Was there relief on his face? Nola wasn’t sure, and anyway Vincent Kirke had struck her from the start as being tough to read. She thanked him and got into her car. He remained standing there, she noticed, watching as she pulled out. Was he trying to see if she would leave Greenbriar entirely or circle around on her own? She wished she had the guts to circle around on her own, but the truth was that she really did have to get going, and besides, she doubted she’d have learned anything useful.
It occurred to her only when she was well on her way to Albany that they hadn’t said a single thing about Culver Bryant the whole time they’d talked.
10
It had been easy to find her; she was the only Villagomez in Albany. She ran a health food store in the university district, one that also sold New Agey sorts of books, music, and decorations, though most of the shelves were stocked with mysterious jars and bags of what Nola could only assume were edible substances. As she stared blankly at the shelves, she heard movement in the back of the store and a faint call of “I’ll be right with you,” followed by “Please do try the free samples.” On a card table in the middle of the store, there were little baskets of . . . something. They looked like the pellets she’d fed her pet guinea pig when she was a kid. Nola liked to think she ate healthily and responsibly enough, though one certainly couldn’t help the occasional extra slice or two of nitrate-meat-heavy pizza, but here she was clearly out of her element. She’d never even heard of a lot of the things in the store, and being able to see what they were didn’t often give her a clue as to how you were supposed to cook them—or if you cooked them, or what they were supposed to taste like, or even what sort of flora or fauna they came from.
“You’re here about Grayson.”
Nola whirled around, almost losing her balance in the process and not regaining it right away when she stood face-to-face with Anna Villagomez. She probably shouldn’t have been surprised. She still was, though, as startled as she’d be if Anna really were psychic and not just tracist. She was even more startled by the fact that Anna was movie-star gorgeous: flawless olive skin, full lips, silky hair, a figure that somehow managed to be both slender and curvy at the same time. Somehow Nola had pictured someone more earth-motherly, which she knew was a bad stereotype but an unavoidable one given her surroundings. But of course Grayson would be attracted to a woman who was more chic than hippie.
Grayson. Nola snapped back into the moment and regarded Anna as coolly as Anna did her.
“You know about me,” Nola said quietly.
“Of course,” Anna said.
It occurred to Nola that while she’d meant this to mean Anna knew about her work as a tracist, it might have been taken differently: you know about me and Grayson. Not that there was a “me and Grayson,” Nola reflected, in the same way that there had been an Anna and Grayson, but she couldn’t help thinking Anna was sizing her up at that moment like a rival. Ridiculous, Nola wanted to say. She didn’t say it. She had come here for information, and she intended to get it.
“Do you have a minute to talk?” Nola said, still keeping her voice sounding calm and quiet but, she hoped, not timid.
Anna stared at her a moment longer and then gestured toward the back of the shop, where a few bistro tables and chairs were arranged. Nola sat at one of the tables while Anna busied herself at a tiny kitchenette, brewing herbal tea. “You still work with the police?” she asked. Nola nodded, and Anna made a faint sound like a snort. “I gave that up at the beginning of the year. I got tired of the disrespect. It’s a lot worse when you look like me, you know.”
It took Nola a second to figure out what she meant: Anna was talking about being Latina, which was obvious even if you didn’t know her last name.
“They’d think all sorts of things about me,” she went on, anger flashing in her eyes. “They’d ask if I was into ‘voodoo.’ There are so many stupid racist things about that, I can’t even begin. So I got out. I started this store. And I am also a personal tracist.”
“What, er, does that entail?” Nola asked.
“Once in a while, a realtor contacts me because a superstitious client wants to make sure the house they want to buy is ‘clean.’ There’s good money in it—these are the kind of people who consult feng shui experts. One couple in Manhattan paid for my train ticket and a night at the Plaza just so I could tell them nobody had died in their dream SoHo loft. Other than that—well, you can probably guess, can’t you?” She smiled in a way that seemed less friendly than mocking. “I go to a house where someone died, and I tell the bereaved about the trace of the recently departed.”
