by Livia Quinn
“When was that?” I asked.
“The contractor said his man saw him Sunday night at the Wasted Turtle.”
“Well, he’s probably sleeping it off somewhere, then.”
“Apparently you’ve never met River,” he said.
There was another space in time where we marked our proverbial territories, then I asked, “Work undercover much, McGuinness?”
After a quick mental assessment in my direction, he said, “Every now and then.”
I got up. “Before I release her, I should mention that I’m not done. I still have a case to solve and a lot of questions unanswered.” I looked at him pointedly, “By everyone.” It was hard to tell by his inscrutable expression if he heard me. Or cared.
“I have a couple more concerns to clear up with her and then she can go. Wait here.”
Tempe
The sheriff strolled in and leaned nonchalantly against the wall across from my cell. “Your boyfriend, McGuinness, corroborated your story about your brother.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. Ex-boyfriend... whatever,” he said sarcastically.
What was his problem? “What do you want, Sheriff?” I blew out a breath. He was exasperating. The weight of the last twenty-four hours sat on my shoulders like twin boulders; it would probably be another eighteen before I got any sleep. And I hadn’t made any progress in finding River.
“When did you know your brother’s vase had been stolen?”
I blinked. It didn’t seem like a trick question. “It sits on the mantle. When I got ready to leave for work yesterday morning it was gone.”
“Your brother lives with you?”
“Yes.” My voice came out hoarse, and I cleared my throat. “Occasionally he stays with my mother.”
“What’s her name and address?”
“Phoebe Pomeroy.” I recited her phone number but had to think about the address.
“Is there some reason why you don’t want to give me her address?”
“Hold your shorts, Lang. Phoebe and I are not close. I’m trying to picture her mailbox.” I closed my eyes and yawned. “Try 61479 Hwy 217 in Alliance. I drove over there last night—well, this morning—before I came to the golf course. She wasn’t home.”
He wrote the information on his pad and I was aware of the masculine beauty of his hands once again. Someone said he’d been a fighter pilot. I could picture those hands on the stick, working the controls.
Unbidden came an image of tanned dexterous fingers stroking my thigh, his darker skin contrasting with mine… I shook my head to banish the image. It was a waste of time to think about this man in those terms. Any attraction he might have felt twenty-four hours ago was surely dead and buried.
“Am I still a suspect?” I asked.
“There’s the B&E at the clubhouse, and you’re connected to the vase, but unless you can be in two places at once, you’re clear of the murder. The same can’t be said of your brother.”
“What? You make me so mad.” I wasn’t volunteering another word. I paced the small cell.
“Your brother has been AWOL since Sunday night and, most likely, so has the vase. I haven’t figured out the connection yet, but I will.”
“Sheriff, you need to start thinking of my brother as a victim—before it’s too late.”
“There you go again, pinging my cop radar. You might want to consider that if something happens to your brother, and you haven’t told me everything, you’ll be partly to blame.”
I closed my eyes, knowing it was true. “I already am.”
When I leaned against the cell door it swung open. I glared at him. I’d remained captive in an unlocked cell. Bet he enjoyed that.
I shoved past him to the front room where Dylan waited. There was a rare look of sincere concern on his face. “You all right, Pumpkin?” For some reason the “P” name irritated me more than usual.
The endearment wasn’t lost on Jack Lang as he leaned against the doorjamb watching us. “I need my cell phone.”
He rummaged through a drawer and brought out my keys and cell. Before I could ask, he said, “The vase is locked up in the evidence room.”
I was relieved that it was safe, but still furious with him for keeping it from me. “Don’t let anything happen to it. I’ll be checking with you this afternoon to see what progress you’ve made on finding my brother.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
Dylan followed me through the door to his pickup. “Where to?”
“Drop me at the house. I’ve got to change and get to work.” Maybe I should have thanked Dylan for springing me but it felt a bit too much like a rescue, something I could barely admit to myself, much less confess to my one time lover, especially after the way we’d split.
