by Mary Bowers
“Uh huh. So what were you doing breaking into his house last night?”
“It wasn’t last night. Don’t make me out to be some kind of sneak thief, Taylor. It was this morning, in broad daylight. I went around ringing his doorbell and knocking on windows, but I couldn’t seem to get any answer. So I tried a window, and the silly thing had left it unlocked. I thought I’d find him sleeping late and surprise him, but the joke was on me, wasn’t it?” She looked at Michael playfully. “Since when did we have to have alarm systems on our houses in a town like Tropical Breeze, where everybody knows everybody and nobody locks their doors?”
“When we’re not home most of the time,” Michael told her. “Like I said, I’m living with Taylor now.”
“Oh, yes, you did say something about that. Helping with the animals?”
“We’re lovers,” I said flatly.
“Really?” she said, staring at me like she just couldn’t believe a man like Michael would associate with a tramp like me. “I had no idea!”
“I told you that an hour ago,” Michael said patiently.
“Well, I hope that won’t keep you from spending a little time with an old friend, after all we’ve meant to one another.”
“In high school,” he said. “I haven’t seen much of you since.”
“But you kept this,” she said archly, digging into her huge designer bag and pulling out an old yearbook.
“Did you take that from my bookcase?” Michael asked, showing the first sign of irritation I’d seen him express about the way she’d let herself into his house.
“Now don’t be mad at me,” she said, batting her eyelashes. “I couldn’t help myself. It was right there in the room with the open window and I saw it from across the room. We did have loud school colors, didn’t we?”
The old yearbook was orange and green, a true eyesore. She had been fondling it, and as Michael reached for it, she opened the front cover. “Remember? Here’s the dedication I wrote to you, all those years ago. See, Taylor?” she said, foisting it across the table at me before Michael could grab it.
The front and back pages, left blank by the publisher for dedications, were covered with little messages from his classmates. There were approximately ten signed messages to each blank page, but Vanessa had taken an entire page for herself. Inside a scrolly heart, placed prominently in the center of the inside cover, she had written, “Always and forever yours, Vanessa!!! I will never let you go!” Below that, in all caps with little flowers dotted here and there, she had written, “YOU BELONG TO ME!!!!!” I took it in without really looking directly at it, said, “Cute,” and handed it back across the table. Michael intercepted it, saying, “I’ll take that,” and shoving it against the wall beside him, away from Vanessa. He was looking a lot less pleased with himself than he had been before she’d pulled the book out. Also, a lot less pleased with her.
After an uncomfortable moment, I looked directly at Vanessa and said, “What brings you back to Florida, anyway?”
“Well.” She dropped the quick syllable like it was the start of something big, picked up her diet soda and took a sip, set it back down and assumed a serious manner. “You’re right, Taylor. I used to do documentaries for network television. I thought I was doing important work. Making my mark on the world. Then, last year, I interviewed Orwell Quest and everything changed. I went in thinking I’d cut in some of his remarks throughout a show I was doing on Nostradamus. Shows on things like that always get you big ratings, but really, I was trying to keep my focus on hard news at that point in my career. Well! By the time the interview was over I realized that I’d been wasting my life, majoring in minors, when there was a whole universe of brilliant ideas being kept from us by the government and its establishment scientists. Right then and there I made it my mission to bring his genius to the masses. I’ve been his biographer and confidante ever since. He’s here to attend a scientific conference, so naturally, I’m here to document everything.”
“Are you talking about ParaCon?” I asked incredulously.
She was nodding. Right about then the food came, and I decided I’d better stop talking and eat. Michael was still giving me warning looks, and they were getting darker. Much as this lady needed to be taken down a notch, it wasn’t worth getting into a fight with Michael.
Even after the cookies, the grilled cheese sandwich tasted good, right up until the moment that Michael invited Vanessa to stay at Cadbury House with us. Then all of a sudden, a chunk of the sandwich lodged itself in my throat.
“Oh, honey, you’re so kind!”
“Or if it’s more convenient,” he added, after looking at me, “you could just use my house in town.”
