“It was like he just disappeared,” the woman whispered.
Brick relaxed. “What did you say?”
The woman seemed to gather her wits back from whatever directions they’d traveled and looked up at him, her eyes made of iron.
“People don’t just disappear,” she said, then pointed behind him. “I’d also like a coffee, please. Black. What do you call your large?”
“Large,” Brick said.
She nodded. “Yeah, that sounds great.”
He used tongs to pluck a pink-topped muffin from the case and slide it into a sack, then poured house blend into a large cup made from recycled trees, or recycled cardboard, or recycled toilet paper. He didn’t know what his cups were recycled from, he just knew the hipsters who came in spread the word when they realized Manic Muffins was a friend of the environment.
“How long have you been here?” the woman asked.
Brick snapped on a plastic lid the hipsters never questioned him about and turned toward her. “I thought you didn’t want to talk.”
She pulled a sweat-soaked twenty from the band of her running pants and put it on the counter. “I don’t. So, how long have you been here?”
He took the twenty and left it behind the counter to dry, then began to hit buttons on the cash register. “Since 4:30. Why?”
Her face tensed. The woman seemed nice, like the kind of person who’d bring snacks to work, but at that moment she held herself like a fighter, and although Brick had at a good foot and a half on the woman and at least 150 pounds, he suddenly felt if she wanted to hurt him, she could. He counted out the change without thinking and set it on the counter. He didn’t want to get too close to her.
“Here.” She shook her head. “No, not here. Not today. I mean in this building. How long has your store been in this building?”
How long? “Four years, I guess. Maybe five. You with the Chamber of Commerce?”
A tight grin pulled across her lips. “Four or five years on Binnall Avenue?”
“No,” he said. “Boulevard. Binnall Boulevard.”
The woman plucked her coffee and the bag with the pink-topped muffin off the counter and barked a laughed. “Ha. I thought so,” she said, grabbing her change; at least the bills. She dropped the coinage into the tip jar.
Then she walked out the door. For the second time in less than twelve hours, the same woman he didn’t know walked away, leaving him to wonder what had just happened.
“Avenue,” he said aloud. Brick stepped from behind the counter and walked to the front window, looking between the hot pink and yellow lettering his niece Amy had written for him. The sweaty woman in black running clothes rounded the corner, going east on Baltimore.
He glanced up at the street sign next to the red traffic light. It read “avenue.”
“Well,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”
8
The journalists were nice, Cord determined as he stood in the yard and waved. Carly the photographer waved back before she pulled the Ford Escape into the street. The overnights took that as a cue and said their goodbyes, some promising to book another tour online and bring friends. Damn straight.
This was it; he knew. Oh, sure, he’d been interviewed on some of the paranormal radio shows, and a few authors had written about the Sanderson Murder House in books like Ghostly Kansas City, Missouri’s Spookiest and Show Me Your Ghosts!, but his house wasn’t like the Waverly Hills Sanatorium or the Crescent Hotel & Spa in the national world of ghost attractions.
Until now. A full-bodied apparition witnessed by twenty people would do it, and those nice newspaper ladies would take him there.
“Thank you for a thrilling evening, son,” Mr. ‘I Lived Next Door When the Murders Happened’ Wanker said, patting Cord on the shoulder. “I never liked that boy, Tommy. He borrowed my hoe one fall and never gave it back. Kept barking, ‘Hoe, hoe, hoe’ at me then laughed all through December. Not saying he deserved to be hacked to death with a Japanese sword, but I am saying I can see why his father got tired of his shit.”
Mr. Wanker nodded and walked off to his car.
Tamara waited until all the other ghost hunters had gone before she came out of the house and approached Cord. He sighed, a smile growing across his lips. Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near. It was a song, but it wasn’t a question. She stopped in front of him. No arm touching, not even an accidental brush against his shoulder. Tamara had to go back to her life, and that brought her back to reality.
