by Devon Monk
Delaney slid her gaze to me. I wasn’t sure what she saw, but yeah, Hogan wasn’t the problem in this relationship. That was all on me.
She raised one eyebrow. I didn’t know if it was the what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you eyebrow or the aren’t-you-going-to-answer-that-flirty-man eyebrow.
Maybe both. I squinted at her and resisted sticking out my tongue. Then I swiveled my chair toward Hogan.
“How about I come over there and you give your brownies to me for free, baby?” I asked.
Delaney shook her head. She got up and took her coffee and judgey-Mcjudgement back over to her own desk where she could mind her own business.
I swanked on over to my man.
My man. I’d been thinking about him that way for a while. For weeks, if I were honest. At first it was just for fun, a silly way to tease him but now...now it felt solid. Real. Right.
What did that even mean? Was this temporary thing becoming more than that? And if it was, did Hogan feel the same?
And if this was just a casual temporary thing for Hogan, how did that make me feel?
My chest tightened and my stomach clenched. It made me feel not good. Not good at all.
“Whoa. What’s going through your head, Jeans?” Hogan asked gently, reaching out with one hand while he placed the pink box of what I assumed were six mint chocolate brownies he’d held aside just for me on the counter.
I so didn’t want to answer his question. “Thought you couldn’t leave the shop.” I leaned on the counter and he leaned too, his wide, long-fingered hands reaching across to me. Warm, strong fingers wove between my colder thinner ones. He pressed until our palms were flat together, until his warmth seeped down into me.
“Billy’s got it covered.”
“On her own?” Billy rocked and I knew that. She’d run the local motorcycle gang years ago. She was in her nineties now, with traffic cone orange hair and a smoking habit she couldn’t quit, even though she never lit the ever-present cigarette in her mouth when she worked the bakery coffee counter.
“Don’t think there’s anything Billy can’t handle on her own.”
“Sure, yeah. She’s something. That Billy. So this is nice.” I peeled back the little puffin sticker that held the lid of the box shut. I couldn’t meet his eyes. Why was it so hard to look at that smile?
“It’s breakfast, baby, not an obligation.” He squeezed our fingers tighter together. “I should have sent Billy over instead, yeah?”
“What are you even talking about? I’m super happy you’re here.” My voice didn’t sound super happy. It sounded super confused.
“Super liar,” he said. Like he could read my mind or something.
I looked up into the sunshine of him. “Just have a lot of things on my mind.”
“Like?”
“Gnomes.”
It was out before I could think better of it. He nodded like that made perfect sense. “Sure. They’re a thing.”
“They’re a thing in October. And this year I have to deal with them.”
“How’s that going?”
“Not great.” I popped the lid on the box and peered inside. “Aw...you brought me a cinnamon roll too!”
“Think I’d leave you hanging with a crack in your heart? Please.”
And how sweet was he?
Maybe I was reading too much into this. Worrying about what we might be instead of enjoying what we were.
“Never doubted you for a moment, baking god,” I said.
He laughed, a deep warm chuckle that rolled over me like a caress. A sexy caress.
I lifted up on my toes and leaned across the counter, which put me on just the right level to kiss him.
“What do I owe you for the goodies?”
“I think you can start with a kiss.” His gaze was full of something that made me want to make him as happy as he made me.
So I kissed him and made a wish that we could do this, find a way to stay happy together no matter how long ‘together’ might be.
Chapter Six
Bertie, our town’s one and only Valkyrie, gave me a hard look followed by a fake smile that showed how white and sharp her teeth were, even though she appeared to be at least in her eighties and should, by all rights, be wearing dentures.
“You called?” I asked.
“I did. Have a seat, Jean.”
Bertie pretty much ran the community center of Ordinary from this pleasant refurbished brick school building which also offered space for local artists. She single-handedly managed to pull off all of Ordinary’s festivals, including the Rhubarb Rally, the Cake and Skate, something that involved knitters smothering Main Street in weird socks and ugly tree sweaters, and currently, the Haunted Harbor and Harvest Festival.
Basically, the streets along the bay were transformed into all-Halloween, all-the-time. Decorations ranged from homemade and quaint, to the level of Hollywood set designers, including an entire block that was nothing but haunted houses, each with a specific theme.
It was a huge thing for a little town to pull off, and it ran for the last two weeks of October. We were almost at the end of the month and so far, so good. Which wasn’t a surprise. If anyone could not only make this festival go, but also make it grow, it was Bertie.
Because no one said no to Bertie.
“It has come to my attention that you are the contact for our autumn animated.”
I blinked. “Is that a new film festival?”
She tapped her painted gold nails on the top of her desk. She had gone all out with her holiday decorations and I totally approved. There was a vulture in each corner of the ceiling, all peering down so that their hard gazes came to rest right where I was sitting.
Her desk was draped in a beautiful orange shawl of some kind. Intricate and obviously handmade lacework teased out knots of spiders, swirls of tentacles, and the detailed spread of owl feathers over the curl of ocean waves and crescent moons.
