Unveiled

by Ruth Vincent

  Reggie’s caterpillar eyebrows furrowed, and he nodded thoughtfully. I did too.

  “Mrs. Sheffield, how do you envision us being able to help?” I asked gently. “What would you want us to do that these other professionals haven’t been able to?”

  Brenda looked slightly askance at me for speaking up, maybe because of my youth, but Reggie was nodding approvingly. He always encouraged me to take a lead in these conversations.

  She was silent.

  “If you think your daughter is depressed . . .” I started, but she cut me off.

  “I don’t think it’s like that.”

  I glanced at Reggie, and we exchanged a look. Depression sounded exactly what it was like.

  “She’s never been like this before,” Brenda went on.

  “Depression can strike at any time,” I said, but Brenda cut me off again.

  “No, what I meant is”—she pursed her lips—“I think she’s on some sort of drugs. She started seeing a new boyfriend, right before the change occurred. I think he gave her something. How else would someone who was an honors student, class president, outgoing, social, just suddenly change overnight?”

  Reggie steepled his fingers.

  “I understand your concern, Brenda,” he said diplomatically. “Have you taken your daughter to a medical professional, gotten her tested for drugs?”

  Brenda gazed out the window at the steam billowing up from the pipes on the roof below. She was silent for a moment. “I performed a home test.”

  “Your daughter consented to that?” Reggie asked, one caterpillar eyebrow raising.

  Brenda bit her lip. “Well, no. But it was for her own good.”

  Reggie must have seen the frown on my face, because he shot me a look that said, Stay silent, don’t judge her. I could tell by the furrowing of his brows that he didn’t approve of Quinn’s mother drug testing her daughter without the girl’s permission either. Reggie seemed like the kind of dad who would have just talked to his daughter, like my human dad would have. It was one of the things I liked about him. But he stayed silent.

  Much as I wanted to speak, I bit my tongue too. I’d seen too many people hurt by things done “for their own good,” without asking them. But I let Reggie continue.

  “All the tests came back negative,” Brenda said.

  “Well, then,” Reggie began, but she interrupted him.

  “It might have been something the test didn’t cover. I mean, the home kits only test for a few things.”

  Reggie crossed his arms over his chest. I did too.

  Brenda looked at both of us desperately. “Call it a mother’s intuition,” she said, breaking the silence, “but I know something is wrong. My daughter is under the influence of something. This isn’t normal behavior for her. She’s always been this bright, bubbly, vivacious girl. Now”—her voice began to crack, and I could tell there were more tears behind it—“it’s like she’s dead, going through the motions of being alive.”

  The raw pain and love behind this woman’s airy, feminine voice took me aback. I genuinely felt for her, and wanted to help her and Quinn.

  “So, what exactly would you like us to do?” I said at last.

  Brenda hung her head. She was silent for a long moment, and that pink flush of shame crept back over her cheeks.

  “I want you to do what you do best.”

  I was about to ask what that was, but I was afraid I already knew the answer. I frowned.

  Finally, Brenda summoned up the nerve to say it out loud.

  “I want you to spy on her.”

  Seeing the look on my face, she backpedaled. “I want you to see if she’s taking anything, see if there’s any substance involved. For her own health and safety.”

  The reasons behind this spying were noble, but still, I bit my lip.

  Reggie’s eyebrows furrowed. We were private detectives; this kind of work was our bread and butter. Hanging out in parked cars outside of buildings, watching for visitors, going through trash cans, planting spy cams. But it was one thing to do it on a cheating spouse, or someone suspected of insurance fraud. I’d never done it for a parent on a child before. It made me queasy, and I could tell by Reggie’s eyes it bothered him too.

  At last he spoke.

  “Brenda, I say what I’m about to say because I think it’s in your daughter’s best interest. I think you should take her to another doctor, someone who really specializes in substance abuse, or a drug treatment center, something like that, before you hire us. Look, I’m turning down potential work by saying this, but it would be unconscionable not to. Can’t you just talk to your daughter? Ask her what’s wrong?”

