Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,29
that more than she could ever admit.
“Ugh,” Loch said suddenly, in a voice full of distaste. “They used to have a hunting club here.”
“Like horses and chasing foxes?” she hazarded.
“Like guns and shooting down anything that moved,” he replied. “I’m glad that stopped anyway.”
“Why don’t you like guns?” she asked, hesitating a moment before she asked the question. “I thought it was a guy thing.”
“Not this guy.” Silence fell between them for a moment, and Spirit figured that was the end of the subject until he coughed. She looked back up again. He was staring bleakly down at the files.
“I was at Carnarvon Academy,” he said, as if he thought she would recognize the name. Then he added, “It’s a prep school in Massachusetts. This was before I learned parkour and how to get away from the bullies. There was another guy, David, he was kind of my friend, because we both got bullied about the same amount. It got to him more than it got to me, I guess. I wish I’d known at the time how much it was getting to him.”
He fell silent for a very long time. “One day … one day he dragged me into his room and said he was going to make it stop. For good. He’d got hold of a handgun somehow, I never found out how. I don’t know if he managed to get off-campus and buy it, or stole it from his parents over break, or found it somewhere.…” His voice trailed off for a moment. “Anyway, he showed it to me. Said he was going to wait until the ringleaders were all at lunch and come in and shoot them. I tried to talk him out of it.”
Spirit knew, right then, that this was not going to have any kind of a good ending.
“Everything I said just seemed to make things worse.” Loch shook his head heavily, as if there was a weight settling all over him. His voice grew hoarser, as if he was trying to hold back emotion. “I kept trying to tell him that, at best, he was just going to hurt someone and go to jail, and at worst, he’d kill someone and end up getting the death penalty or getting gunned down himself by the cops. He kept telling me he didn’t care, that anything was better than trying to live like we were, and finally he said”—Loch’s voice broke a little—“he said since I cared so much about them and so little about him there was no reason for him to go on anymore, and he put the gun in his mouth and—”
The silence pressed down on both of them like lead. She didn’t know how to break it. “I’m sorry,” just wasn’t adequate.
Loch slammed the cabinet drawer closed. “So that’s why I don’t like guns.”
He looked up, and she nodded a little, trying to look as sympathetic as she could. She didn’t feel as if she dared say anything.
* * *
They leafed through files and boxes until almost three in the morning, and the only thing that seemed worth looking into was something Spirit found in a box half full of what looked like old receipts. It was a pile of identical leather-bound scrapbooks, each with gold tooling, an elaborate monogram, and a picture of the house inset on the front cover. Just paging through the first couple, Spirit quickly realized that they were older than anything she had ever seen about Oakhurst—that they dated from the time the first stone had been laid here. In fact, as she deciphered a couple of handwritten notes, it looked as if these were scrapbooks put together by the original owner. As far as she could tell, he had documented every step of the construction, and then went on to collect every mention of it he could lay his hands on. In later volumes there were society columns from as far away as Chicago mentioning parties here, and the menus and guest lists from those parties, photographs of people posing stiffly on horseback or with guns or in clunky-looking masquerade costumes.
“Have you found anything at all?” she asked Loch, after turning the stiff pages of a third volume, and wondering how the women ever got their waists that tiny.
“Not a single record of a transfer,” Loch replied, sounding a little more normal, if disappointed. “If there is another version of Oakhurst for the Legacies without magic, there’s no record of it here.”