by K. J. Emrick
“Because…” I prompted.
“Exactly. Because we never had sex. Not once.”
I clear my throat. My leg brushes back against my satchel, and I could almost feel the weight of the .38 inside, but I don’t think I’ll need it. Barlow was acting like a man who had been sucker punched in the gut. Like someone who had been on top of the world until somebody else changed the rules to the game. He was not acting, not even a little bit, like a guy who was trying to cover his tracks for his girlfriend’s disappearance.
And the kicker was, I think I believe him.
My future-sense isn’t a lie detector. I know what someone is going to say before they say it, but only the first three seconds. It’s like an echo in my head that I’ve learned to ignore. If I hadn’t, then I would be hearing everything like an echo, all the time, and I’d go insane. So I’ve learned to tune out a lot of it.
Look at it like you’re watching a gameshow. The host asks a question, and I know what the contestant is going to say. Doesn’t mean it’s the truth, it’s just what their answer is going to be, right or wrong. It’s the same thing with everyone. I know what they’re going to say, but people lie all the time. I still have to rely on my instincts to know what the truth is.
So I’m skeptical, but I think maybe Barlow’s telling the truth.
“You brought Katarina here from Croatia. You paid for her to come to America, you paid all the associated costs of getting her a visa. You were giving her anything she wanted while she lived in your apartment. Are you honestly going to tell me, that after everything you did to bring her here and make her your girlfriend, that sex wasn’t a part of it?”
“That’s what I’m saying, yes.” One hand scrubs across his face, and through his hair, leaving it a mess. “She’s from a very religious Catholic family. She told me she didn’t want to have sex until her wedding night. She said she was saving herself for our marriage bed. You… you must think that’s really hokey.”
I might have given up on finding love for myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a heart. “Actually, that doesn’t sound hokey at all.”
“Really? Because it did to me.” He laughs bitterly at himself, and then leans back against the bench, looking up at the clouds scudding slowly across the sky. One of them went in front of the sun, and as it did it cast shadows over his face. “When she told me that I thought, this is the twenty-first century. People don’t wait for marriage to have sex anymore. But she insisted, and I went along. Know why?”
Yeah, I did. “Because you loved her.”
He gives me a sidelong glance, and then a shrug. “That’s exactly what I was going to say. I would have done anything for Katarina. I would have waited for her, no matter how long it took. We still had long talks every day. We had evening walks along the Dequindre Cut. I took her on day trips over to Canada and showed her the sights. My every waking thought was about pleasing her. I’d be at work and I’d see something and I’d say to myself, hey, I need to tell Katarina about that. I’d drive by a shop with a dress in the window and I’d think, hey, Katarina would look great in that. She was absolutely my world. If she wanted to stay a virgin until our wedding night, then okay. I was all in.”
“Except,” I pointed out, “she didn’t wait. She had sex with someone. You’re saying it just wasn’t with you.”
A tear rolls down his cheek as his eyelids squeeze shut. “Looks like.”
“And you really didn’t know anything about it?”
With a slow shake of his head, he sighs. “Nope. I didn’t have any idea she was pregnant. Just like I have no idea where she is now.”
Do I believe what he’s saying? Do I believe that he’s the brokenhearted, betrayed man he appears to be?
Yeah. I do.
I don’t think Barlow did this. I think he honestly hired me and gave me an enormous sum of money because he honestly cares about Katarina. He wants her found, and to know that she’s safe… and I don’t know how to do that. He was my best suspect until ten minutes ago.
So now I’m back to finding the woman in Katarina’s contact list, Carol—last name unknown, address unknown—and finding the woman who was with Katarina at the bank—who I also can’t identify. For all I know they’re the same woman but that doesn’t matter because, again, I can’t identify who either of them are. I’m officially out of suspects.
And possibly out of a job, considering what I just accused my employer of.
