by Molly Harper
Jillian pinched a bridge of her nose. “And he expressed this by tickling the unicorn?”
Sonja hummed. “Well, it wasn’t so much tickling as…heavy petting.”
“I’m showering outdoors in a swamp because my boss tried to fondle a unicorn?” Jillian exclaimed, nearly flipping herself off of the porch swing. In the distance, several birds took flight from the trees around the house, squawking indignantly. She could only hope that these were actual birds and not her shape-shifting neighbors who had just heard her yell sexually explicit nonsense.
Jillian was only snapped out of the white noise in her head by the sight of a nutria, an enormous rat-like creature, shuffling through her yard toward the water. It looked a lot like the Marsh Dogs mascot on the town welcome sign. The local mascot was a giant belligerent swamp rat. Of course.
“Why are you showering outdoors?”
“Sonja, please focus!” Jillian cried.
“Yes, you’re stuck in the swamp because your boss tried to fondle a unicorn. Thistlewaite took exception to Dr. Montes’s unwanted advances and used the only weapon at his disposal, his horn.”
Jillian made a sound between laughing and crying.
“Got him right in the gut,” Sonja added.
Jillian cover her face with her free hand. “I should have been a high school history teacher like my mother wanted me to.”
“Sweetie, you don’t like children.”
“So my boss is a misguided groper who can’t be trusted around anything equine, that is news I didn’t expect. But why did the League send me rather than someone else?” Jillian asked.
“That I don’t know,” Sonja said. “Several people in the department put their names up to be considered, but without even interviewing anybody, they named you. Nobody in the office is talking about it. The board met in a closed session after hours, to discuss your appointment and that was it. There are no memos, and you know the board documents everything in memos. It’s some big mysterious deal.”
“Well, it has to be mysterious if you haven’t figured it out yet.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Sonja told her. “Just do your usual stellar work and come back to civilization, so we can reap the rewards of your inevitable and enormous success.”
“I’ll do my best. I really miss you. The people here are nice but they’re not you,” Jillian said.
Sonja’s teasing smile was practically audible. “So they’re nice, are they? Anyone being particularly nice? Anyone of the male persuasion?”
“Decidedly not.”
“That sounds like a story.”
Jillian could practically hear Sonja’s eyebrows waggling over the line. “No really, I’ve barely met anybody in town. The two people I’ve spent the most time with are this giant goofball of a mayor, who looks like he would gladly separate your spine from the rest of you if you touched his motorcycle, but is basically a man-shaped marshmallow. And the somewhat attractive sheriff, who seems to want to load me onto a catapult so he can launch me out of town at the earliest opportunity.”
“Neither sounds like a bad option, if you’re looking for a little temporary distraction,” Sonja purred. “And you can use a distraction, sweetie. It’s been years since Tate. You need to get back up in the saddle.”
“Let’s just stay away from equestrian metaphors for a while, OK?” Jillian retorted. “And Tate or no Tate, I’m not going to screw up my first field assignment by sleeping with the people who could literally run me out of town on a rail.”
Jillian could almost hear Sonja’s pout over the phone. “You’re no fun.”
“I’m not ready, Sonja. I can enjoy the view, but I’m just not ready for anything besides looking.”
“Alright, sweetie, alright. Just promise me one thing.”
“What’s that?” Jillian asked.
“When you find the right man, one you are ready for, you will climb him like a tree.”
Sure that she would never meet such a person, Jillian responded without hesitation, “I will. Love you.”
“Love you, too. Call when you can.”
Jillian hung up the phone, gathered her things and moved inside. It was well and truly dark now, and she didn’t want to be caught outside with unknown creatures, natural and supernatural. While speaking to Sonja had been a balm to her weary soul, even mentioning Tate threatened to drag her into a gloomy mood. She put her papers on the kitchen table and opened the fridge inspecting the offerings left behind by the good Mrs. Berend. She made herself a plate of cold fried chicken and settled in to finish her notes.
Her stomach twisted at the thought of food, but she forced herself to eat. Tate Ashford—seriously, she should’ve known that they were going to have problems from the uptight name alone—had been her first serious boyfriend after college. Hell, he’d been her first serious boyfriend, period. She’d met him at a conference for oral historians. He hadn’t been attending the conference. He just happened to be staying at the hotel at the same time as the conference, attending the wedding of a fraternity buddy. They met in the hotel bar, and for once, Jillian was “socially lubricated” enough to carry on a casual, flirty conversation with a stranger. He’d been charming and sweet, and seemed so interested in her background and her family. It turned out that he was from the D.C. area, too, and they’d arranged to go out to dinner when they returned home.
She’d been a dumbass of epic proportions. She thought the fact that he had the patience to agree to a date weeks later instead of pressuring her into a one-night-stand was a sign of character, that it made him boyfriend material. He certainly had the right resume for a significant other. He was a lawyer working for his family’s firm. He came from old money in Alexandria. He didn’t drink or smoke or spend excessive amounts of time watching sports.
