“Not I—Tilly is the family psychic. I can barely read my own mind.” I followed him into the kitchen, the aroma of the food so dense and rich I felt like I could take a bite out of the air itself. I pulled paper goods out of the pantry.
“You have no idea how relieved I am to hear that,” he said. “The idea of my girlfriend poking around in my head would be disturbing and more than a little embarrassing.” He set the eight containers of food on the table and dropped the carton onto the floor.
“Embarrassing? Just what do you have going on in that brain of yours?” I poured the tea and brought the mugs to the table.
“That’s none of your business,” he said with a grin. “But if you play your cards right, you might find out one day.”
“I can hardly wait,” I said. I took the chair beside him and helped myself to a spare rib. While we ate, I brought Travis up to date on the latest happenings in New Camel. I told him about Merlin’s campaign to change the name of the town and the flag he made from the purloined muumuu. Merlin’s exploits were always good for a laugh, until they blew up in our faces. I described Lolly’s new dark chocolate cranberry fudge for the coming holiday season. “I’ve been thinking,” I said, after we pushed our plates away. “I should have a copy of Ryan’s disk. It would make the investigation more efficient. Besides,” I added, in case he felt proprietary about it, “I helped you steal it.”
He wagged his head. “I don’t know, Ryan entrusted it to me. He showed me where he kept them because he was concerned something might happen to him. Giving them to you would be breaking his trust.”
I felt my hackles rise. “Seriously? Have you forgotten we’re partners? Not to mention, I could have gone to jail for what I did?”
“Oh wait, that must be why I’ve already copied it for you.” He stood up and pulled the thumb drive out of the pocket of his chinos. He handed it to me with a “gotcha” grin.
“You’re incorrigible.”
“On so many levels,” he said, pulling me into his arms.
“Whoa, I believe you still owe me the rest of the story about you and Ryan.”
He let me go with a sigh and followed me into the living room, where we sat on the couch, our legs so close they might have been tied together for a three-legged race.
“Okay, where did I leave off?”
“When Ryan didn’t come home that Christmas, you realized he’d become part of the family in spite of your worst intentions.”
“Right. So after the holidays, I took a trip to Penn State to hunt him down. I apologized for being a jerk and asked for his forgiveness. I half expected him to haul off and punch me in the face. I deserved that much and more. But he didn’t. He said, ‘Whatever man, don’t sweat it.’”
“That was it?”
“I know, surprised the hell out of me too. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like we became instant buddies after that. It took time, but over the years, little by little, we found our way to a real friendship, a brotherhood.”
“Your parents must be devastated by his death,” I murmured.
“They are. They don’t believe it was accidental either. But as much as they want justice for Ryan, they’re against me getting involved in the investigation.”
“You have to look at it from their perspective,” I said. “They’re afraid of losing you too.”
“I get that, but how do I walk away like he meant nothing to me? And after we’d finally found our way to each other?”
I had no answer for Travis. I empathized with his parents and worried for his safety. But I also understood his need to find Ryan’s killer. “Tell me about your brother,” I said. “I’d like to know more about him if I’m going to be part of this quest.”
“I think this will give you some insight into him. A couple of years ago, we were hanging out, watching football, drinking beer and somehow or other the conversation got around to his folks. Before that I’d avoided the topic, because I didn’t want to upset him. But he brought it up himself. He said his parents’ sudden deaths tore away the ground beneath his feet and reshaped his outlook on everything. If life was so risky and random at its core, tip-toeing carefully through it, afraid of your own shadow, wouldn’t buy you an extra hour, an extra minute.”
“That helps explain the career path he chose. It’s interesting that you both wound up in journalism.”
“In very different ways,” Travis said. “I followed the conventional route, scrabbling up the network ladder. Ryan didn’t want anyone telling him what to do or how to do it. He went strictly freelance. He chose what stories to investigate and always had takers for his ‘Beyond the News pieces’—that’s what he called his investigative reports. There were bidding wars for a couple of them; he won awards too.”
“Do you think he was still competing with you?”
Travis shook his head. “Judging by the crimes he dug up, the type of people he antagonized and made enemies of, it was more like he was competing with death.”
Chapter 9
The next morning I was up before the sun and the rest of my household. Curiosity about the contents of Ryan’s disk had pulled me from a disjointed dream in which Merlin and Ryan were beta testing a time travel machine. If Travis was right, the disk could tell us what his brother had been working on and it might even point us in the direction of his killer. Given that Ryan had been living in Watkins Glen for the past month, it seemed likely that the subject of his investigation was somewhere in the greater Glen area. Not even Travis had been privy to more details than that. He said his brother observed a strict code of silence about his investigations, until they appeared in print or on the air. Ryan claimed it wasn’t a matter of trust. It was simply human nature that people with the best intentions often let information slip.
As I emerged from my warm cocoon under the quilt, the air pricked my skin like the spray of a cold shower. My grandmother Bronwen had had the heating system updated decades ago, followed by new windows guaranteed to stop the continuing loss of heat. They didn’t. Morgana had tried caulking and having extra insulation blown in. And when that still didn’t fix the problem, we had a parade of experts troop through, all of whom concluded that old houses were leaky as sieves. One went so far as to cavalierly suggest tearing the place down and rebuilding it the right way. He was shown the door with the help of a magickal push that made him stumble over his own feet. Morgana took the matter into her own hands and spent most of her free time trying to create a spell that would resolve the problem. Five years ago we thought she’d finally succeeded, but it turned out the spell made the house so airtight that we all nearly suffocated in our sleep. If not for Sashkatu sounding the alarm, the Wilde family and its magickal bloodline would no longer exist. At the time of Morgana’s death, the problem had yet to be solved. I continued to make do with thick quilts, warm robes, and lots of Tilly’s hot teas. There was never any question that the house would remain inviolate for future generations of Wildes.
When I’d crawled under the covers the previous night, I’d made the tactical error of leaving my robe at the bottom of the bed. Now there were two cats curled up on it. If I woke them, they’d start thinking about breakfast and I wanted to spend the quiet time before dawn on the computer. I exchanged my nightgown for an ensemble of ratty old sweats on the floor of my closet. I’d been meaning to throw them out, but they were handy and warm. If I fussed about for something more stylish, I’d probably wake all the cats.
I pulled on thick socks and padded into the smallest of the four bedrooms that had been used as a home office as far back as I could remember. I’d kept everything pretty much the way Morgana and Bronwen had left it, with the exception of installing a computer there. I plugged in Ryan’s thumb drive. There was only