Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic (11 page)

Now that she had the trunk unpacked, she could load the car up some more, if the road was open to her father’s house. She glanced at her watch. If she was allowed in the neighborhood, she had time for one load before nightfall.

She didn’t want to distract Conan from his investigations. For all she knew, he believed he was harboring a murderer in his basement. She needed to disprove his ridiculous suspicions about missing clients and then decide how much she trusted him. It wouldn’t be easy to explain why she thought Bo might have been kidnapped by a madman. It would be even less easy to explain why she might be living with her own personal Death Star hanging over her head.

Explanations might require calling in her paranormal family. She shuddered at the prospect but started a mental list. Her psychic grandmother? Perhaps the more logical Francesca—except what could a psychic pilot do? Cho, the Finder, then. But would he believe Bo was alive?

Given the incredible list he was staring at, Conan thought he ought to be reaching for the aspirin bottle about now, but amazingly, his head didn’t hurt as it usually did at this hour.

He swigged from his water bottle, leaned back in the chair he’d vaguely realized had been moved to the wrong side of his desk, and glared at the spreadsheet he’d created.

He’d started out looking at the active FF files that felt
dead
to him. In the computer, the clients appeared to be very much alive and cashing their monthly checks. But once he started contacting those clients, either they had found jobs and were surprised to have heard from the foundation…or they were dead or missing.

Every one of those clients had been handpicked by Miss Dorothea Franklin.

Beware Chinese predators.

Chinese cellar danger.

He couldn’t believe the Librarian was telling him dotty Dorrie was a murderer, especially for sums as relatively insignificant as these. Sure, over the years, small checks might add to a substantial sum, especially when all the diverted funds were added together, but she was driving a damned Prius and living with her father! Her father was worth millions. Theft did not compute.

What did make sense was that someone was targeting Dorothea. Why? What he was looking at had taken place over years, which could make it an old, very odd grudge—unless one counted the disappearance of Franklin’s heir apparent, which made everything much, much trickier.

He opened the documents he’d saved on her mother’s murder. The murderer had only been charged with theft and manslaughter. He sent a question to one of his team asking them to check on whether the bastard was still in jail and for how much longer. He didn’t see how that related, but he’d work every angle.

For the Librarian to become involved… He’d thought that meant Malcolms were involved. So far, his weird messenger had only expressed interest in people who contacted that sticky Malcolm genealogy website, the one that had held Conan obsessed since he’d heard his sister-in-law’s story. He’d checked and didn’t see any record of Dorothea Franklin accessing that site.

But Malcolms were definitely vanishing. Like Magnus, who had Malcolms way back on the family tree. Did that mean Dorrie’s brother might be a Malcolm? And Dorrie’s clients?

Conan’s adrenaline pumped harder. Using his back door to the genealogy site, he began comparing her client files to names and addresses in the Malcolm server.

He found matches for a couple, but not all. Crap. Before he dug deeper into this sewer, he needed to talk to Dorrie. Standing up, he realized he needed food, too. He glanced out the two-story-high windows and saw that the sun had lowered to the horizon while he was working. It would be dark shortly. She was probably starved. Despite her petite size, Miss Frosty ate real meals.

And while it was still daylight, he probably needed to check the curb for stacks of garbage bags containing all his stuff. Judging from his kitchen appliances and—he glanced at the turned-around chair and computer—and other bits, the woman could not leave well enough alone.

He was pretty certain that red painting hadn’t been on that wall either, he decided, jogging down the stairs, carrying the blazer he’d yanked off earlier. An old girlfriend had painted that oil for him, and he’d always hated it, but it kind of lit up that dark wall better than the…he couldn’t remember what had been there before.

Downstairs, he heard no sound of Toto yipping or Dorrie throwing fits or flinging junk.
Toto and Dorothea
! He should have known better than to get involved. If she thought he was the Wizard of Oz, he was in heap big trouble.

