Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (30 page)

Dani joined her and saw a pair of motorcycle headlights coming up the drive. She checked the thermal scan on the security monitor to confirm it was two humans, riding two very hot motorcycles.

Otto began to growl, a deep, ominous rumble from the back of his throat.

25.

Tommy had found Carl sitting on his motorcycle by the side of the road near the turn that led to the Gardener farm. Carl told Tommy he needed to think, and he did his best thinking while riding. Tommy said he didn’t need an explanation, but that his friends back at the house were worried about him.

They parked their bikes in the garage bay closest to the house and closed the door behind them. Tommy wore a down vest beneath his leathers and a fleece face shield beneath his helmet, but he was still cold to the bone from the icy wind. When he used his handheld infrared scanner to check the courtyard, he saw that Carl, who was walking ahead of him, registered several degrees colder than normal.

“You need to get inside and warm up,” Tommy said, worried for his friend. He turned off the scanner to save the batteries. “It’s too cold for you to be riding without more protection.”

“You’re probably right,” Carl said, though he seemed unaffected by the chill.

“Has anybody seen my phone?” Tommy said once he was inside, taking off his coat and hanging it on a hook. “I tried to call you, but I couldn’t find it.”

“It’s in your barn coat,” Dani said.

She seemed oddly unemotional, Tommy thought, or maybe indifferent. He’d hoped for a sign that she was glad to see him.

“Quinn, this is my friend Carl Thorstein,” Tommy said. “He’s been looking forward to meeting you.”

“Your hand is freezing,” Quinn said as he shook Carl’s hand.

“I left my warmer gloves at home,” Carl said. He turned and walked to the sink, where he held his hands under hot water as Tommy checked his security monitors, visual and infrared.

“I want to show you something,” Dani told the others. “But I need the computer in the study.”

“You can use this one,” Tommy said. He brought the laptop and the wireless mouse over and set them up on the food island in front of Dani. She did not say thank you or even look at him. She plugged the SD card into the laptop and waited.

“This is the file I found on the SD card mailed to my office,” she said. “We have someone inside St. Adrian’s helping us.”

“A student?” Carl said. “Do you know his name?”

“I don’t,” Dani said.

“How do you know he’s giving you reliable information?” Carl said. “It could be disinformation meant to lead you away from the truth.”

Tommy noticed that Carl had said
you
, not
us
.

“I thought of that,” Dani said, “but usually when someone is lying”— she looked briefly at Tommy—“they tend to check in to see if you believe the lie. It’s hard to lie and just trust that the lie is going to work. We interrogate people who are lying at the police station or the DA’s office and we know they’re lying when they start asking us questions because they want to know how much we know. They’d probably get away with it if they could just shut up, but they never do.”

She showed them the long list of students, then clicked on the shorter list she’d compiled from her Google searches—William H. Druitt, class of 1863; Karl Francis von Königsberg, class of 1842; Albert Gitchell, class of 1917; and
the others. Each name came with a story, until it became clear to everyone what the school had been teaching for over a century.

“I was thinking that at some point, not now, but at some point we might want to pass this list on to someone like my friend Ed Stanley,” Dani said. “The recent graduates are still out there.”

“How many kids have they graduated since the school started?” Tommy said.

“This list has 662 names,” Dani said, “but I couldn’t find out how many they’ve graduated overall. And I was surprised by how little is really known about the school’s history. I Googled it and came up with almost nothing. Ruth, do you know much about it?”

“I know it was a fort during the Revolutionary War,” Ruth said. “Congress consolidated its military training facilities at West Point prior to the War of 1812, and the garrisons were converted into a private school after that. I’m pretty sure they graduate over a hundred boys a year today. Enrollment was much smaller when the school started.”

“Whoever sent us this list picked these names for a reason,” Dani said. “Or copied a list of selected names. It can’t be true that every graduate of St. Adrian’s went on to mentor a mass murderer or a serial killer. I’m thinking these men are a subgroup, like the Skull and Bones Club at Yale. All private schools have secret clubs.”

“Mine didn’t,” Quinn said. “Or if it did, no one told me about it.”

“Which proves how secret it was,” Dani said, smiling.

Tommy found his old resentments rising, having grown up a townie with an elite private school nearby. His jock friends had called the St. Adrian boys
Addies
and took pleasure in spray-painting taunts and curse words on the private school’s high stone walls. He also realized he resented that Dani was making jokes with Quinn but not with him.

“But how is any of this related to Abbie Gardener?” Carl said.

“Wait here,” Tommy said. “I might be able to answer that.”

He went to the den and opened the safe behind the mirror. Abbie’s box
was right where he’d left it. He brought it into the kitchen and set it on the food island, and the others gathered around.

“We found this in a secret compartment in the desk Abbie was using up in the library archives,” Tommy said.

“It wasn’t a secret compartment,” Ruth said. “It was where secretaries used to keep their typewriters.”

“What’s a typewriter?” Tommy said.

“It’s beautiful,” Carl said, reaching his hand out toward the box, but reluctant to touch it.

“The problem is, we can’t figure out how to open it.”

“It may be a Himitsu-Bako box,” Ruth said.

Tommy looked at her with surprise.

“Well, I
am
a research librarian,” she said. “I’m going to need to do more than just sit around making sandwiches. They were popular in nineteenth-century Japan for keeping personal secrets. They open with a sequence of twists and turns and squeezes. Some take two moves, but others can take up to three hundred. In Europe in the eighteenth century they were called burr puzzles because the interlocking pieces were thought to resemble a seed burr.”

“Or Lemarchand’s boxes,” Quinn said, taking the box in his hands and turning it over. “Believed to be portals to other planes of existence.”

