Meredith shrugged. “The neighbors are curious enough about the police coming here. I don’t want to give them any more gossip.” She opened the driver’s-side door, climbed up, and gestured for Sylvie to come closer, until she was practically on top of the woman, could smell scented shampoo and the faint line of sweat at her hairline. The woman was honestly afraid. Of her car. Or of what it was being used to do.

“I noticed it when I kept needing to get gas, nearly twice as often as usual. Andreas thought someone might be si-phoning it off, so I started keeping it locked in the garage at night.”

“But nothing changed,” Sylvie said.

“What was I supposed to tell the police? That someone’s breaking into our locked, alarm-protected garage and borrowing the car on a regular basis without my knowledge? My husband doesn’t believe it. But right here!” She tapped the odometer with an agitated fingernail. “Forty miles just last night while we slept!”

Sylvie dropped back out of the car, took in the clean lines of the garage, the gap where the second vehicle should be, and said, “Your husband, Andreas? He’s not borrowing it?” It didn’t seem likely, not when he was making suggestions on how to stop it, but people played mind games for all sorts of reasons.

Meredith shook her head, confident in that at least. Sylvie said, “Pop the doors.”

When the side door opened, Sylvie grabbed a flashlight off the wall hook, crawled into the car, and began an inch-by-inch search. “Anyone overly interested in your daily routine? Who’d know when they could borrow the car at times you wouldn’t notice?”

“My husband has enemies; he’s a criminal lawyer—”

“No,” Sylvie said. “They’ve made hash of your alarm code. If they wanted in your house, wanted to harm you or him, they’d have done so already.”

A new quality of silence reached her, and she glanced up. Meredith had blanched. Sylvie mentally reran her last words, judged them too blunt. Too scary. Too pragmatic.

Her little dark voice chimed in. Too bad. Truth is brutal.

“Look,” Sylvie said, “this isn’t about you or your husband. This is about your car being convenient.” It had to be the burglars, the glory-seeking teens. It was one thing to sleep through your car being stolen when it was parked on the street, when the engine sound could be mistaken for a neighbor leaving—most of them had upper-range SUVs also. It was another thing to sleep through a locked garage door rising, a car being backed out and driven away. Homeowners had twitchy nerves for out-of-place sounds.

Either the Alvarezes were heavy nighttime drinkers, Ambien poppers, or they’d fallen prey to Sylvie’s sleep-spreading burglars. Sylvie bent her head back to the search, pleased. It was always nice when she was on the right trail.

“So—” she prompted. “Any nosey parkers, gawkers?”

Meredith said, “I don’t know what you want to know.”

“Who pays attention to you? Have you seen anyone lurking?”

“We have the neighborhood watch,” she said.

Sylvie let out a frustrated breath. “Work with me, Meredith. You’d call the cops if strangers were nosing around. What about locals? They keep taking your car. It’s not ’cause of the spiffy paint job. People are lazy by nature. They want easy. They want close.”

Meredith fiddled with the strap of her purse, ran her fingers up and down the snakeskin. “Isabella asked me once if it was a stick or an automatic, and her boyfriend asked me if the rear seats came out.”

“Isabella?” Sylvie asked, dropping flat to her belly and worming forward for a better look. Something glittered from beneath the third row of seats. She scrabbled for it, collecting carpet fluff beneath her short nails, and the ever-present limestone sand.

“Martinez, the neighbor’s girl. She said she was going to be car shopping.”

“Yeah, like her mother’d buy her a car with her grades—” Sylvie jerked her head up, her brain catching up with what her mouth knew. “Bella Martinez. High-school girl? Ittybitty bleached blonde, a fondness for shiny clothes and cheap cigarettes?”

“Yeah,” Meredith said. She gnawed her lip, her brow furrowing. Really thinking for the first time; even upside down, Sylvie could see the gears clicking slowly away in the woman’s mind. “That was . . . before the trouble started.”

“Great,” Sylvie muttered. “Just great.” Zoe was mad at her already; wait until she questioned her friends. A disturbing idea took tentative root: If Bella was involved in these burglaries, did Zoe know? When Sylvie had mentioned the burglaries, Zoe had looked sick; Sylvie had chalked it up to worry and distaste, but it could have been more personal for Zoe.

Her fingers finally closed on the bright spark beneath the seat, and all the hairs on her body rose in defensive spikes. Cold washed over her in a painful wave. Sylvie’s mouth dried; nausea roiled; she jerked her hand back and dropped the item on the carpet before her face, setting off a broken duet between her own thoughts and the shrieking of the little dark voice, woken to full alert with a single touch.

A fingernail—

Bad—

Not a fake, a—

Bad magic—

—real human fingernail, ridged and furrowed keratin, an old woman’s fingernail, a shred of flesh still clinging to the base, as sere as a mummy’s. The nail was painted, a gloss of silver, a layer of rainbow sparkle, and a tiny ornament dangling from the curled tip—a diamante heart. Sylvie somehow doubted the—

Dead—

—woman had chosen the colors. Decorated after death was . . . worrying. Decorated after death was The Silence of the Lambs.

Belatedly, she heard Meredith holding forth, really getting into it, the indignation that had been stifled by fear erupting now that she had someone to blame.

“. . . Isabella and her delinquent friends. I don’t care that they’re in designer clothes. They’re more than spoiled; they’re . . .”

Sylvie dragged her head out of the SUV, delicately dropping the fingernail into her pocket with a shudder. She interrupted, “You ever find anything unusual in the SUV . . . ? Oh, you did.” Meredith’s face told her as much; her rant broke off, and her eyes angled away, over, anywhere she didn’t have to meet Sylvie head-on.

“No,” she said, and Sylvie sighed.

“C’mon, Meredith, I’m on your side, remember? I believe you. Just tell me what you found, and I’ll get out of your hair. As a bonus? Your car won’t take road trips without you anymore.”

Originally, she had planned to find the vehicle and follow it to see if she could catch the people behind the burglaries. But with that little bit of dead flesh in her pocket, her plan had changed. High-schoolers or not—and Sylvie was inclined to believe the connection, tenuous as it was—they needed to be stopped immediately if they were messing around with magic like this.

Meredith fidgeted, and Sylvie said, “What was it?”

“A piece of jewelry.”

“Show me,” Sylvie said.

Meredith shook her head. “I gave it away. It was just some ticky-tacky skinny dog pin. It wasn’t even gold.”

Sylvie sighed. The brooch was on the list that Conrad had given Alex: one antique art deco silver greyhound. Gone faster than a real one round a track. Still, confirmation was confirmation. “Let me out. I’ve got things to do.”

“You said you’d stop them from stealing my car,” Meredith said.

“Do you have to be anywhere today?” Sylvie said.

Meredith shook her head. Sylvie’s first instinct was to shoot out the tires, but Meredith seemed the kind of woman who might be . . . upset with such black-and-white practicality, might react by calling the police. Sylvie had had enough of them for one day.

Self-control, Sylvie remembered. Taking it easy. She’d forgotten how to interact with ordinary people, with people she wasn’t trying to intimidate or kill.