“Do you want to leave everything here and take another look around, maybe make a plan of attack?” Mac
asked as he undid his seat belt.
I nodded. “Remember all those wine bottles that were in the basement?”
“Uhhuh.”
“Apparently Ethan moved them up to the kitchen. Stella left me a message saying they were supposed to
all be moved out yesterday, but I want to make sure.”
I had told Stella that we didn’t have the expertise to handle her brother’s wine collection. She’d said that
Edison’s son, Ethan, was planning on hiring someone to put a dollar value on the bottles so they could be
sold.
Rose had already picked up Elvis and was getting out of the SUV.
I pulled the keys Ethan had given me out of the pocket of my jeans and climbed out as well.
I noticed the smell the moment we stepped in the front door. Mac looked at me and frowned. “Rat?” he
asked.
I made a face. “Maybe.” It wouldn’t be the first time we’d shown up at an empty house and found a dead
animal. A couple of times it had been mice, once a raccoon and once a seagull that appeared to have
fallen down the chimney.
Elvis squirmed in Rose’s arms. She looked at me and raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“Let him go,” I said. “It’s the fastest way to find whatever it is that crawled in here and died.”
The cat was already making his way to the kitchen. There seemed to be a path more or less through the
stacks of boxes. One thing I could say about Edison Hall: The house wasn’t dirty. Charlotte was right
about there being dust bunnies everywhere, but there were no bags of garbage, no muddy footprints or
bits of spilled food. The place was piled, but I had the same thought I’d had the first time I was in the
house with Edison’s sister, Stella: The old man had had some kind of system for the boxes that were
piled everywhere. The problem was, I had no idea what that system was.
Elvis meowed loudly. I couldn’t see him, but from the sound he was in the vicinity of the kitchen.