Owl or Nothing

by Willow Mason

  I walked back towards Barry, stopping by the counter on the pretence of grabbing a couple of napkins to wipe my eyes. “What is it?” I whispered down to Dee.

  “Gabby’s upset. Can we go outside for a few minutes?”

  “Is it okay if I pop into the courtyard for a second?” I called out to PC Bryant. “I’m feeling warm and the cold air will do me good.”

  “Sure. Just don’t leave the property.”

  “What’s she doing?” I asked as soon as the door banged closed. “Dead Gabby better not be as annoying as live Gabby.”

  “Some sympathy wouldn’t go astray,” Dee said in a shocked voice and I closed my eyes.

  “Sorry. I really am. It’s all getting a bit out of control, is all.”

  “Well, Gabby showed me her stomach. It’s all distended, like there’s a build-up of gas in there or something.”

  I screwed up my face. “Please, spare me the details.”

  “Her tongue is all swollen and blue,” Dee continued as though I hadn’t said a word. “Like an allergic reaction.”

  “She’s allergic to nuts, isn’t she?” I hugged myself and leaned forward, staring at the concrete tiles as though they’d hold the answer. “At least that’s what she always said when I asked her to fill up the bowls on the counter. Do you think she ate something up in the woods? That could be the reason she collapsed and the animals...” I couldn’t finish the terrible thought.

  “Well, Gabby’s nodding, so maybe.” Dee ran up my arm to whisper into my ear. “I’m not sure she’s all there, to tell the truth.”

  Ignoring the stock of sarcastic replies that jumped into my head, I said, “She’s probably going to take a while to get to grips with everything. How about we head home as soon as possible and have a good night’s sleep?”

  “Do ghost’s sleep?”

  I glanced at Dee, pulling my mouth down at the corners. “I’m the one should be asking you that, don’t you think?”

  “Hey,” Barry said the moment I walked back inside. “Have you seen or heard from Gabby’s boyfriend, lately?”

  “Define lately.” I rubbed my arms to work some feeling back into them. “Last week, she told me he was a prat, and she’d kicked him out of the house. A few days ago, Gabby said she had a feeling he was about to propose.”

  “Yeah, same.” Barry pulled at his beard, twirling the edges of his moustache until he looked like an old-time villain. “Only, if he sent me a text about her not feeling well enough to come into work when she was actually up in the woods…”

  He trailed off while I nodded, casting him a sidelong glance. “Nothing we can do about it, anyway,” I said, putting my arm around his broad shoulders. “How long did it take for all the customers to clear off when the police arrived?”

  “Half of them slipped away a minute before, like they had a psychic flash or something,” Silvana said with a smirk. “The rest were slower. I reckon the last of them only cleared out in the time it took for the police to knock on Barry’s office door.”

  Despite the circumstances, I had to laugh. Most of our customers would never have stepped a foot wrong in their lives, but avoiding the police was hard-wired into them from the cradle. And those were the ones who still counted themselves as fully human. Shifters had a better reason than most to avoid a confrontation with the police.

  “Should I clear up, then?” When Barry didn’t immediately answer, I bumped him with my hip. “Hey, Earth to Bazzer! D’you reckon the police will leave in time for any customers to come back?”

  “Nah, go ahead.” Barry drifted off towards his office, eyes unfocused. “We’ll shut up shop and have an early night once these two clear off.”

  I still needed to ask him for a weeks’ leave, but it no longer seemed appropriate. While I grabbed a towel to wipe down the counter, I moved the task to tomorrow’s mental to-do list.

  The entrance door banged open a few seconds later, scaring the life out of me. I looked up as our neighbour from the garage across the street sidled in, eyes scanning in all directions at once.

  “Hey, Tab. What d’you want?” I asked, pulling down a pint glass ready for his usual. But he shook his head, staring at the two officers in the back instead. “You need to talk to the police?”

  He must have heard the open disbelief in my voice because he tiptoed to the bar and whispered, “Is Barry about?”

  “In his office. D’you want me to fetch him?”

