House of Shadows Page 17

  I laughed.

  “You were pretty mature when you were nineteen, too, traveling west on business all by yourself.”

  “Delevan hated to travel for business, and I wanted the experience. As a younger son, my path in life wasn’t preordained like Delevan’s was. I wasn’t looking at the future, and expecting to take over as head of house someday. I had the opportunity to leave if I wanted, and I wasn’t planning on hanging around the estate my whole life, like so many before me had done. I looked forward to having my own business, family, and home. My own traditions.”

  “I’m so glad you didn’t get that family back in the 1800’s,” I said sincerely. I felt a pang of jealousy at the very thought, irrational as that was.

  Miles looked down at me and smiled.

  “How could I? I was waiting for you. It was a long wait, but worth it.”

  I smiled back.

  “Whoever came here did so a number of times,” Miles pointed out. There were multiple sets of prints headed deeper into the cave, and back out again.

  “Only one person though, by the looks of it,” I said. “Unless they all had the same shoe size. And brand of shoe.”

  “A man, more than likely, judging by the size of the prints,” Miles noted.

  Part of the cave was unremarkable, but in other places, spectacular. We passed what looked like a waterfall of caramel, flowing into a caramel river. In the center of the river was what looked like a piece of bacon.

  “What on earth?” I moved closer to get a better look.

  “It’s cave bacon,” Miles said. “It’s a formation, not breakfast food.”

  “What a strange combination that would be, caramel and bacon. Yuck. Pretty amazing though, that’s exactly what it looks like.”

  We continued on, until we reached another cavern.

  Miles panned his flashlight around the large space.

  “The footprints end here,” he pointed out. “This surface isn’t soft, like the rest of what we’ve passed through.”

  We walked around the perimeter of the cavern, shining our lights down the many tunnels that branched off of it. We saw no more footprints.

  Miles turned, and led me back the way we’d come.

  “Let’s go, before we get ourselves turned around, and can’t find our way back to our own footprints.”

  We returned to the passage that led us into the cavern, and began the trek back to the cave entrance.

  “So what are you planning to do?” I asked, as we stepped out of the cave, and into the bright sunlight. We made our way along the narrow ledge, then back to the estate.

  “I’d like to bar the entrance to the cave… although it would be a terrible thing to do, if there was any chance someone was inside.”

  “No kidding!” I exclaimed.

  “On the other hand, it will take a while to put a gate in place, so unless someone is camping out in there, which is highly unlikely, anyone inside will get out before it’s too late. I think I will do that. It could keep someone from getting lost in the cave someday, or injured and stranded, without any way to get help.”

  “That would be awful,” I shuddered. “A gate is a good idea, for more reasons than one.”

  “Yeah. I don’t like that someone has been in there either, and frequently, by the look of it. I’m thankful they didn’t damage anything, at least that we could see.”

  “Does Grandma Polly seem stressed again, to you?” I asked suddenly.

  “She’s good at hiding it, but yes, sometimes I think I see signs that she is.”

  “She doesn’t seem to sleep much. I hear bumping and dragging sounds on the other side of the wall, until late at night. I’ve wondered if she was rearranging furniture. That didn’t happen over Thanksgiving, but there have been a lot of other nights that it has.”

  “How strange,” Miles said, his forehead creased in thought. “The next time you hear something, text me. I can’t imagine Grandma Polly being able to move furniture around, even if she wanted to.”

  “Okay. Expect to hear from me then, the next time we’re here. It happens pretty frequently.”

  “How about you, have you seen anything unexplainable?”

  “No! Because if I had, you would have heard about it immediately,” I said indignantly.

  “Good,” Miles smiled. “No ankle monitor for you, then.”

  I rolled my eyes, and he laughed.

  It was the end of the weekend, so after having dinner with Grandma Polly, we loaded up the dogs and our bags, and drove back to Glen Haven.

  “You’ve got a different kind of faith than I do,” Miles said.

  “What do you mean?” Paul wondered.

  The guys were discussing a required course we were taking. We didn’t have class on the same day and time as Paul, but the instructor and subject matter were the same.

  “To believe that everything happened through a series of random mutations,” Miles said, as the waiter delivered our coffee drinks. “That takes a tremendous amount of faith.”

  “I guess I don’t understand what you mean,” Paul said again. “How does that take faith?”

  “For instance,” Miles said, as he looked around. “It doesn’t take faith at all for me to see this table, that chair, and Anika’s latte, and believe they’re the products of intelligent design. To believe they’re the result of random mutation… that takes faith of some kind.”

  Paul’s eyebrows rose.

  “Well, but I don’t think that. They couldn’t occur without someone to create them.”

  “Why is that?” Miles questioned. “Are they more complicated and detailed than, say, the waiter who just delivered our drinks? I look around, and see how intricate every part of nature is, and how it all fits together. Much more complicated than a table, chair, or Anika’s latte—no offense, I know you love them, Anika—and I don’t have the kind of faith it takes to believe those things just happened without intelligent design.”

  “Hi, everyone!” said Jenny, as she and Xander joined us. “It’s getting colder out there.”

  I looked out the window beside me.

