Chasing Daybreak (Dark of Night Book 1) Page 7

  “I see what you’re saying. She either took it and ran off—”

  “Which would have earned her a one-way ticket to a shallow grave for bailing on the Conclave—”

  “Or whoever killed her took it back. Assuming, of course, that she’s dead.”

  I nodded. “My gut tells me she’s dead. The question is—why?”

  Shane and I were still pouring over the new information when a sharp knock came at the front door. It was well past office hours, nearly midnight. He went to check it out and came back with a huge, white box tied with a red ribbon.

  “It has your name on it,” he said, handing me the card.

  Isabel,

  I hope it’s not too small. It’s hard to judge size on someone so much shorter than I am.

  See you next week.

  ~Mercy

  I frowned. Shane took the card from me and laughed. I took the box, touching it with only the tips of my fingers.

  “It’s not a grenade, Isabel. Just open it.”

  Pushing the stack of papers aside, I set it on the desk and tugged the bow, mumbling, “It could be a grenade. Or a severed head or something.”

  The box practically fell open, revealing layers of crisp, honey-gold satin. With a gasp, I pulled the dress out and stood to hold it to my body. The bodice came down to an empire waist tied with a delicate crème-colored ribbon above a full skirt. The sleeves were small puffs designed to fall almost off the shoulder and covered in sheer lace that matched the ribbon.

  I ran my hand along the smooth gown. I hated Mercy with a burning passion, but I had to admit, she had great taste in dresses.

  “It’s amazing,” was all I could say. And it was the God’s honest truth.

  “You’ll look beautiful,” Shane whispered.

  Looking at his face, I was transported back to the day we picked out my wedding dress. I knew it was bad luck for him to see it before the wedding, but I’d never believed in superstitions.

  Maybe I should have.

  Then I remembered that the whole point of the stupid ball was to make Shane more a part of their family, and less a part of mine. I stuffed the dress hastily back into the box and tossed it aside.

  “Whatever. Listen, I’ve been thinking. All the local vamps will be at this party, right?” He nodded, frowning. “Well, so the vamp from the car might be in the mix. I think we should take the opportunity to sniff around a bit.”

  He snorted. “Oh, that’s punny.”

  I picked up the phone and hit number one on the speed dial.

  A female voice with a thick Asian accent crackled through the receiver, “House of Noodles.”

  I proceeded to place my usual order of orange chicken, wontons, and lo mien. Thank goodness for twenty-four hour delivery, I thought as I hung up. It was then I noticed a light flashing on the machine. I’d been so distracted by the file Xavier had given us, I’d forgotten to check it when we got back.

  I hit the playback button.

  “Isabel, it’s your mother. Again. We’re having a family dinner this Friday night to meet your sister’s new boyfriend and you will be there. I think they might be getting serious. If only your father were still around to see it. I expect you’ve taken care of that thing we discussed, and I also expect you to be at the house at five PM sharp. No excuses.”

  Beep.

  Well, it looked like I had plans tomorrow night after all.

  Shane laughed a you-are-so-screwed laugh. I threw a pencil at him, which he caught with two fingers and launched skillfully back into the pencil cup. Huffing, I switched on my computer and took out the scrap of paper with Phoebe’s would-be suitor’s name on it. Pulling up the people search website, I typed in his info.

  Duke Murdoch was a volunteer firefighter who’d moved to Charleston from Virginia after losing two friends in a terrible hunting accident. He had a clean driving record, no outstanding warrants, and had never declared bankruptcy. Duke looked like a solid guy. I switched off the monitor, content to give my mother the green light on Phoebe’s new beau. With any luck, they’d settle down, spit out a kid or two, and get Mom off my back.

  The doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of dinner.

  I paid the delivery boy, and then brought the order into the kitchen. “Shane, I’m gonna need you to do me a favor.”

  “Forget it,” he answered without hesitation.

  “Hey! I’m doing this stupid ceremony for you. You owe me.”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Fine. What?”

  “I need you to call me at six o’clock, make that quarter till six, tomorrow night.”

  “Ah, an escape clause.” He nodded. “No problem.”

