Page 21 of Killing Time

Well, that girl always had been kind of a stick in the mud.

Still, it was nice to know the Weatherford was yet another landmark that hadn’t changed too much over the years. The sense of continuity was oddly comforting, as though the doings of the witch clans hadn’t affected much of the day-to-day business of my hometown.

The ring Seth had given me fit perfectly, almost as if it had been waiting there in that selection of pawned jewelry for him to find. I watched the diamonds glitter under the bathroom lights and thought of how natural it felt as it encircled my finger, even though I generally never wore rings on my left hand — or many rings in general, since they tended to get in the way when I worked and I’d fallen into the habit of leaving them off unless I was going to a party or some other kind of special event.

When I emerged from the bathroom, he was standing at the window and looking down at the street some three stories below.

“So…what now?” he asked.

Our vague plan had been to “reconnoiter,” but now that we needed to get down to brass tacks, I wasn’t sure how we should proceed. Probably most people who owned businesses in the downtown area would know who Jasper Wilcox was, but if we went around asking point-blank as to his whereabouts, I had to believe word would get back to him pretty quickly about a young couple who were wandering the historic section of the city and trying to find out how to locate him.

I doubted that would end very well.

“We should probably try to see if Jasper is living in Jeremiah’s big Victorian on Park Street,” I said. “If he is, great. If not, then we’ll have to work a little harder to pin him down.”

Seth had turned away from the window to face me, but his expression was dubious. “Are you sure that’s even safe?”

“I have to believe it is,” I said. Although I knew I sounded confident enough, inside I had my doubts. What if my identity-hiding gift — amplified by the amulet — worked just fine when we were at a distance but would be severely strained if we ventured that close to where Jasper might be living?

Unfortunately, we couldn’t pick and choose where we conducted our search. We had to do whatever we could to figure out where Ruby was being hidden, and since theprimus’shome on Park Street was our only real starting place, we wouldn’t be doing ourselves any favors by avoiding it.

“We’ll be in a car,” I said. “We can drive away quickly if anything happens.”

One of Seth’s eyebrows lifted, but he came over to me anyway and took my hands in his. “A really conspicuous car. Besides, do you think we’d be able to outrun Jasper Wilcox’s magic if it turns out he does detect us?”

All right, the Chevy Stylemaster was pretty flashy, with that two-tone paint job and those wide whitewall tires. On the other hand, I’d seen quite a few shiny, conspicuous vehicles on our way to the hotel, as though people couldn’t wait to rush out and buy the newest models now that the war was truly over and they could start indulging themselves again.

As for Jasper’s magic….

“Yes, Jasper’s a wild card,” I said. “And I know it’s a calculated risk. On the upside, if he isn’t there, then we’ll know we can concentrate our search elsewhere.”

Seth was silent for a moment before giving a reluctant nod. “All right. Let’s go take a look.”

The street where Jeremiah and his siblings had once lived was only a few blocks from the Weatherford, certainly within walking distance. However, the last thing I wanted was to get caught on foot if it turned out the currentprimusstill lived there — or any other Wilcoxes, although of course they would be cousins and not brothers and sisters. Jeremiah had been the last Wilcoxprimusto have any siblings.

Well, at least until Connor…and his long-lost half-sister Addie…had come along. The family historians were still trying to figure out exactly how she’d managed to circumvent the Wilcox curse.

Park Street was located just west of Flagstaff’s downtown, and I was relieved to see that all the old Victorian houses appeared as if they’d been well cared for over the intervening years, their paint bright and their yards neat and tidy, even if most of the trees were bare and the grass had already turned yellow from multiple sub-freezing nights.

Seth drove slowly because it was clearly a family neighborhood, with kids playing tag in one yard and riding their bicycles up and down sidewalks that hadn’t been there in the 1880s. None of those kids seemed dark enough to be Wilcoxes, so it appeared the clan had moved elsewhere by this point and had sold what were probably valuable properties, since they were so large and conveniently located near downtown without being right in the heart of things.

We slowed even further as we came closer to the house that had once been Jeremiah’s. The paint had been lightened a little, with a sage green body rather than the dark green it had been painted in his time, but still, it was recognizable enough. A bigblack car was parked in the driveway, and I felt my heart give a nervous thump.

Seth’s jaw had set, but he didn’t say anything, only continued along the street as though nothing was out of the ordinary about us driving through the neighborhood.

Then the front door of the green house opened, and a little blonde girl in a darling bright blue wool coat came running out, followed by a boy who looked a few years older, his hair sandy in contrast to the girl’s almost flaxen locks. A moment later, a man and woman — the children’s parents, I assumed — emerged and locked the door behind them.

The man had light brown hair a few shades darker than his son’s, while the woman was nearly as blonde as her daughter. Maybe she’d helped nature along a bit — in my experience, most children that blonde had hair that darkened somewhat as they grew older — but still, it seemed pretty obvious to me that this family couldn’t be Wilcoxes.

Because that sure as hell wasn’t Jasper, with his night-dark hair.

“I guess he did move,” Seth remarked. We’d reached the intersection with Birch Street by that point, so he slowly made a right turn so we could head back in the general direction of the Weatherford. “Now what?”

“We’ll have to figure out where his house is now.”

Right then, I would have killed for my phone and a connection to the internet. Then again, I had a feeling that if Jasper had lived in the twenty-first century, he would have made sure to hide his phone number and address.

Whereas they weren’t nearly as security conscious in the mid-twentieth century.

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