Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Angela? God—where have you been?”

  “I’m at the airport.”

  She sounded calm. Like herself. Her British accent was there, as distinct as ever. And she knew where she was. All of those things were good signs.

  “I’m about ten miles away from the airport,” he said. “Or rather, the exit that leads to the airport. I’m so glad you called. Listen—I’m sorry. My reaction was not about you.”

  “I met Norman Rockwell.”

  Ryan’s eyebrows shot up. “You what?”

  “Norman Rockwell found me at the airport and sat down to talk to me. Did you send him?”

  “No,” Ryan said, sincerely, although after the initial shock of the news, he wasn’t that surprised. Norman Rockwell was the oldest living member of the Rockwell dragon shifter clan, and he had a way of appearing where he was needed, when he was needed. “I swear I didn’t. What did he say?”

  “The long and the short of it was that I should give you a chance.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll give you a chance.”

  Ryan closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the seat. “God bless Norman Rockwell.”

  “How did you know I would be at the airport?”

  “I broke into your apartment and saw all of your stuff was gone. Your car was still in the parking lot. I was going on instinct.”

  “You broke into my apartment?” Angela said, her voice incredulous. “I’m not sure how I feel about that, actually. That’s rather extreme.”

  “I knew I needed to find you.”

  “You have good instincts.”

  “Well, this is what I do,” Ryan said, “but I am sorry for breaking into your apartment. I wouldn’t do that under most circumstances.”

  There was a long pause in the conversation, and Ryan let it hang there, not rushing her.

  “Would you like to come pick me up?” Angela finally asked. “The bus back would take another hour or more.”

  Ryan actually smiled, his relief was so strong. “Absolutely. Tell me where to meet you.”

  “I’ll wait in the pickup area. I can see it from here. I’m in Terminal One.”

  “I’m on my way,” Ryan said. “Angela?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for calling.”

  There was still hesitancy in her tone, but he could almost hear her relaxing just a bit. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  They hung up, and Ryan pulled back out onto the highway, his black four-wheel drive SUV picking up speed quickly. He was soon sitting at eighty-five miles an hour again, so the ten miles on the interstate passed quickly and he pulled off at the airport exit. Within just a few more minutes, he was pulling up to the pick-up area, and when he saw Angela standing there, holding the handle of her large suitcase and a bag over her shoulder, his heart flipped.

  She was absolutely beautiful, and she looked so vulnerable, standing there waiting for him. If she looked vulnerable, he could only imagine how she felt, and he cursed himself inwardly again for the blunt approach he had taken with her [and for his anger].

  He pulled up to the curb and turned off the engine, getting out to help her with her case. Lifting it into the trunk with ease, he loaded it and closed the trunk door before he and Angela exchanged a word. When his hands were free, he turned to her. They locked eyes for a moment, and then Ryan reached out and pulled her to him, hugging her close.

  “I’m sorry,” he said “This is my fault.”

  For a moment, she stood stiffly in his embrace, but then she relented and leaned against his chest briefly before pulling back. “I was too defensive.”

  “Can we start over?”

  Angela gave him a small smile and shrugged. “That’s why I called.”

  He got her into the car, opening her door for her and closing it behind her. When he rounded to his side, he got in quickly, turned the engine back on, and eased back into the circular, clogged traffic making its way through the airport parking lot. “So,” he said, breaking the returned silence. “Where were you going?”

  “London,” she said. “Well, I was trying to anyway. The only way to get there was through Denver, and I would have had to stay in Denver overnight. All mine for the low price of $2,632 dollars. And that was just for the flights alone.”

  Ryan winced. “Sorry. Well, not sorry at all actually. Definitely not sorry at all.”

  “I would have figured it out,” Angela said. “I was a bit discouraged, but I would have made it work. If not for Norman Rockwell.”

  “Well, as I said before, God bless Norman,” Ryan said, fervently, easing the car out of the main line of traffic and taking a back road shortcut to rejoin the interstate. “And what were you going to do in London?”

  “I was hoping that it wouldn’t come with me,” Angela said. “My condition. It’s never happened to me in England. I was hoping that it would just … stay here. And if it didn’t, I was going to consult a London doctor.”

  “One who doesn’t tell you you’re possessed,” Ryan said, putting it out there so that they could deal with it directly. He wasn’t going to be quite as up-front with her as he had been initially, but he still didn’t believe in beating around the bush. “Clearly the supernatural concept is not one that you’ve considered.”

  Angela shook her head. “Not at all. I’ve never given any credence to ghost sightings. Even those in my field who believe that plants have supernatural properties—I dismiss them. It’s not something I’ve ever considered valid.”

  “So, when I suggested it …”

  “I felt betrayed,” she said, simply. “Dramatic, perhaps. But I had begun to have hope in you. I trusted you. And I felt like you had abused that trust.”

  “I’m sorry. For all of it. For you feeling betrayed. For yelling at you,” Ryan said, truly meaning it. “I don’t know what to say. Betrayal is the last thing I would want you to feel. You can trust me, Angela. I promise—I’m only here to help you. I might do it clumsily from time to time, and I’m sure I’ll do it clumsily again. But I’m on your side.”

