Grim Shadows
Page 77

Hadley.
Lowe could get by without the flock of servants and all the luxuries. Better to live free and poor. But what he’d told Winter was true—the crossbars had to be his last forgery, and that’s all there was to it. Hadley would never tolerate it, not in a million years. And he wanted her more than the money. As long as Adam and Stella had what they needed, Lowe could take his share and retire, so to speak.
All he had to do was find the rest of the crossbars, sell the real amulet to Dr. Bacall, and hand off the forgery to Monk to pay for the crocodile statue forgery—he’d just talk Bacall into giving him the original bill of sale for the crossbars. Give Monk that along with his official documentation for the amulet base. Bacall didn’t care about reselling the damned thing. He wanted it to get rid of Noel Irving.
Simple, really. No one gets hurt; everyone’s happy. And Hadley would never have to know that he’d intended to cheat her father in the first place. But in order for everything to work, he needed to find the last two crossbars.
And in order to do that, he first needed a shave and another bath.
The hunt awaited him, along with his raven-haired hunting partner.
 • • •
The joy of seeing Hadley again didn’t disappoint. In the space of one night, everything had changed between them. Her boundaries were felled. She now greeted him with open arms. He scooped her up with a racing heart and no intention of ever letting her go. He’d never been so happy.
And yet, so anxious at the same time . . .
Because the easy luck they’d experienced tracking the first two crossbars seemed to have dissipated. They plowed through two addresses over the weekend, then two more at the beginning of the following week, sneaking out during Hadley’s lunch break and after she got off work. Each time they used Velma’s charmed bags to hide their trail. They posed as charity workers, door-to-door sales representatives, long-lost relatives, and their finest bit of acting: country preacher and demure wife.
A waste of choice vaudeville, as all names led to dead ends.
Utterly vexing.
Still, the week wasn’t without merit. Her father’s health improved, and even though he couldn’t confirm the existence of Noel/Oliver, they saw not hide nor hair of Oliver and no magical chimeras pecked at their heads.
But, best of all, they buried their failures in consolatory rounds of increasingly daring sexual athletics: in the passenger seat of the silver Packard, darkened hallways, a public restroom, and—during a particularly blasphemous afternoon—on the back steps of an empty church when they were investigating a crumbling graveyard.
Every time he saw her was a gift. Even so, a mounting frustration dogged him that had nothing to do with the crossbars. Winter’s words echoed in his head. You want to see a woman like that, you do it properly. Why did his brother have to be right? Because damned if Lowe didn’t spend half his time trying to keep their affair quiet: tiptoeing around her father and her coworkers; sneaking around her apartment building at odd hours, while he trudged up a million flights of stairs to avoid the elevator man; parking Lulu across the street at the Fairmont Hotel.
It was demeaning to both of them.
And almost a week after their first night together, here he was at ten in the evening, lurking around the cypress trees at the base of the museum’s front tower while he waited for Mr. Hill to take his break—the same guard who’d caught them in Dr. Bacall’s office when this whole thing started. When the man’s car sped around the side of the building, the museum door cracked open and Hadley’s face popped out.
“All clear!” she whispered cheerfully before ushering him inside the door and bolting it.
His eyes darted around the museum’s shadowed front lobby. Eerie to be in here alone. “Another guard is definitely not going to waltz in here, right?” he asked.
“The other two are stationed outside.”
“And Mr. Hill—”
“Won’t be back until after midnight.”
“If the wrong person knew this, you could be robbed blind.”
“We’ve only had two break-in attempts in ten years. And it’s not as if someone could pull up a truck to the front door and bust it down without someone hearing. Where’s your sense of adventure, Mr. Treasure Hunter?”
“Hmph. I think it got trampled beneath the wheels of our failure this week.” He bumped into a stanchion and gritted his teeth as the sound of grating metal bounced off the walls. “Jesus, Hadley. I feel like a misbehaving boy, sneaking into a building on a dare.”
“Well, hopefully the elevator in my apartment building will be repaired tomorrow. Then you can use your misbehaving ways to sneak up the stairwell without bumping into every tenant on the way up.”
“Oh, joy.”
She placed flattened palms on his chest and tilted her face up to his. “Grumpy.”
“Frustrated.” But now that he caught the scent of her hair, a part of him relaxed. He dipped his head to press his forehead against hers for a moment, and then kissed the tip of her nose.
“I’m so happy you’re here,” she whispered. “I had trouble sleeping without you last night.”
“I hate being away from you. It makes me physically ill,” he whispered back. “I want this hunt to be over, so we can stop hiding and lying.”
“I thought you lived for lying,” she teased.
“You’re ruining me, Miss Bacall,” he said against her lips.