by Etta Faire
It seemed like many people could have had the knife-skill training to kill Feldman. Terry had served in the war. Doc was a doctor, probably skilled at incisions. Chance was a carpenter, familiar with tools. Richie was a police officer. Boyd was a farmer. Drew was a seamstress. Not that a farmer and a seamstress were really trained at knife wielding, but it was getting late and it made sense in my mind. And Flo was a rich socialite who had won a knife competition.
I looked up race horses next. Famous race horses and race bets. Cast iron banks with dead painted eyes. The number three in gambling and horse racing. I was desperate. I even tried finding out Feldman’s friend who’d written a book. There was a connection there, and I needed to find it.
But I couldn’t find a thing. I’d have to take the rest of my research to the library.
Chapter 16
approaching the starting gate
Feldman looked stronger the next morning when I saw him at breakfast.
I didn’t think that was possible after a channeling. But it was like having a living, breathing being by me as I sat at the dining room table eating my peanut butter toast. And not just his coloring. It was almost like he was giving off warmth and vitality. I shook it off.
Rex, who had been sleeping at my feet, popped up when he saw Feldman and quickly walked away, heading upstairs. I could tell Rex still didn’t trust Feldman completely, but at least he seemed to be tolerating our guest better now.
“You ready to give it a go today?” Feldman asked. “I’m ready for a channeling if you are.”
“I need to spray this room and figure out if you’re safe to channel with first.” I took another bite of toast. It scraped the roof of my mouth a little.
“Sapientia spray?” he asked, chuckling. “Go ahead.”
I looked around for the spray. I was pretty sure I’d left it on the coffee table next to my plastic poncho and face mask last night. It wasn’t there. The poncho and mask were, though.
I searched the dining room, the living room, and the rest of the main floor, even the rooms I never went into. I went upstairs and looked around my room and the bathroom.
“Jackson,” I yelled into the hall on my way back down the stairs again. “I know you’re here. Where did I leave the spray? Or, where did you hide it?” I flicked on every single light. They were all working fine now that I couldn’t find the spray.
My eyes stung, probably from staying up late and doing research on my laptop. I could barely keep them open. I was happy I had today off. All I wanted was a nap.
“Do you want to wait for Jackson,” Feldman asked, hovering so close to me I could see the cracks in his teeth, smell the stench of must coming off of him like he was some sort of forgotten antique desperate for a new chance at life.
I opened my mouth to say something about waiting for the spray and my ex but closed it again. Every part of me wanted to dive back into this too.
“Did you do something with the spray?” I asked.
He shook his head no. “I didn’t even know you had it.”
I wasn’t exactly sure I believed him.
He seemed to sense my skepticism and went on. “I’ve been nothing but honest with you. I don’t have anything to hide about anything. But if you’re worried about me transitioning, I get it.” His voice was calm and clear, nothing like the first time I met him. “Honestly, though, I think channeling with you has made me less angry and farther from transitioning.”
I nodded. I could tell that. I was more like a ghost therapist than an investigator.
Feldman shrugged. “We don’t really need Jackson, you know. You have your alarm.”
I shook my head. “That didn’t work last time, so we’ll wait.” I was starting to suspect doing this without Jackson was what the strong apparition wanted. Truth was, I wanted it too. But I couldn’t let Feldman know that. Or anyone else. “I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”
I sat on the couch and looked through the notes I’d taken last night, scribbling in some questions for the upcoming channeling.
“Tell me how you came to sell the Bear Bird to Doc? Did he just ask for it one day?”
“Yeah, he did. Come to think of it. Doc wanted in at a time when I wanted out. It was too much of a hassle, and it was making it way too easy for my brother to be a drunk. Terry used to be a pretty good artist before the war. I went with him once to paint something down by the lake. He had that painting sold to a country club lady before we even made it back to the car.”
He paused like he was thinking about it. “I wanted to see if he could find that side of himself again. His girlfriend actually helped me locate an art studio to buy with the money I made from the bar. It was going to be a surprise…”
I searched his eyes. They were sincere, human.
He continued. “So when Doc came to me with an interesting offer, I took maybe a day to think it over before jumping on it.” He laughed. “Probably wasn’t even that long.”
I could see the softer side of Feldman now, even though he tried to hide it a lot.
Every part of me couldn’t wait to do this channeling and see Richie and Flo one more time, my two main suspects.
I called for my ex-husband again, but he didn’t materialize.
“Doesn’t look like he’s showing up,” Feldman said, looking around the room. “But we can wait.”
I made sure I had three alarms set: two on my phone, and one on the little white kitchen timer, just in case my phone went out. I set them both on the coffee table in front of me. Twenty minutes. That’s all I wanted. Needed.
“Take me back to the moment we left off before,” I said, placing my notes down by my two timers. Then I curled into the stiff fabric of my throw pillow and watched the seconds tick away on both timers. “I’m ready.”
I smelled Doc’s pipe first, heard Richie’s voice. It was like drifting down a familiar road, without brakes or steering.
“I wish I could take credit for finding something straight out of hell like this, but you know me, I don’t shop, and I don’t buy,” he said. “If I spend any money, it’s here at the bar.”