To his surprise, the downstairs was empty. Dropping his blazer over the banister, he checked his newly hung front door. It was red. He stared at it in incredulity for a moment before verifying that stacks of garbage bags didn’t litter the lawn. He shut and locked the new door, then opened the garage. Her car was gone.

The woman had painted his damned door red and scarpered.

If she was truly dangerous, he’d assume his house was about to blow up, except his nose for trouble was already twitching, and that never meant
he
was in trouble. He always fell into mischief without warning. Something else was wrong.

He hit Dorrie’s number on his iPhone and got voice mail. He left a message about dinner and began to pace. He should have put a tracking device on her damned car. How long had she been gone? Hadn’t he
told
her to stay close?

He’d paced from one end of the room to the other before he realized—
he could walk a straight line in his jam-packed basement!

Finally looking around and taking note of the spaciousness of his surroundings, he’d have to guess she’d spent the entire afternoon moving things out. Where in hell was his stuff?

Why was his wetsuit on the floor? The burbling fountain had to be hers although he wasn’t certain what was holding it up under the flowing white sheet. His equipment was all neatly lined up on the shelves on the far wall, next to a mysterious pile of fat gym bags.

His book boxes? With suspicion, he eyed a sheet-draped table with pretty bowls and candles on it. She’d turned his packing boxes into a table? The space almost felt like a real family room.

His boards! He hurried back to the garage and breathed with relief. They were all out here, arranged in some order known only to his dotty guest. His bikes had been moved to a different corner to allow for the boards on the wall. He probably needed bike hooks.

Where the hell was she?

***

Dorrie was shoving a shopping bag of underwear onto the stack of other clothes piled in her front seat on top of her purse. She really needed to find an apartment. Conan’s place didn’t have drawers, and living out of bags would grow old fast. If she had anywhere to haul her father’s furniture, she could hire movers —except she feared for a moving van’s safety. Geologists may have cleared the road for opening, but she knew this ground was unstable. She probably shouldn’t even be out here but she couldn’t bear letting the last of her mother’s possessions fall into the ocean.

Forcing her car door closed before anything spilled out, wiping her foolish, sentimental tears, she leaned against the Prius and gazed over the orange barricades blocking what remained of the garden. The views from the house had once been spectacular, but she didn’t think her father would ever enjoy them again. She’d already called the president of his realty company to ask about shoring up the yard. Tomorrow, she’d have to ask her father about selling. The house had done nothing but cause heartbreak. He ought to be glad for an excuse to be rid of it.

Except with nowhere else to go, Ryan Franklin might never leave the retirement home. Bo’s death had sapped him of his usual willpower.

She sagged against the car, overwhelmed by the all the burdens she bore. But life went on. She had Bo’s kids to think of. She shoved off the car to make one final inspection.

Inside the house, she attached Toto’s leash to a chair leg so she could rescue a photo of her mother in a shell frame from the top of the bookshelves. She’d made the frame for her father when she was twelve, just after her mother died. It hurt to look at it, but it would hurt more to lose it. She set the photo on the front table, starting a stack for the next trip up here.

Fighting tears, Dorrie steadied herself in the sunroom while she looked over the remains of the back yard and checked for valuables she might have missed. The energy was very bad in the glass room. She could feel the earth’s pain and anger and knew it was time to run. Taking one last glance around, she noted the French doors had shifted so badly, they no longer closed.

A familiar yip jerked her head up. She’d left Toto in the front room, hadn’t she?

Just beyond the glass panels of the sun room—on the slippery edge of the cliff where a metal bird bath sculpture leaned precariously—Toto’s leash was caught on one of the sculpture’s feet. He was turned expectantly toward the sunroom, yipping to her for release.

“Toto!” she screamed, then covered her mouth to prevent more shrieks. What if her shouts crumbled what remained of the earth?

Oh, gods above, please,
not Toto
! She could not bear to lose one more piece of her tattered life. Toto trusted her for everything. He was looking to her now, believing she could save him, when she was scarcely capable of saving herself.

