I’d never heard anyone mention Billy’s father. It probably showed on my face, because Ardie nodded as if I’d asked a question. “Oh, Jay was a piece of work. When Billy was quite young, Jay found Amos’s journals in an old wardrobe. He became convinced Amos was innocent, that his spell had been sabotaged. He left Billy’s mother to retrace Amos’s path all the way up to South Dakota and east to Omaha. He reestablished contact with the kinds of witches who . . . well, let’s just say they wouldn’t help the Atwoods’ reputation any.”
“And that’s how Billy got the plants,” Quinn concluded.
She nodded again. “Jay’s gift to his son,” she said wryly. “Personally, I think Jay intended for Billy to use the fetters against the Pellars somehow, tear everything apart. But Billy was never smart enough to make a move.”
But Ardie sure seemed smart enough. “And where do you fit into all this?” I asked. “This story about the Atwoods being trashed, it really only gives you more motive to use belladonna against the vampires.”
She arched an eyebrow. “You’ve got it backward. This story is exactly why I would never mess around with belladonna. Playing with the fetters is like giving a child a loaded gun.”
I glanced at Quinn. Vampires can’t exactly smell lies, but I knew he’d be able to pick up the sound of an elevated heartbeat and scent any fear coming off her, which were both pretty good indicators of whether someone was lying. His face remained blank.
“Besides,” she added. “You’re right. I work with plants, I’m related to Billy, and I live close to the vampires who were poisoned. But I’m not an idiot. If I wanted to kill a vampire with belladonna, I certainly wouldn’t do it in my own backyard, where I would be the world’s most obvious suspect.”
As soon as our car doors closed, the windows at Ardie Atwood’s house began to darken. I looked over at Quinn. “What do you think?” I asked, leaning back in the Jeep’s plush seat. All those tarps seemed to have worked—I didn’t see any bloodstains.
“If she’s lying, she’s good.” He started the car and began the drive back to Boulder, looking thoughtful. “Although the marijuana could easily be numbing her enough to fool me.”
“When Lily and I were talking in the bathroom at Simon’s,” I began, “did you overhear us?”
He squirmed in his seat. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop—”
“I know. Vampire superpowers. My point is that we can’t trust Ardie. From the way Simon and Lily tell it, she’s a sociopath who uses Lily.”
“You’re so protective of her.” He smiled, then glanced over at me. “It could also be that Ardie’s lonely, that she’s not happy with the deal she made, that she can’t stay away from Lily any more than Lily can say no.”
I thought it over for a few minutes before I grumbled, “Touché, I guess. But what do we do now?”
His eyes flicked down to the clock on the dash. It was almost two. “Would you recognize the belladonna if you saw it?”
“Not yet, but I could study.”
“Let’s take a drive up to the Atwood farm and take a look around.”
I was happy to have an excuse not to look at the road. While I scanned through images of belladonna on my phone, Quinn spent most of the ride on the phone with the human crew at Magic Beans, explaining that Maven had a family emergency and would be gone for a couple of days. He gave them an elaborate story about a sibling in a hospital with no cell service, and was so convincing that I almost bought it.
I told him that after he hung up the phone, but Quinn just gave me a wan smile in return. “The humans are easy,” he said. “Maven is a good manager, but she still looks nineteen, and at that age people expect you to disappear every now and then. The problem is going to be if anyone in the Old World comes looking for her.”
“Is that likely?” I was only called in for daytime errands or Old World emergencies; I had no idea what Maven’s day-to-day—well, make that night-to-night—schedule looked like. It was starting to hit me how much work she probably had to do to keep the trains running on time.
Quinn glanced over, looking troubled. “There’s really no way of knowing when she’ll get a call about Old World business. Most cities have their own leadership that’s fairly self-sufficient, but there’s squabbling. She might go a week without any disputes, or there might be three in one night. But this will help.” He reached into his pocket and held up a cell phone.
“Maven’s?”
“Yeah, this is the Batphone. If someone calls with a minor problem, I can text back as Maven. Hopefully it’ll buy us at least a couple of days.”
“Smart.”
He shrugged. “All it would take is one phone call from someone with a huge problem.”
“No pressure or anything.”
Chapter 16
The Atwood place was on the outskirts of Gainesville, a tiny town that existed mostly as a gas stop on the way to better things. At one time the Atwoods ran a working farm, but the land had been sold off in patches for decades now. The last time we’d been there, to save Charlie, all that had remained was a shitty house and an old barn. When we arrived, I saw that both structures had been razed to the ground. The rest of the property still looked neglected, so it all resembled the “before” photo in some HGTV show. My heart sank. What were the odds we would find anything useful here?