“Gavin? Are you awake?”
I wrenched the door open. “Oscar, do you have the book?”
“No, you have it. How tired were you last night when you left?”
“I don’t have it.” I indicated the table. “I left it there. You didn’t come in and take it while I was asleep?”
His face drained of color. “No.”
I pressed my fingers into my temples where a headache was starting to bloom.
Oscar pushed past me. “What’s that?” He picked up something from under the table. “Gavin.” The ominous tone clanged a warning and set my heart thudding in my chest.
“Yes?”
“Was this here when you went to bed?” He held up a small effigy made of straw and wearing a pair of spectacle frames fashioned from thin wire.
My stomach dropped. My mouth went dry.
“It must have fallen off the table,” Oscar said.
“What does it mean? Am I the next person to be abducted?”
“I don’t know, but it is a message.”
“Message?” I said weakly. My brain was having difficulty grasping his meaning. Usually sharp, it was failing me badly.
“A message that says the abduction of those women is linked to last night’s theft of the Mackenzie book. I don’t know who would want those women or why, but I do know one person who desperately wanted the book.”
So did I—John J. Defoe.
Chapter 7
Oscar would have charged off to confront Mr. Defoe then and there if I hadn’t blocked the doorway. The fire in his eyes raged so fiercely that I worried he’d forcibly move me out of the way.
I put up my hands, prepared to press them against his chest if I had to. “Oscar, don’t do anything rash.”
“I won’t,” he growled.
“We can’t accuse him of abduction and theft.”
“You’re right. We need to gather evidence first.”
“We can’t even accuse him then. If we find evidence pointing to him, we take it to the police. They can handle it.”
“We can handle it.”
“You’re forgetting something, Oscar.” At his blank look, I continued. “He’s an iron magician. He can tear sharp slivers off iron things and fling them at us with the movement spell. We’ll become human pincushions!”
“Defoe may have lied about knowing the iron-moving spell. Iron magicians are incredibly rare, and we only know of one who knows the spell to move iron. If he could do that spell, India and Matt would have heard of Defoe and warned us, but they didn’t. Your grandfather was an iron magician, wasn’t he? Could he make it fly?”
“No, and I understand that not every magician knows a movement spell. My point is that Defoe says he can, so we must assume he told the truth until we learn otherwise. It’s too great a risk to confront him. I say we take our suspicions to the police. We’ll warn them about his magic.”
Oscar lowered his head, his shoulders slumping. When he looked up again, he was more composed, his brow cleared of the furrow that had formed there upon first mentioning Defoe.
“All right,” he conceded. “We’ll go to the police and offer our assistance.”
I collected a clean handkerchief from my valise and plucked my hat off the valet stand. I followed him out of the room and locked the door, pocketing the key just as my stomach growled.