As soon as I walked through the employee entrance, several voices rang out.
“Tempe, Beck’s been lookin’ for you.”
“Hey, boss, jailbird’s back.”
“Oh, lay off her, will ‘ya, Charles,” Janice said.
“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes,” one of the clerks said.
James Allen slid in next to me as I walked the mail and packages to my case. “Temp, a postal investigator was at the back door yesterday evening looking for you.”
“Who?” It couldn’t have been Dylan. “Dark hair, dark everything?”
“Nah, this was a new black dude from New Orleans—a real hot shot, looking to make a name for himself. I’m thinkin’ you made waves yesterday and he wants to ride them up the ladder. Look, if you need help today, with anything just—” He made the hand sign for a phone to his ear. “I’m serious.”
James’ route runs near mine and we often exchanged deliveries if we got in a bind. He was African-American with nearly white hair, even though he was only in his early forties. He had a friendly smile and a perpetually positive attitude I admired, while maintaining a realistic perspective about life, and the postal service.
“Thank you, friend. But you may want to steer clear of me for a couple days. You might catch the termination plague.”
He grinned. “I’ve been inoculated.” Meaning he’d been grandfathered in from the other system and they couldn’t touch him. We rapped knuckles and he went back to casing his mail.
The intercom shrilled, “Pomeroy, come to the office.”
I laid the undeliverable mail and packages from Monday down on the counter and crossed the floor to the office feeling twenty sets of eyes on my back.
Twenty-five minutes later, after an official warning, a yell fest by Bancroft pointing out that I’d picked a fine time to get official eyes turned on his little mail center, and some transparently self-serving questions from the New Orleans PI who definitely had me in his sights, I was told to get back to work and don’t call any more attention to myself.
“Tell that to the dead guy at the clubhouse,” I muttered, which I shouldn’t have said to my boss before I asked for the day off to look for River.
He turned me down.
Chapter 18
Tempe
The rest of the day held no news about River, which kept me with a feeling of impending doom and in a bad mood pretty much all day. There were no appearances by law enforcement, recalcitrant Imps or ex-lovers—that was certainly a relief—but it didn’t mean the day had no aggravations. The EVAL Cert continued, the mail was extraordinarily heavy, and then there were the usual odd customers.
Like Mrs. Abercrombie who stood waiting at her mailbox to instruct me in the care and maintenance of her ornamental mailbox flag, shaped like a hummingbird. An elegantly lady in her sixties, she said, “I’ll put my flag like this”…bird snout up…“when I have mail, but once you collect it I want you to put it here.” Instead of returning the flag/snout to its horizontal position next to the mailbox per regulations, she placed her slender index finger at the tip of the hummingbird’s beak and eased it instead to a forty-five degree angle. I may have been smiling and nodding,
but inside I was doing a monster eye roll.
Less than ten houses later a retired accountant asked if it would be possible to put her mail in alphabetical order. Grrr… Customers like these were becoming the norm rather than the exception, since every mail service in the country was jumping through hoops to secure business. Unfortunately, these two women would continue to be disappointed with my service.
I did manage to get in touch with a man at The Tricked-Out Tarot on the south side of Destiny who said he could prepare the replacement bottle for River. I still had the same problem though. River’s force was in limbo. Without River and the bottle in the same, say, twenty square foot area, I wouldn’t be able to reconnect my brother with his life force.
And I figured it would be better if I had the original bottle with its ‘soul recall’. That meant I had to find the other lid, and soon.
At 11:30 I called Peggy. I asked what she found out at the Wasted Turtle, but she just put me through to the sheriff. He’d gone home for a couple hours. If irritation could be transmitted through the phone, mine would have been a hot blue flame biting at his eardrum. He was the cause of my being in this tired, irritable state, and he was wasting time sleeping when he should be out looking for my brother.
“What!” the sleepy voice groused.
