by Lucy Score
“Hesty, dat stinks,” six-year-old Rain announced.
When Wander announced her first pregnancy, mother and daughter spent a weekend divining appropriate grandmother names before settling on Hestia, the goddess of hearth and family. As it turned out, “Hestia” was quite the mouthful for little kids.
“Pop-pop!” River, the oldest at eight, launched herself at Roger.
Four-year-old Janet ignored all of them and quietly tucked herself into the cabinet under the sink.
“How are you?” Wander asked, wrapping her yoga-toned arms around Riley and giving her a tight squeeze. She was dressed in a flowing skirt and a cropped tank that showed off abs no mother of three had the right to.
“I’m fine,” Riley insisted, returning the hug.
“Your sister is upset about you-know-who giving you-know-what to you-know-who-else on the morning news,” Blossom said. She gave Rain a smacking kiss on the cheek before putting her down.
“Of course you are,” Wander said, catching a shoe Janet hurled from her cabinet hideaway. The chaos of family never seemed to faze Wander. Riley wondered if it was a byproduct of her conception. “Who wouldn’t be? Speaking of ex-husbands, Raphy’s coming to dinner. He’s bringing organic strawberries for dessert.”
“Wonderful!” Blossom said.
Unlike Riley, Wander had managed to maintain friendly relationships with her ex. Actually, both of them. One was legally an ex-husband. She showed her commitment to the other through a hand-fasting ceremony, which turns out could be untied rather than divorced.
Raphael fancied himself to be an up-and-coming artist. Apparently “up-and-coming” meant paralyzed by self-doubt. The man hadn’t produced a single sketch or painting in all the years the family had known him. He had, however, managed to produce two of Wander’s three girls and a small mountain of credit card debt when he decided that buying his own pottery kiln would unlock his creativity.
Spoiler Alert: It hadn’t.
“Come into the studio. We’ll do a cleansing,” Wander offered to Riley.
“And a tarot reading,” Blossom piped up.
“I don’t need a cleansing or a reading,” Riley insisted.
“Yes, you do,” her sister and mother responded in unison.
“You’re squandering your gifts,” Blossom said, pointing her spoon in Riley’s direction.
They were crowded around the battered green table that once had been a respectable natural oak until her mother got into her painting furniture phase. Roger was chowing down on the salad. The kids were eating tuna salad sandwiches, leaving the rest of them to stir the bitter sludge of cabbage casserole around their bowls.
“Mom, give it a rest,” Riley said wearily.
“I’m just saying if you would have been tuned in, you would have realized what a huge mistake Griffin was in the first place,” Blossom insisted.
“Thanks, Mom. That’s exactly what I need to hear right now.”
“Sometimes the words that hurt the most are the ones you need to hear the most,” Wander said with an uncomfortable amount of eye contact.
“Listen to your sister,” Blossom insisted.
“Don’t listen to either of them,” Roger said. “You’re fine just the way you are. Now, show me how to turn on the security camera again. I wanna see if Strump noticed all the bras I threw in the tree.” He pushed his phone in her direction.
“Whose bras did you throw in what tree?” Blossom demanded.
“When is the last time you even had a vision?” Wander asked Riley. “Repressing these things can be dangerous. You might think you’re protecting yourself, but you could just be bottling up all that power until one day it implodes.”
Riley opened the app on the phone and thought of the barista. Then she thought about Nick the candy guy… and that hideous bedspread… and the feel of him between her legs.
She cleared her throat. “Can we please talk about something else?”
“I started making my own sketch paper,” Raphael announced cheerfully in his rumbling baritone. His textured afro gave him an extra four inches in height on an already tall, gangly frame.
“Good for you, sweetie,” Wander said placidly.
Riley met her sister’s gaze across the table and raised an eyebrow. Wander gave a little eye-roll. Under all those essential oils and box braids was a judgmental human being who Riley loved dearly. Maybe they didn’t see eye-to-eye when it came to psychic abilities, but they were family. And surviving a free-range childhood together had made them friends, too.
