"Mur!"
"Yes, I know, quite terrible of me, isn't it?" She finished rinsing and came out of the shower, drying herself briskly, and rubbing her hair almost completely dry with a towel, before combing it. Judging by the drip-drip-drip sounds from outside the bedroom window and the brilliant sunshine which had disturbed her sleep, the weather had turned some sort of corner. Which was very good, because she didn't think she could go outside with damp hair, otherwise. She had vague visions of doing that and having her hair freeze to her head as a large, unwieldy mass.
While she was home, she should grab a couple of hats for herself and Tom, she thought, as she slid into jeans, a red sweatshirt that was probably originally Tom's, but which she'd claimed by rights of laundress, and had been wearing for the last two months. The man never wore long sleeve shirts, anyway. Just his T-shirts under his black leather jacket.
She put her shoes on and told Not Dinner, "Now, Notty, try to be good. I'll ask the lady to bring you some food, until we can buy you some kitten cans."
"Mur?" he followed her to the door with the dancing step of young, overconfident kittens and seemed terribly disappointed that she wasn't willing to let him follow her outside. An ill-fated last minute rush at the door made her grab him in her hand—where he fit, fairly comfortably, then toss him into the room, as she quickly shut the door.
She asked the proprietress—a large, maternal woman named Louise—to feed the delinquent and informed her that he was a flight risk. It wasn't till she got to the car that she thought she should have asked Louise for a recommendation to a vet. She would need to get Notty his shots, and she should probably have him microchipped, at least if he had wandering paws.
Perhaps she would ask Rafiel, she thought, and smiled absently. He should know everything there was to know about the care of male felines in this town. But her smile died down, as, maneuvering through the mostly-melted streets, she wondered what Rafiel could possibly want. Oh, he'd said that he wanted to meet her at her house. And he'd said it was because of the bathroom . . .
Or had he said that it was because of the bathroom? Kyrie couldn't remember exactly. She frowned. Was there another reason? He'd sounded so odd over the phone—as if he'd been not so much talking as making modulated breathing sounds. But no . . . that wasn't right either. It was just as if there were no force of vocalization behind his words. No real sound. He'd said he had something in his throat. Like what? An elephant?
A brief image of Rafiel prowling the zoo and taking a big bite off an elephant amused her. And she smiled at herself, but as she entered her neighborhood, she went back to frowning. Rafiel's car wasn't parked on the street. This was like an itch at the back of her mind, an itch to which her brain responded by coming up with lots of reasons for the absence—his car had broken down, and he was borrowing someone else's; he had parked in the driveway; he was late.
But if Rafiel's car had broken down, he was likely as not to let her know in advance, so she would know the car to look for. It wasn't the sort of thing Rafiel forgot. Rafiel was a policeman. Details were his life. And he never parked in the driveway, which was a minuscule comma beside the tiny dot of the house and had barely enough space for Kyrie's subcompact. When Tom worked later and had to drive the diner's van home, he had to park on the street. And not just because he didn't want to block Kyrie in, but because there was no way to park two cars in the driveway without one of them having half of its back wheels on the street.
And besides, as Kyrie got to the driveway, it was empty and wet from melting ice. She started to pull in, while the back of her scalp bunched up. Something is wrong, an inner voice said. Something is very wrong.
But that inner voice was wrong nine times out of ten. Fact was, Kyrie's inner voice was a paranoid patient, and had to be kept carefully locked up in its rubber room, or else she would never hear a sound that wasn't suspicious, she'd never approach a place that didn't feel eerie, and she would spend her entire life running from shadows. Deliberately, she stopped within sight of her kitchen door, and put the car in park, the wheels slightly turned so that—should the car roll down the driveway—it would rest across the bottom of it, instead of slipping out into the street and potentially running into other cars.
Her foot remained on the brake, her hand resting on the keys, her car idling.
Run.
