"May, you don't have to..." I started to say, knowing she would anyway. And feeling the tug in my stomach when I knew I needed her out of the house as much as I needed Harris gone before Taj arrived. She did have to go.
"It's okay," May said as she trailed Harris to the door. "We'll talk tomorrow, Lana." She shot me a sad look as she went. There wasn't anger in her voice. There was only disappointment. I'd been late, served off steak, and thrown her boyfriend out of my house.
"May if you just knew the day I had..." But she was already heading back down the path, chasing after Harris. I leaned back against my front door and shut my eyes. This mystery was threatening to tear my relationship with May apart. And if the mystery didn't, her relationship with the Mayor would.
I just couldn't see how there was going to be room in May's life for the both of us.
As the car sped away I noticed that Harris drove a silver BMW almost identical to Louis'. It didn't surprise me: I supposed that was the car de jour of the Tree Valley upper class, and neither Harris nor Louis had much individuality about them.
"Lana?" a whispered voice called out from the bushes. How long had he been hiding there?
I hadn't realized how many things I'd wanted to tell Taj until I saw him standing there in his green khakis and my chest leapt, spewing words like confetti all over him before he even got through the door. "Today was insane..." I didn't even know which part to spew out first, I was just unbearably grateful to have someone there I could actually talk to about everything. The only one who would actually believe me.
"Are we alone?" Taj glanced around my now abandoned dining room.
I nodded. "Grace isn't home. I guess there was an emergency down at the hospital."
"Isn't there always an emergency at the hospital?"
I shrugged. "There are certainly more dead bodies these days, that's for sure." I glanced down at my carpet, finding the silver trails from the snails rather hypnotic. "Though I don't think any actual bodies were left behind today...only ash that fell into the water."
The blue-green stained glass that I now thought I would never be able to swim in again. Not that I swim much. I probably wouldn't even be able to look at that water again without remembering the way that the fiery debris fell into it, swallowing it whole and instant, making me question afterward if I had even seen it or only dreamed it, despite the terrible burning smell that still permeated the air.
"What are you talking about?" Taj asked gently.
I swallowed and only momentarily debated whether I should actually tell him before it all spilled out of me.
Taj just stared back at me, unmoved.
"You aren't shocked by this?" I asked. "I've barely stopped shaking since," I said, holding out my hand. Well, it was actually pretty steady by that point. But it was eight hours after the fact. "So to speak."
Taj glanced at the half eaten steaks on the table. "Anything else unusual happen today?"
I nodded. "Get a load of this," I said and told him about the milk disappearing that morning.
"The milk disappeared?" Taj looked around the house cautiously. "Well, they do say that this place is haunted." He kicked at the snail trails on the carpet. "Could do with a little spruce up," he said, trying to hide the smile on his lips.
"Come on, this is like a castle compared to your place."
"We're not so different, Lana."
I gulped. I still couldn't accept that was true. Taj lived on the fringe, I only visited there occasionally.
"I haven't told you the worst part of it..." I said, wandering into the kitchen, wishing I hadn't washed the evidence down the sink. There were still some remnants in the empty carton I picked up off the floor. "I found this when I got home," I said quietly.
"So it disappeared..."
"And returned pink," I finished the sentence for him.
We locked eyes again, both of us with a hand on the milk carton. I pulled the carton away and withdrew my gaze. "What did you need to see me so urgently for?" I asked Taj. "Must have been important if you were going to risk coming into town."
"Who was here, before me?" Taj asked.
I opened my mouth to answer and then closed it. But why did I care so much if Taj knew May had been here? It wasn't as though I was trying to impress him or stay on his good side. I didn't care about Taj Robinson at all.
"Just some friends. Taj, you're stalling."
He let out a heavy sigh and sat down on one of the stools. "It's not so easy to say now that I'm actually here." He glanced down at his hands which were gloved by fingerless gloves. It wasn't a particularly cold night out.
I gave him time to answer, knowing that if you let silence sit for long enough the other person eventually becomes uncomfortable enough that they race to fill it. Personally, I am quite content with silence and never feel the need to fill it.
Maybe Taj was more normal than me because it only took about thirty seconds of air so dead you could bury it before he finally spilled.
"I know the girl who was killed."
My heart started beating fast.
"I didn't think you knew anyone," was the first thing that came out of my mouth. "Sorry..." I quickly added but Taj had already taken offence. "You know what I mean..." I was the only person he knew.
Taj looked back down at his fingerless gloves. "Lana...this girl...I'm not sure she would want you to investigate her death." He hesitated for a moment. "I mean, I'm still trying to figure that one out."
It had never occurred to me before that a corpse would not want her death investigated. But now it struck me as kind of absurd that we investigate murders at all -- after all, the dead don't care, do they?
But the living do.
Unless they don't.
"And what about you, Taj? Do you want me to investigate her death?"
Maybe Taj had put the milk in the fridge himself.
He kept staring at his hands, pulling the material of the gloves till there was no more give and the material snapped back. "No," he finally said quietly and looked up at me. "But only because I'm worried that something is going to happen to you if you do, Lana."