“Gorgeous,” I said, pointing my Tootsie Pop toward her desk. I’d pretty much been eating a steady diet of Halloween candy for the last three weeks. Halloween was officially only two days away.
No, I hadn’t figured out how to get the gnomes to elect a new leader, even with Myra’s help.
Also no, they hadn’t remembered they were leader-less long enough for it to be much of a problem. Like I said, short attention spans sometimes worked to our advantage.
“Thank you. It was a gift.”
Was that a blush? Did Bertie have someone who was sweet on her? I grinned. “What a nice gift. Why it must have taken days and days to make. Someone must like you an awful lot, Bertie, to give you something so pretty.”
She pressed her lips into a line and her eyebrows arched. “We are not here to discuss my...friendships.”
Yes, I’d caught that slight hesitation. “You’re blushing.”
She pulled herself up straighter, which still didn’t make her taller than me, and blinked rapidly like a startled bird.
I just grinned. The last time I’d seen Bertie flustered was...never. Like, seriously, she was the calmest, coolest cucumber in the whole crisper drawer. This was so great, I wanted to pull out my phone and take a picture for posterity.
But I didn’t. Because I’m a professional, thank you.
Professional or not, I couldn’t keep my gleeful chuckle inside. “You don’t have to look so shocked,” I said. “It’s okay if you have a friend that likes-you likes-you.”
She sniffed and just like that her blush disappeared. Flustered Bertie was replaced by the all-business, no-messing-around, community coordinator and battlefield soul-plucker I knew and loved.
“This is what I called you for.” She placed a square brown box big enough to hold a coffee mug between us, closer to me than to her. It had a shipping label, but there was no return address. Bertie’s office address was written by hand, large and clumsily, as if the author were writing with a blindfold on.
The address trailed off the front of the box, wrapped aroun
d the side, and appeared to come up the other side as well. I didn’t think the post office would deliver a package addressed like that.
Maybe it hadn’t gone through the post office.
A bad feeling crawled down my spine and curled up in my stomach. My gift kind of bad feeling. It wasn’t a big one, wasn’t a full-out doom twinge, but the sense of dread was big enough to make me take this box very seriously.
“I’m not opening that until you tell me what’s in it.”
Bertie must have sensed the shift in my mood. She couldn’t read my mind, but if she could, she’d know I was wondering if I needed to call in back up. Or a bomb squad.
Not that Ordinary had a bomb squad. We’d have to pull in someone from Salem.
“It’s not dangerous,” Bertie said. “But it is a problem I do not have time to solve.”
“Uh-huh. You know what’s in there?”
“I opened it. Of course I know what’s in there.”
“So?”
“So?”
“So tell me what’s in it.”
“A gnome.”
Oh. Well, that wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Since it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, I knew it had to be a statue at the moment.
“Aw...it’s got to be a tiny wee one to fit in there.” I pulled open the lid of the box and peeked in. “Holy shit!”
“Language, Officer Reed.”
“That’s not a gnome!”
Bertie dragged the box toward her with one sharpened fingernail. Tipped the box so she could see the contents.
“Red hat, bushy beard, round face, statue. Looks like a gnome to me.” She let the box fall back and dusted her fingertips across her thumb.
“It’s a head. It’s just a head.”
“If you must be technical, yes. But it’s still a gnome.”
I glared at her. Was that a small curve at the corners of her mouth? Was she enjoying this? Had the jump scare been her idea of fun?
I grinned. “Okay, that was pretty good.” I looked in the box again. Now that I wasn’t so spooked by my bad feeling, and surprised by the faded, chipped, one-eye-missing and nose-be-gone gnome decapitation in a box, I noted what I should have from the beginning.
“It’s headless Abner’s head, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Bertie agreed. “It is.”
“When did you find it?”
“It was...delivered to me this morning.”
“By whom?”
“Let’s say friends.”
“Let’s say the friends’ names.”
“That is wholly beside the point. The point is that Abner has been missing. I know that because I pay attention to what is going on around me, and not because I have a gnome spy.”
“You have a gnome spy don’t you?”
She took a drink out of a delicate pink tea cup with gold scrollwork and tiny black flowers. There was also an etching of a human skull nestled in all that pink and the words, Blood, Sweat, and Tea scrawled across the bottom.
“The gnomes are your responsibility this year, am I correct?”
“Nice pivot. You should get into politics.” I stuck the lollypop back in my mouth and crunched on it a bit. I’d almost broken through to the chocolate middle. “What do you want me to do with the head? Have you any idea where the body is?”
“No. Although there was this note inside the box.”
I made an exasperated sound while she pulled a dirty scrap of paper out from her desk drawer.
“You couldn’t have led with this?”
She was enjoying herself. Really. Like the drama over the Halloween Harbor Festival wasn’t enough to keep her busy?
I tipped the paper until I could make out the writing.
The penguin is next.
“Huh,” I said. “Not what I expected.”
“Do you understand the consequences?” Bertie asked.
“I’m guessing who ever shipped or delivered headless Abner’s noggin to you just threatened Mrs. Yate’s penguin.”
“I knew there was a reason you went into law enforcement, Jean. Such a bright mind.”
