A Cold Tomorrow

by Mae Clair

  “The ‘noise’?” He brushed his fingers against her cheek.

  She nodded. “I think all the stability he’s had with everyone around him—my mom, Martin, and you”—she lowered her gaze, a blush rising to her face—“has made a difference. He’s not afraid anymore.”

  “What about you?” Lyle Mason was a supreme ass for having treated her with anything less than tenderness and respect. He tilted her chin up. “Are you done with UFOs?”

  Jerome’s paperback copy of UFO Sightings and Stories occupied a spot on the coffee table. Ryan nodded toward the book. “I should probably give that back to him.”

  “You don’t need to. I called him yesterday to see how he was feeling and mentioned I had it. He told me to keep it, that it was the least he could do after I’d helped him. He wants to get together and chat UFOs over coffee.”

  Ryan narrowed his eyes. “Are you going to?”

  “Would it bother you?” She leaned closer, her grin mischievous.

  “Hell, yes. I mean—” He fumbled and drew back. “The guy’s just a friend, right?”

  “Of course.” Her smile grew broader, lighting the depths of her eyes. Green like her son’s, they were flecked with gold in the lamplight. “But you sound…jealous?”

  Ryan’s face grew warm. “Katie, I thought I made it clear how I feel about you. I’m tired of being casual friends. I thought we’d moved past that.”

  “We have.” Turning, she nestled into his arms, her back to his chest. Snuggling closer, she drew his hands around her waist. “I like that you’re jealous.”

  He grunted. “I never said I was.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I have coffee with Jerome?”

  It was a losing argument. “I’ve got something better in mind.” He bent his head and kissed her—after which there was no further discussion of UFOs.

  Or Jerome.

  Chapter 14

  The next night Katie helped Sam into his Luke Skywalker outfit and she and Ryan took him trick-or-treating. They started in her mom’s neighborhood, going house to house as Sam collected candy bars, caramels, and gummy worms. After that, it was over to Ryan’s home where Mrs. Flynn and Eve lavished him with homemade popcorn balls and individually wrapped blocks of peanut butter fudge. Neighborhoods were overrun with ghosts and witches waving flashlights, parents trailing behind younger children. No one spoke the name of Point Pleasant’s notorious cryptid, but the Mothman undoubtedly lurked in the back of everyone’s mind. Even Katie couldn’t help shooting an occasional glance to the cloud-streaked sky, fearful the monster might materialize. After its recent rampage, the Mothman had taken to lying low as it had in the past, but a shadow of fear still hung over the town.

  Eventually, she was able to tuck Sam safely into bed, dreams of candy corn and jack-o’-lanterns dancing in his head. It was nice staying with her mom, especially as they grew closer, but she was starting to feel displaced and wanted to get back to her own home. She’d shared the thoughts with her mom that morning over breakfast, and while her mother was reluctant, she’d understood Katie’s need for independence.

  Sam was a different story. He was having fun staying with his Grammie, a situation that worked well given Lyle and the driver of the green van were still at large. Katie agreed to leave Sam with her mom a few more days. When she kissed Ryan good night later that evening and shared her plans, he scowled as expected.

  “Why can’t you stay too? Wait a while longer. We’re getting close on Lyle.”

  “Are you?” She raised a brow. They stood in her mother’s driveway, leaning against Ryan’s Camaro. The earlier cloud cover had given way to a star-strewn sky with a full moon, more orange than gold. If there was anyone still roaming the streets, the revelers would be older kids high on the fun of the holiday or dreaming up pranks. Her mom’s house had been the target of egging and toilet-papering more than once, but Katie wasn’t entirely convinced kids were the culprits. More than a few adults—male and female—weren’t overly fond of Doreen Sue Lynch.

  Ryan gripped her arms, turning her to face him. “We’ve got vehicle ID and a plate number. We know Lyle’s running low on cash. Darrell said as much. He’s got to surface sooner or later.”

  “I’m tired of waiting.”

  “I know you are.” Ryan tugged her against him. Slipping a finger beneath her chin, he gave her a light kiss. When he drew back, he brushed a thumb down her cheek. “I think he’s going to zero in on Caden, not you, but I can’t help worrying. Humor me, okay?”

