Ghost Of A Chance Part 24

"No one is accusing you of doing it," I said smoothly, leaning in to Meredith to get a closer look at the wards. Like most of the others of their kind, these two looked like intricate Celtic knots, doubling over in a complicated confusion of twisted lines. "I'm no expert on wards, but these two appear to be very efficient. I don't suppose anyone admits to having drawn them?"

Five pairs of eyes looked at me. No one spoke.

I sighed and turned back to Adam. "I guess we're going to have to do this the hard way."

"Looks like it. Tony and Jules are out. They can't draw wards."

I nodded.

"Why is that?" Savannah asked.

"They're spirits. Spirits can't draw wards. Nor can demons or anyone bound to a demon lord, but since we're a.s.suming no one here is the servant of a demon lord, a Follower, or a demon, those points are moot." I rubbed the back of my neck and glanced at Pixie. "You want to tell us why you decided to peek in on Meredith?"

Her shoulders twitched. "I was going up to the room you kept me in earlier to get my bag, and I heard some thumping noises. I thought maybe he might have found a way out of the house, or was having a fit, or maybe was hanging himself, so I opened the door to see."

I looked around the room. There were a bureau, the bed, a small bench at the foot of the bed, a nightstand, and nothing else other than the door leading to the bathroom.

"Bathroom," Adam said.

We all crammed into the doorway to peer inside the bathroom. The door to the hallway was slightly ajar, but the bathroom was empty. Which came as no surprise, since everyone in the house was in Meredith's room.

Adam closed the door, turning to Pixie. "Was that the sound you heard?"

She scrunched up her face. "Maybe. I don't really remember what it sounded like. Just that there was an odd noise."

Adam's frosty blue gaze touched me for a moment. "Someone here is lying."

I stood up a bit straighter and lifted my chin at him.

"Oooh, this is so exciting." Jules' whisper came from directly behind me.

"Just like one of those murder mysteries on BBC America. Who killed the evil Realtor? Who poisoned the chief suspect? Who warded the same suspect so he couldn't move...or talk?"

Who indeed? So many secrets had been uncovered that evening: my past, which wasn't really a secret, at least not to people in the Akas.h.i.+c League; the plans Spider had had for the house, which he'd kept from all but Meredith; Pixie's origins, which left her especially vulnerable; Meredith's "poisoning" by my father; the truth of how Adam had acquired the house; and whatever it was Savannah was hiding.

"That's it," Adam said, giving everyone a piercing look. "I've had it. It's slightly less than two hours before the seal expires. We're going to get to the bottom of this before then if it kills me. And I'm a very hard man to kill.

Everyone downstairs to the living room."

I nibbled my lower lip, indulging in a bit of speculation about Adam.

Were my instincts about him wrong?

"What do we do about him?" I asked, nodding at Meredith as Amanita and Pixie headed out the door.

Adam marched over to the still man. "We'll take him with us. Matthew, get his feet."

"This is so Agatha Christie," Tony said as Adam and my father carried Meredith out of the room. "Gathering all the suspects together for the final denouement. Throwing suspicion on everyone present until, finally, the real murderer is unmasked. Followed by a brief, but in the end futile, attempt at escape by the same. So thrilling. It's giving me goose b.u.mps!"

"Should we serve coffee, do you think?" Jules asked as the two of them wisped past me. "Or tea? What's appropriate at a denouement? WWHPD?"

"WWHPD?".

"What would Hercule Poirot do?"

Their voices drifted out of the room. I stood for a minute by myself, trying to put the last few pieces of the puzzle together. One thing stood out: someone here was a whole lot more powerful than they were letting on.

20.

"Oh dear, Meredith's tipped over again. Can someone...Thank you."

When I entered the living room, my father and Adam were propping Meredith up against the wall. The only things on him that moved were his eyes, which resembled those of an indignant elderly pug as they glared in turn at everyone in the room.

The imps, which had followed me when I had released them from their confinement in the downstairs bathroom, were a bit pruny from playing in the tub so long, but fortunately also sleepy. I herded them to their box, where they settled down for a nap on Pixie's scarf.

"I don't want that back, you know," she told me, peering over my shoulder as I closed the lid of the box. "It'll have imp juice all over it."

"Imps don't make juice unless you use a blender," my father said.

"Ew!" Pixie squealed, making a face. I made one at my father-one that told him to knock off the smart-a.s.s comments. He rolled his eyes in response, wandering around behind the couch where Savannah sat.

"Everyone sit down, please," Adam ordered, picking up the small round table we'd used during our interviews, and placing it in the center of the room.

Tony and Jules were just barely visible as Tony sat in an overstuffed chair with Jules seated on the arm. Pixie claimed the window seat, wrapping all four arms around her knees. Amanita pulled a footstool over to a corner and perched unhappily on it. I sat next to Savannah.

Adam placed on the table the gla.s.ses case containing the apports Savannah had picked up, the mangled remains of the box Spider had used to destroy Sergei, and the ipecac bottle.

"What's all that stuff?" Pixie asked.

"Exhibits."

Tony gave a happy little sigh. "Exhibits! This is so Perry Mason!"

"I thought it was all very Agatha Christie," Jules said to him.

"That too. Although Perry Mason was so very...mmm...rugged and manly!"

"Hercule Poirot didn't need to be rugged or manly. He was sophisticated.

He had the little gray cells."

"I'll take Perry's savvy legal sense over Hercule's sophisticated gray cells any day of the week."

"Shhh, he's starting."

"Matthew?" Adam c.o.c.ked an inquisitive eyebrow at my father.

"I prefer to just ..." Dad waved his hands in a vague manner and continued to drift around the room.

