Taken (Ava Delaney #4) by Claire Farrell Page A

try.
    She gazed at
her daughter and nodded. “Fine. Dita, go ahead and wash your hands.
We eat soon.”
    Her daughter
made a face as she took a set of keys from her mother, but she ran
ahead obediently. Anka led me as far as the gate, and then blocked
the way with her body. “I don’t want to hear a lecture,” she
said.
    “I’m not… I
wasn’t going to give you a lecture. I just wondered if you knew any
more about the markets. Anything at all.”
    She shook her
head. “We can’t talk about those things. I’m grateful for your
help, but─”
    “Please.
Anything you can think of that might help. I won’t keep bothering
you about it, but I’m stuck for new leads. I have to do what I can,
you know?” I attempted to look unassuming, even a little
vulnerable.
    She made an
exasperated sound, and I tried not to smile triumphantly. “All I
know is that there are more powerful beings than us in charge. That
much I learned in my mother’s presence. Favours, money,
alliances—all can be bought with a useful child. Nobody cares about
people like us. We have no friends, no power. We aren’t pure.
That’s why you, of all people, need to keep your nose out of
it.”
    She turned
abruptly and headed for her house. At her front door, she paused
and turned. “But if anyone is capable of finding it, I hear you
have the right skills.” She slammed the door behind her, and I was
left standing there, a chill running down my spine at her
words.
     

Chapter
Eight
     
    The next
morning, I had breakfast with Carl at Eddie’s bookshop, partly so I
could whine at how little we were getting accomplished, and mostly
so I could ignore the incessant ringing of my phone. Every now and
then, my grandmother got it into her head to call me. Over and over
again. I had answered the calls for the first couple of days,
thinking something was wrong, but she had only wanted to beg me to
come over to see her. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t tell Carl that
though. I just stuck to the current story.
    “It’s not that
we aren’t trying,” I said. “It just seems like we’re blocked at
every angle. I mean, I’ve been looking online almost constantly
trying to find witnesses.”
    “Maybe we’re
looking too far afield,” he mused as he perused websites on his
laptop.
    “What do you
mean?”
    “We still have
Peter.”
    I shrugged.
“So?”
    “So he’s a
witness, and he went through something pretty traumatic. Maybe he’s
forgotten details or whatever.”
    “Well, if he’s
forgotten them, how are we supposed to make use of him?” I
asked.
    “What if we
spoke to someone else who was there that night? Like a police
officer or something?”
    I stopped
chewing. “Do you think they would even talk to us?”
    He shrugged.
“Who knows? But it’s worth a try.”
    “’Course it is.
Wanna come with?”
    His face lit
up. “Yeah. After I finish?”
    We agreed to
meet when his shift was over. He was in charge of calling ahead to
see if he could find anyone who had attended the scene.
    I walked home
and figured I should make use of the next few hours to check out
the rest of my leads. With an aching neck, I went through incident
after incident, struggling to find a witness. Near the end, I got
lucky.
    I called
Esther. “I’ve found someone, but they’re in England.”
    “Seriously?
That’s pure luck, Ava. I could go see them when I’m over there next
week.”
    “They’re way,
way down south though.”
    “So I’ll go
earlier than the rest of the Circle and join them when I’m finished
with this lead. We could be on the way to something here.”
    “Let’s not get
our hopes up just yet. He’s an elderly man. He might not even be
alive, never mind still remember anything useful.”
    She laughed.
“It’s better than the nothing we had yesterday, so I’m looking at a
half-full glass here.”
    By the time I
met with Carl, I was feeling a little more optimistic.
    “That’s
fantastic,” he said when I told him. “Even if it’s