Page 75 of Black Curtain

The big house. All the books. The carpet. The paintings.

The trinkets from all over the world.

The woman and man we’d seen even joked about being pirates.

I didn’t know much about the colonial period, but I doubted this set up could be entirely typical. At the very least, they’d been extremely well off. Upper-middle class or higher, possibly in the merchant class, or the children of some wealthier estate.

It stuck me that my mind felt slightly more focused when I was cataloguing the various items in the room.

Black stared down at the dead man himself.

“What about him?” He glanced at Dalejem. “Can you tell us anything about him?”

Dalejem walked closer.

He looked at the man’s face, then walked all the way around the body.

We all watched him, riveted.

I noticed his attention never really left Nick, who sat on the room’s only remaining piece of furniture, a ragged-looking leather chair positioned near the old fireplace. The thing looked half-eaten by insects and probably just sun and air damage. When Nick first sat on it, I saw a cloud of dust rise from the dried leather.

In the view from the apparition, the chair looked pristine.

There had been six of them, scattered in various parts of the room.

Only the one remained.

Nick perched there now, his eyes riveted to all of us. He watched Dalejem as if prepared to leap over stone floor to defend his boyfriend’s life if any of us so much as breathed on him. I had an irrational desire to yell at Nick, not only for the way he was staring, but because of his silence, and his weird standoffishness.

He sat too far away. It was really bugging me.

I noticed Dex scowling at him, too.

Kiko, strangely enough, kept looking at him with sadness in her eyes.

All of us remained totally silent while Dalejem made his tour of the scene of death. He leaned down to stare at the man’s glazed eyes, and at the knife’s blood-smeared handle. I don’t know what I expected him to say, but in the end, he exhaled, straightening back to his full height.

Still staring down at the dead body, he placed his hands on his hips.

I noticed his awareness never left Nick, even in that.

“Well, he’s clearly been murdered,” Jem said.

He proclaimed it as a very important fact, as if we hadn’t already discerned that much the instant we looked at him. I could have told him that before he looked at the body at all. Seeming to feel our reaction to his words, Jem frowned, motioning at the dead body.

“Well, what do you want me to say? He’s been murdered, right?”

Black rolled his eyes, clicking at him.

Jax snorted in a way that showed his utter disdain of Jem’s assessment.

Jem looked at all of us like we’d deeply offended him.

“Does anyone know what that means?” Kiko asked, pointing at the Anubis head. “Why would they have that here? Had anyone in America even gone to Egypt back then?”

When none of us answered, Black exhaled in clear irritation.

“So what did Brick tell us?” he growled. “He said that the house contained all the information he was able to gather about some crime he wanted us to solve.”

---