No. No, she wouldn't run. She had run too many times, after she was out of foster care—after she was on her own. Without family or any close friends, with nothing to anchor her down, she had drifted. Convinced she was hideously insane—with her dreams of turning into a panther, her secret fears of eating people—she had kept everyone at arm's length and ran every time someone got too close, every time anyone seemed hostile. Every time a shadow waved in the wind. But now she had a place, she had a job, she had Tom. She had something that was hers, and she wasn't running.
She pushed the parking brake in, relishing the feel of it under her foot, the slight grind of its going in. Then she reached for her purse, from the floor of the passenger side of the car. Where was Rafiel? This was so much like him, telling her to come to the house, and then not being here when she got here. And immediately, she scolded herself, because no, it wasn't like Rafiel at all. He was arrogant, not careless. If he said he would be somewhere, he would be there. He might act put out because she hadn't rushed to meet him, unwashed and in robe and slippers, but he would be there.
She bit her lip. Okay. All right. So something had happened. Could be anything. He was on a murder investigation. Perhaps someone had called and told him he had to be at the morgue now. This minute. Or perhaps . . . or perhaps something else had happened. Perhaps he'd had a fender bender. Or something.
A brief image of Rafiel laid out on a hospital bed made her wince. He wouldn't like that. They all tried to stay out of hospitals as much as possible. Besides being a crowded place, with lots of other humans—it would be a mess to shift in—their healing rate would call too much attention.
She reached for her purse, pulled out her phone. She would call him, figure out if anything had happened to him. Help him, if she needed to.
But the phone was dead. Out of batteries. Kyrie caught herself growling under her breath. She could swear she had recharged it last night. Clearly she hadn't.
She resisted an impulse to throw the phone—with force—across the driveway, and instead put it back in her purse and zipped her purse shut forcefully.
Okay, so Rafiel wasn't here, and she couldn't call him. What then?
She could go back. She could go to The George. It was only five minutes away. She could call Rafiel from there.
But what if he showed up as soon as she drove away? What if it was only a small delay, some administrative thing that kept him back? Then he would be there any second, wouldn't he? And when he got there, he wouldn't find her.
But she could call him.
In five minutes. What if by then he had driven away, furious? Oh, he had no right to be furious. He'd called Kyrie out of the blue. He'd told her to be here. There was no reason at all she should have obeyed him. And he'd said—or at least, he'd agreed—this was about her bathroom. Which meant he wouldn't be coming by alone. He would be with his uncle or cousin, or whoever in his vast tree of relatives was a plumber or a tile layer, or a good enough handyman. And that meant he wouldn't leave in five minutes.
But none of these rational arguments amounted to a hill of beans. After all, Rafiel was all male cat in this one thing, that he could act as capricious as he pleased, and make everyone else seem like they were the irrational ones, the ones who were failing him in some horrible way.
Besides, she realized, she had a phone in the house. Oh, they rarely used it, and in fact Tom had suggested they give it up and go all digital. But his father had protested that it was a number where he always knew he could reach them, even when their cell phones were out of a charge or they were out of range. In fact, it seemed that the phone, on the wall of the kitchen, and possessed of a bu
ilt-in answering machine, mostly existed to take Edward Ormson's messages.
Which didn't mean it couldn't call Rafiel's cell.
Full of new decision, Kyrie got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. The driveway wasn't anywhere near as icy as it had been the night before, which was good. She should probably shovel the walk while she was here. Although most people in Colorado left their snow and ice on the sidewalk and let it merrily accumulate through the cold days, the law, technically, said that they were supposed to shovel within twenty-four hours of a major snowfall. The snow was melting on the sidewalks across the street, but not here, and Kyrie shuddered at the thought of what might happen if the postal carrier slipped and broke a leg on the way to their front door.
She paused at the door to the kitchen, frowning. The door itself was old, much painted, and starting to peel, a layer of red showing beneath the current decaying layer of white paint. It didn't matter, because it was normally covered by a screen door, which had a glass screen, conveniently slid down for winter. Kyrie was sure—as sure as she was of having charged her phone—that Tom had closed that screen door. She remembered him half-skating back through the ice that then covered the driveway to do it. He'd mumbled that otherwise it would probably fold back in the wind and maybe be wrenched off. So, why was the screen door half open now?
