by Alyssa Day
He leaned over and kissed me—a brief touch of lips, and it was over—and then stood up. “Definitely.”
I wanted to tell him what I knew about him, but I didn’t. Somehow, it felt like the wrong thing to do. Instead, I sat in the swing and watched him walk to his car, and felt suddenly more alone than I’d ever been in my life. It was the right thing to do, but my heart still hurt. Maybe I’d never find “the one.” Maybe I’d get another eight or twelve cats, and live out my life yelling at the neighbor kids to get off my lawn.
But Owen and I hadn’t had the essential spark—the undefinable something that made people write love songs and have wild sex and share secret smiles with each other about dessert after nearly fifty years of marriage.
Jack appeared from around the corner of my house just after Owen’s taillights vanished down the road, and somehow I wasn’t even surprised.
“I thought you left.”
“You know I’m not leaving you alone until we catch this killer or killers. But I wanted to give you some privacy.”
“Thanks. I guess.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Did you love him?” His voice was quiet but carried easily in the cool, crisp night air.
“No, I didn’t love him. But I sort of wished I could love him, and he could love me, if that makes sense,” I admitted, uncharacteristically willing to talk about it. Maybe it was the cover of night, broken only by the spill of golden light from the lamp just inside my window. “I could touch him, and that’s pretty rare for me, after all. Above all, though, he’s a very nice man.”
“It does make sense,” he said, and I wondered if he were thinking about Quinn. “You never saw a vision of his death, then?”
“I did see it, that first day he came into the pawnshop. He was so excited about the chair that he reached out and grabbed my hand.”
He walked up the steps and over to me and held out his hand to help me up. “Did you pass out?”
I didn’t need his help, but I took his hand anyway. Because I could, and because it made me feel less alone. “No, I didn’t pass out. In fact, it was kind of peaceful. He’s going to die when he’s very old, in his bed, surrounded by people who love him. I never told him that, though. It felt wrong.”
Jack pulled me up and all the way against his chest into a hug, which I hadn’t expected, and I cried a little bit, which I also hadn’t expected. He stroked my hair, and then he stood back and opened the door for me.
“That’s the very best way to die, Tess,” he said, and I could hear the wistfulness in his voice. “He’s a lucky man, except for losing you.”
I took a deep breath and headed inside. “Well, looking at it honestly, I was never his to lose. Thank you, though.”
When I got back to the kitchen (I’d lied, there was no way I’d leave all that mess in the kitchen and have to face it Sunday morning), my phone was buzzing so insistently that it was bouncing around on the top of my desk.
“It’s Molly,” I told Jack. “She’s playing at the Rat again. Must be on a break.”
When I answered, I could barely hear her over the loud background noise.
“Hey, it’s crazy here, I’m glad you didn’t come, that Gator guy who used to date Chantal is back in town, he just stabbed Hank, and the sheriff took him to jail.”
“What?” I was used to Molly’s rapid-fire speech, but I had to be hearing this wrong.
Jack looked up from the table, where he was clearing dishes, and I waved him over and put the speaker on. “Molly, Jack’s here, can you say that again? Gator is at the Rat? He stabbed Hank Kowalski?”
“They got in a big fight, Gator was really drunk and bellowing about Chantal, and somebody must have told him about Hank and Chantal hooking up. Anyway, they went crazy, and their friends starting beating each other up too, and then suddenly Hank was on the floor bleeding.”
Jack leaned forward. “Is Hank dead?”
“No, it was just a slice on his arm, the EMTs stitched it up and gave him a shot and sent him home. But the sheriff took Gator to jail. It took three deputies to wrestle him into the back seat of the car. Hey, gotta go help pack up equipment. Put ice on your eye.”
And she was gone, leaving me and Jack staring at each other.
“This just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” he said.
I nodded. “I feel like I need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the intersecting lines.”
“I’m pretty sure I saw a whiteboard in Jeremiah’s office. We could use that and try to at least come up with a theory tomorrow.”
