thorough. Don’t turn on the lights. And keep your ghost knife handy.”
That seemed straightforward. Annalise went into the kitchen while I knelt beside the streak.
An opening in the curtain allowed light from the street-lamps outside to shine on the carpet. I got down on my hands and knees beside it. The carpet fibers appeared to have been scorched, and although I couldn’t smell smoke, I could smell the nasty, sterile tang I’d smelled in the gravel lot.
The streak went up the stairs. So did I. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the upper floor. The streak led to the back room, where it ended in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a heap of scorched blankets.
There were Kim Possible posters on the wall and little pink ponies on the dresser. A third child for the Bentons. A daughter.
There was a certificate on the wall that said she’d won her sixth-grade math bee. I didn’t read it. I didn’t want to know her name.
The room was cluttered and disorganized-she wasn’t a tidy kid-but there were a couple of blank spaces. One was on the wall beside her certificates and awards. Another was a rectangular space in the center of her bureau, among the piled clothes and school papers. Everything had two or three months’ worth of dust on it.
The nightstand beside her bed was a nest of photos in cheap frames, except for a blank space at the front edge. Four or five more photos lay on the carpet beside the bed. I picked them up, wishing that Annalise had given me gloves.
Most of them featured a dark-haired girl on the verge of puberty. She was small-boned, like Meg, but she carried a lot of flab, like Douglas. She wasn’t a kid I would have noticed, but standing in her bedroom, knowing that the scorch marks on the floor probably marked the spot where she died, I felt a profound sense of loss.
The pictures showed her smiling with a group of friends. She was, if you believed the photos, a happy kid. I saw the cowlicked boy in one of the pictures and looked away.
There was a second dresser in a corner of the room. Beside it, a mattress and box spring stood against the wall. This dresser was older and held fewer mementos. A photo on the back corner showed the same younger daughter with an older girl with the same narrow glasses and pointy chin. A sister? I liked the challenging, mischievous expression on her face.
I noticed that there was no dust on this dresser or any of the knickknacks. Someone had been cleaning it. Could Meg have been walking past the younger daughter’s things to clean the older one’s? It seemed so. Obviously, they still remembered the older sister.
The middle room was larger and had two beds. There was a definite clash of styles in here-the Wiggles versus Giant Japanese Robots.
On the younger side of the room, I noticed several more empty spaces amid the clutter. The older boy’s things, however, had been torn apart. Drawers had been yanked out of the dresser and dumped on the floor. The closet had been ransacked, toys and books scattered.
Someone had packed in a panic.
I went back into the hall. The scorched black mark was still there. I noticed something funny about it and crouched down on the floor.
At the edge of the streaks were a couple of smaller burns. It was like a river that had one main channel and some small channels that separated for a short while and then rejoined the main flow.
The silver worms had made this trail. I’d suspected it, of course, from the moment I saw the trail leading out the door, but now I was sure.
I hopped over the scorched carpet and checked out the bathroom. It was also in disarray. Toothbrushes had been scattered across the sink and floor. There were a lot of personal effects in here, from expensive salon conditioners to a paperback beside the toilet.
The hall closet was filled with towels and cleaning supplies. Everything was neatly folded and arranged. This had obviously been passed over during the frantic packing.
Last was the master bedroom, which looked like it had been tossed by the cops. I walked on the clothes on the floor because there was nowhere else to step. An abandoned crib at the foot of the bed was loaded with winter clothes. The end table had a pair of cheap paperbacks on it, along with a pair of alarm clocks and a pair of eyeglass cases. Behind the clocks sat a little box coated with a thin film of dust. I disturbed the dust opening the box. Inside was a pile of unused condoms.
The Bentons had skipped town like a drug mule who had been caught dipping into the product.
At this point, I started to feel dirty. This was too private, and there was too much grief and tragedy here. I was ashamed of the tingle of excitement I’d felt at the door.
And yes, it made me angry. Angry at Annalise for forcing me to come on this job. Angry at Meg and Douglas for having these problems. Angry at whoever had cast the spell that had burned these three kids.
I kicked the clothes on the floor into a pile in the corner but found only ordinary carpet underneath. No circles, sigils, or other signs of summoning magic.
I opened the bedroom closet and dug around. If I was going to do something I hated, I was going to do it quickly. I pulled stacks of clothes out of the back of the closet and uncovered a small safe. It was locked.
Annalise could probably tear it open, but I didn’t need her help. I took out my ghost knife and sliced off the steel hinges and the lock. The safe door fell onto the floor.
Inside I found a long, slender box and a folder full of papers. I opened the box, revealing a diamond necklace.
I don’t know much about jewelry, but it looked old, like necklaces I’d seen in old movies. It was probably an heirloom, and it was probably worth a lot of money, yet the Bentons had abandoned it in their rush for the county line.
I held on to the necklace longer than was strictly necessary. I had no job and no food in my belly. My bed and board were in the hands of a woman who hated my guts and wanted me dead. It would have been easy to slip this
