by Jo Macgregor
“Playing with fire,” he agreed, leaving a hot line of kisses where his fingers had touched.
“And you really shouldn’t—” I began but lost the words as his lips found a nipple and drew it into his mouth.
The gentle, insistent tugging stole my breath. My head fell back when he moved his mouth to my other breast, and I clung to his shoulders for support as all the hard, icy pieces of me melted.
“And under no circumstances should you move your hands lower,” he said hoarsely.
I slid my hands down to his hips, slipping my fingers under the towel at his waist and tugging. The towel fell away, and we came together, skin on skin, with his mouth claiming mine and my hands sliding around his neck, fingers reaching into his thick hair. He deepened the kiss. I shrugged out of my robe, and we fell onto the cool sheet of the bed, limbs tangling, hands exploring, mouths tasting. The ember of my desire fanned hot, moving down my body and up into my heart. I slipped into mindless pleasure, beyond thought or fear, whimpering in wordless need, craving his weight on my body, needing him inside me.
He balanced on his elbows, cradling my face in his hands, and looked deep into my eyes. His own were darker now, the color of thunderclouds just before the storm. He held my gaze as he moved into me with agonizing slowness. I lifted my hips, wrapped my arms around him and, dug my fingers into the bunched muscles of his back, dragging him down, welcoming all of him into me. He groaned and, unhinged by pleasure, I surrendered any remnants of control to our bodies and to him and to the now of our rhythm. Afterward, sated and sticky, I curled up against him and drifted into a dreamless sleep.
It was only in the morning when I yawned, stretched myself awake and planted a secret kiss on Ryan’s taut butt while he still slept, that I realized what was wrong, what was missing. I felt no sense of detachment, no disconnect, no urge to pull on my clothes and sneak out before he woke up and never see him again.
And it terrified me.
– 38 –
Sunday, April 29
I left Ryan sleeping, and after showering and changing in my own room, I went down alone to have breakfast, feeling on edge. If the sex had been bad, or even mediocre, if I’d felt self-conscious or he’d been an ass in any way, I’d totally know how to handle things. But the problem was bigger than that. Our night together had been terrific, which meant I was in unfamiliar territory. What would happen if things went downhill from here? What would happen if they didn’t?
Ryan joined me at the breakfast table as I was anointing my eggs with Tabasco sauce. “Great morning, isn’t it?” he said, grinning like a man who’d got it all the night before.
I eyed him warily, nervous he was about to get all sappy with me.
Instead, he said, “Pretty cynical life philosophy you’ve got there, McGee,” and gestured to my T-shirt, which read If you’re happy and you know it, no, you don’t.
Damn. He probably thought I’d worn this as some kind of message about our night together, when in truth, it had been the only other top I’d packed.
“It's my mother's fault. I was never like this ’til I was born,” I said, but it sounded more self-conscious and stilted than funny.
“Are you okay? Something wrong?”
“No, I’m fine.”
He didn’t push it. Perhaps he guessed that I felt overwhelmed by the intimacy and was petrified by any thought of commitment.
On the drive south to Newhurst, home of the last store I wanted to check out on the trip, we didn’t speak much. I sat on my hands to keep from tearing at my nails with my teeth, and Ryan turned on the radio. This time, there was no static. When we pulled up at the strip mall where a fabric store sat between a Dollar General and a salon that went by the name of The Call of Beauty, Ryan asked if I minded going in alone. Officer Ronnie Capshaw had left him a voicemail earlier, and he needed to call her back.
“I’ll wait for you here at the car, okay?”
“Sure.”
Fine Fabrics, I discovered as soon as I set foot inside, was anything but. It was a dark, cramped store that smelled musty and didn’t look very successful, but it was hard to tell if that was due to the dusty shelves of scant stock or the unfriendly man behind the counter. Middle-aged and pasty-white, with a paunch spilling over his belt, he wore the remains of his black hair scraped over his head in an oily combover. I wandered around the store while he tried his best to be unhelpful to the male couple he was serving.
