“A couple weeks?” She clenches her shoulders in a not-entirely-mock shudder. “I wouldn’t last a couple days. No.”
“You said you wanted to get away,” Josh wheedles, smiling.
“I said I wanted to go someplace nice.” She swirls soapy water around the bowl harder than necessary and blows drifting hair out of her eyes. “Someplace exotic.” She looks sideways at him over her shoulder. “Driving to Bumfuck, Egypt, is not exotic.”
He stands, sidling across the room toward her. “I bet someone out there is raising a camel.”
“No.”
“ . . . or a llama. That’s exotic.”
“No.”
“Llllllama.” He slips his hands around her waist.
“No!”
. . . a ringing slap. Bright red handprint on her cheek. Surprised tears in wide eyes . . .
She shakes her head to banish the thought, yanks the faucet handle down, and jerks away from him, grabbing a dish towel. “I don’t want to go back there. Ever. Jesus. Fucking listen.” She turns to walk away, stops, turns back toward him, stops, and finally turns back to the sink and grabs the bowl with a towel-shrouded hand.
“Hey.” His voice is soft. He starts to reach for her again, but she moves her shoulder away before she can stop herself. He stops, lets his hand drop. “Sorry,” he murmurs, barely audible. She doesn’t reply, and after a few awkward seconds, he walks around her and down the hall to their bedroom.
Calliope doesn’t look up or watch him leave. Once the bowl and spoon are wiped down, she sets them in the drying rack, moving as though she is afraid they might break, or that she will. Once done, she hangs up the towel and leans on the sink.
The door to the bedroom closes, leaving her in silence, alone in the kitchen.
Just like before.
“Dammit.” Her voice is a whisper.
Calliope jerked up from where she’d been curled on the bed, surrounded by old pictures and handwritten notes. For a moment, she didn’t know what had woken her; then the knock came again—the kind of sharp, piercing rap that very few people could manage without using an actual knocker.
She didn’t move, though, until the knock came a third time. When it did, she lurched to her knees, bounce-stepping across the mattress as carefully as she could to keep from bending photos. Papers drifted to the ground in her wake; she pulled the door to the bedroom closed as she left.
She checked the peephole, but saw no one and jerked the door open, stepping outside to call back whomever had knocked. She stopped after a single step forward.
“Hey,” Vikous said, his face shadowed by the sweatshirt hood. He shoved his gloved hands into the pockets of his coat. “Ready to go?”
Calliope didn’t reply. After a few seconds—during which she leaned forward far enough to check the street in both directions, as though hoping there might be someone else waiting—she stepped back and crossed her arms, leaning on the doorjamb.
Vikous sighed in a way that made his chest rumble. Unconsciously mirroring Calliope, he checked the street to either side as well. “Might not be such a great idea having a long conversation out in the open.” He turned his attention back to Calliope, whose stony expression had not changed, and shrugged. “Just saying.”
Calliope’s eyelids lowered in annoyance and she looked away, her jaw working. Rummaging through her old life, sloppily jammed into a shoe box, had left her in a foul mood. It was everything she could do not to simply shut the door in Vikous’s face, but she suspected she’d feel that way regardless of who was standing on her front step.
Finally, she turned and pulled the door open, motioning him inside with a twitch of her hand. Vikous seemed to accept this—wisely—as the best invitation he was likely to get and stepped inside, then moved out of the way as she swung the door shut and walked back into the house, dropping into an oversized chair in the corner of the living room. He sat down across from her.
She looked up and frowned. “You don’t need the hood in here.”
At this, he hesitated. After a few moments, he reached a gloved hand up and pushed away his hood, then sat back.
Calliope’s eyebrow quirked. “That face paint has to be itching like hell by now.”
Vikous’s bead-black eyes stayed on hers, shining in the midst of the paste-white face and violently reddened mouth and lips of the clown’s face that she’d first seen on him the night before. “Not really.”
“How—” She cut herself off, fighting another spike of irritation. Any other time, curiosity would have pushed her further, but not today. “Never mind.”
“Fine.” He pushed himself forward and cleared his throat. “What—”
“Why are you here?” she interrupted.
“You have an appointment with Gluen.” He folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair. “Figured I’d tag along.”
“That’s tonight.” She glanced at the cheap plastic clock hanging on the wall. Several hours later than she’d expected—she'd dozed off for longer than she’d thought—but still nowhere near nightfall.
“Yep,” her visitor replied. Calliope waited, but he offered nothing further. Her eyes narrowed.
She stood up and walked toward the kitchen. “You want coffee?”
Vikous ignored the delaying tactic. “Coffee’s fine. No sugar. Put yours in a travel mug, if you’ve got one.”
The two didn’t speak. There was no sound except the clink of cups being moved and filled, then Calliope returned and handed Vikous a cup. She sat down with hers—heavy, ceramic, and terrible for travel—held between both hands. “The cops called back this morning.”
Vikous reached up, scratched at the corner of his mouth, nodding to himself as though confirming a suspicion. “You don’t say.” He took a long drink from the steaming cup and grimaced, his lips stretching back. “What did—” He interrupted himself, his face suddenly sharp. “Did you tell them about me?”
