Charlotte stilled. “The Keys? You mean those three crystals?”
“I was told that’s what my great-grandfather called them in his diary,” Alice said. “Why? Does that mean something to you?”
“Nothing terribly useful,” Charlotte admitted. “But it may explain something I’ve always wondered about. My aunt Beatrix, who died and left me Looking Glass Antiques across the street, spent the last years of her life searching for something she called the Key. Singular, not plural, but she may not have realized there were three of them. I don’t think she even knew what the Key looked like or what it opened.”
“Dr. Tucker used those crystal Keys to fire up the Chamber,” Karen said. “That’s all I can tell you.”
Drake finished his tea. “Alice and Karen and I all need some food and some sleep.” He looked out the window at the unnatural dark that had fallen in the past half hour. “We need to pull together the information we’ve got and come up with a plan, but there’s nothing we can do until morning.”
“You’ve got that right,” Fletcher said. “Shadow Bay was never what you’d call a lively town after dark. We roll up the streets around nine o’clock most nights. But lately it’s gotten real quiet at night. You can move around to some extent with an amber lantern, but that fog makes people nervous as hell.”
“Folks think they see things in it,” Rachel said. “And now that we know about those mutant insects in Deception Cove, we have to take the hallucinations a little more seriously.”
“Everyone who couldn’t get off the island or who refused to leave is staying here in town,” Fletcher explained. “Jasper and I are sleeping in our shop.”
“Rachel and I are staying at the B-and-B at the end of the street,” Charlotte said. “We can squeeze Karen in there, but the place is really full. I think Burt Caster, who owns the Marina Inn and Tavern, mentioned that he had one room left. Drake, you and Alice can have it.”
Alice went very still. She did not dare look at Drake.
“That works,” Drake said.
Rachel gave Alice a commiserating smile. “I’ll bet you didn’t expect to spend your honeymoon on Rainshadow, did you?”
“Actually,” Alice said, “it’s become something of a tradition for me.”
Chapter 18
“YOU KNOW,” ALICE SAID, “IF WE HADN’T ALREADY SPENT a couple of nights together, this situation would be somewhat awkward.”
Room Number Five at the Marina Inn had seen better days. The curtains, carpet, bedspread, and towels were faded and a bit frayed, but the bathroom and the sheets were clean, and that counted for a lot in her opinion. During the past year she had learned to establish priorities. Nevertheless, in the low, mellow light of the amber lantern on the table, the place didn’t look all that bad. Under other circumstances, it might even have been romantic in a retro sort of way. The kind of place where a young, broke, eloping couple might spend a honeymoon.
But she could not remember a time when she had felt young, and she was married—temporarily at least—to one of the wealthiest men in the four city-states. True, they had eloped, but not for the usual reasons.
When they had entered the room a moment ago, Drake had done a methodical walk-through of the small space. Houdini had followed at his heels, evidently taking the job of checking out the room as seriously as Drake. There was none of the usual dust bunny obsession with turning the nearest bright, shiny object into a toy; no trying to swing from the drapery cord. At first Alice had wondered if the effects of the chocolate zingers had simply worn off, but now she sensed that, like Drake, Houdini was in sentry mode.
“Charlotte and Rachel probably could have made space for you over at the B-and-B,” Drake said. “But I didn’t want to go into detailed explanations of exactly why we got married, not in front of a lot of people we don’t know very well.” He shrugged out of the pack and dropped it on the small table near the window. “Figured that would be even more awkward.”
“You’re right.” Alice smiled ruefully. “Explaining to a bunch of strangers that you married me to protect me from Ethel Whitcomb, who thinks I murdered her son, would have been a tad difficult.”
“That wasn’t the part that worried me.”
“No?”
“No.” He opened the pack. “I held off on the explanations because this is a small town. It’s even smaller now that the few locals who are still here are all hunkered down. I trust everyone at that table tonight, primarily because Harry told me that he trusts them. But there are no secrets in small towns. If word gets out that our marriage is a fake, there’s no telling who will find out.”
Alice looked out the window. The dark mist had closed in on Shadow Bay. Here and there she could see the weak light of an amber lantern in a window or the flames of a hearth fire, but the rest of the scene was drenched in dark, disturbing energy.
“I don’t think that any gossip will get off this island as long as it’s locked in this fog,” she said.
“We can’t be sure of that. I’d rather not take any chances.”
“Are you going to tell your brother the truth about our marriage when he returns?” she asked.
“I’ll have to explain the situation to Harry.” Drake removed his overnight kit from the pack. “He’ll know there’s something off about the marriage as soon as he finds out about it.”
Alice wrinkled her nose. “Because we don’t look like a happily married couple?”
“No.” Drake studied the fog-bound scene through the window. “Because in our family we don’t do MCs.”
Her insides clenched but she tried not to let him see the effect his words had on her.
“I suppose MCs are way too tacky for the Sebastian family,” she said, going for flippant. “Always nice to meet a man with such high standards.” Guilt flashed through her. “Sorry,” she said gruffly. “That was uncalled for under the circumstances. Our MC is certainly not typical.”
“It’s not so much a question of standards—more like a definition. In my family, marriage is marriage. An affair is an affair. There is no middle ground.”
“In other words, in your family, when it comes to making a commitment, there’s no gray area. You either make a commitment and keep it or you don’t.”
He gave her a wary look. “Something like that.”
“What a lovely, noble tradition. Very admirable. Yet here you are, stuck in a low-class MC thanks to me. Yep, I can see why you feel like you have to explain things to your brother. Sorry about that, but if you will recall, it was your idea.”
“Yes,” he said a little too evenly. “It was my idea. And it’s not like Harry did things perfectly, either. He went through a full-blown Covenant Marriage ceremony, but his wife divorced him three weeks after the wedding.”
“Really?” Alice stared at him, astonished. “I didn’t hear about that.”
“Probably because a lot of money was spent keeping the scandal out of the media.”
“I see. Wow.” Alice thought about that. The dissolution of a Covenant Marriage was not unheard of, but it was rare because it was a legal and financial nightmare that always left a social stigma. “Mind if I ask what the grounds for the divorce were?”
“It was granted under the new laws governing divorce. Harry’s ex claimed intolerable psychical incompatibility.”
“Geez. Must have cost a fortune.”
Drake smiled wryly. “Like I said, money can’t buy everything but it comes in handy at times.”
“That’s for sure.” Alice took a deep breath. “Okay, thanks for the family background. That makes me feel a little better about getting you into this mess.”
Drake stopped smiling. “You didn’t get me into it. The MC was my idea, remember?”
“I know, but—” She stopped because she did not know where to go with that.
