But the next meeting’s entry was different. May’s father, he read, and stopped.
May’s father. A Mr. Chester Ingram, a wealthy San Francisco magnate, a man Johanna had never mentioned. Bolkonsky had come to Silverado Springs to recover Ingram’s daughter, lost to him two years ago. And he’d deceived Johanna in order to gain her trust before revealing his true motive for summoning her.
That was why she’d taken May into town.
Quentin set down the page and stared out the window. Johanna must have known of May’s father, but she had deliberately not contacted him. She’d kept the child here, apart from Ingram, and was distressed at his appearance. Quentin remembered what she’d told him before he met May for the first time: “Her mother left her with us for treatment. I suspect her home life was not a happy one.”
No reference to the mother here. Only a description of May’s visit to town, where something had gone terribly wrong.
An hysterical fit. Terror. All because May’s father had come into the room against Johanna’s wishes and recommendations.
The terse sentences Johanna had written here hinted at so much more than they revealed. The one point made abundantly clear was that Johanna did not want to release May to her father… and had no intention of doing so.
Quentin swallowed the sourness in his throat and replaced the notes in their original order, then began a second search that took him to the bookshelves against the wall, and the boxes of older records.
The ink was faded on the original entries, made the night May came to the Haven. Quentin read them through without stopping, every line, until he understood the cause for Johanna’s apprehension.
No proof, of course. Only speculation, the pleas of a frantic mother, the implications behind a young girl’s bizarre behavior. Behavior that had changed when she was left alone to heal.
Only to be reawakened when she met her father face-to-face.
The sound of crumpling paper drew Quentin’s unfocused stare to his hands. He’d crushed the sheets into balls in his fist. Releasing a shaky breath, he smoothed the paper flat on the desk.
No matter. Johanna would know someone had been rummaging about in her private papers, and it wouldn’t take her long to determine the culprit.
Quentin reassembled the notes and restored them to their place in the box. The tight sickness in his chest was abating, replaced by the cold, metallic sting of compulsion. He left the room, and the house, in a body most would have mistakenly called human.
No one stirred on the grounds of the Silverado Springs Hotel. The staff had retired, the guests were asleep, and the night clerk was completely inattentive to werewolves on the prowl. Quentin easily slipped past him and found the register that listed Mr. Ingram’s room.
He didn’t know why he was here. He had ceased to think clearly from the moment he put Johanna’s notes away. The fog in his mind had become so familiar that he hardly questioned it.
Tonight it drove him to the doors of the hotel’s best suite. But the occupants behind these doors were not sleeping. He could hear the creaking of furniture, the whispers, the guttural laughter.
A man and a girl. He’d heard such whispers before.
His urge to kick down the door subsided as quickly as it came. He retraced his steps to the lobby and out into the night, circling the hotel until he located the suite’s windows, open to the cool air.
Why should a man like Ingram bother to take precautions against intruders? What had he to fear? Quentin vaulted over the windowsill, avoiding the clutch of heavy draperies. He found himself in a darkened parlor only a room away from the voices—louder now, the man’s whispering more insistent, the girl’s strained.
He crept to the connecting doorway and looked through.
The girl could not have been more than fourteen, her maid’s skirts bunched up around her thighs as she sat on Ingram’s knee. She could have passed for much younger. She squirmed and leaned away from him as he nuzzled her cheek.
“Don’t pretend you’re innocent,” he said, running his hand over her stocking. “I know you want it.”