  Angela looked over at him, her wide eyes seeming to search his face. “I like things that I can understand. Study. Touch. See. Smell. Taste. That’s how I understand the world. I’ve never been the kind of person who deals well in abstract, and I’ve never been the kind of person who, as my mother would put it, is given to fancy or mysticism. I don’t like this at all, and I am very uncomfortable. But I would like you to tell me more.”

  “I can do that,” Ryan said. “First, let’s get something to eat. Are you starving?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “Me too,” Ryan said. “I haven’t had lunch.”

  As he found his way off the highway to a little café that he was familiar with, Ryan breathed a small sigh of relief. It appeared that Angela not only wasn’t going to make a big deal of the way he had flipped out over the picture—she wasn’t even going to ask him about it or bring it up at all. She seemed content enough to accept his apology for his outburst, and to accept that it wasn’t about her. He had dreaded trying to come up with some explanation that would be both true and discreet, discouraging any further questions. But apparently that wasn’t necessary.

  And she was also willing to hear him out.

  He pulled into the parking lot of the café and killed the engine, making a mental note to track down Norman Rockwell, who was a bit of a wanderer, and buy him a beer in thanks for whatever he’d said to Angela.

  They went inside, and Ryan ordered a meatball sub. Angela ordered a loaded baked potato. They both got beers to go with their meal, silently agreeing that they were both in need of one.

  And then Ryan looked across the table at Angela, taking in her wide, doe eyes and the soft fall of her hair. She had little frown lines around her mouth and between her brow, but they didn’t mar her beauty at all. She could look at him however she wanted, as long as she was simply sitting there looking at him.

  “This is an area of the world
that has a lot of unexplained mystical activity,” Ryan told her, jumping back into the deep end, but bringing a life preserver with him this time. “My colleagues and I take average investigation cases, but we specialize in these kinds of mystical cases, where the solution or explanation can’t be found in the natural world. Spirits do exist, Angela. I’ve seen them, and I’ve talked to them.”

  “Stop there,” Angela said, holding up a hand. “Let’s talk about that. You have actually seen a spirit. A ghost. You’ve talked to one?”

  “I’ve talked to many.”

  “Just out loud? Like you and I are talking now?”

  “Sometimes,” he said, nodding “Other times I communicate with them through signs. Or sometimes they take on a host. Like you. I talked to a ghost last night, but she was in your body, controlling you.”

  Angela shook her head, a shiver running down her spine. “That’s a horrifying thought.”

  “I know it feels that way.”

  “No, it is,” she said. “What if someone told you that there was something living inside of you—the remnants of another person—and it was using your body to house itself?”

  Ryan nodded. “I do understand, Angela. I know what it must feel like. But think of it this way. There’s nothing wrong with your brain if I’m right. If I’m wrong, then there is definitely something wrong with your brain.”

  That gave Angela significant pause, and she leaned back in her chair, still studying him, but with a more open expression. “That’s an excellent point.”

  “I’ve been known to make them.”

  “How does one obtain a spirit possession?”

  Ryan smiled a little at her formal phrasing, but didn’t comment on it. She was so different from any other woman he had ever met, and he found himself continually fascinated with her. Even if she sometimes tried to flee the country to get away from him. “One obtains a spirit possession by being an available host in the area where a spirit has a strong connection to the natural world. That strong connection exists because of some connection the spirit had to that place prior to death.”

  “So, anyone can become possessed.”

  “Yes,” Ryan said, nodding. “It has nothing to do with the qualifications or validity of the human being. It’s not like you did something wrong. Just like you wouldn’t have done something wrong if you got a medical diagnosis of some genetic disease. It just happened that way.”

  “How does one get rid of a possession?” Angela asked next, as he knew she would.

  “Well, that’s more complicated,” Ryan said. “The first step …is discovering who is possessing you.”

  The server came by to drop off their food, and for a moment Angela didn’t respond to him. She thanked her, took her plate, and began to organize her various condiments and mash them all into the baked potato. “So, it’s personal. Specific to the person, rather.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we need to find out whose house I tried to burn down.”

  Ryan picked up his sandwich and took a generous bite of it. “That’s the first step.”

  Chapter 18

  Angela

  Once she made the decision to consider the possibility of a supernatural explanation for her condition, it wasn’t dissimilar from pursuing a hypothesis in a scientific experiment. She needed to know the variables. That was the first step. What were all of the components and how did they fit together? If she could put her skepticism and worry out of her mind and just treat this as a new experiment she was conducting, then she could stay calm.

  Calm enough not to end up fleeing to the airport again, anyway.

  It had been a relief when Ryan had picked up the phone. It had been a relief that he had been looking for her, too. Underneath all of her panic and her flight instinct, there had also been disappointment. She didn’t want him to have betrayed her. She didn’t want to have to cut ties with him. There was something about Ryan that made her feel comfortable and safe, and having to believe that had been a lie was painful.

