Hidden Things

by Doyce Testerman

  “It’s a long way to have to go.” The thing tried to sneer, but its lips trembled. “A very long way.”

  7

  Calliope tried, and failed, to keep Josh from seeing she was crying. “Okay . . . okay, just . . . explain it to me again, please?” Josh gave her a look she knew well enough. She shook her head. “I’m not trying to be difficult; I’m just having trouble understanding, okay?”

  “It’s not complicated, Calli.” Josh leaned forward in his chair, rested his elbows on his knees, and wove his fingers together. His eyes were on the carpet, though, not her, as though he were reading from a note card she couldn’t see. “I don’t think this—the band—is getting us where we thought we’d be, and honestly I’m too old to keep banging my head against the wall, hoping it’ll eventually punch through.”

  “You’re too old?” Calliope made a face. “You just turned thirty. Barely.”

  “And I pay my rent—barely—by playing bar gigs.” His tone was that of someone who’d already said the exact same thing several times before—which Calliope realized he had. “I’m done, okay? I have to be done.”

  Fresh tears stung her eyes. She shoved at them with a fist, sniffing hard.

  Josh’s face was a mask. “I’m sorry this is hurting you so much.”

  She sniffed again, glancing up, then away. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Well, it’s hard, Calli, when—” He stopped himself and sat back in the chair, shaking his head, lips tight.

  “What?” She saw his expression and looked away. “I can’t read your mind, Josh.” She looked back at him. “Please.”

  He didn’t look away, but didn’t answer, either. She waited; she wasn’t as good at it as he was, but this time it was enough. He sighed through his nose, his lips still tight, and gave a small shake of his head. “I wasn’t really expecting you to get that upset, I guess.”

  She stared at him. “Really.”

  He ignored the sarcasm. “It caught me off balance. I wasn’t ready for it.”

  “You—” She stopped, looked down, and worked her jaw while she thought of a way to say what she was thinking that didn’t end with her screaming. “I’m not sure how you’d think I was going to react.”

  “Not like this,” he replied. His voice was a mixture of bemusement and anger. “Jesus Christ, Cal, you didn’t so much as reach for a Kleenex when we broke up; why—”

  “I knew that was coming!” She flung her hands away from her body, her fingers spread wide and aching from being clenched in her lap for so long. The motion left her feeling stupidly overdramatic, and she curled back in on herself, her eyes dropping to the floor.

  The words hung, vibrating, in the air of her (once, their) apartment. Calliope imagined she could see them, glowing like a sign, waiting for someone to read them before they faded away.

  “Well, that makes one of us.” Josh’s voice was quiet, soaking up and stealing away the energy of Calliope’s shout. “But then, I was always stupid about things like that.”

  She frowned, still looking at the floor. “Is that what this is about?”

  He closed his eyes, as though the question made him tired, and shook his head. “No.” His eyes met hers; he seemed to lean into the gaze, as though he could push some kind of understanding through the connection. “This is about me, leaving the band. Doing something else.” He dropped back into the chair and quirked a tiny, self-effacing smile. “Growing up.”

  Calliope managed not to react to those last two words, for all that they hurt the worst of anything he’d yet said; she could see he hadn’t meant it as an attack, and she was well and truly sick of making him feel bad for every single thing he said.

  “Okay,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Okay.”

  Josh watched her, his face cautious. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey.”

  Calliope opened her eyes only the bare minimum necessary to get a hazy impression of her surroundings. Morning light was stubbornly attempting to force its way into the room, but in the gloom the figure sitting on the edge of her bed was little more than a dim silhouette. She closed her eyes, letting out a deep sigh.

  A moment later, her body tensed, and she jerked into a sitting position, leaning back from the stranger in her room.

  She blinked her eyes hard until the edges of objects and her visitor came into focus. Another few seconds passed as she stared through sleep-wrecked hair, then dropped back to the pillow with another loud sigh that ended with “Hey.”

  She caught a small smile on Tom’s face. “You always wake up so gracefully.” His voice was quiet and calm, pitched to wake a person up gently.

  “Mmm.” She tried to inject a matching amusement into her voice, but it sounded false even to her—like a different kind of emotion entirely. Bitter. Silence built up until the two of them being on the bed together felt awkward.

  Tom unfolded the leg he’d tucked under himself and set both feet on the floor, turning away from Calliope. “They said you stopped by last night.”

  Calliope stared at his back until the words made sense. “Oh.” She finger-combed her hair out of her face and nodded. “Yeah. The club. Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t have you come back.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “We had a bad first set and I couldn’t really talk—trying to get my head on straight.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. The words came out precise and short, and Calliope could see Tom’s shoulders tighten—she sounded angry, and couldn’t seem to stop it.

  “Okay. I just wanted to apologize.” He stood up.

  Calliope’s chest tightened, and she said the first thing she could think of. “And . . . sneak into my house and watch me while I sleep.”

  Tom turned. “What?”

  Shit. “Kidding. It just . . .”—she pushed herself up to the head of the bed and drew her legs up—“surprised me. I don’t wake up very well, right?” Tom didn’t immediately reply. In the shadowed room, she couldn’t make out his eyes. “What—”

  “I made you some coffee.” He turned and walked out of the room.