I didn’t feel up to committing to the plan just then. I selfishly wanted a day entirely to myself to get some sleep or a mani/pedi or go catch a matinee at the movies. I didn’t want to worry about who was trying to kill anybody for whatever reason, and I definitely didn’t want to have to worry about people trying to kill me.
“Fine,” I finally said, sighing. “Tonight, we clean my kitchen, and tomorrow we analyze clues.”
*
At some point in the middle of the night, I had a terrible, very lifelike, totally confusing nightmare about monsters overrunning the pawnshop, alligators chasing me down the aisles of Super Target, and a motorcycle gang in a bar fight. I woke up screaming, and sat straight up in bed to the sight of an enormous tiger standing next to my bed, tail swishing.
“You’d think this would be the scary part. For most people on the planet, waking up to a tiger would be the nightmare,” I told him, trying to calm down.
He yawned, and I tried not to flinch at the sight of his mouthful of giant teeth. Next to me, Lou had no such pride. She meowed and hid her head under my pillow.
Remnants of my dream floated around in my mind like bizarre puzzle pieces trying to fit themselves together in a lunatic’s landscape. None of it made any sense, at all, so apparently my subconscious was just lumping all of my scared in with all of my crazy and making nutcase pie in my brain. Except…
“You know what I don’t understand? Walt and Hank are in and out of trouble all the time. The sheriff used to arrest them practically on a monthly basis for something or other. Why would he let Hank go home after a huge brawl like this? Especially since he wasn’t hurt badly enough to have to go to the hospital?”
I looked into Jack’s amber tiger eyes and sighed. “This would be more of a two-way conversation if you’d turn back to human, just a thought. I’m not even sure how much you understand me when you’re like this.”
An electric buzz tingled around and through me, like I’d walked into a supercharged pocket of air, and suddenly Jack was sitting on my bed, staring at me with his green-again eyes.
“I understand everything you’re saying, although I don’t always understand why. For example, the sound of the raccoon family scurrying around outside was far more interesting to me a few minutes ago than the story of the loser Kowalski brothers,” he said. “I don’t get it, either. I know more than a few witches. Spent quite a lot of time with one or two. Olga must be extremely low on the magical power scale if her sons are getting into all this trouble, or she’d find a way to keep them in line.”
“You mean like mind control?” I pulled my legs in closer and hugged my knees, shivering at the thought.
Jack laughed. “No, I mean like threatening to put the whammy on their truck engines, or cause their fishing equipment to malfunction, or turn their beer into swamp water while it’s still in the unopened cans. There are lots of ways to use magic without doing something as completely wrong as mind control. Once you take that step, you’ve gone over the line to black magic, and that has its own really bad consequences.”
“Mrs. Kowalski told me that too. I wonder if Alejandro ever found the black magic witches he was looking for. Although, I can’t imagine that a coven in Miami would have anything to do with the murder of a pawnshop owner in Dead End,” I said.
“None of this makes sense to me. But it’s still the middle of the night. Let’s get some more sleep.”
Suddenly, i
t hit me that I’d been sitting in the dark, alone in my bedroom with a man. This hadn’t happened in long enough that it was practically a Dear Diary moment. I shivered again, but this time for a different reason, which Jack misunderstood completely, so he handed me the extra blanket at the end of the bed and started to stand up.
“Are you…don’t leave,” I whispered, ducking my head and looking anywhere but at him. “Will you please just sit here with me for a while? I don’t want to be alone with this stuff in my head right now.”
Jack stilled, not moving a muscle for a long moment. Then he nodded and, without saying a word, kicked off his shoes and turned around so he was leaning back on the pillow next to mine.
“I’m sorry. I’m not usually so girly, but—”
“Go to sleep, Tess.” His voice was a warm, soothing rumble next to me, so I curled up, carefully not touching him, and closed my eyes. I was completely sure that I’d never get even a minute’s sleep with Jack in the bed next to me, but at least I felt safe.
