by Ada Bell
Footsteps sounded beyond the rear door, and Sam appeared in the doorway. Without his hat, scarf, and puffy coat, he looked even more handsome than he had outside. Too bad he barely spared me a glance.
“Hey,” he said. “Mom, I’m just about done, so I’m heading out.”
“Do you want lunch first?”
“No thanks, I’m still full from that six-course breakfast Mama made. I’ll see you soon.” Walking in to the room, he kissed her on the cheek, and I swooned. A grown man who wasn’t shy about showing affection to his mother in front of strangers? Be still my heart. “Nice to meet you, Aly.”
“You, too,” I barely squeaked out as he moved toward the coat rack to prepare to head outside.
“Bye, sweetie. Thanks for helping with the bookcases.”
“No problem. Love you.” We both watched him go. If Olive noticed my interest, she didn’t comment. Thankfully. Today was weird enough.
A thought struck me as the bell over the door signaled his departure. “Does he know? About your gifts?”
She shook her head. “He knows that I’m quite good at finding a home for used objects, both because the store has always done well and because he used to work here on the weekends in high school. Otherwise, no. My wife knows, but no one else. You know how it is. You don’t want people to think less of you. Especially not people with the power to lock you up in a nursing home.”
Heh. “You might be old enough to be my mother, but you’re a good thirty years away from the nursing home.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere. Tell you what. It’s been a strange morning. Let me show you around.”
I told Olive we had a deal.
For the next couple of hours, we explored the shop, peering into various nooks and crannies. It all looked like a mess, but underneath the chaos lay an organizational system that I respected. It might take me time to learn it, but after a few weeks, I should be able to find things for customers fairly easily, just like Olive.
Okay, not exactly the same. But the more time I spent here, the more it felt right. Missing Pieces had a homey feel, an aura that helped me feel at peace. I didn’t know why, but I belonged here. By the time we finished the tour and she’d explained how the shop operated, I was excited to start my new job.
“Can you start tomorrow?”
“I’ve got Kyle in the morning,” I said. “His school is closed for teacher meetings. But I can start after lunch.”
“Deal.”
We were just finishing negotiating my hours and pay when the bell jingled behind me. Cold wind rushed through the open door, swirling around the store. Footsteps thudded across the threshold.
A voice rang out. “Olive Green, you charlatan! Where are you?”
Chapter 4
Although my first inclination should have been to see who stood at the front of the store screaming, my brain instead fixated on the man’s words. “Green? Your name is Olive Green? Did your parents not like you?”
“Very funny. You’re the first person to say that. Green is my married name.” She turned away to face the newcomer before shooting back, “And you’re one to talk, Aluminum.”
Touché.
The man who’d stormed into the room and stopped dead at the sight of me looked vaguely familiar. That could be a Shady Grove thing: you tended to cross paths with pretty much everyone at some point. He was medium height, built like a refrigerator, bald, with a vein the size of New Mexico throbbing in his forehead. His dark eyes flashed, and red splotches were working their way up his cheeks.
“How can I help you, Earl?” Olive moved behind the counter, both giving her an air of authority and creating a physical barrier between her and the man. Smart. I wondered if she had a panic button back there.
“You can give me my money back, that’s how!” He slammed something onto the counter with such force, I jumped. “This darn goddess is no good! You sold me cheap junk.”
Olive shook her head. “Look, Earl, I told you there were no guarantees. Love is a tricky business. You can’t rely on trinkets. You need to use your wit and charm to win someone over. I can’t help it if you don’t have either of those things.”
His face turned purple. “Listen up woman, I’ll call the city council if I have to!”
“And tell them what? That you set your sights on some pretty young thing who refused to sleep with you, even after you tried to invoke the great roofie spirit? Come on, Earl.”
“I’ll have you know that I have no problem getting women to sleep with me, thank you very much.”
As badly as I wanted to point out that if his love life were fine, he wouldn’t be standing in the store screaming at us about love goddesses that didn't work, my more rational side reined me in. Escalating the situation wasn’t going to do anyone any good.
“I’m not a witch. And even if I were, I wouldn’t do love spells. You want a conduit, go to the magic shop. This is a trinket. I never made you any promises,” Olive said. “Sorry, but I don’t offer refunds. You know that. It’s on your receipt.”
Helpfully, I pointed at a three-foot square sign with four-inch red letters hanging from the wall behind her left shoulder. “It’s also right there.”
Earl turned to glare at me. “Who are you?”
“Aly is my new employee, and you’ll be kind to her or get out,” Olive said. “On second thought, just get out. We can’t help you.”
“I’m not leaving until I get my money.”
“Well, then, you’ll get hungry later,” she said. “I’m closing up at six and going home, like I do every night.”
I shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. Her mention of time reminded me that Kevin was expecting me to pick Kyle up from school at three, and I still needed to pick up groceries for dinner. Even though he was only three, my nephew was obsessed with cooking. At this rate, he’d be winning MasterChef Junior before I finished my college degree.
Between the ring fiasco and our angry customer, I’d completely lost track of time. I was going to be very late.
“Hey, Olive, I’m so sorry, but I have to go.”