  Shit. “Wait. Tom . . .” Calliope shoved the covers out of the way and rolled across the bed and to her feet. She was still wearing everything but her shoes from the previous night—no surprise, since she only vaguely remembered getting home.

  He was walking out of the kitchen and pulling on his jacket when she walked into the front of the house. “I didn’t mean to show up where I wasn’t invited,” he murmured, his eyes on anything but her. “You showed up at the club.”

  “I did,” she agreed.

  “I figured you wanted to talk,” he continued as though she hadn’t spoken.

  “I did,” she repeated. “I’m sorry, I just made a bad joke. I didn’t mean anything by it. Please.”

  He glanced up at her, shoved his hands in his pockets, and leaned against the wall. Not great, but not leaving. She took what she could get.

  “Thank you,” she said, letting out a pent-up breath. “Do you want some of that coffee?”

  He hesitated in the way he did when he didn’t want to say what he was thinking; normally, Calliope found the habit irritating, but at the moment she was just as happy not knowing what was going through his head. “I’m good,” he replied. “Already had too much today.”

  And now you give him a little smile and ask if he’ll still be there in a minute if you go in the kitchen and get some for yourself. He’ll like it.

  But she didn’t. A perverse part of her refused. Somehow, that was letting him win. Somehow, that was a bad thing.

  The problem was it left her with nothing to say, even though she’d been the one to stop him, and the silence between them built up again.

  Tom saved her. “Toby said you promised him you’d come back and sing sometime.”

  Calliope let out a short, surprised bark of a laugh. “Oh really?” She shook her head at the ceiling. “I think he might have been overstating m
y part of the conversation.”

  “He said you left pretty quick.” Tom’s eyes were still anywhere but on her. “With a friend?”

  “It was just work.”

  He studied her in morning light coming in through the front window. His expression was carefully neutral. “Well, he wasn’t totally wrong, then, if you were working on something with Joshua.”

  “I—” Calliope felt her eyes go wide as she turned and focused on him. “Oh. God. I didn’t—”

  “Didn’t wh—”

  “Josh is—”

  dead

  “missing.” She heard her voice shake. “The police are still trying to figure out what happened.”

  Tom frowned, pushing away from the wall and moving a few steps toward her. “He called you—”

  She nodded. “Last n—” She shook her head. “Two nights ago.”

  “Three,” he murmured. At her look, his brow creased. He extended his index finger. “Last night, you were at the club.” A second finger. “Night before, you didn’t come home.” A third finger. “Joshua called in the middle of the night.” He turned his hand toward her, palm out, fingers still extended, and waggled them.

  Calliope looked past the fingers at him. “I was at the office.”

  His eyes slid away from hers. “I didn’t ask.”

  Heat bloomed in her face. “I was trying to help the cops with Josh—I was digging through files.” She scowled in annoyance. “And how do you know I wasn’t here?” Her voice sounded loud in her own ears.

  “You told me to come by and pick up my stuff.” Tom’s voice was calm and quiet. For Calliope, that was one of the most annoying things about arguing with him. “I waited about an hour past when you’d normally get home, then I took off.” He stuck his hands in his back pockets. “I drove by after the show, but your Jeep was still gone. I went back to Sean’s.” His eyelids dropped, concealing his expression. “I wasn’t stalking—just following orders.”

  Tom wasn’t the easiest person to read, but that small signal was at least something Calliope understood. She sighed. “I’m really sorry I said that, okay? It was just a joke. A bad joke.”

  “It’s okay.” His mouth moved in an unexpected smirk. “It is a little stalkery when you list it off all at once, especially when you throw in the Cullenesque sleep-watching.” He crossed his arms and faked a shudder. “Now I feel dirty.”

  Calliope laughed—a genuine, cleansing thing that felt like washing her face with cold water. Tom spread his arms, head tilted and eyebrows raised. Calliope nodded, took two steps to close the gap, and wrapped herself in him.

  Above her, Tom murmured something unintelligible. “What?” she asked.

  He lifted his head. “Did your all-nighter at the office help?”

  “Maybe.” She told him about the answering machine message and its impossible time stamp.

  “Jesus, they think he’s dead?” He squeezed her harder. “What kind of jobs are you two working on?”

  She shook her head, her face still against his chest. “I don’t know what this thing was—I never had anything to do with it.”

  “Good.” Calliope tensed in his arms, and he could clearly feel it. “Sorry, I just mean it’s kind of crazy, you know? Even if he’s okay, the idea that he could be on a job that dangerous—”

  “It’s just work.” She heard the defensiveness creep into her voice and hated it more than a little.

  “You’re not saving the world, Calli, you’re tracking down skip traces.” He gave her another hug, hard enough to squeeze the latent tension out of her. “There’s a point where you have stop and say ‘This is not worth my life.’ ”

  “I know,” she murmured.

  “Does Joshua?” She pulled her head back and looked up at him, expression carefully neutral. “He’s kind of a paladin, is all I’m saying.”