  “Don’t you think I’ve tried?” Brenda said again. “I’ve tried to take her to doctors, counselors, programs. She won’t leave her room; she won’t leave her bed. Her father and I have picked her up and literally carried her to the car and driven her there, but she won’t talk. We can’t force her. The last resort is calling someone to commit her, and I won’t do that to my daughter, I won’t!”

  She was on the verge of crying again, and I bit my lip.

  Clearly Reggie had been won over too.

  “Alright, we’ll see what we can do. Can we come over to your home and speak with your daughter directly?”

  He paused, and all the breath rushed out of me at his next words. “I would like my colleague, Mabily Jones, to interview her, one-on-one. I wouldn’t be there; it would be just Mabily.”

  He still wanted me to lead the investigation? He was trusting me to handle a case like this all by myself? I wanted to jump out of my chair and hug him, but in deference to Mrs. Sheffield’s pain, I stayed silent.

  Brenda, however, did not sound pleased. “I assumed you would be conducting the investigation,” she fluttered, looking at Reggie. I could tell my youth and inexperience bothered her.

  “Ms. Jones is only a few years older than your daughter. Quinn might relate to her more as a peer. She might be more likely to open up and talk to her than she would be to somebody like me.” Reggie gestured to his fifty-something-year-old frame. “You and me aren’t exactly of her generation.” He smiled at Brenda, and she gave a tense nod, but her expression towards me softened.

  “Ms. Jones may be a junior P.I., but she has already proven herself on cases of a highly sensitive nature,” said Reggie, and I flushed with pride.

  “I’d be happy to have you come speak to my daughter,” Brenda acquiesced at last.

  “When would be convenient?” I asked.

  Brenda sighed. “She never leaves her room, so I guess one time is as good as another. Tomorrow? Could you come tomorrow morning?”

  I nodded.

  “We live in West Tulip, New Jersey,” said Brenda. “I can pick you up at the train station.”

  We said our goodbyes to Brenda, who looked visibly softer than when she came in. She put on her designer sunglasses, like a mask to hide her emotion from the world, and bid us a stiff farewell.

  Reggie and I waited in silence, watching on the security camera as she got into the elevator and exited onto the street.

  Then he turned to me.

  “So what do you think is really going on here?”

  I pinched my lip. I had some ideas, but they were just that, ideas, without proof. “I’ll need to go see her to know anything for sure.”

  Reggie nodded sagely. “I think her mom could be on to something about the drug thing. She’s right that, without knowing what type of drug to test for, she’s not going to have luck with a home test. What if it’s something uncommon, like that drug you found at that club last year? That stuff was crazy. To think that there are things like that out there, that we don’t even know about.”

  I gulped. The NYPD’s lab had found the vials of Elixir—i.e., fairy magic—at Obadiah’s club, and were still studying it, thinking it was a new narcotic. No one knew what to think of the mysterious substance that had made lab mice levitate. Who knew what they were going to find if they kept examining it?
But I stayed silent.

  “What we have to do,” Reggie continued, “is get some kind of photographic evidence. Get video of the boyfriend slipping her something, or whatever. Plant a spy-cam.”

  “Is that legal?” I asked. “To spy on someone in their own home without their permission?”

  Reggie shrugged, his expression saying without words that everything we did as private eyes fell into that great legal gray area.

  “It’s not illegal,” he said. “Jersey is a ‘one party consent state.’”

  I scowled.

  “But is it right? How is it any different than drug testing her without her consent?”

  It was bold of me to be arguing with my boss like this, but Reggie respected that I had my own opinions and voiced them, and I respected him for respecting that.

  “You’re right, it’s not different, but we weren’t the ones who did that. Personally, I can sympathize with her mother’s motivations. If something doesn’t change, this kid could die. We’d be helping her.”

  Helping, yeah, I’d heard that line before.

  The whole case made me slightly queasy. Maybe it just reminded me too much of the way the Fairy Queen spied on me.

