“Wow,” Seth said from the doorway. He was alternately watching me and peering through the peephole.
A handwritten list of furnishings, statues, paintings, and art sat underneath the money. In the next column were numbers that I assumed were prices or estimates of value. I recognized some of the items as artwork and furniture from the lounge. I glanced at Seth.
“She was keeping track of how much the antiques were worth,” I said. “I wonder if this money is from previous sales, or the cell phones, or blackmail.”
“Blackmail?” Seth asked.
“She liked to collect secrets,” I said.
“It looks like she liked to collect money,” Seth said.
“I wonder if she was selling off some of the antiques in the castle?”
I flipped the pages to see if there was a list of “sold” items. There wasn’t. Just more numbers and items. I wondered if Jessica and Linda knew that Clarissa had assessed the entire contents of the castle.
“Someone’s coming,” Seth whispered.
I quickly repacked the box and I set it up on the shelf. I went to the door and listened with Seth. Mavis was talking to someone—probably Selma—and she stopped at her room and unlocked the door.
I went to the closet and pushed the box to the back where it had been.
Something was bothering me about the list and the money but I couldn’t quite pin it down. The back of my neck prickled and I struggled to make the connection.
“I think people are going down to lunch,” Seth said. He stood with his ear to the door.
“Yeah, let’s go,” I said. I pushed the key down into my jeans pocket and followed Seth into the hallway and downstairs.
The dining room was in disarray when we arrived. René’s hat was askew and he had a wild look in his eyes. He and Wally hastily set the warming pans on the buffet table. They had put out sandwich makings again, a crock of soup, and a large bowl of salad.
Wally brought pitchers of water, and had set up cans of soda on the drinks table.
“What’s up with the chef?” Seth muttered to me.
I shrugged and watched as they continued to set up. I glanced at my watch—it was a little after noon. Maybe René got thrown by being a few minutes late? I would be surprised if a couple of minutes made him so anxious. Especially with this group.
I approached him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Can I help with anything?”
He spun to look at me and I stepped back. He shook his head no.
“I think we have it under control now,” he said. “I was meeting with Jessica about the plan for next week if we can’t get our deliveries. I thought Emmett would set up the buffet, but he’s disappeared.” René held his hands out.
“What do you mean disappeared?” Mac said from behind me.
“He’s not in the kitchen, or downstairs, or anywhere else he should be,” René said. “I haven’t seen him since breakfast cleanup.”
“Oh, no,” Mac said. He grabbed my arm and pulled me out into the hall. “I heard a snowmobile a few minutes ago. I thought it was Kirk and his snowblower, but now I’m worried Emmett may have run away.”
I started to ask why Emmett would run away, but Mac held up his hand.
“Kirk told me about his investigation.” Mac leaned forward and dropped his voice. “He thinks Emmett is our cell phone smuggler. I need to go find Kirk and we might have to go after Emmett.”
“I’ll keep working on the other situation here.” I didn’t have time to tell him about finding the key and the money in the box before he strode off into the back hall.
As I walked back to the dining room, I wondered again where Vi had gone. If she’d been here, she probably would have tried to tag along on the snowmobiles to keep an eye on her number-one suspect, Kirk. I could hardly wait to tell her she’d been tracking an undercover cop.
Seth was chatting with Lucille and already halfway through his lunch when I entered the dining room. Mom and Dad sat with them. I saw that Wally now manned the buffet table and René had left the dining room. I served up a small bowl of soup and sat with my group.
Lucille complimented Mom on her tarot reading. Mom blushed and waved her comments away.
“Has anyone seen Vi?” I asked.
They shook their heads. “Not recently,” Mom said. “She was in the lounge when I started the tarot readings, but she left toward the beginning and I haven’t seen her since. Is something wrong?”
“No, I just . . . wondered.”
“It’s not like her to miss lunch,” Lucille said. “I hope she isn’t feeling unwell.”
“She’s not in her room—we were just up there,” Seth said.
“Oh?” Mom said, and turned toward me.
I squeezed Mom’s hand. “I’ll look for her after lunch.”
Mom nodded and went back to her meal, but her brows remained furrowed and she only pushed her food around her plate.
“Lucille, didn’t you have a yarn-bombing project for Seth?” I asked to deflect attention elsewhere.
“Yes, I do.” Lucille turned to Seth. “Maybe we can do that after lunch?”
Seth nodded and continued slurping his soup.
I finished my soup and excused myself. I felt Mom watching me leave the dining room. I didn’t want to get the rest of them worried, but I felt edgy and unsettled; something was wrong.
Vi could easily get lost in her pendulum daze for hours. I assumed she was still up in the turret room interrogating her swinging crystal. Or maybe she had finally caught Duchess and was trying to pry some information out of the cat. Either way, I decided to go back to the last place I had seen her.
38
I was out of breath when I reached the top of the steps. I swung the door open and was disappointed to see the empty room. I stepped inside. Everything was essentially as we had left it—the shoes still littered the floor, the open curtains allowed a patch of sunlight to creep into the room. Duchess lay on her side, spread out in the sunshine. She sat up when I moved toward her. Those gold eyes held mine, and she began to purr.
“Have you seen Vi?” I asked the cat. I didn’t expect an answer but had to talk to someone.
The bathroom was also just as we had left it, and also no Vi.
I left the cat in her patch of sun and went back downstairs. I stopped at our room, but it was also unoccupied. Where could she be?
Then it came to me—maybe she had gone out to see the dogs. She sometimes liked to sit with Tuffy and Baxter when she was thinking. She said they helped her concentrate. I took the stairs two at a time and headed to the back hallway.
I grabbed Seth’s coat, which was by the back door. His coat was way better than mine for this kind of weather. My sister remembered winter here in Michigan, but she must have embellished it in her mind. She’d sent something that could probably keep a person warm at the North Pole—before global warming. I walked to the cottage, thinking about where I would look if Vi weren’t there.
I also had a decision to make now. Vi would not win our bet, focused as she was on the undercover cop. But she’d still want to open the detective agency together. I had begun to see it take shape. Maybe it would be the answer to my jobless situation. It felt like I’d be taking over a classroom full of preschoolers, but if Vi was going to do this anyway, I might as well get involved if only to keep her out of trouble. And, I had started to warm to the idea. Working to focus my “gift” over the last couple of months had honed my ability to locate things. At the very least I could be a psychic lost and found. I just hoped I could find Vi, and soon.