Emily laughed out loud when she got to Olsson’s plans for lunch: cabbage and beans, “to make the appointment as unpleasant for him as it will be for me.”
Her amusement evaporated when she read the entry about that meeting.
My tormentor concluded by badgering me for half an hour—half an hour—about the underground level. Did the corridors have to crisscross the entirety? Was there no space for any other use? I admit the design is a vexatious waste, but he knows as well as I that one cannot reason with a man possessed of more wealth than sense. Half an hour! Why is he so fixated?
She sped through the diary after that, heart fluttering, looking for more mentions of Vintner or basements or fixations. When she finally found one, it was uncharacteristically terse:
Spoke at length to V. Despite my inclinations, I fear I am—no, I know I am swayed.
The following sentences were blacked out, apparently by the same fountain pen that had written them. The pages immediately afterward were ripped out, nothing but jagged stubs remaining.
And thus ended the journal.
She jumped to her good foot so quickly in search of something, anything on this Vintner that her cane toppled with an echoing crash.
If Valerian Vintner kept a diary, however, he did not will it to the institution that had employed him as head of administration and facilities. She found a number of references to him as a founding staff member, but nothing suggesting a sideline in the supernatural.
When Bernie appeared at three o’clock to take her home, she handed her notes to him without comment.
“Holy shit,” he said under his breath. “Em, this is—you may have just found the first provable historicalexample of a convincer. Maybe the only provable one, considering how hard it is to sort magic fact from fiction.”
“I haven’t proved anything yet. Still, this guy has at least one surviving descendent ...” She handed over the Minnesota address she’d spent half an hour tracking down.
Bernie flashed his rogues-gallery grin. “Feel up to a field trip?”
She did indeed. Ten minutes later, they were standing on a porch outside Minneapolis as Vintner’s great-granddaughter—a seventy-something woman with flaming red hair—blinked at them in evident surprise.
“Well,” Mrs. Summers née Vintner said, “if you two are robbers trying to worm your way into my house, that’s the most creative opening I’ve ever heard. Come on in and get warm. I don’t have anything worth stealing, anyway.”
“Thank you,” Emily said, laughing and hobbling over the threshold. “But we really are researching his life. He’s an important figure in the early years of the college.”
Mrs. Summers closed the door behind them. “I have a photograph of him—would that help?”
“We’re hoping for information, actually,” Bernie said. “Details about his life.”
Her face fell. “Oh. I don’t know that I can be of much assistance, then. Too far removed, you see. He died before I was born, and I never heard any specifics about his Ashburn years.”
“Perhaps he had personal papers we could read? We wouldn’t need to take them with us,” Emily said.
“You’d be welcome to look if I had anything, but I don’t,” said their host, who appeared genuinely sorry. “And I’m really the only one who would—we Vintners weren’t a fertile bunch. Great-granddad had one son, who had one son, who had me.”
Emily sighed, disappointment seeping into her marrow like freezing rain. “I don’t suppose any stories of him were passed down? Um, unusual hobbies or the like?”
Mrs. Summers screwed up her face and tapped her chin. “I think he liked croquet.”
They’d agreed not to talk about magic unless Mrs. Summers brought it up herself, but now Emily wondered whether to go for broke. They’d run out of other options. Hitting a dead end just as she’d been getting somewhere, a dead end on a journey with no apparent alternate routes, was worse than if she’d never stumbled upon Vintner at all.
She glanced at Bernie. He gave a tiny shake of the head.
“Well,” he said, “we do appreciate your time. Thank you anyway.”
“No, no, wait a moment.” Mrs. Summers tapped her chin again. “He had a little house near Ashburn where he slept during the week because my great-gran insisted on a farmhouse two hours away by horse. My grandfather kept it. There’s always the outside chance that when my father sold it after Granddad’s death, he left some things in the attic.”
Emily emitted a squeak of badly suppressed excitement.
“Of course,” Mrs. Summers added, “that was more than fifty years ago now, so it’s an outside chance of an outside chance that anything would still be there.”
“Worth a shot.” Bernie pulled a notepad from his coat. “What’s the address?”
