Jumlin's Spawn Read Free Page A

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man’s shoulders and flipping Yancey over, only to have Yancey’s
lips clamp down on Oliver’s tongue.
    That was all she had seen.  All she had needed
to see.  She’d walked in on them by accident.  They
hadn't even noticed.  
    Even now, they had no idea what she had seen. They
didn't know yet that she was aware her two best friends, to whom
she had once been the third musketeer, whom she had known and loved
since junior high, had chosen a deeper relationship with each other
than the one they shared with her. She had been disqualified and
eliminated. And no one had bothered to tell her. Which was why she
left.
    Of course, Oliver and Yancey had happened
before.  She knew they had slept together before.  They
swore it was a one-time thing. But, what she had seen in the
bedroom that day meant it hadn't been just a fling. And now?
    “You okay?” Yancey's voice interrupted her, as she
hesitated there, staring through the Door into his room.
    She fought to brush-off the visceral impact of the
image. “Yeah, sure, just tired,” she murmured, then followed him
into the den.
    Oliver’s man-eating television occupied a far
wall.  The last she had seen it, the set was sitting in his
Rapid City condo. His impressionist paintings had been moved into
Yancey’s place and now hung on another wall.  This house had
clearly stopped being Yancey’s pad and started being Yancey and
Oliver's home.
    Elfie perched herself precariously at the edge of a
sofa, to which she once would have surrendered like a second
home.  She set the suitcase she had carried in beside her.
    “So, no more Duryea hero-worship, huh?” Yancey asked
briskly.
    “No,” she said matter-of-factly, “you had his number
from the very beginning.”
    “Don't start the Duryea pillory without me. Dead or
not, I hated the bastard,” Oliver said, returning from depositing
Elfie's other bags in the guest room…a room that had once been
Elfie’s room.
    Oliver seated himself in a big, overstuffed armchair.
In his black suit and cultured finesse, he was the antithesis of
nearly everything around him. He swept back his hair, removed his
glasses, and leaned forward, toward the suitcase that Elfie had
carried in with her. He looked up into her eyes directly.
    Elfie drew the small case toward her and opened it. A
protective sheet of cushion plastic obscured its contents.
    Yancey came around to stand between Oliver and Elfie.
“So, what is it?”
    “This is what I was talking about earlier. When
Narvel died under such suspicious circumstances, my curiosity got
the best of me,” Elfie explained. “I had been restricted from his
storage areas. This concerned me, since it was my job to speak for
the whole of the collection. Yesterday, after you two called me, I
decided to break the locks and investigate. What I found there far
exceeded my worst fears.”
    She peeled away the protective cushion wrap from the
sheltered pieces of hardened clay, chiseled rock and black
glass.
    Yancey leaned over them like a protective big
brother. “It's the Jumlin antiquities,” he said, in a hushed voice.
“That thieving son of a bitch.”
    “From looking at his records,” Elfie said sadly, “I
think the rare antiquities that he didn't steal; he bought off poor
locals who were just trying to survive. Then, he sold the items to
big city collectors at a massive mark-up.”
    “I wonder why he kept these,” Yancey said.
    Elfie replied, “Probably because of his crazy
theorizing about Egyptian-Sioux-Irish vampire people. Narvel had
these items in his private storage. I didn't mention it to the
Captain because I was afraid they'd be seized for evidence, just
like the stuff we looked at today.”
    “Yeah, they would have been,” Yancey said. “Where the
hell did Narvel get them in the first place?”
    “His notes said he stumbled over them deep in the
Angel Caves,” Elfie said. “I knew right away it was nonsense. I’ve
always heard the Angel Caves were very