by Madelyn Alt
“Hi, Mel,” I said in a tired voice. There was something about my sister that never failed to wear me out.
“Is that all you can say to me? I mean, you didn’t even call. I had to find out this morning from Margo Dickerson-Craig.”
Margo Dickerson knew my business? Great. Randy Cutter was probably the only person in town my mom’s circle of influence had not reached. Considering that he’d recently had his hands in my underwear drawer, not to mention all my other drawers, I counted that as a blessing.
“What time is it?” I craned my neck around to see the clock on the stove.
“What do you mean, what time is it? It’s just after seven.”
Oh, good. An excuse. “I have to go to work.”
“Oh. Sure. Better be sure to bundle up. They’re calling for snow today.”
Usually going into work was easy, Enchantments being my favorite part of my so-called life, but today I felt distracted and preoccupied, a testament, no doubt, to the events of last night. Liss gave me a curious glance or two, but said not a word when faced with the coins I dropped, nor my forgotten light-up Santa hat, not even the time I knocked over an entire stack of gift bags and sent them scattering to the floor. When five o’clock rolled around, she hovered by the counter a moment until I looked up at her.
“I’m going to be heading home now,” she said, slipping into her coat. It was a crimson replica of a velvet opera coat, complete with ermine (at least, I thought it was ermine) collar. If the look she was going for was Edwardian opulence, she had achieved it and then some, especially when the coat was combined with what amounted to an ankle-length hobble skirt. I couldn’t have pulled it off in a million years, so I guessed I’d better stick to my usual, no matter how boring it might seem to me. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she asked me. “You’ve been a million miles from here today.”
Rising from the box I’d been emptying, I smiled at her and pushed the hair out of my eyes. “I’ll be fine. It’s just everything that’s been going on lately. I guess I’m feeling a little out of whack.”
“Ah. Perfectly understandable. The last week has been a bit trying, hasn’t it.” The glint of a plan came into her eyes. “I know! We’ll close the store for a few days after Christmas, so that you can rest. With pay, of course,” she added swiftly, as though I’d protested. “I don’t want you wearing yourself out completely. After all, I have asked you to pull far more than your share of the weight with regard to the store. In light of that . . .” With a little flourish, she produced a small gift-wrapped box from beneath the counter’s chintz skirt. “A gift, my dear. Something small that I think you can use.”
I stared at the package in her hand and bit my lip. “Oh, but . . . but Christmas is a week away!” I protested. And I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to give her. I mean, what do you give the woman who seems to have everything?
She arched her brow at me with a mysterious smile. “This isn’t your Christmas gift, dear heart. It’s my way of saying thank you. For everything.”
“A thank-you? For what, doing my job? The pendulum you gave me was more than enough, Liss.”
Half frowning, half laughing at her refusal to back down, I carefully began to unwrap the gift. After I spent nearly five meticulous minutes attempting to unknot the ribbon, Liss clucked her tongue and took the gift back.
“Life, my dear, is not all caution and wariness. Sometimes it is better to shred the paper and love the present to death than to tuck the salvaged gift wrap away and set the gift on a shelf somewhere to be admired from a distance.” To demonstrate, she ripped at the colorful paper she’d obviously taken some effort with and laughed at my open-mouthed Oh of distress when it tore noisily.
My Oh turned into a squeal of delight a moment later when a cell phone box was revealed. A deluxe model, with the ability to text-message; take, send, and receive pictures; and even download e-mail.
“Liss, you really shouldn’t have, you know. That sounds trite, doesn’t it, but it’s true.”
“Why shouldn’t you have one?” she asked lightly, smiling at my obvious appreciation for the gift. “You never know when a thing like this might come in handy for a young woman of the world. Marcus helped me pick it out—you’ll notice we have even gone to the trouble of placing our numbers in your directory. This lovely little thing is fully activated and ready for your dialing pleasure. And don’t worry about not being able to fit it into your budget. This one is charged to the store account. Now,” she said, catching me with her piercing gaze, “are you sure you don’t want me to stay? I’d be happy to keep you company.”