  I stared out at the window at the steam rising from the pipes of the building roof across the street, silently thinking.

  Reggie’s voice startled me out of my thoughts. “I hope it was okay I volunteered you to go out there. But I wanted you to know, I trust you on your own. I think this case is perfect for you. Maybe this kid will open up to you. If it is the boyfriend, she’s not going to open up about her love life to some old geezer like me, or to her mom. Maybe she’ll confess to you about whatever this new boyfriend has been doing, and you won’t even have to do any spying. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Nice, yes. Likely to happen? Probably not. But I gave Reggie a thin-lipped smile.

  “Her mother seems like a real piece of work.” Reggie sighed. “But the poor woman is beside herself. I get it. I’d be going nuts if it was my daughter.”

  I glanced over at the photo on Reggie’s desk of Nicole Ruggiero, who had to be about the same age as Quinn. I’d never met the girl, but I’d seen a lot of pictures. She looked just like her father: the same dark, Italian eyes, the same prominent nose, though if she had the same eyebrows, they’d been plucked, waxed or threaded into near oblivion. She had a beaming grin on her face in this photo, just like in all others.

  I glanced back at Reggie. I think he saw his daughter in every one of these cases that involved a young woman. He always told me we couldn’t get personally invested in our cases—“That’s death,” he’d say. But I think he violated that rule about as often as the crew of Star Trek violates the Prime Directive.

  And so I found myself caring about this girl, Quinn, too, who, I supposed, wasn’t that different from me.

  “Well, I’ll go out there, talk to her and see what I can do,” I said. The lack of a concrete plan made me nervous. Reggie had more faith in my abilities than I did in myself. But I had to try.

  “Great. I’ll get the paperwork started.” I rose from my chair.

  “Hey, your first case on your own,” Reggie said brightly. There was something almost paternal about the pride in his smile.

  My first real case on my own. I hoped I didn’t screw this up. I was afraid I would. But more than that, I was afraid I would have to leave before seeing it through. Dammit, now was a really terrible time to go back to the Vale. But the Fairy Queen’s note on the knife said things were getting worse. How much time did I have?

  I sighed, rubbing my brow as I walked back to the makeshift desk Reggie had set up for me since I’d officially started here. Staring at the familiar piles of paper, a thought occurred to me. I tried to dismiss it, but it wouldn’t go away, buzzing around like a fly in my mind.

  I could hear Brenda Sheffield’s words in my head: It’s like she’s dead, going through the motions of being alive.

  That sounded a whole lot like a Fetch. The Fairy Queen always replaced the human children she kidnapped with Fetches—copies made of enchanted wood that looked alive but weren’t. I’d been the only exception, the only live changeling replacement. But Quinn was twenty-one, far too old to be a stolen child. And it wasn’t like when the Queen had briefly replaced Eva with a Fetch to get my attention. Quinn had no connection to me. The Fairy Queen would have no motive for messing up her life. Would she?

  I turned back to the pile of paperwork in front of me. The events of the past year were making me see every case in a supernatural light, even the ones that were just plain old grunt detective work. I’d gotten burned personally and now I was trigger-shy. I’d never forget the sight of that living corpse in the hospital bed that looked like Eva but wasn’t, alive and yet lifeless. And that was the way Brenda described Quinn: listless, silent, catatonic.

  But those could all also be symptoms of severe depression. That was a much likelier cause. Or substance abuse, like her mother and Reggie suspected. If the symptoms started after seeing the new boyfriend, it very well could have something to do with him. Either the guy wasn’t good for her and was having this negative effect on her emotions, or he was giving her something that was making her this way.

  Still, I couldn’t let go of the thought that maybe this “overnight” change in Quinn’s personality could have a magical origin. Probably my own paranoia, but it was worth ruling out. If she was a Fetch, we didn’t have much time.

