The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  “Did you find Sariah?” I asked. The two of them had shared some weird sort of relationship for at least a few months after she’d returned to Vegas. He didn’t talk about it, and I frankly didn’t want to ask. Their relationship had been stranger than being friends with the guy who dated your sister. Way stranger.

  He grimaced. “Yeah, I ran into her. She asked to be my date for the reunion.”

  I snorted. “Of course, she’s going to show up for that.”

  Brody narrowed his eyes at me. “Actually, no, she isn’t. You are. If she’s there, the capacity for batshit crazy just went way over the top.”

  “Oh, come on. She doesn’t have that much—”

  “Every single member of the Arcana Council is going to finagle a reason to be at that party, Sara. Where the Council goes, so go their groupies. Ditto the Shadow Court, at least if recent history has been any guide. And we’ve apparently got someone who wants to pay some sort of blood price as the evening’s entertainment. You don’t think that’s gonna be a problem?”

  I winced. “‘If I show up at your doorstep…’”

  Brody tipped his glass to me. “‘Chances are, you did something to bring me there.’ Yeah. It’s going to be Grosse Pointe Blank. With magic.”

  12

  “Dollface? Dollface!”

  I jerked up, once more sending a pile of glass tubes skittering to the side. It was a testament to how many nights I’d been doing this that I instinctively grabbed them before they rolled off the desk. None of the canisters had ever shattered, but I was completely paranoid that breaking them would be akin to breaking a mirror, seven years’ bad luck. I had enough bad luck on my own.

  “What?” I asked groggily, peering at the clock on the wall. It read 8:30 a.m., which seemed…far too early. I swung my gaze toward Nikki, who was rocking a full desert camo vibe—a skintight tan tank top tucked into bulky camo pants and heavy boots, her black hair lashed into a thick braid that hung over one shoulder, with aviator sunglasses perched above her forehead. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and I didn’t miss her intensity—or her nerves.

  I scowled at her. “Do not tell me we’ve got another partying problem with Sariah. It’s morning. She doesn’t do mornings.”

  “Close, but not quite. We’ve gotten a report of a missing person, though, and it’s one of your old gang.”

  “Not possible.” I groaned. “They haven’t been in Vegas long enough to be missing.”

  As I spoke, I picked up another of the glass canisters, popping the top and pulling out the contents. Similar to a dozen of the ones that had come in overnight, this one contained a slip of paper and a single red feather. An echo of the fire starters from Treasure Island? Had to be. As the others had as well, this one’s slip of paper contained only two words. Burning Man. There was no other indication of what the problem was, or any indication of who’d sent the message. The research I’d done on Burning Man was that it drew tens of thousands of people every year. It was like Mad Max without the Thunderdome, but with the cheerful desert backdrop. I really needed a little more information to go on before I took a stroll out in the desert to check it out in person, but there was no question I was heading there today. Twelve cries for help in one night was a personal record. I got the feeling the crisis wasn’t happening yet, that nobody was currently being dangled off a tricked-out art installation, but a crisis would definitely be happening soon.

  Bottom line, I didn’t have time for a bunch of twenty-something reunion-happy Southerners getting lost in the heart of Vegas. No matter how many algebra classes we’d shared.

  “True,” Nikki said. “But Brody caught the case anyway, because the person reporting the missing woman—her cousin, apparently—asked for him by name. Not being a stupid rabbit, he figured this was probably more of a problem than any of us wanted it to be. He’s meeting the cousin at nine for breakfast, so if you could do something with your face, we can meet them. And there will be waffles, so choppity choppity.”

  I was still grumbling when we entered the diner fifteen minutes later. It was more than half full, with people either still wired from the night before or determined to forget the night before ever happened. We immediately spotted Brody sitting with a slim blonde, but I didn’t recognize her. It’d only been ten years, so I probably should have recognized her, but I didn’t. In fact, she looked a little too old to be one of my classmates, which was…weird.

