Charlaine Harris - Day Shift

Her son — he must be, their mouths and eyes were so alike — was folding up the ladder and giving the newcomers a comprehensive stare, starting with Olivia’s tight blue jeans. But he left, too, carrying the ladder carefully down the hall to the back of the house.

Good. Now there were no witnesses, whatever happened.

Lewis reappeared, so changed it was like he’d taken a hit of laughing gas. He’d morphed into the gracious master of the manor. “There’s an elevator right back here for you, if you’d prefer,” he said. If he’d had mustaches, he’d have been twirling them. “I often take it myself.”

“Thanks,” said Tommy gruffly. “The little lady has a problem with stairs.”

Every effort had been made to make the tiny elevator unobtrusive. Even the door was designed to look like a real wood door. Olivia said, “I’ll just take the stairs.”

She met them at the top and confirmed that the elevator door was right by the study door. She was smiling when the elevator door dinged open and they all appeared.

Lewis’s new hospitality made Olivia deeply suspicious, and her anxiety was confirmed when she caught Barry’s expression. Behind Lewis’s back, he made an urgent face at her. She didn’t know exactly what it meant, but nothing good. She went on full alert.

Tommy got off the elevator with extra care and turned to extend his hand to Suzie. She took it with a smile. Somehow, in the Goldthorpe mansion, they looked smaller and frailer and less in control of their destinies than they had in the Midnight Hotel. Tommy seemed to be aware of it, too. In a patronizing tone, he said, “This is a nice house, young man.” He looked around him in a lordly way. “I haven’t been here in years,” he added, perhaps thinking that he should have visited at least a few times if he’d been such a good friend of Morton’s.

“I’m so glad you like it,” Lewis said smoothly.

Obviously, Lewis suspected they weren’t what they seemed. Olivia didn’t know what he suspected or what to do about it. For the moment, she decided to go along with the plan. Lewis was not a good pretender. She was.

“I’m really sorry about your mom,” she said. Lewis’s glasses winked as he swung his head around to glare at her.

And she saw Barry blink and look away, just for a second.

Lewis was more dangerous than he seemed, apparently.

“She never took good care of herself,” Lewis said brusquely. “She was getting forgetful, too. She was hiding things from me.”

“Hiding things,” Olivia echoed in a murmur with just a hint of a question in it.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “She was getting very… well, paranoid, I’m afraid, and she decided I was after her jewelry. Poor thing,” he added unconvincingly. “I miss her so much.”

“Of course,” Barry said. “Grandpa, can you see the books you loaned Morton? Look carefully. We don’t want to leave one behind.”

Tommy had gone to the shelves to begin his “search.” Suzie began a stilted conversation with Lewis about estate taxes, which only went forward fitfully, because Lewis was watching Tommy like a hawk. Did he think Tommy would try to stuff books down his pants?

Olivia looked around her, registering fact after fact. There was not much furniture. The room was lit from a window on the west wall, casting a pool of light on the large polished desk and the imposing chair behind it. There was an easy chair with a small table and lamp, and there was a huge globe standing in one corner of the room. It hadn’t been visible from the door on Olivia’s previous visit.

Olivia wondered if the globe was Morton Goldthorpe’s idea or if some decorator had told him every man should have a globe in his library. Maybe a bit of both; it was a beautiful thing. The desk was handsome, too; cherry, she thought. The shelves on the south and north walls were stocked with books interspersed with a tennis trophy or two, some business awards, and family pictures. From those pictures, it was evident that Morton had been older than Rachel by at least ten years. He looked very proud of his wife and his children in those portraits of a time long past.

Olivia had the oddest feeling as she looked at those faces, including that of the boy who now stood before her grown into a peevish and unstable man, greedy and grasping. The couple must have been happy in those long-ago days, surely. They must have looked forward to meeting the people their children would partner up with, to loving the grandchildren that would result. How could it be that such anticipation would crash and burn so spectacularly in Lewis’s case?

Had her parents ever looked at her, counted on her to comfort their old age, to present them with the little representations that would carry their name forward?

Not my mother, Olivia thought certainly. Not even she would be capable of such hypocrisy. As for her father, who knew? He’d proved himself capable of such willful blindness that there was no telling how far he’d deceived himself.

And for the first time, in the middle of a job and in a sunny room of a mansion she’d never visit again, Olivia thought, If he’d had any balls at all, he’d have killed my mother when I told him what she’d done. I wouldn’t have had to do it myself. It was a truth that came at the worst possible moment.

“I see your father was interested in Rex Stout,” she said, almost at random. She had no idea who Rex Stout was, but there were many books with that name on them, and they were all together, and they looked old.

“He has a complete set of first editions,” Lewis said with massive indifference. “I’m trying to find a buyer for them.”

“Those are hard to come by,” Olivia said, trying to sound like she gave a shit.

“Yes.” Lewis’s limited patience was trickling away.

Olivia’s brain was telling her to cut and run, that this was a fiasco. She wondered if Barry’s was saying the same thing. There was a certain tension in the way he stood that alerted her. No such danger message had reached Tommy and Suzie, who were shuffling along the shelves, industriously looking for the fictional loaner books.

The front doorbell rang downstairs, and Lewis’s head jerked in that direction. It was a busy morning at the Goldthorpe house. Olivia heard Bertha’s plodding footsteps cross the foyer and the sound of the front door opening.

“I wonder who that can be?” Lewis said malevolently.

Tommy’s head jerked around. He said, “Suzie, honey, these are the books.” He pulled three books from a lower shelf, and Olivia could see they were a set because the bindings matched.

“ The History of Geography and Judaism in Western Europe ,” Suzie said. “Of course! It’s been so long since you read them.”

She was pretty convincing. Olivia almost believed Suzie spent her leisure time reading. Wait, she’d mentioned wanting to go to the library in Davy. Maybe it was true. Olivia dismissed that as irrelevant and concentrated on her job. The desk was an obvious place to search for the jewelry. Possibly it had a secret compartment, though those were usually easy to find. She looked hard at the shelves. She was sure Lewis had been all over them. Even if his sisters had already cataloged everything in the house, which she didn’t believe, Lewis would still want to run his own inventory because he was so convinced that the house was his.

“I’m surprised you’re selling such a beautiful place,” she said, and Lewis glared at her. “Not my idea,” he snapped. “My sisters want to sell the place and divide the proceeds, though I offered to buy them out.”

Not at fair market value, I’m sure, Olivia thought. But she shook her head in apparent amazement at his sisters’ inexplicable stubbornness, while she looked from the desk to the shelves. The books were all aligned on the forefront of the shelves, not pushed back against the wall, so there was plenty of room behind them. But would that be a very safe place to hide anything? Only temporarily. Hadn’t Rachel told them something else, at the séance?