The Bliss Factor

by Penny McCall

  She eased the door to her parents’ trailer open, and when she was sure they weren’t inside she went in. When she came back out, she was wearing her own blouse and jacket, along with a pair of Annie’s walking shoes and blue jeans. Her body was pretty amazing when she was wearing a skirt. She looked even more incredible out of it, long legs, slender curves, and the kind of unconscious grace she’d clearly inherited from her mother in a package that made him feel a thousand degrees hotter than friendly.

  “So,” she said into the awkward silence, “where do you live?”

  The last thing he needed was to take her to a place that included a bed—or what passed for a bed—but he walked by her, circled around the end of the Airstream her parents called home, and stopped at the lot next to it.

  “This is where you live?”

  “Aye.”

  “In a tent.”

  “As you see.”

  “It’s smaller than my bathroom. Shorter, too.”

  “But I can carry it on my back.”

  The look she sent him over her shoulder told him she didn’t consider that much of a recommendation. She dropped to her knees and crawled between the front flaps of the tent, Conn following her denim-clad bottom—a little too closely for her preference, because when she looked over her shoulder and saw him right behind her, she flipped around and tried to scoot backward. She came up short against the far side of the tent. Conn kept going and ended up with his hands braced on either side of her, his knees between her thighs—all of him between her thighs, and his face already lowering toward hers. His lips brushed hers, once, twice, settled, but before he could sink in, before Rae could do more than begin to respond, she scrambled out from beneath him.

  She distanced herself from him as much as possible, and her eyes were wide and a little panicked when they met his. He watched, fascinated, as she regained control of herself. Conn did the same, one jangling nerve at a time, but he did it—even though he wanted to take over for her when she lifted one cheek and rubbed.

  “I think I sat on a boulder. How do you sleep on this thing?” She poked at the thin pad lying over a waterproof ground sheet, a sleeping bag laid out on top.

  “It’s not sleep on my mind at the moment.”

  “Right, we’re supposed to be hunting for clues,” she said, deliberately misunderstanding him.

  It was close quarters when he was in there alone, so Conn chose not to tempt fate, watching Rae through the front opening. There was just his bedroll, a lantern, and a small chest that held his clothing and personal items, most of which he assumed Annie had packed into his duffel. Rae opened it unapologetically and dug through. She found nothing.

  She moved to the bedroll, searching it systematically, although she was careful to put everything back the way it was, just as she’d done with his chest.

  “You’re very orderly,” he said. “You would make a good chatelaine.”

  “I have a career, thank you very much, and it doesn’t involve cooking or cleaning.”

  “Taking care of a home is dignified work.”

  That took her off guard. “I’m not saying it isn’t. I just prefer not to be dependent on a man.”

  “Any man who thinks his woman is at his mercy, or underestimates her strength, is a fool.”

  “That’s a nice little fantasy,” Rae muttered. She sighed heavily and plopped onto his bedroll. “Most men aren’t that evolved. Most women, either,” she added, but absently, her eyes fixed on the ceiling of the tent. She got to her knees again, reaching up to tug at one of the seams. When she ducked back into view, she had a big smile on her face and a map of the faire grounds in her hand.

  “Mean anything to you?” she asked.

  It looked vaguely familiar, but then, he’d seen hundreds of those just since he’d lost his memory.

  Rae unfolded it. Most of the merchant booths were X’ed out, but a couple dozen had circles around them. Jewelry designers and purveyors, metal workers, silk screeners, places that sold prints and posters. “How about now?”

  “I don’t recall making the marks.”

  “They have nothing in common, so I’ll need to check them out, ask some questions.”

  “I?”>

  “Me. Alone. You stay put. And make sure my parents don’t see you.”

  “They sent us away for a reason.”

  “Yes, and that reason is stranded in Pontiac.” And hopefully they were still alive. “This is the best opportunity we’re going to get to find out what’s really going on.”

  “How will you do that? You don’t know what questions to ask.”