“Hey,” Cord said, taking a half step closer. Not invasively close. More like ‘I had a great time at summer camp am I ever going to see you again?’ close. “You want to go get some breakfast, or something. There’s a muffin and coffee place just a couple blocks away. It’s—”
She shook her head, her glorious black mane swishing in the same way that made actresses in disaster movies always look like they’d just styled their hair.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have a boyfriend.”
Cord smiled his best car salesman sealing-the-deal smile and gently took her hands in his. She jerked them away.
“He pulled up about five minutes ago,” she said, pointing toward the street where Roman stood in a tight tank top outside the door of a Mitsubishi sports car.
“Yeah, Roman. Nice guy.” Cord gave a clench-toothed grimace and waved at Roman before raising his voice. “Hey, I hope you enjoyed your adventure at the Sanderson Murder House. You guys come back sometime, okay? I’ll give you a discount.” He would in no way give anyone a discount. Not even his mother.
Cord could almost see the thoughts bouncing around Tamara’s head as she finally decided to smile.
“Yeah. I’d like that.” She stopped for a second as something occurred to her. She laughed. “I might have to come by myself, though, right?”
Cord nodded. I can only pray.
“Sure,” he said. “You do that.”
9
Dave decided not to pace in the alley because of all the broken glass. Sure, Police Detective John McClane would work his way through it and blow up all the terrorists in Nakatomi Plaza, but Dave had sensitive feet. He stood as still as possible and frowned at his mobile phone.
“Yes, Gillian, my GPS shows I’m only two-point-four miles from the lab but—” He looked at his feet and noticed a hole in his left sock. “Like I told you, I was mugged in an alley.” A greasy sack from All-National Burger lay crumpled on the alley floor. “I think I’m near an All-National Burger. The guy took my shoes. I don’t want to walk two-point-four miles on a rural highway without shoes.”
Silence came from the other end.
“Hello?”
Gillian tapped her pen on the desk loudly enough Dave could hear it over the phone.
“What were you doing in an alley at that time of the morning?” she asked.
Dave took his cell phone from his ear and bit it before saying what he had to say next. “I told you, I thought I saw a quarter.” That was the joke around the office. Dave was so cheap he’d get mugged in an alley trying to pick up loose change. Ha, ha, ha. He thought he might as well make it work for him.
She stifled a laugh before the clicks of her keyboard tapped through the phone. “It looks like Dr. Miller is the only one still not in the office yet. If you can catch him—”
Karl Miller. It had to be Karl Miller.
“Yeah, Gillian. Thanks.” Dave ended the call and thumbed through his contacts until he came to Karl’s name with a Summer’s Eve douche as an avatar. He didn’t want to call Karl. Karl hired him at Lemaître Labs because Dave’s foster father had given Karl a job to work on secret projects for the United States government. Now Karl was the boss, looking for the particle beyond the God Particle, the thing past the Higgs boson, the building block of the Standard Model of particle physics. This was everything Dave had worked for, the quest his foster father had cemented in his min
d, and Karl opened the door to let him in. Dave supposed he should be thankful, but Karl felt he owed his foster father and the bastard never let Dave forget it. And something told him Karl Miller, Ph.Douche was responsible for his full matter transfer. Karl also smelled like Cheetos.
But it was only two-point-four miles.
Dave moved his thumb to the call button when something pushed him, like the moment the undercooked chicken vindaloo from Moe, Larry and Curry, that dodgy Indian place on Washington Street, tells you it’s ready to fight its way out. But this was all around him, more like the barometric pressure dropping right before a storm. He looked up.
The glass from his smartphone cracked as it hit the pavement.
10
The volume downstairs in The Dumpling King hadn’t quite gotten to “the doors open in an hour” loud by the time Skid climbed the stairs to her apartment, but it was close. She slid the key into the lock of the door from the street, knowing a single girl in the city was supposed to look behind her, but she didn’t. A lifetime of learning self-defense from a circus strongman gave her the kind of confidence that usually scared people away before anything sweaty and bruisy happened. The day she moved in, the Thai father Mee Noi (half owner of The Dumpling King with his wife Sirikit) stopped her at the door to the street to tell her it was his duty to protect the women in the building. Circus training kicked in, and since then, Skid had never had to pay for dumplings, no matter how many times she apologized.
