Page 87 of Black Curtain

“…Yes, Denis?”

“Yes, my wicked, wicked love.”

Again, she winked at her husband.

Again, something in that wink struck me as dark.

I had no idea if that was Brick weaving his own crazy into whatever this was, or if he was trying to give us an accurate idea of who his relatives had been.

Assuming theywerehis relatives.

I was pretty damned sure they were his relatives.

Hell, I was pretty damned sure they were his mom and dad.

“What else is in here?” Kiko stepped forward so she stood beside Dex, speaking to the virtual couple. “What else is in this house? What should we be looking for?”

The husband looking blankly around the sitting room.

He lifted an eyebrow at all of its gilt-framed paintings and ceramic figurines and hand-carved chess boards and taxidermied animals and birds. His eyes paused on swords hanging on the wall next to hunting horns and a rifle, a small piano in one corner and a basket of knitting yarn and needles. I noticed the windows showed a lantern outside on the street, lit with real flames. A man walked out there, moving fast in the dark.

“Oh, I imagine there are a lot of things in here worth taking a look at,” the husband said, turning to Kiko after a pause. He smiled at her, and his smile wasn’t any nicer than his wife’s had been. “I suspect every room hassomethinginteresting in it… if only you know where to look.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Jax muttered.

I agreed wholeheartedly with Jax.

“Did you kill that man in the other room?” I asked. “The one lying dead on the rug?”

The wife smiled at me, still twisting her finger in the curls of her auburn hair.

“Not yet,” she said, smirking.

Just then, the apparitions faded.

14

DO YOU MISS HIM?

We moved on to the next room after that, a square, featureless room with no furniture at all.

Almost immediately, Dex found another virtual projection, this one of the auburn-haired woman sitting cross-legged inside the middle of a chalk drawing on another symbol-laden rug.

I didn’t see any bloodstains on that one.

We didn’t see any dead people, either.

We tried asking her questions about what she was doing, what the symbols meant, but that one wouldn’t speak to us at all.

She didn’t even open her eyes before the projection abruptly faded.

I still had no idea what we were supposed to be solving here.

I was going through the few books left on shelves in the library: a children’s book about a rabbit and a kitten, a botany book, but modern, so it wouldn’t have made any sense with the time period we’d been looking at, a beat-up copy ofDraculaby Bram Stoker, what turned out to be a first edition. I suspected all of it meant something in Brick’s twisted mind, but I had no idea what he was trying to tell us with any of it.

I would rather have taken a look at the spell book we saw the auburn-haired Virginie reading when she sat on that purple carpet.

I strongly suspected it all came down to that.

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