Three little bubbles popped up. Then disappeared.
A shadow fell over his desk and Cal lifted his head, meeting the limpid blue gaze of the Stafford half of “Stafford & Benson.” Jack Stafford gave him a brief, assessing look, but it seemed he could find nothing on Cal’s pristine desk warranting critique.
“Did you handle the Zamora case already? I saw it come in this morning.”
“Yes,” Cal said. “We’re currently talking through some of his options.”
“Good.” Jack clapped him on the shoulder. Cal didn’t flinch; he never did. “Lunch?”
“I’d be happy to.” Cal’s phone lit up again. “Right after I deal with this.”
No, his sister had written.But I see her running all over town before she goes back to Jessica Mayhew’s. She seems to be setting up base with that holier-than-thou freak. I bet she’d talk to me.
Don’t you dare, he responded, schooling his face with a glance at his boss.I’ll handle her.
From the way she looks at you, his sister taunted,I thought you already had.
“Client?” Stafford raised an eyebrow.
“My sister.” Cal placed the phone down deliberately down on the desk. “My parents don’t know how to deal with her, so the burden often falls to me.”
“There’s one of those in every family.” Jack turned on the heel of his polished loafers, tossing off over his shoulder, “I’ll meet you downstairs when you’re ready.”
Cal nodded in acknowledgement, staring down unseeingly at the back of his phone. He was going to have to go up there and put a stop to this—whateverthiswas. Clearly, Odessa could not be trusted to not go around poking wasps’ nests and provoking Ben. And as for Nadine—
Well. Right now, she wanted to find her sister. She just thought they were cold and unfeeling, but if she kept disturbing the dead, soon she would think they were far more than that. And after writing her those letters, he felt responsiblefor her. If she was living under their roof, he could keep a better eye on her. Monitor her comings and goings. Who she spoke to—and why. Better he control the narrative than Jessica Mayhew poison hermind with half-truths and lies and she became so compromised that his father had no choice but to intervene.
He didn’t think Jessica’s house was particularly safe, either. That little cottage had lost part of its roof during one of last year’s intense summer storms. Jessica had spent the whole summer treating and replacing all of that rotten wood, piling the detritus in front of her house for the sanitation men to haul away. Like many of the townsfolk in Argentum, Jessica was barely scraping by, holding on for tourist season. She’d almost certainly cut corners. It was probably all mildew beneath those carpeted floors.
Real estate law was not Cal’s specialty but he had been peripherally involved with enough appraisals to know what detracted from value—and what made things uninhabitable and unsafe. His parents often had people over to Ravensgate to inspect the property for termites and rot. Everything had to be up to code and they didn’t even rent.
Cal paused, his eyes flicking briefly in the direction his boss had taken. He opened up a new browser tab and typed in “California Rental Regulations for Quality.”
A dark smile flickered over his mouth as he picked up his phone.
???????
The drive back to Argentum changed something in him. As the live oaks yielded to evergreens and the ground darkened into that familiar bloody pyrite-red, Cal could feel the wildness inside him surge like an animal pulling at its tethers.
Ravensgate was oppressive, but it was home.
“Welcome back, sir,” Thomas said, already waiting to greet him in the foyer as he shrugged out of the light suit coat that was perfectly suited to San Francisco weather and already close to boiling here. “Shall I have some coffee brought into the library for you?”
Cal folded his coat carefully over his arm. “No, that’s fine. Is my sister here?”
“No.” An unreadable flicker of emotion passed through the butler’s eyes. “Miss Cullraven is out.”
“And my brother? My father?”
“In their rooms, I would imagine.” The older man looked at him piercingly. “I can inform them of your arrival.”
“I’m sure they already know,” Cal said dryly. “Thanks, Thomas. That will be all.”
The overly formal dismissal earned him a grimace and a nod. A suitable exchange, Cal thought, for that distant ‘sir’ tinged as always with the faintest suggestion of disrespect.
He dropped his briefcase on his bed and loosened the neck of his shirt, sighing in relief. Ravensgate was an old house. It groaned in the dead of night as the sun-soaked woods expanded in the cooling night air. Old brass pipes rattled and banged within the depths of the solid walls of pine, and the shutters knocked against the windows like hollow bones in the wind.
But it was also a house of silences and dead air. There was a certain sort ofquietone experienced while hunting, after the first shot was fired and all the birds had flown.