  Tab’s eyes opened wide, and he grabbed hold of my wrist. “Don’t you dare. I just heard about that poor girl who worked in here. What he did to her.”

  I jerked my arm back, rubbing the wrist. He’d clutched it hard enough to raise a bruise, come morning. “Barry didn’t do anything to anyone,” I said, enunciating every word. “What are you implying?”

  “Don’t let him fool you. I saw him. Last night. He was here alone with her, yelling at the top of his lungs.”

  My eyebrow twitched as the two officers wandered over, hearing Tab’s excited voice. “Something I can help you with?” Bryant asked.

  “It’s nothing,” I stated firmly at the same time Tab pointed to Barry’s office.

  “I think I heard him kill the young woman who worked here. Last night.”

  Chapter Four

  When I rolled onto my pinpricked arm, it complained so loudly I gave up the pretence of sleep. Instead, I lay on my back and glared at the ceiling, furious to still be awake.

  The police had bundled a protesting Barry into the back of their car and whisked him away to the station. When I called an hour later, uncertain what I should do, PC Bryant stonily told me to close the bar. “Your boss isn’t coming back anytime soon.”

  I pushed my fingertips into the injection site, feeling the lumps and bumps where my flesh was reacting to the vaccines. In four weeks, I’d be fully protected against Cholera, Hepatitis A and B, Typhoid, Meningitis, Pneumonia, Polio, Rotavirus, and Tetanus.

  The holiday retreat I had planned was half a world away, and just the list of potential illnesses should have sent me running. But the camp wasn’t just an all-inclusive getaway in a humid jungle, it offered me the chance of training to become fully human again.

  Ever since contracting the infection that turned me into a shapeshifter, I’d been desperate to get back to normal. Although my position was different to Dee’s, the striving to turn the clock back and return to the people we’d once been was a common ambition.

  For the same money as my flights and a week at camp, I could’ve afforded a down-payment on a house. I’d made my choice and didn’t regret a thing.

  Except now I could be in trouble.

  Barry in prison was terrible not just because I thought he was innocent but because it put my job in jeopardy. I could afford to take a week’s leave but couldn’t stretch to a day longer. Without another staff member to rely on, if wasn’t out of jail soon, there’d be no role left.

  I turned onto my side, throbbing shoulder upwards, and let the worries roam free in my mind. I’d learned a long time ago, trying not to dwell on my fears was a sure way to extend them.

  It must have worked because next thing I knew, the alarm clock buzzed me awake.

  “The whole thing’s ridiculous,” I whispered, striding back and forth in the waiting room of the police station. “Tab must have the wrong end of the stick.”

  “Stop pacing,” Silvana snarled.

  She’d spent the night with me and Dee since she couldn’t stand to be alone, and I couldn’t blame her. Despite putting a much braver face on it this morning, her human mask kept slipping. A sure sign she hadn’t pulled any more hours of sleep than me.

  “It makes me feel better,” I said, turning on my heel to begin another length of the room. “Come join me if it bothers you.”

  After a theatrical sigh, Silvana did just that, falling into step beside me.

  “Tab might have seen an argument, but there’s no reason the police should have arrested Barry,” Dee stated firmly.

  It w
as a good line of defence but useless since they’d already done exactly that.

  “With a high-profile case like this, they can’t afford to put a step wrong.” I felt a twinge in my calf muscle and stamped down harder. Don’t you dare cramp. “If they didn’t arrest him, and Barry went off on a murdering spree, it would look terrible.”

  “They’d better not fit him up for the crime, that’s all I can say.” Silvana might have meant the words as a threat, but they emerged as a breathy sigh, verging on tears. “Just because he shouts and grumbles a lot, hardly means he’d kill someone. Even if Gabby was a thief.”

  I shot an apologetic glance at Dee, who sat in the middle of the plastic chair, patiently waiting. She caught the look and shrugged. “Gabby’s not here if that’s what you’re worried about. She took off during the night.”