  I didn’t have time for weird, but apparently weird had time for me.

  Brody glanced up with an expression of almost desperation, while the woman leaned back and regarded me with keen interest as we approached. That also tipped me off. My classmates were interesting people, but none of them were especially wowed by me. It’s tough to be a rock star when people have gone through phys ed with you.

  Now that I was practically on top of her, I realized this woman did seem vaguely familiar. She couldn’t have been a former client, though—she didn’t seem rich enough by half to afford the kind of artifacts I trafficked in.

  Brody cleared up my confusion. “Sara, Nikki, this is Linda Simms. She was a student a few years ahead of you at Farraday High School, Sara, but she’d graduated by the time you and I started working together. Her cousin, Rhonda Madsen, was in your class, and is here this weekend for the unofficial reunion party.”

  “Was here this weekend,” Linda corrected as I tried to picture Rhonda. Quiet, big-eyed, strawberry blonde. But that could’ve been any of a dozen of the girls I went to school with. She’d been a little more of an outcast than the others, if I remembered correctly, a loner.

  “She hasn’t been seen in almost twenty-four hours,” Linda continued.

  “I explained to Miss Simms that missing person reports generally don’t take effect until after forty-eight hours, but given the nature of the group’s visit to Las Vegas—”

  “Which is your fault,” Linda informed me curtly. “Rhonda has always been obsessed with you. Always.”

  I grimaced, truly at a loss. “I’m sorry, I don’t actually remember having too much interaction with her in high school. I didn’t really have a lot of friends.”

  Linda waved me off. “I’m sure she never had the guts to actually talk to you, but she idolized you. That last year before you left school, you and Officer Brody—sorry, Detective Rooks,” she favored Brody with a much more pleasant smile, “helped locate my little sister, who decided to go off with somebody she’d decided was her true love. My sister didn’t always make the brightest choices, and my parents were super into nontraditional therapy. My mom ran a yoga studio, all that. When Janet disappeared—”

  I abruptly connected the dots. “Your little sister was Janet Simms?” I asked. “She was the one who’d left with the…kind of guru, right?”

  “Matthew Frey,” Linda said, nodding curtly. “He was a guest instructor at the yoga studio, and my sister was head over heels for him. That happened a lot. Janet fell head over heels over any guy that moved, though she was only twelve years old when she met Matthew. I tried to tell my parents he was bad news, but of course that didn’t jive with their peace, love, and everybody-included mentality. Then Janet disappeared, and they wanted to hold séances to try to find her. Talk with spirits, that sort of thing. The only way I got them to go to the police was because I’d read an article about you and the work you were doing with the police department. I asked my cousin about you, and at that point, she’d never even heard of the work you were doing. It wasn’t like anyone read the news.”

  I smiled grimly. “Yeah. My, um, mom always wanted us to get more press than we did, but I sometimes felt like people outside the city knew more about what I was doing than inside, which was okay with me.”

  “Well, I didn’t believe you could help, frankly, but I knew the police could, and if that was how I could get them involved, I was all for it.” She shot another smile Brody’s way. “And I was right. I’m not sure how you did it, I never actually got the clear story on that,
but you found Janet within ten days. More or less unharmed.”

  I grimaced. That was always a problem with finding missing kids. You recovered some of them, but others never really did come back entirely. “I was never allowed to follow up with the students, and generally, it was pretty weird for the parents if I saw them in the street or anything. So, was Janet hurt?”

  “She was fine physically, but emotionally, she’d rounded the corner into thinking that a commune-type lifestyle was the ultimate goal for her. She never really snapped out of that, and when she turned eighteen, she disappeared again. She and Rhonda grew closer until that time. I was away at college, and naturally, we grew apart, but I was frankly worried about Rhonda more than Janet. I didn’t want Rhonda to get swept up into my sister’s worldview.”

