by Lucy Score
She was waiting for him to answer the second question. But that was a topic not even a psychic could pry out of him.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” he said, suddenly in a hurry to be anywhere but here. He had a new loose thread to pull on. It was time to see what would unravel.
She stood up and gathered her purse. He decided to take his frappe-whatever with him.
They walked out, leaving most of the cafe staring after them. “Ha. I just realized. Now you can’t come back here either,” Riley said, grinning at him.
32
11:45 p.m., Wednesday, July 1
The front parlor of the mansion was quiet as Riley worked her way through the yoga studio’s social media tasks on the computer. She’d worked at SHART for nine excruciating hours, then squeezed in a meditation with Gabe, during which she accidentally tuned into both Gabe’s unconditional worship of her and Lily’s obsession with men’s butts.
She gave a shudder at the memory and tried to focus on the task at hand. She scheduled two more posts, then updated the spreadsheet on followers and interaction.
Her sister’s social media audience was growing by leaps and bounds. Every week, her free live class drew a bigger audience, garnering more followers and shares. Her Instagram account was a carefully curated collection of beautiful pictures and uplifting yogic sentiments.
Wander’s star was rising. And Riley’s was, well, dim and hard to see.
She was proud of her sister. Not that she understood the desire to step into the spotlight. During their high school careers, Wander had starred in Annie Get Your Gun. Riley had been satisfied to make her contributions to the stage crew, hiding out in the wings, rearranging sets only after the spotlights went dark.
Wander had been head cheerleader and Homecoming Queen. Riley had been second string on the volleyball team and went to Denny’s with her flannel-wearing anti-hero friends instead of the prom.
The pattern continued into adulthood. Now, while Wander experienced steady growth and marched her way toward her goals, the other Thorn sister sometimes felt as stagnant as pond water.
But Riley was proud of Wander’s celebrity. Even if it made her life seem a little quiet by comparison. Okay, she thought, eyeing the empty room. Maybe not quiet. More like tomblike.
A squeaky floorboard and a quiet fart in the hallway ruined her tomb.
“Mrs. Penny?”
Her neighbor poked her head guiltily around the corner. “Oh, hello, dear,” she said. It was the same phony grandmother tone she used when she was pretending to be harmless. She was dressed in head-to-toe black. She had a knit cap covering her hair. Even her cane was wrapped in black tape.
“Going somewhere?” Riley asked. She didn’t have to be psychic to be immediately suspicious.
“I just have a teensy errand to run,” the woman announced.
“Uh-huh. You’re not driving, are you?” Mrs. Penny’s license had been suspended two years ago after an unfortunate and literal run-in with a city bus.
Mrs. Penny hid her car keys behind her back. “Who, me? Nope. As a matter of fact, I was coming down to ask you if you’d mind giving me a ride.”
Lies!
Riley glanced at the horrendous gilt clock on the mantel that ticked noisily. “Are you sure this errand can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“Positive. It’s just a quickie,” her neighbor promised.
Scarred from her accidental reading of Lily, Riley hoped to God it wasn’t an actual quickie.
“Can I go like this?” she asked, gesturing at her pink flamingo pajama shorts—a birthday gift from her nieces—and an ancient Hines Ward Pittsburgh Steelers jersey.
“You won’t even have to get out of the car,” Mrs. Penny promised.
“I’ll get my keys,” Riley said.
Five minutes later, Mrs. Penny was directing Riley into the heart of the city. The capitol complex was lit up in red, white, and blue in anticipation of the Fourth of July. There would be a 5k, which Riley wouldn’t run, and fireworks that she might see.
Maybe she could talk her parents into going? Or maybe Nick would want to recreate their Walnut Street Bridge kiss?
More likely, Nick would have already solved the murder and vanished from her life.
Or she’d be in jail because being a psychic was a crime.
That was a lot of maybes.
Riley followed the directions and felt her suspicions raise when Mrs. Penny had her turn onto State Street. The dignified glamor of the capitol building faded in the rearview mirror. Here houses got shabbier, churches more rundown. Streetlights cast uneven circles of light on corners.
