Ghost of a Chance (28 page)

Adam’s eyebrows pulled together. “No more so
than the one that says all Guardians are tainted by the dark power
they supposedly repress.”

“Ooh, nice one, Adam,” my father said,
licking his finger and drawing a tally mark in the air. “That’s one
for our team.”

“Very well, I’m willing to concede the
unicorn, but that still leaves you,” Savannah said.

Adam dropped his hand from Amanita’s
shoulder. “No, it doesn’t. I didn’t murder Spider.”

Savannah crossed her legs and arched one
delicately shaped eyebrow. “You had a reason to want him dead, the
ability to get to him in time without anyone seeing you, the
strength to kill him, and you refuse to say where you were during
that oh-so-important few minutes when Spider was killed. That says
‘guilty’ to me.”

“I don’t care what it says to you; I’m not
guilty.”

Dad looked troubled. The two spirits looked
equally troubled, their heads together as they whispered. Pixie
watched everything with bright eyes.

I said slowly, “I have to admit, Adam, it
doesn’t look too good. What exactly were you doing during the time
Spider was being killed?”

“Blast it all to hell and back again!” His
jaw worked a couple of times, indicating the amount of control he
was commanding. “I couldn’t have killed him because I wasn’t in the
damned house, all right?”

Of all the excuses I was expecting him to
make, this wasn’t one. Judging by the exclamations of surprise and
astonishment from the others, they were just as taken aback.

“I thought the house was sealed,” Pixie
said.

“I thought so, too.” I looked questioningly
at Adam.

He shoved his hands into his pockets,
scowling something fierce. “The house
is
sealed. I… er…
called in a few favors and had a friend summon me out of the house
to the League offices. The same friend shoved me back through a
rift.”

“What’s a rift?” Pixie leaned forward to ask
in a whisper.

“Sort of a rip in the fabric of reality.
Kind of like a portal to wherever you’re going.”

“Cool. Can we make those?”

“No.”

“You left the house? You said no one could
leave the house!” Savannah said, her voice rising on the last few
words.

“No one can… without expert help.” Adam was
still scowling, but embarrassment tinged his dark expression.

“Spill,” I said, propping myself up on the
arm of the couch.

“I wanted to see if it was possible to get
the League involved in the matter of the house. Once I sealed it, I
knew Spider couldn’t go anywhere, so I called a mage friend and had
him summon me to the League office. I explained the situation, and
they promised to send a mediator just as soon as the seal was
lifted.” He glanced at his watch. “Which should be in less than an
hour now.”

“Why didn’t you just tell us that’s where
you’d gone?” I asked.

His gaze slid toward Savannah. “I figured if
you all knew there was a way to leave, you’d be after me to get you
out of here, and I wanted Spider to stay put until the mediator
arrived.”

“You could have told us that afterwards,” I
gently pointed out.

He gave me a hard look. “I’m the watch
representative here. I couldn’t risk having my authority
undermined.”

“If you got sent back through this
portal-rift thing, why didn’t you have the mediator come with you?”
Pixie asked.

“Rifts don’t work like that,” I murmured
absently. “They are temporary tears in the fabric of being, and
shouldn’t be used more than once at any one location until the
fabric has repaired itself. Adam was risking seriously damaging the
fabric by traveling back, but I assume it’s all right.”

“That means a polter couldn’t have killed
Spider,” my father said triumphantly.

Savannah looked more than a little put
out.

Tony leaned forward, tugging on Adam’s
sleeve. “If it wasn’t a polter, and wasn’t Savannah, Karma, or
Nita, who did kill him?”

Adam’s frown cleared as he lifted his head
and looked across the room. I followed his gaze, a slow smile
creeping across my face.

Dad laughed outright. “I knew it! I just
knew it!”

Meredith, the subject of all our attention,
rolled his eyes around in a distressed fashion, as if to protest
the accusation.

“We’re back to who would benefit most from
Spider’s death. Savannah, what do you know about the partnership
between Meredith and Spider?”

She shrugged. “Very little. I had my own
concerns. Beyond shutting up Meredith’s yammering about making him
a dissipater, I didn’t pay much attention to what he was
doing.”

