A matronly woman smiled warmly at me as I walked in the glass doors, popping up like a jack in the box from behind her desk. The tourist office was big and bright, filled to the eaves with all things York. It was the kind of place that made a tourist want to be a tourist. I returned her smile. “Hi! I was wondering if you could help me. I moved into the area recently and I need to buy some plates and other dishes. Would you happen to know of a department store?”
“Oh, absolutely! My favorite is Debenham’s, over on Davygate. Are you familiar with the city?” She sounded just like Mary Poppins and I flashed back to the first time I’d seen it. Macy contracted pneumonia when I was 8 and the four of us spent a rough six days in the children’s hospital waiting it out. Dane hit a video store the night we moved in at UMMC and purchased a bunch of movies. Mary Poppins was one of them.
“No, this is my first time here. It’s beautiful,” I told her, having ogled the city walls and the Minster upon arrival. Hard to miss them.
“Ok,” she said, sliding out a paper map with a swish from a drawer behind her desk; a practiced move. She laid it out on the desktop and circled a star. “This is the TI. Take a right outside the doors and when you come to the intersection of Museum Street, if you go straight, you’ll be on Blake. Blake eventually turns into Davygate…you can’t miss Debenham’s, just look for the store with the black front and white letters.” While she’d explained, she’d marked my path in red ink on the map.
“Great, thanks. What about somewhere good to eat lunch nearby?”
She cocked her head thoughtfully, tapping her chubby chin with a long fingernail too perfectly formed to be real. “I’m not supposed to suggest anything,” she told me quietly, “but between you and me, I’m going to lunch in about ten minutes.” She winked at me.
“Um, okay,” I answered, confused. She folded the map up and passed it to me.
“Just about ten minutes, I’m taking lunch at my favorite restaurant.” Wink, wink.
Comprehension. I grinned. “Oh sure, enjoy your lunch, then, and thanks for the directions.”
I lolled on a bench outside the shop, studying the map, until she exited. She was bundled up in a bright pink pea coat and white scarf and gloves. Her round cheeks were flushed. “There’s an Ask up on the corner of Museum. It’s really quite good, if a little pricey. That’s where I’m headed.”
“Pricy is okay,” I assured her.
“Try to make the time to tour the Minster, if you don’t do anything else,” she said conversationally as we started down the street, her high heels tapping alongside me. “It’s an amazing place.”
“I’ll try,” I promised. “I’ve got some serious shopping to do.”
We chitchatted amiably and parted ways at the restaurant doors. The Chicken Caeser Salad was to die for, chock full of homemade dressing, ciabatta croutons, and some kind of cheese of which I’d never heard. I ate every last bite because it was good, not because it cost 9 euros; somewhere in the graveyard of seventeen dollars. I hadn’t gotten my first check from Edward yet, so I was still spending my savings. I’d care less about the price of things when I was earning at the same rate I was spending. I ordered a Coke and received no ice. Damn Europeans.
I could see the rugged spires of the Minster rising like sentries above the city as I walked across the intersection of Museum. I hit the shopping area on Davygate and began searching the stores for Debenham’s, dodging weekend shoppers loaded with bags, their mouths gabbing as everyone talked over one another.
Feeling very alone in the world, I found the department store and made directly for the plate ware after gazing at the department locations on the wall. I browsed for a while, sliding my fingers over the displayed dishes, some much too expensive to even consider. I managed to find a dinner set of 4 big plates, 4 small plates, and 4 bowls in two tone: black outside, white inside. Very me. I grabbed four matching mugs. At the silverware, I had to hold back a ridiculously girlish squeal when I found a 16 piece black handled cutlery set with white polka dots. Matching colors! I was in heaven.
Unfortunately, I had no luck finding an armoire, so I made a mental note to find one on the internet the next night at work.
After handing over my American Express for almost a hundred dollars worth of dishes, I took my two sturdy handled bags and headed back to the car. I stashed my dishes in my trunk and made a beeline back to the Minster, having promised the nice TI lady I’d see it before I left. If I was going to be honest with myself, I had a thing for history and architecture.
