Borderline

by Mishell Baker

I could feel a headache starting just behind my left eye. “Well, he is missing, and we think Claybriar may have hurt him, so we need to know everything we can about him.”

  “I don’t know anything about the viscount.”

  “No, I meant Claybriar. I need to know about Claybriar.”

  “I’m sorry, I get confused because you keep saying ‘him’ like it’s a person.”

  “He seemed like a person when I talked to him.”

  “It’s a facade,” she said as though I were the stupidest thing ever to crawl out from under a log.

  “Just tell me what Claybriar wanted with you. Why he was in the bar.”

  “It had misplaced some commoners or something. That was how I smelled something rotten. Why would anyone care if a few commoners went missing?”

  Missing persons again, just like “Officer Clay” had mentioned. This had to relate to his mission for the Queen.

  “Apparently the Queen cares about at least one of them.”

  “She has to pretend she does, or they band together and loot and murder and it gets so ugly. Orange?”

  I held up my hand in a sharp no thank you gesture, fighting the surge of fury that clenched my jaw. When dealing with the unknown, it’s important not to assume that it parallels the known. I was 80 percent sure Foxfeather was full of shit about commoners, but 80 percent wasn’t enough to justify choking the magic out of her right there in her kitchen.

  “Anything else you remember?”

  “It used your language well,” she said, “so it obviously comes here a lot.”

  I watch too much TV, I suddenly remembered him saying at the coffee shop. I felt a weird twist in my gut. I should have known he was fey by the ridiculous amount of sugar in his drink.

  “Did he say anything about when these commoners went missing? Was it all at once, or one at a time? How many are missing? Anything you can remember will be a huge help to the Arcadia Project, and to your Queen.”

  To her credit, she really did seem to be trying hard to remember. She frowned, and her eyes crossed slightly. “It came in, looking not very pretty, but nice dark hair. It ordered cherry-­pomegranate juice. Talking, talking, talking, missing commoners, it held up its paw like this”— here she splayed her hand out in my face, sticky with orange juice—“then it said bad things about the viscount, so I peeked at its real face. Then I kicked it out. I was mad. I carved it into the bar, but then I forgot to set the bar on fire. It’s still a very nice carving.”

  I turned to Teo, splaying my hand in the same gesture Foxfeather had made. “The hand might mean five missing. He only mentioned one girl when he was pretending to be a cop, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that five is the same number of fey that have been half counted on the census for weeks. I think the Queen’s trying to figure out where they’ve gone.”

  Teo studied Foxfeather for a moment. “My lady,” he said, “do you know of any way, or any place, where a fey could be both here and in Arcadia at the same time? Like, stuck in transit?”

  Foxfeather laughed. “No, silly. That would be like falling halfway down a hole. Sideways.” She tilted her body charmingly at a near right angle and smiled. “One time, I held on to the edge of the Gate just for fun, but it stopped being fun very fast.”

  “No arguments here,” I mumbled.

  Teo caught my eye and gestured with his head toward the door, then looked back at Foxfeather. “If you hear or remember anything else, do you know how to contact our office?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Are you leaving?”

  “For now,” said Teo.

  “Come back if you want sex later.”

  I looked at Teo.

  “Not a word from you,” he said, and left.

  I followed. “How do you know Foxfeather isn’t your Echo?”

  “I shook her hand the first time we met; I’d have felt it.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “I don’t know, because it wasn’t her. Come on, let’s stop by the bar while we’re on this side of town.”

  The Seelie bar wasn’t quite open for business yet, but neither was it locked. I supposed the ward removed worries about people wandering in and looting the place.

  Even without all the lights on, the colors of the paint and fabric and glass were breathtaking. The wooden bar, as Foxfeather had suggested, was embellished with new carvings, all of them masterpieces. I’m not sure what Teo expected to find there, though. Foxfeather’s homage to the Very Bad Faun was an impressive work of art, but there were no clues to be found in it. The figure was carved from memory by a woman who admitted to a bad memory, and who had only glimpsed Claybriar’s true face for a moment.