The next time I opened my eyes, sunlight was streaming in through my window, and Jack was gone.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Molly sang out from where she was staring into my closet. “We’re going shopping.”
I groaned. “Why do I even bother having a house with a door and a lock? Why don’t I just sleep in the middle of Main Street?”
Molly, dressed in a hot pink sweater, black jeans, and black boots with four-inch heels, turned to look at me, cocking her head to one side. “Is that some kind of riddle? You’d get tire tracks on your ass, that’s why.”
“Right. Sure. Why are you here, again? I thought you’d be sleeping off your late night.” I glanced around, but no human Jack, no tiger, not even a trace of either one remained.
“It’s nearly noon! Get up. You’re buying me lunch at the mall, and we’re finding you a nice, sexy dress now that you’re hanging out with Mr. Totally Delicious all the time.”
I opened my mouth and then shut it again, because I couldn’t really argue with any of that. Or maybe I could, but I realized that I didn’t want to. The shop was closed on Sundays, and there wasn’t any paperwork that couldn’t wait.
After all, even Nancy Drew got to dress up and go hang out with her friends sometimes.
Chapter Eighteen
Maybe I shouldn’t have had the all-you-can-eat pasta special, because there was definitely more of me than there was of this dress.
“Show me, already,” Molly said from outside the door. “I know this is the one.”
“I don’t wear red,” I repeated with no conviction, over the music blaring through the loudspeakers. I wasn’t sure that a song about thrift shops tied in with the overpriced store’s marketing plan, but what did I know?
The overly cheerful saleslady chimed in. “You know, no red on redheads is just an old myth. Red looks spectacular on some redheads, like you, for example. You should totally get this dress.”
If she hadn’t said I should “totally” get each one of the five dresses I’d tried on before, she might have had more credibility. On the other hand, I did look spectacular. I looked badass—like somebody who could fight crime, seduce hot guys, and become an international jewel thief in her spare time.
“I’m getting it. I deserve this dress.”
I could hear Molly and the saleslady high-fiving each other, which was pretty understandable, because one of them got the commission and the other one had been patiently finding me dresses to try on for the past two hours. We’d been up and down the mall from one end to the other before finding this dress in the last shop I’d been willing to enter. Because, naturally, that’s how it always worked.
I looked at the price tag and tried not to fall over. I hadn’t spent that much on a dress since my prom, and look how well that had turned out. Suddenly feeling reluctant to make such a big investment in such a small piece of fabric, I changed back into my jeans and sweater and hung the dress carefully on its hanger.
When I opened the fitting room door, Molly saw the look on my face and didn’t even bother to listen. She snatched the dress out of my hands and handed it to the waiting saleswoman.
“She’ll take it,” my best friend said decisively. Then she turned to me and grabbed my purse out of my hand before I could protest. Walking up to the counter, she pulled my credit card out of my wallet and handed it over.
All I could do was follow. “This feels like some kind of credit card fraud,” I pointed out.
The saleslady gave Molly a pained smile. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
I looked at the silky red fabric on the counter, and I weakened. I really did look spectacular in it. “Okay, okay. I’ll take it. I’ll eat Ramen noodles for a month to make up the price or something.”
“Maybe you’ll finally sell that nightmare catcher,” Molly said, always the eternal optimist. “We should get cheesecake.”
One of the reasons it was sometimes hard to be Molly’s friend was that her metabolism burned up every calorie that ever went into her mouth within about thirty seconds. She was always fidgeting, constantly in motion, and she had a sweet tooth like I’d never seen before, but never gained a pound. If I ate half the food that Molly did, even though I was several inches taller than her, I’d gain a hundred pounds in a week.
I glared at her. “Don’t make me buy the tiniest dress I’ve ever owned and then expect me to eat cheesecake. I’ll never fit into it again.”
“We need to start running. I want to sign us up for another 5K race,” Molly said.