  “Oh, it’s starting to snow!”

  Everyone turned to look.

  “Ever have a white Christmas where you’re from?” asked Xander.

  “Very rarely,” I said.

  I noticed a girl from one of our study groups sitting on the other side of the coffee shop, furtively watching our group. Specifically, me. She looked uncomfortable, and hesitant.

  Excusing myself, I went and sat across from her.

  “Hi, Delia,” I said.

  “Hi, Anika,” she replied, glancing away briefly, then back at me.

  “Would you like to join us?” I asked.

  “Oh, no… thanks, that’s okay. I’m with my boyfriend, he’s ordering.”

  “Okay, then. Well, it was good seeing you, Delia.”

  I started to rise, and she reached out and put her hand on my arm.

  “Wait, Anika,” she said almost in a panic. “I need to talk to you about something, and I don’t know how…”

  I sat back down. I knew something was up, Delia was usually bubbly and friendly, not nervous.

  “Anika, you and Miles seem really good together… I’m just going to come out and ask, are you going out on him?”

  “What? No!” I said in astonishment.

  Delia looked at me intently, as though gauging my sincerity.

  “Why do you ask that, Delia?” I frowned.

  She sighed.

  “My boyfriend overheard a conversation. I’ll just leave it at that.”

  Oh my word. I totally and completely understood how Miles felt about all of the accusations against him.

  “Delia, I love Miles. I’ve never, ever been out with anyone else, or wanted to be.”

  “Okay, Anika,” she nodded. “It just made me really uncomfortable, what he heard. Miles seems so nice, and it bothered me.”

  “Miles is very nice, and I’d be an idiot to ever mess up what
we have. I’m not an idiot. I love him, and I would die rather than ever betray him,” I said with absolute sincerity.

  A guy who must be Delia’s boyfriend, carried two drinks to the table.

  “Pete, this is Anika,” Delia told him.

  “Hi, Anika,” he said, giving me a funny look as he sat down, and handed Delia her drink.

  “Hi, Pete,” I replied. “Delia just told me you overheard a conversation about me recently. Do you know who it was that said the things they did?”

  “No. I have no idea who it was.”

  “They were lying,” said Delia. “I told you I didn’t believe it could be true, and Anika says it isn’t. I believe her.”

  “Thank you, Delia,” I said gratefully.

  “Okay, well, it was pretty strange,” said Pete. He seemed more relaxed now.

  I looked over at our table, where Miles and our friends were talking. We made eye contact, and I motioned to him. Miles excused himself, and joined us.

  “Pete, this is Miles,” I said. “Will you tell us everything you can remember overhearing?”

  “Don’t tell me—something new?” Miles asked, as his eyebrows knit.

  “Yeah. Only this is about me,” I said ruefully.

  Miles reached for my hand, and held it in both of his.

  “I trust you completely, and not without reason,” Miles said. Whether it was for my sake, or Pete and Delia’s, it felt good to hear it. And for them to hear it.

  “Thank you,” I squeezed his hand. “I trust you, too, Miles. We need to find out who’s responsible, so we need to know what you overheard, Pete.”

  “Okay… if you really want to know. I recorded it. Not because of what I heard!” he quickly added. “Delia’s in band, and I was recording her practice. I didn’t even pay attention to what the woman near me was saying at the time.”

  “When Pete showed me the recording, I heard the conversation and your names, so I knew who she was talking about,” Delia said.

  “Can we see this recording?” asked Miles. “And maybe you can send it to us. We’ve had trouble with false accusations all semester, although usually they’re against me. We’re trying to get to the bottom of who’s doing this, and why. Maybe there’s something on that recording that will help us figure it out.”

  “That’s messed up,” said Pete, and Delia looked shocked. “Sure, I’ll send it to you. I hope it helps.”

  Miles gave Pete his number, and he immediately texted it to Miles.

  We thanked Pete and Delia, then returned to our table.

  We were both distracted, and finally said goodbye to our friends. As soon as we reached our vehicle, Miles played the recording.

  At first all we heard was the band as they practiced. Then a voice filtered in. When the recording ended, we turned to each other.

  “She must have been on a cell phone,” Miles said, as he started the vehicle. “It’s too cold to just sit here. You look like you’re about to freeze.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess I am. I’m shaking more from how upsetting this is, though,” I shivered.

  Miles turned up the heat, and warm air began to fill the SUV. He turned to me and took my hand.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly. “I know how this is making you feel. I do. Try not to let it get to you. Let’s just look at this as an opportunity to search for clues, okay?”

  “Okay,” I nodded.

  He pulled out of the parking lot, and we headed back to the apartment building.

  “Send that to my email,” he said. “We’ll look at it on a bigger screen, and see what it tells us.”

  Several minutes later, Miles and I sat on the couch in my apartment with his laptop, which had a bigger screen than mine. We watched the recording all the way through.

  “I couldn’t make out everything,” Miles said. “A lot of it was so garbled. But did you catch that, she said ‘when they find out’.”

  “Yeah…” I thought about that. “This woman is talking about a future attempt to undermine our faith in each other. This wasn’t intended to do that, Pete just happened to record this conversation, and it just happened that Delia heard it, and recognized our names.”