“What kind of errand is this?” Riley asked when Mrs. Penny had her taking a left on Seventeenth Street.
“Where’s that sexy boyfriend of yours? Haven’t seen him around lately,” Mrs. Penny retorted. “You two fighting? Is he bad in bed?”
Neither one of them felt like answering the questions.
“You can pull over here,” the woman said, pointing to an open spot.
Riley pulled up to the curb behind a bumper-less Ford Taurus on blocks. The house next to them desperately needed a new paint job, but there were flowers in planters on the front porch, the exterior light worked, and there was an actual welcome mat at the door.
The little homey touches made Riley feel a little better… until Mrs. Penny opened her mouth again.
“Now, you just wait here with the engine running, and I’ll be right back.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Hang on there. You want me to keep the engine running?”
“Back in a jiffy,” Mrs. Penny announced. She yanked the black cap down over her face and peered at Riley through eye holes.
“Oh, shit.”
But Mrs. Penny was gone, slipping out of the Jeep and into the night with her cane.
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” Riley muttered, wrestling her seatbelt off. “My eighty-year-old neighbor just put on a ski mask in the middle of Harrisburg.”
She jumped out of the vehicle.
“Mrs. Penny!” she hissed, jogging after the short, round figure.
Other shadowy figures were coming into focus on the dark sidewalk at the end of the block. They were converging around her neighbor.
“Oh my God. She’s going to get murdered. Detective Weber is never going to believe I didn’t have anything to do with two murders,” Riley muttered, running at full speed now. She elbowed her way into the center of the silent, shadowy mob. “Back off!” she said, putting Mrs. Penny at her back.
“Yo, Stabby McGee. Who is this weirdo?” The voice was nasally and pubescent. It came from a tall, skinny figure in what Riley could only assume was an all-black onesie. He was wearing an Elsa mask.
Mrs. Penny’s eyes rolled within the holes of her ski mask. “That’s just my getaway driver.”
Stabby McGee? Getaway driver? What fresh hell had she stumbled into tonight?
“Uh, Stabby? Can I have a word?” Riley asked, tugging on Mrs. Penny’s sleeve.
“Gimmie a minute, guys,” Mrs. Penny said.
Riley dragged Mrs. Penny away from her army of darkness.
“What in the hell are you doing?” Riley demanded.
“Relax.” She drew out the word like someone who was not worried enough about the consequences of their actions.
“Are you doing something illegal?” Riley hissed.
“Look, kid. It’s just a quick gig. No big deal.”
“A gig? No big deal? Are you in a band?”
“Ha! Yeah. A Band. Now, don’t you worry your pretty little head. You just sit tight. Keep the engine running. Play some Tetris.” Mrs. Penny patted Riley on her arm and then pushed her way back into the center of her masked crew. “Everyone understand the plan?” she asked.
Heads nodded. A chorus of assent was echoed in many voices and accents.
Riley frantically scanned the dark sidewalk for band instruments and came up dry.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” Mrs. Penny, AKA
Stabby, ordered.
A man whose beard was poking out from under his Zorro mask snapped together two ends of what looked like a dog leash.
“Maybe we should all go home,” Riley began. But the dozen or so weird ninjas ignored her and filed down the ribbon-skinny walkway between two houses.
Please be in a band, Riley chanted in her head. When that didn’t allay her fears, she started whispering it out loud as she paced between her vehicle and the mouth of the walkway where Mrs. Penny had disappeared.
The home on the corner had been a nice brick two-story at one point. Now, it had plywood nailed over its windows and piles of trash spilling off its narrow front porch. The door was dented as if by an insistent steel-toed boot. The only house number left was an upside-down seven.
The rest of the neighborhood wasn’t bad. A little rundown, a lot in need of some maintenance. But it looked like people lived there. Except for the boarded-up house on the corner that looked like an invading blight.