“My, aren’t we the picture of voter appreciation. How do you expect to find my brother from your bedroom?”
“Get to the point.” His voice was muffled, like he’d pulled his shirt over his head. Then I heard a zipper...
“What did Peggy find out at the Turtle?”
Another sound, water running. “She talked with Rutledge’s man and got a description of the girl, though not much of one. Blonde, curvy, medium height, nice ass. His words. He either didn’t see her from the front, or didn’t look at her face.”
Figures. “I want to know what you find out, when you find out,” I said.
“Just get me that picture of River.”
The only “picture” I had of my brother was a self-portrait River had made with a wish that I had scanned once upon a time to use for just such a purpose.
“And stay out of trouble.”
I hung up. Staying out of trouble hadn’t been working for me so far, so why start now?
I wracked my brain to come up with someone River might have gone out with Sunday. There was one girl from River’s past, but she was a brunette. Paige Whyte. We’d never gotten along. She worked at the Red Carpet Inn. After work I drove by the motel, but it was Paige’s day off and her boss wouldn’t give me her address or phone number. Halfway between my house and the fairgrounds sat Joe’s Crawfish. I pulled in hoping he hadn’t already run out. He stopped scrubbing his ice chest when I got out of my truck.
“How ‘bout you take some crawfish off my hands, Tempe? I have three pounds of crawfish and a bunch of potatoes and corn. You can have it all for five dollars.”
“Are you sure, Mr. Joe? That’s awfully cheap.”
He opened a small chest and withdrew a bag, handing it to me. “I’m sure. Now I can close up and get outta here. Crawfish are dyin’ on me. I shoulda known better than to open this early in the season. This cold front will just screw it up for another week.” He pocketed the money, then picked up his hose and resumed his cleaning. Conversation over. My stomach growled as I put the truck in gear and headed home.
“Oh, man.” I pulled up beside the porch. I’d forgotten the broken window. I stood there, taking in the jagged edged sheet of glass propped against the tree. There were beads of glass everywhere. I must do something about Freddie.
I set my crawfish down on a stack of leftover roofing tin, pulled my gloves on and moved the broken pieces next to the house, covering them with the cardboard box and a tarp. Then I carried my dinner to the edge of the swamp and sat down on a fallen cypress tree.
Dusk is my favorite time of the day here. Everything wild takes a siesta, and the bayou turns into a mirror. Once or twice a day, a flock of white egrets flies low across the water, like now, creating the illusion of two flocks. The rain clouds were gone and the increasing moon sat just above the trees.
We’d named it Harmony, and any other time, this spot by the Forge would restore my sense of equilibrium, but tonight it wasn’t working. I couldn’t even eat Joe’s tasty crawfish. My stomach was queasy with worry.
I walked back to the house and looked in River’s telephone book for Paige. No luck. I called the phone company, pleaded an emergency to try and get his cell phone bill. They refused, since I wasn’t on his account. I copied his phone book for Peggy, printed the scanned portrait for the sheriff and printed 50 color copies because Sheriff Lang might be too cheap to print them in color.
I called Phoebe again, starting to wonder where the heck she was. But time moves slowly when you’re worried and watching the clock, Besides it wasn’t unusual for Phoebe be off on some tangent, or to shut me out.
I sat at my desk looking at my brother’s picture. He’d been such a cute kid. He’d grown into a sweet hunk of a guy, too. Clear golden eyes, unruly tawny hair, muscular build that was inherent to Djinn—to my mind, a real catch. If I had my way, he wouldn’t get involved with Paige again.
Thirty minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot at the community college and saw the SOAPs standing outside waiting for me. We met formally once a month, and February’s activity had been selected by Bailey, a two-night workshop on social media at the local community college. I promised Montana I’d pretend enthusiasm even though learning how to Squawk or use Snapchat was way down on my list. Like holding up the bottom.
