I texted the names Wynonna and Charles Scarletti to the Kid with orders to research STAT, then I reread the letter and dumped the packet out on the table. The first thing I saw was the legal paper Misha had drafted and signed to allow me the right to see her book before it was finished. The second thing was a last will and testament. “Crap in a bucket,” I said under my breath. “Crap, crap, crap, crap.”
I realized that they had heard me when Charly giggled and Bobby shook his head. “You still say that, even after you got in trouble for it.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling embarrassed for no good reason. Crap was not a bad word. It was the shortened name of the marketing genius of the best known flush toilet, John Crapper. Really. It was. But not everyone saw it that way, including a short-term housemother when I was growing up. She hadn’t been with us long enough to make any major changes in our lives, but she had put the kibosh on any “bad words,” including crap. Thanks to my mouth and fighting, I’d practically lived in house detention, with toilet duty—crapper duty—for the three months she lived with us. She was one housemother I had been glad to see go.
I dialed Misha’s cell number and was shunted directly to voice mail. I left a short message and closed my phone. The kids were watching me. Okay, Bobby wasn’t a child, but still. What was I supposed to do? How long was I supposed to wait before assuming that Mish was in trouble and track down Randy, Charly’s bio dad? I looked at the time again and said, “Charly, does your mom have a laptop?”
“My mama has everything,” she said, rolling her eyes. She pointed to a satchel near the neatly aligned running shoes, and I pulled it out and booted it up. While it was working, I called my personal, five-star hacker. He answered, and I asked, “We have a missing mother. Misha had a meeting with Charles Scarletti. He’s on our kill list. Is there a way for me to send you every file off a laptop so you can get started working on it?”
“Yeah, sure. What kind of laptop?” I gave him the name and model of the laptop, and he asked, “Can you get online with it? If you can get online, you can e-mail me everything or just anything that looks interesting. It’ll take a while either way.”
I checked the laptop and said, “Yes. And . . .” I clicked through to discover that no files were password protected, and her e-mail passwords were remembered by her system. “I see several things in her most recent files. I’ll zip them up and send them to you.”
“Good. And bring the laptop and anything else electronic when you come. And don’t think I’ll be doing babysitting duty. Not gonna happen.” He disconnected. Crap. That was exactly what I’d been thinking.
• • •
I ordered breakfast on Misha’s room service and while we waited for it to arrive, I asked more questions and called Eli to fill him in on the situation. When he asked what I intended to do with Bobby and Charly, I said, “I’m bringing them back to the house.”
“Jameson is gonna poison your piglet.”
“Yeah. I know.” I raised the volume on the TV and walked away before I went on. “I can’t leave them alone here. My alternative is to call in social services, or whatever they call them in Mississippi. I have a signed piece of paper that says Charly is in my care with permission of her legal guardian. And I think Bobby is emancipated, or as emancipated as he can get. He tells me his grandmother passed on last year and he’s been working for Misha since then, though he isn’t real clear in what capacity. Misha hired him as a dowsing rod. That make any sense to you?”
“Not a lick,” Eli said. “I’ll be out front of the hotel in fifteen. We can load your bike up in back.”
“Yeah. Okay.” I hung up and started gathering clothes and toiletries for my new charges, my brain feeling like it was stuffed with steel wool, all snarled and useless. Beast was clearheaded and happy. She had a kit to mother. Sometimes my life made no sense at all.
• • •
Back at Esmee’s, I looked over at my new charges sitting at the breakfast-room table, eating leftover piglet sandwiches. “Bobby? Can you take care of Charly while we’re gone?”
“I’m her babysitter. I always take care of her,” he said.
“Ah. Good.” One problem solved.
“She takes her nap at three,” he said, “and she gets her next medicine at five.”
Charly looked up at me from the plush chair, with a foam-backed blanket over her legs and snugged to her armpits. Her hair was dull and lifeless, and Beast peeked out from my eyes, seeing the sick child. At her feet, Bobby turned on the TV, starting Beauty and the Beast, which seemed oddly apropos. Charly pulled the blanket higher, up under her chin. “Are you really my mama’s friend?”
I felt itchy under her stare. Thinking about Misha. And the friends we might have been had I ever had the slightest notion of how to make one.
“Uhhh. Yes. Yes, I am,” I halfway lied.
“Are you gonna find my mama and bring her back?”
Beast slammed down on my mind, her claws shooting through me with an instant headache. “Yes,” Beast answered, my voice low and gravelly. “Will find her.”
• • •
“You do know how stupid that promise was,” Eli said to me later as I sat at the breakfast-room table with the cell phone in my hand, staring at the blue screen. Papers and laptops and e-tablets and phones were scattered across the table top, along with coffee cups and mugs and small plates and scraps of food.
Before he left and went back to Jackson, where he lived and worked, Gordon had suggested that we might be more comfortable in the larger dining room, but the breakfast room was closer to the kitchen, the coffeemaker, the teapots, and the food. All pluses.
I closed the phone with a snap. Since we got back with Bobby and Charly (and Esmee had gone bonkers over Charly, putting her in the princess room, and Bobby across the hall from her, and all that rigmarole), Alex had been working on locating the blood-servant and vamp Misha had purportedly gone to visit—Wynonna and Charles Scarletti. The Kid had four computers and laptops going at once. It was something to see. I had tried to contact blood-servants in Natchez, to ask about missing humans and vamp properties with basements. I was figuring that Misha had ticked off a vamp and was stuck in with the food supply. Maybe it’s cliché, but basements and vamps have always gone together, maybe because the rooms are underground and keep out the light, or because of the old saying that vamps keep their young chained in the basement for ten years until they cure. But whatever the reason, vamps always seem to have basements. Or safe rooms. Or both. Basements were rare in the Deep South, because of hurricane storm surges and high water tables, so I assumed this had to be fairly easy to narrow down. I had been wrong. The online site for the property-tax division of the Mississippi Department of Revenue wasn’t particularly helpful or user friendly. It was taking time we likely didn’t have.
Nothing was happening. The sun had risen and the sick vamp in the silver cage in the garage was asleep. Leo and Bruiser weren’t taking my calls, and I was loathe to phone my own witch contacts, Molly and Big Evan. I guess killing a family member makes people stop being your friends.
Misha’s book research had now impacted my own investigation. I needed to concentrate on the vamp angle, as in tracking them down and killing them, per my contract with Big H, but now any action I took might conceivably endanger Misha. Big H had said something about magic when I talked to him, so maybe I should call a local witch—but witches didn’t advertise their covens. Whatever was going on in Natchez sounded like a story that a reporter/book writer would jump on in a skinny. But my reporter/book writer was missing. Wouldn’t you know it?