“No,” Ilya replied.
“Then who is?”
A hesitation. “The rest of the terra indigene call them the Elders.”
“You mentioned the Elders when Officer Grimshaw called about the new trouble. Who are they?”
“They are Namid’s teeth and claws.”
Oh crap. “So they’re what, the world’s hit men?”
He blinked. Then he laughed, a rich, deep sound.
Personally, I didn’t think the question was that funny, especially when I started wondering how the dead man ended up dead.
“That is one way of putting it,” Ilya finally said as he wiped his eyes.
Since he found that amusing, I really didn’t want to know what other ways you could put it.
“If the Elders are the land managers, I’m guessing they aren’t going to rub their paws together in greedy glee over the prospect of having the woodland overrun with humans.”
I suddenly remembered a couple of bad jokes that were going around last summer just before Yorick started divorce proceedings and told me to find an apartment because he was keeping the upscale home in Hubbney that, apparently, the second official Mrs. Yorick Dane coveted.
Joke one. Why did the Bear chase the track team? He wanted some fast food.
Joke two. What do you call a flock of chickens caught in a fire tornado? Shake and bake.
On second thought, maybe the Elders would be happy about easy meals on their land—like campers who talk about tossing a line in the water and catching a couple of fish for dinner.
“Twelve cabins updated to match the times and social customs,” Ilya said, sounding serious now. “No more and nothing more.”
I pushed my fingers through my hair and wondered just how badly I’d been played. “What was that man doing here? I certainly wasn’t going to try to build a resort on this land.”
“Clearly someone thought it could be . . . finagled.”
“Who? I could see my ex-husband showing up now that I’ve had a few months to realize how hard I’m going to have to work for so little return.”
“Little return in human terms, perhaps, but there are other ways to measure a rich life,” Ilya countered.
I tipped my head to indicate agreement. “But going with the reasoning in human terms, I could see him offering the cash equivalent of The Jumble as it had been valued at the time of the divorce settlement, completely ignoring all the money I’d put in for capital improvements. I could see him doing that, but he wasn’t the person who emptied out my safe-deposit box.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“As long as I have the original documents that show Yorick ceded The Jumble to me, I can block whoever is trying to push in and change things.”
“Yes, you can, and I will help you do that.”
I nodded. I wasn’t in the mood for self-examination, so I didn’t want to wonder why I trusted a vampire more than I trusted most humans. Since I didn’t want to wonder about that, I looked at the screen door and wondered about something else. “Do the Sanguinati have trouble with mosquitoes?”
“You mean, do the big bloodsuckers get pestered by the little bloodsuckers?”
Judging by my attorney’s laughter, if I failed to turn The Jumble into a viable business, I could always get a job as a stand-up comedian in a vampire bar.
CHAPTER 12
Aggie
Sunsday, Juin 13
Aggie moved back and forth on the tree branch, studying the dead man lying within sight of Miss Vicki’s house.
The newest dead man? The last dead man? The dead detective man? How should the Crowgard identify this one? There had been an abundance of dead humans in The Jumble lately but a decided lack of easily acquired meat since they had died where alive humans had found them too quickly.
If the newest dead man couldn’t be meat, maybe he had something else that was desirable? There had to be bits of treasure in the man’s pockets, but she didn’t want to get Miss Vicki into trouble by poking around, and the rest of the Crowgard who were watching the body—and the police—reluctantly agreed.
This body has been disturbed.
How had the human called Officer Grimshaw known that about the first dead man? He hadn’t been there when the smaller terra indigene found the body and removed the useful items like the knapsack and thermos and the shiny that had rectangles of paper and the other things. Well, the eyeballs were gone, so that might have been a clue—police were always looking for clues in the TV shows Miss Vicki liked to watch—but had he known about the other things?
Ilya Sanguinati had known, or at least suspected, and had demanded that all the possessions be brought to Silence Lodge as his condition for helping Miss Vicki. And they had brought everything to the lodge. Except the eyeballs. Officer Grimshaw had taken the one she would have had for lunch yesterday, and Aggie suspected that one of the Weaselgard had made off with the other eyeball before the Crows had gathered to check out the first dead man. And the Weasels didn’t even like eating eyeballs, so that was just them flipping their tails at the Crows.
On the other wing, Ilya Sanguinati had said he wanted to see what the first dead man had brought with him in order to figure out why the man had been trespassing at The Jumble. He hadn’t said he would keep the useful things.
Still, she’d given up the shiny case that held the rectangles of paper in order to help Miss Vicki, and now there was this dead detective man who was bound to have some treasure.
Except Officer Grimshaw had already seen this body, so he would definitely know if it was disturbed by even tiny hands reaching into pockets to see what might be out of sight. He’d looked hard at the body, had even touched the neck like they did on TV in order to know if a human was dead, like they couldn’t just tell by looking or smelling. Dead did not smell the same as alive. Even young Crows knew that. But apparently humans didn’t and needed to touch.
Then she noticed a piece of cloth poking out from beneath the body. Humans called it a tie. One of her kin had seen a shiny clipped to the cloth, had seen it glint in a beam of sunlight as the detective man pulled out his weapon and challenged one of the Elders, who was already angry about the other two humans trying to enter Miss Vicki’s house. Jozi had flown off to look for food, leaving Aggie to study the dead man.
She moved back and forth on the tree branch as she thought and thought about the shiny Jozi had seen. She could get that shiny without disturbing the body too much. All she needed to do was pull the tie out from under the body just enough to reach the clip.
Officer Grimshaw led Young Osgood to the car. She couldn’t see them—which meant they couldn’t see her.
She flew down to the dead man and looked again. Still couldn’t see the car or the live humans.
She grabbed the end of the tie and pulled and pulled, tugging it out from under the body inch by inch. When she couldn’t pull anymore out, she shifted her wings to tiny arms and hands that could squeeze between the ground and the body, following the tie until . . .
There!
She pulled out her prize, dropping it on the ground as she shifted arms and hands back to wings. Picking up the clip with her beak, she flew to the tree near the cabin she was renting from Miss Vicki—the tree that had a carefully built nest that hid a shallow hollow in the trunk. The hollow was just as carefully stuffed with sheets of paper that formed layers of hiding places for her little treasures.