Shiver on the Sky

by David Haywood Young

Chapter Seven

  (Monday, Late Morning—Owen)

  Five months ago Shawna had opened Signs & Portraits, a small graphics design business. She and her partner Martina Moynihan leased space in an oddly funky section of downtown Corpus, nestled between the big hotels, fancy tourist restaurants, banks and similarly archetypal city-center enterprises. Owen found a parking spot on Water Street, two blocks away.

  He and Shadow walked by a palm reader’s establishment sitting cheek-by-jowl with the Church of Scientology. In the next block somebody was about to open a bookstore specializing in the occult (and with, judging by the window display, a sideline in supplies for arcane rites and rituals).

  Directly across from Signs & Portraits was a business specializing, if their signs could be believed, in something called “Holistic Pest Control.” Biodegradable, and poison-free. Apparently the proper diet was critical to the process. They had cookbooks available.

  Owen quirked his lips and wondered for a moment what, exactly, the proper diet might be if you had (for instance) termites in your house? He didn’t come to any definite conclusions, but was newly suspicious of a diet high in fiber. Cellulose was fiber, wasn’t it? And termites ate it? Maybe a lot of fried food would do the trick.

  He wondered how Shawna’s new business was making out. The door was locked, and the interior was dark. He was trying to peer through the window when he heard keys jingling behind him.

  Martina stood there, smiling. “Hey, you’re Owen, right? I saw you looking at the place across the street,” she said. “It gets me too.” She smiled at Shadow. “Who’s this? Shawna never said you had a dog.”

  Owen smiled back at her. “This is Shadow. I already had a shadow, but he’s auditioning anyway.” He nodded at the locked door. “Don’t you have a secretary, or receptionist, or whatever I’m supposed to call her?”

  “Sure, but she didn’t show, and I wanted a latté. So I locked up and went to get it.”

  “Does she do this a lot? Just not show up.”

  “Nope. Probably only the once, unless she has a really good reason. We can’t afford to have the place closed, we’re barely making it as it is.” She unlocked the door and held it open.

  Owen twitched Shadow’s leash and walked inside. Martina bent down to pet Shadow as he went by. Shadow suddenly wanted to stay right where he was, and Martina showed no sign of straightening up, so Owen dropped the leash and wandered around.

  The walls had a few samples of work done for three different clients, certificates and awards in Shawna’s and Martina’s names, and very little else. A desk faced the entrance, with a closed door behind it. Against one wall stood a cheap table with two copiers, a fax machine, and what appeared to be random papers in loose piles.

  “Are you looking for Shawna?” Martina asked from the doorway, where she was still rubbing Shadow’s belly. “She’s not here, obviously.” Shadow groaned and turned over to show her where to pet him next. She laughed, and Owen forced himself to grin a little.

  Either she didn’t know anything or she was really good at pretending. “Any idea where she might be?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Owen’s gut twisted. He looked away. He’d known better than to expect to find Shawna that easily, hadn’t he?

  Martina kept talking. “And that’s pissing me off too. We have a client who wants a restaurant menu done, and this guy’s really a pain. He just insists on misspelling every word he possibly can, and won’t believe a mere woman when we try to fix it. I’m busy with a couple of brochures, and Shawna promised the restaurant guy she’d have his menu ready for the printer by this afternoon. So either she gets here soon or I get to choose which customer to annoy.”

  Owen had been nodding, looking around the office. When she stopped talking he glanced at her, finding her watching him with a concerned expression.

  “What?” she asked. “Did you guys get in a fight or something? You look like you haven’t slept in a week, which I wasn’t going to mention, and now you’re acting like I just kicked you someplace sensitive. I mean, sure, she should be here, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  “She’s missing,” Owen said. “Since Saturday night. I hoped you knew something.”

  “Missing? What do you mean, missing?”

  “I don’t actually know what I mean,” he said. “None of it makes much sense. Can we go sit down someplace for this?”

  “Oh! Sure. I’ll just lock the door again and we can go in back. What the hell, we don’t get many people just dropping in anyway.”

  “So the missing receptionist is no big deal?”

  “What? Oh. Sort of. Mostly we need her to answer the phone. Just give me a second here.” She busied herself at the front door, waving Owen toward a hallway that led further into the building. “Go on back, it’s the second door on the left. I have a couple of things to do up here first.”

  Owen opened the door, snapped his fingers for Shadow, and led him down a short hallway. He turned left and chose the least-cluttered of several tables that filled the room. The tables were identical to the one up front. Maybe they’d been on sale?