So, it was easy for her to ignore the early red flags. He wasn’t very intellectually curious and scoffed when she mentioned something that she’d read. He didn’t take a lot of pride in his work. Every time she asked him a question about his role at his office, it became pretty clear early on that he was the living embodiment of her dad’s old chestnut, that “half of the lawyers and doctors in the world graduated in the bottom half the class.” That was always her father’s excuse for not going to get an annual physical, but it also shed some light on Tate’s way of getting by in the world.
He was perfectly happy to have her on his arm at firm functions or family parties, but he didn’t seem that interested in her as a person. She was well-educated arm candy. He wasn’t interested in what she did for living, until he sensed her hesitation in telling him anything beyond the fact that she worked as an anthropologist for a private historical foundation—the public cover story the League insisted on for all employees. He didn’t care to know until she had the audacity to say “no” to him, and then he wouldn’t let it go, asking her dozens of needling questions and becoming frustrated and resentful for her lack of answers. He couldn’t stand her drawing a line with him.
He flip-flopped on a lot of things after that. He was fine with them staying casual, until she went on a date with a coworker and suddenly he complained that he felt betrayed by her interest in other men. When she expressed disinterest in moving in together, he demanded they go look at apartments, only to change his mind when they made appointments with a rental agent. Just when she thought she’d figured out where he stood on an issue, he’d change his mind and she was lost again. All the while he accused her of using him for his connections, of not appreciating him, of being selfish and not taking their relationship seriously. She was so busy trying to keep up with his moods, to fight through the constant cycle of gaslighting, that she didn’t question whether he was wrong.
Soon, Tate’s discontent grew to how she dressed, how she wore her hair, the stories she told at parties. She rationalized a lot, told herself that dating a man like Tate would naturally be more complicated than the college boys she dated. She thought that adult relationships took more compromise. But by the ti
me Tate was done nothing about her felt safe or sure anymore. She’d always considered herself a confident person, someone who made decisions easily. Every time she so much as tried to choose a dress, all she could hear was Tate’s voice in her head, asking if she really thought that was the way she wanted to look when they went out.
The final strike against the relationship was that Tate didn’t like her friendship with Sonja. He repeatedly pointed out the differences in the two friends’ appearances and told her that girls like Sonja didn’t have friends like Jillian. He insisted that Sonja was only using her for rent money and all the favors she did for Sonja. He refused to see that Sonja took care of Jillian just as much as Jillian took care of Sonja. Sonja’s response was to use her connections at the State Department to have Tate added to no-fly lists in almost every country and put him right at the top of the federal sex offender registry. She insisted that this was justified and appropriate use of force.
True to form, when Jillian ended things, Tate told her he was tired of her anyway and she’d never find anyone else who would put up with her. And then he showed up to her apartment door with an engagement ring, which he threw at her closed door when she refused it. He still periodically texted her to ask her out for “drinks or something” because he missed her, and then left angry voicemails an hour later when she didn’t respond.
Work was the only thing Jillian felt confident in after the break up, so in the past two years, she’d thrown herself into it fully. This was great for her career and moved her up in the ranks of the League’s anthropology department faster than any new employee had ever risen, but it also left her drab and gray and drained. It took Sonja and lots of time to bring her back to the Jillian that Sonja knew and loved. Sonja had given up dates with highly eligible men to stay home and watch movies with Jillian. She personally oversaw an overhaul of Jillian’s wardrobe and pulled several strings to get Jillian an appointment with the First Lady’s colorist. She slowly brought the nonprofessional side of Jillian back to life.
While Jillian was in a much better place now, she wasn’t ready to date. She’d tried going out with some very nice—truly nice, not “surface nice”—gentleman the last few months, but it never extended beyond drinks or a dinner or two. She had odd little flashes of panic any time her date changed his mind about something. She walked out of a dinner once because her date expressed an interest in the salmon, but ended up ordering chicken. She just didn’t trust her instincts anymore. Sadly, the better a man seemed on paper, the more she pulled away, because now she knew better than to trust anyone who seemed to be “appropriate boyfriend material.” She feared any man she found profoundly attractive would turn out to be an emotionally abusive asshat.
Jillian was sure her dating luck would be the same here. She might have thoughts about any number of available, attractive men in the Bayou, and have some weird, inevitably confusing dreams about Zed, but that’s where it would end.
“Right,” she said, nodding decisively. “Problem solved.”
5
Bael
Bael ripped the completed speeding ticket from his pad and handed it to the tourist from Texas. The man had the bad luck to try to take a shortcut back from New Orleans to Dallas and wrong-turned his way right into Mystic Bayou. Even more unfortunate for the tourist, this was the second ticket Bael had written for him, and Bael was getting pretty sick of his shit.
Paul Shields had gotten lost and turned around so many times trying to find his way back to the interstate that he got frustrated and drove through the town’s school zone at forty-five miles an hour. And he didn’t realize he was in a school zone, because kudzu had grown over the sign for the Mystic Bayou Combined School. And he argued viciously about whether he should be held accountable for speeding because he didn’t realize that he was near a school. And in a third unfortunate event for Mr. Shields, he was parked next to another sign that read “Slow Down 35 MPH Zone,” so Bael considered that a moot point. Mr. Shields did not agree, so vehemently that he ripped up the ticket and tossed the bits in Bael’s face, shouting, “I’m never coming back to your pathetic little suck-town again! My tax dollars pay your salary, you know!”
