Madison Mosby and the Moonmilk Wars Read online

“No, I don’t know anyone named Trask.”

  Carol opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of Xeroxed documents.

  “Well,” said Carol, “He’s heard of you.” She placed the papers in Shelby’s lap. Scanning through them, Shelby could see handwritten notes on her, Dana and Madison, listing them as “granddaughters.”

  Shelby almost dropped the papers. Her vision narrowed to just the words on the page, an address in Switzerland, requisitions for enough food to feed a hundred people, and lists of weapon inventories.

  “What?” was all Shelby could manage.

  She looked back at Carol, who’d clearly had enough time to process all of this. A thousand questions flew though her head.

  “You still recruiting informants for the bureau?” Carol asked.

  “You know I can’t talk about that,” Shelby whispered.

  “Hey!” Carol shouted. “Don’t give me that privileged information shit now. I’m in real danger here. My bosses look like they want to send me to a black site for even thinking about this shit. And you want to play super-secret G man with me?”

  “Fine, yes. I am,” Shelby said through clinched teeth. “And keep your voice down.”

  The rain was really coming down now. Shelby has the presence of mind to stuff the papers back into the envelope before the rain ruined them.

  Carol waited for Shelby to pull herself together. “Think you’ve made a new enemy?”

  “I don’t...I don’t know.”

  Carol frowned as if Shelby had lied to her.

  “I don’t know, I swear.” Shelby thought for a moment. “Where are the originals?”

  “Stashed in a deposit box, in case this comes back to bite me.”

  “Where did you find all of this?” asked Shelby.

  “They were in a filing cabinet drawer that must have blown clear of the house in the explosion. Those are all the documents that weren’t burnt up. Forensics guys must have missed it, before the investigation was shut down. The last page is the weirdest.”

  As if Shelby needed any more “weirdness.” She shuffled through the envelope and pulled out the bottom page. It was a Xerox of just a scrap of burnt paper. Only three handwritten words were visible: “Rose Widow’s” and “Moonmilk.”

  Chapter 7

  Item #876

  Name – Dust Metal Jacket

  Size – Small

  Material – Leather, brown

  Properties – Metal destruction

  Note – jacket must be buttoned all the way up to activate spell.

  Source – Rose Widow Spirit Suit Inventory, p65

  ***

  Madison followed Lammy and Buddy over fallen trees, across a narrow brook and through an abandoned hunting camp. The rain, which had started in the morning, showed no signs of letting up. Despite her jacket, she was soaked to the core and every step seemed to land in a deeper puddle. The last one had swallowed her leg up to the calf.

  While the rain was annoying, Madison couldn’t ignore the sheer beauty of the forest in the rain. Everything seemed to be greener and more vibrant. Raindrops pattered off the leaves and mixed with the songs of a thousand birds overhead. One could be quite content just to sit on a porch, watching and listening to the storm.

  “Almost there,” Lammy said over his shoulder.

  How the hell did she manage to get whatever is in the library this far into the forest? Madison wondered.

  As she struggled to keep up with the twins, Madison wondered if Nancy Mosby had owned all of this land. It wasn’t out of the question. Estimates at the time of Nancy’s disappearance placed her wealth right around the billion dollar mark. Most of it was tied up in Blue Petal International stock, but with even a small percentage in cash, Nancy could buy this much land; no problem.

  The thought conjured more curiosity. What else did Nancy own that no one knew about? Furthermore, who did know about all her holdings? Someone had the master list. Unfortunately though, that person would probably only talk to Madison’s father, Peter. Eventually, she was going to have to have a serious talk with her father, one she didn’t want to have. Her dad avoided talking about his mother, almost as much as he hated talking about Blue Petal. It was too overwhelming for him, too complex and too much responsibility. He spent almost all his time in places like this, surrounded by the simple beauty of nature.

  Madison wanted to probe Lammy’s comment about Nancy coming to the library five years ago. But, it was simply too hard to carry on a conversation in the rain as she panted like a dog trying to keep up with a jogger.