  “Typical,” Silvana said. We’d filled her in on the apparition as soon as we got home the night before. “Even as a ghost, she’s unreliable.”

  “Oh, no.” I caught sight of the journalist from the previous day across the road. With my fingers crossed, I counted down from ten. He might be headed for another point of interest, right?

  Wrong. The man crossed the road and barged through the door a second later.

  “Who’s he?” Silvana whispered, her eyes eating him up as though he was a succulent dessert. “I saw him in the bar yesterday but he’s new, yeah?”

  “I’d stay well clear. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about injured hikers being the victims of shifters intent on world domination.”

  “Pity.” Silvana put an extra sway in her step as she completed another circuit of the small room. “It’s rare I get new pickings.”

  “I’d keep things like that to yourself as well,” I warned just as the man finished at the front desk and joined us in the waiting room.

  “Hello, again,” he called out with a good-natured wave. “We never got a chance to finish up our talk yesterday.” He strode over and held out his hand to shake. “In fact,” he said with a laugh, “I didn’t even catch your name.”

  “Liv Hammon,” I said abruptly, then nodded to my friend. “And this is Silvana Weston.”

  The smile disappeared and the man’s face crumpled into disgust. “What sort of place are they running here?” he said, before turning to yell out the doorway. “There’s a rat sitting here, right on the seat. Haven’t you heard of exterminators?”

  With a leap, I scooped Dee into my pocket before the journalist turned back. “Must have gone back to its hidey-hole,” I said with an innocent smile.

  “I’ll give him—”

  I zipped up my pocket before Dee could work herself into a true temper tantrum. “What’s your name?”

  “Caleb,” he said, concern still etched deep into his face as he continued to scan the room for vermin. “Caleb Williams.”

  “And I heard you’re a journalist,” Silvana said. Whether she meant them to or not, the words poured out in a flirtatious gush. “Tell me about the story you’re writing.”

  Like many a man before him, Caleb soon gave in to Silvana’s charms. By the time PC Bryant finally phoned through to reception, stating he could spare us five minutes, and five minutes only, he’d laid out the entire conspiracy theory for all to see.

  “It’s amazing,” Silvana breathed huskily. “And it proves shifters must have been part of the population for centuries.”

  Caleb frowned and shook his head. “No, these are just the findings from the past year.”

  I shot her a glance, but Silvana was so deep in her conversation she didn’t see me. With thirty seconds already gone from our deadline, I gave up and followed the receptionist through to the main station office.

  “It’s a waste of your time being here,” PC Bryant said as a greeting. “Even the things we do know, I can’t tell you.”

  “Nice.” I sat down in the chair and unzipped my pocket, so Dee didn’t die in the enclosed fug. “What about a cause of death?”

  “Classified.”

  “What time did she die?”

  “Classified.”

  “Have you come to your senses and realised that Barry had nothing to do with it?”

  “Classified.” Bryant shifted in his seat. “And it’s not a ridiculous idea.”

  I leaned over the desk and turned my glare up to ten. “Why?”

  “It was known he had suspicions about Ms Mulligan and things she may or may not have been—”

  “She was a thief. We all knew it.” I rubbed at my eyebrow as it signalled it wanted to twitch. “Gabby regularly helped herself to money out of the till, despite her father’s deep pockets and her own more-than-generous paycheque.”

  It was a source of great annoyance to me that Gabby had started on far higher wages than I’d been given. Sure, I earned more overall, but I also had to work a lot more hours. If I hadn’t been such a forgiving soul, I might have killed her myself. “There are a dozen people in town with better reason to murder Gabby than Barry, if she was even murdered.”

  PC Bryant opened his mouth, but I held up my hand. “I know. Classified.”

  “You’ll find out more about the case when everyone else does,” the constable said, leaning back in his chair. “Until then, go home and enjoy your day off.”

  “What makes you think I’ve got a day off?” I stood up, tucking stray hairs back into my couldn’t-be-bothered-to-do-my-hair bun. “The bar still has to open. We’re performing a public service. In fact, I’ll have to work three times as hard because my co-worker’s dead and you’ve seen fit to lock my boss up for the unfortunate coincidence of being gullible enough to hire her.”