  “I’ll snoop. I have the advantage of being able to see what’s out of place because I know the shtick.”

  “Shtick?”

  “The con . . .”

  He popped up an eyebrow.

  “It means confidence game. That’s where someone gets you to trust them but they’re really lying to get something from you.” Yeah, that made her feel better. “The point is, I grew up in places like this.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go by yourself.”

  “I’ll avoid the people who know me, and I don’t need to ask questions, so they won’t know I’m looking for something. I’ll be perfectly safe.” As long as she could avoid her parents, too.

  chapter 6

  ESPIONAGE DEFINITELY WASN’T FOR HER, RAE decided, fighting the almost constant urge to look over her shoulder. She felt like she was being watched, which was ridiculous since the bad guys were carless, her parents were manning their shop, and she was careful to steer clear of any re-enactors who might remember her.

  She opened the map, found the closest circled booth, and headed for it, clamping down on the little surge of excitement—and dread—that made her heart pound. She wasn’t in danger, she reminded herself. It was probably just a misunderstanding between Larkin and someone in his group. And yeah, hitting him over the head was a bit extreme. So was the gun, but some of these people were a turkey leg short of a feast, and he wasn’t the kind of guy you took on face-to-face. She could even understand how one of these kooks might think it took a gun to put a good scare into him.

  All she had to do was discover who’d sent the clowns in the Honda, figure out what their beef was, and get them to talk it through. Child’s play, right? Except she’d lived with a group of these people the first eighteen years of her life. They were a hell of a lot harder to handle than children. But if there was even a remote chance of solving this thing and getting Larkin off her hands, she had to take the shot.

  She kept her eyes open, making sure she didn’t run into anyone who knew her. She checked behind her at fairly regular intervals to quiet the buzz between her shoulder blades. Since she failed to spot anyone threatening, she wrote it off to the general feeling of menace that had dogged her since the guys in the Honda had used her car for target practice.

  The first circled booth she came to was called Earth Enchanted, proprietor Onyx Chalcedony. Yeah, slight possibility that wasn’t her real name.

  Rae wandered the booth, sifting her fingers through the bins of semi-precious stones, looking at the mystical and Celtic symbols strung on chains as pendants or fixed to hoops for earrings. She worked her way around the small enclosure, moving steadily toward the back room.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Jeez.” Rae jumped, slapping a hand over her heart as she spun around.

  A small woman wearing a deep red wench dress stood close behind her, eyes darting around so quickly they looked like screen-saver balls bouncing off the sides of her eye sockets.

  “I’m just browsing,” Rae said, turning to look at the next section of goods.

  Onyx jumped in front of her. The dozens of stones at her wrists, neck, waist, and ears rattled, and her fingers worried at the cords twisted around her neck. “The designs are mystical,” she said of the silver pendants on the counter in front of Rae. “I create them right here in my shop—” She lowered her voice. “—according t
o ancient Celtic rituals that imbue them with special protective powers. Are you from the police?”

  She ought to be more worried about the men in the white coats, Rae thought.

  “The Secret Service? The IRS?”

  “I’m from Grosse Pointe.”

  “You look like an accountant.”

  Rae looked down at herself. She had a point. “Maybe it’s the jacket.”

  “No.” Onyx narrowed her eyes, gave Rae another lightning-fast once-over. “You’re wearing turquoise earrings. Turquoise is for money, success—love, too, but you’re not wearing a ring, so that’s not it.”

  “They’re just earrings,” Rae said, trying not to be insulted. She wasn’t entirely successful.

  “Your eyes are squinty, like you spend all day staring at numbers.”

  “What’s wrong with numbers?”

  “People use them to hang you.”

  “Rope works better.”

  “Not kill, hang. You know, out to dry, twisting in the wind. Taxes, social security, license plates.” Her eyes darted around, and she dropped her voice to the scratchy whisper that had freaked Rae before. “It’s all a way for the man to keep track of you, keep you under his thumb.”