Why was he being so gosh darn cryptic?
I shifted from one foot to the other. An exploding helicopter wasn't going to put me off, and pink milk in the fridge wasn't going to make me give up -- so any pleading from Taj Robinson certainly wasn't going to.
"You don't need to worry about me, Taj. Is that why you're here? To try and protect me?"
Taj let out a long sigh. "I know you think you don't need help Lana, but believe me...this is not the sort of stuff you want to go messing with." His voice was less gentle now, more stern. There was a faraway look in his eyes that would have been enough to scare me if I was capable of feeling that emotion.
"Who was the girl?" I asked, staring back at him.
Taj climbed off the stool and walked straight up to me, so quickly that I didn't even have a chance to back away.
He stared into my eyes and whispered. "Lana if I told you that you wouldn't be able to handle it."
Somehow, without me even noticing it had happened, Taj had picked up my hands and was holding them in his. The only flesh I could feel was the end of his fingers.
"I can handle anything," I whispered back firmly.
His grip around my hands tightened.
"Lana. It was you."
***
I don't know how long we held hands for.
"I should go," Taj finally said.
"It's late. It's cold out."
"Maybe I shouldn't go. Maybe you shouldn't be alone right now," Taj whispered back.
"You can stay the night," I said, pulling away at last. "But you'll have to take the couch."
Part Two.
"Even in the Future the Story Begins with Once Upon a Time."
― Marissa Meyer, Cinder
Chapter Six
One Detective Becomes Two (Not literally in spite of what was revealed in the previous chapter)
"He
y!" I clapped my hands above Taj's head as loudly as I could, frightening him out of his dreams and into my nightmare. He opened his eyes and jumped when he saw me hovering over the couch with the silver blade in my hand. Good.
"What the heck are you doing with that knife?" Taj sat up in shock and backed away, pulling the blanket up over him like a shield as though that would protect him if I was actually going to stab him.
He screamed as I brought the knife up into the air and then started to bring it down again. "Oh, relax, I'm not going to stab you." Instead, I stuck the tip of the knife into the tip of my left index finger.
A large drop of red blood oozed out. I shoved it right in his face. "See? Red. Not pink. So you can just...shut up, okay?" It was meant to come out firm and matter-of-fact and I hated the note of fear that had crept into it that made me seem rattled. I wasn't. I swear. Taj was crazy. I hadn't lost eight hours sleep over his ridiculous, completely absurd statement. No way.
Taj threw the blanket off and stood up, and I saw that he was in his boxers. Blushing, I quickly looked away as he picked his khakis off the living room floor and pulled them up, fumbling with the belt. "If you're going to dismiss me totally, I don't even know why I bothered trying to help you..."
"I don't know why you even bothered either," I said, the blood dripping from my finger to the floor.
Definitely red.
I heard a key turn in the front door and looked at Taj in horror. "Grace is back from her shift at the hospital," I whispered, frantically looking around for a place to hide Taj. It wasn't that anything had happened between us, but he did have his belt undone in the middle of my lounge room at 7.30 in the morning.
"Get into my bedroom," I hissed at him, pushing him in that direction.
"Why do I have to hide, exactly?" Taj asked.
"Umm, because I don't want to be seen with the town's resident conspiracy theory nutter," I said, pushing him into my room and pulling the door shut just as Grace entered the hallway.
"What's been going on here?" she asked, poking her head into the living room where the three half empty plates of steak still sat.
"You should really get around to throwing those out before they attract flies," Grace said, screwing her nose up. She sniffed the air. "Is that men's deodorant I can smell?"
I doubted Taj actually wore deodorant so I delivered a fairly confident, "no," hoping that she wouldn't find any cause to enter my room. I could practically feel Taj's presence through the door. I hoped I hadn't left anything embarrassing lying around in there. Hang on, he was the embarrassing thing in there.
Izzy came out into the hall and Grace bent down to scoop her up, the cat immediately purring as they mashed their faces together.
"Long night at the hospital?" I asked Grace. She looked completely shattered, skin almost grey from exhaustion. But her eyes were wired.
She avoided my eyes. "Yeah, some, erm, weird stuff happened..." she said, trying to push past me down the hall. The sound of something getting knocked over in my room stopped her. "Have you got a man in there, Lana?" she asked, her mouth dropping open in surprise.
Again, I felt confident delivering a "No".
"It sounds like there is someone in there." She shrugged and sighed. "I need to feed Izzy and sleep."
"She's already been fed," I said, and didn't add, "like usual," to the end though I wanted to. When she was finally out of sight and in her own room I ducked into mine.
"Can't you be quiet for five minutes?" I whispered to Taj. He still had his belt undone. "And do up your pants for crying out loud."
He quickly reached down to do up his zip and belt while I looked away again. "And do it quietly."
"Who is she, anyway? Is that the Grace you mentioned earlier?"
I realized that Taj had been out of my life for so long that of course he wouldn't know that I was living with a surgeon. He didn't know anything about my life anymore. He'd even had to ask if I still lived at this address. Not that I'd ever live anywhere else -- I'd rather move into the mud pit with Taj than get a townhouse in the housing estate or worse -- move to Melrose. Not that they'd have me. They did stuff to you there, that I wanted no part of.