Nola looked at her blankly.
“I tell them what they want to hear. It’s peaceful. It’s beautiful. Their loved ones are happy.”
“But . . .” Nola stopped herself from continuing. Anna was a tiny woman, but there was something intimidating about her even as she simply sat there sipping tea.
“But it’s a lie? Is that what you’re going to say?” Anna laughed outright. “It comforts them. That’s more than I can say for what I used to do—for what you do. That brought them nothing but suffering, so I suffered, too.”
She sounded so much like Grayson at that moment that Nola wondered which one had influenced the other. She soon found out.
“Grayson was the one who made me see this. Now he’s going to make you see it. Oh, don’t look so innocent. I know him. I know the effect he can have. And he is obviously having that effect on you, because you are here. You wanted to find out about me because of him, because of what I used to have with him. So find out. Ask what you want to know.”
Nola found herself momentarily stunned. She lifted her cup to her lips, but her tea had turned unpalatably lukewarm, which was fine; she couldn’t swallow it anyway. She put the cup down and decided she had nothing to lose. She had come all this way. “Grayson is a suspect in his brother’s disappearance.”
“That’s bullshit,” Anna said without waiting for more. The tiniest bit of an accent rendered the word bull-sheet. Her tone made it clear she had no doubts.
“You trust him?”
“Yes.” No hesitation at all.
“Do you . . .” Nola stopped, not sure what she wanted to ask next.
“Do I love him? Yes. Does he love me?” Anna’s dark red lips curled slightly. “He needed me, once.”
Nola didn’t know what to say to that either, so she didn’t address it at all, instead asking the next thing that came into her mind. “Do you feel the same way about trace that he does? Do you . . . take it? Use it? Enjoy it?”
This time it was Anna who seemed to find Nola’s words unexpected. She took her time before answering. “I did when I was with him.”
“And now?”
Anna picked up their cups and took them to the sink behind Nola’s chair, even though Nola hadn’t finished her tea. She rinsed them carefully, wordless. Nola sat looking straight ahead, out into the little shop with its crystals and candles, its bags of teff and amaranth, its bottles of natural cleaning products.
“That bird,” Anna finally said from the sink.
Nola froze, afraid to turn around, afraid almost to breathe. For the second time that morning, she thought Anna Villagomez might be a psychic. Nola could have asked what bird, but there didn’t seem to be much point. “Yes?”
Anna came around and stood before her, face impassive. “I put it there.”
Nola looked up at her. There was neither threat nor shame in the words or in her face. Anna was simply stating a fact. “That pigeon and the note, you mean? You did that?”
“Yes. I drove all the way from Albany to see you. Actually I went to see Grayson, but he said he didn’t want to talk. Worried about his brother. I knew he didn’t want to see me anymore, and I knew about you. I thought, well, he’s found someone new. So I was jealous.”
The simple, open way she made the statement seemed even more unsettling to Nola than if she’d given another mysterious, dark laugh.
“Don�
�t get scared,” Anna said, now back to looking condescending. “I didn’t kill the bird. It was dead when I found it. And I won’t bother you again. He has a new way to get what he needs. There is nothing I can do about that.”
The implication was clear: Grayson was using Nola just as he had Anna. Anything else she imagined happening between them was really just imagination.
Nola had the peculiar awareness that she should be angry, but she wasn’t. This woman had threatened her and insulted her, yet all Nola could feel right then was a tired sort of sadness. They had so much in common, Anna and herself, including the most important thing of all, their tracism, but Nola had a feeling that this first meeting with Anna would probably also be the last. For whatever reason, they weren’t going to stay connected. They wouldn’t be able to help each other as they walked through the world feeling life escape the living.