“You believe in that?” Dani said.

“No,” Quinn said. “I read it in a horror novel.”

“The inlay may be a version of
yosegi-zaiku
,” Ruth said. “Japanese parquetry from the Edo period. Himitsu-Bako boxes were decorated with it, but the mosaic tiles were sometimes used as a key to open the box. Like those plastic puzzles where you slide the pieces around to make a picture.”

“I saw Bobby Fischer on the
Tonight Show
once, and he unscrambled one of those in about ten seconds,” Carl said.

“The chess master could do it,” Dani said. “Quinn, you wanna give it a shot?”

Tommy felt insulted again, even though he saw the logic of asking Quinn and not him. Quinn pressed on various pieces of the inlay for no more than thirty seconds, then set the box down.

“I don’t see how the pieces move if there’s not a free space to move the first one into,” he said.

“You wanna try, Carl?” Tommy said.

Carl shied away. “If Quinn can’t figure it out, I’m sure I can’t,” he said. “Why don’t you give it a try?”

“I have,” Tommy said, puzzled by Carl’s reluctance—it was the kind of challenge he would ordinarily be drawn to. “No luck.”

“Try again,” Dani said, the hostility in her voice cutting. “You’re good with secrets.”

Tommy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and counted to ten, or tried, getting as far as three.

“Excuse us for a second,” he said. “Dani, can I talk to you for a minute in the study?”

26.

“What’s going on, Dani? You’re furious at me and I have no idea why.”

He leaned against his desk. She stood at the window, staring out into the darkness. She tried to collect her thoughts, to breathe deeply, to calm down and tell herself that the task at hand was more important than their relationship. For a moment she wondered if she could convince Tommy to postpone this conversation, but when she turned and saw the look on his face, she knew it couldn’t wait.

“When were you planning to tell me Cassandra Morton was here?” she said.

“The second you walked in the door,” he said. “When were you going to tell me you intended to bring Quinn into the circle? That decision should have been discussed first.”

“There are a lot of things that should have been discussed first,” she said. “Things that should have been discussed before you and I ever decided to . . . get involved.”

“Getting involved with you wasn’t something I ‘decided,’” he told her. “I won’t speak for you, but for me, it wasn’t something I could have either planned or prevented. An army couldn’t have stopped me from falling in love with you.”

“Don’t say another word,” she said. “You’re just digging the hole deeper.”
“What hole?” he said, lowering his voice so that the people in the other room wouldn’t hear him. “What hole are you talking about?”

“The hole of distrust,” Dani said. “All right, I’ll give you a chance. Tell me why Cassandra Morton is here.”

“I don’t know why she’s here,” Tommy said. “She just broke up with some Brazilian soccer dude and she needed a friend. I guess that’s why.”

“You didn’t call her?”

“No,” Tommy said. “As far as I knew, she was still in Los Angeles.”

Dani moved toward the door.

“Wait,” Tommy said. “Did you talk to her?”

“I ran into her in the parking lot at the inn,” Dani said. “She couldn’t find her rental car. Which was about twenty feet away in plain sight, by the way.”

“She
thinks
I called her,” Tommy said. “Apparently I pocket-dialed or something. She thought I was reaching out to her. I wouldn’t do that.”

“You never told her, ‘You have a home in me’?” Dani asked. “And by the way, it’s not ‘You’ve Got a Home in Me.’ It’s ‘You’ve Got a
Friend
in Me.’”

“I know,” Tommy said. “It was a reference to something she said once. Her parents had just sold the house she grew up in, so she said to me, ‘You’re my home now.’ And when we broke up, I told her she’d always have a home in me. It was just one of those things you say to soften the blow.”

“You’re saying you didn’t invite her here,” Dani said. “That you pocketdialed her?”

“Apparently.”

Dani was too hurt to laugh. “Let me see your phone.”

“My phone?”

“Let. Me. See. Your. Phone.”

He handed it to her. She scrolled through his text messages and found the one she’d seen earlier. She showed it to him.

He looked at it, stunned.

“That’s one heckuva pocket-dial,” she said.

He read the message three times, then checked the time it was sent.

“I was asleep when this was sent,” Tommy said.

“You were asleep? Now you’re trying to say you sleep-texted? No, wait—you sleep-pocket-texted?”

“Dani—”

“I was told you were going to betray me,” she said. “That’s why I’m kicking myself. Got it from a highly reliable source.”

Tommy’s eyes opened wide as he recalled that the angel had told him exactly the same thing.

“Someone you trust will betray you. How you handle it will make all the difference,” he said. “Charlie told me the same thing.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m not sure. Why didn’t
you
tell
me
?”

“I thought . . . Were you worried that I’d betray you?”

Tommy thought about it. “I think so,” he said, “and it made me afraid. There’s nothing I’m more afraid of than losing you.”

“Then why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t lie to you. I’m not lying to you now.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then said, “Well, when Cassandra gets here, we can ask her what happened.”

“What do you mean, when Cassandra gets here? You invited her?”

“I borrowed your phone while you were out looking for Carl.”

“You read my private texts
and
sent her a message from my phone, pretending to be me?”

“I did,” she said. She felt deeply ashamed. At the time, she’d thought what she was doing fell under the rubric of “All’s fair in love and war.” She was fighting back, striking a blow against all the pretty little flirts who’d ever batted their phony eyelashes and stolen guys away from the smart girls who didn’t know how to play that game. She now felt ashamed for a number of reasons, but chief among them was allowing herself to be reduced to an insecure fourteen-year-old again. “It was wrong, but I did it.”