that as we moved up the stairs to the third floor. The smoky stench hit us before we reached the first landing. When we got up to the Grandma’s room, I could see why. The firefighters had sealed off her apartment with plastic,but Emily had ripped part of that down. After we stepped through, I tacked the plastic back up. Might as well keep the cleaning of the rest of the house to a minimum.
“Oh, look, Delia has a friend! Hello, there, friend.”
Aunt Emily’s voice was so loud it startled me, and her peal of laughter rang out through the room. The smoke had dissipated somewhat, leaving a veneer of grittiness in the room, but the air was surprisingly clear, almost cool, with all of the windows open. A steady breeze had kicked up at this level, and I was glad for my hoodie. I supposed it was a little more understandable for Grandma Kate to light a fire in the summer if she’d caught a chill from the breeze.
But the windows had been closed when I’d been up here before. I was sure of it.
“Emily, this is my friend Claire. Claire, this is Max’s Aunt Emily.”
“Well, aren’t you pretty.”
The edge to Emily’s words caught me off guard, and I turned to look at Claire, who was giving every indication of being a rabbit caught in the spotlight. “Um, thank you,” she managed.
I noticed the lit fireplace, and I scowled at Emily. “Is that safe?”
She shrugged. “The damper’s open now. There was nothing wrong with the fireplace, just the witch who was living up here, keeping it all to herself.” She refocused on Claire. “Do you model? I’m a model, or I was. Not so much anymore, though the acting continues.”
“You’re EmilyWinslow,” Claire gushed, as if she’d suddenly figured it out. “I’m such a fan, but—” she coughed on cue, and Emily straightened, clearly delighted.
“The smoke is terrible here—come on, we’ll go downstairs,” she announced. The two of them moved toward the door, and I let them go. I looked around the grandma’s living room. I’dnever been up here, but now I wondered why that was. It seemed almost, homey, and smaller than I expected. There was a little kitchenette with a mini fridge and microwave that I could see through the far door and then what looked like a couple of bedrooms off another hall. And of course, the door to the roof, which would have looked like any other door, except it was now barred with a thick plank of wood hammered into the doorframe. No one would be getting back onto the roof that way, at least not anytime soon.
My gaze drifted back over the walls and I frowned, peering a little closer. The smoke hung heavily there, like it had been stuck to the walls. I walked over and grimaced at the stench of it. Cleaning this place was going to be a bitch. But I realized that the smoke was adhering to the wall in actual patterns. Patterns that looked like letters. Almost despite myself, I reached out, but I felt the heat from the walls a few feet away. My fingers throbbed a little, and I remember the sting of my hands as I’d touched Grandma Kate. Her clothes had been soaked as well, I assumed with water, but that didn’t make sense. And she’d smelled sweet. I stood back and studied the wall, and finally—finally I could read what she’d written there, in a thin, spidery scrawl. A chill skated over me, and something roiled in my stomach.
It read “Jesus.”