“Aren’t you a sweetheart! But no, Orwell has accommodation for us in downtown St. Augustine. The Santa Monica Hotel. It’s a bit provincial, but nice enough. He’s taken a large suite on the top floor for us so we won’t be disturbed by fans, and really, the view is very nice. Very nice. St. Augustine is a nice little town.”
“Is he rich?” I blurted. The Santa Monica Hotel is the most luxurious accommodation in St. Augustine, and is a Spanish-influenced work of art. I’d pay top dollar to be allowed to spend the night on a couch in the lobby there.
Vanessa was nodding. “He’s very wealthy, not that that matters.”
“No, of course not,” I said, doing the math. I wondered if Vanessa’s sudden conversion to a more important mission in life had anything to do with finding herself a sugar daddy.
When I looked up at Michael, I could see him reading my mind, so I decided to have only sweet and generous thoughts for a while. At least until he stopped staring at me.
Vanessa, of course, could read my mind, too, and she was giving me a feline look of deep satisfaction. Just to put an exclamation point on things, she threaded her arm through Michael’s and gave him a squeeze.
“Oooo, it’s so good seeing you again, Michael,” she purred. But she was staring at me.
Chapter 6
I managed to get back home by about two in the afternoon. We don’t have a garage at Cadbury House, per se. When tropical storms come our way, we put the vehicles into one of the outbuildings, but normally, we leave them parked against a series of railroad ties lined up near the house. As I got out of my SUV, I looked at Ed’s little green Metro as if it were a blood relative of whatever I’d seen crawling around by the cemetery the night before. Beyond the Metro was a van that appeared to have been tie-dyed. Colors exploded all over it, making it look hyperactive, even sitting still, and I decided it must belong to Sparky Fritz.
I was right. After checking on things in the house – it was strangely empty without Myrtle, but also strangely peaceful – I trekked on out to the kennel, had a quick discussion with two volunteers who were stocking the supply cabinet, then headed up cemetery hill to see what the geniuses were up to.
My first impression of Sparky Fritz was that he needed a little rewiring himself, by a better electrician than the one who’d put him together in the first place. He seemed to be shooting out little sparks of energy from all the sharp joints of his body. He was about five foot seven, skinny, and jerky as a marionette. He’d gotten a new dye job since the pictures for the website. His hair was still cardinal red, but now it had bleached-out tips that made the stand-up spikes all around his head look like flames. His tattooed arms were stuffed into the sleeves of a tight blue jean jacket, so I was spared the sight of flaming skulls and whatnot. He looked me up and down with bright blue eyes and said, “Heard a lot about cha.” Then he grinned, like it was a joke.
I knew he was baiting me, and I ignored it. I didn’t know what Ed had told him about my encounter with the unknown, but Ed was never a confabulator. He’d probably recited my initial explanation verbatim, and I wasn’t going to let Sparky stir things up.
They had a thing that looked like a miniature space cadet, about the size of a large coffee mug, with one huge eye. I guessed it was the surveillance device Ed had told me about.
/> “This is quick work,” I remarked. “You managed to find your friend right away, huh?”
“Naturally. Being on the organizational board for the upcoming conference, I have current information on all the attendees. Actually, Sparky was down the road at Bing’s Landing, having lunch when I called. He came straight over. Apparently he already had the equipment we needed in his van. Lucky for us.”
“Be prepared, that’s what I always say,” Sparky told me. Then he sniggered as he turned back to the little Cyclops, as if he’d just put one over on us. Somehow, you got the impression that Sparky was always laughing at you, no matter what he said, and he was always intensely aware of you, no matter what he was doing. I suddenly got a mental picture of a little Yorkshire Terrier we’d had not long before, named Sparkles. She was hyperactive, too, but we’d found a home for her where she had a couple of kids to play with and a mom who needed a buddy at home during the day to keep her laughing. Sparky Fritz would be harder to place than Sparkles had been, I decided. He didn’t exactly have dominance issues, but he looked like he’d break training every chance he got.
