Page 31 of Crossroads Magic
“I don’t know the exact details,” Olivia said, getting to her feet. “I would risk misrepresenting either of them if I repeated the little I do know.”
I realized that she was ending the visit.
She moved over to the glass door and rested her hand on the handle.
Yeah, I was being kicked out.
“Fine,” I said, following her over to the door. “Where does Benedict live? I’ll ask him directly.”
“He lives next door,” Olivia said, and opened the door.
The blast of cold air was like a slap in the face. I stepped out, alert and alive. “Thank you for your time,” I managed to slip in before Olivia shut the glass door once more.
Then I turned on my heel and headed for the house next door.
Chapter Ten
The same style porch and curved tin roof was a feature of Benedict Marcus’ house, too. But his porch was not closed in and the floorboards showed a lot of wear and tear.
The front door was a faded cream color. I rapped on the wood, hurting my knuckles.
The house was small enough and the walls thin enough that I could hear footsteps from deeper inside the house. I tracked them approaching the front door, and was braced when it opened.
Benedict Marcus looked surprised. Then his expression shifted, so that there was a warmth in his eyes that made them a heated treacle instead of the blank, polite blackness I’d spotted so far. “Anna. You’re up. Is everything alright?” He rested a hand against the door he held open. “You need me to test the kitchen for salmonella, now you’ve seen it?”
I didn’t even smile at what I presumed was a joke. “What did you and my mother argue about?”
He looked over my shoulder. Checking for observers? I hadn’t seen anyone on the street while I was stalking along the footpath to Benedict’s narrow front pathway. But I hadn’t been paying attention, either.
Why didhecare who saw us?
“You’d better come in,” Benedict said, pulling the door fully open.
I moved through the doorway into a tiny front room. The floorboards looked original to the house, but had been filled, sanded and sealed some time in the last few years. They were a dark brown, almost black. The sofa was a cream color, a modern, squared off corner unit with a chaise lounge at the end. It went well with the dark floor and very pale green walls, but I stared at the thing, astonished. “Where did you get that?”
Benedict glanced at the sofa. “Ikea delivers. Even here.”
“You can get the Internet here? I could barely raise two bars of cellphone reception last night. Who the hell provides an internet service out here?”
“We do,” Benedict said. “The whole hamlet is a single network. Juda set it up a few years ago. We’d go even more crazy than we appear to be to an outsider like you, without the internet.” His smile was wry and self-aware. He held out his hand. “Give me your phone. I’ll show you the network.”
I handed my phone over with slow movements, reluctance weighing me down. Did I really want to give a man I thought might have murdered my mother my cellphone?
He took the phone, thumbed through the screens, swiped a couple of times and held it back out to me. “There you go. I’ve logged you in. The password for this month is ‘StayWarm123’ with two exclamations at the end. You can tell Ghaliya.”
A network for a whole town. I switched over to the email program, and tapped to download new mail. It ran smoothly and swiftly, even though all the email was spam or newsletters. Nothing personal.
I put my phone away, now extremely uncomfortable. Fraternizing with a potential enemy. Tsk, tsk, as my mother had said frequently while raising me. “So tell me what you and my mother were arguing about,” I demanded of Benedict Marcus. “I get the impression it wasn’t a brief moment of disagreement.”
Benedict didn’t shift on his feet or cross his arms or shown any signs of wariness. “What we argued about is nothing I can share with you.”
“Whowillyou share it with? The police?”
“The Sheriff’s department won’t care about a silly personal thing.”
“That’s up to them to decide. I will have to tell them you and my mother weren’t…were…that you quarreled. It won’t look good, if you don’t tell them the same thing.”
“I’ll tell them exactly what I’ve told you. That it was a personal matter, perhaps even trivial, and nothing to do with why she died.”