“Homeless stalker guy?” she said. “I mentioned you yesterday, but didn’t say much.” She took a drink herself, her mouth twisting. The coffee was still hot, but had been cooking down since early this morning, untouched. “Hot” was the only thing it had going for it. “I didn’t want them worrying about something that didn’t have anything to do with the case.”
“Did they buy that?”
“Buy it? Hell, I believed it when I said it; there was nothing to buy.”
“But they let it be?”
Calliope frowned, her head tilted. “Johnson did. Walker got a little squirrelly about it for a while.”
“Which one’s Walker?”
Calliope described the sharp V’s of the federal agent’s features. “Why?” she asked.
He shook his head and took another drink, swallowing forcefully. “Just wondering. Walker’s an . . .” He shook his head. “Interesting name, at least.”
His questions had reminded Calliope of something else. “Walker said that a homeless guy was seen around the place where Joshua was—” She looked down at her coffee cup, clenching her jaw. “Where they found the body.”
Vikous looked at her over the rim of the cup. “Yeah?”
“Was there?”
He finished his drink and let his eyes slide away from hers into the empty cup. “Might have been.”
“Was it you?”
He shook his head. “It’s a very long way,” he said in a different, softer tone of voice.
“I realize that. I’m purposely living about as far away from there as you can get without learning another language.”
He looked up at that, then shook himself free of the quiet in the room. “So what did Detective Johnson and Special Agent Walker have to say?”
“It was just Johnson.” She scowled. “They’ve gone over Josh’s last message and can’t get anything more out of it.” She blew air between her teeth in disgust. “The official opinion is that the time stamp is a hardware malfunction.”
“The one that says the call came in—”
“After he supposedly died.”
“So they’re giving up?”
“No.” She told Vikous about being blocked from returning to her office while Walker’s people searched the files.
“That’s an awful lot of work to find something they heard about on a malfunctioning answering machine,” Vikous observed.
“Kind of what I thought,” Calliope replied. “But Walker and I didn’t really hit it off; I figure it’s just him pulling a dick move to amuse himself; mess up our files, leave them for me to straighten out. It’s happened before.”
“Sure.” Vikous tipped his head to the side, as though mulling over possibilities. “Or they’re actually trying to find out more about Gluen.”
“Why would they? There’s no real reason, from their point of view.” She stood up. “They don’t know half of what I do, and I don’t know a goddamn thing.” She looked at Vikous. “Do I?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Vikous said, “but you’re not wrong.” He stood up and handed her his empty cup. She’d barely touched hers. “You wanna fix that?”
Her brow furrowed. “How?”
“A little side trip before going to see Gluen.” He made a show of looking out the front window of the house. “It’s why I showed up early.”
“Some cunning plan, like last night?” Calliope turned back to the kitchen and walked away. Vikous watched her back, then followed her as far as the archway. She looked up from the sink as she emptied her mug. “What if I say no?”
“Then you say no.” He shrugged in a way that made his coat shift in unusual ways. “It’s not a big deal—just something maybe-useful.” He leaned against the archway. “If you want to hang out here for hours, pining for the moment you can go see Gluen again, that’s your call.”
Calliope turned back to the sink to rinse out the cup. “When you put it like that, not going along sounds pretty stupid.”
“Only if you don’t like Gluen.”
“Which I don’t.”
“No one does,” Vikous replied. “Even among his own kind, he’s considered creepy.”
“What’s—” Calliope cut herself off with a shake of her head, pulling down a towel and drying her hands.
“What’s his kind?” Vikous asked for her. “Short question. Long answer. Come with me and we can start working through it.”
She turned back to Vikous, who returned her look with his impossible black eyes.
This time it was Calliope who gave in. “Where are we going?”
“Kegeln,” Vikous replied.
Calliope looked from the sign above the building’s entrance to Vikous, standing on the other side of her Jeep. “Bowling?”
“Kegeln,” Vikous replied.
“Which means?”
“Bowling,” he said, walking toward the entrance.
Calliope scowled at his back as he strolled across the mostly empty parking lot, then followed him.
Vikous was already at the cashier’s counter (old; repainted so many times that the corners were rounded and each nick and chip looked like a bite taken out of a jawbreaker) when she entered. A young girl with half-lidded eyes and a face full of silver piercings asked him a question as she opened the till to make change. He turned to Calliope. “Do you need shoes?” Calliope raised an incredulous eyebrow. His face moved in a way that Calliope associated with rolled eyes—an expression somewhat wasted with him—and he turned back to the girl. “Yeah, she needs shoes.”
“ ’Kay. Do you?”
“I’m not bowling.”
The girl shrugged and reached under the counter, pulling out a pair of worn leather shoes that she pushed across the counter to Calliope.
Calliope eyed the shoes, turning them to check the size tattooed on the back. “Good guess.”
The girl snorted and shook her head. “Whatever, man.” She wandered down to the other end of the counter.
“Nice.”