Bael fucking hated tourists. They so rarely made it into Mystic Bayou that Bael forgot how annoying and arrogant they could be. But he couldn’t rip this jerk’s head off and shove it up his ass, because that would raise questions. And he couldn’t take him to jail on charges of destroying what was technically a court summons and general dickheadedness, because that would keep him in town. And in Bael’s experience, speeding belligerent dickheads making a departure from Mystic Bayou kept its citizens and secrets safe.
“Mr. Shields, do us both a favor and take the ticket,” Bael said, all carefully faked patience. “Neither one of us wants me to have to fill it out again. Just take the ticket and stay on County Line Road and you’ll be out of our ‘pathetic little suck-town’ in no time.”
“This is bullshit,” Mr. Shields seethed, snatching the ticket out of Bael’s hand. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyer!”
“I look forward to it. I’ll be sure to tell him that his client destroyed an issued citation after driving like a speed demon through a space occupied by school children and calling a sworn officer of the law a ‘puffed up, small-town inbred bitch cop.’”
“You can’t prove I said that!” Mr. Shields cried.
Bael gestured to his squad car. “Dash cams, sir. Even in pathetic little suck towns, we can afford them.”
Mr. Shields punched the gas and sped away.
“Stay on County Line Road!” Bael called after him, smiling and waving. While his face was frozen in that fake smile, he muttered, “Embrasse moi tchew.”
Bael needed peach pie, immediately. He knew that his aunt Bathtilda had a batch baking this morning and it was necessary for him to complete his shift without murdering someone. Unfortunately, it was only nine a.m., and Bathtilda insisted that pie was not breakfast. At least, not a complete breakfast. So she served it with bacon, which was why she was Bael’s favorite aunt.
This wouldn’t happen if Bathtilda would let him keep emergency pies in his freezer. But she insisted that her pies only be served in optimal conditions, and “no pie at all was better than freezer pie.”
A familiar white panel van rolled by—at a safe speed—but Bael wasn’t any happier to see it.
“God dang it,” he sighed. “I just want my freaking pie.”
He slid behind the wheel and flipped his blue lights.
The van window rolled down and Jillian looked decidedly annoyed about being pulled over. She was wearing a lavender button-up shirt that brought out the purple undertones in her eyes. Her hair was arranged in a loose bun on top of her head in concession to the heat. “I wasn’t speeding, Sheriff. I was going five under the limit, even with the school zone.”
Bael tamped down the tiny flare of pride he felt in her managing to spot the sign when other outsiders couldn’t. Stern and professional, that was him.
“Dr. Ramsay, what are you doing?”
“Not speeding?” she guessed.
“What are you doing, driving around by yourself?” he demanded. “Zed and I asked you not to do that, remember? Because you’ll get lost. And I’ll have to spend my whole week looking for your body. And honestly, the paperwork involved would just be a pain in the ass.”
She glared at him. “Well, Mayor Berend was supposed to escort me to my interview this morning, but he didn’t come pick me up, he didn’t call and explain why, and now I’m due at Earl Webster’s house in twenty minutes. And from what I’ve been told, Earl’s a real stickler about promptness.”
“You should have called me,” he insisted.
“You’ve made it pretty clear you don’t support my assignment here.”
Bael pinched the bridge of his nose. “Just follow me and don’t miss the left turn onto the gravel road. It’s tricky.”
Without his super-hearing, he wouldn’t have heard her mutter, “Ve
ry helpful.”
While it wasn’t exactly how he planned on spending his morning, he was glad that he happened upon her before she tried to make it out to Earl’s. Thunderbirds preferred solitude, and Earl Webster lived in one the most remote corners of town. His home was nestled in a rare tree-covered rise above sea level, hidden in so much swampland that even Bael got turned around driving out there. He was surprised at the flush of panic in his chest at the idea of Jillian driving out there alone, and not just in the annoyed “making the effort to find her submerged van” way. The urge to call Zed and demand to know what the hell he thought he was doing not keeping his appointment with Jillian was very strong. But then Zed might start to suspect that Bael was doing so out of more than professional courtesy, and the mockery would be both comprehensive and merciless.
Bael spent the next thirty minutes constantly checking his rearview to make sure that Jillian hadn’t taken a wrong turn. He parked the squad car in front of Earl’s two-story house, built to get Earl as close to the sky as possible. Earl was waiting out front, because he couldn’t stand to have people approaching his perch without him watching.
Jillian was introducing herself before she got the door fully open. “Mr. Webster, thank you so much for meeting with me.”
She glanced at her van’s dashboard clock. “We were supposed to meet ten minutes ago. That’s ten minutes I won’t get back in my day.”
Jillian blushed all the way down to her collarbone and began to stammer an apology to the tall, broad-shouldered old man with skin the color of cedar. Bael interrupted her, yelling across the yard, “Aw, come on, Earl, what’s that mean in the grand scheme of things? You got about ten minutes less to watch Price is Right? Give the girl a break. Not her fault you live out in the middle of the ass end of nowhere.”