  Finally, the trio stopped at the bottom of a hill. “This is it,” said Buddy.

  Before them lay a small clearing of tall grass, ringed with trees; no door, no cave, no magical portal to another dimension, just a small field.

  This is what, exactly? Madison had the sudden fear that this was all some elaborate scheme to get her into the middle of nowhere and shoot her. What if Grandma had set some order to kill anyone who came looking for the Shiloh Library? Langston was always scared shitless when he talked about it. What if that was because the twins defended the place with force? Madison’s hand drifted toward the pistol under her jacket.

  “Where are the glasses?” Lammy asked Buddy.

  “I thought you had ‘em,” Buddy shot back.

  The two started rifling through their pockets.

  Glasses, what the fuck do you need glasses for? Did they have to read something?

  “Did you drop them?” Lammy asked.

  “Shit, I think so,” Buddy replied.

  “Well, you best get looking for them.”

  “Oh, please don’t tell me we have to go back,” said Madison.

  “Found ‘em,” said Buddy as he produced a pair of what could only be described as “old lady sunglasses.” They were white with upturned edges.

  “You steal those from Lucille Ball?” asked Madison.

  “They were Ms. Mosby’s, said Lammy, “thank you very much.” He looked around as if he was about to steal something and donned the glasses. “Oh, yeah. Right where we left it.”

  He took the glasses off and handed them to Madison. She’d seen enough shit in the last year to know that the glasses were more than protection from the sun in 1950. She put them on. “Oh, shit.”

  A metal shed, similar to the kind people have in their backyards for yard tools and lawn mowers, appeared in the middle of the clearing. With the glasses on, Madison could hear the tink, tink, tink of raindrops on the shed’s metal roof. She pulled the glasses off. The shed and the sounds went away.

  “Nifty, eh?” said Buddy.

  “I’ll say.” Madison spent a moment taking the glasses on and off. The effect was just too cool. “So what, I just keep these on and open the door?”

  She decided this was a sort of permanent Predator’s Cloak invisibility spell, similar somehow to the potion she’d drank to escape Caymen Darrow and then again when she stole the client totems from the Preens’ floral shop. The glasses somehow saw through the spell. This was both interesting and worrisome. If there were more of these glasses in the world, someone could see her when she was invisible. She filed that away as something to be terrified of later.

  “Yep,” said Lammy. “You can take them off, once you’re inside. At least that’s what Nancy told us.”

  “Wait, you’ve never been inside?”

  “Nope,” they said in unison.

  “Don’t leave those things in there. We only got one spare pair and it’s buried pretty deep.”

  What is with you two and burying shit in the ground?

  “Right, I guess. How would you find the place, without these?”

  “It’s not just that,” said Lammy. “The shed isn’t there without those.”

  “What?” The glasses showing the shed seemed believable, but the shed not existing without them was something new.

  Glasses on, Madison walked over to the shed. She touched it. The corrugated metal sides were cold and slick with rain. She took the
glasses off and all she touched was air.

  What if? Madison stuck her arm all the way out and put the glasses back on. The shed reappeared and her arm was through the exterior wall. The metal wrapped around her bicep, making a hole. She tried to pull her arm free, but the hole was too tight. Glasses off again, her arm was free.

  “It was made that way in case a tree fell across here,” said Lammy.

  Madison jumped at the sound of his voice. She hadn’t noticed them walking up behind her.

  “You don’t ever want the entrance of your treasure stash to get blocked,” said Buddy.

  I guess not. Damn, that woman thought of everything. She put the glasses back on and opened the door. It made a metal on metal grinding sound. Might want to oil that later. Care and upkeep of one’s cookware was essential to success in the kitchen; no reason not to apply that philosophy to the door to the Shiloh Library.

  “Don’t take too long,” said Buddy. “It’s a long way back and we ain’t partial to standing out in the rain.”

