Summoned by Anne M. Pillsworth

Author:Anne M. Pillsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan-Tor/Forge

14

Edgewood turned out to be a neighborhood of Victorian houses on a more human scale than the grand behemoths around MU. The pedestrians, too, were more varied: older people, young couples with strollers, kids on bikes, teenagers in self-conscious packs. Down side streets to the left, Helen spotted Narragansett Bay, a blue expanse dotted with sails and crisscrossed by motorboat wakes. Land hugged the water on both sides; it looked approachable, without the implicit threat of open ocean that confronted Arkham.

The Wyndham house was a russet-shingled Craftsman. All business, Jeremy led Helen and Gus to the back porch, where they inspected a broken door latch and scratched screens. The screen from Sean’s bedroom leaned against an overturned garbage can. No dainty scratches here—something had rent the screen wide open. Under the garbage can was a black plastic bag; and under the bag, the dead cat. Helen bent for a closer look. The corpse was eviscerated, gnawed, nearly decapitated. Worse, it reeked a loathsome combination of skunk and rotten eggs. She backed off, holding her hand to her mouth. Inside the black bag were Sean’s pillows. The nastiness on their cases stank exactly like the cat.

Jeremy got plastic knives and sandwich bags from the kitchen. Somehow he was able to hunker over the cat and pillows long enough to collect samples. Sean had called the gummy stuff ichor, but according to the ancient Greeks, ichor was a venous fluid, the blood of the gods. This substance was more analogous to saliva. That or it was a hoaxer’s concoction.

While Jeremy and Gus bagged the cat, Helen retreated into the cleaner air of the backyard. In the failing light, delphiniums and hollyhocks stood impressively tall. She made out a vegetable plot, a circle of roses and daylilies centered on a sundial, two rows of raised rectangular beds like a monastic herb garden. One of the beds featured prostrate rosemary burgeoning from a terra-cotta urn; she stole a sprig and rolled it between her hands, releasing astringent perfume.

Jeremy jogged down the flagstone path between the rows. “Gus is going to look over the house. I’m taking the garage and studio. We’d better stick together.”

She glanced at the dense shade under a grape arbor, where much could hide. Sticking together sounded good.

The garage took up the first floor of a carriage house at the end of the lot. Nothing assaulted them there except the comparatively wholesome odors of gasoline and dried manure. Jeremy’s studio was on the second floor. While he peered under tables, Helen took in a ceiling open to the ridgepole; four huge skylights, and clerestory windows running like a silvery ribbon around the exterior walls. On corkboards under the windows were pinned dozens of sketches. The three largest were same-size drawings of her library windows, with every bit of glass numbered and notes clustered thick around the margins.

“Everything seems fine,” Jeremy said.

“Fine over here, too.”

He straightened from flashlight-probing the space behind cabinets. “Oh, the cartoons of the Founding.”

“Is that what you call them? They make me realize how complex the windows are.

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