  She waved off my next question, which, apparently, Brody had already asked. “Rhonda spent an awful lot of time at our house when she was growing up. Her family situation wasn’t the best, and our mothers were sisters. She was welcome all the time, and she wasn’t that much younger than I was. We connected a little bit more than I did with my own sister. I feel kind of bad about that, but we all make our choices, I guess. Then I left, and eventually, so did Janet.”

  I noted Linda Simms’ brittle, prickly demeanor, but I supposed it made sense. I couldn’t imagine growing up in a household where Mom ran a yoga studio and your little sister took off with a guru. Linda had apparently reacted by going a little further the other way, making sure everything in her world was squared off and tidy. But there was no question that her concern was genuine, and she sat forward now. “I knew Rhonda was coming here for the reunion because it was all she would talk about when she was at home for the Fourth of July celebration. She was so excited to see Sariah Pelter again, since one of the classmates had figured out that you were in Las Vegas under a new name. They were already planning on coming here for the party, and Rhonda wasn’t really interested at first, but with Sariah the Almighty involved, it was a done deal. I honestly didn’t think that much about it, but when I lost contact with her yesterday…” She sighed. “It’s Janet all over again. I keep thinking that.”

  “You still live in Memphis?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “You came all this way because Rhonda wasn’t answering her texts?”

  Linda’s temper flared. “I don’t expect you to understand. You don’t have any brothers or sisters, and I know you lost your mother. But Rhonda’s the closest thing I have to a sister—a whole family anymore. I can’t help thinking something’s wrong.”

  It was that last bit that tipped me off. I flicked open my third eye, which I should’ve done from the start, and reached out my senses toward Linda Simms. Sure enough, she lit up like a Christmas tree, the Connected ability in her so strong, I was shocked that she didn’t realize it. “What do you do for a living, Linda?”

  She flattened her eyes. “I’m a nurse,” she said tightly. “I don’t see how that has any bearing at all in our current conversation.”

  “Just curious.” Like police officers, some nurses—often the best nurses—had a little bit of Connected ability even if they never thought of themselves as psychic. Some nurses simply knew what needed to be done and when. They would chalk it up to intuition, knowing their job, recognizing the symptoms they’d seen a hundred times over, it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that they were there when they were needed. I suspected Linda was one of these nurses. It also lent credence to her concern about her cousin.

  “Were you the one who first realized Janet was gone, all those years ago?” I asked quietly.

  This time, her expression softened. She nodded.

  “She was just a kid, but she was super high energy and wouldn’t take no for an answer on anything once she made up her mind. And she thought that Yogi was the most exotic, incredible man she’d ever meet in her life. She believed it with all her heart, and she was so desperate to follow someone—anyone. I should’ve been paying more attention at the time, but that first day when she didn’t come home from school when she was supposed to, I knew. Mom thought she was just off with friends, but I knew. I finally got my parents to raise the alarm after dinner. But then, of course, ol’ Matthew was already over the state lines with her. I don’t think he touched her, for what it’s worth. She insisted he hadn’t, submitted to a full medical workup. For his part, he truly believed it was natural for her to come with him, that her spirit wanted it, so who was he to say no?”

  Her voice trailed off, and Brody supplied the rest of the story. “The parents never prosecuted. They kept the search pretty quiet, not going to the media, not even letting us post an Amber Alert. They accepted the consequences of that action, and they were lucky. It was a dumb move.”

  Linda smiled a little sadly. “My parents were dumb people. They still are, but they’re their own people.”

  I watched how her energy dipped a little as she spoke of her parents. Family dynamics were never easy, but it said something that Linda was here wanting us to search for Rhonda. She was worried, and perhaps legitimately so.

  “What do we have on the disappearance?” I asked Brody.

  I didn’t miss the surge of excitement in Linda’s expression. She might not want to believe in psychic abilities, but she did want to take care of her cousin. I liked her better for that.