“Have you done any interesting readings lately, Blossom?” Raphael asked.
“Well, you know I can’t ethically divulge details. But I did have a reading that revealed a breach of trust. A week later, my client caught her husband with another man. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay. It’s beautiful and normal to love all people,” she said, loud enough for her granddaughters to hear before lowering her voice again. “She threw him out on his keister and then chucked all his stuff out on the porch.”
“That must have felt very empowering,” Wander said.
Riley felt a greasy, lingering shame in the pit of her stomach and thought of the envelope back at her place. The one that arrived like clockwork every month. Could she have predicted this ending to her story? And if so, would she have even believed it?
7
10:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 17
Riley trudged up the stairs of the ancient stone mansion.
After dinner with her family, she had printed out the municipal laws for her father so he could figure out a new legal way to piss off the neighbor. Then she’d spent an hour playing with her nieces while her mother did a tarot reading for Raphael encouraging him to channel his creativity.
She had just gotten to the third floor when the bathroom door opened.
“Oh, come on, Dickie,” she groaned. “Can’t you at least wear a bathrobe?”
“Nope,” the man said, shuffling his skinny, naked ass toward his room. “Gotta air out the boys.”
Riley gagged and clamped a hand over her mouth. Her neighbor’s wrinkly white left butt cheek sported a middle finger tattoo. Classy. “Yeah? Well, air them out behind closed doors,” she called after him.
He slapped the tattoo and walked through his open door. In an instant, Dickie’s naked ass was replaced by something else. The hallway shifted on its axis, and Riley slapped a palm against the wainscoting to keep from pitching over.
Her nose twitched violently, and she felt herself falling through fluffy, cotton candy clouds.
“What the—”
But the falling sensation lurched to a stop. The pastel clouds thinned just enough, and she found herself peering at Dickie’s open door.
But it was dark now. And he was wearing a robe—thank God—and calling someone a cocksucker. He stepped back to slam the door, but there was a black-gloved hand shoving it open and pushing him into his room. A second hand came up within her line of sight. This one was holding a gun.
“Oh, God,” she croaked.
The gun fired twice, making her ears ring dully. Dickie crumpled to the floor. She heard footsteps running over the buzzing in her ears. The clouds obscured her vision, but she could smell gun powder residue and blood. Her vision tunneled in on Dickie’s lifeless eyes. He looked pissed off and surprised as a dark puddle slowly spread beneath him on the wood floor toward the Fuck Off welcome mat.
“What the—”
The vision vanished as quickly as it had come on, leaving her weak and dizzy. And super close to barfing.
Dickie’s door was closed. There was no gloved gunman standing next to her. She slid to the floor, sweating and shivering. Her heart pounded out a staccato SOS in her chest. The taco she’d snarfed down on the way home after her mother’s cabbage casserole threatened to revisit the world via the wrong end.
She could hear Dickie’s TV. Hear him moving around in his room. He was alive. Not dead on the floor.
“Not real,” she whispered. It wa
sn’t real. It was food poisoning. It was a cabbage-induced hallucination. She crawled to her door and let herself in.
The tidal wave of nausea took her by surprise. She stumbled for the kitchen trash can and threw up mightily. So much for the taco.
The floor seemed like a nice place to curl up and die. She lay down on the rug in the kitchenette and stared up at the plaster ceiling.
Someone shot Dickie.
Dickie was dead.
But it wasn’t real. He was clearly alive. Her rational brain scrambled for an explanation while the malfunctioning part replayed the vision over and over again.
Her phone was ringing from wherever she’d dropped her purse. It was her mom. But Riley was too tired and dizzy to answer it. Blossom had most likely been awakened mid-snore by the sense that something was very wrong with one of her daughters.
