by Lucy Score
Nick could confirm that luck was definitely a lady.
“Did you track down that Frick guy?” Josie asked him, closing the blade and slipping it back into place.
“No luck,” he said. “Place is one of those big monstrosities on Front Street. Looks like a flophouse.” He thought of the pretty neighbor with the pizza sauce on her tank. He’d always been a sucker for big, brown eyes. And pizza.
“What’s that look for?” Brian demanded.
“What look?”
Josie’s eyes narrowed. “You got all dreamy-faced for a second.”
“I’m not dreamy-faced,” Nick argued.
His employees shared an annoying look.
“Don’t start that marital telepathy bullshit,” he complained.
“You met someone,” Brian sang.
“Oooooh,” Josie crooned.
“I hate working with family,” Nick complained before stomping into his office and shutting the door.
His office was… functional. It was the least offensive way to describe the windowless room with its threadbare, shit brown carpet that clashed mightily with the pea green file cabinets. His desk was a dented gray metal with drawers that stuck unless punched in exactly the right spot.
But the rent was cheap, the internet was fast, and there was a great deli right around the corner.
Maybe someday he’d upgrade. Give the place a facelift. Put down roots or whatever. But for now, it worked as-is. Just like the rest of his life. Low maintenance. Low responsibility. Easy.
He unloaded his files, his Glock, and his badge from the backpack before logging into the system and officially starting his day.
He spent a tedious hour updating files for clients. Then answered the handful of emails that had come in that morning. There was a request for a “proof of life” from an insurance company and a potential armed security job that sounded a little too sketchy for his liking. He accepted the proof of life, declined the security gig, and mapped out a route for evening serves.
The client wanted another attempt on Dickie Frick.
Normally, if he didn’t have any luck on a serve, he’d turn it over to Chad or Josie for another attempt. But then he wouldn’t get to see the pizza sauce neighbor again. An attractive hot mess with a smart mouth living with a bunch of senior citizens and lying about family ties? The mysterious Ms. Thorn interested him.
He drummed his fingers on the metal desktop, debating.
Ethics weren’t exactly Nick’s favorite thing. Other people’s moral codes always felt a little too restrictive for him. Like wearing a necktie. He generally did the right thing. He just didn’t like having someone else dictate what the right thing was.
In this case, he was just curious, not up to something nefarious. And that was good enough for him. He called up Facebook’s search engine and keyed in “Thorn” and “Harrisburg.”
It took some scrolling, but he found her. Riley Thorn. The profile picture was definitely her. She had her arms around two other women. They were all wearing sunglasses and laughing. Private profile. Smart.
Profile Picture Thorn was wearing one hell of a diamond engagement ring and a diamond-encrusted wedding band. Rings that had most definitely not been on her finger last night. He’d checked.
“Nice to meet you, Riley Thorn,” he said to himself. Annoyed that his curiosity wasn’t magically appeased, he decided it was time for a break.
The deli was a short walk away, and it was a good, almost-summer day. He got the usual—cheesesteak in the garden, raspberry iced tea, and extra napkins. He dropped a few bucks in the tip jar and left, heading in the direction opposite the office.
“Nice day,” he called out a block later to the bearded guy sitting on a folding chair in the doorway of a barbershop.
Perry was a Third Street fixture. As close to homeless as a person could get without making it official, the sixty-something-year-old slept in a dilapidated shack near the railroad tracks that the bank and township tax collector had given up on long ago. Perry acted as a one-man neighborhood watch and unofficial crossing guard for a handful of blocks on Third Street.
Nick and his fellow business-owning neighbors kept an eye out for the guy, supplying him with whatever essentials he needed. At least, when Perry allowed it.
“It certainly is,” the man agreed, lifting his face to the sunshine and closing his eyes. His white, bushy beard was neatly coiffed, which meant that the barber had talked him into a chair this morning.
Nick took the empty seat next to him and unwrapped the cheesesteak. He handed over the tea and half of the sub.
“Much obliged, Nicholas,” Perry said.
“How’s life?” Nick asked, divvying up the napkins.
“Blissfully uncomplicated. Yours?”
Uncomplicated was what Nick strived for. Every time he’d brushed up against complicated, it had ended in disaster. Better to travel through life unencumbered. “Living the dream, my friend,” he said.
They ate in silence for a few minutes, people-watching and soaking up the sun.
“Heard there was more vigilante action last night,” Perry said, breaking the companionable silence.
“Heard that, too,” Nick said. If anything happened within city limits, Perry usually knew about it. “Any idea who’s organizing it?”
Perry gave the shrug of a man without worries. “You know how it goes. We tend to get fed up when the powerful stop paying attention to the people who put them there,” he philosophized.
“Think it’ll become a real problem?” Nick asked.
“Doubtful. They’re probably just good, frustrated people having a little fun in the name of justice. It’ll burn itself out,” Perry predicted.
“Any good neighborhood gossip?” Some people had entertainment news shows or gossip blogs or soap operas. Nick had Perry.
“Oh, plenty. You know that pretty gal lives over on Forester next to the church?”
Harrisburg’s population might have made it a city, but the tight-knit neighborhoods made it feel more like overlapping small towns most days.
