Read The Festival of the Moon (Girls Wearing Black: Book Two) for Free Online Page B

like a machine.
    Nicky stepped out of the study and quietly closed the door behind her.

 
    Chapter 4
     
    While Jill hacked away at the database, Nicky explored the Tremblay mansion. She started with the bedroom next to the study.
    If the main entry was Merv’s walk-in trophy case, this bedroom was a museum in his honor. Photos of Merv standing with every power player in Washington lined the walls. Framed thank you notes and letters of appreciation from dignitaries and business titans hung near the window. And sitting alone on the far wall, where it could catch the perfect lighting, was a huge oil portrait of Merv the hunter in all his glory. The portrait showed him standing in the tall grass of the African plain, a comically large rifle propped against his shoulder, his finger on the trigger. He wore a beige flak suit and hard hat, like some Colonial British adventurer, and he stared down the barrel of his gun, begging the viewer to imagine what awesome prey was about to get shot.
    The next room over was a strange, almost sad, bit of space. Clearly meant to honor the children the way the previous room honored Merv, it was an untended, incomplete project. Childhood photos of Art and his older brother Reggie gave way to photos of Reggie by himself to photos of Reggie out hunting with his dad. There were photos of Reggie and Merv in a pine forest in winter, in a tropical jungle, and on the side of a mountain. Art was in none of these shots. He had the opposite wall, and all he got were his school pictures, one after another in sequential order. In the middle school photos he wore colorful polo shirts. In the high school photos he wore suits. A few inches of wall space separated Art from the rest of his family, but it might as well have been an ocean for what it implied.
    Art’s mother, who had lived in this home only a few months ago, was nowhere to be found in any of these pictures. It was that kind of divorce. The fighting parties didn’t just want to separate; they wanted to stamp each other out of existence.
    The more Nicky looked, the more the Tremblay mansion left her depressed. Fifty rooms, most of them untouched by the two bachelors who still lived here. Art’s older brother was off at college. His mother lived across town. Two men and a team of servants—that was the Tremblay home. Sure, there were still great parties at this mansion—an invite to one of Merv’s cocktail hours meant you were a power player in DC—but what about the rest of the time?
    Nicky went back through the foyer with all its animals. She stopped to check on Art, who was still sleeping soundly. She went to the sitting area beyond the giant moose and grabbed a pillow from one of the couches. She brought it back for Art and laid it gently under his head. He let out a soft whimper as she did so. He had a smirk on his face. Hopefully he was someplace nice at the moment, someplace better than here.
    The west wing of the mansion had a giant indoor pool with a cascading waterfall, a game room with two pool tables and a pinball machine, a small movie theater with a full-size screen, and a dining room with a long mahogany table and twenty chairs. Past the dining room, Nicky found an intersection between three hallways. One hall led to the garage, where Merv’s collection of sports cars from around the world was stored. Another hall led to the kitchen, and was meant for servants. But the third hall, the one to the right….
    That hall dead-ended at a small door. Unlike any of the other doors in the house, which had beautiful engraving and filigree on the handles, this one was plain wood with a plain brass doorknob. And it was locked.
    Nicky ran back to the foyer where Art was still sleeping peacefully. Remembering something lumpy pushing up against her earlier, she reached into his front pocket and pulled out his keychain. She took it back down the hall and to the locked door. She tried every key on the keychain. Not a one of them worked.
    She