by Alyssa Day
“That’s ridiculous. Walt threatened me. I picked up my bat, Eleanor ran to get her gun, and Jack came in at the end of it and told him to get out,” I said hotly.
Susan made a go-ahead motion with one hand. “Okay. We can work with that. How did he threaten you? Did he physically assault you? Threaten to kill you? Pull a weapon? And, by the way, we need to talk about Eleanor and her gun.”
“I locked it up, if you want to come get it.” I thought back to Walt’s exact words and actions, and started to feel stupid. “Well, he slammed his fist on the counter.”
“Did the glass break?” She pulled out a little notepad and pen.
“Um, no. But then he told me I’d be sorry if I didn’t have money for Shelley soon.” Even as I said it, I realized how lame it sounded.
Susan raised an eyebrow. “You’d be sorry. That’s it? He made a vague, generalized threat and pounded—but didn’t break—your counter?”
I shifted my feet. “Well. Yes.”
“Did he harm or threaten the child in any way? Grab her wrist too tight or shake her, swear at her, anything like that?”
I closed my eyes and thought back. “He, well, actually he kind of ignored her. I think the only time he spoke to Shelley at all was when he told her to call him Uncle Walt.”
Susan blinked at me in patent disbelief, and then she put her notebook back in her pocket.
“He said it in a rude way,” I protested. “I had a bad feeling about it. And she was happy when Jack scared Walt, so that must mean something.”
“Tess, I’m on your side. There’s no way I’m going to let anything happen to that little girl. But Mrs. Kowalski is her cousin, and she seems to care about Shelley very much. We can’t pull the child away from her only living relatives because you have a bad feeling about a rude cousin who doesn’t even live in the same house.”
Sure, when she put it that way, it sounded weak.
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll make a point to stop by regularly and check on her. And I’ll ask Mrs. Kowalski to have somebody other than Walt bring Shelley to the pawnshop, okay?”
“If she even lets Shelley come to the shop anymore,” I muttered.
Susan’s eyes narrowed, and I could see that she was losing patience with me. The worst part was, I didn’t blame her. Yanking a recently bereaved child away from a woman who cared for her, even if that woman was the local coven’s head witch, made no sense, no matter that I didn’t like it. And Susan was going out of her way for Shelley, which I appreciated. Besides all that, I was starting to realize that my “bad feeling” was being amplified by a memory that was trying to work its way to the surface of my mind—something to do with Jeremiah. Something about Shelley. But I just couldn’t remember what it was, and Susan was getting impatient.
“I’m sorry. I know you can’t act on a bad feeling. Thanks for checking in on her. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I’m worried about that little girl,” I told her.
Susan’s face softened. “Of course it makes sense, Tess. You lost Jeremiah, Shelley lost her mom, and you just had a murder victim dropped on your doorstep yesterday. It would be strange if you didn’t have bad feelings right now—about everybody.”
I remembered Agent Vasquez. “Did the P-Ops guy talk to you?”
“What P-Ops guy?”
Jack and Shelley came back out of Beau’s then, and the little girl was carrying a white paper sack and holding an ice cream cone that was roughly the size of her head.
“Mr. Jack said that sometimes dessert can be first,” she confided in us, her face lit up with the delight of a child breaking rules.
“Mr. Jack is right,” I told her, smiling and trying not to let her see a hint of my concern. “Come back and visit me soon, okay?”
“I will,” she promised.
Susan gave me the “call me” signal, and then led Shelley away.
“Let me guess. No basis to take Shelley away from that family,” Jack said, his voice a low rumble at my back as we watched Susan help Shelley climb into the car and buckle her seatbelt without dropping the cone.
“Got it in one. Walt doesn’t live with his mother, so he’s not around Shelley all the time, apparently. And honestly, he didn’t direct any of his anger at her, only at me, so I had no good argument to make. Maybe I was just seeing something that wasn’t there,” I admitted.
“No. You weren’t. But we’ll keep an eye on her.”
A wave of warmth swept through me at his “we”—a feeling that he and I were a team on this.
