Thing of Darkness: A 1920s Historical Mystery (A Smith Investigates Mystery) by Beth Byers

Author:Beth Byers [Byers, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

I unlocked the doors to the office, grateful to see that the girls were smart enough to work with the doors bolted. I preferred a world where they didn’t have to, but none of us trusted mankind that far. Both looked up, and I found them hard at work at their desks.

“Hello, darlings,” I said cheerily, looking around for any sign that someone had been in the office and gone through our things. To my surprise, I found it when I crossed to my desk. I kept the papers carefully sorted and squared when I worked, and they were shuffled, pages askew from one another in their stacks. There was no way either Natalie or Victoria would have touched my organization because I was downright vicious about it, mostly because Smith would shuffle my things just to see if I noticed. He would never do so at a time like this, so it had to have been Bender.

Reggie stayed by the front door looking self-important while Lila took a seat across from my desk. I looked through the two stacks on my desk, first the letters of request for money and then the letters of update from actual investments, both in their own, separate stacks. The investment update from the chocolatier was mixed with the requests and I was completely certain that I had put it in with the updates, as it was a personal investment to Vi. I shivered and placed my piles into file folders and the files in a stack, prepared to go to the auto where I’d stupidly left the briefcase in my rush to check on the girls.

“Reggie, drive the girls home.”

“What now?” he asked with the panic of a person who had been told to keep his eyes on me.

I glanced Lila. She shooed him out the door with Natalie and Victoria, both having been ordered to not come back until they were told to.

Lila watched the girls take their things, both looking frantically back at us and biting back their questions. Reggie hesitated.

“We’ll lock the door, idiot, go,” Lila told him.

The moment they were gone, Lila locked the door behind them and then asked, “He was here?”

I nodded, only noticing then that my hands were shaking. “I suppose it’s karma.”

Lila laughed. “I did warn you. At least we know he’s already been here.”

She had a point. Still, it was alarming. To distract myself as I finished going through any other files that needed to be taken with us, I told Lila about following Smith into the brick office only to be ordered to distract the guards and the people working. I described how I ran screaming down the stairs and out the front door so Smith could dig through the office things, and also about the man following me, which, considering the recent developments, left a chill across my skin.

“What was Smith looking for?” Lila asked with a lazy curiosity that declared she cared far less than one might expect from such a tale.

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