Plagium (Keepers Book 1)

Chapter 21 - In Which the Pieces Take Shape

"Hello, Tracey!" Harriet piped, spinning around to face her, "Did we catch you at a bad time?"

Harriet smiled up to Tracey as if she were trying to distract her from Bentam's own cold demeanor. Tracey glanced towards Bentam before sighing and focusing her attention back on the girl.

"Of course not, Harriet. Come in," Tracey said. She stepped aside to allow the two to walk in.

"I'm sure you must be wondering why we've come here," Bentam finally said, rolling up and tucking his portable document into his pocket.

"Yes," Tracey sharply replied, closing the door with a little more force than necessary. "I thought that you would have found everything you needed by barging in on Mrs. Pinot. Rather careless, don't you think?"
"And you must've found an abundance of information by revisiting what you already have, hm?" he retorted. He cleared his throat. "Anyways," he continued, "we did find some information of interest to you."

"Why don't we sit in the sitting room," Tracey said, whisking past the two and reclaiming her seat in the room. "I believe we all have new information that everyone would like to hear."

"What happened here?" he asked in bewilderment as they navigated fallen items from the earlier-toppled table.

"Attempted burglary not ten minutes ago."

"I should create a report on this," he muttered, scanning the room and perching onto a nearby sofa. "Hello, Mittie."

"Hello, Bentam! How did your constable report go, by the way?" Mittie cheerfully said. "The last time I've seen you two, didn't you say you were going to file a missing person's report?"

"We changed our mind," Harriet replied. She sat next to Bentam. "Constables make me a little nervous, so I thought it'd be better if we just continued with our own searching."

"And for the record," Bentam added, "we did not barge into Mrs. Pinot's residence last night. We visited her this morning."

"How?" Tracey asked incredulously. "She didn't want to see us again the last time we saw her."

"Correction," Bentam said. "She didn't want to see you. I had a better guise for our visit."

"And what was that?" Mittie said.

"I simply went to go over some more paperwork with her. We've been working on this case for a few weeks now, so she wouldn't suspect much of that. In the meanwhile, Harriet looked around her home under the guise that she was checking all of Mrs. Pinot's fireplaces."

"I still can't believe that worked, to be honest," Harriet said. "I couldn't find any sign of Mr. Porter or Charlie, though, and I searched every corner of that house."

"No hidden rooms?" Tracey asked, thinking back to The Marketplace's hidden entrances.

"Not even that. All I found were some old blueprints in Mr. Pinot's old lab."

"Oh? Could they've been blueprints for Mr. Porter's keeper book?" Mittie asked, leaning forward.

"No, but they were kind of interesting. That's why I still remember it! They were some sort of miniature self-defense devices. I couldn't tell how they worked exactly, but I recognized one of its designs to be the same brooch Mrs. Pinot always wears!"

"That adds up," Mittie thoughtfully said. "Mrs. Pinot did say her husband had given that brooch to her, so he very well may've made it."

"Since we didn't find anything of too much interest at her residence," Bentam continued, "we decided to look more into what exactly keepers do since I couldn't understand why everything about them is so secretive. At the library, I found an interesting fact."