*********
The rain started pouring down on the way home. I navigated the winding country roads slowly, my windshield wipers moving furiously across the glass, yet the scenery was still just as beautiful as it’d been hours earlier when the sun was shining.
Hunter met me at the door, whining hysterically. I put my bags down on the kitchen counter and grabbed up his leash, earning even louder hysterical whining. “Okay, okay!” I laughed, clicking his leash into place and pushing open the back door. I stood in the doorway, letting his retractable leash out all the way while he did his business in the rain.
Back inside, I toweled his furry body off until he was semi-dry. My answering machine was flashing. “I should have looked at cell phones today,” I told Addie, her little form winding figure eights between my legs.
“It’s Melissa, sorry I missed your call. I could definitely have used some stuff from York, too! Anyway, call me back.”
She aswered almost immediately. “Sitting by the phone eagerly awaiting my call?” I joked.
“You wish,” she scoffed. “So, going out with Katherine? I bet that will be interesting. When are we supposed to meet them?”
“She said they’d be there around 9.”
“Plenty of time to hit up Jordan’s house,” Melissa mused. “So, I’ll pick you up at 6?”
*********
I wasn’t surprised by his house, not since I’d heard about his wealthy wife. It sat off the road, accessed by a fully paved driveway lined in old pine trees taller than my apartment building. The sun was near invisible under the canopy, leaving it a dark and gloomy tunnel we traveled down. Melissa peered out the windshield, leaning forward over the steering wheel as if it were holding her up.
“Wow, check that out,” she murmured.
It was a gray stone hulk of a building, almost three stories tall and covered in tall windows. The front lawn was impeccably manicured with lush green bushes and brightly colored fall flowers. A red sedan was parked off to the side of the concrete driveway, mud on its tires and the windshield wipers frozen in mid-swipe on the glass.
“Douchebag is safely at work,” Melissa said, nodding. She cut the engine and pulled the emergency brake on her little manual transmission. We stepped out into the rain.
A soft yellow globe lit the spacious front porch, illuminating a white wicker patio furniture set complete with an unfinished mug of tea and half a local newspaper. Through the etched glass window on the front door, I could see lights on at the back of the house.
Melissa lifted a hand and knocked loudly. We waited in silence, my heartbeat the only thing I could hear. After a few moments, I knocked even louder.
Finally, a small, dark shadow came slinking down the hallway leaning heavily on the wall with one hand. I exchanged a look with Melissa as the faceless blob began to unlock the door, not once but four times, before it creaked open like something out of a horror show.
“Yes?”
She wasn’t attractive. Her blonde hair was too stringy and needed a wash. Heavy bags pulled down the skin under her eyes, and her face looked jaundiced and pinched. One hand clung tightly to the door frame, knuckles turning white. Her wrists were so thin someone without super strength could break them with little effort. The long white tank top she wore was stained brown in several places, and from her spandex shorts grew thighs no bigger around then my biceps.
One side of her face was purpled with bruises.
“Megan? I’m
Melissa, and this is Vale. We work with Jordan.”
At the mention of her husband’s name, the woman shrank just the tiniest bit into herself. “Yes?”
“We’d like to speak with you, if you have a few moments,” Melissa said gently, speaking as if to a child.
Megan Brinkman closed the door imperceptibly. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I reached out and gripped the edge of the door, pushing it. “Mrs. Brinkman, we came while your husband is at work for a reason. Please talk to us.”
The silence dragged on entirely too long as we waited for her to answer. Her wide green eyes studied us closely, taking in Melissa’s seasonally inappropriate sandals and the small tear in the hem of my shirt. She looked harmless, but she was a woman who missed nothing.
“Come in then,” she sighed just as I was starting to fidget.
We followed her down a long, unlit hallway and into a spacious back room, the only light coming from a single lamp in a corner. The entire back wall of the house was windowed, gaping black holes where the yard would supposedly be. It creeped me out.
Megan sat on a floral patterned couch and reached for a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. “Why are you here?” she asked, digging out a long, slim cigarette and balancing it between her thin lips.
