“The computer was off,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as lost as I felt.
Jan looked up, and actually grinned. At least one of us was enjoying this. “That might matter if we were, y’know, in the mortal world. But getting electricity in the Summerlands is hard enough that it never works quite right, so we have to deal with kludges. Generators instead of ground power, lights on timers . . . computers that don’t realize they’re supposed to forbid network access when they’re turned off.” The laptop made a sharp pinging sound. “We’re in.”
“In what?”
“Barbara’s computer. I have full access.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “Can you do some sort of search for things that might have to do with Dreamer’s Glass?”
She looked at me, amused. “I can make this computer dance the polka if I want it to.” Her typing picked up speed, only to stop when the laptop pinged again. “And . . . whoa.”
“Whoa? What whoa?” I craned my neck to see the screen. “What did you find?”
“Only everything,” she said, mouth compressing into a thin, hard line. She tilted the laptop so that I could see the screen; it was covered by a list of file names so long that it scrolled off the bottom. “This is what I get when I search for files with the words ‘Dreamer’s Glass,’ ‘report’ and ‘confidential.’ ” She tapped the screen with the tip of one finger, and the first title lit up for a moment before a word processing program took over the screen, opening the file. “She was a busy little girl.”
“Yes,” I said. “It looks like she was.”
The file Jan had opened was a financial overview of the company, the County, and their performance over the last few years. It was annotated, showing where Barbara had interfered with the County to the advantage of Dreamer’s Glass. I glanced to Jan.
“We couldn’t figure out where the money was going,” she said. “Another two years and she’d have closed us down.”
“Would someone have killed her over this?”
“Possibly,” she admitted. “I might have strangled her myself. But . . .”
“But you wouldn’t have killed the others. Can you print Barbara’s records for me?”
“Of course.” She shook her head, frowning. “This is so . . . wow. Babs was our friend.”
“She was a cat. The Cait Sidhe have never followed the rules.” I shoved my hair back again. “Would Dreamer’s Glass have anything to gain by killing you all?”
“Just the land.”
“There’s nothing special about the knowe?”
“Not a thing. We dug the Shallowing ourselves.”
“Great.” Another dead end. “Make those printouts, and we’ll keep working. Just be careful. Getting yourself killed won’t bring anyone back.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t storm over to Dreamer’s Glass and confront the Duchess.” Her smile was mirthless. “Although when this is over, I’m kicking her ass.”
“Totally fair.” I paused. “Is there any chance Gordan was working with Barbara?”
“No, not really,” Jan said. “She got Barbara hired on, and she was always worried about her doing something stupid. They were working on a project together, and they’d been fighting for months.”
“What about?”
“I was never quite sure. They seemed to be sorting it out between themselves.”
“Good to know,” I said, and hefted the drawer. “I’m going to go back to Quentin and start shuffling through this stuff. See if there’s something else in here that we can use.”
She blinked. “You left him alone? After telling us to stay together?”
“I left him with a locked door between him and the rest of the knowe,” I said, feeling suddenly uncomfortable about that decision. “He’s got the keys, and I needed to do some hunting.”
“Well, at least it paid off.” She looked up at the ceiling. “April, could you come here?”
The air in front of her flickered, and April was there, delight transforming her face into something bright and real. I looked at her, remembering what Gordan told me. April loved her mother. No one could see them together and deny it.
Jan looked down, and smiled. “Hey, sweetie. I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”
“Nothing of importance, Mother. May I assist you in some way?”
“Please. Do you remember Quentin?”
April’s nod was immediate. “Yes. He is located on the first floor, in office A-3.”
I stared at her. Either she’d just been visiting him, or she knew where he was without thinking about it. If it was the latter, the killings couldn’thave been an outside job—she’d have spotted an intruder before they could do anything. “You watched us get here, didn’t you? That was you in the woods,” I said, before I fully realized I was going to.
“Yes,” April replied. “I watch all entrances.”
Right. Unless our killer was somehow invisible to April, we were dealing with a person, not a thing. “Have you seen anyone strange coming or going right around the murders?”
“Only you.”
“I see. Will you be available later? I’m going to want to talk to you.” I just needed to figure out what I was going to ask her.
She slanted an anxious glance toward Jan. “Mother?”
“Do as Toby says, sweetie; it’s all right.” April made an unhappy face. Jan smiled. “I know you don’t want to. Tell you what: I’ll come to your room and watch a movie with you tonight, real-time, okay? We can snuggle.”
“Will there be popcorn?”
“Popcorn and cartoons.”
“Acceptable,” April said, and vanished.
Jan looked toward me, a tired smile on her lips. “Normally, she watches movies straight from the file server, but she’ll watch them slow if it means I do it with her.” She removed her glasses, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. “Motherhood is exhausting. What was I thinking, saying I could handle a County and then adopting a kid? I must’ve been crazy.”
“Jan . . .”
“This whole thing is crazy.” Sighing, she put her glasses back on. “I’m sorry we were so weird when you got here. We’ve been running scared for a while now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and was surprised to realize that I meant it. “We’re doing our best.”
“I know you are.” A flicker of something like anger crossed her face. “It’s almost ironic. What we’re trying to do here . . . people shouldn’t be dying. That’s the last thing that should be happening.”
“What areyou trying to do here?”
“Nothing big. Design better computers. Get the Summerlands onto a decent phone plan. Save Faerie.” She waved a hand vaguely, like she was brushing off a fly. “The usual nonsense. What are you going to do now?”
“Go back to Quentin, and go through the rest of this paperwork.” I picked up the drawer, tucking it under my arm. “I need you to be more careful. All of you. Gordan’s in the cube maze, alone. Elliot is Oberon- knows-where, alone. Cut it out.”
“I’ll talk to them,” she said.
“We’ve reviewed the information you gave us and searched the offices we could find. Did Yui have an office?”
“Yeah—she just hid it really well.” She pursed her lips, looking momentarily unhappy. “When Elliot gets back, I’ll ask if he can lead you there. He can usually find it.”
“Elliot? All right. We can’t find anything the victims had in common, other than working here. I’m going to have a second look at the places where the bodies were found, but I don’t expect to find anything.”
“They were hired from a lot of different places, for a lot of different reasons,” Jan said, almost apologetically. “Colin . . . well, we needed a Selkie for some of our integration testing. It’s difficult to explain, but race really mattered. Peter was a history teacher with a specialization in folklore—that wasn’t just human folklore.”
“Faerie historian?”