by J. B. Lynn
“I’ll take care of it,” he said as I pulled into the hotel parking lot.
“Thank you,” I muttered.
“So Armani’s shaken up?” He tried to sound casual, but I heard the note of concern in his tone.
“This has been hard on her,” I admitted grudgingly.
“Does she have a phone yet?” he asked hopefully. “Maybe I could give her a call. Give her someone to talk to besides you?”
“Besides me? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I threw the car into park angrily.
“Just that you have a lot of other people vying for your attention,” he soothed.
As though on cue, I got a text from Ian right then, asking, “Can you meet me at the zoo tonight?”
Frowning, I stared at the hotel. “She doesn’t have a phone yet,” I told Jack. “When she gets one, I’ll let you know.”
“Thanks.”
For a second, I wondered whether I should just tell him to call her through the hotel, but I decided if the hotshot investigative reporter couldn’t figure that out for himself, I wasn’t going to make his job easier. “I’ve got to go.” I turned off the engine.
“Maggie?” Jack asked. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No,” I told him tiredly. “I’m beyond help.”
8
I dropped the menagerie, including God, who said he needed a nap, in the hotel room, and took Armani out for something to eat.
Armani was not right. I couldn’t tell whether she was exhausted from her ordeal or incredibly depressed, but it was unusual for us to sit in silence. She offered no unsolicited advice or crazy theories or funny observations. She just stared glumly at her meal of spaghetti and meatballs, and I stared at her, worried.
Most alarmingly, she ate her food just as it was offered on the menu. She didn’t ask for any strange substitutions or additions. She ate like a normal person. That kind of terrified me.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and pushed my own plate of chicken parm away from me. “What is wrong with you?”
She raised her gaze slowly from her plate to meet my eyes. “It’s all gone.”
I nodded sympathetically. After all, my home had blown up not once, but twice, so I was all too familiar with that sense of loss and devastation.
“You’ll make it through,” I assured her, reaching across the table to pat her hand.
“I’m all alone,” she said in a small voice, tears welling in her eyes.
“No, you’re not. You’ve got me.” I tried to give her a reassuring smile even as it occurred to me that maybe my friendship wasn’t the best consolation prize.
“But the spirits, my guides, the voices are gone,” she said in a strangled tone. “I’m all alone.”
I bit my lip, unsure of how to respond to that. I remembered how upset I’d been when I’d temporarily lost my ability to talk to animals. I assumed that she was going through something similar, and I knew how painfully lonely that kind of loss could be.
Finally, I offered, “You don’t know that it’s permanent.”
“But I don’t know that it’s not,” she countered.
“The tiles still work,” I reminded her. I’d pulled Scrabble tiles that had spelled out just what I needed to help defeat the man who’d been holding my family hostage.
She shrugged, seemingly unmoved by the success.
“And they worked for my dad,” I said. “He came back for me, carried me out of the B&B right before it blew up.”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah, I’d forgotten about that.”
Encouraged by her agreement, wanting to give her something to believe in, I suggested, “Let’s do them again, now.”
Her eyes welled with tears. “I don’t have them. They burned. They were lost like everything else.”
I swallowed guiltily as drops sped down her cheeks and dripped onto her meatball. “We’ll get you new ones.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” She dashed away her tears.
“How do you know?” I asked.
She blinked.
“How did you end up with the first set?”
“I found them at a thrift store,” she admitted.
“So they weren’t blessed by a voodoo priestess or a shaman or something?” I asked. “Their power came from you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have any powers.”
I frowned at her. “You forget who you’re talking to. I talk to freaking animals, remember?”
A slight smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “Yeah.”
My heart soared as I saw a glimmer of hope spark in the depths of her dark eyes. “I’m someone who believes in the impossible. And I believe in you.”
She sat up a little straighter.
“We’re getting you a new set,” I told her.
She nodded slowly. “I think I’d like that.”
I grinned, finally feeling like I’d done something right.
If I’d known then what message the tiles would hold for me, I wouldn’t have been so smug.
“It’s no wonder you’re exhausted,” God lectured. “You spent the whole day running around taking care of everyone.”
He was curled up in my bra, so his know-it-all voice seemed to speak directly from my heart.
I sighed heavily, knowing he was right, but my verbal response was, “It’s not like I have a choice.”
“You could have chosen to encourage Susan to deliver the papers to her sisters herself.”
“But I was going there anyway to take Katie to her play date.”
“But you weren’t going to Susan’s anyway. That was an extra trip.”
“It was easier to do that than to listen to her complain,” I countered.
“You didn’t have to take care of Boy,” the lizard continued.
“I couldn’t let him starve,” I gasped.
“Why not? You let me starve all the time. I can’t remember the last time you bought me a feast.”
“Do you have scurvy?” I asked.
He did not appreciate my joke. “I have nutritional needs, too.”
“Piss has been providing you with your cricket protein,” I reminded him.