“Short skirts, fancy sunglasses?” Nick asked, drawing her out of his memory banks.
“That’s the one. Seems she came home early from a business trip and found her husband making a candlelight dinner for two.”
“I take it that second place setting wasn’t for her?” he guessed.
“No, indeed. The second plate belonged to a gentleman known for his conservative politics when it comes to gay marriage.”
“You don’t say.”
“Just goes to show you can say anything you want, but that don’t make you a different person than what you are down deep.”
Nick nodded in agreement, his mouth too full to comment.
“Seems the good-looking gal gave him the boot and threw all his stuff out on the front porch for him to collect. I might have helped myself to a fancy tie or two,” Perry said.
“You’d look good in a tie,” Nick said.
“I think I would too. How goes the investigations business?” he asked, changing the subject. “Got any hot ones?”
“Pretty lukewarm right now. But it’ll pick up again soon,” he predicted.
Perry nodded sagely. “Gives you more time for the ladies. Maybe you should pay the pretty gal on Forester a visit? Commiserate with her.”
Nick shook his head, thinking about the expensive suits, the perfectly coiffed hair. “I don’t think so. I think even a palate cleanser with her would be complicated.”
“Complications make the world go round,” Perry mused.
Nick laughed. “That is the exact opposite of what you preach, my friend.”
Perry gestured at him with the sub. “The way I choose to live my life is not providing a commentary on how you should live yours. You’re a young, healthy man, Nicholas. Complications are the best part of life. I’m starting to get concerned about you.”
This coming from the guy who went without running water for most of 2017. “You’r
e concerned about me?”
“I am.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t have a bank account,” Nick pointed out.
“And you’re the one who hasn’t been out with a girl in what? Two? Three months?”
“It hasn’t been that long,” Nick scoffed. Holy shit. It really had.
“You’ve either hit a dry spell or…” Perry paused to take a long, contemplative sip of his tea. “Your appetites are changing.”
“I assure you, my appetites where women are concerned are just fine,” Nick insisted.
“Then maybe you’re getting tired of the buffet and you’re thinking about finding that one right entree.”
Nick eyed his friend. “Have you been making bathtub jungle juice again?”
6
6:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 17
Riley’s parents lived in a two-story brick home on the outskirts of Camp Hill, a town just across the river from Harrisburg. Things were quieter there. Yards were more uniformly groomed. Cars were more expensive. Kids walked home from school for lunch, and moms went to Pilates classes. It was nice. Normal.
But normal wasn’t exactly a word that got thrown around when it came to the residents of 69 Dogwood Street.
Riley’s dad, Roger, had retired a few months ago from his warehouse manager job of thirty-plus years. After a week spent lounging around in his underwear, he’d started a second career as a trivia night host for local bars. He’d swapped his uniform of steel-toed boots and button-downs for flashy tracksuits and orthopedic sneakers. Business was booming. Three nights a week he was paid under the table in cash and free beer to lead West Shore bar patrons through categories like Sports Heroes, Famous Criminals, and Gangster Cinema.
Riley’s mother, on the other hand, had never bothered with the pretense of normal. While friends’ moms had been packing lunches after work or driving their kids to 137 activities, Blossom Basil-Thorn had been making her own yogurt, turning the backyard into a jungle of vegetables and flowers, and raising free-range children. Riley had been walking herself to school since she was six. At seven, she was making her own breakfast, and by twelve, she’d built a network of friends’ parents who didn’t mind another kid in the car on the way to volleyball games.
There was also the matter of the neon sign found in the sunroom window facing the street. When Blossom plugged it in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturday mornings, the words “Psychic Readings” glowed proud and purple.
Riley climbed the steps. Noting that half of her mother’s army of plants had been moved to the front porch, a sure sign that summer was here, she let herself in through the front door.
The smell of something—was that burnt cabbage?—assaulted her nose. Just another typical family dinner.
“Adult child entering the premises,” she called out. She and her sister knew better than to walk in unannounced. Their parents enjoyed an annoyingly healthy sex life in their empty nest years.
“Back here,” her dad yelled.
“Are your pants on?” She waited for verification.
“For now,” Blossom sang.
Sighing, Riley followed the short hallway back to the kitchen.
She found them leaning over a casserole dish on the stove, the source of the stench. “Smells like liquid garbage that a raccoon ate and shit back out,” her dad observed.
“I don’t care what it smells like. You’re eating it,” her mom said, whacking him in the butt with a wooden spoon. The Wisconsin twang issuing orders was the unique soundtrack to Riley’s childhood. “The doctor said you need to get your cholesterol under control, and that’s what we’re doing.”
“She didn’t mean by starving me,” he complained. “Rye Bread, you’re with me on this, aren’t you?”
There had always been two teams in the family. Riley and her dad versus her sister and mother.
Roger had called dibs on first name naming rights on the first kid, which was why Riley was Riley and not Amethyst-Lavender. Blossom got to choose Riley’s never-to-be-mentioned middle name. They swapped for their second child, which explained why her sister was Wander Nancy.
“Smells… interesting,” she said.