“Uh,” I stammer, “Barlow, listen. If you want to drop me from this investigation, I’ll understand. I mean, I basically just flat out said it was you who got rid of Katarina, and I know some people might find that, well, a little offensive, so…”
“What? No, you can’t stop now!” Sitting up straight, his eyes fly open in alarm. “You’ve already found out so much, and you did it so quickly… please. Don’t give up now. Please? I need to know she’s okay.”
“Even though she cheated on you?” Hey. I had to ask.
His shoulders slump again. “I know. She got pregnant off someone else. It doesn’t exactly make me the happiest man in the world to know that my girlfriend may have been using me all along, just like you said. But people make mistakes. They slip. I believe that our relationship is strong enough to come back from that. I can forgive her, but not if I never see her again. I want you to keep going, Miss Stone. I want you to find Katarina.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man this much in love. First Katarina steals from him, and now we find out that she was sleeping with another man, and his only concern is still her safety. Some people might call Barlow Michaelson a sucker, all things considered. A stooge. An easy target for a woman who just wanted to get into the US no matter who she had to lie to in order to make it happen.
While all of that might still be true, I think what he’s doing for a woman he loves is pretty darned noble.
“All right, then, Mister Michaelson. I’m still on the case.”
His expression practically gushes with gratitude as he grabs my hand and shakes it repeatedly, thanking me over and over. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found you, Miss Stone. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
It takes a little doing to get my hand back. “Don’t thank me yet. I’m out of leads. You don’t have any idea what other guys she might have been seeing?”
“No, of course not. I mean, she must have been seeing whoever it was while I was at work.” He gestures helplessly as he tries to think it through. “Otherwise, we were almost always together. Maybe she was even seeing them at my place… but I’d rather not think about that.”
Yeah, I’m sure he wouldn’t. Well. I can scroll through Katarina’s Facebook again although I don't know what good it will do. I might be able to ask my good friend down at the police precinct, Sergeant Christian Caine, for help in tracking down the conversations that I suspect she was probably deleting, like the messages from Louise Timmins. The police have ways of doing that sort of thing. I mean, if Barlow didn’t know she was screwing someone, then he could be wrong about her not having any other friends, too. It was possible. The phrase ‘slim chance in hell’ pops into my brain, but I really was at a loss.
Or I could just ask my new genie friend, I suppose. Although, if he couldn’t tell me where Katarina was, I don’t know what he can do for me now. Harry can’t tell me anything he doesn’t already know. Harry can get me a new car, if I wished for it, but he can’t give me the address where Katarina is hiding. He won’t be able to tell me the name of who she was sleeping with, either.
Not that I’d want a new car, just for the record. I like Roxy the Mustang. She’s always been good to me. So, with nothing to wish for, I guess Harry’s really only good for making me coffee.
“I’ve got it!” Barlow shouts out without warning.
Maybe I jumped, but if I did it was only a little. And only because I have such cat-like reflexes. Not because my future-sense warned me and it still spooked me. No, sir.
“What is
it?” I ask him. “At this point I’ll take any suggestion.”
“Carol. I bet Carol would know who the father of the baby is.”
“You mean the Carol from Katarina’s contact list? No, I looked through the text messages between those two and there’s nothing to them. Just stuff about the weather and things like that. They really didn’t seem to talk much. Maybe through a different chat program like Snapchat or something, where the messages disappear as soon as you send them, but if that’s the case we’ll never know anyway, because the messages have all been eaten up by cyberspace.”
“But you still have the text messages between them,” he says. “Maybe you can use those and, I don’t know, find out who she is somehow. Use those amazing detective skills of yours. Then when you find her, you can get her to tell you who Katarina was seeing behind my back. She has to know, Miss Stone. They were talking all the time, and maybe she only left the text messages that meant nothing on purpose. Maybe she deleted all the others because she didn’t want me to see her talking to Carol about this other guy.”