  The portrait reminded me of Mr. Tumnus in my childhood copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, minus the umbrella and parcels. Hadn’t Tumnus been a traitor too? Despite an elongated jaw, the face in the carving could have passed for human. Foxfeather had carved him with a vapid expression, but I didn’t read much into that. Was he awkward? Yes. Stupid? Not that I could tell.

  I snapped a photo of the carving with my phone, for what it was worth, and then we stopped by the sushi place. Jeff, the guy who’d supposedly spoken to the “cop” about John Riven, wasn’t working that day, but I left my number for him and stressed that it was very important. I wasn’t holding my breath for a call back, though. I was not the kind of girl whose number guys wanted.

  • • •

  When I arrived back at the Residence, Tjuan was pacing the living room. “Did you see him?” he greeted us.

  “See who?” said Teo.

  “Black guy sitting in a car about half a block down,” said Tjuan. “Been there an hour at least.”

  “You think he’s staking us out or something?” said Teo dubiously.

  “He doesn’t live around here. I went for a run an hour ago, heard his door locks click when I went by. He’s still there.”

  “What kind of car?” Teo asked.

  “Old Taurus. But I looked in when I heard the locks, and he was dressed like some Beverly Hills bullshit.”

  I didn’t get why a nicely dressed black man sitting in a car was a big deal, honestly, but I wasn’t about to tell Mr. Hostility that he was being paranoid, especially since that might be part of his actual diagnosis. I went into the kitchen for a snack while he and Teo hashed it out. I was on my way back to the living room, banana in hand, when a knock sounded on the front door. Tjuan and Teo and I all looked at one another, me with a mouthful of banana.

  Tjuan eased his way to the front door and very carefully peeked through the curtain. He turned back to us as though he’d seen a ghost.

  “It’s him,” he said. “He’s here.”

  “Well,” said Teo, “should we answer it?”

  “Fuck that,” said Tjuan. “Locking his doors when I go by. Cheap car, nice clothes. This smells bad. Don’t open the door.” He looked genuinely panicked, more so than I felt the situation warranted.

  Teo held his palms out. “Settle down, Tjuan. I think you’re having one of your ‘moments.’ Let me have a look.”

  While Teo peeked out the curtain, Tjuan paced and took slow breaths. I felt an unexpected surge of sympathy for him.

  “From the clothes,” said Teo, “he’s either selling something or preaching, and either way he can fuck off.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, you two,” I blurted, and made my way to the door, cane thumping on the hardwood, banana still in hand. “Let’s at least find out what he wants. I’m perfectly ­capable of slamming the door in his face if he tries to sell me a Bible.”

  I stuck the banana in my mouth to free a hand, opened the door, and sighed. There comes a point where surprises start to get tedious. It was the driver of the BMW from the PCH.

  I popped the banana out of my mouth. “Relax, guys,” I said over my shoulder. �
��It’s just the paparazzi.”

  “Paparazzi do not ring the doorbell,” said the man on the porch. His voice had an effeminate Ivy League snobbery to it that set my teeth instantly on edge. “I’m Ellis Barnes,” he said. “I expect that name is familiar to you?”

  It really wasn’t. “I’ve had a rough morning,” I said, still standing in a small wedge of open door between him and the interior of the house. “I’d appreciate a memory jog.”

  “I was so sure you’d know me,” he said. “A fellow private eye, working for A-list Hollywood clients, you really should be more familiar with your competition.” His tone was mocking, his words too on-the-nose. He knew I wasn’t a private eye.

  “You’re the guy working for Inaya,” I said. “What do you want?”

  32

  “May I come in?” said Ellis Barnes, PI.

  “This isn’t my house,” I said, not budging from the doorway. “I don’t have the right to let you in, and I don’t think my friends are too keen on meeting you. State your business and let’s keep this brief.”

