by Celia Jerome
“So someone rescued him and took him home, thank goodness.” But why hadn’t they called the authorities? For that matter, what kind of person makes a rescued house guest sleep in the bathtub, no matter how wet or bedraggled? “Where is he so I can go get him?”
Joe shrugged. “I never know unless the person is in front of a street sign or a store, or someplace I recognize.”
Damn. “He’s not moving?”
“Not so much as a twitch.”
“Can you tell how far off he is?”
“I used to check on my wife in Mineola. That’s how I caught her cheating. Visiting her mother, my ass. I’ve never been able to view someone much farther away. Not like Hobbit stuff where wizards can see across continents. Maybe their water has something in it that ours doesn’t.”
“Well, closer than Mineola is a help.” And a whole lot of territory. How far could the wave have carried him? Or the dolphins towed him? Unless someone drove him in their car. “I need more to go on. What if you looked in the bathtub here? Could that help, you know, like sympathetic magic?”
“Can’t hurt to try.”
We waited for the tub to fill, then Joe leaned over the side, tightie-whities and all. “You’re right, the picture’s much clearer. Closer, too. Hey, I recognize those faucet handles, crystal with jade inserts. They’re a special order from a company in Chicago. If they’re here in the harbor, I might have put them in. Of course, I’m not the only plumber to work in Paumanok Harbor, or the only one to have that company’s catalog.”
“But they are rare enough to make it a good chance the professor is in one of your clients’ houses?”
“I’d guess eighty percent.”
“Great. Which client?”
Joe scratched his head. “I can’t remember. I remember fixtures a lot better’n I remember names. I can check my records, but there’s a shitload of order forms and job estimates, and this one had to be from years ago.”
“Look again. Can you see the color of the tiles? Are there towels hanging nearby? What about a shower curtain?”
He almost fell into the tub, trying so hard. “I see white, like most bathrooms, except for that green rug. I might—Nope, it’s gone.”
“What’s gone? What did you see?”
“Flowers, maybe, maybe not. Sorry, Willy. And sorry I can’t remember about those faucets.”
“But you saw Professor Harmon, and that’s what’s important. Do you have the catalog, or can you draw me a picture of the faucets I can show around? Someone else might recognize them.”
They looked familiar to me, once I had the sketch in my hand. Maybe the power of suggestion had me wondering, or maybe I did catch a glimpse over Joe’s shoulder without realizing it. Either way, neither Joe nor I had a name or location.
I went back to Vincent. “Do we have anyone who can bring memories back?”
“The cops have Sodium Pentothal. That can work sometimes. Other drugs they might have confiscated here or there.”
“No cops, no drugs. I just need a memory unlocked, not someone babbling about all they know.”
“Then you need a shrink.”
Now I have been told I need to see a therapist more than once. I went a few times, too. And yes, she wanted me to talk about my past and bring back memories I’d sooner forget. I stopped going. I got past a whole lot of insecurity and fear on my own. Now I glowed.
“I don’t think I can get Joe the plumber to a shrink. He’d talk to Doc Lassiter, but that won’t get him to remember where he installed those faucets.” Doc lived on Shelter Island, but he worked by touch, spreading mental wellness through his fingers. You couldn’t shake hands with the man without feeling better about yourself and your world. I’d love to see his aura someday. “I just need one lousy plumbing memory jogged.”
“I didn’t mean Joe needs his head examined, except for doing all that work for a little sex, but you need the kind of psychiatrist that works with past lives, buried memories, that kind of thing.”
Which I used to think was all a crock. Now I believed anything was possible.
Vincent went on: “Or maybe you could find a lounge act in Atlantic City or Las Vegas, you know, the magic show where they get people from the audience to do stupid things they don’t remember afterward. It can work both ways.”
“Hypnosis?” I rolled the word around in my head. Hip noses. Like someone wanting to hit my nose? Could that be what my father meant? Before I could call him or ask if anyone else knew a better way of finding the house with crystal-and-jade water faucets, Martha from the real estate office walked by.