Melissa sat on the matching loveseat, dropping her purse to the floor, but I chose to remain standing. “Megan, we’ve heard rumors that Jordan isn’t very kind to you.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” the woman answered, her face lighting up momentarily as she struck a match and touched it to her cigarette. The cherry tip flared as she took a deep breath, then released it, eyes closing, and shook out the match.
“Has he always been violent?”
She laughed, a sound somewhere between dying goat and cough. “Since the day he brought me home as his bride. You should have seen him at our wedding. He cut quite the handsome man in that tuxedo.”
Her eyes were focused on something we couldn’t see. As Melissa opened her mouth to speak, I dropped a hand to her shoulder, met her eyes, and shook my head.
After another drag on her cigarette, and a deep swallow from a tumbler of amber liquid, Megan continued, “He was like an animal at the hotel that night. I was a virgin, you see. Even naive as I was, I knew when I’d been thoroughly satisfied.”
A little too much information, but sometimes you have to take the unnecessary to reach what it is you seek.
“That next day, he brought me here. This was my grandparents’ house, you know,” she snorted, waving a hand around in her smoke. “It was a place of love when they owned it. But, he brought me home and…” she trailed off, fingering the bruise on her face. “Ten years.”
Silence stretched between the three of us, measured by the heavy ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner. Megan settled back against the seat cushions, her stained shirt making a mockery of the fancy fabric. She cradled her glass against her breasts. “My ex, William, he told me he had heard Jordan once was put up to trial for beating and raping a woman in London.” She laughed, but it turned into a sob, and my throat constricted. “But that was before the wedding, when I accepted the ring because Papa made me and William was furious because I was supposed to marry him. Jordan, he was different then. Sweet and kind, and I called William a liar.”
I held Melissa in place as she tried to rise and go to the crying woman. Back home, my mother was involved in a lot of charity work, but the one she cared most about was battered women.
Megan Brinkman didn’t need a hug. She needed help.
*********
“We need to dip into his background,” I told Melissa as she navigated the dark, winding driveway back to the main road. “If he really did go up on trial for something like that, we need to see if there are more. What if he’s going after the girls because he has urges to off strong females? His wife just gave in and decided to take the beatings, so he’s not getting his rocks off anymore with her.”
“Good point, Dr. Avari,” Melissa joked, turning onto the highway. We both took deep breaths as we drove away from the black cloud that hung over the Brinkman property.
Katherine and four other women waited at a trendy restaurant-style pub just outside of town called Killegan’s. I almost didn’t recognize the receptionist, clad in blue jeans and a purple flannel shirt over a form fitting white tank top that advertised her full breasts to their best advantage. She wasn’t wearing her garish red lipstick, or even any make-up at all, and she was surprisingly fresh and pretty. Her usual nest of curly hair was straightened and hung shiny down her back.
“Vale! Melissa! How are you?” she hopped to her feet—hooker boots with four inch heels—and offered us both hugs. I stepped outside my comfort boundaries and returned it.
“Great. You?” I replied, settling into a chair across the table from her while Melissa took to my side.
“Fantastic! We’ve a couple bottles of Chardonnay on the way, don’t we girls?” A chorus of excited assent followed—“and we’re going to drink them up in honor of Fran’s birthday! Oh, let me introduce you to everybody.”
I met bouncy, blonde Fran, who was turning thirty. Outspoken Amy of the long black hair, overweight Amelia, and pretty Fatima of Indian descent. They all worked at Headquarters, and acted like I was some kind of superstar.
“Tell us about your powers, Vale!” Katherine clapped her hands as she said it, and the other women nodded eagerly.
It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 11
“I hate to admit it, but I think she is kinda growing on me,” I told Melissa with a harried sigh as we left the restaurant and she aimed the car for the nearest pub. “But, I can only take so much giggly nonsense before needing a break.”
“It was a little surprising when you dropped the bomb we were going out with them.”