  “I want to know why you called my client and why you lied to her about who you are.”

  “It’s true I’m not a licensed PI,” I admitted, “but I never explicitly said that I was. I am working for Berenbaum and trying to track down John Riven, and that’s really more than you have any need to know.”

  “I’m investigating Riven too,” said Ellis slowly, an odd expression on his face. “It seems as though we could help each other.”

  “Things aren’t always what they seem. Anyway, I thought you were tailing Berenbaum, not Riven. What was that about this morning, with the screenplay?”

  Ellis sighed. “My brother-in-law. He’s obsessed with Beren­baum and likes to tag along when I do surveillance of him. I finally let him make contact because I wanted to get a better read on the relationship between the two of you. I’ll confess I’m intrigued. If Berenbaum were having an affair, he’d hardly flaunt it. So what’s going on there?”

  “I’ve already told you more than I need to.”

  “What if I had something to tell you in exchange, about John Riven?”

  “I have the feeling that between the two of us, I’m probably the one with better dirt on Riven.”

  I heard a hissing noise from behind me and turned to see Teo making a slicing motion across his throat. I made a face at him and turned back to Ellis.

  Ellis said, “Does your ‘dirt’ include his whereabouts last night?”

  I blinked. “No, and neither does yours.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Ellis said with a smile. “All right then. I’ll leave you to your day. Here’s my card if you decide you want to talk.” He held it out, and I just glared at him, leaning on my cane. Unfazed, he smiled wider and left the card on the arm of the moldering love seat on the front porch. “Stay in touch,” he said.

  I waited until he had driven away, then took the card, went back inside, and bolted the door behind me.

  Tjuan had apparently left during my conversation, but Teo was half sitting on the arm of the nearest couch, his eyes narrowed. “What did that dude mean, asking you if you knew where Rivenholt was last night?”

  I shrugged. “He needs info about Berenbaum, so he’s trying to get me to slip some. First he weakens me with guilt, then tempts me with dirt. If I weren’t such a stubborn cuss, I’d probably be eating out of his hand.”

  “What if it’s for real?”

  I rolled my eyes. “He left his card. Take it if you want to call him.” I held it out, but he didn’t take it, so I stuck it in my pocket. “You know, maybe you and I should straighten out who’s Good Cop and who’s Bad Cop.”

  Teo made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Until now, I would have said there was no one in the world who would be worse at Good Cop than me. Whatever. I’m gonna go have a smoke.”

  “Isn’t that against house rules?”

  “I’m not going to smoke in the house, and I don’t keep ’em in the house. If Caryl wants to make a thing out of it, she can change the wording in the contract.”

  “Hey, Teo, before you go . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s probably against the rules to ask, but . . .”

  “Spit it out.”

  “Why does Tjuan hate me so much?”

  Teo stared at me for a second, then laughed. “You’re kidding, right? The dude’s got massive trust issues. When I first moved here, it took him three months to even answer when I said hi.” He shook his head, walking away. “Not everything’s about you, mija. Really gotta get that into your head.”

  After Teo left, I allowed myself a few moments to enjoy the peace and quiet and have a few crackers from the kitchen. The place was a little spooky when not populated, even in the daytime. The cracks in the bathroom tiles, the water stains on the dining room ceiling, the sun discoloration on the carpet by the sliding glass door: all symptoms of a house that wasn’t cared for by its owner. I felt a little sorry for it.

  I had just stuffed a handful of crackers in my mouth when I turned and saw Gloria in the kitchen doorway, staring at me with a look of naked contempt.

  I coughed, spraying crumbs. “Uh, hi there,” I said.

  She smiled, sweet as antifreeze. “Does Caryl know you have plans to become a celebrity?” she said.

  “Beg pardon?” I yanked a paper towel off the roll and attended to the mess I’d made.

  “You’re all over the paparazzi sites,” she said. “Cuddling with David Berenbaum in his convertible. What’s that all about, hon?”

