“Okay, okay.” I headed for the door. “I did see him.”
“Maybe you’ll see him in your dreams. By the way, I called our insurance company to give them a heads-up about the Yarrow case.”
“Why?”
“We rammed a house with Brick.”
I made a one-eighty. “You what?”
“It was a hostage situation,” she said. “The damages aren’t that bad.”
“How bad?”
“We took out a wall and a panic room door.”
I opened my mouth. Too many words tried to come out at once, and I just stood there, trying to sort them out.
“Anyway, our insurance is canceled as of last month.”
“What? Are they claiming we didn’t pay the bill? Because I had them on direct deposit!”
My sister sighed. “No, they canceled because our grace period expires tomorrow, and we’re ‘high risk.’”
“Nice. Do they expect us to immediately die in horrible ways?”
Arabella nodded. “Pretty much. Let’s go get some dinner.”
Chapter 6
I woke up because my alarm went off and it was my turn to cook breakfast.
Cooking was basically my and Mom’s job. When Nevada lived with us, she was too busy keeping us afloat financially. Bern and Leon had kitchen duty once a week and usually made meat, preferably steak, and they served it charred on top and raw in the middle. Grandma Frida came from the generation when things weren’t cooked unless they were mushy or slightly burned, and my younger sister, who was actually a decent cook when she had to be, couldn’t be trusted to stay in the kitchen for the duration of the cooking process. She’d start frying and then end up outside texting to her friends or in the media room laughing at some show, until the smoke detectors went off and we had to race to save the food and put out the fire.
I set about making things. Since it was a weekday, I decided on a simple menu. I put two packs of bacon into two baking pans and popped them in the oven. Then I mixed the batter for the blueberry pancakes.
The best part about cooking, besides making delicious things, was that it gave you time to think while your hands were busy.
I had spent a few more hours last night going through Sigourney’s case files. Most of the people she testified against were still incarcerated. Two had died and one was released and had moved out of the country. The revenge angle was looking unlikely.
Every minute we wasted chasing down dead ends made recovering Halle that much less probable. The first seventy-two hours in a missing person case were crucial. The fire happened early Monday morning. Today was Thursday. The seventy-two hours had come and gone, and we hadn’t even realized she was missing for most of it.
I imagined Runa finding her sister’s body after thinking Halle was alive, and shuddered. How much loss could Runa and her brother take? To have that hope and then have it crushed was almost worse than not having it at all. And where was Halle? If I was right, someone dragged her out of her house in the middle of the night while her mother burned to death. It made me angry. Violently angry.
We had to make some progress today. Bug hadn’t reported in, so right now Diatheke was the most obvious choice. They opened their doors at nine and I would be there exactly one minute after that. I had the legal backing and my magic. They would tell me what I wanted to know whether they liked it or not.
I called Nevada while chopping mushrooms for the egg, mushroom, and cheese scramble.
My sister answered on the second ring. “Yes?”
“How’s Spain?”
“Sunny and beautiful. How’s Houston?”
“Cold. My toes are cold. Anyway, do you remember Runa Etterson?”
“Yes.”
“Her family was murdered.” I summarized things for her.
“In the heart, huh?”
“Yes. It was smooth, Nevada. Practiced.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a thing. Do you need me?”
“No. If we do, I’ll call you, I promise. I don’t want you to worry.”
Nevada snorted. “You sound like Mom. Speaking of Mom, how are things with Abarca?”
Yep, she’d heard about Augustine waltzing into our house at two o’clock in the morning. I knew Rogan left someone to watch us. The man couldn’t help himself. Served us right for not spotting the observer. If our security was better, they wouldn’t have gotten so close. If I told Abarca about it, he wouldn’t believe me. According to our valiant security chief, there was “no way” for anyone to penetrate our