  There was only one way to find out. And that was to go out to West Tulip, meet the girl and see for myself. If I could look in her eyes, touch her skin, talk to her, I could tell whether she was real or a copy. That was the only way to know. And Reggie was right, though he didn’t know it: this was one area of our work that I was uniquely suited for, and no one else. I felt like I could never escape my supernatural life, even when I tried to bury my head in my human one. I tried to dismiss the thought, and instead focus on looking up train schedules from Penn Station to West Tulip, but I couldn’t quell the growing feeling of unease this case was giving me. It was just reminding me of the fact that I was living in the human world on borrowed time. Sometime, and soon, I had to go home.

  When I got back from work that evening, Obadiah was already there waiting for me. I’d given him his own key; we were at that point now, and Eva didn’t mind. She was thrilled for us, even though she made a great show of pretending to gag whenever we acted ultra-lovey-dovey around each other. When I opened the door and saw him, lounging awkwardly in the tiny IKEA dining room chairs that were much too small for his tall frame, my heart leapt. It didn’t matter how many times I saw him, there was still that rush when his eyes met mine. He got up from the chair, walked over to me and folded me into his arms. I leaned into him, pressing my cheek against his leather jacket, closing my eyes and inhaling the spice of his cologne. He leaned down; I lifted my face, hungrily reaching for his mouth. His stubble was a delightful prickle against my lips. He gave me a playful bit of tongue, and when we pulled back for air, we were both smiling.

  “How was your day, love?” he asked, and the warm, melty feeling that came over me whenever he called me “love” crept over me, like maple sugar in my soul.

  “Good. Reggie’s putting me on a new case. He wants me to do this one on my own.”

  I set down my purse and sat at the table while Obadiah went to fetch two hard ciders from the fridge, the perfect thing on a warm September evening.

  He poured them into glasses for both of us, and I relayed to him our whole conversation with Brenda about Quinn.

  “It makes me nervous,” I said at last.

  “Why?” he asked.

  I frowned, watching the tiny gold bubbles rise to burst on the surface of my glass.

  “Because it’s spying. It’s wrong.”

  “You’re a P.I.,” he countered gently. “Isn’t spying what you do?”

  “Yeah, but it’s one thing when it’s cheating spouses, or stalking exes or insurance fraud or whatever. Those pe
ople are adults at least.”

  “Twenty-one is technically an adult,” Obadiah said. But I shot him a look.

  “Come on. Almost no one acts like an adult at twenty-one. Plus, a parent spying on their grown child?” I frowned.

  “Does it remind you too much of what your mother did to you? What she’s probably still doing right now?”

  My stomach went cold at his words, and I pushed my cider away. I was still unnerved by how that knife had appeared on my pillow. I hadn’t seen a floater in my eye, the telltale sign that the Fairy Queen was watching me via one of her pixie spies. But she or one of her minions had obviously visited without my knowledge or permission. I was never completely out of her control, and it made it feel like there was a leash on my free will. Quinn’s case rubbed at that old sore, because we were acting like her own personal Fairy Queen.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I admitted. “But it’s different. This case is temporary. We’ll observe, learn and leave. It’s not for life, not like with me.”

  “True.” Obadiah nodded. “So, are you going to go out there?”

  “Tomorrow. She’s out in West Tulip.” I grimaced. I didn’t like the suburbs of New York, all those perfectly manicured lawns, the too-large houses, the big empty space of it all. It felt cold, in a way the warm, pulsing life of the city never did. Still, it was one day. I didn’t have to live out there. I wondered if being stuck in a suburban house in the middle of New Jersey with one’s parents would be enough to make anyone depressed. I adored my human parents, but I would have gone mad if I was still stuck living with them out in Grover Heights.

  “You got any tips for my interview?” I asked Obadiah. He was good with this sort of thing. I sort of wished he could come with me. But Reggie would never allow that.

  “Be yourself.”

  I rolled my eyes at the cliché.

  “No, seriously. And make sure the parents are out of the room, and not listening at the door either, when you interview her. This girl has had her privacy violated a lot. I’m sure her level of trust isn’t high. You’ll have to earn it.”