Read The Golden Age of Death (A CALLIOPE REAPER-JONES NOVEL) for Free Online Page B

Calliope was doing—but he was still her Executive Assistant and that meant he had to do her bidding, regardless of how he personally felt about her orders.
    “This morning I opened my mail to see that Callie had iTunes gifted me this very, I assume,
prescient
Dolly Parton song called, ‘I Will Always Love You,’” Daniel said, roughly dragging his hands through his dark hair so that a few pieces stood up like a cockscomb. “Now I show up here—knowing something’s wrong if she’s sending me that song—only to find the place empty. It’s extremely confusing.”
    Jarvis wished Daniel would stop expressing his anger and take a moment to calm down. The right question asked, would set all explanations into motion. Though Jarvis had been truthful when he’d said he didn’t know where Calliope had gone, he was chock-full of lots of other extraneous information…including why Calliope had seen fit to go in the first place. And many,
many
important things could be gleaned from understanding Calliope’s reasons for leaving. But until Daniel was ready to listen to him, there was nothing Jarvis could do to ameliorate the other man’s worry.
    Daniel strode past Jarvis and sped down the hallway. Jarvis knew there was nothing for Daniel to find at Sea Verge, so he kept his pace to a trot, already feeling exhausted by what was ahead of him.
    “I’m checking the study—” Daniel called back to Jarvis as the two men hit the circular stairway.
    “Be my guest,” Jarvis replied, shaking his head. There was nothing in the study, but the last of the sheet-covered furniture.
    And the book.
    He decided there was no need to chase after Daniel, so he slowed his pace, letting the other man get ahead of him. He took the stairs one at a time and kept a leisurely pace as he moved down the hallway, so that when he finally arrived at the study, Daniel was already there, leaning against the massive sheet-covered desk Calliope had inherited from her father.
    “I don’t understand,” Daniel said, his voice strained. “Where’s Callie?”
    “As I said before, Calliope is gone and I have no idea where she is—”
    Jarvis saw Daniel’s mouth open, as if he were going to argue, but then he closed it, starting to pace in front of the desk, instead. Finally, he stopped and turned to face Jarvis.
    “Okay, you don’t know where she is. Got it,” Daniel began. “But if you don’t know
where
she is, then do you maybe know
why
she left?”
    “That was the very question I’d hoped you would calm down enough to ask—”
    Jarvis was interrupted by the peal of the doorbell. He knew who would be at the door this time.
    The damned Realtor.
    He took a deep breath and gave Daniel an encouraging smile.
    “I need to answer the door, but you can come with me,” Jarvis said.
    Daniel didn’t need to be asked twice.
    *   *   *
    jennice kicked the wheel of her tiny Ford Aspire and cursed the day she’d bought it. A friend said it “aspired to be a car” and she’d laughed, but it wasn’t far from the truth.
    She’d bought it used. It’d looked good in its pictures on craigslist, but the reality wasn’t nearly as pretty. It’d driven fine the first two months and then it’d just begun to sputter and shudder its way into falling apart. She took it to a mechanic who’d openly laughed at her, pointed to the odometer, and told her someone had reset it. Which meant the car had seen way more than the thirty thousand miles the seller had claimed.
    Then the mechanic had given her the estimate for fixing everything on the clunker, and the figure on the piece of paper was so exorbitant all she could do was try not to cry. It far exceeded the amount of money she had in her bank account.
    Head swimming, she’d asked him how much to get it running, no bells and whistles. He’d quoted her another number—still high, but a little more manageable—and she’d pulled out her checkbook.
    Six months later and here she stood, on the side of the