“Why on earth did you marry the man if you
disliked him so much?” I asked her, my curiosity getting the better
of me. “I may have had no love left for Spider at the end, but I
did love him when I married him. Why bind yourself to a man for
whom you had so much contempt?”

“What better cover could a person have than
being the wife of an apparently respectable bank manager?” Her
smile was positively sinister.

“Plus there’s the fact that it was his bank
that held the mortgage to Adam’s house,” I said thoughtfully.

Her smile dimmed as she shot a nasty glance
at her husband. “Fat lot of good that did me. The second I started
talking about getting the house, he had to run to Spider and blab
about it. You just never could keep a secret, could you? Not even
when you tried. I always found them out, didn’t I, Meredith?”

Meredith’s eyes blinked rapidly.

Savannah laughed a low, sinister laugh. “You
needn’t look so startled; I know about more than just your
predilection for underage polters. I know about the bank account
you think is so untraceable in the Cayman Islands, and that little
arrangement you have to buy certain medications without
prescription. Oh, and I know about your fetish for wearing women’s
thongs, too. In short, there’s nothing about you that I don’t know,
husband of mine.”

“Indeed. I’m sure the watch and mundane
police will be interested in statements from you,” Adam said. “They
will want proof, though.”

“Proof? Oh, I have proof. He’s really quite
disgusting,” Savannah said absently, reaching for her purse. “He
took videos of his sessions with the polters. They’re all on his
laptop. I’ll be happy to turn them over to the police.”

Adam looked thoughtful, his gaze touching me
before moving away. I rubbed my hands against the goose bumps that
suddenly appeared on my arms, my stomach turning over at the
thought of the perverse videos.

“I’m confused,” Jules said, holding up a
hand. “Meredith killed Spider? Who hit him on the head, then?”

“No one,” Adam said, turning to the spirits.
“Or rather, Meredith did it himself. He probably banged his head on
the door frame a couple of times to raise a welt and give himself a
little cut. The bookcase was no doubt pulled down by Spider as he
was being attacked, probably in a last-ditch attempt at
self-defense. All Meredith had to do once he was dead was give
himself the appearance of an injury, and artistically arrange the
scene. Would that fit what you heard, Nita?”

The unicorn sat with her arms around
herself. She looked startled to be addressed, but after thinking
for a moment, quickly nodded. “There wasn’t much noise, just a few
grunts, Spider saying it would all be his when he was gone, and the
crash of the bookcase. That was it.”

“But why did he kill Spider?” Tony
asked.

“Money,” Savannah said, pulling a nail file
out of her purse. She glanced up at the startled silence that
followed. “He was always bitching at me whenever I asked for the
minutest amount of money. He said more than once that we’d end up
on the street if I didn’t stop spending, which was ridiculous. I
told him the machines I created didn’t come from nothing.”

“Money would do it,” Adam said. “The sad
truth is that this damned scheme they had to turn the house into an
Otherworld brothel, desecrating its sanctuary, was financially
sound. There would be no small supply of people, both Otherworldly
and mundane, who wouldn’t hesitate to fork over exorbitant fees to
indulge their darkest desires. They were set to make money hand
over fist… but clearly, that wasn’t enough for Meredith. I wouldn’t
be surprised at all if an inquiry into the bank and his own
personal finances showed he was in dire straits.”

“So by killing Spider, he stood to save
himself from financial ruin, and in fact would have become quite
wealthy if their plans had gone through,” I said, nodding. “It’s
plausible.”

“Exactly. Being the savvy businessman he is,
he probably wrote into their partnership agreement a survivor
option. If one of them died, the other would inherit all their
business holdings.”

“But we asked him about that,” I said,
remembering a conversation from the prior evening. “And he said he
hadn’t.”

“So he lied,” Pixie said, standing up. She
sat back down quickly when everyone turned to look at her. “Didn’t
Meredith also say something about you trying to add another nail to
his coffin, but that it wouldn’t work because Spider owned his
assets outright? He accused you of knowing that, and said that’s
why you wanted Spider dead.”