Her parents paused their bickering for the traditional Thorn greeting. A hearty hug from her father and uncomfortably intense eye contact from her mother while Blossom squished her daughter’s cheeks between her hands.
“You’re upset,” Blossom decided after invading Riley’s personal space.
“Why would I be upset?” Riley asked, side-stepping the observation and extricating herself from her mom’s grasp. She made the mistake of sticking her face directly over the casserole dish and seared her nasal passageways. “Gah! What is this? Ammonia?”
“I told you,” Roger said triumphantly. “I’m not eating that garbage.” He picked up the mail stacked up on a turquoise side table clustered with purifying crystals, succulent plants, and a pile of scratched-off lottery tickets.
“It’s not garbage. It’s cabbage casserole,” sniffed Blossom. She turned to her daughter. “It’s called forced fasting,” she whispered to Riley. “I made it up. If he gets hungry enough, he’ll dig into the veggie salad I put in the fridge.”
Her mother was a diabolical manipulator, but she only used her powers for good as a rule.
“Now, is this smudgy aura of yours related to that dumbass getting engaged to the woman he cheated on you with?” Blossom asked.
Riley picked a peeled carrot stick off the cutting board and bit into it. “I’m fine,” she insisted. She needed to get that tattooed on her face.
“Of course you’re fine. But are you though?”
“It’s not like I’m going to buy them something off their registry or anything. But it doesn’t really have anything to do with me. Maybe this is just proof that life isn’t fair.” Her ex-husband was planning a honeymoon to Fiji while she was living with Dickie Frick the underwear dropper.
“Sometimes karma takes her sweet time to work things out,” Blossom said, shoving the casserole back into the oven. “All you need to do is ask yourself if you’re mad at Griffin the human fungus or yourself?”
“Pretty sure I’m mad at him,” Riley said, this time sneaking a slice of cucumber. She hadn’t cheated or lied or gotten her significant other fired when the marriage ended. She’d been the dutiful wife. The hardworking employee.
“Hmm,” her mother said, turning back to the stove to stir whatever was simmering on the burner.
Hmm was never good.
“Don’t ‘hmm’ me, Mom,” she complained.
“Hmm,” Blossom repeated.
Riley started to count backward from ten. Her mother only made it all the way to six.
“If you really want to know what I think—” she began.
“I really don’t,” Riley interjected.
“I think you’re upset with yourself for rejecting your gifts, which you know would have prevented this entire situation. If you hadn’t been so concerned with repressing—”
Roger stormed back into the kitchen waving a letter like a battle flag. “That helmet-headed garden gnome next door reported us to the township for hanging laundry in the backyard,” he yelled.
Her father’s other retirement hobby involved ramping up the long-standing feud he had with their goody-two-shoes neighbor Chelsea Strump. Proving that it was a small world and that apples didn’t fall far from their trees, Chelsea just happened to be front desk Donna’s niece.
She was as committed to her hair spray and blue eyeliner as she was to labeling herself a stay-at-home mom though both her kids were in college… on the opposite side of the country. Which was probably not a coincidence given Chelsea’s aggressive parental helicoptering.
She still drove a minivan and still sat on the PTA. Her husband traveled for work—which Riley guessed was another non-coincidence—leaving his wife far too much time to keep track of infractions committed by neighbors.
“First the garden, then the fence height, now this!” Roger s
tomped around the kitchen table.
Blossom’s backyard vegetable patch and herb containers spiraled out of control every summer. She didn’t pull weeds because “they were living things too,” which meant that every summer, the quarter acre turned into a snarl of greenery. Chelsea claimed the pollen from the weeds was affecting her health.
Roger had erected a fence between the properties right around the time Chelsea’s second son went off to college. She’d filed a complaint with the township claiming the fence height was one inch too tall according to code. In retaliation, Riley’s father had spread exactly one inch of mulch on his side of the fence.
“Now, Roger. She’s just a sad, empty woman who’s lost her sense of identity,” Blossom reminded him.
“She called your bras a ‘pornographic eyesore,’” Riley’s dad read.
“That greasy, close-minded slug trail had better learn to mind her business,” Blossom said, eyes narrowing.
“Incoming little souls,” came a musical voice from the front of the house.
“We’re all fully clothed,” Riley yelled back.
There was a stampede of tiny feet, and Riley’s three nieces exploded into the kitchen. Roger Thorn was drowning in estrogen, but he didn’t seem to mind, high-fiving each granddaughter as they stampeded in.
Their mother, Wander, floated into the room on a cloud of Zen. She was the kind of beautiful that made members of both genders pause to take notice. Her rich, dark hair was confined into long box braids. She had their mother’s heavily lidded eyes, her biological father’s cupid’s bow lips, and a leanly muscled physique. If she hadn’t been just as beautiful inside, Riley could have worked up an intense dislike for her sister.
“Is that lunch I smell, or am I channeling someone?” Wander asked serenely, placing a serving dish of sliced apples and homemade yogurt on the table.
“See? Your sister doesn’t have a problem using her gifts,” Blossom announced, giving Riley a pointed look as she boosted a granddaughter up on her hip.
Riley rolled her eyes. She remained unconvinced that a psychic snoot was a gift.