“Sorry, no orange ribbon,” he told them.
Stepping around a revolving stand of dressmaking patterns, however, I discovered shelves haphazardly stacked with hundreds of rolls of ribbon. I picked out three in various shades of orange and walked back to the front of the store to place them on the counter with a laconic “Here.”
The two customers thanked me, but they were clearly not fooled by the storekeeper’s exaggerated expression of surprise.
“You know what I think, Louis?” the shorter man said.
“That we should take our business elsewhere?” his partner asked.
“You know me so well.”
As they left, the man behind the counter mumbled something about not wanting business from their type anyway.
“What type is that?” I asked loudly, though there was no one else in the store to hear my challenge. “Black or gay?”
He gave me a bored look and sighed. “Can I help you?”
Taking a step back from the Satan’s fart that was his breath, I pointed at the shelves on the wall behind him where his stock of buttons was stored, every type in a separate glass bottle. “Quite a collection you’ve got there. You got a thing for buttons?”
“I sell them. You want to buy any?”
I scanned the display, searching for ones like those I’d seen and held. “Can I see those wooden ones?”
He grabbed the bottle and plonked it on the table in front of me. I opened the lid, half expecting to get a vision, but nothing happened, and the buttons inside were nothing like the ones Singh had let me hold.
“Why do you display them in bottles?” I asked.
He eyeballed me like I was stupid. “To keep the dust off them. You want some or not?”
“Yes. Three of these and two of the square yellow ones over there,” I said to keep him busy while I asked my questions. “Did you ever have a young man working here by the name of Larry? This would have been sometime in the late nineties.”
Did his shoulders tense, or was it my imagination?
He turned back to me and rang up my purchases on the cash register. “Anything else before you go?”
“He had dark hair and would have been in his mid-twenties at the time. Drove a Ford Thunderbird.”
The man tossed my packet of buttons in front of me and held out his hand. “Five fifty.”
“Well?” I pressed. “Do you remember anyone like that? Or did you ever know a man called Derek Kehoe?”
Scowling, he placed both his palms down on the glass counter, leaned forward, and got in my face. “Lady, you’re beginning to piss me off.”
The atmosphere in the store, unfriendly to begin with, now felt unsafe, not to mention unsanitary, given his fetid mouth odor. I was aware that I was alone with a menacing man who refused to answer what should have been a perfectly easy question. Was it possible that he was Larry? I cocked my head, listening for a message from Colby because he always warned me when I was in real danger. I sensed nothing, so that must mean I was safe. Then again, maybe Colby had taken my plea to move on seriously.
I walked to the door of the store, stuck my head out, and was relieved to see Ryan leaning against his car, eyes closed and soaking up the sun. That satisfied smile was still on his face.
“Chief!” I yelled, and when he opened his eyes, I beckoned him to the store.
When he stepped inside, I told the storekeeper, “I’m Detective McGee, and this is Police Chief Ryan Ja— Jameson.”
The storekeeper sneered. “I don’t believe you.”
Ryan pulled o
ut his police ID and flashed it at the man, keeping his surname covered with a strategically placed thumb.
“This man is refusing to cooperate in our investigation, sir,” I said.
“Well, we can’t have that now, can we?” Ryan growled, and I bit my bottom lip to keep from laughing at his repeat of the previous night’s words. “We don’t like uncooperative citizens. We wonder what they’re trying to hide.”
I nodded like a toy dog in the back window of a car.
“I’m not hiding anything!” the man protested. “Where’s her ID?”
“In the car. Where’s yours?” I demanded.
Reluctantly, he found his driver’s license and handed it over to us. Joshua Gage, born November 3, 1968.
“Now, Mr. Gage, perhaps you’d be kind enough to answer my officer’s questions,” Ryan said.
