Grave Matters: A Night Owls Novel Read Online Free Page B

that particular groaner.
    For now, he was alone in the Night Owls back room, sorting through bills and paperwork. The last of the repair invoices from last month had come in, and what insurance wouldn’t cover, Night Owls’ coffers miraculously could. Well, maybe it wasn’t entirely a miracle: once the news got out that a bunch of thugs had wrought havoc on the store, business had picked up. People from Edgewood and surrounding towns came in to show their support, spending money and rubbernecking and clucking their tongues at the senseless destruction. Of course, they thought the smashed front window and trashed state of the store was a case of vandalism, not a night of supernatural violence, but hey. People were reading.
    They also had a bit of unexpected cash flow from the Clearwater estate. Henry and Helen had left clear instructions in their will about their library, and in it, Night Owls was named as the official broker for the massive collection of books. Many of them had been earmarked for Edgewood College’s English department. The rest, Chaz and Val had been working through bit by bit, inventorying, sorting, pricing, reselling.
    The books in the first-floor library, that was.
    The upstairs library, with its floor-to-ceiling stacks of old occult books, was a matter of more . . . creative handling. Two things worked in Val and Chaz’ favor: Henry had no family, and Helen’s was mostly on the other side of the country. What few relatives had flown out for the funeral hadn’t stuck around for a stroll through the house, not while Henry’s and Helen’s blood still soaked the carpets. While lawyers and appraisers and God only knew who else had been through the house once the crime scene investigation had finished, their interests had trended toward Helen’s jewelry (worth some serious cash) and Henry’s poor attempt at a coin collection (nothing in it worth more than twenty or thirty bucks, if your buyer was generous).
    Val had told the lawyerly types from the start that the second-floor library was off-limits. Only once had two of them grown curious enough about the room while Chaz was there working, but they were that brand of New England polite that meant they didn’t try barging past him, just asked nosy questions and tried some good old-fashioned neck craning. He’d taken their business cards, promised Val would be in touch, and run some quick-and-dirty web searches to find their home addresses.
    She’d been in touch, all right, though they wouldn’t remember it. The few times Chaz had seen them at the house again, they’d walked past the door to the second-floor library without even a cursory peek. It was almost as if they didn’t see the room at all. Val had probably Commanded them not to.
    The books that weren’t quite right for the college, but not useful enough to be squirreled to Val’s or Cavale’s for safekeeping, were sold to collectors through Night Owls. A decent percentage of the sale went to the bookstore, but the majority of the proceeds went into a scholarship fund for Edgewood students the Clearwaters had established in their will.
    Soon enough, all the paperwork would be done,
i
’s dotted,
t
’s crossed, and they’d have to pack up and move any books still unsorted from the house to the store. Or, more likely, to Val’s house. Night Owls’ back room was decent-sized, but not could-house-a-couple-decades’-worth-of-rare-books big. For now, though, morbid as it was in that house, in that room where the Clearwaters and Elly had made their stand against the Jackals, it brought a sort of closure. More for Val and Justin, who’d known Henry and Helen the best, but for Chaz, too. Much as the old man had spent the last few years hinting that Chaz was secretly a werewolf, he’d liked the old fucker. It helped that Helen had sent a constant stream of baked goods to the store, and Chaz got to eat Val’s share.
    “It’s getting downright fucking
maudlin
back here,” he muttered,