The saleslady, who was long and lean and looked like an athlete herself—which was just annoying—perked up. “Oh, there are so many races around here to choose from. I’m going to do the Walt Disney Marathon next year, I think. Which races are your favorites?”
Molly blinked, probably startled at being called on her BS.
I smiled at the saleslady. “We don’t actually run. We just talk about it. Did you read that study that says thinking about exercise is almost as good as actually exercising? We really, really believe in that study.”
I signed the receipt, only gulping a little bit, took my beautifully wrapped package, and we left the store, leaving the saleslady still looking perplexed behind us.
“Good one,” Molly said. “She was annoying me. When she told you that ugly orange thing was ‘totally’ the right dress for you, I wanted to punch her.”
“No more punching, remember? You don’t want to have to go to anger management classes with Dice next time.” Guitars were not the only things in danger when Dice was feeling particularly brokenhearted. The heads of drunk guys who’d hit on her had been targets before. Molly said she’d seen her bass player hand out more than a little trust fund money to placate men with injured heads and wounded egos.
We got Molly her cheesecake to go, and I gave in and got a piece too. Banana cream, because who can resist banana cream cheesecake? On the way to the car, Molly patted my arm.
“I really am sorry about Owen. I know you really liked him. I’m not going to add insult to injury by saying I never thought he was right for you—”
“Actually, you just did,” I said, rolling my eyes and unlocking my car.
She gave me her “don’t interrupt me, I’m making a point here” look. “But he was very nice, and he liked you, and I don’t think you’d ever have to worry about him turning out to be a rat bastard.”
We put our packages in the backseat. In addition to the dress, I’d picked up vanilla spice bath gel, a pair of flats, a bright blue cardigan that matched my eyes, and a pair of silver earrings. Molly had picked up three pairs of jeans, a bag full of lacy underwear, new gloves, and a pair of boots.
“I really should have thought this through more when I was choosing a best friend,” I said, sliding into the driver seat. “If I’d gotten one with the same shoe size, I could’ve borrowed all her new boots.”
“Coulda, shoulda, woulda,” Molly sang out. “Don’t even get me started on the length of your un
borrowable pants legs.”
“Unborrowable isn’t actually a word,” I pointed out, backing out of the parking space.
“Yeah, well, is bite me a word?”
“That’s two words.”
We both started laughing, but she turned serious before I was even back on the highway.
“Tess, I hate to spoil our wonderful day, but I’m worried about all of this. I hate that you got hurt, and I hate the danger you’re in. I keep worrying that if somebody is out there dumping bodies at the shop, it’s only a short step to killing people inside the shop.”
I sighed. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? It worries me too. But I can’t run away. I can’t close the shop and hide in my basement for the rest of my life. Besides, Jack—”
“Jack is somebody we don’t know at all. He’s been off doing mysterious and awful and dangerous things for the past ten years. He was a soldier, Tess. We know what happens to them these days. We went to school with guys who’ve come back from fighting in the Middle East, and now they live out in the swamp, communing with nature, suffering from PTSD, and breaking into violent rages sometimes. Is it possible that Jack is like them?”
She was my best friend, and the last person in the world I would ever try to lie to, so I said nothing, but we both knew that saying nothing was an answer all by itself. We drove along in silence for a while, each thinking our separate thoughts, before I figured out exactly how to answer her.
“I know that he’s dangerous, Molly. But I also know that he’s not dangerous to me. It doesn’t make sense, and I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s true. We need to find out what happened to Jeremiah so that Jack can figure out what he’s doing next. I don’t know if he’ll even stay in Dead End. But if he’s going to—if he ever hopes to make a home here—he can’t see the ghost of Jeremiah’s unavenged murder around every corner in his house and in the shop.”
Molly was silent for a little while, but finally she nodded. “That makes sense to me, Tess. And I think you feel the same way about Jeremiah’s ghost. But you have to promise me that you’ll reach out for help the first second you feel like you’re in danger—whether from Jack, or from anybody else. I can’t lose you.”
