Alex climbed the stairs to the third floor. She’d spent little time here, but she found the
Virgil bedroom on her second try. It was directly above the Dante room but far more grand. Alex supposed that if she survived three years of Lethe and Yale, it would one day
be hers.
She went to the desk and opened the drawers. She found a note with a few lines of poetry inside, some stationery stamped with the Lethe hound, and not much else.
There was a statistics textbook on the desk. Had Darlington left it there the night they’d
gone to the basement of Rosenfeld Hall?
Alex padded back down the stairs to the bookshelf that guarded the library. She pulled
down the Albemarle Book. The smell of horses rose from its pages, the sound of hooves
on cobblestones, a snatch of Hebrew—the memory of the research she’d done on golems.
Darlington had used the library regularly and the book’s rows were full of his requests, but
most seemed focused on feeding his obsession with New Haven—manufacturing history, land deeds, city planning. There were entries from Dawes too, all about tarot and ancient
mystery cults, and even a few from Dean Sandow. But then there it was, early in the fall
semester, two names in Darlington’s jagged scrawl: Bertram Boyce North and Daisy
Whitlock. The Bridegroom was right. Darlington had been looking into his case. But where were his notes? Had they been in his satchel that night at Rosenfeld and been swallowed up with the rest of him?
“Where are you, Darlington?” she whispered. And can you forgive me?
“Alex.”
She jumped. Dawes was standing at the top of the stairs, her headphones clamped
around her neck, a dishrag in her hands. “Turner’s back. He has something to show us.”
Alex retrieved her socks from the armory and joined Turner and Dawes in the parlor.
They sat shoulder to shoulder at a clunky-looking laptop, matching frowns on their faces.
Turner had changed into jeans and a button-down shirt but still managed to look sharp, especially next to Dawes.
He waved Alex over, a stack of folders piled beside him.
On the screen, Alex saw black-and-white footage of what looked like a prison hallway,
a row of inmates moving along a corridor of cells.
“Look at the time stamp,” said Turner. “That’s right about the time you were headed into my crime scene.”
Turner hit play and the inmates shuffled forward. A huge shape lumbered into view.
“That’s him,” said Alex. It was unmistakably Lance Gressang. “Where does he go?”
“He turns a corner and then he’s just gone.” He struck a few keys and the scene changed to a different angle on another hallway, but Alex didn’t see Gressang anywhere.
“Here’s number one on the long, long list of things I don’t understand: Why did he go back?” Turner hit the keys again and Alex saw a wide view of what looked like a hospital
ward.
“Gressang went back to jail?”
“That’s right. He’s in the infirmary with a busted hand.”
Alex remembered the crunch of bones when she’d hit him with the putter. But why the
hell would Gressang have returned to jail to await trial?
“Are these for me?” Alex asked, gesturing at the folders.
Turner nodded. “That’s everything we have on Lance Gressang and Tara Hutchins right
now. Look your fill, but they’re going back with me tonight.”
Alex took the stack to the velvet sofa and settled in. “Why such generosity?”
“I’m stubborn, not stupid. I know what I saw.” Turner leaned back in his chair. “So let’s
hear it, Alex Stern. You don’t think Gressang did the murder. Who’s responsible?”
Alex flipped open the top folder. “I don’t know, but I do know Tara has connections to at least four societies, and you don’t get stabbed over the occasional twenty bag, so this isn’t about a little weed.”
“How do you tally four societies?”
“I’ll get the whiteboard,” said Dawes.
“Is it a magical whiteboard?” asked Turner sourly.
Dawes cast him a baleful look. “All whiteboards are magical.”
She returned with a handful of markers and a whiteboard that she propped up on the mantel.