None of the Others took pity on the humans who had to haul their luggage back to the cars unassisted. Neither did Julian. And Grimshaw decided he needed to keep his distance from these people, just in case Darren or Vaughn upset something that had bigger claws than Conan Beargard.
It took more than thirty minutes, but the three couples finally headed for the boardinghouse, leaving him and Julian in the hall with Ilya Sanguinati until Vicki and Natasha came out of the office.
“They’re gone?” Vicki asked.
“They’re gone,” Ilya replied.
“Thanks for your help.”
Grimshaw wasn’t sure who was being thanked, but since the Sanguinati seemed to be waiting for him and Julian to leave, they walked to the cruiser and drove back to Sproing.
He didn’t say anything until they turned off the access road and were heading for the village. “You get any feeling about those people?”
“I don’t get feelings about people, Wayne,” Julian said. “I sense places.”
“What’s your sense of The Jumble?”
Julian looked out the passenger window. They were pulling into a space in front of the police station before he finally said, “It’s no longer a safe place.”
CHAPTER 50
Them
Moonsday, Sumor 3
The four men and their wives met in the Danes’ room in the boardinghouse because Yorick couldn’t even leave to go to the bathroom without that damn dog trying to dig a hole in his groin looking for who knew what.
Damn Vicki. He wasn’t sure there was a way to pay her back for shooting off her mouth like that, but he’d sure like to try.
Vaughn poured the wine, looking pissed and pleased in equal measure. He hadn’t expected to be thrown out of The Jumble; hadn’t expected to be thwarted when he sent Trina to look through the papers in the office and pull out anything that could support Vicki’s claim to The Jumble. But Vaughn said those things were a temporary setback in turning The Jumble into a high-end moneymaking resort.
Yorick wasn’t so sure they would be able to turn The Jumble into anything. Not anymore. The other men had done these kinds of deals before, buying a run-down property and fiddling with the deed in order to add a few more acres of land from neighboring plots. Then they built what they pleased with none of those creatures being the wiser. But those deals, from start to finish, had been made with other humans, had been done quietly, and they had been done before the Humans First and Last movement made that colossal blunder last year that riled up the scary forms of Others that usually didn’t even notice humans. But this? People dying and Vicki making such a fuss, bringing in cops who had no allegiance to Vaughn or the rest of them, to say nothing of those freaking vampires. Too many people, too many things, were watching them now.
When he’d first started flirting with Constance, he had bragged about owning a rustic resort right on the shores of one of the Finger Lakes. He’d known from family stories that there was no practical way to do anything with the place. But it had impressed Constance, who was Vaughn’s cousin, and Vaughn was a top-tier member of the TCC and had barely noticed him before he started dating Constance and had sneered at his business deals, as if they were too insignificant to impress a true entrepreneur.
Then the dating became a hot affair, and Vaughn and other top members of the TCC began commenting on the affair drawing too much attention within their social circle, and Constance no longer found it amusing to be the Other Woman. She demanded that he divorce Vicki and marry her, but she had wanted to keep the house in Hubbney, and the car, and all his other assets, and he had to put up something that he could claim was of equal value and then browbeat Vicki into taking it as her half of the assets. He’d known the buildings in The Jumble were in poor condition, but signing over the place to her made him look generous, especially when he added the cash settlement that almost matched Franklin Cartwright’s estimate of what it would cost to upgrade those buildings enough for people to use them.
Days after the divorce was pushed through, he and Constance were married—and Vaughn introduced him to Darren and Hershel and said they were all interested in investing in this resort he owned to help him bring it up to quality standards. Yes, Constance had told her cousin all about the resort, had talked it up because he had talked it up to impress her. But she hadn’t known he’d signed it over to Vicki so that Constance could keep the house and expensive car and all the other things she had claimed they just had to keep.
Vaughn had been furious when he’d learned about the division of the assets because he had talked up The Jumble and had Darren and Hershel salivating over the chance at running a posh lakeside resort. After seeing that side of Vaughn’s temper, which wasn’t half as unnerving as Hershel’s cold sympathy about troublesome divorces, Yorick had been afraid to tell the men about the wording of the original agreement and that it wasn’t laziness or lack of vision that had stopped any of his relatives from making money off The Jumble.
“Here’s to the Tie Clip Club’s next successful business venture,” Vaughn said, raising his glass.
“We will make a success of it,” Constance said.
“Where would the Clippers be without their women?” Hershel said, giving Yorick a chilling smile.
The Tie Clip Club. People collected all kinds of rubbish, and in school there had been all kinds of clubs. Who would suspect that the movers and shakers in all kinds of businesses, and even in the police and government, formed their alliances by belonging to a club that collected tie clips? Who would suspect that the tie clip that had been specially designed for club members would have real significance when those young men left school and began working in their various fields? While they were in school, members who weren’t society boys endured being laughed at for belonging to such a dorky club—and never forgot the names and faces of the ones who had laughed when it came to awarding job contracts or hamstringing someone’s climb up the business or social ladder.