“When there was a yard where she could hunt. There are no crickets in the hotel room.”
“Fine. Fine. I’ll go to the pet store tomorrow and buy you a bag of chirpers,” I promised.
“Good. I deserve room service just as much as your simian friends.” He gave me only a moment’s respite before he added, “And now you’re off in the middle of the night to attend to Ian’s whims.”
Considering that I was currently walking across the parking lot of the zoo at 1:30 in the morning, carrying a bag of soggy Mexican food, I couldn’t argue with him.
I tossed the bag o’ burritos over the chain link fence, hopped up on a garbage dumpster, and catapulted myself over said fence without doing physical harm to either myself or the sensitive-skinned lizard.
“You’re getting better at that,” my reptilian friend admitted grudgingly as we made our way through the darkened zoo.
Some of the animals stirred and said hello, some told me to get the hell out, and I’m pretty sure the yak intentionally farted in my direction. I held my breath as my eyes burned from the stench.
Finally, we reached our destination, the gorilla enclosure.
“Burrito! Burrito! Burrito!” the young female ape called excitedly.
I tossed one over the top of the enclosure to her. “Hi, Cleo.”
“Hi, Maggie,” she trilled, picking up the foil-wrapped treat.
“Don’t eat the paper this time,” the young male gorilla grunted.
I tossed him a burrito.
He grunted a response, scooped up the food, and quickly retreated to a back corner of the enclosure.
“Mind your manners,” the older female gorilla admonished. “It is good to see you Maggie of the family Lee.”
“It’s good to see you, too.” I tossed her a foil packet.
She made no move to retrieve it, seemingly more intent to continue our conversation. “You are a loyal friend.”
“I try to be.”
“Too loyal,” God groused from his hiding spot.
“You are a leader among your kind.”
“No,” I told her quickly. “I’m not.”
She leaned closer to get a better look at me. “You possess strength, wisdom, and integrity. You are a leader.”
I shook my head. “I’m a klutz, easily distracted—”
“And a people pleaser,” God interjected.
The ape sat back on her haunches and observed me for a long moment. “And, not but.”
I blinked at her, confused. “Excuse me?”
“And, not but,” she repeated.
“I don’t understand.”
“You are the qualities I listed and those you and the lizard king added.”
“Lizard king. I like the sound of that,” God declared.
“Your but is wrong,” my primate professor continued. “You think your but qualities cancel out the good things. You are incorrect. You encompass it all.” She pointed to a nearby tree. “It provides shade and it sheds its leaves. The shedding does not diminish its beauty or usefulness. It is part of the whole.”
“She’s not wrong,” God piped up.
“About the tree or me?” I asked.
“Both.”
“The other human is coming,” the male bellowed from the back of the enclosure, pounding on his chest for emphasis.
“Ian of the family Lee,” the elder said.
I decided that explaining our warped family tree to a bunch of gorillas probably wasn’t the best use of my time so I didn’t correct her assumption.
“More food! More food!” Cleo yelled excitedly, shaking the bars of the enclosure.
“I don’t have any more,” I told her, holding up the empty bag for her perusal.
“I do,” Ian said as he approached.
I chuckled when I realized that, like me, my half-brother had arrived with a sack of food for our simian friends.
“Hello,” he said as he tossed the entire bag into the enclosure.
The male gorilla charged the bag, preventing Cleo from reaching it.
Reaching inside, he respectfully handed the first burrito to their elder, then tossed one to Cleo and took the last one back to his spot at the rear of the habitat.
“Humans only feed the furry ones,” God grumbled.
Ian raised his eyebrows.
“He’s mad I haven’t gotten him crickets,” I explained.
“Thank you, Ian of the family Lee,” Cleo called, unwrapping her treat. “Is your uncle well?”
Ian nodded. “He’s made a full recovery.”
“And yet you are unhappy,” the old gorilla observed.
“A little stressed,” he admitted.
“Why?” I asked curiously.
“One more person to take care of,” God complained.
Ian’s eyes grew wide.
“You do know he can understand you, don’t you?” I admonished the lizard.
“I forgot,” he muttered sheepishly. “My apologies, Ian.”
Ian shrugged. “You’re not wrong. I do need Maggie’s help.”
“With what?” I tried to keep the fact that I didn’t really want to help anyone at the moment from being revealed in my voice.
“It’s in my car,” he began slowly.
“Okay. Goodnight.” I walked away from the enclosure with Ian.
“Night, Maggie. Night, Ian, the talking humans,” Cleo yelled.
“And, not but,” was the last thing I heard.
I don’t know what I expected to find in Ian’s car, but it certainly wasn’t a skull.
9
“What the hell is that?” I asked when he popped open his trunk in the parking lot of the zoo and revealed a box that housed the bony structure.
“A human skull,” he muttered.
Hearing that, God scrambled up onto my shoulder to get a better look.