Just the person I wanted to see! She’d been in half the houses in Paumanok Harbor at one time or another. Maybe she’d recognize the fixtures.
Martha wasn’t half as happy to see me. We had Issues. She did, anyway: Grant. She handled the purchase of the Rosehill estate for a Royce outreach center, and latched onto the handsome, wealthy, charming British lord as soon as I broke my not-quite-an-engagement to him. Did I mention wealthy? With the dip in the real estate business, Grant must have looked like Prince Charming to her. That’s how he looked to my mother, too. They were both disappointed. Martha went to England, maybe meeting the parents, maybe going over plans to refurbish the estate and outbuildings, maybe trying to wheedle an invite to stay on in Britain.
She’d come back alone, and blamed me. I never talked about her to Grant, I swear. In fact, I was glad they’d hooked up for a while, so I didn’t have to feel bad about breaking up with him. He must have mourned my loss for a week and a half. Anyway, I knew his family wanted a Royce dynasty match for him. My genes might have done, since our talents, me as Visualizer, him as Translator, meshed nicely. All Martha could do was never get lost. She mightn’t know what street she was on, but she always knew true north, without a compass. I got turned around every time I backed out of a strange driveway. She impressed the hell out of me. Maybe she impressed Grant’s parents less.
I showed her the picture of the faucet handles.
She barely glanced at it. “Oh, you and your little projects.”
Little? The rogue wave/sea monster was anywhere from five stories to ten, depending on which eyewitness account you heard. I was not about to discuss a kraken in the middle of Main Street. “It’s an important clue to finding the missing passenger, Professor Harmon.”
“Harmon?” She looked more closely. “You know, I do recall seeing something like this, but it was ages ago, when the House got sold.”
“What house?”
She looked over her shoulder, then whispered, “You know, the House.”
Shit. Maybe bullshit, too. Martha might send me out to Paumanok Harbor’s haunted house for spite. No one lived there, no one went there, yet the taxes got paid, the mail disappeared from its door slot, and the grass got mowed. Oh, and the House yelled at anyone who tried to enter. Now the houses on either side of it stood empty. Who’d want to live next to a talking building?
“Are you sure about the faucets?”
She waved a well-manicured hand in my direction. “I see so many houses, you know.”
I knew she wanted to be a countess one day. Good luck. And don’t blame me. His lordship didn’t return my calls either.
I went back to Janie’s and found Joe upstairs.
“The House? Hell, no, I wouldn’t step foot in the place.”
Me neither.
I asked Mrs. Ralston at Town Hall to make copies of the faucets to hand around. Maybe a cop had been in the place a long time ago. It was a long shot, but worth a try.
The ogre at her side curled her lip. “Now you are wasting time and money and man hours looking for bathtub knobs? What kind of operation is this town running?”
Good question, lady. Wrong people to ask.
CHAPTER 24
“DO YOU KNOW ANY HYPNOTISTS?” I asked Susan when I went home to drop off Little Red. He’d had a good day, too. He’d peed on every street sign and hydrant in town, barked at every car that passed wit
h a dog in it, and ate Mrs. Terwilliger’s sandwich out of her tote bag when I went to the library to get books on hypnosis. And another one on mythological monsters that I didn’t ask for.
“Grandma says it won’t work.”
Grandma Eve did not believe in modern medicine, the Internet, or the two-party system of government. “How can she know? I’ve heard it’s a respected practice now. All these books say so.”
Susan kept moving things around in the refrigerator, maybe looking for the quiche for lunch. “They tried it on me at the hospital during chemo. They said it could help me relax and not get so many side effects from the drugs. It didn’t work. Grandma says it’s because we have a barrier in our brains.”
“We, as in the Garland family?”
“We, as in Paumanok Harbor talents. It won’t work on Joe if you tell him in advance, or you if you realize someone is going to do it to you. She didn’t know if any of us could be taken unawares. Said it had something to do with protection, so no one could invade our minds without permission or steal our powers.”
