In Too Deep

sea as soon as night falls. I was planning to wait until midnight to make sure no one notices, but I don’t think there’s any need to hold off, not with this storm. No one will notice one more tourist stopping at the blowhole turnout to dump a couple of bags of trash.”
    “Since we’ve got all the time in the world,” Isabella said, “mind telling me how you located the Bridewell curiosities?”
    “I’ve been looking for them for years,” Sylvia said. “To some extent, I was able to use the resources of the museum, but I had to be extremely discreet. I did not want to draw the attention of my colleagues or J&J. But after a certain point, I decided to fund my own search.”
    “And to do that, you needed money. A lot of it.”
    “More than I could afford on my salary from the museum, certainly.”
    “You set up a profitable little sideline selling off the odd paranormal weapon to Julian Garrett and Caitlin Phillips, using Orville Sloan as the broker.”
    “Sloan knew the world of paranormal arms dealing,” Sylvia said. “It’s a highly specialized field, as I’m sure you can imagine. He was the one who suggested that we work with Garrett and Phillips. The arrangement was quite successful for several months. Then I got a solid lead on a cache of curiosities.”
    “You found one of the two men who survived the explosion in the shelter, didn’t you? Was it Kelso? That’s the name of the family that used to own the lodge.”
    “His name was Jonathan Kelso. He was the last member of his family, and he was not mentally stable. By the time I tracked him down he was living in an institution. He told me a fascinating story about how he and two colleagues had discovered a number of Bridewell’s clockwork curiosities. They wanted to find out exactly how they worked, but they knew the objects were dangerous. Kelso remembered the old bomb shelter behind the lodge and decided it would be a good place to run their experiments.”
    “They brought the curiosities here, tuned them up and then things went wrong.”
    “According to Kelso, there was an explosion. It killed one of the three outright. The second man’s senses were severely affected by the heavy dose of radiation. He took his own life a few months later. Something about incessant nightmares. Kelso, himself, as I said, wound up in a psychiatric facility. But he was able to tell me about the commune that was going on in Scargill Cove at the time of the experiments. I started doing some research.”
    “You found Rachel Stewart.”
    “By the time I tracked her down she was dying of cancer and using serious pain meds. Her story was somewhat confused, but I was able to put the facts together into a coherent picture.”
    “She was a Seeker,” Isabella said. “The woman everyone thought ran off with Gordon Lasher.”
    “Well, that was the plan. But Lasher was only interested in Rachel because it turned out she had a strong affinity for glass psi. Not only was she immune to the effects of the curiosities but she also intuitively understood how they worked. Furthermore, she could sense them at a distance.”
    “That was how she found the tunnel entrance to the bomb shelter.”
    “Yes,” Sylvia said. “Lasher intended to use Rachel to remove the relics from the bomb shelter.”
    “She got one out for him, the clock.”
    “Yes. The idea was to store the devices temporarily in the Zander mansion until Lasher could figure out how to transport and sell them. When he and Rachel Stewart went back into the shelter to get another artifact, however, they quarreled. In the heat of the argument Rachel discovered that Lasher did not love her and was only using her. Surprise, surprise.”
    “So she crushed his skull with a tire iron.”
    “No,” Sylvia said. “There was someone else there that night. Rachel said something about him not being right in the head.”
    “I hit him,” Walker said. He rocked urgently, tears glistening in his eyes. “He hurt Rachel. He hit her and called her names. S-said he was going to take all the alien weapons. Rachel started to c-cry. So I hit him. Then she screamed and ran away through the tunnel and never came back.”
    “It’s okay, Walker,” Isabella said gently. She looked at Sylvia. “Thanks to Rachel Stewart, you knew the clock was somewhere in the Zander mansion and that the rest of the curiosities might still be in the shelter.”
    “Exactly. I set up as a real estate agent in Willow Creek and used my cover