“You go. And have a good evening. Although I hope your plans include sticking close to your fireplace, the way the weather is looking.”
The snow had begun to fall around one that afternoon, big, beautiful flakes, and store traffic had fallen off quickly after. I’d phoned Evie’s house and left a message for her to stay home. Not a bad thing for a teenager on a Friday night, although I doubted it would be spent popping popcorn and watching a movie with the folks. Nowadays an evening stuck at home was more likely to mean hours of Internet chat and online games with friends.
Liss took a long look out the front window. “It does appear to be getting a bit slick, doesn’t it? Ah, well, it’s all very good for business. Once the snow stops, at least. I don’t suppose tonight will be very busy. It never is in weather like this.” She tugged on her gloves and headed for the back, only to turn before she entered the office. “Maggie . . . you will call me should you need anything, won’t you?”
She said it so strangely that I had to laugh as I patted the gift she’d given me. “Of course I will. Now, stop worrying, woman, and go!”
She left after a last admonishment to close early if the weather warranted. There being no customers to speak of, I picked up my brand-new cell phone and began to play.
The first thing I did was to ring up Steff. “Hmm, ’lo?”
“Given up sultry and sexy now that you have a new man, I take it?” I teased.
“Hey, girl!” came the sunshiny voice I knew and loved. “Sorry, I was just taking a bite of peanut butter when you called. Hey, I was hoping to hear from you today. How are you doing? I wish you’d have stayed with me last night. Danny wouldn’t have minded, you know that.”
Somehow I wasn’t so certain Dr. Dan would have wanted one of Steff’s friends horning in on his romantic evening, and God knows he’d spent enough of the evening helping to straighten out my mess of an apartment. “It was okay. Really. I’m fine.”
“If you say so. Hey, can you believe this weather? WOWO is saying this is turning into an actual winter storm. My mom said the grocery store is a madhouse. No bread on the shelves, no milk. Stripped bare. The usual routine. And we’ll probably get the usual couple of inches and everyone will feel stupid.”
“An actual storm. Maybe we’ll have a white Christmas after all. Speaking of Christmas, guess what I’m holding in my hand right now?”
“Let me get out my crystal ball. Umm, I’m going to take a stab in the dark here and say . . . a phone receiver.”
“Ah, but not just any kind of phone. Liss gave me a cell phone! It’s so cool. I know, you’re thinking ‘It’s about time,’ but I really haven’t been able to afford one. The Toad wasn’t exactly forthcoming with the raises, you know.”
“I know. I’m really glad your new boss is treating you better, Mags. You deserve it.”
“Aw, thanks, sweetie. I’m glad you seem to be enjoying your new romance.”
She giggled. “I am, at that. Danny is something special, that’s for sure.”
It was the way she said it more than the words themselves that made my breath catch. “Steff!” I exclaimed. “You’re in love!”
“Maybe. It’s too soon, really. I know that I enjoy being with him. I know that we have a lot in common. I know I can’t wait to see him every day, and my day doesn’t seem right when something happens that I can’t see him. He’s just really, really
great. You know?”
Actually, I wasn’t sure that I did, outside of my dad and my grandpa. And that just wasn’t the same at all. “I’m happy for you. Really happy.”
“Me, too,” she said with a blissful sigh. “I mean, I’m not sure if he’s The One or not. Only time will tell.”
Time wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already sense. A pinkish red haze filled my mind when I closed my eyes and pictured my redheaded best friend with her man, and I smelled roses. Big, lush, blooming pink cabbage roses. Sheesh, all that was missing were the squiggly little hearts and silvery fairy twinkles, and really, I didn’t need them to know that Dr. Dan was The One. I knew it with every fiber of my being. But I wasn’t about to tell Steff. Better to let her enjoy the path every step of the way.
