Califia's Gold: A Steampunk Adventure by Richard Levesque

Author:Richard Levesque [Levesque, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Using a key that Beatrix had given her before she left the hospital room, Arabella unlocked the door to her sister’s apartment and let herself in. To the best of her recollection, Beatrix had lived here for the last two years, and during that time, Arabella had never been inside. The two had always met at Arabella’s home or in a restaurant or café. The pattern had never struck Arabella as odd; her sister had always been private and had indicated more than once that her home life and her work life were so thoroughly intertwined that it would be unadvisable to have her sister over as a guest.

“Too many sensitive things to clean up and clear out,” Beatrix had explained once when she’d been living in a different apartment.

“But don’t you have…friends over?” Arabella had asked, raising an eyebrow to suggest the type of encounters her sister might be having.

Beatrix had laughed at this and responded with, “I always make certain that those kinds of friends have much more means than I do, so there’s never a question of whose bed we’ll end up in.”

Now, as she cracked the door and entered the apartment, Arabella understood why her sister had said this. The place was stuffy and dusty. The shades were pulled down so no light came in, and when Arabella switched on the electric light by the door, the dim bulb revealed a single room stacked with books and boxes. There was a couch and a chair with a coffee table between them, but the apartment seemed to have no dining or cooking areas, and it looked as though Beatrix habitually slept on the sofa where she also sat and read or wrote reports.

“My goodness,” Arabella said as she closed and locked the door behind her.

She was tempted to take her time looking through her sister’s things, but she’d been given specific instructions and knew she had to move quickly. On an end table next to Beatrix’s sofa, four boxes had been stacked in a jagged tower.

“Third box from the top,” she said, recalling Beatrix’s instructions.

She slid the first two off the top of the stack. The boxes were so light that she suspected they were empty decoys. All the boxes in the stack—like the rest of the boxes in the room—were unmarked, so the third down from the top looked no different from the others, but when Arabella picked it up, she felt considerable weight within. She carried it over to the one spot on the sofa not covered with Beatrix’s belongings and sat down with the box on her lap. A standing lamp was next to this end of the couch, and Arabella reached up to pull its chain before she lifted the top off the box.

The bulb above her illuminated the contents of the box, and her eyes went straight to the handgun her sister had told her to retrieve. It was small and ornate with intricate markings of vines and leaves along the barrel and carved into the bone handle.

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