“Classic case of misdirection,” Jules told
Tony. “Very Hercule.”

Tony rolled his eyes.

I dredged around in my memory of the
conversation. “That’s right, he did. I’d forgotten that, because it
didn’t make any sense to me; I had no idea of what Spider was up
to.”

Dad marched over to Meredith’s still-stiff
body, which leaned against the fireplace. He peered closely into
Meredith’s eyes, which rolled over to look back at him. “You’re
going to rot in the Akasha. Although I think you should get a few
years off for bumping off Spider. Still, you deserve to rot.”

“Why did you put binding and silence wards
on him?” I asked Savannah.

The look she shot her husband was nearly
lethal. “He started telling you things. He mentioned my connection
to the machines. The little rat was going to set me up and let me
take the rap for Spider’s murder while
he
got my house.”

“A woman scorned,” Dad said, nodding
sagely.

“So, what now?” I asked Adam.

“Now we wait until the watch comes and takes
him away. I don’t believe my captain will want to bring in the
mundane police, since both the murder and the charge of child
molestation concern the Otherworld.”

I glanced at Pixie. “How likely is it that
your captain will do otherwise? I don’t see anything but trouble if
we bring in the mundane police. There’s Pixie and the spirits and
Amanita to explain, and I hesitate to expose any of them to what
would follow should the mundane world find out about them.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Jules said, nodding.
“They’d want to take us away, and we’re quite comfortable
here.”

“Quite comfortable,” Tony agreed. “Nita
wouldn’t like it either, would you, dear?”

She seemed to shrink into her chair, her
voice a faint whisper. “No.”

“I don’t think it’s likely, although there’s
a chance if he feels Spider’s murder charge won’t stick.”

“It’ll stick,” I said firmly, lifting my
chin. “I have no doubt of that.”

“Savannah could, I suppose, make a case for
it to be turned over to the mundane police,” Adam said, glancing at
her.

She looked up from her nails with an acid
smile. “Much as I would love to see all this dragged out into the
open, I have my own career to think of. The Guardians’ Guild frowns
on its members becoming the focus of too much attention, so there
really is no choice to be made. I won’t fight Meredith being
charged by the watch.”

“That’s all there is, I think,” Adam said,
his hands behind his back as he surveyed the room. Meredith rolled
his eyes with great vigor.

“Quiet, you,” Adam told him before facing us
again. “We’ll turn Meredith over to the watch, and let them handle
the details of what is to be said to the mundane police.”

“Justice,” I said on a happy sigh, and sank
into the nearest chair with a profound sense of relief.

Forty-five minutes later, a slight popping
noise heralded the dissolving of the seal. A half hour after that,
the watch—who had shown up just before the house was unsealed—took
Meredith away. I felt no pity for him, no sympathy, nothing but a
sense of relief that it was all over. The man was a murderer, pure
and simple, and he reaped what he had sown.

The watch captain, a somber man by the name
of Muir, had stood quietly while Adam had made his report on the
happenings of the last day. Savannah had tried to get him to arrest
Adam, my father, and me in turn, but the captain listened
implacably to her demands, then said simply, “The situation with
the house is out of my domain, madam. I suggest you take it up with
the proper officials.”

Savannah was so annoyed by that response
that she outright refused to lift the binding ward on her
husband.

“If you want it lifted, you can call a
Charmer. Otherwise, he can stay that way until it wears off,” she
said, marching off to collect her things.

Three members of the watch circled the now
vertical, but still frozen, Meredith, scratching their heads.
“Those are a hell of a couple wards,” one of the men said. “No way
that’s going to fade away quickly.”

“We’ll have to take him out as he is,” Muir
told them, and so it was that they carried Meredith out to their
car, one man at his head, the other at his feet.

Savannah sailed past us, trailing gauzy
scarves, then tossed her head as she paused at the door. “Don’t
think for one minute that you can get away with keeping what’s
rightfully mine. I will present my case to the League. You might
not have murdered Spider, but they will see that only the true
owner of the house is best suited to care for it.”