That was good to know. I’d always worried that some of our telepaths could read my thoughts. On the other hand, I kept looking at the picture of those faucets, sure I’d seen them somewhere. “Maybe you could ask your mother if anyone knows a hypnotist anyway. I’d cooperate, if that helped, and if someone I trusted were nearby to keep it honest.” Asking anyone else, like Grant if he ever replied, meant sending a message to DUE to check the rosters, waiting for clearance to open private files, then waiting to see if the esper would come. That could take days, days we didn’t have, not with a life at stake. Not with a vengeful sea serpent on the loose during hurricane season.
“I wish I could recall where I’d seen them. Maybe I flipped a page in a magazine once and I’m wasting my time.”
“While you’re at it, maybe you could recall what you did with my quiche.”
“Will you come with me to a house on Shearwater? Martha thinks she saw a similar bathtub there.”
“A house or the House?” She knew by looking at me. “Not on your life.”
“Then I ate your quiche for breakfast.”
“Both portions?”
I didn’t have to answer. She took another look at my guilty face—or my jiggly ass—and asked, “What if I said I’d go with you?”
“I still ate it for breakfast, but I’d buy you lunch.”
“Not worth it. You owe me lunch, anyway.”
“You’ll have to take a rain check. I need to get to Matt’s by twelve.”
“Why, he turns into a pumpkin at noon?”
“No, but his office closes then and he might go off with Peg and the dogs. I need to talk to him.”
“Well, whatever you said to that bird worked. I slept better than I have in days. And Grandma says the birders aren’t a problem anymore. They’re all too afraid of getting robbed or having their identities stolen. Everyone else is out looking at the shipwreck and watching for new kinds of dolphins.”
“I’ll take the signs down, then, so we don’t scare off any farm stand customers.”
Before that, I made calls and left messages: Could my father have meant hypnosis? Did my mother have enough homes for the greyhounds, because the guy here wasn’t suitable? And Grant again, a long-distance, long message about Martha and monsters and where the hell was he? Then I gathered some old leashes—my supposed reason for calling on Matt—and headed for the door, without Little Red.
“Sorry, pal, but I don’t trust the big pups yet.” Actually, I didn’t trust Little Red not to pick a fight he couldn’t win. The phone rang while I broke a wait-here dog biscuit in pieces for him.
Speak of the devil. Or the devilishly appealing. Matt called me. He needed me. He wanted my company. I put the leashes back in the drawer.
He sounded desperate. “She keeps crying. I told her to make herself at home, she cried. She came to the office, saw a sick cat, and cried. I said the dogs are doing fine, even Mollie, she cried. Frankie wants to show her his new Land Rover, she cried. I need to get out of here before I strangle her, or start crying myself. Let Frankie hand her tissues all afternoon.”
I was laughing, and glowing.
“It’s not funny. I’m running out of tissues. And bedding. More company arrives tomorrow, and I never bought any sheets or blankets for the second guest room. Will you help me?”
“Only if you’ll come with me to a haunted house.”
“Great. That’s my kind of woman. No dinner, no movie. So far we’ve been to a swamp, a sea rescue, and now we’re chasing sheets and specters. You’re a cheap date, lady. I thought I’d have to bribe you with an ice cream cone at least.”
“That, too.” This was a date? To buy bedding for his company? “So who’s coming?”
A marine biologist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute was on the way, an old friend from vet school. An expert in the field, she was coming about the new dolphins.
She? I should help pick out sheets for an old college buddy who happens to be female? How about cheap ones that scratched and tore when you moved your toes? Or blankets that gave you rashes if you didn’t wash the dye out first? Yup, ugly jealousy ripped through me again and I almost said I didn’t want to go with him, anywhere. Maybe I understood my mother for the first time in my life. She always accused my father of being unfaithful, even when he swore he wasn’t. They’d split up eventually, after screaming at each other for years, which might be why I ended up in a shrink’s office. Did she love him so much she thought every other woman in the world wanted him? A pot-bellied executive? She definitely believed he wanted them.