The muffin bag skipped across the surface of the small table in her kitchen in front of a quiet Japanese waving cat and stopped before it dropped onto the floor.
“You’re failing me, Hayata,” she said. “You should’ve had that.”
Skid reached a hand toward the cat and flicked its arm. The back-and-forth bobbing threw a thin, harsh shadow across a wall calendar of adorable kittens. The rest of the tiny apartment was decorated with items any young, sophisticated metropolitan woman should have—a tightly made bed, a framed picture of Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” a Barbie toothbrush, a punching bag and a full-sized spinning trick knife-throwing target with wrist and ankle straps. She often wondered if she brought anyone into her apartment how long it would take them to ask if they were going to shoot porn.
Skid sat her coffee on the table and walked into the living room. Even after a run and not enough sleep, she had way too much pent-up energy, enough to go out for another run, or to down a bottle of wine while watching a cooking show; the one with all the cakes.
Her mood began with Bud Light Dave disappearing in front of her, right in front of her. Now she had to deal with an entire street changing its name. Not completely, just slightly; such a little change most people would never notice. Except people who lived and worked on that street. Hipster Dan Haggarty worked on that street. He’d called it boulevard. He was right.
“What the hell, Hipster Dan Haggarty? What do you know?”
A black leather knife belt with twelve blades hung from a nail she’d hammered into the living room Drywall with a boot. She slipped a four-inch Browning Black Label stainless steel blade from its sheath and flipped it in her hand. The knife was deadly, the kind of deadly people picture ninjas using against helpless nobles in hand-to-hand combat. Double-blade, hollow handle, holes down the length to give it that ‘Mama’s going to spank you with a slotted spoon’ look. She tossed it in the air, grabbed it between her index finger and thumb without looking, then threw it. The knife slammed into the target’s left leg.
Skid hadn’t aimed at the left leg. She never aimed at the legs. Knife scars decorated the white paint outside the red silhouette of a man clutching his groin, but the body itself? Clean of knife marks, except for this one.
She stood, hands hanging to her sides. Her father, in a tuxedo and top hat, had strapped hundreds of men—mostly cocky, stupid men—to the target and spun them like he was playing the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right. In Portland, Oconomowoc, Hershey and other towns people never meant to go to but ended up in anyway, she’d always planted the knifepoints next to ears, in the crooks between arms and bodies, and so close to thighs that maybe, just maybe, the knife would cut a thread or two on a pair of blue jeans. But it never went in the groin.
Ever.
I need sleep.
Skid walked back into the kitchen and opened the bag from Manic Muffins. A couple of bites, or maybe just the top of the pink frosted muffin, and she’d get some sleep before leaving to work the concert this afternoon. She pulled the muffin from the sack and almost dropped it. The icing was chocolate.
Chapter Three
September 4
1
The Sunday Kansas City Star, rolled and stuffed into a plastic bag to keep out rain that was never in the forecast, lay on the sidewalk on Baltimore Street between Clem’s Country Diner and a payday loan place that changed names every couple of weeks. Skid looked at her vintage thrift store Swatch as she walked through a cooldown. It was 8:45 a.m. Clem’s had been open for more than two hours, and the loan place opened at 8. She had told herself earlier if the paper was still there by the time she walked by with her coffee and doughnut (no muffin this morning, maybe not ever), it was officially hers.
She passed Clem’s. The smell of bacon wafted through the screen door. Inside, the counter was dotted with old men in plaid pastel shirts and blue jeans held on with suspenders and a belt. Never can be too careful. Couples in a few of the booths sipped coffee and read the newspaper.
