wanted in a bride and once he met her, he refused to let her go. He’d signed off almost half of his capital over to her father to marry her.”
“So, your grandfather sold her?”
“Pretty much. Ask her to tell you the story sometime.”
Better and better. “Who would know that cameras in the office are nonfunctioning?”
“Everyone. Mother assured everyone that they would have privacy inside the house.”
We stared at each other with identical expressions. Sometimes Mom did things like this. Like when we said, “don’t climb into the crow’s nest today, because your leg is hurting,” and she would do it anyway and then spend the evening rubbing Icy Hot into her knee and limping.
“I’m going to bug the house,” I told him.
“Did my mother agree to this?”
“Yes, on the condition that nobody except family views the recording. Bern is family.”
Rogan leaned back. “You got further than I have in the last twelve years. Congratulations.”
“Thank you. She really wants the Sealight found. She showed me the wedding album.”
“What do you need from me?”
“I need files on everyone, even people you don’t suspect. I need someone to sneak in as part of the landscaping crew and install the cameras. I could get Bern to do it, but if they had done their homework, they will recognize him, and I don’t want to take chances. Also, I would like you to take over the monitoring of the Sealight sensor.”
“Which is an antique.” Rogan grimaced again.
“I want to be notified immediately if the tiara leaves the grounds.”
“Very well,” he said.
“Also, I need you to convince Nevada that blue lilacs don’t belong in her bouquet.”
His eyes flashed. “Nice try. You’re on your own.”
“It was worth a shot.”
Chapter 4
People said that the kitchen was the heart of the house. If that was true, what would it make the kitchen table? One of the atriums, because food flowed into it, or one of the ventricles, because we ate the food and flowed out? Sometimes weird things like that got stuck in my brain. Usually when I was tired, and my brain wanted to do something else.
I rubbed my face and drank more coffee. The table was covered with tablets and notepads. On my right, my cousin Bern was messing with hummingbirds—tiny waterproof cameras in casings that could be tinted the color of your choice. We decided to hide them in the pretty shrubs. Bern was a huge blond bear of a guy, the cameras were tiny, and he handled them with the precision of a surgeon. He was the oldest of all of us, except for Nevada.
Across the table Arabella was going over the catering menu on her tablet. When Mrs. Rogan was a child, she was almost poisoned at a birthday party. Her little cousin had died instead. Now she prepared most of her food herself, but that wasn’t an option for the wedding. Nevada deferred to Mrs. Rogan, and after interviewing seventeen catering companies, she finally settled on one. Now we had to select the menu, and Mrs. Rogan had delayed till the last minute.
Next to Arabella, Bern’s brother, Leon, dark and lean, had taken apart some sort of a gun and was cleaning it. Ever since Leon discovered his magic talent a few months ago it was all guns all the time. Mom didn’t even try to stop him anymore. She was by the sink, trying to precision pour melted gelatin into silicone molds. Arabella had told her that there was no way homemade gummy bears would ever taste the same as store-bought. Now half the fridge was occupied with silicone trays.
My brain hummed, trying to sort through the background files on the two branches of the family Rogan suspected.
We all used to sit just like this when we did our homework.
“What’s a canapé?” Arabella asked.
“Something with a melon on it,” Leon said.
“It’s a bread thing,” Bern said.
A door swung open deep in the warehouse and a couple of moments later Grandma Frida emerged wearing a pair of heavy-duty twill overalls, smudged with engine grease. Her platinum white curls framed her face like a halo and her blue eyes sparkled. Grandma Frida was almost never in a bad mood. I once asked her why and she said she didn’t have that much time left so she didn’t want to waste it being miserable. I obsessed over every cough she made for a month after that.
“Grandma, what’s a canapé?” Arabella asked.
Grandma Frida landed in her chair and wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t it an Italian desert