Gideon didn’t interrupt me, just crossed the room in two enormous strides and sat down on the coffee table in front of me, eyes intense.
“This one and my mom’s—they had dates attached. I don’t know about Meredith’s yet, but the date on Mom’s was the day she was murdered.” I pulled out my phone and cued up the pictures I’d taken, holding it out and scanning slowly through them so Gideon could have a look, only moving on to the next each time he nodded to indicate he was finished with it.
Since I was thinking about it, when he was done, I opened my phone’s browser and searched Meredith Johnson, and the date my father had put on her photo. It only took a second to turn up an ancient article from the local newspaper, from their early days on the internet, about Meredith Johnson’s gruesome murder.
A knife, just like Mom.
But it couldn’t have been the same killer, could it? Mom and Alan were married by ninety-eight. She would have known if he’d murdered her friend. Wouldn’t she? And wouldn’t she have done something about it if she had?
I showed Gideon the article, and we were quiet for a long time. She’d lived another twenty years after he had worked with her, but Gideon had known this woman. Trained her. Liked her, I imagined.
He had known she was lost, but this was different.
After a while, he nodded and looked down at his shoes. His expression was at least as much murder as sadness, so I figured he was more interested in hunting down the culprit than talking about his feelings.
“Also,” I told him, “There were the books.”
At that, his head snapped up, and he turned to look at the box.
As much as I didn’t want to look at them, or even think about them, I opened it up and started pulling them out to lay each one face up on the coffee table. “I don’t know anything about half of them. Half the ones I know are out of print and rare. The others are old versions, so who knows what initial printings had in them that later ones don’t?”
I was going to have to reread them all. A lot of reading wasn’t usually a hardship for me. At my happiest, I read a book a day. Sometimes two.
These were different, and not just because they were going to be dry as dust, about magical theory and physics and other sciences.
“What’s the one with the blank cover?” Gideon asked.
I shuddered. That was the one I wanted to read least of all. “It’s a journal in my father’s handwriting.”
He inclined his head to it. “Let’s see.”
So I flipped it open. That, of course, was when I realized it was in some kind of code. Oh, that was just fucking lovely. I groaned. “I didn’t realize it was coded.”
“It doesn’t look complicated,” Gideon assured me. “Probably just a cypher. If I could write, I could figure it out.”
For a second, I thought he was telling me he was illiterate. Then I remembered what he meant.
Ghost.
Couldn’t hold a pencil or turn pages.
I sighed and fell back against the couch, journal still clutched in my hands. “Beez would be able to figure it out too. She always liked puzzles, and she’s really smart.”
“But?”
“But my mother was murdered, Gideon. It was”—my eyes strayed to the kitchen archway again—“bad. It was bad.”
“You don’t know she was a link,” he hedged, but it was half-hearted. Whether my mother had been dubiously gifted with the same kind of magic or not, she’d known Meredith Johnson, who had been. Who had also been brutally murdered. It seemed reasonable that my mother had been Meredith’s successor, trained by the woman herself. Maybe one of the Adlers had been my mother’s. I didn’t remember either of them, but that didn’t mean anything. He turned and stared off into space for a moment before nodding decisively and turning back to me. “Maybe you should ask your grandmother.”
“Do you think I can trust her?”
“I don’t think you should trust anybody. But you can beat around the bush. Say you think your Dad was looking into something, and, I don’t know, imply something about the convergence.” His lips were drawn tight, and I wondered if it was causing him physical pain to suggest that I lie. He was always so honest, it had to be a little counter to his character.