Ha. Monday’s paper. If someone had wanted to read Sunday’s paper, they would have read it on Sunday. Skid bent and snatched the newspaper off the pavement and stuck it under her arm like she hadn’t stolen it. Randall R. Roe didn’t tolerate getting anything for free. “Hard work,” Skid’s father had stated the day he caught her taking a sucker from a basket in the grocery store. She was seven and that was why the candies were there, but it didn’t matter to Randall. They walked to their car, a bag of groceries in one of Randall’s hands, Skid’s small fingers in the other. “Hard work is what makes a person. Study is work. Practice is work. Work is work.”
“But it was free,” Skid told him.
He stopped, never letting go of her hand. Randall squatted and looked his daughter in the eyes. “Are the clothes you’re wearing free? Are these groceries free?”
She shook her head, wanting to pull her eyes away from his deep brown ones, but she couldn’t.
He smiled. “If you get things for free, they have no meaning. It’s the work that makes them important.” He paused, staring deeply at his daughter. “Do you understand, honey?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she’d said. Skid hadn’t known what he was talking about then. She just wanted to get home and watch TV. She did now. Life, she’d found, is what a person wanted it to be, and sometimes a person had to take a handout when it came.
2
The MacBook Air chirped. Cord sat at his desk in what had once been the sunroom of the Sanderson family, and scrolled through the booking website he’d subscribed to when he bought the house. His page, usually quiet on a Monday morning because most of the bookings were done by weekend ghost-hunting groups or drunk college students who didn’t do anything productive until three a.m. But not today, and not yesterday. The computer chirped again. Another booking, this one in December. All his slots for September, October and November were already filled.
Chirp.
Thank you, Beverly Gibson.
Cord knew as he slid the laptop shut and went for his pre-tour ritual (batteries charged, closet refrigeration on, loosen that basement step that had stopped squeaking), that Beverly was only part of it. Cord’s real financial hero was Tommy Sanderson, or whomever had dropped out of the air and onto the floor of his hallway. If ghosts existed, and Cord wasn’t convinced they did, the person from Friday night wasn’t a ghost. He was real. He came from somewhere wearing gray Dockers, and he went somewhere wearing gray Dockers.
Cord went into the kitchen, well stocked with water and soda at $1.50 a bottle. The Keurig, for when the sleepies came to visit, took coins, bills and credit cards. He pulled a hammer from the junk drawer. He’d wanted to keep the feel of the Sanderson Murder House as close to a home as he could, and every Midwestern home he knew of had a kitchen junk drawer.
The problem with a man appearing then disappearing on the spot Delbert Sanderson butchered his son Tommy wasn’t the fact that he did it in front of twenty witnesses. Oh, no. That was a present from God, or Jesus, or the jolly fat man himself. Cord needed all those people to see the Amazing Appearing Man then tell everyone they knew about it. From the bookings, it was working as fast as a new government hire whose soul hadn’t been beaten into submission. The problem was the same problem all those visiting ghost hunters had. Repeatability. Nothing’s real unless it’s repeated. That’s why Babe Ruth didn’t hit just one home run in 1927, he hit 60. If you can’t do something more than once, nobody believes it.
“Who are you?” Cord wondered aloud, walking down the basement steps, putting all his weight on the loose step and bouncing. Yep, the atmosphere-building squeak had gone. “And what were you doing in my house?”
Cord knew he had to find the Amazing Appearing Man and he had to find him fast. When he did, he’d have to pay the man to do the disappearing trick again, and the way visitors were clamoring to get inside the Sanderson Murder House, he could afford it.
3
The day-old Sunday edition of The Kansas City Star had a problem. Not on Page A1 where idiots from Washington, D. C., Germany, and Russia couldn’t get their shit figured out, and not on Page B1 where idiots from various local city governments couldn’t get their shit figured out either. It was in the Around The City section, under the picture of a band Skid had not seen Saturday night as she worked concert security. A headline read, “Steely Dan Rocks KC.”
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 4
