Jenn Bennett - Grim Shadows

Oliver Ginn.

Noel Irving.

Inside his shock-fueled brain, the letters rearranged themselves without effort.

An anagram.

A goddamn anagram.

“Anyway, whoever the guy is, we figure he killed your friend and trashed the place looking for something. Probably got scared off when Ackerman banged on the door.”

“How?”

“Pardon?”

“How did he die?” Lowe asked in a voice that sounded far away.

“We aren’t really sure, yet. You say he was twenty-five. The Ackermans and a couple of other neighbors said the same thing, and his identification confirms it.” The detective lifted his hat to scratch his head. “But when we found him, I know this might sound crazy, but he looked . . .”

“What?” Lowe demanded, trying to read the man’s face.

“He looked like an old man.”

Jesus Christ.

Lowe stared at the detective for a suspended moment, a thousand thoughts jumbling inside his head, and none of them jibing . . . until his gaze landed on broken crayons scattered across the floor.

Fall apart later, he told himself, fighting the onslaught of emotion threatening to bring him to his knees. Just keep it together for a little longer.

“Where have you taken Stella?” he asked.

“Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum, on Silver and Mission. Everyone said the next living relative would be Goldberg’s father—”

“He’s a drunk,” Lowe said angrily. “Adam wouldn’t let Stella anywhere near him. Not that the old man even gave a damn. Last Adam heard, he was somewhere in Philadelphia.”

“Court will still try to contact him. Anyone else you know? An aunt, maybe? Deceased wife’s family?”

“The girl knows me,” Lowe insisted. “I’ve seen her every week since she was born. I’m her family.”

“Legally?”

Oh, Christ. “She’s deaf. She needs special care,” Lowe argued.

The detective set his hat down on the counter, nodding. “The orphanage director is aware.”

Lowe started to say something else, but another cop signaled for the detective outside. “Listen,” the detective said, “you can petition the court for guardianship. And you can go talk to the ladies at the orphanage—maybe even set up visitation. But we can’t just release her into anyone’s care. I’m really sorry, and I know you’re distraught. Believe me, I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we find out what happened here today. Give me a number where we can contact you. Hold on, I’ll be right back.”

Blindly, Lowe pulled out a business card and left it on the counter next to the detective’s hat. And when the man stepped outside to talk with one of the cops, Lowe strode to Adam’s curtained-off storage room at the back of the shop. Without hesitation, he pushed aside an empty crate and popped open a secret panel in the wall. The iron box was still there, thank God.

The key was hidden separately. Lowe rummaged through a tray of old tools. Found it at the bottom. Quickly unlocked the iron box.

The crocodile statue stared back at him. It took Lowe several moments to get over the surprise of seeing it there. Another moment to realize that he couldn’t feel any strange energy. But when he moved the statue and found only one amulet—not two—he had a damn good idea where the other had gone.

Hadley certainly hadn’t come here to make small talk about the weather.

And if Noel Irving had just killed Adam to get his hands on the amulet, what the hell would he do to Hadley?

HADLEY SPENT HOURS SEARCHING her father’s house for the key to the family mausoleum. The staff thought her mad. She didn’t give a damn. Father would be back any minute from his checkup at the hospital, and she was prepared to outright tell him what was going on—that she knew everything about her mother and Noel Irving. That she’d been helping Lowe search for the crossbars the entire time.

That he’d betrayed both of them.

And that she’d fallen for someone who’d broken her heart.

It was all bound to come out sooner or later. Levin might’ve already called Father, for all she knew. Regardless, she had to get inside the mausoleum. If she had to bloody her fists to knock the door down with her own hands, she would.

“Miss,” the oldest housekeeper said, blowing a stray hair out of her reddened face. “I really don’t know where else to look. It’s probably in your father’s safe. When he gets home, we’ll ask him for it. But if he comes back and finds you’ve torn through the house, he’ll be very upset. And we’re not to be upsetting him in his condition.”

“If we don’t find that key, his condition will get a hell of a lot worse on its own. And what safe are you talking about? The one in his study?”

The housekeeper’s plump face flushed a deeper shade of red. “I meant the other one.”

“What ‘other’ one?”