  “According to the other Farraday High classmates who’ve shown up so far, Rhonda traveled with two of them into the city yesterday afternoon, arriving approximately twelve thirty. She checked into a single room at the MGM Grand, which is where most of them are staying—that’s where the main party will be held. She joined the other women for a couple of hours at the slots, where they all excitedly discussed their day trips for today. Several of the women went out to shows last night, several went to nightclubs, Rhonda said she wanted to walk around alone. She wanted to find Sariah Pelter slash Sara Wilde, according to two different classmates, and thought she was living near the Strip. She hadn’t heard of your appearance at the Sky Lounge, we don’t think. One of her classmates called to tell her, but her phone was turned off.”

  “It’s not in her room,” Linda put in. “They searched the room after I begged them to at least send a maid in, since Rhonda hadn’t put up a Do Not Disturb sign. I think she must have it with her, but maybe she’s out of range?”

  I shot a glance to Brody, who nodded. “We’re tracking it through the phone service provider, but nothing yet.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, she went out by herself? Does she usually do that? Vegas near the Strip is pretty safe, but it’s still a big city.”

  Linda fielded that one. “Rhonda could be as impulsive as the rest of our family. She told me before she left that she’d figured out that Sariah lived at the Palazzo Hotel, so she thought it would be pretty easy to find her. But I gave them a photo of Rhonda and begged all over again. There’s no record of her on the security cameras at the Palazzo. From everything we can tell, she didn’t return to her MGM Grand hotel room last night and nobody’s seen her this morning. It’s like she vanished.”

  Almost unconsciously, I pulled out my cards as Linda spoke, grimacing a little as her eyes brightened. Even Brody got a soft smile on his face, one of recognition and maybe even nostalgia. Some things you couldn’t go back to after you grew up, but the cards always left a light on for you.

  I drew three cards in quick succession. The first was the Knight of Cups, for the knight most likely to be going out on a Grail quest.

  “She really wanted to find Sariah, didn’t she,” I murmured. Linda frowned at me, probably surprised to hear me referring to myself in the third person. She nodded.

  “She did. I thought she’d gotten over her sort of hero worship for you, but apparently not.”

  “Yup.” I dropped the next two cards in rapid succession, the Tower and the Devil. Beside me, predictably, Linda stiffened.

  “Well, that doesn’t look good.”

  It wasn’t the easiest of draws, true enough, but there was som
ething in particular about these two cards that I noticed right off, more because of what had recently been happening in my own life than anything else. Of all the cards in the Tarot deck, the suit of wands was typically considered to be aligned with fire. Otherwise, there were very few cards that actually expressed fire, except for, you guessed it, the Tower and the Devil. Both of these cards depicted flames greedily licking away at the edges of their images. Granted, I had Burning Man on the brain, but I immediately suspected where Rhonda might be.

  “Did she have any day trips planned that you know of?” I asked Linda in a last-ditch effort to make the cards mean something other than what I feared. “Any spa trips?”

  “No. She said she always wanted to visit the desert, and I told her she’d be surrounded by nothing but desert. I didn’t think she planned on getting any closer to it, though. She seemed happy with simply exploring Vegas, playing slots, and finding you.”

  “Got it.” I pulled one more card, the Moon. Shining out on a deserted landscape, raining droplets of fire.

  “I know where she’s gone,” I said. “With any luck, we’ll have her back by nightfall. And if someone took her by force, or if she didn’t go willingly…”

  I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. Flyers and trash fires were one thing, even letter-bombing me in pneumatic tubes I could almost forgive. But abduction? No. If that’s what was going on here, someone was going to pay.

  Nikki, however, wasn’t buying it.

  “Nobody took her that far, against her will, as bait,” she said, clicking her buff-colored, square-cut nails against her coffee cup. “Burning Man is a nine-hour drive. There are helicopters and private air services that are quicker, but those are spendy.”

  Brody looked at Linda. “Does your cousin have that kind of money? Or is there any reason why someone would take her to Burning Man?”