Members helped members. Saying no was not an option. And that was the catch. When a member asked for help, the rest of the membership was expected to provide whatever assistance they could. It was one reason why the founding members hadn’t stuck to their own social circle when they began recruiting a couple of generations ago. Rubbing elbows with young men who were attending the public university, the tech college, and the police academy hadn’t felt right, but when those men became the owners of their own construction companies, or owned the garages where you could get your expensive luxury car fixed, or became high-ranking members of the police force, putting up with them while you attended the private college along with your real peers made sense.
Just like marrying Vicki had made sense. She had been such a social nobody, it had been easy to dazzle her with the great future they would have together, and he had dangled that dream in front of her during the years when she’d worked to support them while he’d waited for his trust fund to kick in and dabbled with working whenever she balked at making a payment on his tailor’s bill instead of paying the electric company to keep them from turning off the service. She wasn’t the right wife for a man like him, but she’d been useful, and it had been so easy to convince her that his affairs were her fault because she wasn’t enough for any man when it came to sex.
A lot like Heidi, in fact. After he’d gotten Vicki off his back, Yorick hadn’t understood why Hershel hadn’t dumped Heidi years ago. But that was before he realized that Hershel sometimes needed to tune up his partner a bit in order to really enjoy sex, and Heidi was enough of a doormat to take it.
If he hadn’t needed to divorce Vicki and marry Constance in order to remain in good standing with Vaughn and the rest of the Tie Clippers, would he and Vicki have reached the point where foreplay included the back of his hand to make things good? Not something he could try on Constance, of course, with her being Vaughn’s cousin.
“If Vicki showed that at
torney all the paperwork, he’ll wonder about me presenting this document now,” Yorick said.
“We’ll swear we saw it with the rest of the paperwork when you were working out the terms of the settlement,” Darren said. “She destroyed her copy in order to retain her hold on property that was no longer hers. Her signature is on the document, same as yours. And it’s notarized.”
“First thing tomorrow morning, you’ll go to the police station and insist that Officer Grimshaw, in his capacity as the chief of police, help you issue the eviction notice,” Vaughn said with a nasty smile.
Yeah. He liked that idea.
They discussed going out to eat, not that there was anything remotely adequate in Sproing, but the rooms included breakfast and dinner in their price, and not eating at the boardinghouse didn’t reduce the price of the rooms. Hershel had already checked.
Pamella claimed a severe allergy to dogs, so at least that beast wasn’t tormenting him while they ate dinner.
“Ms. Xavier,” Vaughn said when Ineke filled the coffee cups and set out plates of fruit, cheese, and chocolate at the end of the meal. “If we decide to stay a bit longer tomorrow . . .”
“Checkout is eleven o’clock,” Ineke said. “Other guests are coming in and we need to turn over the rooms, so I’m not offering extensions.”
“If we choose not to leave, what are you going to do?” Vaughn persisted. “Call the police?”
She stared at Vaughn for so long, Yorick began to squirm in his seat.
Then she smiled. “No, I wouldn’t call the police. There’s someone else I call when I need to eliminate vermin.”
CHAPTER 51
Vicki
Sunsday, Sumor 4
I had just finished washing the breakfast dishes when I heard a quick whoop of a police siren—a bloop of sound, there and gone so fast I wasn’t even sure I had heard it until Aggie ran into the kitchen.
“Jozi says Officer Grimshaw is here with those other humans,” Aggie said. “He flashed the lights and made the car howl, but just a little.”
Since Aggie was naked and had more feathers than usual in her hair and framing her face, I deduced that she had been in her Crow form when Jozi gave the warning. Or maybe it was more accurate to say Jozi was passing along Grimshaw’s warning.
Grimshaw didn’t make idle warnings.
Trembling, I hurried to the kitchen phone and called Ilya Sanguinati.
“I’ll be there,” he said when I stumbled out the reason for the call. “Make sure the porch door and kitchen door are unlocked. Take your time answering the front door. Make some excuse.”
Doing the dishes. Had soapy hands. Wasn’t sure I’d heard the bell with the water running.
Since I’d seen Ilya flow through a screen door, I figured unlocking the doors was for the convenience of someone—or something—else who would deal with a lock by ripping the door off its hinges. Wanting to save myself the expense of repairs, I made sure the back doors were unlocked before heading toward the front of the house. The doorbell rang again, immediately followed by someone pounding on the door.
“Damn it, Vicki!” Yorick shouted. “Open this door!”
What was he doing here?
“Miss Vicki?”
Had I stopped moving toward the door because I had stopped to respond to Aggie? Or had I frozen the moment I heard the anger in Yorick’s voice? But he couldn’t shove me against the wall and tell me how angry I had made him, not with Grimshaw right there. Could he?
“Better if you’re not here right now,” I told Aggie. “Not undressed in human form.”
She shifted to her Crow form and flew up to the railing at the top of the stairs—not in anyone’s line of sight but able to see and hear everything.
In Crow form, there wasn’t much she could do against a human—not much she could do against a grown man in her human form either—but I felt braver knowing Aggie was there as a witness.
I opened the door and saw Yorick’s fist coming toward my face before Grimshaw grabbed his wrist and stopped the movement.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was washing dishes and didn’t hear the doorbell.”