“Couldn’t very well tell her no, could I?” I griped, my hand whipping up to grab the Oh-Shit bar as she took a curve much too fast. “She’s in charge of my car keys while I’m at work. It’d suck if I came back and she’d gone and run it into a pole to spite me.”
Melissa laughed, whipping into the parking lot of Myrtle’s, where we’d shared our first “date.” “I don’t think she would do that, drama queen. She’s really a very nice girl, just a bit overbearing.”
“And dull, don’t forget dull.”
“I don’t know about you,” Melissa said seriously as we got out of the car, grinning at me with twinkling eyes over the hood. She draped the strap of her brown leather purse over her shoulder. “But, my life was not complete until I heard all of Fran’s breastfeeding troubles.”
I burst out laughing, following her up the sidewalk, her boots clicking and my sneakers silent on the cracked asphalt. Myrtle’s was a well-lit facade of a building where the “Open” sign was blinking like a neon arrow. “No, for me, it was Amelia’s diaper rash story. Takes the cake.”
Myrtle’s was a happening place; the complete opposite of the tranquil, comfortable building I’d sat in with Melissa only days before. The crowd was a mix of young and old: the young spread out across the tables, laughing and shouting, wearing all the latest fashions, while the old hunched over the ancient bar grunting to each other quietly over beer, muddy boots propped up on scratched bar stool rungs.
Melissa led me over to a small two person table in the corner near the door, pushing our way through the crowd. As we took our chairs opposite each other, I noticed how radiant she looked, her cheeks flushed and topped by sparkling blue eyes, and her hair falling in gentle waves down her body. She could have been an LL Bean advertisement.
“I love your top,” I told her as she whipped off her sweatshirt, eyeing the bright red turtleneck that hugged her curvy chest. I was still in the same jeans I’d worn to York that afternoon and a long sleeved, sheer black top over a bright yellow tank top.
“Thank you! Mom mailed it to me on my birthday last month. What are you drinking? I’ll buy first round.
”
“How about one of those tasty ciders?” I teased with a grin. With a thumbs up, she sashayed up to the bar, swishing her hips as if they were a separate entity. I watched no less than half the men in the joint case her as she strolled past. It made me wish I’d at least bothered with makeup.
A rowdy group of guys in the corner caught my attention, and I saw Nikolas seated among them with a gigantic glass in hand. He saluted me with it, smiling, and I opened my hands with a grimace to show I didn’t have a drink yet. He toasted me anyway, and turned back to his conversation.
Within moments, Melissa squeezed her way back over, both mugs held high over her head, and plopped one down in front of me. “Why no bottle?” I inquired, taking an exploratory sip. It was apple cider on steroids. I groaned. “That’s even better than the bottled stuff!”
She laughed as she slid back into her chair, tucked into the corner near the window. “I know. They were out when we were here the other day. Okay, we’ve gone all evening without talking about it. Too much cloak and dagger nonsense. I want to hear about your date with Brett! I went after that hunka hunka when I first started and was shot down time and time again.”
“I didn’t know you liked him,” I gasped, almost choking on my cider.
She waved me off. “It’s not that I liked him, honey, I just thought he was hot and I was aching for some ass. Nope, I’ve got myself a nice little sex buddy, I’m not in the market for one anymore.”
I coughed again, fizzy cider making its way from my throat to my nose, and clapped a hand over my mouth. This was a Melissa I hadn’t seen yet. “Did he tell you we went out?”
“No, Katherine did when I crawled home after working your shift last night. She saw you guys leaving Toni’s.” At my eye roll, she giggled. “Nothing is sacred in this small town! Coming from a similar place, you should know that.”
“We had a really good time,” I said in answer, my eyes on the heavy mug I spun on the table between my hands. It felt so much easier to be with just Melissa in the more easygoing atmosphere of Myrtle’s. I felt like Katherine and her friends tried too hard and I was entirely underdressed at Killegan’s. Half of my cider was gone and I hadn’t been seated for ten minutes. On top of the three glasses of wine with dinner, I was going to end up smashed again. “I drank a little too much and almost invited him in for a little hanky panky, but I didn’t.”
The Temple Page 10