“I meant to send this back to him, but I was afraid it might open a dialog. You see what I mean? Maybe you can give it to him when you see him.”

“Uh, I don’t think—”

But she was already gone, trotting back up the cement walk, then running up the stairs.

Griff stared at the key.

Bad idea.Very bad idea. But it was also one heck of an opportunity. And it wasn’t a chance he would get again.

He put the Karmann Ghia in gear and returned to the tidy white house on Fourth Avenue.

Mrs. Honeycutt did not answer the doorbell, which hopefully meant she had left for her afternoon with her daughter.

Griff looked up and down the quiet street, then he went around the side of the house and walked up the short driveway to the white cottage in the back.

From the outside the cottage looked hardly bigger than a large potting shed. The blue-and-purple hydrangeas growing along the side nearly engulfed it.

Griff knocked on the door.

He’d have been thrown for a loop had anyone answered, but it was still a relief that nothing but a resounding silence followed his polite tap, tap, tap.

He drew a breath, inserted the key Clotilde had given him into the old-fashioned lock. The scent of turpentine oil and paints wafted out as he opened the door. He stepped inside, closing the door hastily after him.

It took his vision a moment to adjust to the reddish gloom. The first thing he saw were stacks of canvases. Blank canvases and painted canvases. The painted canvases were mostly of women. And most of the women were nude. Griff moved past an easel, taking care not to knock anything over in the cluttered space.

There were three rooms. A closet-sized kitchen, a closet-sized bath, and a main room with a large wall mirror indicating a pull-down bed. He fanned quickly through a stack of painted canvasses. Some of them were only half-finished. He didn’t recognize any of the subjects, but Chad Kelvin had been right. Alvin was talented. The work seemed professional quality to Griff.

There was a small built-in desk beneath a window shaded by the screen of hydrangeas. Griff reached for his phone and pressed Pierce’s number. To his surprise, Pierce answered immediately.

“If I were to get access to Alvin’s living quarters, what would you want me to look for?”

“If you were to get access? What does that mean?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“What does that mean?”

“That you should stop asking me what that means, Counselor.” The silence on the other end was deafening. Phone still to his ear, Griff opened the top drawer, glancing through its few contents. “I don’t think I’m going to find anything definitive, but...”

“Anything with a social security number. Anything that helps us build a history, a track record on this guy. Anything that connects him to any member of the Arlington family or a member of the Arlington household.”

“I may already have a pretty good start on building that CV. Okay. I’ll be in touch.” Griff disconnected. He began to search the desk in earnest.

No pay stubs, no credit card bills—no bills of any kind. There were a couple of receipts for painting supplies, paid in cash. No letters, no postcards, no photos.

Who was this guy?

Even Griff, who did most of his banking and business online and had been taught from an early age to safely dispose of all nonessential documents, had more paper and pocket litter.

He moved on to the kitchen, opened drawers, checked cupboards. He looked in the bathroom, checked the bathroom cupboard...there just didn’t seem to be anything useful. Talk about leaving a light footprint. Alvin was the original invisible man.

Griff checked his phone. He’d been in the cottage for nearly thirty minutes. Way too much time already. He took a final glance around the room, making sure he had left nothing to reveal his intrusion.

He opened the door, stepped outside into the bright sunlight, and put his key in the lock. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He started to turn, the sun seemed to nova and the world turned white.

Chapter Twenty-One

Someone was knocking on the roof of his brain. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Griff’s nose twitched. What the...shit? That smell. What was it? Cow? Manure? Moldy hay? All of the above?

He tried to pry one eye open. There was a single shaft of light beaming straight into his face. He winced, put a hand up, and bits of dirt drifted down. Was he lying on the floor?

The floor of where?

This was one heck of a hangover and he couldn’t remember the party...

Thump.Thump.Thump. His heart beat with painful loudness in his ears. He hadn’t had a headache like this since...

Ever.

He pried his other eye open. Overhead was a hay loft. Motes of dust and pollen floated in the golden rays of the dying sunlight pouring through the giant hole in the roof.

He was in a barn. A barn no longer in use. By anyone but him.

What. The. Heck.

Slowly, very cautiously, he sat up, fighting the instant surge of nausea. Not good. Not good at all. He felt his head, trying to pinpoint the exact...ouch.

Yeah. There it was right on his hairline. No blood. That was the good news. But a knot the size of a...knot. A not-supposed-to-be-there-sized lump. He laughed shakily, wove his way to his feet, leaned against a weathered post. He felt around for his phone.

No phone.

Crap.

Blearily, he tried to focus on the hay-strewn floor. No phone. He felt over his jeans pockets. No wallet. Nothing. Nothing but Pierce’s business card. Okay. So. Next idea?

He stumbled his way to the wide double doors and pushed, half expecting them to be locked. But no, with a gargantuan screech of rusting hinges and rotting wood, the doors swung open. In fact, one of them sagged down, nearly taking the wall with it.

Griff stepped through the opening and found himself in the middle of green and rolling nowhere.

No sign of his car. No sign of any car. No sign of anyone. In the far distance, he saw cows grazing.

He began to walk.

In the plus column, it wasn’t raining.

At last he came to a silver mail box at the end of a dirt road. He followed the dirt road to a faded yellow house with several broken-down trucks and tractors in the yard. Flapping and clucking, chickens escorted him to the front porch where an elderly dog lifted its head and bayed at him and then thumped its tail.

A red-haired woman in a flowered apron came to the door. She stayed on the other side of the locked screen. Griff asked to use the phone and she declined. He felt in his pocket and pulled out Pierce’s now slightly crumpled business card.

“Then could you please call this guy for me? Tell him where I am and that I need a ride back to...where I left my car?”

After a moment’s scrutiny, she unlocked the screen, took the card, and disappeared inside the house. She was back a short time later. She unlocked the screen again and opened it wide. “He wants to talk to you.”

Griff rose from the steps where he had been petting the aged hound dog, and followed her into the house to the kitchen. He picked up the phone. “Hey, it’s me.”

“What happened?” Pierce sounded brisk and reassuringly normal.

Griff glanced at the woman in the apron. “I’m not exactly sure. I’ll try to explain when I see you. I don’t have my wallet or cell, so can you send a taxi or—”

“I’m already on my way,” Pierce interrupted. “But it’s going to take a while.”

It took four hours. The woman, Mrs. Butler, eventually invited Griff back inside the house. He washed up in the little downstairs bathroom, and she served him coffee and cookies while she did laundry. She was not the chatty type, and he wondered about her. She seemed to be doing a lot of laundry for one person, but no one showed up during the long afternoon or the early evening.