I felt better after a group hug and warm smiles from Aurora, Montana, Mariah, Shannon and Bailey, five of my six Paramortal sisters. SOAP stands for Sisters of the Astral Plane. We let the mere-mortals think we’re daytime TV fans.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on a class when my world was nuts. Montana slipped in beside me and turned her computer on.
The florescent lights apparently did nothing for my complexion because Montana remarked on it, “Tempe, you should take tomorrow off. You look like you were the corpse instead of finding one.”
“I’m starting to feel like it, too. I got a sub for tomorrow, which is just going to give my boss more ammunition against me.” Six computers were set up around each of two large tables, but we had pulled some chairs close together taking advantage of the minutes before class started.
Montana said, “I filled the girls in yesterday evening about River, and Six Packs.” She winked. “Anything new?”
“Now that you ask…is it my imagination or am I not having more trouble with the opposite sex?”
Montana held up her index finger and thumb an inch apart. “It did seem as if Mr. Jackson and Dick Randall were focused on you more than usual.”
Bailey said, “Billy Huber was in the DMV today and he said he heard you were stealing the contents of your packages and selling them on Ebay.”
Bailey Duplessis sat on the other side of me. She was a petite blonde with green eyes who worked at the DMV during the day and after hours at Bons Amis as a waitress. If you met her on her night job you probably wouldn’t realize you were talking to the same person you got your tag from. She’s a chameleon. No, she’s actually a chameleon. It’s her supernatural nature. People describe her as quirky, but I think what they’re really seeing is her dual personality.
Mariah said, “And I heard you broke into the golf club to get some of those expensive clubs to pawn because you’re running short of money for the Voracious Monster.”
I just stared. “Where do people get this stuff?”
Montana said, “Well, here’s some good news. The guy with the coroner’s office told me he stuck the body—”
“What?” Three voices sounded simultaneously.
Montana explained, “This is not for public consumption: SOAPs only. The sheriff called the coroner and asked him to get a body temperature on the victim so he could get an idea of TOD. That’s ‘time of deat
h’,” she clarified.
Aurora asked, “Why wouldn’t he just wait for the autopsy?”
I sat back, thinking about that. “The sheriff was probably trying to get an idea if he should let me go, or arrest me.”
“For what?” Bailey’s eyes widened. “Killing that man?”
Montana tapped Bailey’s hand. “Shush, Bailey.” She turned back to me. “Well, if what Bobby, the coroner’s man told me is correct, he was killed around noon. You were delivering the mail right?”
I nodded and couldn’t help but smile. “If that’s true, Sheriff Lang can’t arrest me. He’s my alibi.”
We all laughed except Aurora, who just eye smiled.
“But I forgot to tell you that I had two visits from Marty yesterday.”
“What!” Montana exclaimed. “How could you forget that? That Imp never shows up unless something’s fixin’ to go down.”
“See what I mean about crazy males? And that’s not all. I, uh—” As close as I was to these women, I still hesitated, and maybe I shouldn’t go there. The group scooted their chairs closer. I exhaled, shaking my head and felt Bailey’s hand patting my knee.
“Goddess, Tempe.” Montana’s finger quit its impatient tapping. “Class is about to start. Spill it.”
“It seems silly to mention, but every time I turn around, half a dozen times yesterday, I’m either crying, mad or thinking about zapping somebody. It’s like the Grand Mother of PMSs.”
Shannon said, “You poor thing. You’ve been under a lot of stress.”
Bailey squealed, “Oh my God, you’re pregnant.”
The rest of the SOAPs gave a collective, “Ssshhhh” and after an inquisitive stare or two, the other students resumed their conversations.
I rolled my eyes and they landed on Montana. She gave me a cynical smile, “Happens to the best of ‘em.”
“Well, in my case there’d have to be Star in the East.”
Everyone laughed, everyone but Aurora whose expression was pensive. Her gaze centered on mine. “It’s the quickening,” she said quietly.