  “Thanks.” I dove into my box of chicken.

  “Whatever,” he replied in a nearly perfect imitation of my earlier remark. “I’m going to go to bed. I need to get my beauty sleep.”

  “There aren’t enough hours in the day,” I joked.

  “Ha-ha.”

  “I’m going to stay up for a while. I want to see if the number of the credit card they gave Lisa is in the file anywhere. If it is, I can put a trace on it, see if anything hits.”

  He nodded, chucked his empty paper cup into the trash, and headed upstairs.

  I finished my chicken, grabbed a fresh cup of coffee, and sat back down at the computer.

  ***

  The account number wasn’t in the file, but there was a receipt from a motel that used the old card slides. Using that number, I called the company and got an e-mail of the recent charges. Lisa had used the card to pay for lunch with her sister, but that was the last charge. There was also no record of who’d ordered the card, but I did get the billing address. A law firm downtown.

  Also in the file was an accounting of what Lisa was being paid and the reduction of debt owed by her husband. Almost every penny from her illicit activities was going to pay off a fifty-thousand-dollar debt Robert Welch owed to a bookie referred to only as 360.

  I dug back into Robert Welch’s police file. Robert worked as an accountant for the law firm of Morris, King, and Deford. The name seemed familiar. Flipping back to the file from Xavier, I discovered why—a memo regarding a potential client for Lisa, a Judge Harris. It suggested that compromising photographs of said judge might be helpful in passing state legislation regarding a vampire registry bill, one of the many ideas circulating in congress.

  The memo was on Morris, King, and Deford stationery. And the icing on the cake? Lisa’s credit card bills were being sent to M, K, and D.

  A quick search confirmed the Council had ties inside the law firm, so many in fact, that I was beginning to believe the entire firm was a front for Council activities. I’d always believed that lawyers were blood-sucking demons. Now I had proof.

  So Robert was working for the company responsible for coercing his wife into a life of prostitution. His alibi for the time she went missing was airtight. But was that by design? I was beginning to suspect that the grieving husband knew more than he was admitting.

  Before I even opened the door to my childhood home, I could smell Mom’s homemade lasagna. The house was a modest one, by Charleston standards at least, two stories tall with gray-and-white siding and a burgundy door. It had nothing on the massive, old plantation houses or the towering homes in the downtown area where I lived. My parents lived a few miles outside of town in a place called Ridgeville. Out in the boonies, my mother always joked. It wasn’t that far from the truth. The yard was enormous, five acres fenced in, the only opening a large, iron gate at the head of the driveway that opened by electronic keypad. It was the home my great-grandparents had moved into just before they died, and it’d been in the family ever since. My Great-Grandpa Thaddeus hadn’t been rich by any means, but his wise investments had bought this house and still managed to bring in enough, when combined with my father’s pension, to at least pay the taxes and monthly utilities.

  I’d barely stepped over the threshold when my younger sister Sarah launched herself at me, wrappin
g me in an enthusiastic hug. I squeezed back, grateful that her time at UCLA had left her exterior, at least, unchanged. In a family full of dark-haired, short-ish Italian women, Sarah looked out of place. Thin, straight, strawberry-blonde hair was twisted into a bun at the crown of her head. Even without makeup, her face was flawless and pale, compared to her light blue eyes. When we’d been little, I’d teased her that she was adopted. Sarah had cried for hours. So did I… after my dad got through tanning my hide for it.

  “When did your flight get in?” I asked as I squeezed my little sister.

  “This morning.” Clinging to me, she whispered, “Please help me,” into my ear.

  I rolled my eyes. Mom must be in one of her moods again.

  “Sarah,” Mom called from the kitchen, “run and get the good salad forks out of the china hutch, will you, dear?”

  “Sure thing, Ma,” she called back. Turning to me, she confided in hushed tones, “Mom hasn’t shut up for five seconds, and I think Phoebe is about to go postal with the salad chopper.”

  I winked. “Don’t worry, as soon as she sees me, she’ll forget all about you guys and go into her ‘my poor spinster daughter’ number.”

