“Why are you here?” she whispered.

“Your father left a message. I have some errands to run, so I thought I’d drop by and speak to him in person while I . . .” His gaze strayed over her top and skirt. “Well, while I saw you,” he said with a wicked slant of one brow.

Desire leapt up inside her, hot and sudden. She shifted uncomfortably and struggled to keep her breath steady.

He glanced over his shoulder again and leaned closer. “My contact should have the list tomorrow. Would you like to meet somewhere for lunch and review it against our canopic jar paintings?”

“Yes,” she said, far too eagerly. She cleared her throat and tried again, more softly. “Yes, that would be agreeable. Fine. Good. Sure. I probably can.” Oh, God. She sounded like an idiot.

A loud whap! flew from the door, courtesy of her coworker, George. His irritating morning greeting consisted of smacking the doorframe with his briefcase—something that never failed to make her jump in her chair and tempted her to send the Mori down the hall to wallop him on the head with the damned briefcase.

“Who the hell was that?” Lowe asked.

“My biggest mistake,” she answered as Miss Tilly’s heels clicked toward her office.

 • • •

During his brief visit with Dr. Bacall, Lowe gave him a pack-of-lies tale concerning the hunt for the crossbar pieces. Not only did he leave Hadley out of it, but he also concocted a completely different path for his search. No books of poetry, no canopic jars, no Columbarium, and no Gloom Manor. Lowe was simply deciphering a set of symbols and following where they led. Bacall was overjoyed just to have Lowe working on it. And Lowe would be overjoyed to take the man’s money.

But at the moment, he was more interested in the younger man who’d passed by Hadley’s office. A “mistake,” she’d called him. Lowe intended to find out exactly what she meant by that. So after telling Dr. Bacall he’d show himself out, he strolled the maze of hallways until, in a quiet corner, he found a connecting corridor that led into the museum proper. A small office faced it, and the nameplate next to the open door said George Houston. Lowe ambled inside.

The man in question leaned against a file cabinet, looking into a small mirror as he ran a comb through dark hair. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He was tall—not as tall as Lowe, but probably a couple of inches over six feet—and his body looked as if it sat behind a desk all day doing nothing.

“You must be Mr. Houston,” Lowe said.

“That’s right.” The man set his comb down and looked up. “Oh, yes. Dr. Bacall’s golden boy,” he said, giving “boy” extra emphasis before blowing out a cone of smoke. “Suppose it could be worse. At least I won’t be working for a woman.”

“Miss Bacall mentioned you.”

Houston’s eyes narrowed. “Did she? In what context?”

Lowe loosened his posture and gave a causal shrug, attempting to lure the man into dropping his guard. “Just mentioned you worked for her.”

“For her?”

“With her,” Lowe corrected with a causal shrug. “I can’t remember. Didn’t say much, but she’s hard to read. Not exactly bubbly.”

Houston chuckled. “No, B.L.B. isn’t a charmer.”

“Pardon?”

“Bad Luck Bacall. That’s what we call her. You’ll understand if you end up working here. She’s a walking tornado of destruction. Wherever she goes, chairs break, books fall, light bulbs pop, and people end up in the hospital. You’d do well to stay out of her way, because if there’s a chance for something unlucky happening, you can bet she’ll be in the room.”

He hadn’t expected to hear all this, but if the idiot was leaking information like a busted tire, Lowe might as well help him along. “Is that right?”

“You were at the dinner party—could you believe that chandelier?”

“Yeah, that was something, all right.” Would’ve been nice if Houston had been sitting under it instead of him.

Houston shook his head and ashed his cigarette on the floor, ignoring the ashtray sitting on top of the file cabinet. “I swear to God, as soon as it fell, I thought of her. We used to have one of those Safety First signs that said ‘This department has worked blank days without an accident’—you know the ones with the black box where you chalk in the number? We painted B.L.B. over the top of it and used it every time something busted around here.”

Lowe pretended to laugh. Goddamn arrogant little pissant. No wonder Hadley kept to herself. If the office was filled with pigs like this, he hoped she broke every chair in the building.

“I went to college with her. She wasn’t as bad back then, but she was still a walking beacon for chaos.”

“Stanford?” Lowe asked.

“Yep.”

Lowe joined Hadley’s comment to Houston’s story, taking a guess. “She said someone in college was a ‘mistake.’ That you?”

“Mistake?” Houston chuckled and opened the top drawer of the file cabinet. “She liked it well enough.” He made a dismissive noise. “And if you want to know the truth, she came to me. Offered to pay me to screw her.”

Lowe’s false front momentarily dropped.

“No kidding,” Houston said, as if they were best buddies. “She said a man could pay a prostitute for sex, so why couldn’t a woman pay a man? See, that’s her fixation—she always has to have control over a situation. Once she loses that control? Forget it. She goes cuckoo. Terrible temper.”