I rolled my eyes. “Do you know anything else about this?”
“Such as?”
“Such as why someone would deliver this threat to you?”
“I can’t imagine what you’re implying.”
“Why does this,” I held up the scrap of paper pinched between my fingertips, “threat come to you? Don’t you think this should have been aimed at Mrs. Yates?”
“That,” she said with a flash of her sharp, white teeth, “is certainly a mystery. I’m sure we’ll never know the answer.”
“Are you telling me not to look into it?”
“Me?” Bertie took another sip of her tea. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.”
Chapter Seven
I drove by to check on the penguin in Mrs. Yates’s yard. The thing had become a sort of celebrity in our town ever since someone, or multiple someones, had started stealing it, then leaving it to be found in ridiculous situations.
It’d been tied to the top of a church steeple, stuffed in a cannon, dressed up and dangled over a busy intersection. It had been left floating on a buoy, hidden in the dinosaur bone museum, and once, duct-taped face-first to the camera the TV station in Portland used to check the weather along the coast.
Its blog, The Ordinary Penguin, had over a million subscribers.
If anything happened to the penguin–say, like a beheading–the entire town would go into mourning. There might even be a vigil. Or a manhunt. Could go either way.
So the little penguin was one more problem we had to keep an eye on.
Mrs. Yates’s yard was looking beautiful in the misty cool October evening. The Japanese lantern plants lining her path had gone from drops of bright lantern-shaped orange flowers to skeletal-lace teardrops on spiny sticks with a single red berry inside each lantern. Hearty bushes were trimmed into neat round shapes, and a lovely ornamental maple’s trunk and limbs twisted and curled like smoke frozen in place.
She had decorated for the season: corn stalks behind bright fat pumpkins stacked along her porch, more out amongst her wide flower beds, and what appeared to be a handmade scarecrow propped up in one corner.
Her yard was pretty enough to be displayed on the cover of a magazine. And right there in the center, where the eye of the average passer-by naturally paused, stood the penguin wearing a witch’s hat.
The penguin very much still had a head. So that was one worry off my plate for now, at least.
I drove the neighborhood, noting the position and number of gnomes. They all seemed to be where they should be. None of them seemed equipped to pull off a beheading.
But I’d learned the hard way to never underestimate gnomes.
I passed one of our beach accesses and noticed a man sitting on the top of the fence. Since the fence was rickety enough, and the rocks and sand below were far enough, I decided he might need to be told to get off the fence before he fell.
I pulled the truck all the way to the end of the access, which was empty of vehicles since it was nearly the end of October. It was wet and the winds were picking up. A few tourists still visited, but usually only on weekends and mostly they stuck to the hotels and shops.
There was something familiar about the man. Even from the back. Something that made me pause before stepping out of the truck. Something that made me put a call in to Delaney to tell her where I was and what I was doing.
“I’ll be right there,” she said. “Do not approach him until I get there.”
“If he moves, I move.”
“If he moves, you wait.”
I didn’t answer and Delaney bulled on. “That’s an order, Officer Reed.”
“Yes, Chief,” I grunted.
She was really getting overprotective since that car had hit me.
Yeah, I guess that made sense. I was worried about her a lot more lately too, since she’d been shot. So I could understand where she w
as coming from.
But then the man turned his shoulders and looked back at me.
I’d know that hard-angled face and piercing gaze anywhere.
Death.
As in the god of. Thanatos, himself. Last I’d seen him, he was kicking some ass and forfeiting his vacation time for a year so that he could deliver death to an undead vampire.
I’d missed him. On the outside, he was sort of stilted and stuffy. But on the inside, when he wasn’t carrying the power of death, Thanatos was kind of like a little kid who hadn’t gotten nearly enough time on the playground.
He liked being mortal. Liked experiencing mundane things like flying kites and peeling sunburns. But he did it all with a droll sort of detachment that didn’t for a single second hide how much he loved being in Ordinary.
Being around Delaney and us other Reeds too.
I’d been sad when he’d had to leave town to pick up his power again and had hoped he’d show back up when the required one year absence had been paid.
Yet here he was, back in town, ten months early.
A chill washed over me as I realized why that might be. He was death, after all.
I sighed and got out of the truck. If death were here for me, I was pretty sure I’d know it, but since he wasn’t, I might as well find out who was so special that he’d come all this way to collect them personally.
The wind was cold and pushy as I strolled over to him. Death watched me, still as a stone, that icy gaze unwavering.
“Afternoon,” I called out all cheery and police officer-like. “Did you read the sign? No sitting on the fence.”
And then a truly weird thing happened.
Death almost smiled.
Okay, it wasn’t like he actually curved his lips. But there was a change in him, a charged sort of vibe he gave off, like he wanted to burst out laughing at a joke that hadn’t yet been told.
“Am I breaking a law, Daughter of Reed, being here, on this fence, on the edge of your town?”
His voice was how I remembered it, cool and suave and deep enough to give me chills even while all of me went sweaty. But there was more behind it now. There was power. A power of endings. The power of a great cold empty.