That seemed like a lot of wishful thinking at first glance, but he had a good point. It was the same line of reasoning I’d been using about Katarina’s probable deleted Facebook messages. Text messages can be deleted too, at least on one end. There might have been a lot more said between them that Katarina was trying to hide. If I found Carol, and she let me see the complete message history on her phone, we might know more. Carol might know more, too. Unless she decides she doesn’t want to help me. Either way, it was still worth a shot to find Carol. I can be very persuasive when I want to be.
It could work. I’ve done more with less before.
And this time, I’ve got a genie on my side.
Standing up, I pull my satchel up and over my shoulder. Time to get back to work. “I’m going back to my apartment,” I tell Barlow. “I’ll let you know if anything else comes up.”
Before I can take a single step he holds his hand out, pointing. “Wait…”
I already know what he’s going to say. “Oh yeah, my sandwich. Thanks, Barlow. I would have forgotten.”
He looks up at me all perplexed. “But… I didn’t say anything.”
“I know. You didn’t have to.”
“Harry, I’m home!”
I figured I might as well announce my return. I was going to have to get used to living with the guy, after all. There was going to have to be some ground rules, too, like no bringing home overnight guests without telling the other person first. Did genies date? Did they have late night poker parties? Not in my apartment. No way was I going to allow that.
Of course, I was going to have to stop walking around naked in the mornings, too…
“Greetings, Sidney Stone!” Harry calls out as he poofs out of the rug in a cloud of flower-scented smoke. “I trust your day has been productive?”
“Uh, sort of yes and sort of no. I found out that our missing girl was pregnant and went to see a doctor about it.”
He floats into a kitchen chair, feet never touching the floor, and lifts an eyebrow at this new information. “Ah. That is good.”
“Then I accused my employer of killing her and hiring me to cover it up.”
His eyebrow scrunches itself down low again. “Oh. That’s not so good. Did he do this thing you accused him of?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Hmm. That is definitely not good.”
Dropping my takeout bag on the table, and my satchel in the chair, I give him a look. “You know, Harry, you’ve got a real talent for stating the obvious.”
“Yes,” he laughs. “Yes I do!”
I kick my sneakers off and get them to land mostly over by the door before going over to the fridge. “What have you been doing all day?” From inside I take out my last bottle of Miller Lite and bring it back to the table. “Anything fun?”
His lips pucker. “When my master doesn’t need me, I usually go back to my carpet, until I am needed.”
“What? Seriously? That doesn’t sound like much fun at all.” I try to twist the top off my beer but then remember it’s not that kind of cap. Back to kitchen I go, to the silverware drawer, in search of a bottle opener. “Harry, you can hang out in my apartment while I’m gone. You said you can’t go very far from your rug, fine, but there’s a TV in there to watch and I’ve got some books on the shelf if you want to read. I’d stay away from the paperbacks. They’re, uh… they’re trashy.”
Where was that bottle opener?
He gives me a deep bow from the chair where he’s sitting. “I am grateful to you, Sidney Stone. Most of my masters have been disinclined to give me access to their abode. I see now that you are different.”
“In every way that counts,” I tell him. Knives, forks, a nutcracker that I never use… no bottle opener. “My casa is your casa. We’re partners, right? Someone decided it was a good idea to send you to help me, and the least I can do is give you rights to the TV. Hey, can you open this bottle for me?”
I swing it back and forth by the top of its long neck.
He smiles and raises his hand, fingers poised to snap. “Is that a wish, Sidney Stone?”
Guess it couldn’t be that easy. With a sigh, I put the pleated rim of the cap on the edge of the counter and slam my opposite hand down on the one holding the bottle. With a snap, and a hiss, and a spray of foamy beer, the cap goes spiraling away to the floor. “Never mind,” I tell him. “I got it. No thanks to you.”
Harry’s smile curls wider. “Often, it is better to overcome obstacles by yourself, rather than rely on magic.”
