No White Knight

“What was he up to?” I finally make myself speak, taking a sip of my lemonade to wet my parched mouth.

“Well…you didn’t hear this from me.” She leans closer still, her voice dropping to a stage whisper. “Illegal art dealings. The kind of thing you see in those absurdly delightful heist movies. Why, he’d have flipped the Mona Lisa if he could’ve gotten his hands on it, but as it is, I’ve heard he ran quite a few stolen artifacts through Heart’s Edge and sold them in secret auctions at his home. There were wicked rumors about those auctions. Things like Hitler’s personal art stash, spell books from the middle ages, missing gold…oh, and of course, the orgies.”

“The what?” I blink, glancing at Holt to make sure I heard her right.

She sniffs again and takes a ladylike sip of her lemonade. “Oh, people always think whenever there’s wealth and secrecy, there must be orgies. Rich people seem to have nothing better to do.”

Holt chokes on his own lemonade, spluttering on a laugh. “I hadn’t really thought about it, ma’am. That’s pretty interesting, if he was brokering stolen stuff. Where do you think he got it all?”

“I certainly wasn’t involved in his dealings, so that I can’t say.” She tilts her head. “I imagine the usual means, though. Thieves looking for someone to fence their stolen goods without exposing them. Perhaps swindling people out of their personal effects, when they aren’t educated enough to know the value.”

Holt and I exchange somber looks.

That note.

Those numbers.

Bostrom probably tried to swindle my dad one way or another.

It’s all making sense and it’s not looking pretty.

Ms. Wilma clucks her tongue. “The two of you look as though you’ve just seen a ghost. Why so terribly glum?”

I offer a hasty smile. “It’s nothing, really. We’re just digging up info while we try to figure out some property zoning stuff.”

“Well, I can’t imagine what Gerald Bostrom might have to do with that.” She folds her hands on the table, watching us shrewdly. “You haven’t touched your cookies, dear.”

Holt and I are like chastised kids, both of us dutifully taking a bite of our cookies.

I’m not sorry I do. Ms. Wilma’s baking is legendary, and the still-warm, gooey chocolate chips practically melt on my tongue.

Maybe it’s enough to clear my throat and give me enough of a sugar rush to clear my head so I can ask another question.

“Ms. Wilma, have you ever heard of a place called Ursa?”

Her face goes pale. Now she’s the one who looks like she’s seen a ghost, and I can’t help but wonder why.

“My, my,” she says, sitting up straighter in her chair. “There’s a name I’ve not heard for ages. They say it wasn’t far from here, but I wonder…even by my grandmother’s time it was just a wild story. Everyone acted like it was cursed.”

“Cursed?” Holt echoes, his brows pulling together.

She stops, shaking her head with a sigh.

“It’s less that, and more…” Trailing off, she tucks her silvered hair behind her ears, her eyes unfocused as she looks somewhere past us. “…more like they didn’t want to invoke bad luck. Like summoning an evil spirit. Say its name, and it might bring you grave misfortune.”

The place is creepy enough, isn’t it?

I could definitely see that.

“What did your grandma tell you about it, if you don’t mind me asking, ma’am?” I prompt.

She blinks and gives me a look, offering a polite but sheepish smile.

“Old, far-fetched stories, mostly. Half legends she’d whisper mostly at night to scare us kids into bed, or else Danny the Rattlesnake and his magical blood stone would come out of the mountains to take me.” She wiggles her fingers with a smirk before trailing off into a ladylike laugh. “All these tales of cults and crazy outlaws, surely you’ve heard them?”

“Grade school stuff, yeah,” Holt says. “Never heard of Danny or cults, though. They’d tell us all those stories to keep our attention so we wouldn’t riot like the sugar-filled little monkeys we were. I always figured they were just exaggerating, making it up as they went to keep us entertained.”

“Exactly,” Ms. Wilma says, her eyes twinkling. “But there’s some truth, you know. Danny the Rattlesnake was real. So was Ursa, I believe. It was an early silver town, before Heart’s Edge, back in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Sadly, it didn’t survive. The veins tapped out, and Heart’s Edge just proved to be more stable when our founders broke ground here. So as Ursa started falling apart…the bad folks moved in. All sorts of thieves and lunatics and con men. Danny was the worst of them.”

“What’d he do?” I whisper.

She tilts her head. “He played the people of Ursa, they say, the ones who didn’t pull up stakes when money and mining work dried up. He said he’d make them rich because he had a vision, and claimed he had proof—a blood-red stone he pulled out of the ground.”