Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [31]
Spirit knew, right then, that this was not going to have any kind of a good ending.
“Everything I said just seemed to make things worse.” Loch shook his head heavily, as if there was a weight settling all over him. His voice grew hoarser, as if he was trying to hold back emotion. “I kept trying to tell him that, at best, he was just going to hurt someone and go to jail, and at worst, he’d kill someone and end up getting the death penalty or getting gunned down himself by the cops. He kept telling me he didn’t care, that anything was better than trying to live like we were, and finally he said”—Loch’s voice broke a little—“he said since I cared so much about them and so little about him there was no reason for him to go on anymore, and he put the gun in his mouth and—”
The silence pressed down on both of them like lead. She didn’t know how to break it. “I’m sorry,” just wasn’t adequate.
Loch slammed the cabinet drawer closed. “So that’s why I don’t like guns.”
He looked up, and she nodded a little, trying to look as sympathetic as she could. She didn’t feel as if she dared say anything.
* * *
They leafed through files and boxes until almost three in the morning, and the only thing that seemed worth looking into was something Spirit found in a box half full of what looked like old receipts. It was a pile of identical leather-bound scrapbooks, each with gold tooling, an elaborate monogram, and a picture of the house inset on the front cover. Just paging through the first couple, Spirit quickly realized that they were older than anything she had ever seen about Oakhurst—that they dated from the time the first stone had been laid here. In fact, as she deciphered a couple of handwritten notes, it looked as if these were scrapbooks put together by the original owner. As far as she could tell, he had documented every step of the construction, and then went on to collect every mention of it he could lay his hands on. In later volumes there were society columns from as far away as Chicago mentioning parties here, and the menus and guest lists from those parties, photographs of people posing stiffly on horseback or with guns or in clunky-looking masquerade costumes.
“Have you found anything at all?” she asked Loch, after turning the stiff pages of a third volume, and wondering how the women ever got their waists that tiny.
“Not a single record of a transfer,” Loch replied, sounding a little more normal, if disappointed. “If there is another version of Oakhurst for the Legacies without magic, there’s no record of it here.”
“So where do they go?” Spirit wondered aloud, and thought, And what happens when they figure out I’m never going to get any magic?
“Maybe they don’t go anywhere.” She looked up, and Loch shook his head. “I am completely without a clue here.”
“You don’t suppose…” she gulped, but it had to be said. “You don’t suppose that the ones without magic … die?”
That possibility had been haunting her ever since she got here; that the only reason that she had lived was because she wasn’t “normal.” And worse … that because she wasn’t “normal,” her family had gotten a big fat target painted on them. So in a way, the reason they were dead was because of her.
Loch looked her right in the eyes and nodded just a little. “It makes a kind of awful sense, doesn’t it?” he replied.
She swallowed hard. She didn’t want to think about it. Instead she showed him the pile of scrapbooks. “I found these. I think they belonged to the original owner of the house.”
He got up and came over to where she was sitting, squatted down on his heels beside her and looked through a few pages of one. “These might have something for Addie in them, and I doubt anyone is going to miss them. We might as well take them