Free Nightwing by Lynn Michaels Page A

blinked at her, and then it flew away.
    “Go shit on Frank’s car,” she muttered, and glanced down at her list.
    Why had she written how with two question marks? She knew how—the Stonebridge Historical Society Museum. If she couldn’t find the guy in the boots and breeches there, she wouldn’t find him anywhere. Except in her mirror, maybe. Willie tucked the list in her purse, turned on the air conditioner and locked the house behind her.
    The digital time and temperature board outside East Cape Savings and Loan said it was eighty-two degrees and 10:12 a.m. as Willie crossed the street and climbed the steps of the Stonebridge Historical Society Museum. It was housed in one of the oldest shingled saltboxes on the Cape. The curator, Lucy Pulver, dressed in a colonial gown with an apron and a lace-trimmed cap, smiled when Willie asked what she had on the Raven family and where she’d find it.
    “Front parlor,” she said, nodding at the low, square doorway to the left of the entry hall.
    The slanted floor creaked as Willie stepped into the room. A wooden settle sat in front of the fireplace. Cane-backed chairs and spindly tables holding oil-wick lamps and candlesticks were scattered across a faded rag-braided rug.
    Over the mantel hung a framed portrait of Horace Raven. A gold plaque beneath it said he was a patron of the Stonebridge Arts Council. He’d died of pneumonia in 1947 while touring castles in England. It didn’t say that on the plaque; Nancy Crocker had told her. He had Raven’s dark eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a grim expression and a receding hairline. Give his great-nephew thirty years, Willie thought, and he’d be a dead ringer for old Uncle Horace.
    There were other photographs inside a display case built along the wall opposite the windows. Willie turned on the shaded fluorescent tube above the glass top, leaned her elbow on the wooden edge and bent forward to study them.
    Most of the photos were grainy and faded with age. Still, she had no trouble recognizing the dark eyes she’d first seen by the glow of the luminarias on the terrace. He stood smiling in a sepia-tinged photograph on the steps of a house, his right elbow bent on the banister, his left arm slung around the shoulders of a man a good head shorter than he was, with bristly muttonchops. There were two brief lines typed on a slip of white paper pinned beneath the picture.
    Jonathan Raven and Theodore Gorham, the first two Harvard graduates from Stonebridge. Photo taken June 1877. Both men murdered in Egypt, at Thebes in the Valley of the Kings, August 1878.
    “Oh, my God,” Willie murmured, a slow chill crawling up her back.
    His hair was shorter, he wore a tweed suit and brocade waistcoat, a high collar and elaborately tied cravat, but it was him. The man she’d seen in her mirror. He not only looked enough like Dr. Jonathan Raven to be his twin, he had the same name.
    Only he’d been killed—no, murdered— 117 years ago.
     

Chapter 8
     
    Willie stood, stunned and staring at the photograph until her purse slid off her shoulder and hit the floor with a thunk. Startled, she swooped it up by its strap, her heart pounding, and glanced at the doorway. Lucy Pulver stood there, her head cocked curiously to one side.
    “You okay, Willie? You look a little pale.”
    “I’m fine. Just surprised,” Willie admitted. “I didn’t expect to find another Jonathan Raven here. Especially one who looks enough like Dr. Raven to be Dr. Raven.”
    “You did?” Lucy cocked a dubious eyebrow. “Where?”
    “Right here.” Willie tapped her finger on the case.
    Lucy took her glasses out of her apron pocket, put them on and peered at the photograph. “Oh, this one,” she said with a shrug. “There’s a resemblance, I suppose.”
    “Clean your glasses, Lucy, and look again.”
    “I’ve seen this picture a hundred times, Willie. Every day when I polish the case. You’re seeing things.”
    I know that, Willie wanted to shout. Instead