I hung up trying not to let myself feel down about the whole conversation. To distract myself, I spent the next several minutes figuring out how to program numbers into my phone list. Steff, Evie, Annie, Gen, Devin, Joe, Eli, Mom, Mel, and Marshall, who had broken my mom’s heart by telling her he wasn’t sure he could make it home this Christmas. With deference to Steff ’s romantic success, I even added Tom, though that seemed like a hopeless case of wishful thinking at this point in time.
With that out of the way, all that was left was testing out the camera feature. Which was way cool, as I soon found out. I even took it outside to take a picture of the falling snow, coming down even faster now. The streetlamps had come on, beaming down yellow spirals filled with swirling snow. I stood a moment in the cold, silvery otherworld conceived by the worsening storm, feeling the snowflakes hit my upturned face. A snow grader went past, its driver bundled to the hilt and sipping coffee from a quart-sized insulated mug as the heavy equipment barreled along past me, pushing the three inches of snow out of its path. I gave him a hearty wave, and he waved back. Life in a small town. It’s a good thing.
Back inside the store, a silence had fallen that was so complete that it was almost as though time had stopped. The traffic on River Street was next to nothing, so I locked the front door and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED. I doubted anyone would know the difference if we closed early tonight. Right now all of Stony Mill was battening down its hatches in preparation for possibly the first winter storm of the season. This was one Christmas shopping day that would go unshopped.
But instead of calling it a day myself and going home, I turned down the lighting to security lamps only and brewed myself a strong cup of tea. Chamomile, to soothe, with lemongrass for clarity. Sitting on the cushioned stool behind the counter, I sat in the semidarkness and tried to unwind. Something had been nagging at the back of my mind all day, and I needed to find out what it was. I closed my eyes and let the fragrant tea steal into my brain. I’d found that it seemed to work even better than drinking it down. I just held the warm cup between my hands and let the steam work its magic.
I knew it had something to do with Amanda. That much was clear. She’d been on my mind from the moment I’d found out that she had disappeared virtually from Enchantments’ doorstep. All the whispers and rumors and secrets that had engaged and titillated the town. The blog. The pictures on the disk in the clock . . .
The blog. The pictures.
Sliding off the stool, I retrieved my purse from the office, taking the printout of the blog from its voluminous depths. There in the darkened store, the words of the blog whispered to me, challenging me to understand, to open my eyes, to see . . .
I flipped through the pages a few times, back and forth, but I kept going back to where I first noticed that Amanda was using aliases for the men in her life.
The nicknames. What had they meant to her?
I sat down on the stool again with the cup of tea steaming away in my hand, staring out the windows at the lowering gloom. Snow was gathering in the corners of the windowpanes, blown there by the rising winds. I would have to leave soon . . .
Jordan.
Jordan was her steady boyfriend, and we knew with a fair level of certainty that the two of them had been intimate. But did she write about him?
And what about Charlie? He’d sworn they had never, that Amanda wasn’t like that. Or was that a lie, something to cover their tracks?
Jordan, Charlie. Charlie, Jordan.
The two boys-but-almost-men. Both basketball players. Strong. Athletic. Young men, still inexperienced at handling the testosterone surges that could turn them into stark raving lunatics at any given moment. I could see them in my mind’s eye, grappling about on the floor of Eyeball Alley, their muscles flexing, faces contorted with intense dislike. There had been an awful lot of power, both physical and metaphysical, swirling about that afternoon. Either one of them could have lost his grip on reality in the split second of a jealous rage, had Amanda pushed him to it.
Cut to the picture of Jordan that Amanda had kept on her desk, looking for all the world a young man in complete possession of himself. A young man of means, in his casually expensive clothes and easy confidence.
And in that one split second of time, my mind leapt the chasm of the unknown.
The Alligator Man.
Jordan’s shirt had sported an embroidered alligator logo on the left breast pocket. It looked like the kind of casual chic clothing a young man about town would be expected to wear.
Excitement volleyed through me as the connection gained importance in my mind. Could it be? It was as good a presumption as any.
My hands trembling, I picked up my phone and dialed Evie’s home number. No answer. Damn. Who else could I call? Who else might know?
