Lycanthropy Files Box Set: Books 1-3 Plus Novella Page 13

  “Since she’s gone…” I told them about the wolf paw print in the side yard. “I stepped on it to hide it. I didn’t want either of you to get blamed.”

  “Thanks,” said Ron. “Although I don’t think Peter knows about the true nature of CLS. He just thinks it makes us impulsive and crazy.”

  “I don’t think anyone in the outside world realizes what it does.”

  “But you do,” Ron said. He looked at me with his piercing blue eyes. “And your grandfather did. I think he found something out.”

  “I don’t know, honestly.”

  “Do you think you could pick up where he left off?” asked Leo. “You’re the only one who can.”

  I met his eyes. I had vowed not to enter the research world again, but this was the perfect opportunity to regain my status and credibility. And maybe Robert.

  My heart skipped a beat. Robert was the only one who had ever understood me. If I could figure out a cure for CLS, or at least a way to control it, I could re-enter the field in triumph, and then he would have to respect me. But when the thought of him takeingme back crossed my mind, I found it had lost some of its appeal. Some, but not all.

  Lonna had been right. I was back on the hunt, but was it for the same old quarry?

  I needed to be immersed in data, not people problems. I pushed back my chair and stood. “Gentlemen, feel free to stay here this afternoon if you like, but I have work to do.”

  Leo and Ron exchanged glances. “We should probably head back to Peter’s house,” Leo said. “I’m sure he has a few things he’d like to say to us, so we might as well get it over with.” He made a rude noise. “Like we could go out partying even if we wanted to. We’ll go back through the woods and see if we can find any clues as to what happened to Lance.”

  “Good luck.” I meant it.

  I went up the stairs to Lonna’s room, my heart pounding with the thrill of my resolution to pick up where my grandfather had left off, but when I got there, she was asleep, snoring softly. I didn’t know Lonna to be a napper, but maybe it was the after-effects of the previous night’s sleeping pills. Or the shame of being taken in by Peter Bowman’s charm and manipulation. With a sigh, I returned to the office, ready to start working again.

  I looked at the box. The charred edges curled slightly, water stains blotched the outer layer, and it still smelled faintly of smoke. Even so, I had never seen a more beautiful sight. With shaking fingers, I lifted the top and was comforted by the neat row of charts. I didn’t know how this box had escaped unscathed, but there it was. I only hoped it had enough data in it for me to find my answer.

  I sat at my grandfather’s desk in the study. The drawer to my right still held the books he had earmarked. He had figured out something and had possibly been killed for it. For the first time, my mind made the leap and wondered whether his disappearance and the fire at my lab were connected. I hoped whoever had set the fire hadn’t realized some of the data had been saved. I also wondered who had saved it. That went on the list of questions to ask Gabriel.

  The charts held the notes I had seen countless times before. There had to be something beyond what I had been looking for. Rather than the usual columns in my database, I decided to go the brute-force route and document everything, even down to the minutest detail of objective evidence. That way my mind could look for patterns as my fingers typed, and then I could run some exploratory correlations to see if anything matched up.

  A knock on my door startled me when I was halfway through my second chart.

  “Yes?”

  “Teatime, Doctor.” Gabriel came in with a laden tray. “Your grandfather mentioned you like to have tea and biscotti at four o’clock.”

  “It’s four already?” I stretched my shoulders. The first two charts had been particularly thick, and my database stretched to over a hundred columns.

  “You must be working hard.” He poured the tea out of an antique silver pot into my favorite childhood mug, white with the picture of a black cat, its tail the handle.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “There’s a storeroom downstairs off the ballroom. Your grandfather mentioned he had saved several things for you down there.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I only found exactly where it was this afternoon, and I didn’t want to disturb you. Every time I thought to ask you previously, you were out of the house. And chaos seems to follow you home.”

  “I wonder what else is down there.”

  “The room gets the afternoon sun, so it would be a good time to look. If you’re not making progress?” He inclined his head toward my computer screen.

  “I am, but it’s slow. It’s progress by brute force, not finesse. I’d rather see if he left me anything of his own research to help give me a jump-start.”

  “I understand.”

  “Help me drink this tea, then, and we’ll see what we can find.”

  The main entrance to the ballroom was down the steps that curved to the left of the front hall stairs. I had almost forgotten it existed, but when I was a child, my grandfather and I would go down there and have teatime—or he would have tea, and I would have milk and cookies. We’d sit in the middle of the big, dusty floor and look at the murals illuminated by the afternoon light. It made sense that his laboratory and whatever he left for me would be down there.