“Come on now,” Boyd replied. “You also gamble.”
“My one weakness.”
“His one weakness,” Feldman said to me, mocking him. “You can open your eyes whenever you’re ready.”
We were all looking at the horse. I scanned over the coin slot, but it was empty, no note yet.
Feldman explained to his friends that it came a week ago without any indication who it was from.
“Where was the box postmarked from?” Richie asked, like a trained police officer.
“Yeah, good point,” Boyd chimed in. “Every package has to have a postmark.”
The music stopped for a commercial and Terry laughed his way over to the guys at the bar. His breathing was heavy and fast, and his cheeks were red. “She’s something else, huh?” he said to Feldman.
“Only way to describe her,” he answered.
Drew, Chance, and Blanche laughed their way back into the bar area, finishing up with their tour, and ready to join the others. Drew had her hat off now, her shortish brown hair framed her heart-shaped face beautifully. She asked Blanche if she wanted a drink, and the woman lifted her skirt, patting a flask that was strapped to her garter. “I’m a friend of Doc’s,” she replied, winking oddly like that explained it.
“Babe,” Feldman interrupted. “Do you know where that package came from last week? You know, the box the creepy horse bank came in?” He motioned toward the horse, like she might not know which creepy horse he was talking about.
She shook her head. “It didn’t have a note.”
“No, the postmark. On the box.”
She shrugged. “The what? I think the box’s still in our room if you’re desperate to look at trash.”
He blew it off. “Nice of you to offer to run up there and get it, honey, but don’t worry about it. I’ll get it later,” he said, sarcastically, like she should’ve jumped up at h
is beck and call.
Drew and Blanche went right back to their conversation, and I listened in.
Blanche was pointing to Flo, the twenty-year-old who was pretty much dancing to the jingle on the radio advertisement. “Must be nice to have money. And the fanciest dresses,” she said as she watched the younger woman effortlessly kick her leg out from the flouncy material the skirt was made from.
“I made her that dress,” Drew replied, softly.
“No kidding.” Blanche’s voice was loud and drunk. Her head swayed a little as she studied the dancing woman at the bar with new interest, probably mesmerized by how the soft fabric moved with each kick. “I can’t even mend a sock. I mean, why bother mending a sock, though? Nobody sees it.”
Drew nodded. “I design dresses for a few of the ladies here in Potter Grove. I work at Merlot’s on fourth.”
“Merlot’s. The old guy’s place. Can he teach me to sew too?”
“I didn’t learn it there. I’m afraid I have the Sisters of the North to thank for that talent, a poorhouse for wayward orphans,” Drew said with a laugh. “Sewing was the best thing about it.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. The only thing worse than spending your childhood in an orphanage is being pitied for it. It’s over. Life moves on.”
“Could you do a dress for me? I’m not exactly twenty anymore, though.” Blanche lowered her voice. “Or thirty.”
“You’re beautiful,” Drew said and the woman’s face lit into a smile. “I will make you a dress to knock your socks off, whether they’re mended or not. I can teach you that little trick too. Darning socks is easy.”
Like he sensed the attention his girlfriend was getting, Terry rolled up his sleeves and lifted Flo onto the edge of the bar. She scooted along the wood then got up to dance the Charleston. The room roared with laughter and applause with every high kick, probably because she was doing it to the background music of an announcer telling us all about “the new hairdryer guaranteed to give you the hair you want in half the time.’”
“Your bar now,” Feldman said to Doc as he watched the woman’s heels scrape up the woodwork. “But I’ll say something to her if you want me to.”
“Yes,” Doc replied, puffing harder on his pipe. “Could you please tell that gorgeous, young woman to come back every night. On the house, if she wears that dress.”
“The chicken!” Drew yelled as the smell of something burning suddenly filled the room.
“I’ll take it out. I want to find that box anyway,” Feldman said. He walked right by his brother and Flo, who were still laughing and dancing.
“My brother’s a great drunk,” he told me in his mind. “Until he’s not. Trust me, by the end of the night, he turns. Like Jekyll and Hyde, that one.”
The lilt of jazz music picked up again after the commercial as Feldman opened the kitchen door.
“I wasn’t sure how to save him from himself, but I was trying,” Feldman said. “Of course I mean, until I died trying.”
The kitchen was larger than I thought it’d be, twice as large as the one at Gate House with an island, a sink, and a large commercial oven taking up most the back wall. Smoke billowed out when Feldman opened the oven door to pull out the chicken, waving the smoke away with the back of the pot holder. The pieces varied in size and kind, blackened just enough to make the skin crispy, and my stomach growled even though I’d already eaten peanut butter toast.
Calorie-free eating was my favorite part of channeling. All the flavor, none of the guilt.
Feldman put the chicken onto the cooling rack then went down the hall. So much for eating.
The sound of conversation spilled into the hallway from the main bar area, but I couldn’t hear anything in particular. We turned the corner and opened what looked like a closet but was really a secret stairwell.