“I’ve been thinking about the incident,” Ed said to me. “You said that the entity made a distinctive sound as it moved away from you.”
“Yes. A sort of a grunt.”
“Could it have been a sob, or a whimper?”
I looked at him. That was exactly what I’d thought when I first heard it, but after my conversation with Rosie I wanted to believe it had been a machine, not an animal. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Not something you’d associate with a frightened animal?”
“Or a retreating Martian?” Sparky said. He was looking at me much too seriously, and I felt like he was mocking me.
“Ed, what are you getting at?”
He made a slight motion with his head, and I followed him into the cemetery. We sat on a stone bench, far enough from Sparky that he wouldn’t be able to hear us. Sparky shrugged and went back to dealing with the spycam.
“What I’m trying to do is categorize the anatomical structure of what you saw.”
I stared at him, befuddled.
“Let me rephrase that,” he said, glancing back at Sparky, then lowering his already low voice to something less than a murmur. “Was it flesh and blood? Or do you think it could’ve been mechanical?”
My head lifted in comprehension and I gazed at him steadily for a moment. Then I said, “You need to go into town and see your old cleaning lady. I think you and Rosie are singing off the same hymnal, and she’s an eyewitness too.”
“I’ve already discussed the matter with her.”
“I see. Do you think you tainted the witness? Did you suggest a bot to her? Because that’s what she’s saying now.”
“Perhaps I did,” he said ruefully. He shot another furtive glance at Sparky. “Perhaps that’s what I’m doing to you right now.”
“Is that why you brought your old pal Sparky into this? ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer?’ Is this him, punking you?”
“It would be just the kind of thing he would think up. With ParaCon coming up, plus the fact that I’m the most widely-known paranormal expert living in the area, it would be just like him to stir up a controversy in advance of the conference. Everybody knows about my research here at Cadbury House, and about my friendship with you. I suspected him right away. And now that I’ve tainted you as a witness, do you think you can remember it objectively if you try? What was it, animal or machine?”
I thought it over, closing my eyes and trying picture it. Finally, decisively, I said, “Machine.”
We both looked back at Sparky, who was jumping down from the crotch of a tree where he’d been affixing his little Cyclops.
“All done,” he called to us. “Now, let me get up the feed to my cell phone and you two can smile for the camera.”
I kept my voice low. “He’s going to have a live feed to his cell phone too?”
“It’s just for a little while,” Ed assured me quietly. “I’ll have it on mine, too, and yours, if you want it.”
“I think I should. Well, this is just great. The perpetrator of the hoax is now in charge of the investigation.”
“No,” Ed said, adjusting his glasses firmly. “I am in charge of the investigation. Sparky’s weakness is that he thinks he’s cleverer than anybody else, but he’s not more clever than me.”
He arose and walked away with a look of purpose.
I walked back to where Sparky was standing and looked at the crotch of the tree. It seemed to be looking back at me with a glassy eye that had grown into the bark. Then I nodded to Sparky, thanked him again and started to follow Ed down the hill. Before I could get very far, I heard him call out, “Are you good at technology, Taylor?”
I turned. “Not particularly. I can play Solitaire on my cell phone.” He didn’t look impressed. “Just the other day I managed to figure out how to text a picture to somebody.” It had taken me fifteen minutes, but I didn’t tell him that. He seemed to know it, though, and he walked toward me with his hand out, saying, “Give it here. Your cell phone. I’ll get the feed from the security camera working for you and show you how to access it.”
“Okay,” I said, softening up a bit. “Thanks. Nice of you to think of it,” I added, remembering that Ed hadn’t.
While I watched him working the phone like it was all child’s play, I wondered if he could see just how technologically deficient I really was. Then I took a closer look at him, his spiked-out hair, his skinny jeans and his gearbox full of circuit boards, tools and cables, and I thought, “Yep, he knows exactly what he’s dealing with here.”
I didn’t realize until much later how very true that was.
