Page 46 of Giving Up The Ghost
“She’s my mum,” I said patiently, irritated and discombobulated. “She misses me.”
Charlotte stared at me for a long moment. “You are lying,” she growled. “You lie vilely!”
“I’m sorry you think that,” I mealy-mouthed. “But I don’t know what to tell you.”
Her gaze traveled from me to the window, the stack of boxes beneath and the exposed bench. “Do not step on these,” she snapped. “In fact, get the hell out of here! Go!”
I didn’t need to be told twice. When I glanced back, the eyeless woman had turned to face me as I fled, Charlotte beside her, the pair of them eerily similar in appearance. I nearly stumbled on the steps, catching myself in time and bolting for the door.
CHAPTER 11
JULIAN
Ezra and I had the wherewithal to wait until Charlotte’s car turned down the lane from the drive before getting down to business. “Start in the study,” he announced.
“Study, cellar, her room?”
“I’d rather stick to common areas,” Ezra said as we headed for the study. “Less risk of being accused of theft or something.”
“We could still get accused of it, you know.”
“I know.” He smiled over his shoulder at me and shrugged. “Just less risk of it.”
The study was as we’d last seen it, save for the afghan being returned to the back of the sofa and the binders being stacked on the desk in one column. Ezra headed for the desk right away, checking the drawers. “Pens, pens, oh a pencil—getting fancy in here, embossed stationary with a very 1980s flare. Look at you, Miss Violet,” he murmured. He looked up and tossed me his phone, which I fumbled before catching it against my chest. “Note to self: do not ask you to be on the show’s softball team.”
“We don’t have one. And what am I doing with this?”
“The code’s Oscar’s birthday. Go to the second screen and open the app with the weird eyeball.” He rifled through another drawer. “Bills from the late 2010s, a guidebook to golf courses in Scotland. The empty DVD case forTitanic?Good lord.”
I found the app with a green and red eyeball, garish and chunky. “Holy eight-bit, Batman.”
“Enter this in exactly as I say.” He rattled off a string of letters and numbers. “Got it?”
“Slow down! Okay, after the J was a seven?”
“Oh my god.” He repeated it. “Now?”
“It’s doing a spinny thing… Okay, now it’s asking for an input ID?” I entered the six letters he gave me and waited as the screen went black. “Um, I think it timed out.”
Ezra dropped to his knees to feel under the desk’s leg space as he spoke. “It’s a nifty little scanner I homebrewed a while back. It checks for listening devices, bugs, and that sort of thing. It’s not military grade or anything, but it does the job for most commercially available shit people think makes them the next James Bond. Walk around the room, yeah? Tell me if the screen does a thing.”
I made a slow circuit of the room, watching the screen for any changes. “Nothing.”
“Disappointed but not surprised. Oh, hello. You’re locked. You have a pocketknife?”
“No. Knowing my luck the TSA would’ve decided to make an example of me and I’d be sitting back in Houston.”
“Hm. Well. Do you care if we get caught?”
I fixed him with alook. “Isn’t the point of us waiting till they’re gone so we don’t get caught? But if you mean get caughtlaterversusnow…” I nodded at the drawer. “Go for it.”
Ezra bent to work on the drawer for a moment, muttering under his breath before uttering a triumphanthawhen the drawer gave way with a sound of cracking wood and a metallic clunk. “That pen’s useless now, but here we are. Let’s take a look.”
I huddled close as he started pulling things out. “Bills again. Lots of them. All for Charlotte Fellowes.”
Peeking inside the first few envelopes, I winced. “She’s in a lot of debt. This is pretty recent. Six thousand euros to some company in France.”
“This one’s for a hundred thousand pounds, to an estate agency. And this is notice of a lien on a car.”
