way. She did not look right. She did not look wholesome. She did not belong.
She glimpsed Sandow’s salt-and-pepper hair in a cluster of guests by the piano. He was
balanced on a pair of crutches. She was surprised he hadn’t healed himself, but she also
couldn’t imagine him dragging a dozen cartons of goat’s milk up the stairs at Il Bastone
without help.
“Alex!” he said in some confusion. “What an unexpected pleasure.”
Alex smiled warmly. “I was able to find the file you requested and I thought you’d want to know as soon as possible.”
“File?”
“On the land deeds. Dating back to 1854.”
Sandow startled, then laughed unconvincingly. “Of course. I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on tight. Excuse us for just a moment,” he said, and led them through the
crowd. Alex stayed behind him. She knew he was already calculating what she knew and
how to question her, maybe how to silence her. She took her phone out and hit record. She
would have liked the protection of the crowd, but she knew the microphone would never
be able to pick up his voice in all of the party noise.
“Stay close,” she whispered to North, who hovered at her side. Sandow opened a door
to an office—a lovely, perfectly square room with a stone-manteled fireplace and French
doors that looked out on a back garden caught between the leavings of snow and the green
beginnings of the spring thaw. “After you.”
“You go ahead,” Alex said.
The dean shrugged and entered. He set his crutches aside and leaned against the desk.
Alex left the door open so they would be at least partially visible to the partygoers. She
didn’t expect Sandow to pick up a fancy paperweight and club her with it, but he’d already
killed one girl.
“You murdered Tara Hutchins.”
Sandow opened his mouth, but Alex stopped him with a hand. “Don’t start lying yet.
We’ve got a lot of territory to cover and you’ll want to pace yourself. You killed her—or
you had her killed—on a triangle of unused land, one I’m guessing the Rhinelander Trust
is going to move to acquire.”
The dean took a pipe from his pocket, then brought out a pouch of tobacco and gently
began filling the bowl. He set the pipe down beside him without lighting it.
At last, he folded his arms and met her gaze. “So what?”
Alex wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “I—” “So what, Miss Stern?”
“Did they pay you?” she asked.
He glanced over her shoulder, making sure no one was lingering in the hallway.
“St. Elmo’s? Yes. Last year. My divorce left me with nothing. My savings were gutted.
I owed outrageous alimony. But a few dedicated St. Elmo’s alumni wiped all of that trouble away with a single check. All I had to do was provide them with a nexus to build
over.”
“How did they know you could create one?”
“They didn’t. I approached them. I’d guessed at the pattern during my days at Lethe. I
knew it would repeat. We were so long overdue. I didn’t think I’d actually have to do anything. We simply had to wait.”
“Were the societies involved in the murders of those other girls? Colina and Daisy and
the rest?”
Again he glanced behind her. “Directly? I’ve wondered that myself over the years. But
if any of the societies had solved the riddle of creating a nexus, why would they have stopped at one? Why not use that knowledge? Barter it?” He picked up his pipe. “No, I don’t think they were involved. This town is a peculiar one. The Veil is thinner here, the
flow of magic easier. It eddies in the nexuses, but there is magic in every stone, every bit
of soil, every leaf of every old elm. And it is hungry.”
“The town …” Alex remembered the strange feeling she’d had at the crime scene, the
way it had mirrored the map of the New Haven colony. Dawes had said that rituals worked
best if they were built around an auspicious date. Or an auspicious place. “That’s why you
chose that intersection to kill Tara.”