  Sarah nodded, a bright smile spreading across her face. “Thanks, Isabel. I’ve missed you, ya know.”

  “Yeah. Same here, Shorty.” I smiled back though Sarah had been taller than I had since eighth grade. “Now go get those forks before Mom calls in the National Guard.”

  My mother’s kitchen was exactly how it’d been since I was a toddler. The stark white cabinets locked it into a 1980-esque theme, which my mother had only exaggerated by choosing to decorate with gaudy, fake greenery. The whole room was littered with grape vines, pictures of grape vines, and towels, rags, and oven mitts with you guessed it—grape vines on them. Mom liked themes. And wine.

  Mostly wine.

  When I pushed open the door, she was bending over the stove, commenting on the bread sticks as Phoebe stood over the sink slicing carrots with more force than was completely necessary. When she saw me, Phoebe smirked.

  “Hey Isabel. Glad you could make it.” She tossed the abused carrots into a big salad bowl.

  Mom looked over her shoulder at me before sliding the pan of bread out of the oven and onto the top of the stove. “Only twenty minutes late,” she scolded in her typical passive-aggressive tone.

  I shrugged, picking a piece of cucumber out of the salad and popping it into my mouth. Like lightning, Mom reached over and slapped my hand with a wooden spoon.

  “Ow,” I mumbled around the food in my mouth.

  “You weren’t raised by wolves. Wait ‘til dinner.” Then she turned on Phoebe, who was trying not to laugh. “And you, why don’t you make the bruschetta? Actually, wait.” She paused, looking over Phoebe like she was a cut of lamb at the supermarket and Mom was trying to judge her freshness. “Better yet, why don’t you go put on some makeup? Blush, I think. You look a bit pale. And change your shirt. Pink really isn’t your color, dear. Isabel, you can make the bruschetta, if you remember how.”

  I silently counted to five. “Yes, Mother, I remember how.”

  “Good.” Handing me the basket of tomatoes, she pointed toward the cutting block.

  As soon as Phoebe was out of the line of fire, I started talking. “So, I did that thing you wanted. Duke is squeaky clean. No red flags.”

  “Good. Thank you for checking for me. It’s such a dangerous world we live in nowadays. I feel so… vulnerable without your father here to keep an eye on you girls.”

  I stopped chopping. “Yeah. I miss Dad, too.”

  “Well, you girls have always been two handfuls, all of you. I mean, look at Phoebe. Twenty years old and still hasn’t had one stable relationship. I was beginning to worry she’d end up…” Mom trailed off.

  It wasn’t hard to fill in the blank.

  “Like me?”

  “I was going to say alone, but since you brought it up, yes. I worry about you, Isabel. You can’t keep clinging to Shane. That ship has sailed. You need to move on, meet new people. Have you considered online dating? Suzanne Wheeler’s daughter found a very nice young man that way.”

  “Really? He didn’t, like, want to wear her skin as a suit or anything?”

  Mom stopped what she was doing, put her hands on her hips, and glared at me. “It wouldn’t kill you to try to meet someone.”

  “It might, in fact,” I mutter, calling to mind some news story about a man taking a lady he’d met online to Mexico and telling the police she’s been eaten by alligators or something. “Besides, I work a lot. I have to, remember? Sarah’s college isn’t going to pay for itself.”

  That sounded harsher than I’d intended. Mom didn’t say anything for a minute, which told me I’d scraped a nerve. I opened my mouth to apologize, but she cut me off.

  “You work a lot. Yes, I’m aware of that. And I appreciate you doing it. I’m not heartless. I know you gave up quite a bit to come home and take over the business. But you don’t have to work every minute. Surely, you’ve met some suitable prospects.”

  Prospects. Like men were gold nuggets to be panned out of the river.

  “I meet plenty of men.” I shrugged. “Most are criminals or adulterers, but I suppose I could bring one of them home.”

  She slapped me with the spoon again, this time across the shoulder. “Don’t give me lip, girl,” she ordered, expression stern. “This is not a joke. You don’t want to spend your life alone.”