Maybe I should back out now while I still had a chance, and a spark of sanity. However—I try not to use “however” in my books; too old-fashioned for my readers—however, he intended the marine mammal expert to sleep in her own bed, in a separate room. And I needed him to go to Shearwater Street with me. And I refused to become my mother.
“So are you free?” he asked.
Like a bird, albeit—another word I loved and kids would sneer at—a bird that didn’t know whether it was coming or going. Like Oey. Glub.
I met Matt at his office to save time. The waiting room was empty except for Melissa, who was gathering her purse and keys and sunglasses. Today she wore gray, head to toe: gray tights under a short gray piece of fabric that hardly qualified as a skirt, and a loose gray cross-under-the-boobs blouse that looked like a shroud. Her black hair still had its limp white streaks except, today, silver showed at the tips and temples. She wore heavy black eyeliner, and had heavy dark circles under her eyes. Either she’d given up on the skunk look and decided to go trick or treating as a raccoon, or she hadn’t slept in days.
“Are you all right?”
“What’s it to you?”
Whoa, a rabid raccoon. I backed away. “Sorry, you just look tired.”
She slammed a drawer shut. “It’s this shit job. Dogs messing in the lobby, having to commute to Hampton Bays in the stupid traffic. Now this dork town is all filled with porpoises and stranded passengers. Who gives a rat’s ass?”
“There’s a lost professor, too. We’re searching everywhere. Here, maybe if you look at this picture, you can recognize the faucets. You might have gone to a party there or something.”
Melissa shoved past me without looking. “You can shove it up your—”
Matt came out from the back. “Hey, Sissy, no call to be so rude. Two of my clients grumbled about you this morning.”
“Those jerkoffs can all go fu—”
I broke in before things got uglier. “‘Sissy’?”
Matt tried to put his arm around her. She cringed, but stayed beside him. I guess she needed the job, jerkoffs or not.
“Her baby brother couldn’t say Melissa, so he called her sis, or sissy. It stuck.”
“Like a piece of dog shit on your shoe. No one outside the family uses it, so don’t get any ideas.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.” You euthanized ani
mals with rabies; you did not make pets out of them. “Melissa’s too pretty. Sweet, like in mellifluous.” And Sissy Kovick didn’t sound half as hip as Melissa tried to be.
Matt squeezed her shoulder. “I told her lack of sleep is making her grouchy, but she’s young. Kids party. We forget.”
We forgot a lot, these days. Like I forgot to warn her about Axel Vanderman before she flounced out of the office.
Matt shut the door behind her and put the closed sign out. “Whew. I guess she’s not happy here, so far away from her friends and all. She seemed content last month when she was dating some guy, excited even. He broke up with her last week. Poor kid.”
“What kind of man wants to put up with that kind of— That is, did you meet the guy?”
“No, they always met near Hampton Bays. That’s what she told me.”
“Well, it’s only for a few more months if she’s going back to college in January. And maybe she’ll get over him by then.”
“I’ll miss her.”
Now that’s kinship loyalty, missing the wormy apple on your family tree. “Um-hmm.”
He knew I didn’t see any big loss. “She’s great at the patient records and payrolls and bank accounts. I’ll have to hire both a receptionist and a part-time bookkeeper when she leaves.”
“Yeah, but you’ll keep all your clients, which is more than I can say if Melissa stays.”
“She’ll get over her disappointment long before then. You’ll see a different kid when she does.”
Sure, maybe she’ll be human by then. “So which first, sheets or search for Professor Harmon?”
“You really think he’s alive? And in Paumanok Harbor? It’s a long way from Montauk, not even on the same body of water as where the boat rolled over.”
“I know, but we’ve got to look.”
“Then let’s do that first so you can relax.”
How could I relax if we didn’t find the professor? We needed him. I tried to explain it to Matt while he drove, how the wave was no wave, how the dolphins weren’t real, how Oey’d tried to warn us. How the sea god’s enemy could wipe out Paumanok Harbor in one tsunami. How the local psychics showed me the professor lived.