  He cleared what looked like work-in-progress on a gratuitously vegetarian restaurant menu (was there really a demand for “fried portobello fingers”?), dragged two chairs over, and sat in the one that gave him the best view of the room’s single door. Shadow sighed and collapsed on his feet.

  Martina was taking a while to lock up, if that was what she was doing. He was thinking about going back to check on her when he heard the faint flushing of a toilet.

  She came in a couple of minutes later with her latté and a glass of water for him. “Sorry. Water’s all we have right now.”

  “It’s fine. Can I ask you some questions?” For example, it would be good to know if she had Shawna hidden someplace. Or knew where she was.

  Martina sat, then gave him a quizzical look. “Sure. But what happened—”

  “First, can you tell me what’s going on with the business here?”

  “What do you mean? And why are you asking about that? I thought you were going to tell me about Shawna.”

  Owen nodded. He’d rather find out what she knew before her reactions were colored by the news about Junior and Leon. Assuming she didn’t already know all about them. “I am. I’ll tell you what I know, anyway. But the thing is, she’s missing, and we’ve been out of touch until just recently. I need to know more about what’s happening in her life if I’m going to find her.”

  She didn’t answer him immediately. Owen found himself staring into her eyes. They were green enough that he wondered about tinted contacts, but he had a feeling they were natural. His gaze wandered. Freckled nose, slightly wavy black hair. Black Irish, he decided. Mostly, anyway. Her first name sounded Mexican or maybe Spanish.

  “Owen,” she said finally, “we’ve only met a couple of times. You say Shawna’s missing, and I guess that has to be true, because she’s not here. But how do I know she’s not hiding from you?”

  It was a reasonable question. “You don’t, I guess. But you’ll have to make a decision. Did Shawna give you the impression she might have a reason to hide from me?”

  “No. Actually she said she wished you would push a little harder.” Martina blushed slightly. “I mean, in your relationship.”

  Owen spread his hands and waited. She smiled, then looked down at Shadow as the blush deepened, began to radiate warmth into the room, and spread—probably—to her toes.

  What else had Shawna been telling her?

  “Okay,” she said, meeting his eyes after a few moments of increasingly awkward silence. “What do you want to know?”

  “How do you get your customers, besides walk-ins?”

  She laughed. “Not many of those, not around here. We tried traditional advertising. We’re in the Yellow Pages with a quarter-page ad. But we’re new, and a lot of other companies aren’t. In this business that matters a lot. So we have to work a little harder.”

  She
sipped her coffee and made a face. “Guess I waited too long.” She put it aside. “Anyway, we get a list of all the new business license applications every month, and we solicit them by mail. Email too, if they give an address on the application. Sometimes we take the list and work our way down, calling all of them. We’re hoping to get Andrea, she’s the receptionist, to do that starting next month. We tell them straight out that we’re in the same position they are, trying to get off the ground—but that means new customers are important to us, and we’ll give them a good price.”

  Owen nodded. “Makes sense, I guess.”

  She shrugged. “So far it seems to be working. We do get our share of deadbeats. And some of the people we talk to don’t seem to have much chance of making it, but I like to think we’re in the business of helping people to realize their dreams. While, of course, we realize ours at the same time.”

  “That’s pretty much like what we used to do at CyberLook in the early days,” Owen said. “It turned into something different later on…but anyway, I think you’re being a lot more efficient about it than we ever were.”

  She smiled. “We really are hoping to grow with some of these guys, so we have a strong interest in helping them make it. I think it shows.”

  Shadow got up and stuck his nose under her hand. Owen shrugged apologetically, but Martina smiled and went back to work at Shadow’s direction.

  Owen doubted she was hiding anything. But maybe she knew something she didn’t realize was important. “Back to Shawna…how many customers has she been dealing with personally?”

  “You mean just lately? Anywhere from four to forty, for all I know. We work better when we don’t work together too closely. It took us a while to learn that, but we did. So if you’re thinking she might have gone out to meet some new customer, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it. I can look up the recent orders, though.” She looked more worried than she had. Maybe the idea that Shawna was really missing was sinking in.

  “Did she seem close to any of the customers? Personally? Or did any of them bother her?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Okay. The customer list sounds like a good place to start.” He paused, thinking. “While we’re on the subject, does Andrea ever go meet customers with either of you?”

  She looked at him. “You think they might be together? Because they’re both missing this morning?”