"Yes, that was Grace. She's my temporary lodger. All off the books," I added quickly, realizing that I was talking to the most off-the-books person out there. There was no way he was going to dob me in to the Tree Valley Government.
Taj finished buckling his belt and looked around my room at my unmade bed. I cringed at the dirty clothes on the floor and the overflowing can of trash in the corner. To be honest it didn't look a lot better than Taj's shack. "So what are we going to do?" Taj asked me, seemingly unconcerned by the mess.
"We? Going to do? Umm, you're going to leave and return to the hole in the ground you crawled out of." It sounded like the kind of generic metaphorical insult you would fling at someone you didn't like, but in this case, it was entirely literal.
Taj's mouth dropped open in offence and for a second I wanted to apologize but then I remembered that he'd basically told me I was already dead or that I was going to die, or that I was...I didn't even know what kind of bulldust he was trying to feed me. But claiming he'd come to my house to help me? When all he'd done was freak me out with his wacky theories? Please,
There was a reason I hadn't spoken to him in three years. And there was a reason that May would probably not even swerve her car out of the way if he stood in front of her on the road.
And there was a reason that he lived in a hole in the ground in a toxic dump site.
"You need to go Taj," I said, thinking the coast would be clear, that Grace would be changed into her monkey pajamas already, ready to sleep the day away.
I was right about her being in her pajamas but wrong about her being asleep. She and Taj almost banged right into each other as we stumbled out into the hall.
Great.
"I thought you said you didn't have a man in your room," Grace said, giving me a playful slap.
"He doesn't belong to me. He's just a very old acquaintance that shouldn't be here." I probably should have just kicked him out into the cold the night before. What did a man who lived in a pit without electricity care about the cold for, anyway?
"Are you going to introduce me?"
Um, no. Had no plans whatsoever of doing that. "This is Taj," I said with a heavy sigh. "This is Grace," I mumbled, trying to push Taj towards the door.
"Hey there," Grace said, twirling her hair around her index finger flirtily. I just looked at her in disbelief. Was she flirting with...Taj? Taj Robinson? Must have been delirious from lack of sleep. Only logical explanation.
I swear to God I wasn't jealous. I was angry. That was the only emotion fuelling me that day. "Taj has to get going immediately," I said, pushing him towards the door.
"Aww, that's too bad..."
Taj shot a look back over his shoulder as I shoved him down the hallway. "She is about a billion times out of your league Taj. She's a beautiful surgeon."
"What is she doing living with you?"
Good question. "She's temporarily off the grid as well." Asides from that, I didn't know much about Grace. Just that she was a cancer surgeon, in Tree Valley for six months, and that she had a black cat. I would have had trouble even recalling her surname unless I had a piece of her mail in front of me. As for her reasons for wanting to go incognito in Tree Valley? I didn't ask because I didn't particularily care. In a few months, she would be out of my life forever.
Speaking of people out of my life forever. "Goodbye, Taj," I said, giving him one final shove through the front door. "Maybe I'll see you again in a few years if I go totally crazy and lose my mind again."
Taj straightened up and steadied himself after the impact of my shove almost pushed him right onto the overgrown lawn out the front of my cottage.
"You came to me for help, Lana," he grumbled.
"I should have known better than that," I snapped back and then lowered my voice in case Grace had her face pressed
up to the glass, trying to get one last look at Taj. "And I do now..."
"I don't know what you're so angry for," Taj hissed. He took a step closer to me, which was the opposite of the direction he was supposed to be heading in. I should have pushed him away again.
Why didn't I?
"I am angry because you came here to scare me. Kind of your M.O, Taj," I said, unable to hide the bitterness in my voice.
Taj's tone was more gentle this time. "I didn't tell you any of this to scare you." Even though it was gentle, there was also an urgency to his voice.
"You didn't scare me," I said back in a low voice, as convincingly as I could.
"I only meant to help you. I came as soon as I figured it out, Lana."
I shook my head. Figured it out? Made it sound like it was based on some kind of formula, or you know: facts based in the real world. Instead, it was the ramblings of someone who literally had not had contact with the outside world for years.
"Just go Taj." My voice was cracked and dry. "I don't want to see you here again."
His eyes were heavy with hurt. I looked at the ground to try and avoid looking into them, knowing I'd only be met with my own guilt there. I just waited for him to leave. Which he still did not do. I suppose I could not blame him for not wanting to return to a hole in the earth after spending a night on my couch.
Maybe he missed being a part of society. Why, though? Half the time I wanted to join him in the ground. There was only one thing keeping me in Tree Valley, and even it had a very loose grip on me at that moment.
When he was finally done having a little sulk Taj looked up at me again and I noticed that the bottom of his khaki trousers were frayed. I think they were the same clothes he'd been wearing three years earlier.
"Don't you see what danger you're in, Lana?" The way he delivered it was barely a question. Like I was stupid to not see what was apparently so obvious to him.
Pink Blooded: A Lana Pink Mystery Page 5