Riley paced the sidewalk and debated. She should follow Mrs. Penny. She should go home. She should have pretended not to hear the fart in the hall.
Work—the thing that actually paid her bills—started in just a few hours, and once again, she was out too late for a good night’s sleep. She was getting really tired of being really tired.
She heard a sound coming from the back of the house. Breaking glass. Followed by… barking?
A lot of barking.
Porch lights flickered on up and down the block.
“Oh, come on,” she muttered. With one last look at the house that was giving off creepy vibes—and not like hilarious Scooby Doo bad-guy mansion vibes—she charged down the walkway.
She was wading through debris in the dark when the shouting started. It was followed immediately by the kind of commotion the human brain couldn’t identify. Through the dim light pouring from the windows of the neighboring house, she could just make out the wooden gate as it swung open toward her.
Something big and black bounded out.
“Ahh!” she shrieked.
The shape raced past her at a dead run. It was too short and quick to be a bear, she decided. Also, it hadn’t paused to eat her face. Werewolf? But it wasn’t a full moon, and as far as she knew, werewolves weren’t actually a thing. Though Gabe hadn’t officially answered her question.
Screwing up her courage, she reached for the gate. Two more bulky shadows exploded forth, squeezing their way through the opening. The wood of the gate caught her in the chest and smooshed her against the brick.
As the wind left her lungs, she made a collapsing accordion noise. One of the dark shapes paused, then licked her bare knee before giving a happy bark and rocketing toward the street.
Dogs?
Floodlights went on in the backyard, and Riley had just enough time to jump out of the way of an entire parade of canines racing toward freedom. Tall ones. Fat ones. Fluffy ones. All barking and howling joyfully as they whizzed past.
There was shouting coming from inside the villain house and out on the street.
Riley waited a beat, making sure there wasn’t a second canine wave, before stepping around the gate.
She should have waited longer.
Massive paws the size of her mother’s tea leaf reading saucers hit her in the chest. She was already off-balance when her flip-flopped foot slipped on a crushed beer can.
She went down hard, landing on her ass. The rocket of fur landed on top of her with all million pounds.
“Gah! I need to stop breaking falls,” she wheezed. The dog—dear God, please let it be a dog—slurped her face with a long tongue.
She heard the distant wail of sirens.
“5-0’s coming!” Mrs. Penny burst through the gate, sending it bouncing off Riley’s prone body.
“Ouch!”
“Stop fooling around and get your ass up,” Mrs. Penny yelled, tottering by using her cane to shove garbage out of the way.
Someone with a headlamp dragged Riley to her feet. The giant lug of a dog stretched leisurely at her side.
She limped her way toward the mouth of the walkway. There was a howling coming from the house, but it sounded… human.
“What’s that sound?” she asked.
“It’s the sound of Vigilante Justice,” a neighbor in silk boxer shorts and a tank top said as he hung over the railing on his front porch. “Wooooo!” He hoisted a beer in the air.
“Woooo!” repeated the crowd of pajamaed neighbors that had gathered in the street.
“Nobody saw anything,” Mrs. Penny shouted to the bystanders.
The growing crowd started applauding.
Riley could see better now that they were under a streetlight. The dog glued to her side was long-legged and long-bodied like a lion. He had short, reddish fur and a head roughly the size of a wrecking ball. Judging by some dangling anatomy, he was most definitely a he.
“Why are they clapping?” she asked, wondering if she should fashion some kind of leash for the hulking lion dog.
“Because we’re friggin’ heroes,” the androgynous ninja next to her announced.
“Yeah, we just busted up a half-assed puppy mill that some asshole was going to turn into a dog-fighting ring!” the nasally teenager in the onesie squeaked.
“We gotta go now,” a taller shadow announced in a rumbly church choir baritone.
“Everybody scatter!” Mrs. Penny ordered before turning and hightailing it toward the crosswalk.
The sirens were rapidly approaching, and Riley could see the flash of lights coming from a few blocks away.
“Wait!” she yelled, flip-flopping after her neighbor, who was jogging in the opposite direction of their getaway vehicle.