I turned around and put on a calm “I’m here to eat, not to gossip about dead bodies” face. “Shall we get some lunch?”
He glanced at Beau’s window, where people were crowded at the glass, pretending not to stare at us. “Are you sure? Everybody in town is going to pump us for the scoop about Ms. Nelson. They already tried to start when I was in there with Shelley.”
“Oh, no. What did you do?”
“I convinced them that it was not a good time to do so.” Jack’s green eyes shone with that hint of amber, and he flashed a smile that showed his teeth. Suddenly, he looked deadly—every inch the soldier and rebel commander who’d taken on and defeated scores of powerful vampires.
For some reason, that cheered me up. “Let’s do it, then. I’m starving, and Beau’s has great burgers, in case you’ve forgotten.”
He opened the door and held it open for me. “I never forget a great burger or a pretty face.”
When I glanced back at him over my shoulder, he was intently watching me, as if I were the only person in the very crowded diner. Again I had that sensation of being stalked. I shook it off as a product of my overactive imagination and looked for a table. Jack wasn’t stalking me. He was trying to find out who’d killed his uncle.
Anyway, there was also the matter of Quinn Dawson, whom I intended to Google the heck out of when I got home. Not that I was curious. Much.
While crossing the room to a table by the front window, I waved to friends, acquaintances, and people who annoyed me (there was an even distribution of all three in the diner that day), geared up for a wave of interrogation, and tried not to entertain even a single fantasy of what it would be like if Jack really were stalking me.
And what it would be like to let myself get caught.
Wow. It was suddenly really, really hot in there.
“Cold water. Lots of ice,” I told Lorraine when she handed us menus. “Maybe even two glasses.”
Beau’s was a fixture in Dead End, and Lorraine was a fixture at Beau’s. For fifty years, rain or shine, she’d worn her pink, starched uniform and white apron and presided over the lunches and fortunes of the town. She was the head waitress, dining room manager, and occasional bouncer when somebody got rowdy. Considering she only stood about five feet tall in her shoes, it was pretty impressive. For a while, she’d also been the mayor, but she’d never missed a shift at the restaurant except during the flood.
She nodded her head, her short, silver hair bouncing, and glanced at Jack. “You? Still a lemonade-with-extra-ice guy?”
He grinned at her. “How do you do it? After ten years, you still remember what I like to drink? You’re a marvel.”
She rapped him on the hand with her order pad, which I’d never seen her actually use in all the years I’d been coming into Beau’s. “Don’t get fresh with me, young man. I can still put you to work washing dishes if you misbehave.”
To my utter disbelief, a faint tinge of red touched Jack’s cheeks, high up on those excellent cheekbones.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said sheepishly, and she cackled and walked off.
“Now that’s a story I need to hear,” I said. “She made you wash dishes?”
“More than once,” he admitted. “We deserved it. Dave and I were always up to something. The time she caught us spray painting the diner windows with the team colors on the night before the football game, I thought she’d tan my hide. I shifted shapes, sure I could get away by surprising her, a
nd she picked me up by the scruff of the neck, said ‘bad kitty,’ and locked me in the kitchen with Dave and a sink full of dirty dishes.”
“Bad kitty?” I cracked up, because it sounded exactly like something Lorraine would do. She never put up with anything from anybody. “So what did you do?”
Lorraine came back and put tall, frosty glasses down on the table. “He shifted back and helped Dave wash the dishes, bare-ass naked, is what he did.”
“He what?”
Jack roared with laughter. “I hadn’t learned yet how to pull clothes into the shift. I wasn’t going to leave my best friend alone to do all those dishes, though. He found me an apron to at least cover part of me, and we stood there and did dishes for hours.”
Lorraine grinned at him. “Taught you a lesson, didn’t I?”
“You sure did. I never vandalized anything else in my life.”
Chapter Ten
Lunch wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, because either Jack or Lorraine scared even the most persistent busybodies away from the table. We had the meatloaf special (double portions of everything except green beans for Jack), and I picked at my food while he cleaned his plates, and then ordered cherry pie.
