Read Online Spirit and Dust by Rosemary Clement-Moore - Free Book Online Page A

picture of Alexis somewhere? Maybe a photo album?” I wanted to get a better image of her physically to see if that helped at all.
    Carson nodded to a wall that separated the sitting part of the suite from the bedroom part. It held a decorator-perfect arrangement of frames, but when I went closer I saw that the shots were mostly candid: teenage Alexis with glasses and braces, slightly older Alexis with straight white teeth, arms around her girlfriends, all of them wearing school uniforms a lot like the one I’d worn to Our Lady of Perpetual Snobbery in San Antonio. There was Alexis in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, on the ski slopes of the Alps, in front of the British Museum and the Trevi Fountain.
    The only picture with her father was also the only formal portrait, one of those where they try to make it look unposed and natural but it just ends up looking like a magazine photo of ahappy family. Maybe it
was
a magazine shoot. In any case, Alexis and her father didn’t look miserable, but their body language was almost businesslike.
    Contrast that with the one picture of Alexis with Carson. He wore a tux—and wore it really well—and they leaned into each other, grinning cheekily at the photographer. The photo couldn’t be very old, but the carefree guy in the photo seemed a lifetime of experience from the young man standing nearby, watching me with folded arms.
    I pointed to the picture. “Did someone put a happy spell on your prom tuxedo or what?”
    He allowed himself a shadow of that smile. “Alexis’s first sorority formal, our freshman year. She went to an all-girls high school and hadn’t dated much until then, and she was wary of asking a stranger.”
    Yeah, I could see where having Devlin Maguire as a dad would impede romance, with the bodyguards and all. So who was Carson to her? He would have been too young to be Maguire’s employee then. He still looked too young now.
    “How long have you known Alexis?” I asked, moving to the nightstand to poke around. The
something
was still nagging at me. Something besides curiosity about Carson.
    His answer was unobliging. “A while.”
    “Since you started college?” I asked, undeterred.
    “Since before.” He obviously knew I was fishing for information on more than just Alexis, and he gave me a grudging morsel. “Maguire sent me to school.”
    I paused in my drawer rifling. “Is
that
why you work for him?”
    He smiled slightly, but the humor in it was bitter. I’d hit a nerve. “That would be the simplest answer.” It was also clearly the only one I was going to get. “Are you finding anything?” he asked. “Or just pretending to look while you give me the third degree?”
    “Trust me,” I said, tough, like I was some badass ghost interrogator. “If I give you the third degree, you’ll know it.”
    I shut the bureau drawer. This room was neat as a pin, cleaned regularly, and totally unhelpful on a psychic level. What I needed was a dead person.
    “There aren’t any pictures of Alexis’s mom,” I said, suddenly noticing. “Where is she?”
    “Gone,” said Carson.
    “As in dead?” I asked, maybe a little too hopefully.
    The corner of his mouth turned up at my tone. “As in remarried and living in Europe.”
    “What about a grandparent or an aunt or uncle?” I asked. “Someone she was close to, who might check in on her from the beyond now and then?”
    “Her maternal grandmother.” He must have followed my line of reasoning, and anticipation sparked in his eyes, though he kept it tightly reined in. I suspected Carson kept everything tightly reined in. “Lex—Alexis, I mean—always spoke of her fondly.”
    “Excellent. Grandmothers are the worst busybodies.” I rubbed my hands together, shifting into higher gear. I pretty much
never
reined anything in. “Does Alexis have something of hers? Anything intimate or personal should do.”
    “How should I know what’s intimate or personal to her?” asked