“Grab your shoes,” Vikous said, heading for one of the lanes. He held a scoring sheet and half a pencil in one hand—the alley hadn’t been updated with computerized scoring systems. Vikous settled into one of the orange, contoured fiberglass chairs at the lane’s tiny, stained scoring tables; Calliope sat at the creaking players’ bench across from him and set her shoes beside her.
She looked around. “This place is kind of a dump.”
“Mmm.” He pivoted away from her in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and hunched over the scoring sheet. “Keen eye for detail. You’re up whenever you’re ready.”
Calliope stared at his back. “You seriously want me to bowl.”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
Vikous sighed, his head sagging over the score sheet. “I just do, all right? A little trust?”
Calliope snorted almost exactly the way the girl at the counter had, but reached for her shoes. Vikous said nothing. Once she’d pulled the shoes on, she rooted around the ball racks until she found one that seemed to suit her hand well enough and returned. “Now what?”
He looked up at her. “You don’t know how to bowl?”
“Of course I know how to bowl,” she replied. “I practically grew up in a bowling alley, watching my folks. I mean do you want me to throw it left-handed, or with my eyes closed, or keep track of which odd-numbered pins I knock down, or what?” Vikous looked at her as though she’d lapsed into another language. She returned his stare. “What?”
His mouth opened, then closed. Finally, he said, “I just. Want you. To bowl.”
“Okay.”
“ . . . have to make it so complicated.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just, please—”
“Perhaps,” said a voice behind them both, “you’d like something to drink before you get started?”
Calliope turned. A man stood there, wearing the same tunic-style shirt as the girl behind the counter. He was older and almost certainly related—he had the same delicate, fine-boned facial features that the girl’s piercings had largely occluded. Calliope couldn’t decide if he was the girl’s brother or father—he seemed too old for the former and too young for the latter. She settled on “brother” more out of optimism than any telltales.
She brushed her hair back. “Yeah,” she agreed. “A drink would be good.” She smiled. “Anything you can rec—”
“We’re not staying that long,” Vikous interrupted.
Calliope paused, gave a tight smile that didn’t expose her teeth, and pivoted slowly on her heel to face Vikous. “I’m thirsty.”
“No,” replied Vikous. “You’re not. Not here.”
“What—”
“We’re fine, thanks,” Vikous said, leaning out in his chair to speak around her.
“The lady . . .” her pretty waiter protested.
“Is with me,” Vikous growled. “And I know how long we’ll be here for.”
Tension hummed in the air around Calliope. “As you say,” the man replied. Calliope could almost imagine an accompanying bow to go with his obsequious tone. Then he was gone; Calliope could feel him leave, as though a source of heat had been removed from behind her.
Vikous looked up at her from his chair, his black eyes unblinking. Calliope met his gaze until her eyes began to feel dry, then walked past him, approached the lane, threw her ball into the gutter, and stepped back to wait by the ball return.
“Twenty gutter balls in a row.” Vikous led the way out of the bowling alley, pivoting on his heel to hold the door open for Calliope, who stalked by, the muscles in her jaw working. “That’s a pretty impressive temper you’ve got.” He let go of the door and rubbed at the side of his face. “I should have guessed that from the first time we met, but—”
“What the hell is your problem?” Calliope whirled on him, continuing to walk backward across the lot. “I’ve never—” She stopped, and stopped walking, a deep crease between her raised eyebrows.
Without turning her head, Calliope took in the bright lights illuminating the dark lot, sti
ll mostly deserted, and the garish neon that lit up the bowling alley’s sign. Her eyes came back to Vikous. “What did you do?”
Vikous lifted a hand to his chest, fingers splayed, and struck an affronted pose. “Me?” His hood swayed back and forth in denial. “I didn’t do anything.”
“We got here at four in the afternoon.” She pointed behind her, toward her Jeep, as though indicating proof of their arrival. “I bowled one game—”
“I dunno if you could really call that bowling,” Vikous interjected.
“Shut up,” Calliope barked. “It was daylight out, and now it’s . . .” She looked up, waving her hand at the dark-but-never-starlit sky of the city.
“Probably around eight. Eight fifteen, maybe.” Vikous’s smile showed teeth, visible even within the shadows of his hood.
Calliope’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “Really?”
“Explain.”
He raised his hands in surrender, then dropped them into his pockets, watching her, his head slightly tilted within his hood. Finally, he asked, “You ever noticed that there’s no windows in a bowling alley?” Calliope held her scowl and didn’t reply. He nodded as though she had and strolled past her toward the Jeep. “There’s a reason for that, sometimes, and it’s not to cut down on sun glare.” He turned once he reached the Jeep and rested his elbows on the hood, looking back at the bowling alley. Calliope had followed him, but at a distance, and stayed on the other side of the vehicle.
Still looking at the neon lights of the sign, Vikous said, “There are a lot of stories you tell each other that are almost-but-not-quite right, you know?”
He looked at Calliope, who gave her head a short shake and looked away. “No, I don’t.”
“Sure you do.” He flipped his hand up, as though throwing trash into the air. “The three little pigs were the good guys. The bears forgave Goldilocks. Only one prince hooked up with Rapunzel. Sleeping Beauty was put in a hundred-year coma for no reason.”
Calliope shook the distractions away. “What’s that got to do with this?”
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