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Dalejem and Nick headed for what I guessed was some kind of library or sunroom.

All of us stayed on the ground floor.

By unspoken agreement, no one would go upstairs, not without the rest of us.

“Floor by floor,” Black muttered under his breath, nodding approvingly as he glanced at me. “That’s exactly right. We do this by the numbers. We do it by the book. Floor by floor. No one goes alone…”

I gripped his hand tightly.

I was trying really hard not to be distracted by his open shirt and tuxedo jacket. I wondered what happened to his tie.

“YELL OUT IF YOU FIND ANYTHING!” Black yelled, aiming his voice at the others in the other rooms.

No one answered, but I was pretty sure at least some of them heard him.

We walked into a room with a dusty, forest-green couch, a brick fireplace with a warped wooden mantle. Paintings… so many paintings. Over half appeared to be portraits or other depictions of people. Most of those showed scenes and clothing that appeared to be from the 1700s and 1800s. A few might have shown scenes from the early years of the Revolutionary War. A large hunt scene hung between two windows, with an antique table below.

The carpet on the floor was pale pink and strongly faded by sun. The wooden trim at the upper part of the walls and around the fireplace had been painted a different color from the lower part of the walls. I guessed it might have been forest green originally, like the couch, but sun and time had faded it to a dingy green-gray.

I tried to imagine what the room looked like before, when the embroidered chairs weren’t faded to gray, when the carpet, upholstery, and walls held their original colors. When there had been newish furniture in the room, and books, and other signs of life.

It struck me that the design inside hadn’t really changed much over the years.

Some of the fixtures had been changed, obviously, but even those looked old.

It was as if someone had taken the time to fit the place with electricity, possibly even to clean it up once or twice, removing items that decayed beyond any use.

Otherwise, they left it alone.

Not only the bones of the place, but the overall feel of the house’s interior remained colonial, locked in time. It had simply gone to seed.

It made me wonder again where we were.

This wasn’t some replica of the colonial period. It was an original structure from that time. I would have bet on it.

The heights of the ceilings, the furniture… all of it came from the 1700s.

None were of a style you would see in New Mexico.

Their old buildings were Spanish, with Native American materials for the most part. None that I had seen looked like this.

New England, maybe?

I guessed a historical house in the Northeast.

PossiblySan Francisco, but that struck me as significantly less likely.

But how many houses would have kept the same furniture over the years? How many houses this large and beautifully constructed would have been left to simply decay? Obviously a very wealthy family had lived here once.

Which brought me to the other question.

Could this really be Brick’s childhood home?

Hadhebeen the one to preserve it like this?

And could they be in Louisiana right now?

But that didn’t feel right to me, either.