Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,75

the office.

We passed by the library, which according to Sharon and Nick was the room that had gotten the most damage, first. Peeking in, I saw that it was covered with sheets, the kind you use when you put a house up for the season, not the kind workers use, so I figured they hadn’t gotten the insurance evaluation yet. No matter how rich you were, insurance companies made you wait, I guessed.

The office where m’lady chatelaine brought us was uncovered; most of the damaged furniture had obviously been cleared away, but the space otherwise untouched. If Wells was anything like J in his desk management, the staff was afraid to do anything in here without his express orders.

“The missing objects were kept here.”

She stood in the doorway and didn’t offer any more information. I wasn’t sure if she was being recalcitrant, or she just honestly didn’t know anything more. In my experience among J’s friends and colleagues, housekeepers knew everydamnthing, especially the stuff they weren’t supposed to know, so I was betting on recalcitrant. She was possessive of her boss’s privacy, and felt that we were just as bad as the goons who’d broken in originally; maybe even worse, because we hadn’t already made the problem go away.

Stosser stepped into the room, and I could swear, even from behind him, I could see his nose twitch.

While he was doing whatever the hell he was doing, I surveyed the room from the doorway, ignoring the housekeeper, who sniffed and retreated, apparently not worried that we would sticky-finger anything left behind.

Deciding I wasn’t going to discover anything standing there, I leaned against the doorway, crossed my arms over my chest, and watched the boss do his thing.

“Are you looking for something in particular, or just sniffing in general?” I wasn’t being snarky; the only way to learn, Venec constantly reminded us, was to ask when we didn’t know something. And I had no damn idea what he was doing, or why we were here.

Well, no, I knew why we were here. We were here because Ben was in the hospital, and Ian Stosser was angry, and worried, and needed to do something, even if there wasn’t anything to do. Also, it kept my thoughts off Venec, away from the bite marks I could still feel ghosting on my skin. The hellhound had, obviously, been dealt with, and it wasn’t illegal as such to own or hire one, so we couldn’t do anything about the owner in that regard... especially since Venec had, in some respects, been trespassing... .

My brain was starting to ache, so I shut down that line of thought and waited for Ian to answer me.

“There was something about those objects.”

“Yeah,” I said, because he seemed to be waiting for a response, even without looking at me. His hair was pulled back and tied at the base of his neck, but even as I watched, the strands quivered, as though touched by a wind nobody else could feel. Current-use rising from his core, so subtle and powerful you couldn’t sense it any other way.

Sometimes, the boss scared the hell out of me.

“And what is that something?” I asked, when he didn’t offer anything more.

“If we knew, we’d know why someone would take it, and then we’d know who.”

“Well, yes.” I didn’t even think the “duh” because he’d probably pick it up and neither of us needed that right now.

He was waiting for something else from me. It was like being in fifth grade and having a surprise pop quiz first thing in the morning, while you were still trying to wake up and remember what subject you were in.

“And... ?” I gave up, baring my throat, figuratively, in submission.

Stosser sighed. “And that is exactly what the client doesn’t want us to know.”

I blinked. “How the hell... ” I started to ask, but Stosser was already moving on farther into the room, inspecting the floorboards with the air of someone who has answered all the questions he intends to acknowledge.

Working with a genius? Not all that it’s cracked up to be.

I stood and watched him work – or whatever it was he was doing, and then retraced my steps, back to the main room, where Nick and Sharon thought the perps had come in. There were the French doors that had been boarded up with plywood. It was a decent job, and I left it in place – I had no desire to bring the wrath of the housekeeper down