  What Madison wanted to say was, Don’t take too long? Do you know what I’ve been through to find this place? You two can sit out here for a week if that’s what it takes for me to go through everything. But she didn’t, knowing that Sarah would shame her when she told her the story later.

  “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  As she crossed the threshold, Madison worried that the space would be empty. What if this was like the vaults of Qarth in Game of Thrones, all hype and no money? How could so much stuff be packed into such a small space? Or, was this place like the camping gear in Harry Potter, where one tent was actually the size of a house on the inside? Christmas time.

  Inside, Madison felt a wave of disappointment. The place was empty, just four metal walls and the open door. The twins weren’t even paying attention to her, just looking up at the sky and talking softly to one another. Her eyes darted in all directions, frantic to find some piece of parchment or magical Superman hologram crystal, or fucking something!

  She felt her blood pressure rise. Her heart fluttered and palpitated. Nothing, there was nothing here. All this hiking for nothing. She’d just wasted a full day and night with these morons. She could be back at the mansion, working with Sarah on the Moonmilk batch for the new customer. But, no. Her dumb ass had to come out here to stand in an empty, rain-soaked shed.

  “Fuck!”

  That got the twins’ attention.

  “Oh, sorry,” said Lammy. “Open the trapdoor.” He pointed at Madison’s feet.

  Looking down, Madison noticed a small hand-groove in the floor. She knelt down and pulled. The section of the floor swung open releasing a bright blue light, which reminded her of the crystals in the greenhouse’s fish tanks. A spiral staircase led down, into the blue. Madison took a deep breath and started down the stairs.

  Chapter 8

  Shelby decided the house just wasn’t safe. She let Muffin in and bolted for her car. Jacob would be home any minute. She needed a place to sit and go over the files, without being interrupted or, perish the thought, Jacob seeing what she was reading. Shelby knew all of this was wrong. She was carrying evidence of a crime, without reporting it to her superiors. Being caught was serious business, serious enough to get her reprimanded or worse yet, fired. She needed to go somewhere where she could sit and think.

  The New Faith Church offices were quiet, save for the youth basketball practice in the gym down the hall. All the secretaries had gone home for the day, so Shelby was alone in the office wing. Her seat on the advisory board gave her access to the building. She darted into a conference room and began to lay out the files on the table.

  There were ten pages in all. Most were lists of names. She didn’t recognize any of them. Some had the words “White Union” next to them, whatever that meant. Then she came to what looked like handwritten dossier files on her and her sister Dana. There was a third dossier, which was burned at the top so the name was missing, but it mentioned Sky Garden Family Buffet.

  Madison.

  Comparing all the files quickly revealed the same common word: “granddaughter.”

  This whole thing has something to do with Grandmother. That was Shelby’s guess anyway. The words Rose Widow had to mean Nancy Mosby. Rose Widower might have meant grandfather, but he’d been dead for decades. What would anyone want with him?

  Shelby fell into a chair and stared up at the ceiling. Her phone buzzed:

  Jacob: Hey I’m picking up Chipotle, you want the usual?

  Dinner, shoot. Gonna need a few more minutes, hun.

  Shelby: Sure

  Jacob: Are you at home yet?

  She hated to do it, but Shelby had to tell a little white lie to buy some more time.

  Shelby: No, about to walk into the tanning booth. Then I’ll be home.

  Jacob: ok

  She turned back to the files. She didn’t have much more time with them. Before she started packing everything up, she noticed another curious phrase, “Ajax Project,” as a handwritten note in the margin—almost a throwaway doodle.

  Were these people trying to blackmail Blue Petal, maybe?

  Shelby’s mind raced. Maybe Ajax Project was some sort of secret project at Blue Petal. Corporate espionage was rampant these days and industrial secrets, even for something as trivial as a frosting recipe, could be worth millions.

  All that seemed unlikely, though. An explosion, killing scores of people—the real body count was unknown, even Carol didn’t have that number—was part of something bigger. She knew it. If it were three people, that could be some sort of blackmail/greenmail thing, but if it was ten or more, then something more sinister was going on.