  If they weren’t together, Owen didn’t know what to do next. The customer list might help, but it was a long shot. And the police, with their manpower and clout, could look into that more effectively than he could.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever met Andrea,” he said. “Right now the only thing I’m sure of is that I’ll know more if I ask questions. Do you think they might be together?” Come to think of it, the police should have talked to Martina by now. Maybe they didn’t know where Shawna worked, or they’d been busy with something else?

  “Huh,” she said. “I don’t know. They could be, I guess. They hit it off pretty well when Andrea started here. All of us did, really, though I’ll change my mind if Andrea doesn’t come up with a good excuse for not showing up today. Anyway, as far as the business goes, no, Andrea hasn’t ever gone out to meet a client with us. I guess it could happen eventually, but she’s never seemed interested. Right now we’re just hoping to teach her enough so she can do some of the cold-calling for us. On the personal side, I don’t know. Sometimes they go do things, I guess. I haven’t paid much attention.”

  “How did you and Shawna meet?”

  Martina blushed again. Owen had begun to enjoy watching her do that. “Through Junior,” she said, looking away. “Shawna insisted on quitting her job at CyberLook because she was dating him, which if you ask me is going overboard, but that’s how she is. So she was looking for something else, and Junior knew my father because Dad runs a charter business and takes him out on a boat sometimes for fishing tournaments. Anyway, Dad and I ran into Junior and Shawna at the Port Aransas marina when they were coming back from a sailing trip. We ended up eating dinner together, and I talked about how much I wanted to quit my job and go out on my own, and the rest,” she waved her arm grandly, “is history.”

  Owen smiled at her. “Sounds like a dream come true.”

  “It is. But we have to work at it.”

  “How did your receptionist—Andrea, right?—come to get hired?”

  “We still don’t really need her full-time. But one phone call from a client used to disrupt both of us for an hour or more. We get a lot more done when we know we’ll be left alone for a few hours at a time, so it’s worthwhile having her here.”

  She stopped talking. Owen looked at her. Did she think she’d answered the question? Maybe she had, in a way. He tried again. “Did either of you know Andrea before she came here?”

  “No, we put a sign in the window.” She grinned. “Partly so we could see what sort of person might walk in and apply in this neighborhood. Anyway, she came in with experience in telemarketing, and she looked presentable, so we hired her.”

  Owen nodded. He might as well get to the point. “Do you know anyone else Shawna might have gone to?”

  “Well…lately she was seeing you quite a bit.”

  “Right.” He met her eyes. She waited patiently. “Okay, here’s what I know.” He told her about Leon first, then Shawna and Junior. He didn’t mention the Jeep.

  “My God, Owen.” Her voice shook. “We have to find her.”

  Owen raised an eyebrow. “We?”

  “Yes, goddamn it, we. What’d you think? I’ll start calling the client list, I know more about these people than you do. You check out Andrea’s place. Nobody’s answering the phone there, I called again before I came back here, but it’s worth a look.”

  She was fierce, like a mother defending her young. Owen had wondered how Shawna was coping in the business world—but as Martina hustled him out the door he was suddenly convinced she had everything under control. He wasn’t worried about the client list, either. Martina would be on it, and God help anyone who didn’t jump when she got them on the phone.

  Shawna was bright and capable, but she didn’t do a whole lot by herself. If she was hiding somewhere, somebody was helping her. Somebody besides him, it looked like. Though maybe she’d tried him first? He was having a hard time understanding the connection between Leon and Junior. Maybe Shawna had been followed to the marina, but she knew about the kayaking trip, so why would she have been there? Had she planned to hide on the Fusty Navel? Of course, she would have had to go there to borrow the Jeep….

  He’d been hoping Shawna had gone to Martina. But he couldn’t believe that anymore. Martina was about as direct and honest as it was possible to be. She probably would have helped Shawna, but she hadn’t been asked.

  So where was Shawna? He could still look for Andrea, but what if that didn’t pan out? If Shawna hadn’t asked anyone for help…maybe it was because she couldn’t.

  He felt better when he got to Carl’s car and found a couple of guys in expensive suits leaning on it. When one of them opened his jacket to show a gun and indicated with a theatrical gesture that Owen should precede them down the sidewalk, Owen shortened Shadow’s leash and complied almost cheerfully. He’d recognized them, or at least the one with the gun.

  He’d been worried that he wouldn’t be able to do anything useful. But now maybe something was shaking loose.

  ***