Nola got up to leave, but Anna did not get up to see her out. She did not even say good-bye. Nola didn’t care. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, and she certainly hadn’t expected the two of them to be friends or anything like that, but still she couldn’t help feeling disappointed as she faced the long drive home. Some part of her had hoped for—what? Understanding? A link between two people who saw life and death in a way few others ever did? That was what drew her to Grayson. After talking with Anna, she doubted that’s what had drawn him to Anna or herself.
Just as she was opening the door to leave, Nola stopped. She wasn’t sure what could possibly be moving her to do what she was going to do other than the fact that she knew it was unlikely she’d see Anna again. She half-turned her face in Anna’s direction. “Did you ever hear voices around him?”
It was one of those moments when everything was so silent and still that Nola wondered if she’d actually spoken aloud or just in her head. She turned to fully face Anna. Again her uncertain expectations about the woman were confounded. She had expected laughter or scorn, but Anna looked—there was no doubt about it—afraid.
“I did not,” she finally spoke. There was concern in her voice when she added, “Have you?”
“What would that mean, the voices?” Nola asked instead of answering.
Anna stared, all hostility gone, all masks slipped off, her face betraying a surprising vulnerability. She looked like a child. Nola wondered when Anna had first experienced trace and if it had been like her own first experience, the death of a relative. She realized she didn’t know that about Grayson either. She had always shied away from talking about trace reading, like it was something shameful. Maybe it didn’t have to be this way.
And then Anna looked away and the vulnerability was replaced with—could it be?—shame. “I don’t know,” she said. Nola knew she was lying, but the woman seemed so deflated, so strangely crumpled in on herself, that it was unlikely she would reveal what she knew or suspected. For a second time that afternoon, Nola turned away from Anna’s silence feeling as if she knew less than she had before.
___________
The fall colors along the drive had been spectacular, and Nola tried to clear her mind of its messiness to enjoy them. She would go for a few miles reveling in crimson mountainsides before finding herself gripping the steering wheel a lot harder than she needed to because she was back to thinking about everything that had happened in the last few days. By the time she pulled into the parking lot at her apartment, she felt almost as tired as if she’d been working out for two hours. As she approached her apartment door, vegging out in front of the TV had never seemed so appealing.
A sound behind her made her stop. It was coming from the Lafferty apartment, and it was unmistakably the sound of a woman crying.
Nola felt like she had fallen into a hole. Oh no. Oh dear God no. No other sounds came from the apartment, only steady, gasping sobs. She turned toward their door but moved no further. Mrs. Lafferty might need help. Mrs. Lafferty might want to be alone. Nola desperately wanted to be alone and was appalled at the thought of entering that apartment, trying to comfort a newly grieving widow all while being hit with her husband’s newly released trace. Where was Grayson Bryant now, she wondered grimly. The quiet sobbing continued. Nola took a step toward the Laffertys’ door and halted again.
“Angela,” said a dry, thin voice. “Shut up.”
Nola froze as if she’d heard rattlesnakes behind the door. James Lafferty was still alive. Well, that explains the crying. The poor woman probably needed even more help now than if the man had been dead, but it was not help that was likely to be received well. Nola backed away and unlocked her door and closed it behind her as quietly as possible before sinking wearily onto the sofa.
She figured she owed Lynette a call but didn’t feel like dealing with her at the moment, so she took out her phone and sent a brief e-mail instead. She didn’t have much to report but could let Lynette know what little she’d discovered. Nola wasn’t sure why she felt compelled to say anything at all when none of this was official work and Dalton had warned her to cease and desist anyway. Perhaps she simply didn’t want to think about one more woman suffering because of a man she loved, even if that woman was Lynette, who didn’t much seem like the long-suffering type.
Anna Villagomez, spurned by Grayson. Angela Lafferty, verbally abused by her husband. The two could not be more different and yet both were unhappy in some way because of a man they’d once loved, and probably still loved. It almost made Nola glad for the silence of her small, sparsely furnished rooms. They were hers, unshared and uncomplicated. Sometimes solitude was nothing short of bliss. But it never lasted. What kind of bliss ever did?