Her mom’s abilities fell mostly in the divination realm. Palm reading, tarot cards, sometimes tea leaves. But Blossom also had heightened motherly instincts that reported whenever one of her daughters was in trouble.
Riley was too nauseous to have the “ignoring her gifts” conversation for the nine millionth time. Her mother wouldn’t see food poisoning hallucinations—she’d see evidence of clairvoyance.
“I didn’t just see the future,” she told herself between slow, deep breaths. “I had a hallucination. It was the cabbage. Food poisoning.”
She waited until she was relatively sure she wouldn’t hurl again before pulling herself up to standing. Her legs were shaky, and she was sweating like a hairy guy in a sauna.
Opening her door, she stood and stared at Dickie’s door. She could hear NCIS coming from within. Dead men didn’t watch reruns. She closed the door and flopped down on the couch. Maybe she’d watch a few minutes of TV to tune out and pull herself back together before she cleaned out the trash can.
The urge to vomit returned when she scrolled through channels and accidentally paused on Channel 50, which was showing a clip from Griffin’s morning proposal.
She stabbed the power button, erasing the happy couple’s expertly contoured faces.
The sudden silence caught her attention, and she went on full alert.
Dickie never turned the TV off this early. Maybe something was wrong?
She sat, debating for another moment before she couldn’t take it anymore. “Dammit,” she muttered, unlocking her door and peeking out into the hall. The rest of the house was still quiet. There were no strange footsteps on the stairs. No gun-toting bad guys tiptoeing up to the door.
What if Hot Nick the fake candy guy was involved? What were the odds that a total stranger would just happen to come looking for the man whose death she’d just envisioned… witnessed… imagined… hallucinated… under false pretenses?
Was Hot Nick a deadly assassin?
And if so, what had Dickie done to piss him off?
Also, what did being physically attracted to a murderer say about her?
“This is ridiculous,” she muttered to herself. Creeping over to Dickie’s door, she pressed her ear against the wood. She held her breath and listened.
There was a creak on the other side. A quiet shuffle and another creak. Was it her neighbor still airing out his genitalia? Or a dimpled, cold-blooded killer disposing of evidence?
The door was thrown open, and she yelped, stumbling back.
“What the hell are you doing?” Dickie demanded. He was wearing a bathrobe now, but—in true creepy old man fashion—hadn’t bothered to tie it.
She had never been so reassured to see wrinkly man parts in her entire life.
“Nothing. Nothing. I was just—”
“Spying on me with your big ear pressed up against my door?”
Riley had always considered both her ears to be of normal proportions.
“I, uh, heard your TV go off, and I was concerned.”
“Concerned?” He cackled. “If you want a piece of the ol’ Dickie, you don’t gotta make excuses.” He pointed suggestively toward his crotchal region.
“Look, I already threw up once tonight. I was just worried you… fell…” Into a pool of his own blood. After being murdered by a good-looking stranger who lied about candy. “Just keep Little Dickie covered up, and forget I was ever here,” she told him, heading back to her room.
“They all want a piece of the Dickster,” she heard him say as he closed his door.
“Gross.” But at least “the Dickster” was alive.
Back in her own room, she cleaned out her vomit can, reset the locks, and dug out her lucky signed Hershey Bears hockey stick. It was the closest thing to a weapon that she had.
Just in case.
Her phone rang again.
“Hey, Mom,” she answered wearily. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.”
8
7:02 p.m., Thursday, June 18
Pennsylvania provided very few months where it was comfortable to sit locked in a car for long hours at a stretch. June could go either way. It could be breezy and seventy degrees or 8,000 degrees and humid.
Camped out at the far end of the gravel lot behind Dickie Frick’s place, Nick was grateful for the breezy evening. The mansion had probably been impressive a few decades ago. Now, it just looked like an oversized funeral home that had fallen on hard times.
A Jeep pulled into the parking lot, radio blaring. Nick admired the view as Riley Thorn hopped out in cute gym shorts and a t-shirt. She opened the back and leaned in to grab some bags.