  I rolled my eyes and resumed chopping, garlic this time. “Ma, I’m far from an old maid.”

  At that minute, Phoebe walked into the kitchen wearing a clingy, lightweight sweater that accentuated her, ah, assets nicely. I whistled. Mom frowned and motioned to the stairs with her spoon.

  “Phoebe! Go find something else to wear. That’s barely decent and not appropriate for a family dinner.” Phoebe rolled her eyes but turned to obey. Before she could step foot out of the door, Mom called out to her. “Remember, dear, no man is gonna buy the cow if he can get the milk for free!”

  “Ma!” I chastised.

  She looked at me flatly. “What?”

  I blinked. “Did you just call Phoebe a cow?”

  ***

  The doorbell rang at exactly seven. Phoebe had changed into a Mom-approved yellow blouse and tan slacks. Silently, we took up our usual positions in the hallway. Phoebe at the door, Sarah in front of me, and Mom at my back. It was the Stone family gauntlet. The only thing missing was Dad at the end.

  Phoebe greeted Duke with a quick peck on the cheek and led him in to be introduced to the firing squad, AKA Mom.

  Duke was easily a half a foot taller than all of us, except for Sarah. Which meant he wasn’t super tall for a man. He was muscular in the way that was more physical labor and less time in the gym. When we sat down for dinner, he pulled out Phoebe’s chair, earning him a sly smile from Mother. But it wasn’t long before the polite banter wore off and Mom went into full-blown inquisition mode.

  “So, Duke, do you plan to continue your job as a firefighter after you get married?”

  Sarah paled. Phoebe coughed and kicked me under the table. I grunted as she glared at me. Hey, what was I supposed to do about it?

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit dangerous?”

  “No more so than most careers, ma’am,” he answered, far more politely than I would have.

  “That’s true,” I interjected. “Just yesterday, I was in this dark basement with these two vampires and—”

  Mom cut me off with, “That’s nice, dear,” before turning back to her prey. “And what about your family, Duke?

  He looked to Phoebe, who turned to me. I shrugged.

  “What about them?” He swallowed a bite of bread.

  “Well, are they all well? What I mean is—are there any unfortunate genetic conditions in your family medical history?”

  At that, I laughed so hard that red wine shot out my nose. Luckily, I had m
y napkin over my face. This was actually a standard Mom question. For her, boyfriends were nothing more or less than potential breeding stock.

  I remembered the first time she’d met Shane and asked him the same thing. He’d responded that the only unfortunate genetic conditions were his Uncle Peter, who was a sword swallower in the traveling circus and his Aunt Bernie, the bearded lady. Mom’s eye had twitched, but Dad had laughed his ass off and promptly told Mom to leave the boy alone.

  Duke wasn’t going to get so lucky. He sort of sat there with his mouth open, a bite of food falling off his raised fork.

  “Mom, that’s enough.” I turned to Duke. “You’ll have to excuse her. Her brain-to-mouth filter is in the shop.”

  Mom folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t apologize for me. It’s a legitimate question. Especially these days.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Phoebe finally piped up.

  “I’m just being cautious.”

  “Ma, enough,” I said sternly.

  She shot me a look that clearly said, “We’ll talk about this later,” but she didn’t push the subject.

  Bless her heart, Sarah decided to break the tension. “So, what made you decide to become a firefighter?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Well…” Duke smiled, and a dimple appeared to the left of his mouth. “I was living in New York, and I’d just started law school. One night, some of my friends and I went to this club inside this old warehouse. Somehow, a fire broke out. I got out all right, but one of my friends was trapped inside. The firemen got there and got everybody out, but it was too late for my buddy. That’s when I decided to change paths. I wanted to do something important, something that would really help people.”

  By the end of his tale, Mom was looking at Duke like he’d personally hung the moon. With a beaming smile, she offered him another slice of bread.

  I rolled my eyes. Before I could think of something to say, my phone rang.

  “Is that the theme song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” Sarah asked seriously.

  I nodded. “Yeah. You know how it is. If I can’t laugh about my ex-fiancé being turned into a bloodsucker, then who can?”