  “Uh-huh, sure.” Rae reached for a pair of earrings, managed to get a look into the tiny back room, and didn’t see anything suspicious. Heck, there wasn’t much of anything to see at all, just a cardboard box with plastic bags sticking out of it, and a small table with what appeared to be a tackle box, probably where Onyx made her paranoia talismans. “If I see the man—” She used finger quotes. “—I promise not to mention your name.”

  Onyx narrowed her eyes.

  “Speaking of men, do you know the guy who makes the armor?”

  “Why, did he say something about me? Is he a cop, too?”

  Rae rolled her eyes at the idea of a floater like Connor Larkin being in law enforcement. “It just seems like he might be cutting into your business, you know, the smaller pieces he makes.”

  Onyx snorted. “He’s just a technician. And anyway, mostly what he sells is sex.”

  She had that right. And from what Rae had seen, there was no overlap between Onyx’s goods and Larkin’s—not that Onyx would have anything approaching a logical motivation for attacking him. Paranoia pretty much ran her life, and paranoia wasn’t logical.

  Paranoia didn’t like contemplative silences, either. Onyx made a sound in the back of her throat and nipped behind the counter. Rae didn’t stick around to find out why; she’d been thinking the woman wasn’t the violent type, but she could have been hasty there.

  The minute she’d put Earth Enchanted behind her—and assured herself it wasn’t Onyx causing the familiar itch between her shoulder blades—she felt better, foolish but better.

  Her next stop was a shop called Paper Moon. A lot of the booths in Holly Grove were built in rows. Dozens of them followed the curving contour of the grove, with common walls, boardwalks in front, and small back rooms that were used as workshops for those who personalized items or made them on-site, and where most proprietors kept back-stock and bags.

  Paper Moon was a little way off by itself, along one of the stone paths that wound through the center of the grove in a haphazard maze. Rae had a bad feeling as soon as she entered the place, but it had nothing to do with Conn or his troubles. The small wooden building was lined with prints. Prints of ladies in medieval gowns besieged by dragons, prints of ladies being stolen away on horseback by knights in black armor, prints of ladies locked in towers, in glass coffins, tied to stakes with fire inching toward their skirts.

  It was a disturbing pattern, even before she met the proprietor. The sign behind the counter identified him as Hans Lockner. The way he looked her up and down told her the prints were more a personal statement than mere decoration.

  “Say the word, and you can see more than a paper moon,” he said.

  Rae felt her lip curl and tried to hide it with a smile she knew was sickly at best. “Do you print these here?”

  “I don’t just print them, I do the artwork.”

  “Gee, I never would have guessed.”

  “I don’t look much like an artist. That’s what you’re thinking, right?”

  She was thinking he looked like a pervert, and it wasn’t just the perpetual leer on his face. He wore the costume of an Elizabethan courtier, complete with a codpiece that would have been ridiculous on a giant, let alone someone who barely topped five and a half feet and who, presumably, wasn’t riding high on Viagra. That codpiece probably wasn’t regulation, either, since Hans wore a cape over his ensemble, only letting it flap open when he chose.

  Unfortunately, he chose to flap for her, and despite the disgust she was sure showed on her face, he sidled a step closer. Rae scoped out his hands to make sure he wasn’t a grabber, backpedaling as far as she could without completely putting him off. That it took her closer to the back room was a bonus. Until Hans caught her looking toward the curtain covering the doorway.

  “You wanna see the wizard?”

  Rae froze, too revolted for even sarcasm to rescue her.

  “It’s from the movie, you know, with Judy Garland.”

  “I know.” Only in his version it would be called Dorothy Does Oz. “I . . . have to meet someone.”

  “A guy, right? Women like you always have a guy.”

  “Sort of. I’m meeting my friends at an armor-making demonstration. Supposedly it’s going to be the high point of my day.”