She waved one hand. “It’s fine, dear. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Earl was still ranting and raving when the door swung shut behind me. It didn’t feel right to leave her alone, but I reminded myself that Olive took care of herself just fine before I came along. The issue became moot seconds later when the bell jingled again, and Earl stormed past me.
I shrank into the shadows, but he either didn’t see me or didn’t care. A moment later, he slammed the door of a shiny red convertible. As the car zoomed out of sight, I caught a glimpse of the license plate: HAWTSTF.
Hot stuff? Someone had a high opinion of himself. I rolled my eyes. Why not just say “MIDLIFE” to describe the clear crisis he was having? Ah, well. I had more important things to worry about than an irate customer at a job I hadn’t even started yet. It was Wasabi Wednesday, and Kyle waited for me to pick him up so he could help me roll the sushi. Sushi that required rice I still needed to purchase. Along with wasabi and, well, all the other ingredients.
The big supermarket was at least half an hour away in Willow Falls. I wouldn’t have time to get there and back, so I swung by the smaller Grocery Mart instead. Who needed real wasabi, anyway?
There was rarely a line at the corner store. Of course, when there was, it always formed behind the town gossip, the only person in the state who still used a checkbook. Luckily, Thelma wasn’t around today, or I’d have lost another ten minutes. That probably would’ve earned me a stern lecture from Mr. Spaulding on punctuality. I raced home, dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter, then took off toward the preschool, luckily only two blocks away. As it was, I arrived at pickup with about ninety seconds to spare.
My nephew squinted up at me when I screeched to a halt in front of him, panting. He was tall for his age, and I wasn’t, so he already came up practically to my ribcage. His serious brown
eyes peered out at me from beneath his red ski cap, which perched precariously atop chestnut curls so like Kevin’s and mine. My nephew had inherited his mother’s pert nose and heart-shaped lips, but otherwise he was all Reynolds.
“Why is your face red?”
“I’m excited to see you!” And also, I might be dying. A stitch in my side made breathing impossible.
The teacher’s aide eyed me, but didn’t comment. Kyle turned to him. “Mark, is my face red?”
“No.”
“Why not, Aunt Aly? I excited.”
“I’ve been outside longer.” This was true, and a much better answer. Probably the one I should’ve given in the first place. I braced myself for the request for a scientific explanation, which came about forty percent of the time.
Apparently today was my lucky day, because my nephew switched over to telling me about the “jumping box” in his classroom, where he could stand and jump as long as he wanted. I got very nervous about this concept until Mark assured me that it was just duct tape arranged in a square on the floor.
The afternoon passed in the usual flurry of activity, getting Kyle his snack while listening to him talk about his day, practicing his reading while we cooked dinner together. Or, really, while Kyle directed me around the kitchen.
After dinner, Kevin went to his weekly bowling league while Kyle and I raced his toy cars until bedtime. Finally, after two requests for water, three trips to the bathroom, and four stories, I hugged my delightful nephew and said goodnight.
“G‘Night,” he said. “I’m happy you got a job.”
“Thanks, buddy. Me, too.”
I stood in the doorway for a long moment before I shut the door, thinking about the turn my life had taken in the past year. Before Katrina died, I’d been going to school, taking labs, and working in the bookstore. Most of my free time was spent with my BFF and roommate, Carly Rogers.
We had the kind of friendship borne of having last names adjacent in the alphabet and therefore spending fifteen years sitting next to each other in school. Our junior year, poor Juan Rodriguez transferred in and got stuck between us. He spent half the year listening to us talk around him in the moments before class. Then he developed a crush on Carly, and they started whispering without me. Not that it mattered. That was the year I discovered the Hitchhiker’s Guide books and started secretly reading under my desk whenever I had a spare minute. Since I tended to finish work pretty fast, that was often.
Anyway, three years ago, we’d moved into our first apartment together. I was getting an associate’s degree in biology while Carly studied art history. We both cried when I moved to Shady Grove. Now she worked at a local museum, organizing events and having the time of her life while she went to school at night to finish her last few credits. Meanwhile, I just applied for a job working for a woman who thought she was psychic.
Even more hilariously, Olive thought I was psychic. Which reminded me: I had researched to do before Kevin got home.
I blew Kyle one last kiss goodnight and went downstairs to make coffee. This could take a while. Researching hallucinogenic metals wasn’t exactly as easy as singing A-B-Cs with a three-year-old. Nor was it nearly as cute. I settled onto the couch and got to work. I needed to get as much information as possible before showing up at work tomorrow morning.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have the first clue where to start. My college-level biology classes didn’t spend much time talking about psychics. I couldn’t find any liquid hallucinogens likely to work in seconds. Unless it wasn’t the ring? Maybe there was something in the air. That seemed unlikely, though, since Olive, Sam, and Earl didn’t seem to have been under the influence of anything, and they were all in the store at least as long as I was before the vision hit me. Unless the same substance caused my vision and Earl’s rage (which—no), that theory was a non-starter.
If I had kept the ring, it might be possible to test the metal for various acids or other substances. Unfortunately, despite Olive’s insisting that I take it, I’d left it in the store “accidentally.” I never wanted to touch it again. It didn’t matter that Olive thought the ring belonged to me. She could sell it to anyone else.
