I’d felt Pamela so strongly in her dorm room yesterday. Even in Alex’s dorm room, I’d experienced a sense of her essence. So far, in this room, I was coming up blank.
No doubt it was Rafe throwing me off. I centered myself. Focused not on the vampire who dominated the room but on the woman who’d died here. I took another tour around the room, silently calling on my former friend.
And I felt nothing.
Finally, I opened my eyes as the obvious truth struck home. “She didn’t die here.”
He nodded slowly, and I felt like I’d won a prize. “The police aren’t certain, but they don’t believe she died here either.”
We stared at each other, the obvious question between us. If she hadn’t died here, where had she died?
I went back upstairs and found Miles and Alex tucking into sandwiches and beer. They offered me a beer, but I stuck to sparkling water. I did have a sandwich though and found that they’d moved on from talking about the murder to talking about their studies. I needed to move the conversation back again though, and I didn’t want to sound like I was a police investigator. I hoped that, seeing that the weight of guilt and horror must be heavy on Alex’s mind, he’d bring it up again. Or Miles would.
So I listened through Homer and something that I thought might be mathematics, and then Miles said, “Oh, I don’t know if you need this or if it’s useful, but I found this in my pocket.”
He pulled out the map he’d used to get to the wine bottles in the wine cellar.
Alex looked at it and shuddered. “Chuck it away. I don’t want it.”
I wanted it. But I wasn’t going to say anything. I watched as Miles scrunched the paper into a ball and chucked it into the wastepaper basket in the corner.
Alex stared into his beer for a minute. I could have kissed Miles. The sight of that map brought Alex’s attention back to the murder. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe she’s dead.”
My patience had paid off. I asked, “How did she come to be here for your dinner anyway?”
He glanced up at me as though it was my fault. “She was your friend. You know why she was here.”
“But was it your idea that she be a server that night? Or was it hers?”
“It was hers. I thought she was joking. See, my dad was so anxious that there not be any hot women here that he was hiring some bird out of a knitting shop to wait on us. I told Pamela for a laugh, and then she said she knew you and wouldn’t it be funny for her to show up and do some serving.” He sipped his beer. “Like I said, I thought she was having a laugh.”
As the “bird out of a knitting shop,” I wasn’t very amused.
“I never believed she’d actually do it, because…” He stopped himself and dove back into his beer again.
“Because she’d been here before, hadn’t she?”
He looked at me now like I might be a witch or something. “How do you know that?”
I wasn’t going to let on that he had a very chatty housekeeper in case I got Shannon Briggs into trouble. “I heard a rumor.”
Once more, he got that sulky schoolboy look. “She was only having a bit of fun, planning to surprise me. Except my dad was here, and the whole thing ended in a great row. So, yeah, I didn’t think she’d seriously come back into this house again. Not when she knew he’d be here.”
She had to have a good reason. I wondered once again if she was somehow involved in art theft. As a former dealer, she’d been perfectly placed; then, an art student in Oxford. I began to wonder if it wasn’t a title she was after but their priceless art collections.
I now knew that Pamela hadn’t been killed in the billiards room but moved there after she was already dead. I bet the forensics people were now going over the stables where Alex had admitted going to meet with her. If they found she’d died there, not all the family money and connections could save him.
Sometimes, when I was practicing a new spell, Nyx would watch me, clearly worried I might set the flat on fire or something by accident. She’d have one eye on me and be ready to bolt out the open window at a moment’s notice. That’s how Alex watched me now. Finally he blurted, as though he couldn’t stop the words, “I didn’t kill her.”
Unfortunately, mind-reading wasn’t one of my talents, so I had no way to tell if that was the truth. I would have to rely on good, old-fashioned sleuthing techniques. Like asking a lot of nosy questions. I was becoming a master in the art of nosy questions.
“Did the other Gargoyles know that you were seeing her?”
He looked at Miles with his eyebrows raised. Miles shrugged. “I’d seen you with her. Didn’t really know what the story was.” I could have driven a truck through the pause between those two sentences. What Miles was saying seemed secondary to what he wasn’t saying.
I had no time for innuendo. “You mean she wasn’t the only one you’d seen Alex with?”
“I never said we were exclusive,” Alex said, as though we were arguing. “If she thought different, that was on her.”
No one said anything, and his color rose. If he’d said
