Mercy shook her head. “Should I?”
“She passed away on Saturday night. In her office. There’s a chance her death is just some kind of sad accident. But it’s also possible she was murdered.”
“You think the deaths are connected?” Mercy drew in a sharp breath.
“You think there’s magic involved?”
“Maybe.”
“Alex, if the societies … if some bastard did this to Dean Beekman…”
“We don’t know that’s the case. I’m just … exploring every avenue.”
Mercy put her head in her hands. “How do they get away with this?
Isn’t Lethe supposed to stop this kind of thing from happening?” “Yeah,”
Alex admitted.
Mercy shoved back from the table, her tray rattling as she snatched up her bag, fresh tears in her eyes. “Then you stop them, Alex. You make them pay for this.”
The Peabody originally stood at the corner of Elm and High Street,stuffed to the rooftop with items both interesting and obscure. Planswere made for a new building and the basement was dug, but materialswere challenging to come by, what with the war being on. The collectionsfrom the original museum were scattered all over campus, in basements
and carriage houses. It took so long to build the museum, and thedocumentation was so haphazard, that parts of the museum’s collectionwere still being discovered in old outbuildings as recently as the 1970s.
Of course there are some items in its mighty rooms that will never becatalogued, and in some cases, it’s best that provenance remainunknown.
—fromThe Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of theNinth House
Table; amethyst
Provenance: Unknown
Donor: Unknown
Records first appear c. 1930 after construction of the new Peabody.
Please see closed collection notes.
—from the Lethe Armory Catalogue as revised and edited by
Pamela Dawes, Oculus
17
The following night Turner met Alex and Dawes outside of the Peabody, by the statue of a triceratops that Wolf’s Head had accidentally animated back in 1982. Once the cameras were down, slipping into the museum was a matter of timing the rounds of the security guards. She mentioned the potential psychiatry connection to Turner and the professors who had badmouthed Dean Beekman, but he didn’t seem impressed.
“You get names?”
“Ruth Canejo, but not the others.”
“You find out anything about aging poisons?”
“Yes and no,” Alex said, trying to keep the edge from her voice. It had only been two days since Turner had demanded her presence at the second
crime scene. “There’s something called a Wizening Stick that makes you look older if you chew on it long enough, but the effects don’t last more than a few hours. And there’s a poison called Tempusladro, the thief of time. It ages you internally.”
“That sounds promising.”
“No, it only ages your organs, speeds up the clock. But the whole point is that the victim looks like he died of natural causes. Young and dewy on the outside, shriveled on the inside.”
“Then keep searching,” Turner said. “Find something I can use. I need you and your demon boyfriend for the work I can’t do.”
“Then help us bring him out of hell.”
Turner’s face shuttered. “We’ll see.”
Alex had badgered him into meeting them by promising him that, once they had two more murderers to walk the Gauntlet, she’d leave him alone.
She was surprised he’d agreed to come.
They shuffled past the main entry and down the stairs. Turner looked up at the dead eyes of the security cameras uneasily. They were still recording, but the magical tea in Dawes’s thermos would keep the cameras from capturing anything but static. “You have a real gift for turning everyone around you into criminals, Stern.”
“It’s some light trespassing. You can say you heard a noise.”
“I’m going to say I caught you two breaking in and decided to pursue.”
“Would you both be quiet?” Dawes whispered furiously. She gestured to the thermos. “The tempest won’t last all night.”