  So she was glad that she had stayed, and she was determined to work this problem like she would work any other. This was just another species of plant, and it was her job to figure out what it was and how it worked. The fact that it was her mind under the microscope wasn’t important. The fact that she might lose consciousness at any moment and return to acting like a common criminal didn’t matter. Every experiment came with risks.

  “It’s late on a Sunday afternoon,” Ryan said, breaking into Angela’s thoughts as they drove down the road in his car. They had finished lunch quickly while putting together the outline of a plan. The first step of that plan was to identify the people who lived in the house that she had almost successfully burned down. That was their only clue as to who, if anyone, was possessing her.

  “And …?” Angela asked, pulling her gaze away from the suburban streets they were driving down.

  “People are usually home on a Sunday afternoon,” Ryan said. “Stereotypically. Adults are off work, and children are off school. Families stay at home and hang out.”

  “Or go out for a picnic, or a movie, or to a friend’s house,” Angela said.

  Ryan shrugged. “True. But we’re probably going to find at least someone at home. So that means we need a cover story for why we’re there, in the event that we end up interacting with them.”

  Angela felt a little twinge of anxiety. “We’re interacting with them? I thought we were just going to use a spyglass or something to see them and figure out who they are.”

  Ryan laughed. “A spyglass? Not exactly. We could just find the address, then figure out who lives there. But I think we need to know a little bit more about them. I doubt that their identity alone is going to reveal what dead person might want to burn down their house.”

  That was a reasonable point, but it didn’t make Angela feel any more comfortable with the prospect of talking to these people, whoever they were. But she was committed, and scientific discovery wasn’t always a comfortable process. After all, she had spent hours upon hours out in the bayou, collecting specimens, even working into all hours of the night with just a torch to light the ground around her. That hadn’t been comfortable either, but it had been worth it to get the information she wanted.

  “Okay, so what’s the cover story?” Angela asked.

  “I think that we should be a married couple, looking to buy a house in the area,” Ryan said, glancing over at her as he flipped on his turn signal and pulled into a neighborhood that didn’t look familiar to her at all. “We can say we were driving around, that we liked the houses in the area, and that we’re hoping for more information. We can say that we don’t trust all the stuff that a realtor feeds you about how great the schools are and what a quiet neighborhood it is. We want a real assessment from a family who has lived in the area for a while.”

  Angela was impressed. “That sounds legitimate. A little invasive, but perhaps still reasonable.”

  “I’m going to take that as full approval,” Ryan said, pulling off to the side of the street he had just turned down. “There it is.” He nodded to the house to their left, just ahead of them. “This is where we were last night.”

  “I don’t remember it at all,” Angela said, staring at the house and wondering whether, if she looked at it hard enough and long enough, she could somehow generate a memory of it. “It inspires nothing in me. No feelings. No memories. No anything.”

  Ryan turned off the engine. “I’m not surprised. Look at the window on the right. Did you see that?”

  Angela looked, but she didn’t see anything of note, other than curtains hanging in a window. “What am I looking for exactly?”

  “There was a movement by the window,” Ryan said. “Watch carefully. You’ll see it again. The person is still there.”

  “Watching us?”

  “Maybe,” Ryan said. “Look like we’re having a conversation about the house.”

  “We are having a conversation about the house.”

&nb
sp; Ryan gave her a look. “Like this,” he said, starting to point to random spots on the house and around the street as he talked to her. “We need to seem like we’re engrossed in ourselves, having a conversation about the neighborhood. In a minute, you’re going to point at the house we’re targeting and talk about something. Then I’m going to nod and we’ll both get out of the car while studying that house.”

  Angela followed his lead, because he was the investigator after all. But she felt a little silly, pretending to talk about the house in case the movement at the window of that house was someone watching them.

  “Why would someone be watching us?” she asked, pointing around them like he had been doing. “Isn’t it pretty normal for a car to pull off to the side of a road in a neighborhood? Do you think they suspect something after last night?”

  “When I pulled you away from here last night, there was no movement within the house,” Ryan said. “I don’t think they knew that we were out here, or that you managed to set fire to their house. The movement at the window looks like a younger woman. She might be bored on a Sunday afternoon, or it might be a slightly built housewife who has a habit of peeking out of windows to spy on her neighbors, or it could be someone waiting on a visitor.”

  Angela realized that she might have a scientific mind, but she did not have an investigator’s mind. Ryan was much more experienced at this than she was, and she, once again, committed to following his lead. “Okay,” she said, putting her hand on the door handle of the car. “Let’s do this then.”

  They got out together, and Angela did follow Ryan’s lead, walking around the car with him as he talked about this and that around the neighborhood, pointing at several different houses and then turning to her and talking about nothing much at all, but doing so emphatically while he used his hands to gesture along with his comments. She nodded along, contributing as best she could.

  Then he started walking towards the house they were interested in, and she followed. When he took her hand in his, lacing their fingers together, her heart jumped into her throat, and she felt a tingle of warmth move over her skin. His thumb brushed over hers gently, and when she darted a glance at him, he smirked a bit.