Scatter apparently meant clump together suspiciously. Eight vigilantes crowded around them like flies on dog poop, and together they jog-limped across the street.
“You can cut through our backyard and down the alley,” said a woman in an oversized Trans Siberian Orchestra t-shirt, waving from the front stoop of her house.
“We’ll keep ’em occupied,” another neighbor promised.
“Thanks,” Mrs. Penny said, pushing one of the ninjas through the fence gate. “And don’t let them run plates on that Jeep down the block!”
Riley and her four-legged friend caught up with Mrs. Penny and four other ninjas in the alley. “We’re going the wrong way,” she huffed. Why was she more winded than her eighty-year-old charge and the French-kissing dog? She really needed to take Gabe’s offer of actual personal training more seriously. “My Jeep is back there.”
“Your Jeep is blocked by at least four police cruisers,” Mrs. Penny said, throwing herself over a short fence into another yard. The other ninjas followed suit.
The dog looked at Riley. She looked at the dog. Riley shrugged.
They both hopped over into the yard, ducking against the rundown garage with Mrs. Penny when the back porch light came on.
Heads down, they snuck out of one yard and into another.
Mrs. Penny waved her arm and pointed. “Let’s go down another block before we start breaking car windows.”
“No one is breaking any car windows,” Riley hissed.
They wove their way through backyards and alleys, vigilantes peeling off and vanishing into the shadows.
“Stay in the car and keep the engine running. How hard is it to follow instructions?” Her neighbor grumbled, peering over a forsythia bush.
“I thought you were in trouble,” Riley said defensively from her crouched position behind a couch someone left in the alley. She wasn’t going to feel guilty. She wasn’t the one being chased by the cops… Well, technically she was.
“Yeah, well, now I am in trouble, smarty-pants.”
“Yeah.” Teenage Ninja Elsa poked his head out of a half-dead arborvitae.
Riley gave a little shriek, but it was muffled by a small hand that closed over her mouth.
“Quiet down,” Mrs. Penny said. She gave a nod to the figure behi
nd Riley, and the hand disappeared. “Now, how are we getting home without getting arrested?”
33
12:42 a.m., Thursday, July 2
“The things I do for you, Thorn.”
Nick in sleep pants, a t-shirt, and bare feet—because he’d accidentally grabbed two left sneakers off the floor—navigated his SUV onto the Harvey Taylor Bridge and headed for the West Shore.
Riley was in the passenger seat, looking like someone had yanked her out of bed and dragged her into the night. Her flamingo shorts were pretty damn cute. But her old bruises were covered in fresh new scrapes. She had two muddy paw prints on the boob region of her Hines Ward jersey and was missing a flip-flop.
There were three wannabe ninjas crammed in his back seat, only one he recognized. Despite her ski mask, the giant glasses and peek of purple hair gave her away as Riley’s neighbor Mrs. Penny. The other two were still masked. The short, dainty one wore a Richard Nixon mask. The tall guy in the onesie was wearing an Elsa from Frozen mask. Then there was the lion-sized dog in the hatch who was slobbering on one of his left Nikes.
Life was weird sometimes. And he was pretty damn glad he’d answered the phone when it rang.
“So,” he began. “Who wants to explain why I’m playing Uber for a bunch of Kung Fu movie extras?”
There was a comical silence as the three backseat passengers looked at each other.
“Who wants to explain why you’re supposed to sell life insurance, yet you have a PI license?” Mrs. Penny sniffed.
The quiet ninja snickered.
“You told them I sold life insurance?” Nick asked Riley.
She shrugged. “They put me on the spot. I didn’t know what to say.”
The police scanner on the dashboard squawked. “Individual found in basement locked inside a dog crate,” a monotonous voice stated.
Riley turned in her seat. “You put a human being in a dog crate?” Her voice rose high enough at the end of the sentence to have the dog’s giant head popping up over the tall, skinny ninja’s shoulder, sneaker dangling from his mouth.