  She nodded and leaned against him again. “He knows. He’s lectured me about it often enough.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Anyway,” she said. “There’s the phone call. He’s not dead, even if he is in Iowa.” Tom’s low chuckle carried into Calliope’s chest, easing her worry a fraction. “It’s worse than that,” she said, riding the momentum of Tom’s amusement. “The only lead I’ve figured out might mean I have to go out there myself.” She let the statement trail off into a small laugh, but stopped when there was no answering sound from Tom. Around her, his arms had gone unresponsive, dead weight holding her down rather than a comforting embrace.

  “Go out to Iowa.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Maybe?” The change in his mood left her off balance. “I’m not sure yet if it’s even—”

  “You told me once you’d never go back there,” he said. “ ‘Not for anyone.’ ”

  Calliope’s breath went cold inside her chest. She stepped back out of Tom’s embrace; he let her go without a hint of reluctance. “That was something else entirely.”

  He nodded, moving slowly. “Well, it was me.” He said the words the way someone might say mostly cloudy. “Not Joshua.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “He might be dead. Definitely in trouble.”

  “And you’re running off to save him.” Tom’s mouth twisted, as though he’d just realized a new kind of pain. “Right into the same thing that he ran into. Blind.”

  “I don’t—”

  “No.” He shook his head. “You can’t do this.”

  She sighed. “Listen—”

  “No.” He leveled a long, calloused finger at her. “For once, you listen.” Incredibly, even now, he wasn’t raising his voice; Calliope wondered if he even knew how. “You—” His eyes came up to hers, and he stopped. For a few seconds, his finger continued pointing at her, then he lowered it. He took a breath as though he were about to say something, held it, shook his head, and let it out in a long exhalation. Calliope blinked when he turned to the door and opened it on the chilly morning.

  “What . . .” She couldn’t think of anything else to say, but it was enough to make him stop, at least for a second.

  He turned just enough to look at her sidelong over his shoulder. “You’ve already decided you’re going,” he murmured. “I don’t know if you know it yet, but you have.” He turned back to the open door, straightened his shoulders from his subtle, perpetual stoop, and stretched. His next words were spoken to the open morning air. “And you’re going for Joshua, pure and simple, and I don’t know if you know that, either.”

  Her throat grew tight. “That’s not fair.”

  “I love you,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. “I’m going to be crazy worried about you until you come back.” He moved out onto the front step and turned back just enough to reach the door handle, without meeting her eyes. “So, please come back.”

  “Tom—”

  “I love you. Be careful.”

  The door closed. The house might have been dead quiet, but Calliope couldn’t tell over the pulse beating at her ears.

  When the phone rang, Calliope—still standing in the entry-way, staring at the door—jumped as though she’d been electrocuted.

  She fumbled the phone out of the pocket of her jacket where it hung on the back of a chair. The screen displayed a number she already recognized, and she thumbed the answer button. “Good morning, Detective.”

  “Likewise, M—” He paused. “Calliope.”

  “Well done,” she murmured, trying to inject some kind of amusement into her voice.

  “Thank you,” he deadpanned. “I practiced. How was your Halloween?”

  “Eventful, but nothing worth reporting to precinct.” Despite their conversation the previous evening, Calliope felt only the barest flicker of guilt at this evasion, remarkable only because it was there at all.

  “Fair enough.”

  “How did your partner’s boy do with the records down at the office?”

  “My—” Calliope could hear a moment’s hesitation in Johnson’s voice.

  “Walker.”

  “Ah
h. Yes.” Johnson took a breath. “Technically, Special Agent Walker is not my partner—I am a liaison between his office and the department. I facilitate what I can, but he is directing an investigation in which I have no official role or jurisdiction.”

  Calliope could hear an overcareful precision in his tone and wording. She was willing to bet he was, at some level, vein-poppingly livid about something, but too good a cop to let it show. She’d also put a smaller bet on the source of his stress. “Things a bit tense down there?”

  Johnson didn’t respond immediately. “The agent didn’t have much luck last night—or this morning, come to that.”

  Calliope winced. “Our filing system is a little arcane.” She let her eyes drift to the front window, but Tom’s car was long gone. “I could come down and help sort it out for him for a while, if you’d like.”

  “Special Agent Walker has assigned a second agent to the files,” Johnson not-replied.

  “I could still speed things up for them, even if there’s nothing to find.”

  She heard Johnson exhale over the line and knew they’d gotten to the part she wouldn’t like. “Special Agent Walker doesn’t believe that your help will be necessary.”

  Calliope turned that over in her head. She chose each word as she went, moving through her reply as if each syllable were rigged to explode. “Would Special Agent Walker like me to stay clear of his agents while they work through the files?”

  Another small exhalation she didn’t imagine Johnson realized she could hear. “He would.”

  Calliope closed her eyes. “Has he filed any paperwork or given specific orders to that effect?”

  “He has.”

  “He’s keeping me out of our office.”

  “Yes.” The detective cleared his throat. “The file system was very confusing.”

  “He thinks I’m obstructing.” Her lips felt cold; numb. “Or he thinks I’m a suspect.”

  “No.” Johnson’s tone was adamant, but he hesitated after the denial. “Not a suspect,” he finally added.

  Not a murder suspect. That’s a comfort.