  Gabriel had opened the heavy red velvet drapes, faded on the window side from years of sun exposure, and I caught my breath as I descended the stairs and saw the familiar floor. The butler’s footsteps marked a trail through the dust, as mine soon would. The marble had been cut and laid so as to mimic the pattern of light on the forest floor. Above me the domed ceiling with its chandelier that tinkled as I walked also displayed years of neglect, the paint and gold leaf from the night sky replete with stars starting to flake. Even so, it showed no evidence of moisture or mold. The walls of the ballroom by the stairs were covered in paintings of trees to give the impression of a forest. My grandfather had wanted to put new creatures in every year. He had done all the painting work himself and contracted the gold-leaf labor, and he had only made one addition. A black wolf peered at me from behind an oak tree, its golden eyes glowing in the afternoon light. It was so lifelike I caught my breath.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Gabriel’s voice made me jump even though I knew he was right behind me. “I found the room by following your grandfather’s footprints.”

  “He never let it get this dusty. He’d always have someone from the village come in and clean it once a year.”

  “It sounds like he was distracted.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. When he was on the hunt, especially for knowledge, there was no turning him back.” Perhaps we were more alike than I thought.

  “What of your grandmother?”

  “Died before I was born.”

  “Ah.”

  The door to the supposed storeroom was by the wolf, its handle concealed as a tree knot. The only time the outline of the door itself would be visible was now, in the late afternoon, as the sun shone directly into the room. By candlelight or chandelier it would blend into the forest painting. I turned the handle, my heartbeat loud in my ears.

  The storeroom was lined with metal shelves like one would find in a lab, but no table stood in the middle. It was illuminated by a single bulb on a chain. The shelves were lined with a few boxes, but mostly with objects I fondly remembered from my childhood, toys and cups and even some of the old kitchen equipment like the cast-iron skillets he had taught me to make cornbread in. The boxes held old letters from me to my grandfather from during my school years. I would write to him and give him news about me and Andrew since my brother didn’t like to write as much as I did. Something tickled at the back of my brain, but I decided not to chase it and just let it lie dormant until I could tease it out with intuition.

  In spite of the dustiness of the ballroom, this room seemed less dirty. Even the old toys showed no evidence of the dust and din
giness that should have accumulated over the course of twenty or so years. My grandfather must have moved them down here recently.

  “Find anything?” This time Gabriel’s voice seemed an intrusion.

  “Lots of things, but I’m not sure you’d find it interesting. Old toys and stuff, mostly. Did you take anything else out?”

  “Only a cat statuette I thought would look charming on the kitchen windowsill.”

  “A cat statuette? What did it look like?”

  “It was a little angel cat with your name on it. I was going to show it to you this evening.”

  A little angel cat? I didn’t remember one, but my grandfather had pointed my way to important volumes upstairs with statuettes like it. “Do you remember where it was?”

  “I believe it was on the pile of boxes in the back, on top of the box with letters.”

  Indeed, the back wall held only one set of shelves, the rest of it file boxes piled high. An angel cat. I had found the four terrestrial elements, but to balance them, one needed the fifth element of spirit. And I needed to be alone.

  “Whatever I’m doing down here will bore you, Gabriel. Why don’t you go upstairs and continue doing what you were doing? And maybe Lonna would like some tea or coffee.”

  “Yes, Madam.” I heard resentment in his tone, but this was something I wanted to handle on my own. I opened the storeroom door all the way back on its hinges to let the light in the little room. Indeed, the back wall held a door set into the wall so closely that again, it required the sun to see it. I moved the boxes away from it, careful to keep them together in case they, too, held clues to this path my grandfather wanted me to follow. I also had to feel around for the handle to the door—the metal type that needed to be pulled out, then turned—but it moved easily and silently once I found it, and the heavy door opened back and into the laboratory I had only dreamed of.

  The room took up the entire rest of the first floor of the house. It had formerly been the entertaining kitchen with two sinks, a long wooden prep table with marble top, and marble counters along all the walls. The basic equipment was still there, but now every surface was littered with different paraphernalia. I could only guess at the purpose of some of it. Row after row of long wooden test-tube racks with various substances, burners, and even a large piece of equipment that looked like something from a genetics lab crowded the room. I knew my grandfather had been very intelligent and had almost unlimited financial resources, but this was beyond anything I had ever expected to find at Wolfsbane Manor.

  I searched for notes to see if he had written what he'd done, as most scientists would. Nothing. The directions must be in that pile of boxes in the storeroom. I looked around the lab one more time and promised I would be back. My fingers itched to play with the fancy toys all around me. But before I played, or even cleaned, I needed to know what he had done. The question was, where were his notes?

  I returned to the storeroom and sifted through the boxes that had been directly in front of the door. I opened one to find letters in childish handwriting, the ones I remembered sending to my grandfather. Instead of being organized by date, they were tied in little bundles with ribbon. I put that box aside and moved on to the next one.

  My heart skipped a beat when I saw more pediatric charts. A note in scrawled handwriting lay across the top of them: “Charles, this was all I could get. The H. rep and the head nurse are getting suspicious. H.J.”

  The third and fourth boxes held more charts, these very old, including mine and my brother’s. There were also some other papers, yellowed and faded, that appeared to be birth and marriage certificates. I brought these up to the office first, then returned for the other two. I had no idea what the significance of any of it could be, only that my grandfather seemed to have been on the same track. Then there had been a fire, a mysterious disappearance, and now a likely murder. What were we so close to finding that we posed a threat to someone? What kind of threat could be so big it was worth killing for?