  “Okay then. Let’s turn off the sound,” he said, and did so. “Let’s see if we can get any clues from the video.”

  We watched in silence.

  “What’s that?” I pointed. “Smoke?”

  “Yeah... I think it is. Whoever was on the phone was smoking, now and then you can see it drift past Pete, and look how he moved over.”

  We watched some more.

  “This grassy area where they’re practicing,” Miles thought out loud. “This is outside Student Services.”

  “You’re right, it is!” I realized. “Where Gina works.”

  “Right. But, that isn’t her voice. And unless she’s taken up smoking recently, that also indicates it’s someone else, not her.”

  Having gained all of the clues we could for the time being, Miles shut down his laptop and set it on the coffee table, then sat back on the couch with his arm around me.

  “I hate all of this,” I complained. “Why on earth would anyone go to all this trouble?”

  Miles gently rubbed my shoulder, as he thought.

  “I don’t know. We’ll figure it out, though. We will.”

  Miles looked up from the final exam he was studying for.

  “Is there anything you’ve always wanted, but never had?”

  “Hmm, to marry you? Right now?” I replied.

  Miles laughed.

  “I’m serious! Think of something. Like a particular kind of car, a star named after you, a shopping mall, the moon, a country—what have you always wanted?”

  I gave that some thought.

  “I’ve always wanted a cat,” I remembered. “My Dad is allergic, so that was never an option. We did once have a cat that sort of adopted us, but it lived outside, and would come and go. I loved that cat, and was devastated when one day it just never came back.”

  Miles looked sympathetic.

  “That’s really sad.”

  “Yeah… so, anyway, that’s something I’ve always wanted.”

  “Good to know,” he said with a smile, and returned to his studying.

  This had to be about Christmas. Why else would he be asking?

  I looked over at Chip, who was sound asleep, and Trixie, who was chewing an old shoe Xander generously donated to her. Wonder what they would think of a cat?

  Wonder what a cat would think of them?

  Finals week came, and we were ready. Miles, of course, came out with perfect scores. No way would he not be valedictorian one day. I did well, also. Having Miles as a study partner pays off!

  Miles and I were packing up for a long Christmas break, and planned to do some shopping before we headed back to the castle.

  As we walked past the security guard on our way out, Ron, one of the guards, stood.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bannerman. I have a message here for you.”

  “Thank you, Ron,” Miles said. The guard handed him a small pink envelope, and we continued on our way through the front doors toward the covered parking lot.

  “This is either from Gina, or whoever it is that’s out to sabotage our relationship,” Miles frowned. “I can’t imagine anyone else who would leave something like this.”

  “It’s from someone up to no good,” I agreed, looking at the highly perfumed envelope in Miles’ hand. “Gina has kept awfully quiet, ever since our little talk… but you’re right, it could be from her. The attempts to undermine have increased significantly. It seems like there’s a new one every other day.”

  “Have you had any more texts since we blocked that number?” asked Miles.

  “No, thank goodness,” I said, remembering the awful texts that I started receiving within days of hearing about the video Pete recorded.

  “Good,” Miles said.

  “How about John and Xander?” I asked.

  “No, not since they blocked th
e number.”

  “It makes me so mad that someone sent those to me at all, but then trying to convince our friends to convince you that I was seeing someone else—grrr!”

  “Same here. Fortunately, we both have real friends, who really know us, and have real faith in us,” Miles said. “You should have seen the response Xander sent back. It was pretty funny.”

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “It was a big letdown that the phone was a pay-as-you-go. I really hoped my security guys would get a name or address to go with it, but no such luck.”

  “You know, if we didn’t have the history that we do, all of this would really be affecting our relationship.”

  “Friendship is a good foundation,” he agreed.

  We reached our vehicle, and Miles pressed the unlock button on his keychain.

  “Be careful how you open that envelope, we might want it dusted for fingerprints,” I suggested.

  Miles helped me into the vehicle, then popped open the glove compartment.

  “Tell you what… I’m putting this here, and when we get back to the apartment we’ll open it carefully, and keep our own fingerprints off of it.”

  “Sounds good,” I agreed.

  Miles got in the driver’s seat, started the vehicle, and pulled out of the lot and turned the wheels in the direction of downtown.

  Maybe that note would give us a clue to go on.

  Chapter 14

  Fluffy snowflakes fell gently as we walked down the street, dusting Miles’ leather jacket, and my crimson rose wool coat. Ever since seeing Miles’ reaction to the dress I wore the day we were engaged, I’d been shopping more for that color.

  I was in ecstasy as we walked down the snowy sidewalk, with my hand tucked in Miles’ arm. It couldn’t look more like Christmas, at the North Pole. It was as if we stepped in to a Hallmark card.

  Christmas lights glowed from every door, window, and lamppost. Carolers were singing on the corner, and wreaths hung from the street signs. The scent of cinnamon wafted from a bakery across the street.

  We stopped for coffee—a latte for me, of course—and pastries, and watched the snowflakes falling outside the window as we talked about our plans for the Christmas break, and beyond.