Adam nodded at my father and took a moment to eye us all before saying, "Someone here is a murderer. Someone is lying. Someone has deceived us all from the beginning. And I for one am getting a little tired of having my house used as the backdrop of this little drama. In exactly one hour and thirty-seven minutes, the seal will dissolve, at which point the watch will arrive, and I will have to deliver into their possession one bona fide murderer. The question is, who will that person be?"

"He's ever so intimidating, isn't he?" Tony whispered to Jules. "Quite gives me the chills!"

Adam's head snapped around to look at them.

"So sorry. I'll stop, shall I?"

Jules whapped his partner on the shoulder as the former made a locking gesture over his mouth.

"I don't see that the watch need to be brought in at all," my father said as he flitted past us in a never-ending circuit of the room. "It's not like anyone is going to miss Spider. The world is a better place for his leaving."

I sighed to myself. There were times when the urge to slap a big piece of duct tape over my father's mouth was almost impossible to resist.

"We're well aware of your opinion, thank you," Adam said, giving my father a chastising look that completely missed its mark. "The fact remains that Spider was killed, here, in my house, and he had strong business and personal ties to the Otherworld. The watch will demand that his murderer face justice.

What we must determine in the next hour and a half is who will face that justice."

"Justice," I said softly, my eyes moving from Meredith to Pixie. Would justice be done that day? "So, what now?"

"We're going to do this logically, step by step. After due consideration of the facts, I've come to the conclusion that there are two solutions to the problem that we have to think about: one likely, and one very unlikely. We'll take the likely solution first, by beginning with a brief examination of the motive for killing Spider. First of all, there's his widow."

"Me?" I asked, somewhat surprised.

Adam nodded. "You told me the payment you were charging Spider for cleaning the house was a divorce. From that statement and other comments you've made, I believe it's safe to say there was no love lost between the two of you."

"There's no love lost between several people and myself, but I don't go around murdering them," I answered with what I hoped looked like a sincere smile.

His expression remained grim. "We're not addressing the issue of your relations.h.i.+p with other people. However, given that Spider was going to agree to a divorce, you don't seem to have had a reason to want him dead. Unless he had a fortune that you will inherit?" Adam's eyebrows rose questioningly.

I made a wry face. "Our house is mortgaged to the hilt so he could use the money on real estate speculations. I'm sure I won't even get back the money Spider paid for your house, so no, there is no hidden fortune, no a.s.sets tucked away. Just a bunch of debt."

"I'll talk to you later about the situation with my house. For now, I think it's safe to say that you didn't have a motive to kill Spider. And since you haven't exhibited any homicidal tendencies, I think we can move on."

"Wait just a minute," Savannah interrupted. She sent me an apologetic glance. "I'm sorry, Karma. I like you, I really do, but what Adam said just isn't true."

I blinked at her in surprise. "What isn't true?"

"That you're not homicidal."

Everyone gawked at her, although I doubted that anyone was as stupefied by her statement as I was. "What?"

"That wergeld that you were charged with. You killed someone, didn't you?"

"How did you find out ..." My gaze narrowed on my father as he whisked into view.

"I didn't say a word," he answered, holding up all three hands in innocence before I could accuse him.

"Neither did I," Adam said quickly.

"Who told you about the wergeld?" I asked Savannah.

She fretted, looking at her amulet bag. "Oh, I wouldn't be comfortable saying. The sanct.i.ty of sources and all that, you know."

My hair spun out as I whipped around to glare at Pixie. She had curled up into a little ball of teenage polter, one that peered at me with miserably guilt-riddled eyes. "I didn't exactly tell her. I just asked how long she thought wergeld would last. ..."

"We're going to have a little talk later about the responsibility that goes along with keeping someone's secret," I told her sternly before turning back to Savannah. "It's true that I did destroy someone when I was very young and not in control of my abilities. My father and Adam both know the details."

"That was an isolated situation," my father said, continuing his endless patrol around the room. "Karma wouldn't kill anyone unless it was life or death."

"But how do we know it wasn't?" Savannah asked.

I shot her a look.

"I'm just playing devil's advocate," she said with a particularly insincere pat on my hand. "I don't for a moment believe you did it, but just to make absolutely certain, shouldn't we go over every possible reason before dismissing them?"

"I won't be accused of not being thorough," Adam said with a nod at her.

"If you can think of a reason Karma wanted her husband dead, I'd be happy to hear it."

"Well..." She toyed with the gauze scarf draped around her neck. "I can't think of any reason. I thought perhaps someone else might be able to. What about her alibi? Where was she when Spider was killed?"

Adam frowned. "We saw her go upstairs with Spider. He came back down and went to the bas.e.m.e.nt with Meredith."

I nodded.

"Yes, but what about after that? She could have gone down the back stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt," Savannah said.

"You're missing your calling as a prosecuting attorney," I told her.

"We'd have seen her if she had," Tony answered quickly.

Jules nodded vigorously. "Yes, we were hiding in the kitchen. Adam had told us to go to our room to be safe, but we wanted to see what was going on, so we stayed in the kitchen and peeped out every now and again. No one came down the back stairs. We'd have seen them if they had."

"Besides, I saw her upstairs later," Pixie said, scooting forward on the window seat. "After she'd ralphed all over the floor. I saw her coming out of the bathroom when she was cleaning up."

"And that, I believe, is an alibi," Adam said dryly.

Savannah leaned back, an odd expression on her face. "I just think it's smart to be sure."

"Agreed. Why don't we go over your possible motives and alibi next?" I resisted the urge to smile a catlike smile.

"Me? I have no motive whatsoever, and my alibi is that I was with Matthew and Morbid...oh, whatever her name is."