  “As you see fit.” PC Bryant stood as well, sweeping his arm out to indicate I should walk in front of him. “There’ll be some areas taped off until we finish our examination, but most of the bar will be okay.”

  “What…?” I bit off the question, not needing to hear the repetitive answer again. “Never mind. I don’t need anything out the back, but I can’t answer for what my patrons get up to.”

  “If they cross into secured areas, we’re more than happy to shut the whole operation down.”

  Touché.

  As I walked into the waiting room, Silvana’s face swirled with emotion. If she’d been in a cartoon, her cheeks would be swollen out to twice their usual size and her eyes would be bulging. “You can’t possibly believe that every attack—”

  “Come on,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Bryant’s not going to give us anything more so we might as well head out for the day. How about a cooked breakfast?”

  Silvana’s eyes didn’t leave Caleb’s face. “I’m in the middle of something here.”

  “Yes, an argument by the looks of it.” I grabbed her arm and tugged her backward, giving a parting salute to the journalist. Perhaps a better term would be ‘so-called journalist,’ since whatever publisher he wrote for couldn’t be mainstream.

  “You just can’t handle the fact I’m right,” Caleb called out as I pushed her out the door. “But you’ll…”

  His words trailed away to nothing as the door swung shut and I tipped my head back, inhaling an enormous breath.

  “What a dope,” Dee said, popping her head out and sniffing the air. “I swear, I heard less of his conversation than you two, but I’d happily sign a petition to lock him up.”

  “Maybe we should point the police in his direction,” Silvana grumbled. Her lips twisted into such an evil smile that I stepped back. “After all, he turned up in town at the same time Gabby was murdered and he’s got bruised knuckles, like he was in a fight.”

  “If she was murdered,” I said with a sigh. “Bryant was so tight-lipped he wouldn’t even confirm that.”

  Silvana narrowed her eyes. “Did you get anything useful?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing at all.” Although it should have annoyed me, the morning sun hit at the right angle to make me think everything would turn out okay. “Now, how about breakfast?”

  The good thing a
bout sleepless nights was no one had the energy to argue. I directed them into the local breakfast bar and slid into a booth. With the amount of food I wanted to chow down on, a seat at the counter wouldn’t suffice.

  “Why are you in such a good mood?” Dee asked, scrunching her nose in my direction.

  “I have no idea,” I announced happily. “But I’ll take it while it lasts, thank you very much. Once the bar gets humming this afternoon, I’m sure it’ll disappear.”

  “We’re opening the bar?” Silvana cheered up, a situation which would normally make me anxious. “Can you give me a raise, since Barry’s not there to object? Nothing extra, just a little helping hand.”

  “Why not? I’m happy to be generous with other people’s money.”

  “Howdy, strangers,” a voice called out just as our cooked breakfasts arrived.

  I suppressed a groan, something that neither Dee nor Silvana managed. With a quick glance at my mouse friend, she jumped into my pocket a second before Caleb invited himself into our booth.

  “How d’you get on with the police?” he asked, raising one eyebrow in an expression that would have been cute on someone with more brain cells to rub together. “They’re keeping their cards close to their chest, eh?”

  “I got on fine,” I lied, giving Silvana a quick wink. “What’d you find out?”

  Caleb clenched his hands together on the table, frowning at them with displeasure. “That PC is a piece of work.”

  “Bryant’s a good stick,” I agreed, pretending to ignore his true meaning. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m starving. Time I spend talking is time not eating.” I dug into my pile of hash browns, poking one corner into a poached egg to add flavour.

  He cleared his throat and placed his palms flat on the table. “Would you like to join forces?”

  I stared at Caleb while I slowly chewed through another few bites. He squirmed, turned around to grab a menu off the table behind us. “Isn’t there anything for vegans around here?”

  Silvana snorted. “There’s bread. If you tip the waitress nicely, she might even turn it into toast.”