“Can’t we just—”

Hadley narrowed her eyes. “Show me the safe, Charlotte. Now.”

She followed the woman up the grand staircase to her father’s bedroom. The nightstand next to his bed had a drawer that didn’t open. The housekeeper lifted off the lamp and pulled the piece of furniture away from the wall. The back opened up to expose a black safe, the size of the front drawer.

“I don’t know the combination,” Charlotte insisted.

But Hadley did. Her father used the same predictable numbers he always used: Hadley’s date of birth. And after a few quick turns of the knob, the lock clicked open. She tried not to look too hard at the few things that lay inside: photographs of her mother, some legal documents, a stack of cash. Several keys were stuffed inside a small envelope, but she had no trouble finding the one she needed: one large key and one small, both on a hammered ring.

The mausoleum was built by her mother’s grandfather in 1856, a year after the house was built with the Murray family’s newly acquired gold rush fortune. The story was that Great-Grandfather Murray wanted to build it in Laurel Hill Cemetery—back when it was called Lone Mountain—but got into a fistfight with someone from the records office when he attempted to purchase a plot of land. Angry at the city, he was resolved to build it in his own backyard.

It wasn’t large. The roof of the neoclassical structure was barely two feet above Hadley’s head. And though it was much deeper than tall, half the back end had been swallowed by huckleberry bushes, and the entire building was dwarfed by the cover of her grandmother’s prized Blackwood Acacia tree. One of the two columns sported a large crack—earthquake damage—but both it and the house had been spared during the Great Fire, as they were on the northwestern side of Russian Hill.

With afternoon drizzle misting her hair, Hadley fitted the heavy key into the mausoleum’s ironclad door. The rusty lock gave way, but the door was a little more work, requiring all her weight and strength to budge. Its squeal of protest made Hadley wince as she finally heaved it open.

She switched on a flashlight. Six crypts, three on each side, all covered in a pale sheet of dust. Great-grandmother and -father, grandmother and -father. Hadley looked past those and focused on the top two crypts near the ceiling.

VERA MURRAY BACALL

WIFE AND MOTHER

BORN 1875–DIED 1906

Her coffin lay on the other side of the carved granite door. No crossbar inside, of course. Her father would’ve found it when he defied the law that forbid burial within the city and sneaked her remains into the mausoleum during the chaotic aftermath of the Great Fire.

But the last crypt, her father’s future resting spot, remained empty. If her mother was going to hide something, that would be the place.

“Here goes nothing,” Hadley murmured to herself, and inserted the smaller key into the iron crypt door.

Dread hit her like a slap against the cheek.

Bad energy she’d recognize anywhere. Adam had been right about iron keeping things contained.

She directed the flashlight’s beam into the dark space. The final canopic jar. The human-headed lid representing Imsety, protector of the liver.

What a fine joke her mother played, hiding the crossbar in a place that no one would have reason to open until after her father’s death. When it was too late for him to use the amulet.

She’d never hated her mother more.

After flicking off the flashlight, Hadley hauled the canopic jar out of the crypt and took one last look at the pictograms before dashing it against the granite floor. A flash of gold danced over the ceramic shards and skipped out of the mausoleum chamber, into the muddy ground outside.

Hadley stepped into the gray light and saw the thing more clearly. It wasn’t a plain crossbar like the others. This one had a loop on top, onto which a long gold chain was attached. The top of the amulet. Once it was attached to the other pieces, it became a necklace.

Hadley stepped over a gnarled root of the Acacia tree and stooped to pick it up. Her fingers met someone else’s. She looked up and found herself face-to-face with Oliver Ginn.

“Hello, Miss Bacall,” he said, snatching the crossbar out of the mud.

She jerked away and stumbled to her feet.

“Doing a little afternoon grave robbing?” He wiped mud from the crossbar with the cuff of his dark coat sleeve as drizzle beaded on the brim of his hat.

“That doesn’t belong to you,” she said, grabbing.

Long fingers closed around the chain as he yanked it out of her reach. “If we’re being accurate, it doesn’t belong to anyone but the ancient priestesses back in the desert. Your father was a fool to track down the pieces. A bigger fool to send children out to reclaim it after your mother spent all that effort to keep it out of his hands.”