Two pieces.
Plus ice cream.
“Is this some magical tiger metabolism you’ve got going on?” I stared in disbelief at the pile of empty plates stacked on the red tabletop. “We just had doughnuts and a huge breakfast a few hours ago.”
“So, you’re saying you don’t want ice cream?”
I groaned at the thought, but then perked up, because Molly was suddenly there, waving at me through the window.
Molly Chen was a force of nature. She was tiny, wore her silky black hair in a pixie cut, and liked to confound anyone who displayed the slightest racist tendencies by pretending she only spoke Chinese. Her parents were both lawyers in Orlando. Mrs. Chen was a trial lawyer in something complicated to do with patents, and Mr. Chen was a sort of general lawyer, who did a little bit of whatever a person needed from him. He was handling Jeremiah’s estate, in fact, and helped me with legal issues regarding the shop. (Since the only lawyer who still actually practiced law in Dead End, Gruber Elliott, had recently elected to become a vampire, he wouldn’t take on any new clients, and he’d mostly dumped the ones he’d had. On the bright side, he’d spawned a whole slew of pretty funny bloodsucker lawyer jokes.)
Molly had been my best friend since the first day of kindergarten, when mean Nancy Hoffman had stolen my shiny new box of eight fat crayons and eaten half the red one. Molly had punched Nancy in the eye and taken back the other seven for me. Then she’d shared her red crayon with me for the rest of the school year. The Hoffmans had moved out of town shortly after the crayon incident, although I didn’t think the two things were related.
These days, Molly worked part-time for her parents’ law firm, but mostly she was a musician. She had an indie rock band, Scarlett’s Letters, that played a three-state circuit, and they were really good. She’d even had record label interest, but that had prompted a long, wine-fueled rant about subscription services and music pirates that I’d only half-understood.
She made it through the maze of tables and people who wanted to talk to her—everybody loved Molly—and I stood up so she could hug me, even though she’d seen me only a few days before. Molly was a big hugger.
“Hey, Molly.”
“I heard, why didn’t you call me, I think you should move in with me for a while, this is insane, do they have any leads?” This came out all in one breath.
Jack looked up from inhaling his second piece of pie, his eyes widening. “Molly Chen? When did you grow up and get tattoos?”
She grinned at him and rolled up her sleeve, showing off the rest of her newest. “What do you think?”
It was a beautifully designed and inked koi fish, swimming up the length of her arm. She’d only had it about a month.
“It’s gorgeous, but I prefer tigers,” he said, and she laughed.
“You know Molly?” I looked back and forth between them. “When did this happen?”
“Her dad was a collector, and he used to bring her into the shop sometimes when she was a little kid,” Jack said.
“Only a few times, and I’d forgotten about it, to be honest,” Molly said. “Dusty old pawnshops are the most boring thing in the world when you’re little, and I was too young to notice teen boys, cute or not.”
“Hey! Dead End Pawn isn’t dusty or boring,” I protested.
This time, both of them laughed.
Molly squeezed in next to me. “So, are you coming tonight?”
I was confused. “Coming where? It’s my turn to host, remember? Pizza, wine, ice cream, a Resident Evil marathon?”
“You have great taste in movies,” Jack said. “Am I invited?”
“It’s girls’ night,” I informed him.
Molly frowned. “I’m sorry, Tess, but I must have forgotten to tell you. I’ve been so busy, what with Mom and Dad on that anniversary cruise to Europe. I can’t make it tonight. My band has a gig at the Swamp Rat this week and we’re playing all weekend. You’ll come, won’t you?”
This was unwelcome information, on several levels. I really needed a girls’ night, I wasn’t all that crazy about the Swamp Rat, and I wanted a break from Jack to figure out how I felt about the way he’d invaded my life. Also, if Mr. Chen was out cruising then he wouldn’t be around to settle the legal stuff we needed to figure out for Jeremiah’s estate.
Finally, I really, really liked Resident Evil. Alice was a badass, and I could use a little bit of that this week.