  Shelby pursed her lips and raced to think of a hiding place for the files. She didn’t dare take them home, and the office was absolutely out of the question. She stuffed everything back into the envelope and made for the church library. At the bottom of one of the shelves, she found several books, covered in dust, large enough to stash the envelope. She eased one out, an illustrated Bible from the early nineteenth century, opened it to the middle and slid the envelope in. She replaced the Bible, careful not to disturb too much of the camouflage dust and strolled back to her car.

  No one saw her, and she hoped she looked tan enough from her last session that Jacob wouldn’t give her a second glance. She knew she had a night of Googling, thinking and sleeplessness ahead of her. Besides, sleeping had been something to avoid the last few months, what with the nightmares and all.

  Chapter 9

  Contessa rose as the last guest arrived, escorted by a butler who promptly left through a service door. The people around the table, eight including Contessa, were the heads of the remaining East Coast Moonmilk cartels.

  “I think you all have heard of each other,” Contessa started, “but I’ll go around the table. To my left is my son, Corrado; next to him are Max Molden, his son Leo and his daughter Abigale. They represent the New York brewers.”

  The Molden’s wore garish business attire, silk suits and gold jewelry with slicked-back hair. All three had a sleepy confidence in their eyes, like they were too good to be sitting there, contemptuous of the other guests, including Contessa. They had every right to be too, given that they had survived the Rose Widow’s exit, and subsequent client disappearances, relatively unscathed.

  Contessa wanted more than anything to wipe the smug look off all three of them.

  Corrado watched his mother as she drew long puffs from her cigarette. The smoke curled around her, in the shape of a slowly revolving funnel cloud.

  “To my right are the newest members of our community, Hector and Dmitri Zakarov from our friends in Baltimore.”

  The brothers were broad-shouldered and pot-bellied, bald and sporting a mosaic of tattoos on their thick forearms. They slouched in their chairs, wrapped in black Adidas track suits. Large crucifixes hung from their necks and their fists shimmered with diamond rings. Their faces were blank, save for slightly downturned mouths.

/>   Contessa continued, “And next to them is Louis Preen, who holds Washington, DC.”

  What’s left of it, she thought.

  Louis was the easiest to read of the group. He looked pissed, angry that everyone else at the table was clearly doing better than him. He had been wronged, and today was the day he’d start to right his operations. A thin-framed man, he in no way resembled the gorilla he’d called Father. He twitched like a meth addict waiting for his dealer and was forever running his hands through a thick crop of blond hair.

  Contessa finally sat. As she did, tendrils of smoke spread away from her, rolling across the table and floor. She waited for someone to ask to see her new prize. Everyone just looked at one another with a combination of boredom and irritation.

  “So,” she started, “we have a problem.”

  “I have a problem with him,” said Max. He stabbed a thick finger at Hector. “What happened to Cooper and his people?”

  Hector smirked and bobbed his head up and down. “He retired.”

  Hector’s grin, that little knowing glance, could troll a priest. He clearly wanted to pick a fight with Max. Or, specifically, goad Max into a fight. New York was the biggest market by a long shot, which gave Max extensive resources over the rest of the players at the table, a fact that clearly made Hector jealous he hadn’t aided in the “retirement” of Max instead of Cooper.

  “Bullshit,” Max fired back, “Cooper’s not the type to leave the business. His grandfather started the Baltimore market.”

  “That may be. But family is important to him. He said he wanted to go fishing every day with his sons; leave the headaches to me and Dmitri here. Besides, you never liked Cooper anyway. He told me.”

  “What else did he tell you?” asked Max.

  “That your daughter is very beautiful.” Max winked at Abigale.

  Good. That’s it-fight amongst yourselves. Contessa slammed her hand on the table. “Enough! Mr. Cooper’s retirement is not why we’re here. You two have differences, go settle them outside.” The two’s rivalry would come in handy, and it was apparently deeper than Contessa first thought.