  It was hard to say no when he was so attentive. She tugged her jacket closer. “A few more days.”

  “Till after Halloween.”

  She dissected the thought. “Why then?”

  “It’s the magic date. Don’t you remember?” The corner of his mouth lifted in a crooked grin. “According to Parker, Indrid Cold is coming back. Maybe Lyle will too.”

  She’d have to make another trip to her house to pick up more clothes and other items she and Sam needed, but it wasn’t as if he’d asked her to wait a week. “All right, and then I’m done.” She wouldn’t budge on that. “Agreed?”

  He smiled, gloating a little that he’d won. “Agreed.”

  Score another for the sergeant. “Good night, Ryan. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She gave him a kiss, then turned and headed back up the drive toward the house.

  “Tomorrow?” he called behind her.

  It never hurt to do a little gloating of her own. He couldn’t see her expression, but mischief bloomed in her smile. “We’re having coffee with Jerome.”

  * * * *

  Jerome.

  Ryan blew out a breath as he followed Katie up the sidewalk to Jerome’s front door. The morning had dawned clear and bright with the sun burning off a thin layer of clouds. He’d had breakfast at home, chatted with his mom, then swung by Doreen Sue’s place to pick up Katie. Sam was in school, and Ryan’s work shift didn’t start until noon. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to filling the intervening time talking to Jerome, but the guy wasn’t without a unique perspective on recent events.

  And he was clearly infatuated with Katie. Best to put an end to those fantasies before they mushroomed larger.

  Jerome greeted them at the door, surprised and plainly disappointed to find Ryan hovering at Katie’s side. Apparently, she hadn’t told him Ryan would be joining their get-together.

  “I hope you don’t mind I tagged along.” Ryan offered what he hoped passed for a friendly smile. “With everything going on in town, I thought you might have some insights to help us at the sheriff’s office.” With luck, the offhand comment would bolster Jerome’s confidence and offset the letdown. Nothing like putting a damper on the party.

  Jerome’s smile faltered but he motioned them inside. “Always glad to have an audience.”

  Ryan wasn’t certain if he was being facetious, but followed Katie into the living room. The house had undergone a makeover since the last time he was here. Newspapers and magazines still occupied a spot by the window, but they were tidily arranged and pushed back from the main walking area. Everything from the end tables, to the coffee table, and furniture looked recently cleaned. Pine air freshener replaced the odor of stale cigarette smoke and greasy fast food. Clearly, Jerome had taken the time to make his house look as appealing as possible for Katie. Ryan almost felt bad for the guy, given the trouble he’d gone to.

  “How about some coffee?” Jerome directed them to have a seat. “I’ve got donuts, too, and picked up a few cinnamon muffins from Early Start.” He twined his hands together, a nervous bird unmistakably out of his element. “They’re fresh.”

  “Just coffee for me, thanks.” Ryan took a seat on the sofa, conscious of the cushions sagging like a swayback horse beneath his weight. “Black is fine.”

  “Same for me.” Katie’s smile lit up the room. “Can I help you, Jerome?”

  “No, I’ve got it.” He shook his head, nearly tripping over his feet as he t
rekked backward.

  Ryan waited until he’d disappeared into the kitchen, before taking Katie’s hand and tugging her down beside him. “You’re going to give him a coronary, smiling at him like that. The guy’s besotted with you.”

  “He’s being friendly. I think he’s lonely.”

  “Of course he is. He’s got a room in the back that’s looks like a shrine to the Mothman and little green men from outer space. Not exactly hot date material for most women.”

  Katie cast a sideways glance. “How would you know?”

  He held up a hand. “Just saying.”

  “Well, try to be nice. I like him.”

  “As long as you don’t like like him.”

  “That territory’s already been claimed.” She leaned forward and kissed him.

  The sound of Jerome clearing his throat pulled them apart. Ryan glanced up to find the scrawny man holding a tray with three mugs of steaming black coffee. Jerome’s face flushed red as if he realized how foolish he was to think Katie might be interested in him.