“We’d love to come,” Jack said.
“Wait, what is this ‘we’ stuff? I might have had plans,” I blurted out.
Molly tilted her head and gave me her “are you nuts?” face. “You did have plans. You were going to spend the evening with me. So nothing’s changed, right?”
“Um.” Damn it. Foiled by logic.
“I’ll see you there.” She started to rise, but then sat back down and looked at me. “You know, this is maybe a weird thing to say, but it’s going to be kind of creepy and sad tonight, so I’m glad you’ll be there.”
“Why sad and creepy? I mean, it always smells like stale beer and sweaty bodies there, but…”
“Say that again, Tess,” Jack said slowly.
I nodded. I’d thought of it too. The same smell was on Chantal when we found her. We needed to ask around the Swamp Rat.
“No,” Molly said. “It’s about Chantal. She was there Wednesday night, when we were setting up and doing a sound check. I even talked to her for a few minutes, before she and Hank took off with their friends.”
“Hank? Hank Kowalski?” This was getting weirder and weirder. “They were together? I thought she was dating some biker.”
She shrugged. “I don’t keep up with people’s dating histories, but she was definitely in a romantic mood with Hank, if you know what I mean.”
Jack leaned forward. “Did you tell the sheriff this?”
“Sure. Well, not Lawless. He hasn’t asked anybody in the band anything, which is kind of half-assed, if you ask me. But I called Susan and told her who I’d seen Chantal leave the club with that night. Hank, Walt, and some of their crowd. Mostly people I avoid, to be honest, but I never had anything against Chantal. She was nice.”
I was shaking my head before Molly even finished. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would Chantal be hanging out with them? Mrs. Kowalski is the type to call Chantal ‘that nice colored girl,’ and think she was paying her a compliment, and Walt and Hank are much worse.”
Molly raised her hands in a “who knows” gesture. “She was drunk. They were all drunk. Hank kept bragging about some windfall he was coming into—a winning lottery ticket or something. Even I overheard him, and he was four tables away from the stage. Maybe he convinced her to go out and roll a couple of fat ones.”
Dirt roads near swamps were custom-made locations for hanging out an
d smoking pot, especially around Dead End, where no sheriff had ever given a crap about The Marijuana, as Aunt Ruby had called it hysterically the one time I’d come home high. (Uncle Mike had laughed himself silly and fed me junk food until I’d gotten violently sick, putting an end to my druggie inclinations for all time. To this day, I couldn’t even think about pot without smelling the faint odor of corn chips and ranch dip.)
I shuddered, and Molly grinned. “Ranch dip?”
Like I said, she’d been my friend for a long time. “We don’t talk about that. Ever.”
“Poor Owen. Does he know about your checkered past?” Jack clucked his tongue in mock sympathy for Owen, whom he’d never met and was never going to meet.
Ever.
Molly stood up again. “Gotta bounce, first set starts at nine, don’t be late.”
“Wait. Was Chantal wearing a jacket that night?” I didn’t know why I was fixated on the jacket, but I was. For some reason, seeing her lying there in that flimsy tank top, with her arms bare to the cold, had bothered me almost as much as the blood. Or maybe it was just my mind trying to deflect the horror of it all.
“Yes, actually. It was a red leather jacket, and I told her how much I coveted it, and how gorgeous it looked against her dark complexion.” She grinned at Jack. “We Asian girls can get away with mentioning the color of another woman’s skin.”
He sighed. “I thought you said you didn’t remember me?”
“I didn’t. It’s coming back to me.” She looked at me and rolled her eyes. “He asked me if I liked fried rice.”
I winced. “Ouch.”
“I was eleven years old,” Jack said, looking sheepish. “But you only spoke Chinese at the time, so I didn’t even realize you knew what I said.”
Molly and I both burst out laughing. “She never in her life only spoke Chinese, Jack,” I said, pityingly.
We watched as his mental light bulb clicked to the “on” position. To be fair, it only took a split-second, and then a smile filled with pure admiration spread across his face.