When I was ready to start banging my head against the desk, I thought about something else Olive mentioned during our interview—how did Katrina die? That whole time blurred together in my mind. So many things happened at once. Kev was distraught, Kyle was confused and sad, a global pandemic hit. All I remembered was “a tragic accident.” Surely someone must’ve mentioned the details, but they completely escaped me.
With a quick glance over my shoulder to ensure Kyle was still sleeping—as if he could get out of his room without me knowing it—, I opened a new tab and typed “Katrina Reynolds obituary” into the search bar. A clipping from the paper in the small town where they’d lived popped up at the top, as well as an homage by the funeral home that handled the ceremony.
The page contained all the basics: name, age, loving wife, loving mother. She had a sister, who I didn’t remember from the funeral. That was it. Not a peep about what happened to her, just a note that she “left this world all too soon.” I sighed and rubbed my eyes. It didn’t matter, not really. Kevin was finally getting better, and I didn’t see any reason to make him relive the single worst experience of his life by asking a lot of questions about my sister-in-law.
Back to psychics. So far, all of my research revolved around whether they were frauds. But after a moment’s thought, I decided to expand my hypothesis. What if psychics were real? What would the signs be? How might a person find out if they were one? Hundreds of pages of results popped up.
Element seven is nitrogen.
Page after page filled the screen, but I didn’t find anything conclusive. As Olive had hinted earlier, apparently psychic gifts took many forms. And no one sold a how-to manual. The whole thing hurt my brain.
When I got tired of reading, I gave myself a break. Olive wasn’t the only fascinating person I’d met today. Opening yet another a new tab, I typed “Sam Green.” Not shockingly, I got about forty thousand results. A dead end. Back at the top, I typed “Olive Green Shady Grove” which got me pages both for Missing Pieces and Olive the person. From her profile, I went to “relationships” and there he was. Sam Green, Son. As absolutely beautiful on the screen as he’d been in person.
His profile picture showed him alone, which gave me hope. No relationship status. I’d been hoping for single, but at least it didn’t show him with someone else. Then again, he posted almost nothing on Facebook. Either his profile was closed down to non-friends or he didn’t use it much. Probably both. I couldn’t send him a friend request since I didn’t use Facebook, either, and opening a profile just to talk to a man I’d met for about four minutes seemed excessive. Instead I moved over to Instagram.
By the time the outer garage door rumbled upward, I was no closer to figuring out what had happened to me, but I’d ogled about twenty images of Sam and discovered that he’d arrived safely home in Brooklyn in time to pick up dinner in Koreatown. Lucky. Although that meant I might not see him again any time soon.
Whatever was going on with me, this was one question Google couldn’t answer. Like it or not, I needed Olive. I heaved a sigh. It was time for bed once I said good-night to Kevin, and I was no closer to figuring things out than I’d been at three o’clock this afternoon.
Outside, the garage door slid into place. The interior door to the mudroom squeaked open, something we’d been meaning to fix. Then my brother walked into view, and all thoughts of magical rings fled. Kevin looked like he’d gotten hit by a bus. It hadn’t been uncommon to see him falling down with exhaustion when I first moved here, but over the past few months, we’d settled into our routine. He began sleeping better, the bags beneath his brown eyes vanished, and he started laughing and smiling more. He actually started looking his age instead of ten years older. An amazing transformation.
But now, all that progress had be
en erased. He looked as hollow-eyed as the day I’d arrived. He kept his hair short to keep the curls so like Kyle’s under control, but the locks stuck out as if he’d spent the last twenty minutes running his hands through it.
“Kevin? What’s wrong? Are Mom and Dad okay?”
He nodded slowly, walking toward the couch like a zombie before he bent his knees just enough to perch on the edge of the cushions. He lowered his head into his hands, staring at the floor.
I went to my brother and sat beside him, rubbing his back. “You’re starting to scare me.”
“Sorry, Aly. Mom and Dad are fine, last I heard. I haven’t talked to them in a few days. But I’m sure they’re fine.”
Okay, that was good. And yet, if not something with our parents, and knowing Kyle was upstairs asleep in bed, I couldn’t imagine anything terrible enough to put that look on Kevin’s face. “What happened?”
“There’s been a murder.” He sighed. “Earl Parker is dead.”
Chapter 5
I gaped at my brother in disbelief. Earl was dead? The same guy I’d seen having a verbal coronary in Missing Pieces only a few hours earlier? Sure, it was our only interaction, but—dead? He was only like fifty.
Okay, I knew that not only old people died. Katrina was proof of that. But still. It was so weird. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that someone I saw alive a few hours ago was not just dead, but had been murdered. Shady Grove wasn’t Los Angeles or Boston or even Albany. People didn’t get murdered here. That’s one of the reasons Kevin moved here in the first place—low crime, lower murder. Only one person named after a scientific unit of temperature.
Mentally, I shook myself. My mind went weird places when I got stressed.
A strangled sound escaped me. The words didn’t compute. I didn’t know what to think, what to say.
“Are you okay?” Kevin asked. “I didn’t realize you even knew Earl.”