I take a swig of the Miller Lite before sitting down again. “It was just a beer bottle. I’m not asking you to get me free WiFi or anything.”
“Yes, just a beer bottle. It starts with small things, and then before you realize it…” His gaze focuses past me, on something pretty far away, like maybe years in his own past. “You find that it is easier to do everything with magic, rather than have to work for anything. One day, you ask for too much and you find yourself trapped, unable to undo what you have done.”
Lifting his arms, he stares down at the copper wrist cuffs banded into place there. They extend a good six inches back from the base of each of his hands, and they were intricately etched with designs and what might have been letters in an ancient alphabet. They were beautiful, real works of art, but somehow I got the impression they meant something very different to my new genie friend.
Just before he settles his hands back into his lap, below the table where I can’t see them, I would have sworn those designs were moving. Must have been a trick of the light.
In the silence that follows I pull over my doggie bag from the Songbird Café and take out what’s left of my lunch. A small bite off the sandwich tells me it’s still delicious.
“What is this you’re eating?” Harry asks me, eyeing my turkey club and the cold, soggy fries. “It smells… oddly.”
“It’s a club sandwich,” I say around a bite. I didn’t bother getting out a plate. I just ate over the bag. “Turkey and bacon on slices of rye bread, lettuce and tomato, a little garlic mayo. Really good.”
“Hmm,” the genie hummed. “Might I try a bite?”
“No! Get your own sandwich. That’s supposed to be one of your specialties, right? Isn’t that what you said? Just poof one into existence, or whatever.”
He considers my food with a frown. “But it won’t be the same.”
“Listen, you keep your hands to yourself, all right?”
With a long pull from the beer, I got up and brought the satchel with me into the living room. Might as well get this started. I needed a notebook or some paper, and then I was going to start the tedious process of writing out each text message exchange between Katarina and Carol on a separate sheet, so I could compare them easier. I’ve tried scrolling up and down in a message string before, looking for what I need from different sections, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds. Try looking for something you text
ed to your friend two days ago for instance, something you know is there somewhere, and you’ll see what I mean.
So. There’s an old notepad up on the bookshelf here, wedged in between a Nora Roberts novel and one by Beverly Jenkins. I left it here after a failed attempt at making regular shopping lists for myself. I just kept leaving the lists here in the apartment after making them, which totally defeated the purpose of making the list in the first place. Easier just to get things as I crave them. Of course, that’s also why my refrigerator is so bare…
When I got back to the couch with the notebook all ready to work, and looked over into the kitchen, I saw Harry devouring the last of what was left of my sandwich in one bite.
“Hey!”
He at least has the good manners to look guilty, jumping up from the chair and waving his palms back and forth. Rye breadcrumbs fell out of his mouth as he tried to speak and chew and swallow all at the same time. “I’f tho thorry, my lathee. It juth lookthd tho goot!”
I stood there, one hand on my hip, the other holding the notebook against my thigh, and glare at him. See, if my future-sense worked with him I would’ve known he was going to mooch that off me before it happened, and I could’ve saved it. Only it apparently doesn’t work that way with magical beings so here I am, sandwich-less!
Oh yeah. There were definitely going to be some rules in the Sidney Stone household. You could bank on that! No food snatching. That’s going to be rule number one, even before no walking around in the nude.
“Next time,” I say, enunciating very clearly, “no… means… no.”
“Yeth, yeth, of courth my lathee! Of courth!” He finally manages to swallow, and in spite of his embarrassment, he smiles. “By the stars and planets, that’s good! I think from now on I shall make only turkey chubs!”
I laugh in spite of myself. I couldn’t help it. Harry was just so sincere in everything he did. So smart in so many ways after being on Earth for so long, and yet he was as naïve as a child in other ways. “It’s a ‘club,’ not a chub,” I correct him. “And to tell you the truth I wouldn’t turn down one of those for lunch sometime with some of that incredible coffee you make.”