It hit her just then that Jeb Crawford’s engagement party started in twenty minutes. Nola had twenty minutes to get into the right frame of mind to congratulate the happy couple and make it sound sincere.
11
Jeb Crawford was marrying his girlfriend of five years, Jennifer Hanson. Jeb was a cop, Jen was an elementary school teacher, and they were so cute together that they’d have been insufferable if they weren’t such genuinely likable people. Nola had to admit a stab of envy whenever she saw them, not because they were getting married, not because they were so cute, but because they were so normal. Of course, if she ever said that to anyone, they’d immediately say, “What’s normal? Nobody’s normal,” and give a lot of other dismissive, knee-jerk responses. Perhaps nobody was truly normal, but people like Jeb and Jen certainly came closer to it than she did. Did anyone’s definition of normal include the dubious ability to know where people had died?
Nola dreaded being the only person there alone, and sure enough, when she entered the bungalow Jeb and Jen shared, it was like dropping in on Noah’s Ark, everyone in twos but her. Sometimes she and Matt Gorsky would go to social events together, usually suggested by him in a humorous way: “Hey, Lantri, let’s keep each other from looking like big losers at the shindig tomorrow night, eh?” He knew she wasn’t dating anyone, and it was widely rumored that Matt was gay. Nola figured this was probably true even though she seldom believed those kinds of rumors and didn’t trust her own gaydar any more, especially with cops, given that the ones who were men all exuded a uniform maleness, both literally and figuratively. Matt never tried to refute these rumors; in fact, sometimes he seemed to do his best to encourage them. He was either gay or ridiculously confident of his masculinity—or, given his prizefighter physique, both. But Matt had another dinner party to go to and wouldn’t be getting to this one until late, and Nadine hadn’t been able to attend either, so Nola steeled herself for what promised to be an uncomfortable evening.
Bad enough that she was there alone, worse that after Jeb and Jen greeted her she found herself standing next to Jack Dalton, worst of all that standing next to him was Mrs. Jack Dalton. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, of course—it wasn’t as if they were rivals, after all, Nola being a Lynette to Kimberly Dalton’s Maureen Bryant. But Kimberly Dalton had never seemed like a very friendly person to anyone outside her own circle. She was an administrator
at the school where Jen Hanson taught, so Jeb and Jen were in the circle, while Nola was most definitely not. Even though she and Mrs. Dalton were exactly the same height (same hair and eye color and build, too, Nadine had once pointed out, waggling her eyebrows, with the implication that Nola might also be the commander’s “type”), Nola always had the impression that Kimberly Dalton was looking down at her from a distance—when she noticed Nola at all.
She seemed to be noticing Nola plenty at the moment. As Nola turned to talk to the Daltons (she didn’t have much choice given their immediate proximity), she saw that Kimberly Dalton was staring at her. A hard stare. “We were just talking about you,” she said to Nola.
Even said jokingly, this was the kind of statement that put Nola slightly on edge. That it had been said with no humor whatsoever made her want to flee the room. But, of course, she couldn’t. Jack was smiling at her. “I was just telling Kimber about your work on the Amy Siegel case.”
Kimber. How cute.
“As if I haven’t heard about that case a hundred times before.” She—Kimber—smiled at her husband and patted his arm. When she turned back to Nola, the smile tightened.
This can’t really be happening. This woman could not possibly see Nola as a threat, a predator out to steal her man. As a woman with an extraordinarily attractive husband, she couldn’t behave this possessively every time a woman got near him or she’d look like a fool. At the moment, Nola was the one who felt foolish. What was she supposed to say?
Jen Hanson saved her by bringing her a glass of white wine (which she forced herself to sip instead of chug as she so desperately desired) and by staying to join their conversation. “Oh, Jeb talks about that case all the time, too. ‘Nola saved our sorry asses.’ I think those were his exact words—right, sweetie?” she yelled across the room to Jeb, who probably had no idea what they were talking about but blew his soon-to-be-wife a kiss.
Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) Page 9