Run.
No, nonsense. Probably some weather-defiant Jehovah's Witness had come and opened the screen door to knock. Or perhaps one of their neighbors, worried about the lack of lights in the house had come to check on them. Most of the people in this neighborhood were elderly and retired and took an inordinate interest in Kyrie and Tom because they weren't and perhaps because they reminded them of their grandchildren.
She got her keys from the pocket of her winter coat, and unlocked her door into the kitchen. The house felt empty. It had that cold/empty feel of a house where no one is.
It should feel empty. They'd never given Rafiel a key. They were friends, but normally they met at the diner.
Right. I'll just call the arrogant lion boy, she thought, as she walked the four steps across the kitchen to the phone. But as she picked it up and before she could dial, a smell rose around her.
It was thick, miasmalike, overpowering. Her throat and nose closed. She gagged. It was like . . . like walking into a closed shed at the zoo, where someone had been housing several hundred wild animals.
And then there was the voice, a voice without vocalization behind it, a voice that seemed to come from the phone and yet not, a voice that seemed curiously devoid of sound, "Welcome, Pretty Kitten."
Gasping and gulping, through the horrible smell, Kyrie turned.
Run.
* * *
"Hey, Rafiel," Tom said, as Rafiel walked up to the counter, "I thought you said you'd come by this evening?"
Rafiel shrugged. "I was going to, but I talked to my cousin Mike, and he said that he could go by this afternoon, and I happened to be in the neighborhood, because I have to . . . do some interviews." He looked around. "In relation to the case in the aquarium." Shrug. "So I thought I'd drop by and get the house keys from you."
"All right. If you want to come behind the counter, they're in my jacket pocket under there," he said, as he flipped a couple of burgers. And broke two eggs onto the griddle surface of the new stove. He looked over his shoulder and was amused to see Rafiel gingerly lift the pass-through portion of the counter, as though he was afraid it might be spring-loaded or something. He didn't remember if Rafiel had ever been behind the counter, for all he'd offered to man the diner, just yesterday.
"Yeah," he told Rafiel. "Down there. Just under the edge of the counter. You're going to have to look, because there's Conan's stuff under there too, and there's the time sheet boards. At least there isn't a cat today."
"A cat?"
"Uh . . . Kyrie and I have a cat. I mean, a kitten. He's barely larger than one of the burger buns. Full of himself, though." He heard his own voice become embarrassingly doting, sounding much like the voices of old childless people who dressed their pets in costumes for Halloween and took them out trick or treating. He changed the subject, abruptly, "Hey, why didn't you just go to Kyrie? She's probably awake by now."
"I'm sure she's awake," Rafiel said. "I went by there. The owner—Louise?—said that Kyrie had left to go check on something back home. Yeah, I could have gone by your place, but that was out of my way and this isn't. What?"
The "what" made Tom aware that he was standing there and staring at Rafiel with an idiotic expression on his face. He felt oddly betrayed, and he couldn't have explained to himself why. But the idea of Kyrie going back to their place without telling him made him feel like she had shut him out or something.
Of course, this was very stupid. It wasn't like he and Kyrie lived in each other's pockets, or anything. Sometimes he woke up in the afternoon, and she was gone—gone to the store, or to do laundry or something. Of course, she always left him a note on the table. Of course, that might also be because when she went she took the only vehicle they normally kept at home, and if she wasn't going to be back in time, it meant Tom had to walk to The George.
"Nothing. I just . . ." Tom said, struggling with the feeling of betrayal, and not knowing what to say. "She didn't tell me she was going to go home, that's all."
"No?" Rafiel said, and frowned slightly, his blond eyebrows meeting up above his oddly golden eyes. "Weird."
"Well, not really," Tom said, almost defensively. "I mean, it's not like I own her, or she needs to tell me where she's going to be, or . . ."
"No, but you'd think she'd tell you anyway."