Very nice legs.
And now he felt like a lecherous stalker. If people realized how easy it was to watch them without their knowledge, no one would leave their home again.
She froze, mid-lean, before dropping her grocery bags on the ground and looking right at him.
“Shit,” Nick muttered.
He did his best to duck, pulling his ball cap lower over his eyes. But he was a tall guy, and Thorn was apparently a suspicious woman. She crossed the lot toward his vehicle.
He pretended to be enthralled with the GPS on his phone when she knocked on his window.
“Selling more candy?” she asked, crossing her arms when he rolled the glass down.
“You shouldn’t be confronting a stranger alone in a parking lot,” Nick said. Bad things happened to good people all the time.
“What? I’m supposed to let one of my eighty-year-old neighbors do it for me?” she asked, crossing her arms.
Something obviously had made her even less trusting than the last time their paths had crossed.
“Stop staring and get in,” he ordered.
“Yeah. Okay.” She snorted. “Get in the car with a stranger so what? You can take me to a secondary location and murder me?”
He sighed. “I didn’t want to have to do this but…” Nick flashed his badge at her. “Get in.”
She blinked, then complied.
“Nice to see you again, Thorn,” he said when she climbed into the passenger seat.
She pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of him.
“What are you doing?”
“Sending your picture and a description of your car to my sister in case I go missing,” she told him. “Let me see your badge again.”
He handed it over and waited.
“You sneaky son of a bitch! You’re not a cop. This says private investigator.”
When she reached for the door handle, Nick hit the automatic locks.
“I swear to God, I will scream bloody murder while punching you in the junk and calling 911,” she threatened.
“Relax, Rambo,” he said dryly. “I’m not kidnapping you. I’m keeping you from blowing my cover.” He pointed at the minivan that came squealing into the lot. It stopped, taking up two spaces and a good portion of the throughway. A woman in at least her early 100s with purple streaked hair spryly jumped out from behind the wheel.
“Listen, Nick—if that is your real name,” Riley began.
But he held up a hand. “I’m Nick Santiago. I’m a devilishly hand
some private investigator and I’m looking for Dickie. Now hang on for a second.”
Bad Park Job Lady was eyeing Riley’s groceries where she’d left them behind the Jeep. The woman squinted through the thickest prescription eyeglasses Nick had ever seen. He felt reasonably confident that she couldn’t see four feet in front of her, let alone to the back of the lot. But he’d been wrong before.
“Well, shit,” he muttered when she zeroed in on his car and headed their way. He’d been made by two out of two residents. Sitting in the lot had been a stupid idea.
“Santiago,” Riley said, enunciating the syllables while she typed on her phone. He heard the whoosh of a text message. “If you murder me my sister is going to be very displeased,” she warned him.
“Listen, Thorn. I will give you whatever you want if you don’t blow my cover right now. If I have to talk myself out of another trespassing arrest—”
“Another?” she hissed.
“Anything. Thorn. Anything you want.”
There was a knock on his window. He considered himself to be a good reader of people. But the woman next to him wasn’t giving a hint of what she was thinking. He had no idea if he was about to be sold out.
Nick rolled down the window and pasted on his most charming, dimple-flashing smile. He’d discovered that weapon in preschool and had wielded it with deft precision ever since.
“Is everything all right, Riley?” the woman asked, giving Nick the magnified evil eye. She was so short she could barely see over the door into the vehicle. What was with the mausoleum residents being so suspicious?
He held his breath and his smile.
“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Penny,” his passenger seat prisoner said grudgingly.
“In that case, who’s the stud?” Mrs. Penny demanded, still eyeing him with suspicion.
Riley waited just a beat too long, and Nick took matters into his own hands.
“I’m Nick, Mrs. Penny. Riley’s new boyfriend.”
His “girlfriend” choked on what he could only assume was her own saliva. Nick reached over and slapped her on the back while still grinning at the elderly woman.