“Ms. DeVine, we need to come in,” Grimshaw said.
His police-issue sunglasses made it impossible to see his eyes, but I had the impression he was either really ticked off about being here or had a vicious case of indigestion and needed some seltzer. Either way, he wasn’t asking permission to come in; he was telling me I didn’t have a choice.
I backed up and kept moving back as Yorick, Darren, Vaughn, and Hershel strode in, followed by their wives and, finally, Grimshaw, who didn’t fully shut the door.
“Ms. DeVine,” Grimshaw said, coming to the front of the group, “it is my unpleasant task to serve you with this eviction notice, effective immediately.”
“Eviction?” I wanted to wiggle a finger in my ear like they do in movies to show that the person couldn’t possibly have heard what they had heard. “How can you evict me? I’m the legal owner of this property.”
“No, you’re not,” Yorick said, looking insufferably smug.
Grimshaw held out the folded paper. “You have to take it.”
Ilya Sanguinati strolled in from the back of the house, carrying a thin briefcase that must have been really expensive and top quality, judging by the envy in Yorick’s and Darren’s eyes when they spotted it. Even Vaughn looked uncomfortably impressed.
“I’ll take it.” Ilya held out his hand.
Grimshaw didn’t hesitate to hand over the paper. I suppose giving it to my attorney was the same as giving it to me. I wasn’t sure about that, but no one protested.
Ilya took his time reading it. I was too busy struggling to avoid a meltdown to try to read over his shoulder—or past his arm since I wasn’t tall enough to see over his shoulder, let alone read anything.
He folded the eviction notice and handed it to me. When I started to open the paper, figuring I was supposed to read it now, he said in a voice as sharp as a slap, “Don’t bother.”
If Yorick started in on me, I would buckle. I knew it and Yorick knew it. His way of discussing anything had been to yell until I agreed with him.
“Mr. Dane, what makes you believe you are entitled to repossess this property?” Ilya asked, his voice still sharp but now also cold.
“This.” Yorick produced another document with a flourish. He tried to hand it to me, but Ilya reached in front of me and snapped it out of Yorick’s hand. “It’s signed by both of us and it’s notarized.”
“It couldn’t be,” I protested.
“Victoria.”
Ilya using that tone of voice was his way of issuing a warning, so I clenched my teeth to avoid trying to stick up for myself. Of course, if Yorick and I went at it with all his friends taking his side, I’d probably end up in the hospital heavily sedated, so hoping that Ilya had a plan made more sense than having a breakdown.
“This document seems to be more obscurely written than most human agreements, but stripping it down to its essence, it says that since The Jumble had been in the possession of the Dane family for several generations, it came to you, Victoria, in the divorce settlement with the provision that you could prove it to be a viable living so that you wouldn’t be a burden on the Dane family or a homeless embarrassment.” Ilya paused. “Ah. You had six months to do this, and if you hadn’t made sufficient effort to have income coming from the property, it would revert back to the Dane family—specifically back to Yorick Dane.”
I couldn’t stand it. I had to say something. “Even if I had seen that document, it isn’t realistic to think this place could have been ready for paying guests in that amount of time. Not with all the work that had to be done.”
“Vicki, Vicki.” Yorick shook his head and tried to look sad. “You can see your signature right there. You knew the timetable, and you didn’t meet
it.”
“I had people working on the main house and the first three cabins all winter, but some things couldn’t be done until the spring! I wasn’t ready for paying guests until mid-Maius.”
“Conveniently two weeks past the deadline,” Ilya murmured.
Just two weeks? I hadn’t worked out the dates in my head. And something about being off by so little time struck me as odd.
“Two weeks, two days, two months, it doesn’t matter,” Yorick snapped at Ilya. “She didn’t meet the terms of the agreement.” He turned to me. “You’re evicted, effective immediately. Hand over the keys and get out.”
“No,” Ilya said mildly. “That’s not how this is going to work. Ms. DeVine will leave immediately. I’ll arrange to have all her personal possessions packed and out of here by the end of the day. You, however, cannot take possession of the property until the utilities are informed that as of 12:01 a.m. tomorrow, you will be the responsible party for payment. Also, before you take possession of the property, I need to know how you are going to reimburse Ms. DeVine for the capital improvements she made on the property.”
“Those are part of the property now,” Vaughn said, narrowing his eyes.
“Not quite.” Ilya smiled, showing a hint of fang. “The document says that if Ms. DeVine fails to develop the property in the agreed-upon amount of time, she will quit the property, leaving it in the same, or better, condition. My client chooses to return the property to Mr. Dane in the condition she found it after his family’s decades of neglect.” He opened his briefcase and pulled out a single sheet of paper, which he handed to Yorick. “Those are the capital improvements that were made to the main house and cabins. The total cost is listed at the end. You will agree to reimburse Ms. DeVine for all the money she put into this property to make it habitable again, or I can have crews here within the hour to remove the new septic system; dig up the new water pipes and remove all the new pipes that were put into the house and the lakeside cabins; and remove the new circuit breaker box and any other electric work that was done here.”