He laughed. “Who knew?”
It was late by the time they finished and drove back to Dot’s. Wes was weighed down by the fantastic club sandwich, the knowledge he had to be up in too few hours, and Nadine’s story. He knew she didn’twant pity, but he wished he could make her feel better. He felt bad he couldn’t.
“Good grotto find by the way.” She congratulated him as they went back through the gates at Dot’s. Her voice was normal, and when he looked over, that dimple was there again. He felt better. Perhaps letting her talk had been enough for the moment.
“God knows what else is back here,” said Wes as she parked. “A helipad?”
“An arena.”
“A ranch.”
“Area 52?”
Trading increasingly wacky suggestions, they locked up and headed to bed. Separately.
Although when Wes watched Nadine’s door close, missing Murasaki’s tail by a centimeter as she trotted in, he was alarmed but not surprised to find he wished he was going in as well.
Twenty-six
“I got one!”
Wes’s voice rang through the house, and Nadine backed out from under the bed where she was hunting for clues. She swore as she hit her head and went to go find him, trying to keep her animosity in check and to remember they were on the same team.
They’d split up the house to make sure they checked everywhere, and she found Wes in the hallway of the west wing, holding a copy ofThirty Pieces of Silver. Streaks of dust marred his black Cuban shirt, which had a slight V at the collar. There was a freckle near his throat that she couldn’t take her eyes off until he waved the book in her face.
“Hold on,” she said, refocusing her attention. It took a few seconds. “That’s the edition she kept moving around the salon when we were visiting. I recognize the scratch on the cover.”
He opened it with a flourish to reveal a newspaper clipping tucked at the beginning of chapter thirteen. “Voilà.”
She plucked it out. It was an obituary about a woman named Abigail Spencer, minus the notes or highlights of the other obits Dot had left. Also, no shade to Abigail, but it detailed a fairly uneventful life, withoutany of the elements Dot usually appreciated. Nadine turned her attention to the book. “Chapter thirteen. Does it have something to do with the text?” she asked. “Judas was thirteenth at the Last Supper.”
Wes groaned. “Do you remember doing Machiavelli in Professor Otterly’s poli-sci class?”
“That elective nearly killed me.” Nadine flipped through the book, looking for other notes. “When we did that chapter ofThe Prince?”
“We thought it was about being Machiavellian.”
“Then Otterly was mad because he said it was ultimately about the death of God, and none of us got it.” Nadine returned the book, and he reinserted the clipping. “It was like getting to the end of a mystery and finding out some character barely mentioned was the killer.”
“That’s the first project we worked on together,” Wes said.
She shook her head. “That was the narrative journalism class.”
“No, it was Otterly. You sat in front of me, and I asked if you had a partner. That’s why we ended up doing the narrative project, so we didn’t have to juggle a bunch of meetings with different groups.”
“Very pragmatic.” A sparkling electricity passed through her before she decided she was reading too much into it. Wes’s extraordinary memory meant it was normal for him to recall their first project with the same level of detail she had about eating breakfast. “Look at us now.”
“I’ve been on worse jobs,” he said. There was a beat of silence where she caught Wes’s gaze for a moment too long. He coughed and turned back to the book. “I suggest we find everything and examine them later for connections. We can put them on the table in the library.”
She looked at the cabinet. It was third in a row of six, all of them stuffed with enough bric-a-brac to fill the house of a Victorian naturalist. “How did you find it?”
“It was the only book in the whole collection, so it caught my attention.” Wes looked regretful. “No pattern or anything we can apply.”
“Damn.”
“That’s one question for me, by the way.” He gave her a jaunty wave and headed down the hall. “I’ll collect it later.”
***