“I can see that.” I punched Ian’s arm. “Why the hell are you driving around with it in your trunk?”
Shrugging, he said, “I found it.”
“You found it? Where?”
“In a box with your dad’s name on it.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach, and I had to steady myself against the fender. Things were finally on a pretty good track with my father, since he’d gone to the trouble to save my life at the B&B, but I was pretty sure that Ian’s find was going to wreck all that.
“I’m sorry.” Ian offered support by grabbing my shoulder. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You could have left it in the box,” I murmured.
“It’s dented,” Ian replied.
“The box?”
“No, the skull.” He pointed to an indentation an inch or so above the eye socket.
I’m no medical expert, but from the spider web-like marks spreading out from the indentation, I’d say someone had gotten their skull smashed. That was my technical opinion.
“Oh, that’s not good,” God mused.
Ian rubbed the back of his neck nervously. “That was what I thought.”
“There must be a reason there’s a skull in a box with my dad’s name,” I said, trying to make sense of it all.
“A human skull,” Ian reminded me.
“A damaged human skull,” God added for emphasis. “You know what that means, don’t you? Foul play.”
I closed the trunk, unwilling to look at the skull for a moment longer. I sucked in a deep breath, trying to quash the nausea that was now churning in my gut. “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
Ian nodded. “Like Archie offed his enemy and then kept his skull as some sort of trophy to remember his terrible deed?”
“Yeah,” I replied dryly. “Kinda like that.”
“I’m sure there’s an explanation,” Ian soothed. “I just thought you might want to ask him about it.”
“I’d rather suffer a thousand paper cuts,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Where did you discover this box with its mysterious contents?” God asked.
“Uncle Thurston has a storage unit,” Ian explained, as though it was perfectly normal for a grown man to be answering a squeaking lizard. “I’d gone looking to see if I could find any pictures of myself as a kid, and found the box instead.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It was near the front of the unit.”
“No,” I said. “Why were you looking for pictures?”
He shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other and looked away.
“I didn’t mean to pry,” I apologized awkwardly, wanting to alleviate his discomfort.
He nodded. “Anyway, I opened the box and there it was.”
“And you decided to dump the problem in Maggie’s lap,” God accused hotly.
Ian blinked, taken aback by the little reptile’s attack.
“You could have just closed up the box and pretended to have never seen it. Instead, you’re carting it around…transporting human remains is a felony, by the way… and asking her to solve a problem that she had nothing to do with,” God railed.
“A felony?” Ian asked.
“He doesn’t know that for sure,” I hurried to tell him. “He watches a lot of crime shows and takes everything they say as gospel.”
“Hey, at least I’m interested in educating myself,” the little guy said defensively.
“Just put it back where you found it,” I ordered Ian. “I need some time to figure out how to proceed, and honestly, I already have too much on my plate.”
Ian nodded. “I understand.”
Considering he had no idea that I needed to pull off a dangerous job in order to provide for my family, he couldn’t possibly understand, but I didn’t correct him.
“Was there anything else?”
He tilted his head to the side and rocked back on his heels. “Are you mad at
me?”
“I’m just stressed.”
“Of course she’s stressed,” God ranted. “Do you have any idea how—”
“Hush,” I ordered him sharply.
Annoyed about being silenced, he dove back into my bra.
Ian patted my shoulder. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
I shook my head.
“Are you sure?”
Instead of answering, I asked, “Why were you looking for pictures?”
He looked away.
I waited.
The long silence grew uncomfortable, but I sensed that the reason he’d gone to the storage unit was important.
He scuffed the ground with his sneaker. “You’re not going to like it.”
“My entire life revolves around dealing with things I don’t like,” I told him.
“I’m just trying to put some stuff together,” he replied evasively.
I sighed, too tired to chase him down for an answer. “Okay. I’m going home. Well, back to the hotel.”
“I’ll see you soon?” Ian asked.
I nodded and got into my car.
“What are you going to do?” God asked after I’d started the engine.
“About the skull?”
“About Ian being so cagey. That’s very suspicious.”
“He must have a reason,” I replied, though I secretly agreed with him. “It’s pretty low on my list of priorities.”
“What’s the highest priority?”
“Getting a decent night’s sleep,” I yawned. Pulling out of the zoo’s lot, I drove a block and caught the first available red light.
“Seriously,” the lizard said crossly. “Is your highest priority doing the work for Delveccio or finding a place for your family to live?”
“I’m not sure they’re mutually exclusive.”
“And yet you wouldn’t give Patrick the time of day. Considering you need him for the job, do you think that was the best idea?”
“He’s following me,” I said.
10
“You could do worse than having that man look out for you,” God chastised. “It’s not like he’s being intrusive. You should—”
“No,” I interrupted. “I mean, he’s literally following me.” Looking in the rearview mirror at the car stopped behind me at the red light, I waved at the driver, Patrick Mulligan.