Feldman talked to me again. “This goes up to the pharmacy. A lesser-known entrance I keep locked and sealed during business hours. Drew and I have a little bedroom off the back upstairs. Not much. We’re saving.”
“To get married?” I asked.
He laughed. “Now why would we want to ruin a good thing? Saving for a house before the speakeasy came along. It was too good of an investment to pass up.”
The steps creaked under Feldman’s heavy footfalls, echoing off the walls that seemed to close in on us as we climbed the stairs. I could hear his breathing, smell the cigarette smoke mixing with the various medicines.
As soon as he opened the door, I tried to suck in a clean gasp of fresher air, but no such luck. The top floor was just as weird smelling.
The pharmacy looked remarkably similar to every other pharmacy in the old black-and-white movies. Hundreds of tiny glass medicine bottles lined the entire back cabinets behind a main counter with the words “Drug Store” painted across the mirrored paneling around them.
“Were you sad to be selling?”
He thought about this a second. “I was, actually. This had been my life for almost three years. And it was a good one, more or less. But I was in my 40s now, and it was time to help my family and grow up.”
Feldman’s bedroom was small, only a standard full-sized bed next to a nightstand and a vanity dresser.
“We were happy here,” he said. “And I shouldn’t joke about marriage. Truth was, marriage wasn’t in either of our cards. And Drew couldn’t have kids.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“She had a botched procedure a few years back. Ended up in the hospital for weeks.”
“What kind of a botched procedure?”
“The none-of-your-business kind,” he said, his voice rising into anger again, making me wonder if the botched procedure had been an abortion.
He went on. “She used to say she wasn’t missing anything because having me for a boyfriend was a lot like having a kid.”
I chuckled politely. I could see that. It was also the way I felt about Jackson.
The box was leaning against the small trashcan in his room. He picked it up and looked it over. Feldman’s address hadn’t been written directly on the box itself. It had been typed out and taped on, not that I would’ve known anyone’s handwriting, anyway. And there wasn’t a return label, but it did have a postmark, from New York.
“Probably just where it was special ordered,” he said to me.
“Didn’t Doc mention your friend Jeremy lived in New York?”
“This wasn’t from him,” Feldman said, tossing the box back by the trashcan.
“How do you know?”
He didn’t answer me.
There was a closet at the back of the room, and Feldman walked over to it, looked around, then opened it. Several jackets and pants hung neatly on their hangers, and he sifted quickly through them until he reached a dark gray woolen suit jacket. He didn’t take it out but instead shoved his hand into one of the pockets, feeling for an opening in the lining.
“What are you doing?”
“Checking,” he said. “Doc paid me a nice down payment for the bar, and I didn’t trust banks.”
“Sounds like you didn’t trust your friends much either,” I said.
“Yeah, I trusted ‘em too much if you ask me,” he said.
Shelby’s mattress and now Feldman’s suit pocket. It must’ve run in the family. He took the cash out but didn’t count it. Then, he put it back in the lining hole, moving the other jackets and shirts around it again and closing the door.
When he left his bedroom this time, he closed the door and locked it behind him.
We headed back toward the hidden staircase in the hall as he explained himself further. “Drew took everyone on a tour, probably showed ‘em our room without thinking anything about it. She was sweet but she wasn’t one to notice the obvious too much. They could easily have distracted her and searched my room.”
He opened the door to the hidden stairwell, immediately catching his foot on something hard that caused him to tumble down the first few stairs, twisting his ankle a
s he grabbed for the railing. His hand slipped and he fell again, smacking his head against the wall before finally grabbing the railing to stop himself.
Cursing under his breath, he pulled himself up, a sharp pain shooting across our entire body.
Feldman stormed back up the stairs to see what he had kicked, limping on his hurt foot. A horse’s head peeked at us from the corner of the top step.
“What in the hell,” he said. He scooped up the bank and looked it over.
“I never saw anyone or heard anyone, did you?” he asked me in our head.
“No,” I replied as he limped down the stairs.
He went straight to the radio and yanked the volume knob down like he was going to make an announcement.
Sweat pooled along his temple and our head still stung. “Who thought that was funny? Putting this horse at the top of the stairs? I almost broke my neck.”
The room fell quiet until Terry covered his mouth and laughed. Flo looked at him and giggled then the whole room laughed too.
I could feel Feldman’s anger bubbling over as he watched his friends laughing, which probably stung even more now, knowing one of them would later slit his throat.
“Sorry, Feldman,” I said.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he snapped.
I thought about the time. The dancing. The chicken. The stairs. This had to have been more than twenty minutes. Just like how I’d gone out of my way to use the sapientia spray at the speakeasy, I was losing track of time, and wasting it.
“You sprayed the sapientia formula at the speakeasy?” he said, his voice drifting into a cackle. “That could get interesting.”
“Stop listening in on my private thoughts,” I snapped. “And what does that even mean?” Before I got the words out completely, I realized my alarms were going off. A sound so far in the distance I didn’t recognize it at first, like a crow cawing or an engine chugging along a highway. Background noise.
As if the sound sent a signal to my body, every bone ached with a million pains like little needles prickling my flesh. I needed rest. And water. Lots of water.