  I froze, feeling my hands go cold. As always, my first reaction to anyone talking to me in that tone was shame, as though I, and not the paparazzi, were guilty of something. I took a moment to talk myself down so I didn’t go into a full-on panic attack. All I was guilty of, as far as I could see, was being interesting enough to be photographed. So just exactly what was Gloria’s problem?

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “He and I hit it off. It’s perfectly innocent.”

  If anything her smile got frostier. “Shall we expect you to be starring in your own reality show soon?” she drawled. “Or do you think you’ve maybe attracted enough attention to the Arcadia Project for now?”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I didn’t really think it through.”

  “And just what good is ‘sorry’ going to do if the paparazzi start camping on our doorstep? Is there anything else you ­haven’t thought through that we should maybe know about before it shows up all over the Internet?”

  My pulse accelerated. By the grace of Dr. Davis I managed to keep it together, though I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking or think of anything clever to say. In my directing days I could have won a shouting match with a howler monkey, and now I was trembling at a few sugarcoated rhetorical questions.

  “What exactly is it you’d like me to do?” I said as calmly as I could.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “I e-mailed some of the worst links to Caryl. I normally keep out of this kind of stuff, but ever since I heard about what you did to Teo, I’ve been keeping my eye on you. I don’t take kindly to people who mistreat that boy, so you’d better step real carefully from here on out, hon.”

  “I—what?” Mistreating Teo? She must have meant the time I hit him, but who had told her? And she was full of shit anyway; she’d been trying to cut me down to size from minute one. But before I could retort in any coherent manner, she’d already made her exit.

  I used my good knee to deliver a weak kick to the kitchen cabinet, leaning both hands on the counter. Venting anger is a hard thing to do when you have no one to yell at and very little kicking power. I fumbled through Dr. Davis’s exercises in my mind, but it was hard because I was dealing with anger and panic at the same time. Through my Borderline filter, everyone in the house had turned against me
and was plotting to bring me down. All it takes is a fragment or two of evidence, and my mind leaps to join dots that aren’t there, constructing a picture of conspiracy that is almost impossible to unsee.

  My attempts at calming myself with DBT skills were not working, at least not fast enough to satisfy me. So I answered that frantic little voice saying do something, fix it, fix it, and called Berenbaum. Another bad move straight out of the What-Not-to-Do Handbook. Never, ever call someone important when you’re having a spell of “intense episodic dysphoria,” as the DSM-V calls it.

  Araceli put me through to Berenbaum without a lot of fuss, but he didn’t sound as warm as I wanted—no, needed—him to sound. It was probably because of work, my Reason Mind should have prompted, but my paranoid Emotion Mind was making everything about me.

  “What can I do for you?” he said.

  “I don’t want to work for the Arcadia Project anymore,” I said. It was by far the least crazy thing I could have said under the circumstances. Perhaps Dr. Davis’s lessons in self-control were buried somewhere in my subconscious after all.

  “You’ll want to set up a meeting with Vivian,” he said.

  Not what I wanted to hear. Very much not.

  “I’ve met her before. We didn’t get along.”

  “She doesn’t get along with anyone. But she will play ball on this, I guarantee. She’s been desperate for someone who can mediate between the studio and the Project.”

  “Can you call her and set something up?”

  “I would, but I’m up to my ass in a new pile of alligators. Crocodiles, too, and I think there’s a Komodo dragon in there somewhere. Are those things poisonous? Besides, you need to make the call, because you have to get her to promise not to cause you harm.”

  “Oh, I always do that when I set up job interviews.”

  He laughed, thank God. I could feel all the tension draining out of me like he’d stuck me with a pin. “Just be sure you say it like that, ‘cause me harm,’ not ‘hurt me.’”

  “Why?”

  “Well, if she somehow causes an anvil to fall on your head, technically it’s the anvil, not her, that hurts you.”