Tom thought perhaps Rafiel thought this meant he and Kyrie had had a falling out, and he wasn't really ready to be a rival with Rafiel for Kyrie's affections, again. He said, "Look, I don't think she means to dump me or anything, it's just . . . I'm guessing she went home because she realized she missed something. We left kind of in a hurry and didn't bring a lot of stuff." Of course, most of that stuff, like their toothbrushes, hairbrushes and most of their toiletries had, presumably, been ground to dust by his shifting in the bathroom.
"Yeah, but you'd think she'd tell you so you could tell her if you needed anything from home, too."
Tom shrugged. "I can walk there, if I do. It's no big deal. I was just surprised, that's all. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong."
"No," Rafiel said. He was still squatting by the space under the counter where they put their jackets and where they stored aprons. He had Tom's jacket in his hands, but he hadn't pulled it out yet. "It's just . . . very weird? I mean, I have this feeling it's weird. I know that I don't know Kyrie as well as you do, that I don't know the . . . patterns of your relationship, like you do. But it seems to me she always tells you when she's not going to be where you expect her. How many times have I been here, talking to you—or at home talking to you, for that matter—and you get a phone call from Kyrie saying she's going to the supermarket or the thrift shop, or the bookstore, and do you want anything. Or she tells you if she's going to have the oil changed, and it's going to take a while."
"So maybe she thought it would be very quick and wasn't worth mentioning," Tom said. But he felt it too, the wrongness of it. He just didn't want Rafiel to start thinking along the Kyrie might be available again and I might have a chance lines. "Anyway, my keys should be in there, righthand pocket. Yeah, that's it. My house key is the simplest one. Yeah. The keys for this place are way more complicated." He watched Rafiel remove the house key from the ring, fold the leather jacket carefully and push it back under the counter.
Meanwhile, Tom assembled two Voracious Student specials, with the double cheeseburgers and the egg and enough fries to sink a small ocean liner, and set them on the counter ringing the bell and announcing "Eighteen and ten."
Conan scurried towards the counter. He was getting better, Tom thought. He was also learning to carry the coffee carafe in his weaker hand. Tom had no idea how much longer it would take for t
he full arm to grow in, and it just now occurred to him that they would need to make some explanation to Anthony. He was thinking experimental treatment. It covered a multitude of sins, and most people didn't enquire any further.
Rafiel straightened up, slipping Tom's key in his pocket, and at that moment Keith came in, more or less towing a young woman. Keith was wearing his normal attire when the temperature went above freezing but not over 80—a CUG T-shirt, this one reading "I'm just a CUG in the college wheel," and jeans, topped by an unzipped hooded jacket in sweatshirt material. The girl with him, on the other hand, was dressed as if she thought she was going on a hunting expedition in the arctic wastelands. She was wearing a sweatshirt, a huge, puffy ski jacket in bright shocking pink, and the sort of fuzzy pink muffler that Tom associated—for reasons known only to his psychiatrist, should he ever acquire one—with Minnie Mouse. The rest of the girl's appearance certainly said mousie, if not necessarily Minnie. She was too skinny, the type of too skinny that the nineteenth century would have associated with consumption and a romantically early death, pale and had colorless white-blond hair that seemed insufficient for her head size and age. It was cut in a page boy just at her ears, but it gave the impression of having trailed off of its own accord and stopped growing due to either lack of energy or effort.
And yet, the way Keith looked at her, Tom saw that he seemed to be attracted to her. Who knew why? It made absolutely no sense to Tom, but then very few pairings did. He supposed his was as much of a surprise to everyone as theirs was to him. After all, what on Earth was a cat doing with a dragon? Or vice versa? And what was a nice girl like Kyrie doing with Tom?
"Hey Keith," he said. "Is this the friend you told me you'd bring by to meet me?"
The girl blushed furiously and Keith smiled. "Yeah, this is Summer Avenir, Tom. I've told her this is the best place in the world to get a burger, besides being my own, personal hangout, which, of course, immediately makes it better."
"Of course," Tom said. "Nice meeting you, Summer. And this is Rafiel. He's a friend."
Gentleman Takes a Chance Page 14
