Spider's Trap
Page 92

“Bria thought that I might want his stuff, and I went through everything, just in case he had set something else in motion that I didn’t know about. Some plan to be executed in case he disappeared or died or both.”
Worry flooded through me. “Had he?”
She shook her head. “Not that I’ve been able to uncover. Seems he was too confident that he would be able to kill me. But he’d been writing to someone, and they had sent him a letter back. I thought it was a little weird, since most folks just text or email now. But Raymond liked to be old-fashioned that way, just like our father. I remember him writing letters too.”
Lorelei handed me the folded sheet of paper. I opened it and read the short note:
Mr. Pike,
Glad to hear that things are progressing on schedule in Ashland. Please keep me apprised of your situation. Happy hunting.
No signature was scrawled across the paper, but a rune had been stamped onto the bottom of the letter: a heart made of jagged icicles fitted together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
The letter said nothing important, nothing that gave me any clue about who had written it, although I was willing to bet that it was the woman Pike had referred to in the gardens. But a cold chill crawled up my spine all the same, as though someone had just walked over one of my graves. Because I’d seen that rune before, and I knew exactly where.
On a file in Fletcher’s office.
One of the hidden folders that I’d pulled out from a trick drawer in the bottom of his desk. The only one that had been secreted away in that particular spot, as if he hadn’t wanted anyone to find it, not even me. Ever.
Lorelei stared at me. “You know something about it.”
I shook my head. “Not exactly. But the rune . . . it might be a lead. I have a feeling that I’ll find out more about it sooner or later.”
Definitely sooner, since Fletcher had kept a file on this person, whoever she was.
I held up the letter. “Can I keep this?”
“Sure. It’s a copy.”
I tucked it into my back jeans pocket. “Thanks. And I have something for you too.”
I reached into another pocket and held out my hand. A red rose-and-thorn pin sparkled in the center of my palm, right on top of my spider rune scar.
Lorelei blinked. She recognized the pin as one she’d been wearing at the cabin all those years ago. Her hand trembled a bit as she reached out, carefully plucked the pin out of my hand, and traced her fingers over it. The motions made the diamonds in her rose-and-thorn rune ring glimmer. The ring matched the pin almost exactly.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered, running her fingers over it. “I thought I’d lost them all in the woods that day.”
“Apparently, Fletcher found one of them. It was in his house. I thought you might like it back.”
Her lips curved up, but her smile was sad. “My mother gave me a set of these pins for my fourteenth birthday, a few weeks before she died. That’s why I chose it as my rune.”
Tears glistened in her eyes, but she blinked them back and slid the pin through the bottom of her braid, admiring the way it shimmered in the fading sunlight.
When she looked at me again, her eyes were clear. Another gust of wind swept through the cemetery, stirring up the leaves and swirling them through the air between us.
“You know, I never did thank you for what you did for me that day in the woods,” Lorelei said. “And everything that you’ve done over the past several days, including this.”
I shrugged. “It’s what I do. It’s what Fletcher taught me to do, even if I didn’t realize it way back then.”
She smiled, her expression warmer than I’d ever seen it before. “Well, I’m glad that he did.”
I smiled back at her. “Yeah. Me too.”
   * * *
Lorelei and I said our good-byes, and then I got into my car and drove home to Fletcher’s house. It was full-on dark now, but instead of taking a shower and going to bed, I grabbed a glass and a bottle of gin from the kitchen. I had a feeling I was going to need them. Then I headed back to the old man’s office, flipped on the light, put down the glass and the bottle, and grabbed the hidden file, the one with the icicle heart rune on it.
I laid the file flat on Fletcher’s desk, staring at the rune he’d drawn on the tab. Maybe it was my imagination, but the rune seemed darker than the ones on the other files, as if he’d sat in this very seat and had traced and retraced it onto the folder. Curiouser and curiouser. What had bothered him about this person more than all the other dangerous people he’d spied on over the years?
Time to find out.
I drew in a breath and opened the file, expecting . . . well, I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting. Maybe another blast from the past, like Raymond Pike. Somebody related to some job Fletcher and I had done way back when. But it was just like any other file in the office. A detached recitation of facts about a certain individual.
I didn’t see her name listed anywhere right off the bat, so I leaned back in the chair and started reading through all the information.
She was a wealthy Ice elemental from a prominent, old-money family in Ashland—the Shaws. I frowned. I’d never heard of that family before, and I didn’t remember Fletcher ever mentioning them. That was strange—very strange—especially since Fletcher knew everyone who was anyone in Ashland, no matter how legitimate or crooked they were.
So I kept going through the file, reading and absorbing all the information. And there was a lot of it. Whoever the Ice elemental was, Fletcher had spent more time monitoring her than anyone else, even Mab. I wondered what it was about her that had interested, and concerned, him so much.