Tara might. But would she answer my questions?
I had to try.
Louis and Molly Tabor were listed in the phone book. I dialed the number and waited, holding my breath.
“Hello?” A male voice, presumably Uncle Lou.
“Hello, this is Maggie O’Neill. You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Marcus’s.”
“Oh, hello, Maggie. Yes, Marcus has spoken of you. How are you this evening?”
“Just fine, thank you. I was wondering if I might have a word with Tara.”
A pause. “This isn’t about the books that Tara took from your store, is it? Because I was operating under the assumption that she had paid you back for the books, and if she hasn’t, I’d like to kn—”
“No, sir, this isn’t about the books,” I hastened to assure him.
“Oh. Well, then, just let me call Tara for you.”
On the other end of the phone, I heard a series of muffled sounds and knew he had placed his hand over the mouthpiece. But soon I was rewarded with, “Yo.”
“Hi, Tara. It’s Maggie O’Neill. Marcus’s friend.”
“Oh. Hi.”
“Hi. Listen, Tara, this is going to sound a little strange, I’m sure, but . . . I need to ask you a question. Is that all right?”
“Shoot.”
“It’s about Jordan Everett. I need to know if he likes to wear a certain kind of shirt.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No. No, it’s not.”
I heard a small intake of breath. “You’re serious, aren’t you. Is he all right? I mean, he isn’t in any sort of trouble, is he?”
There was something in her voice that I recognized from that teen-girl part of me still lurking within. “You like him, don’t you?”
Instant withdrawal. “So what if I do? That’s not a crime, last time I looked.”
“Is that why you were binding Amanda that day?” I asked, suddenly sure of the answer.
“Yeah, I admit it. I was trying to do a spell to get him to see what she was really like. He was blind to it, you know. Men always are.”
I felt better, suddenly, knowing that Tara’s ritual that day wasn’t meant to cause physical harm to come to Amanda—no matter that she would have been a day late and a dollar short at the time. “Yes, they always are, aren’t they.”
“Lessee, the shirts he wears most often are LaCoste, I think. I’m not much into designer duds,
you know, but I’m pretty sure that’s right.” She paused, then confided, “He sure does look good in ’em, though.”
I laughed, but I was already heading back toward the office laptop. “That’s what I needed to know. Thanks, Tara. I appreciate your help.”
“No prob.”
Within two minutes, I had my answer. Gotta love those Internet image searches. LaCoste was known for its alligator emblem. Jordan was known for wearing that kind of shirt.
Therefore, in my mind, Jordan Everett was the Alligator Man.
But what about the rest of them?
I tried to apply the same sort of thinking to the others, but the only one that came to me was Chicken of the Sea. It must have been her code for Charlie Howell. Not only was his name the same as the goofy tuna from that old advertising slogan, but hadn’t she thought of him as some sort of pushover, the kind of boy she could lead around by a string?
Randy Cutter, I supposed, could have been Buzz Lightyear, a friend of her father’s. He had the right haircut for the job. I flipped through until I found the first reference. There it was, a description of a mermaid bop in a swimming pool with Buzz Lightyear. Apparently, either Amanda had the lungs of a sea turtle, or else the man was a quick, um, study. No wonder he was willing to risk life and limb. No man would want that kind of rumor to get out.
But as for the others, especially the one she referred to as Papa Bear? I had no idea. Without knowing the intimate details of her life, how was anyone to know? What we needed was a diary, or a key, or a box full of photos with captions.
Photos . . .
Again, that nudge that felt almost as physical as it was mental. There was something I wasn’t putting together. Something . . .
Hi-res. Marcus said we needed high-resolution versions of the photos so that the pics wouldn’t be pixilated so badly when zoomed. But Marcus had spent the afternoon hauling me to Dr. Phillips’s office, and the evening cleaning up my trashed apartment, so we’d never gotten around to it.
I reached for my cell phone again, selected Marcus’s number from my phone list, and pressed SEND.