Chapter 7
After that, I expected it to be a weird and frustrating week, but in fact, things settled back into their normal, comfortable routine. I lost my battle buddy, King, when he was adopted by a young man living on his own for the first time and needing a pal, but that was a good thing. It’s always a good thing. But you never forget them.
My only change in routine was to meet Michael at the clubhouse for a glass of wine and a Caprese salad after his golf game on Wednesday. Vanessa had not joined his foursome, thank God, and I didn’t have to keep my claws out while I tried to eat. When I checked in at Girlfriend’s later that afternoon, Florence was over her cold and back behind the counter, and Wicked was back on top of the entertainment center, sleeping. Myrtle had decided that her sister was still “a little green around the gills” and needed supervision, so she was still there getting in the way, but otherwise, we were back to normal. When I told Florence I’d just come from meeting Michael at the club, I got a look of approval for good boyfriend husbandry. Michael had been happy about it too. You know how you can see right into a person’s mind in that first split-second when they see you? That lighting up of the eyes and letting-down of the guard that comes with honest delight? It was there.
The surveillance camera at the cemetery had garnered nothing, but that was expected, since Ed and I figured that the guy who had installed it was the one who had been causing the disruptions in the first place, so he knew darn well it was there. Still, I scanned the live feed from time to time, just for the novelty of it, and whenever I woke up during the night, I checked. It made me feel kind of cool to tap that little icon on my phone and go right to the live camera feed, like I actually knew what I was doing. Along with Cyclops, Sparky had installed several motion-sensor lights, and it was reassuring to take a look in the middle of the night and see that everything was dark and quiet.
But on Friday, the first day of ParaCon, things got not only weird and frustrating, but other-worldly. And I discovered that among the scholars of the paranormal, I had become a celebrity. They all knew about me and my cat, Bastet.
Ed had begun to do a paper (he called it a “monograph”) on how Bastet had showed up suddenly, attached herself to me, and for a time, appeared to be invading my mind and control
ling my movements. All an illusion, of course, in a time of stress following the death of a friend. Vesta Cadbury Huntington had died one night, and Bastet had come to me in the same night, along with suspicions about Vesta’s death. I had decided to look into it further, and the black cat had become a theme during my investigation. Ed had some idea that Bastet was a “familiar,” in the folkloric sense, and more than just the arrogant feline she appeared to be.
As he wrote his monograph, Ed’s ideas and speculations had exploded along predictable lines, and he got more than a little carried away. It turned into a book (472 pages) called Visions of Ancient Egypt, and as Ed’s books go, had become a pretty good seller. I hadn’t read it beyond the Forward, and the newer Forward to the Second Edition, but everybody at the conference apparently had, and had penetrated Ed’s thin veiling of my identity (in the book he had called me Larry DuPont, of all things, and characterized me as this lone-wolf guy who ran a soup kitchen!).
He had called Bastet Bastet, which was one giveaway. He explained that that was absolutely necessary in order for the book to make sense. He had gone to extravagant lengths to link her up with an ancient Egyptian cat goddess, and many people knew that I had a cat named Bastet. I don’t move in Ed’s professional circles, but I have a pretty good idea how that information bled over into the paranormal community: Teddy Force, Ed’s big, handsome, dumb-as-a-brick partner on his hit reality show on TV. That and the fact that the paranormal community is connected via the Internet in a way that’s probably the envy of Earthling-abducting Martians everywhere. But I didn’t know all that when I arrived at ParaCon.
Had I but known that when Ed told me to get to ParaCon around 9:30, when the speech I was interested in hearing wasn’t going to begin until noon, I would have gotten there later. Like, two-and-a-half hours later. But I am always punctual, and as I drove into the parking lot, the 9:30 news was just beginning on the radio. It was all about the weather up north, far, far away, where a winter storm was pounding the coast from Washington D.C. to New York. I do miss snow. It’s so beautiful. Just not when it’s all over your driveway. I remembered trying to commute from the south side of Chicago to my job downtown when I was a twenty-something working girl, and was glad all over again to be living in Florida. But I do enjoy seeing pictures of other cities getting hammered by snowstorms.