  I shuddered as I remembered Louise, her last breaths, her warning about the black wolf. It was out there somewhere, and it may have snatched Lance Bowman after its escapades at the Manor. Another strand in the web, but I was no closer to finding the spider. And if I did find the spider, what would it do to me?

  11

  I sat with the boxes in the study. Now I had five of them, one from my own destroyed laboratory and four from the storeroom downstairs. Television portrays research scientists with a certain glamour, as though the profession is all about sexy underwear under white lab coats, which are ready to come off at the end of a long day of making life-altering discoveries. In reality, there’s a lot of paper and late hours involved. That’s why most of us wear comfortable clothes and geeky glasses.

  The door opened, and Lonna poked her head around.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure.” We looked at each other. I let her speak first.

  “I don’t really know how to say this.”

  “Okay.”

  “This place is giving me nightmares. The first night I was fine, but I don’t know, I guess it’s all the talk of missing children and those awful screams in the woods.”

  “Would you rather stay in town?”

  She shivered. “No, because even though I’m not sleeping well here, I feel like I shouldn’t leave, like there’s something here I have to find.”

  “A husband? Or someone else’s husband?”

  “No, there’s something else.”

  I could see the dark circles under her eyes, and a wisp of guilt curled from my stomach to my chest. “I’m sorry, that was out of turn.”

  “I’m sorry too. I’ve been a bitch. It’s just that I came here to help you, and it seems you’re keeping me out of the loop.”

  “Everything’s been happening really fast.”

  “I understand. But would you please try to do better with including me?”

  “I will if I can.”

  She sat in one of the overstuffed leather armchairs by the reading table. “What’s all that stuff?”

  “Things I found in the storeroom off the ballroom. I’m hoping they’ll give me some clue as to what my grandfather found and the direction his research was going in.”

  “And the smoky one?”

  “From the lab in Memphis. Somehow it got sent here. There must have been a mistake, but I’m keeping it.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “What’s in it?”

  “Medical records from kids with CLS. I’m looking to see if there’s something I missed. Hopefully there’s enough for my database to sift through.”

  She came to stand by the computer and looked over my shoulder at my database. “Research through brute force, huh?”

  “You got it, baby.”

  “I was thinking about going to interview Louise’s family. They’ve lost a child and now a grandmother, so they may be more tied into this than anyone else. How about some research by charm and sympathy?”

  “I could do that, but let’s wait ’til tomorrow. It’s already dinnertime, and I feel like I’m really, really close to figuring out something important.”

  Lonna laughed. “I know that look. And that feeling. I’ll have Gabriel bring something in for you for dinner.”

  “Thanks.” I squeezed her arm. “You’re a good friend.”

  “You are too. Even if you’re a stubborn little thing.”

  “You have no room to talk.”

  But stubborn as I was, I couldn’t figure out what, exactly, I searched for in the data. Finally, a little after midnight, I gave up. The numbers and notations swam before my eyes, and I decided to go to sleep and let my brain work on the puzzle.

  I woke to the sound of male voices in the front hallway. The clock said six-o-five, so I rolled out of bed and threw on my robe. Leo and Ron stood in the door, duffel bags in hand, both of them unshaven and with dark circles under their eyes. Gabriel physically blocked them from entering the house.

  “What’s going on
here?”

  “Doctor Fisher. I didn’t intend for them to wake you.”

  “That’s not what I asked, Gabriel.”

  “We have a couple of strays here.” He pitched his voice low, almost a growl, all the amicability of the day before gone. “And they want to stay here. I knew if we fed them, they’d keep coming back.”

  “At least be civilized and give them a cup of coffee, Gabriel, so we can find out what’s going on.”

  He shot me a look but backed down and went through the den into the kitchen.

  “Thanks, Joanie,” Ron said. “It’s been a rough night.”

  “What happened?” I gestured for them to put their bags to the left of the door by the umbrella stand, not a promise to let them stay, but a possibility.

  Leo plopped down on the new sofa and ran his hands through his hair. “Well, we looked for clues in the woods between here and town, but we couldn’t find anything.”

  “Why would you expect to find anything between here and there? What about the other side of the subdivision?”

  “Because whatever’s happening seems to center around this place.” Leo looked up at me. “I know you probably don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.”

  He was right. I didn’t. “Fine. Then what did you do?”

  “We hung out in town for a while and asked people if they’d seen anything unusual the night before last.”

  “They hadn’t,” added Ron.

  “So we went back to Peter’s place. Marguerite was in bed with the help of a sedative, and Peter sat in the drawing room with a glass of Scotch. He looked like hell, I’ll give him that.”

  “I bet.”

  Gabriel came in with three steaming mugs of coffee and set them down on the table with cream, sugar and spoons. “Would you like anything to eat?” He only addressed me.

  “Do you have any muffins ready?”

  “Baked them this morning.”

  “Would you bring those out, please? And three, no, four plates.” I heard someone moving around on the second floor.