Page 59 of The Case of the Missing Love Stone

Her gaze moves between us. “What were you discussing?”

“Evidence labels,” Wes says.

She looks at my hand still resting near his waist. “Intensely?”

“We care about administrative standards,” I tell her.

“That’s the least convincing thing either of you has said.”

She crosses the kitchen and stops beside the evidence wall. Photographs and notes cover only part of it. Scarlet studies the arrangement. “You made my dining room look like a crime show.”

“Your pushpins are aggressively cheerful,” I say.

“They came in a floral stationery set.”

Wes pins the photograph of the white ribbon beneath the image of the gathering path.

I open one of the museum restoration folders. “Myrtle sent these. Most of it is renovation records and old exhibit photography.”

Scarlet moves beside me. Her shoulder presses against mine while she leans over the table. The contact is casual for perhaps three seconds. Then she stays there. With her close, my instincts settle.

Wes stops moving for half a second. The room gets warmer, and the investigation suddenly feels complicated.

Thunder rattles the old windows.

Scarlet moves toward the kitchen cabinets. “Coffee?”

“Yes,” Wes and I answer together.

She snorts softly without turning around.

I watch her move through the kitchen while Wes unpacks evidence beside me. There’s an ease to her here that doesn’t fully surface in town. The swamp softens her edges, her posture loosening inside these walls like the crooked floors recognize her in a way the square never has.

My gaze drifts toward the tarot deck sitting near the far bookshelf. The top card has shifted halfway out of the pile. The Lovers.

Scarlet notices me looking and narrows her eyes. “Don’t start.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You made a face.”

“Focus,” Wes says.

The word carries enough alpha command behind it that Scarlet’s breath catches. It’s a small involuntary thing, her pulse jumping once at the base of her throat before she turns back toward the coffee pot. The room gets warmer still.

We comb through the new information for a few minutes. When we’ve got our bearings, Wes spreads photographs across the table while I organize archive pages beside them.

Scarlet sets three mugs down and watches me reorganize the photographs chronologically. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Adding to the murder wall.”

“Don’t you have a hotel room for this?”

“Your place is better.”

Wes pins the museum blueprints near the center of the wall. “Start simple. What do we know?”

Scarlet folds her arms beside me while Wes lays out the theft timeline. The archive records were accessed two weeks before the stone disappeared, which means whoever took it already knew the Heritage Hall layout before the cameras went down. This wasn’t a crime of opportunity but a planned extraction. And whoever planned it knew enough about the old rituals to seek out specific materials.