  She recovered quickly and patted the coffee table in front of her. “Here, Jerome, why don’t you set that down?”

  “Yeah.” His voice spiraled lower, matching the misery on his face. He grabbed a cup with a bug-eyed alien on the front, then retreated to a chair across from the couch.

  Ryan guessed he’d hoped to sit beside Katie, but the kiss he’d witnessed had naturally dispelled those ideas. “Smells good.” Ryan picked up a mug with a silhouette of Bigfoot. He took a sip of coffee. “Hot too.”

  Katie’s cup read MOTHMAN HUNTER in big red letters, but she merely retrieved it and cradled it in her lap. “It was nice of you to ask me to visit, Jerome. How have you been feeling?”

  He worked a skinny shoulder into a shrug. “Good, I guess.” His lips squashed into a sour line as he looked down at his mug. “It irks me to think someone played around inside my head and I can’t remember any of it.”

  “You mean Deputy Brown?” Ryan took another sip of coffee. Aside from being hot, the stuff was strong enough to peel rust from metal. No wonder Jerome was a rail. If Ryan drank this junk on a regular basis, he’d be bouncing off the walls. He set the cup back on the table. “Katie’s been reading that book you gave her, and I glanced at it too.” He’d taken a peek, nothing too serious, honing in mostly on Jerome’s scribbled notes. “You’ve heard about the dogs we found in the TNT, and about Wilson’s cows?”

  Jerome nodded, his earlier dejection replaced by a flicker of interest. “What about them?”

  “Do you have any idea what could have caused their deaths?”

  Jerome hesitated, narrowing his eyes. “I thought you had Doc Holden check them out?”

  “I did.” Ryan spread his hands. “All the reports came back the same… That an outside source exerted barometric pressure strong to make the animals’ brains explode.” It felt freaky sharing the details of Holden’s report, but he was talking to a guy who believed in Martians and Sasquatch. If anyone was going to take the veterinarian’s findings seriously, it was Jerome.

  “That makes sense.” Jerome took a gulp of coffee, then set the mug aside. “See… A UFO could do that. We don’t know what kind of frequencies they operate at…sound that might not affect us, but could be a siren song to an animal.” Standing, he hunched his shoulders and began to pace. “When I heard about the dogs, my first thought was that something lured them to that clearing. Probably not intentionally. It could have been an extraterrestrial craft transitioning through dimensions.”

  “What does that mean?” Katie hadn’t taken a single sip of coffee, and probably had no intention of drinking the bitter brew. She set her mug beside Ryan’s and leaned forward, lacing her hands on her lap. “Are you saying UFOs just appear, randomly popping in and out of space?”

  “Exactly.” Jerome beamed at her as if he’d discovered a star pupil. “That’s why it’s so hard for the government to track them. It’s not like they fly into our air space. They appear and disappear at whim through layers between worlds. When people think of UFOs, they tend to think of them as existing in our universe, but the reality is most exist in parallel, even temporal universes. The Men in Black know that. I’m not even sure all of them come from Earth.”

  Ryan let out a slow breath. He’d seen enough strange shit lately to keep an open mind, but it was tricky navigating Jerome’s rapid-fire delivery. “You’re saying the Men in Black are aliens?”

  “I’m saying some of them could be.” Jerome stopped pacing and shoved his hands into his pockets. His shoulders were still hunched in an awkward posture, but his voice had grown stronger, fueled by confidence in a subject he knew well. “UFOnauts don’t want to be discovered. They want to observe our world for whatever reason, and move on. That’s why you’ve got all these guys running around, warning people who’ve seen flying saucers to keep the stories to themselves. In that respect, our government and alien visitors are on the same page. Big Brother isn’t limited to our world alone.”

  Ryan’s gaze drifted across the room to the stack of newspapers below the window. How many hours, days, weeks, even years had Jerome spent reading about stuff like this? His life seemed to revolve around little else. Katie was definitely off the radar, but it was a shame the guy didn’t crawl out of his shell and try to be more social. He was clearly intelligent, but unquestionably most people would find his choice of topics odd.

