What Bryce is saying won’t be overheard. Unless my cell phone has been tapped. Unless Carrie has hacked into it or the FBI has. I will myself to be cool and calm, to concentrate on what I’m doing and why I’m here. But it’s getting more difficult, close to impossible. Chanel Gilbert dove the Bermuda Triangle. Lucy was just in Bermuda. Now Chanel has been murdered and Lucy’s property has been raided by the FBI. A police officer is missing, and Marino and I are alone again inside this house where clocks are mysteriously wound, the table set, and doors open and shut on their own it seems. It’s as if we can’t escape gravity here. It’s pulling us in like a black hole.

“Well, the headline is the way-cool thing Anne found,” Bryce launches in about why he’s in the trace evidence lab.

“I hope you don’t mean it literally as in something that’s in the news.”

“No! But it’s so exciting it should be in the news and I’m sure it will be huge when it eventually hits.”

“Not now. Not until I say.”

“You’re talking like someone has a gun pointed at your head or you’ve been turned into bad animation in a bad Lego movie. I take that to mean Big Brother’s watching you not that there’s such a thing as privacy at all anymore. So I’ll do the talking. Anne found a weird piece of glass sticking to blood and I’m thinking good God what could have happened? How did this thing get on Chanel Gilbert’s body? I mean it’s true she lived in a house that goes back to when they were still hanging witches on the Common. But unless you saw other stuff like this inside her …?”

“Other stuff?”

“The mineral fingerprint that showed up on SEM.”

“Can you be more specific? I assume Ernie’s with you …?”

“Okay hold on.”

In the background I hear Ernie’s voice, then Bryce is back with the answer. “Specifically sand quartz, soda ash and limestone. In other words glass. With trace amounts of silver and gold.” He parrots what Ernie is saying to him. “Almost undetectable traces. But that could be from dirt obviously.”

“What dirt?”

“Well the bit of broken bead’s been somewhere the sun don’t shine all these hundreds of years. Gold and silver could be in the dirt and therefore not really part of the glass but then again they certainly could be. You can’t see it with the naked eye, what he calls a whisper of precious metals. Which is such a poetic way to put it. There’s also lead.”

“Has he identified something that might tell us where this particular item had been before it somehow ended up where it did?” I’m mindful of my every word and tempted not to be.