“So we have an empty house and a stocked fridge,” I said. “By all accounts, Caleb Franklin slept here, ate here, stored the barest necessities here. Didn’t seem to do much else here.”
“No,” he didn’t,” Ethan agreed.
I looked around. “Whatever got him killed, there’s no evidence of it inside.” I glanced back at Ethan. “You want to finish up in here? I want to take a walk around the yard.”
Ethan nodded. “I’ll take a pass. Be careful out there.”
I promised I would and walked back to the front door, then outside. I needed to think like him. He might not have had a Pack, but as the stocked fridge showed, he was still a shifter.
I hopped down the steps, walked around the house. There were shrubs in front of the foundation every few feet, and a few trees just beginning to bud around the edge of the narrow lot.
The backyard was small, bordered by the back neighbor’s chain-link fence, which was covered in brambles and vines. There were a couple more trees back here, as well as a cracked and peeling redwood picnic table. A swing hung from one tree, a simple wooden plank attached to an overhanging branch by a thick, braided rope, probably hung for the same child who’d once owned the white bedroom furniture.
I tugged on the ropes to check they were solid, knocked on the wooden seat. I gingerly sat down, pushed back in the soft earth with the toes of my boots. The swing moved back, then forward, then back again, the rope creaking with effort. I stretched out my arms and leaned back to look up at the tree limbs overhead.
The child would have played out here, the trees creating the walls of the castle only she could save. That was how I would have played, anyway. Our backyard had been empty of fun—no trees, no swings, no sandbox. Just the lawn my father paid someone to trim into a perfectly manicured rectangle.
I sat up again, head buzzing from the motion. That was when I saw it—a square piece of plywood stuck over the painted brick foundation. The plywood was new, still showing its price in bright orange paint.
Maybe our shifter had a den, I thought. I walked toward it, knelt in front in the soft, new grass. There were no screws or locks; it had merely been set in place, propped up by a concrete block. I moved away the block, then the plywood, and peered into the crawl space. The ground beneath the house was packed dirt and dotted here and there with rocks and broken bricks. It smelled of wet earth.
The plywood had been larger than the void it covered, which was only about sixteen inches square. Big enough for pests to crawl into, but Caleb Franklin didn’t strike me as the type to care overmuch about something nesting down there.
The hole wouldn’t have been big enough for him to slip through. But maybe it was big enough for him to reach into.
With a silent prayer to whatever gods would keep the rest of the house’s spiders out of my hair, I braced my hands on the foundation and poked my head inside.
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to darkness-inside-darkness—and just a moment more to spy the metal cashbox just inside the foundation.
If I’d been a child in my imaginary castle, this would have been my long-lost treasure.
I reached inside, fingers grasping at something stringy before my fingertips landed on cold metal. I found the handle and pulled it out just as footsteps echoed behind me.
I stood, dusted the dirt from my knees with one hand, and walked to the picnic table. I set the cashbox on top of it.
“And what do we have here?”
“There was new plywood,” I said. “I was hoping I’d find a hidey-hole, and it looks like I did. Or found something, anyway.”
The box was rectangular, closed with a metal latch. I unhooked it and flipped open the lid.
There was a small manila envelope inside, the flap still gummed and open. I picked it up and emptied into my palm a small brass key. Its working end didn’t have the typical angular hills and valleys; instead there were square notches. A number, 425, was inscribed on the head.
“Well, well, well, Sentinel. Look what you have there.”
I glanced at him. “I’m looking but have no idea what it’s for. Do you?”
Ethan smiled. “That is a key for a safe-deposit box.”
A hidden box that led to a vaulted box. That was a pretty interesting find.
“So our murdered shifter, who defected from the Pack, has a hidden cashbox and a key to a safe-deposit box.” I glanced at Ethan. “What does an unaffiliated shifter keep in a safe-deposit box?”
“I’ve no idea,” Ethan said, eyes gleaming with interest, “but I’m eager to find out.”
I slid the key back into the envelope and put the envelope in my pocket. Then I put the cashbox back where I’d found it, pulled the plywood and brick back into place.
And realized we weren’t the only ones to have been here. The ground here was as soft as it was near the swing, so it had saved the impressions of the large, rough footprints.
I pointed them out to Ethan. “We aren’t the only ones poking around out here.”
“Then we’d best be the first to solve the mystery.”
• • •
We made a final pass through the house, looking for information that might identify the bank Caleb had used, the location of the box. But we found nothing.
We turned off all the lights and walked outside, setting the lock on the doorknob to deter intruders. We were on our way back to the car when I heard a faint murmur of sound, a voice carried on the wind. And with that voice came the buzz of magic.
“Listen,” I said quietly, when Ethan joined me on the sidewalk.
He tilted his head, and when he caught the sound, alarm crossed his face. “Magic,” he said.
“Our sorcerer?”
He flipped the thumb guard on his katana. “Someone is doing magic in this neighborhood. Let us be prepared either way.”
I nodded, kept my hand on my katana’s handle as we walked across the street and down the block, pausing every few yards to check our position in relation to the sound. Silently, I touched Ethan’s hand, nodded toward a small cemetery, the graves surrounded by a chain-link fence. Unlike much of the rest of the neighborhood, the fence and grass beyond it looked well tended.
“Longwood Cemetery,” Ethan whispered as we reached the front gate. It was a double gate and standing open, large enough for cars to drive through.
I stopped at the entrance, gathered up my courage. I didn’t like cemeteries. My brother, Robert, and sister, Charlotte, and I had held our breath when we passed them on car trips as kids. I was the youngest and always held my breath the longest. I had been completely terrified by the thought of all those people underground waiting, Thriller-like, to thrust out their dirty hands and grab my ankles. If I stayed quiet and still, they’d stay happily asleep beneath the earth.