The man nodded, but his answers were short and sullen. No, he had never had any guy called Larry working for him nor any Derek Kehoe either, he said. He’d been running this store since 1997. What kind of car had he driven back then? A Chevy truck, that’s what. A Thunderbird? Hell, no. Did he look like a dickhead?
I so wanted to answer that question, but Ryan tugged me outside.
“What an ass wipe,” I said when we reached the car.
“True. But if he knows anything, he’s not telling. Besides, your fight isn’t with him,” Ryan said dryly.
I didn’t respond to this, scared to ask what he meant in case he said I was fighting myself or some other such entirely too perceptive observation. Back on the highway headed southwest to Pitchford, I asked, “Could that driver’s license have been fake?”
“It didn’t look it. But it’s not impossible, I guess.”
I picked at the edge of a nail. “What a strikeout this weekend’s been.”
Ryan glanced at me, a small frown between his eyes. “Surely not the whole weekend?”
There it was. We’d reached the awkward discussion stage.
“About last night …” I began.
“Oh, this is going to be good,” he said. “Okay, let’s have it.”
I put my head down and stared at my hands, trying to figure out what it was I wanted to say. That it had been marvelous or that it had been a mistake? That it had been marvelous and a mistake? That I wanted to know what was going to happen now, but I truly didn’t know what I wanted to happen now? That under my sassy, cynical exterior, my heart was still fragile?
What I eventually said was, “Honestly, I don’t know.” I looked over at him, trying to guess what he felt.
He met my gaze and held it. “Me either,” he said eventually. Then a slow smile spread across his face, dimpling his right cheek. “Though I am certain about one thing.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“That bumping uglies with you was fun.”
I laughed, relieved at the release of tension. “Well, you know what that means, Chief?”
“I’m listening.”
“We’ll just have to do it again sometime.”
– 39 –
Wednesday, May 2
During the next few days, there were no new developments in the relationship between Ryan and me. If he’d called me every day, inundated me with messages signed xoxo, sent flowers, or wanted to immediately pick up where we left off in Halliwell, I would’ve spooked like a skittish filly and pranced away to a safe distance. But Ryan was like a freaking horse-whisperer, holding his peace and keeping his distance, waiting for me to calm down, come closer, and sidle back up to him. Which, of course, I did.
I was aware of the absence of Colby. On Tuesday evening, when Ryan and I went for a drink at the Tuppenny Tavern, a woman sat down on the barstool to my left just as if it was as empty as it looked. A glance in the mirror behind the bar confirmed my expression to be one part wince, one part frown and two parts sad smile. If I was a cocktail listed on the Tuppeny’s specials board, I’d be called mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it was a relief not to be juggling the demands of two men and hiding Colby’s “visits” from Ryan. I’d never mentioned to the new man in my life how I sometimes heard Colby speaking to me or felt his presence. It sounded too crazy, and I figured it would throw a real wrench in the works of my relationship with Ryan. Who would want to be in a love triangle with a dead boyfriend? So it felt good not to have to hide that anymore or to make excuses about falling paintings, and I was pleased that Ryan and I would be able to enjoy each other without supernatural opposition. Mostly, I was truly happy for Colby, that he’d “moved on.” I wasn’t at all sure what that meant, but I hoped that there were better things to do on the other side of the veil than hang around your old girlfriend.
And yet, I also felt bereft, like there was an empty space somewhere inside me. I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to Colby’s comforting presence these last few months, but now I missed it. It was a loss, not on the same scale as the grief I’d felt when the flesh and blood Colby had left me but still a loss.
There were no new developments in my Button Man investigation, either, despite the fact that it engrossed my mind even as I knocked Henry’s tax receipts into shape and entered his data into the complicated financial software. Ryan and I had found out a couple of things on our trip to New Hampshire but nothing specific enough to take to Singh or even to Washington. If the Button Man kept to his pattern, then in just four days, he would take and kill another Jacob or Antoine or Denzel. And another mother or father or partner would be left with empty arms and a heart full of pain, regret and guilt. It was maddening to realize that, unless some miracle happened, I wouldn’t be able to stop that from happening.