  “Okay, put that aside for now.” Ryan chose not to go down the path of Big Brother and parallel worlds. “If I read you right, you think the pressure from a UFO caused the dogs and Wilson’s cows to die the way they did?”

  Jerome bobbed his head. “Rex was lucky. He was probably drawn to the clearing like the other dogs, but must have gotten there after the saucer left. That’s why he was spared.”

  “But what about the green cloud my son saw the night Rex ran away?” Katie asked.

  “Another dimension traveler, passing through on a different plane. Not all would have the same effect or cause the damage. It was probably unusual enough to lure Rex away, but didn’t operate on a frequency that would harm him.”

  “And the star shit?” Ryan used Wilson’s term for the silvery goop scattered throughout the farmer’s pasture and the clearing in the TNT.

  “Residue left behind by the UFO’s passing. If you tried to get a sample of the stuff, it probably evaporated before a lab could examine it.”

  Katie squeezed Ryan’s leg. “That’s exactly what you said happened.”

  “Yeah.” A few weeks ago he’d have thought Jerome had a screw loose. Now he was starting to think the guy was the only one who knew what was going on. “The first cow Wilson lost was in a pasture a good distance from the barn. We couldn’t find any tracks in the field, animal or human.”

  “Probably transported there by whatever craft drew her outside.”

  Ryan webbed a hand over his face. The discussion was starting to sound like something out of Star Trek. Remaining seated was too confining. He stood and paced to the window. Jerome had opened the blinds before they arrived, the view outside a vista of browning grass and autumn-colored trees. “Hank Jeffries always said strange things happened around his house.” The observation came out of the blue, a memory tugged awake by their unusual conversation.

  Jerome stepped closer, halting halfway between the window and the sofa. “I think this house is on a ley line. I think it’s where Indrid Cold is going to meet Parker on the thirty-first.”

  Ryan spun. “Here?” The idea made a warped kind of sense. Parker had watched his brother die at Hank’s hands, then killed the drunken man in a blind rage. Caden had hinted he knew where Cold might appear and Caden was directly tied to the Jeffries house, now Jerome’s. Ryan should have pieced it together.

  Katie stood and placed a hand on Jerome’s arm. “So you’re going to wait for him at the appointed time?”

  He flushed with a visible start, obviously pleased by her touch. “I am.�
��

  “And if he doesn’t show?”

  “I’ll be no worse off than before.” He sucked on his bottom lip. Somewhat reluctantly, he glanced back to Ryan. “Parker told me he heard a lot of radio chatter. That’s how they communicate, you know. It’s just static to us…noise that shouldn’t even be there. But Parker understood it. He knew what they were saying when they talked to each other. The only message he wanted was from Cold. He did that drawing-thing as homage to him, waiting for the contact.” His eyes grew large, rounded by a hint of awe. “And then it came.”

  Cold must return. Evening will follow.

  “Yeah.” Ryan wasn’t sure what he was agreeing with, but knew the conversation had reached its usable end. If he’d gleaned nothing else from Point Pleasant’s prime conspiracy theorist, at least he’d learned where his brother planned to be on Halloween night.

  “Thanks for the coffee, Jerome. Sorry we’ve got to leave so soon.” He extended his hand to Katie, who stepped to his side and clasped her fingers with his. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “That’s good.” Jerome sounded anything but pleased. His shoulders slumped lower, and a look of dejection crossed his face.

  Katie tugged on Ryan’s hand. “Do something,” she whispered. Her meaning was clear, backed up by a pointed glance only a female could deliver.

  Ryan sighed, committed to the extra mile. “Hey, um…sometime you should join us at the River Café. Maybe the three of us could hook up for a few beers and a burger.”

  “Really?” Jerome went from staring at his toes to grinning broadly. “That’d be great—I mean… I’d be into that. I don’t get out that much.”

  “You should.” Katie stepped to his side and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Six o’clock tomorrow night. How’s that?”

  The kiss left Jerome blinking like a deer in the headlights. He gulped and swallowed. “S-sure.”

  Katie waved good-bye, and they stepped outside. As Ryan led her to the car, he hooked an arm around her shoulders. “I wasn’t planning on anything that soon, you know.”