  Hans’s face went through a range of emotions, from Damn it to Oh well to Lots of fish in the sea. No resentment, no surprise. If Hans had sent the Honda after them, he’d know Larkin had left Holly Grove, and as Rae had just noted, the man didn’t exactly have a poker face. He did seem like the kind of guy who’d get others to do his dirty work—and be cheap enough to hire cartoon characters. He did not strike her as someone who would bother, though, not unless he was jealous of Larkin, because what Hans Lockner cared about was between his legs.

  “You sure you don’t want a print?” Hans said. “I’m willing to give you a discount.”

  Rae took another visual tour of Hans’s salute to female degradation. “Thanks, no.”

  This time, as she walked away, she knew she was being watched, but she didn’t have to fight off the urge to look over her shoulder. The need for a shower, now, that was another matter.

  Mettle Works, owned and operated by Cornelia Ferdic, wasn’t far away. Cornelia was tall and gangly, wearing a plain, dark-colored wool dress with a paisley scarf wrapped around her head in a sort of turban, the ends of which were loosely nestled around her neck. She was wearing too much perfume, and she must’ve had really bad skin, because foundation was caked on her face.

  “Can I help you with something?” she asked Rae in a two-pack-a-day voice.

  “These pieces are gorgeous,” Rae said, bending to take a closer look at the earrings and pendants in the glass display, and not because she was using it as a ruse to get a look behind the sales counter.

  The earrings were metal hoops filled with tiny gears and cogs that shifted like clockworks as they were moved. The pendants were flat glass disks, also filled with intricate workings in three dimensions. Rae lifted one, smiling as the colorful miniature gears rolled around inside their clear case, the patterns beautiful and mesmerizing.

  “Do you make these yourself? There’s another booth with amazing metalwork.”

  “You mean the armorer? The guy with the bare chest and the completely female audience? I hear he planted a hot one on a woman in the audience this morning, and now every female between the ages of twelve and ninety is hanging out at his place.”

  Rae felt her cheeks heat again, not to mention the heat blooming in some other body parts that were reliving that kiss.

  “He actually does some pretty intricate work,” Cornelia said with grudging admiration. “Nothing like this, though. I make all my own creations, right down to the gears and glass.”

  �
�They’re very clever, and beautiful.” So clever and beautiful Rae pointed to a pendant. “I’ll take that one.”

  It turned out to be a pretty good deal. For fifty dollars she got a unique piece of jewelry and a look at Cornelia’s back room, which consisted of nothing more than a tiny space at the back of the booth where she ran credit cards and bagged purchases.

  She must have hit an odd lull, because just after she made her purchase the place was jammed with customers, and they weren’t just admiring the goods—they were buying. Cornelia Ferdic had nothing to worry about competition-wise from Connor Larkin. And of the three re-enactors Rae had met so far, she seemed the most normal.

  She stepped out of Mettle Works and started working her way down the row of booths, visiting four more of Conn’s circled artisans with no more luck than she’d had with the first three. Probably it had something to do with the fact that she had no idea what she was looking for.

  She came to one of the crowds that periodically blocked the path, as people gathered around some performer hawking a show or a demonstration like Connor Larkin making armor. She was working her way around the edge of the crowd when she was grabbed, spun around, and lifted into the air, leaving her dizzy and disoriented, struggling to make sense. Hard hands locked around her legs and arms. She fought, knowing it was useless but determined to inflict some damage. Rae didn’t know what her abductors had in mind for her, but she was damn well going to make them sorry they’d ever laid eyes on her, let alone hands.

  “Relax. Stop struggling and you’ll be fine.”

  Relaxing was out of the question, but she gave up the fight, and when she did the sound of bagpipes registered, along with the laughter and cheers of the crowd. She was facing up, the treetops and sky all she could see until she tipped her head back and realized she’d been hijacked by a bunch of men wearing kilts, and not much else. They were bare-chested but for a swatch of folded plaid slung over their shoulders. They all had bushy beards and big smiles—and really strong arms, she hoped, since they were passing her from one to another overhead. She’d never been a fan of crowd surfing. It was oddly invigorating, more than a little scary, and some of them weren’t very careful where they put their hands.