I hoped the FBI was having better luck with their investigations than I was. The news channels updated their countdown widgets daily, but they weren’t reporting any new developments. Was that because there were none or because the FBI was holding back on sharing the latest? A hotline had been set up for tips but, as the frustrated-looking journalist reporting from the Nash Forest site said on the morning news, “We want answers, yet all we have is more questions.”
Tell me about it, buddy.
I had added Joshua Gage, the foul-smelling jerk from the last fabric store, to my list of suspects. He was the age Larry the Lodger would be now, plus he had dark hair and was clearly homophobic, which would fit someone who went around murdering gay men. But when Ryan ran the man’s name through his systems, he found nothing suspicious. Short of checking out every other fabric store in the nation — and there was no guarantee that either Derek or Larry had even continued to work in the industry — I had no idea what more I could do or where to start doing it. The answer came via my mother.
That Wednesday night, I went over to my parents’ place for our usual weekly family dinner and gave them an abbreviated version of my trip north. Not wanting my mother to start planning a wedding, I didn’t mention that Ryan had accompanied me, let alone that we’d spent a night together, and I also didn’t tell them about what we’d learned at the first store or about my misgivings about the man in the last one. I simply said that the whole trip had been a bust.
“But I did bring you something,” I told my mother, giving her the paper bag with the embroidery kit inside it.
My mother’s pleasure turned to perplexity when she examined her gift. “This is very kind of you, dear, but I don’t do needlework. And I’m not a Gemini, you know.”
“I thought you could sell it in your store.”
“Now, that’s a good idea! Did they have more? For all the star signs and maybe of fairies and angels too?”
“Maybe. I didn’t check, to be honest.”
“You left something in the bag.” My mother pulled out two flyers that the friendly woman in the second store must have slipped in with my purchase. “This one is for a farmers’ market in Halliwell. Not much use to us. I’m not going to drive two hours to buy an organic rutabaga, am I? But this one looks like fun. The annual Fabrics and Finery Convention is happening this week
end in Montpelier! They’re going to have stalls with all kinds of fabrics and haberdashery, plus textile crafts, and even talks by experts on all sorts of interesting subjects. I’ll bet I could get any number of wonderful products for the store there!” She glanced at my father. “I assume you won’t want to go with me?”
“Correct.”
My mother turned to me. “And now you’re going to say you have no interest in these things, too, aren’t you?”
“On the contrary,” I said. “You had me at haberdashery.”
“Really?” My mother gave me an incredulous stare.
“Truly. I’m interested in that kind of stuff.” And in the people who sell them. “Let’s go on Friday. That’s the first day, so they’ll have a full selection of stock. I’ll ask Henry for the day off, and we can drive up bright and early.”
My father was not fooled by my newfound interest. He gave me a narrow-eyed glance that told me he’d guessed why I wanted to go to the convention. “I wish you would drop this. It could get dangerous.”
“It’s a haberdashery convention, Dad. Honestly, what do you imagine could possibly go wrong?”
– 40 –
Friday, May 4
It was after noon by the time we reached the hotel in the center of Montpelier where the convention was being held, and it took a good while to find parking, because apparently, this kind of thing was huge in a way I’d never imagined.
In a vast exhibition hall, passionate crafters demonstrated beading, quilting, weaving, spinning, lacemaking, and needlepoint, while fabric sculptures and yarn hangings decorated the walls. The entire ballroom next door was filled with stalls selling every kind of fabric under the sun, plus enough supplies to sew, knit, crochet, cross-stitch, macramé or patchwork your way to the moon and back.
“This place is jammerpacked,” my mother said.
She was right. There were hundreds of exhibitors and vendors, each wearing a nametag lanyard and convention branded ball cap, and throngs of visitors milled around, inspecting and buying the wares. I decided to search systematically, starting on the left-hand side of the huge room and going up and down the aisles, looking at each stall until … what? Until I got a feeling or a flash?