Day Shift - Charlaine Harris Page 0,91

same time. “All right,” she said, her hands planted on her knees. “Let’s have it.”

Manfred was more than ready to leave the explanation to Olivia, since he had no idea what she was going to say. He was surprised when she gave Magdalena a factual account of their trip to Bonnet Park the day before—factual, that is, if you believed in telepathy and if you didn’t know that Olivia had a lot of experience as a sort of covert operative.

To give the lawyer credit, she listened with every appearance of attention and interest. If her slight smile got tighter and tighter, that was only what Manfred expected.

At the end of Olivia’s story, Magdalena said, “You know this is a bunch of bullshit, right?”

“I know to most lawyers it would sound like the chitchat of a total nut,” Olivia said. “But I also know you’ve done legal work for my . . . boyfriend, Lemuel Bridger.”

“Yes, well, Lemuel is a real person to whom I have spoken on more than one occasion,” Magdalena said. “He’s not a mind-reader or a psychic.”

“But he is an energy-sucking vampire,” Manfred said brightly.

Magdalena looked down, as if she didn’t want to go on record as admitting even that much. “Lemuel is unusual,” she conceded.

Olivia didn’t even try to conceal her smirk. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it,” she said. “But the important thing is that Manfred is telling the truth. And if we hadn’t gotten into the house to see for ourselves, I would never have known where the jewelry is. But now, I know.”

That was what Manfred wanted to know. They hadn’t had a chance to talk alone on the drive home. “Where?” he asked eagerly.

“Where is it?” Magdalena leaned forward.

“It’s in the globe.” Olivia leaned back, smiling triumphantly. “Remember? Well, maybe you wouldn’t, since you weren’t yourself. Rachel told us she saw the world. World, get it?”

“The globe,” he said blankly.

“The globe in Morton Goldthorpe’s study.”

“How do you figure that?” Magdalena was skeptical, to say the least.

“I’ve seen another one made by the same company, a globe that was designed to hold guns,” Olivia said. “It has a fitted compartment inside so they won’t shift around and make noise if someone spins the globe.”

“But you haven’t had an opportunity to open the globe to test this theory of yours?”

“No, I couldn’t do it with Lewis standing by. He would turn around and accuse us of planting the jewelry to escape prosecution.”

“Since you’ve been in the house, that is certainly what a police officer might assume.” Magdalena wasn’t as angry as she had been, but she wasn’t thrilled about Olivia’s information, either. She was thinking it through. “Say you’re right, and the jewelry is in the globe. How will we go about proving that in a way that won’t leave a shadow on my client?”

“Let me just add another detail here,” Manfred said, feeling that the two women were settling his future without his input. “I just came from a conversation with the sheriff in Davy.”

“You went to talk to the sheriff without me.” Magdalena’s temperature was rising again.

“Since he’s not the Bonnet Park police, yeah. He had something to tell me that we didn’t get around to yesterday,” Manfred said. “Since he’d driven down here to tell me, it seemed like the least I could do. And what he told me was that apparently Rachel was murdered.”

Both women were absolutely stunned. Manfred took care to look at Olivia directly, and he could swear that she was genuinely taken aback. Relief flooded him, but he was very careful not to show it.

“How?” Olivia asked. “How was she murdered? When I saw her in the lobby, she seemed to be unwell but not anywhere close to death.”

“It’s likely that someone crushed several of her blood pressure pills and put them in her water bottle. I guess there’s a remote possibility she did that herself, but she was really sane, and she did not have a suicidal thought in her head.”

“Someone who had access to the pills and the bottle,” Magdalena said. “That limits the field considerably.” She smiled. “In fact, that means it has to have been the maid or the son, right?”

“No, not exactly. I wish it were that clear-cut. When she dropped her purse in the lobby,” Manfred said, “everything fell out of it, including the water bottle. So it’s just possible that the bottle was switched there. It was pretty distinctive: a black refillable bottle with butterflies on it. I say