Weeping, murmuring prayers, testing the muddy, chaotic
chi
, Dorrie swung the French door open. It stuck on a growing crack in the pavers of the patio, but there was room enough for her to squeeze out. The atmosphere was deadly out here, the earth energy shifting and groaning beneath her as she sought a safe path to her dog.

The lawn looked safe, but she knew it wasn’t.

The ocean crashed on the rocks at the bottom of the fragile cliff.

Toto stopped his yipping and wagged his tail once he saw her. Her fault. She should have secured him better, should have noticed the door had opened, shouldn’t have brought him here in the first place…

Maybe, if she hurried… She dashed across the small patch of lawn, feeling superstitious because she knew every footstep worsened the pattern of bad energy, even if there was no evidence beyond the vibrations she felt. As the sprinkling system came on—she should have turned the damned thing off—she kneeled down beside the statue. Toto licked her face. How the hell had he managed to catch his leash under the leg of a hundred pound statue? She could barely lift the base…

The heavy metal tilted and fell away, smashing into the turf as Dorrie wrapped Toto’s leash around her wrist. Not just the earth energy quaked—the whole ground shuddered.

And the ground slid from beneath her knees.

***

Conan cursed himself for being an idiot, for driving up to the bluffs when he had work to do, and his stomach said it was past time to be fed, all because some fool woman couldn’t stay where he’d put her. Women never stayed put. He knew that. They weren’t objects he could find where he left them, when he was ready to look for them. Which was why he didn’t have them in his life. He just didn’t have time to go looking for one every time she strayed.

And still he was following his twitching nose into the hills. At least it wasn’t raining today, but it was almost dark. His headlights cut across minor rock and mud slides left from the previous day’s downpour.

He would kick himself three ways from Sunday if he drove all the way up here and she wasn’t here—but he’d come to know the fool woman a little too well. She might pretend to be her father’s daughter in the office, but she was a house person. Now that she’d unloaded her car into his basement, she was picking up more junk. At least his junk was useful. She was probably gathering more dusty glass and noisy wind chimes.

Sure enough, she’d left her car inside the hedge at the street end of the drive rather than risk her Prius near the crumbling house. If she took care of herself as well as she did the car, she’d damned well not be out here at all, stupid, idiot woman. It was okay for her to risk herself but not the car?

Adrenaline pumping, Conan parked behind her and slammed out, striding toward the front until he heard shouts. His pulse rate kicked up two notches as he located the shouts and loped down a pathway leading to the side of the house—where his heart almost stopped altogether.

Dog under her arm, Dorrie was clinging to the trunk of a spindly tree with one hand while the chunk of earth she kneeled on cracked away from the roots.

Far below, the surf pounded noisily against rocks.

“Dorrie!” Conan shouted in sheer terror. The wind had picked up, and he didn’t know if she could hear him. She was so focused on clinging to the tree and the dog that she didn’t even glance up. Shock etched her normally serene face.

Fear threatened to wrench his heart straight out his throat. “Dorrie!” he shouted. She still didn’t hear him.

He needed rope. He glanced at the sprawling mansion and knew it could take him an hour to search the place, and he still might come up empty-handed. “Rope?” he shouted into the wind as he jogged closer. How could he find rope if she couldn’t hear him?

As if sensing his approach, she finally glanced his way, then shook her head. At sight of him. her expression turned to relief and determination. She let the dog loose on its tether. “Take Toto!”

The ground she kneeled on was at the very edge of the cliff. Even as he watched, clods of dirt tumbled from the crack forming between her and the tree she clung to—just as it had the day the rain had washed out the skull. The tree was slender enough for her to wrap an arm around now that she’d set down the dog, but the tree was barely hanging on to the edge.

“Are you out of your friggin’ mind?” he thought he shouted back, but the earth groaned and tilted, tumbling him to his knees on the wet grass. The damned sprinklers were running.

Terrified that if he looked away for even one second, she would vanish into the waves below, Conan concentrated on reaching her, even if he had to crawl. Her bright red and gold skirt flapped in the wind like a flag, and for the first time in memory, he prayed.