by Alex Owens
I turned to Linc, “I used to work for Ernie. When I left some of my clients were a little nervous; Old man Smithson was the worst of the bunch. But, I assured them that they’d be in good hands with ‘ol Ernie here.”
I slugged Ernie in the arm playfully. I tried to ignore the fact that he winced and rubbed his arm where I’d tagged him. Oops—guess my muscles weren’t feeling so playful anymore.
“Well again, I’d appreciated. You all settled in your new house?” He stepped closer to the table, giving a waitress carrying a large tray room to pass by. If he took another step, he’d be sitting in my lap.
“Yep, all settled.” I played with the straw in my lemon water. Of course, I couldn’t drink it, but as luck would have it there was a potted plant sitting in the window of our booth, so I planned on dripping straws full of my water into the plant at the first chance. I’d already downed a beer and while my stomach tolerated it for the most part, I was smart enough to not push it. I was a one-drink date again sadly.
Linc gave me a what’s-he-still-doing-here look and I shrugged slightly.
“We were just...” I started, before Ernie cut me off with another question.
“You must be feeling better, then?” Ernie tipped back his tumbler and took a long pull of the amber liquid, splashing some over his salmon pink shirt when the ice cubes decided to get a bit unruly in the glass.
Linc’s face developed a curious look.
Great, that’s what I was afraid of. I didn’t want Ernie skirting anywhere near my so-called health issues that necessitated me leaving the company. Not that I’d told him the truth, mind you. Instead, my ex-boss though I’d left for a perfect storm of reasons. Namely a fresh divorce, excessive stress and a newly developed skin condition that didn’t tolerate sun or rigid daily schedules.
I needed to get rid of him, and fast.
“Um, I’m doing good, real good. Thanks for asking. How’s Janice?” I smiled sweetly.
Don’t get me wrong, I was fond of my old boss, but I really needed him to go.
The quickest way I knew to accomplish that was to remind him of his disabled wife. I knew how his mind worked; he’d think of Janice, then he’d feel guilty for stopping in for a few drinks, and then he’d worry about how it must look to everyone—out living it up while his wife was confined to her bed. Then he’d be out the door.
“She’s fine. Well, it was good to see you again. Take care! And tell Quinn I said hi!” He waved, downed the rest of his drink and sat the empty glass on the bar as he passed by.
“He’d an odd little man.”
“Yeah, but he’s basically harmless. Socially awkward though. For a minute there, I was worried he was going to pull up a chair and join us.”
“Well, you know I’m always down for a threesome, but that’s not quite what I had in mind.” He flashed a playboy grin my way and I kicked him under the table.
“Oops, sorry. Trick knee. Earned that bad boy in Normandy.” I deadpanned.
“Right. I’ll try to remember that.” He took a long swig of his beer, never breaking eye contact with me.
“Best you do, buckaroo.” I countered, plucking the lemon slice from my drink and popping the whole thing into my mouth. My expression remained one of amusement, despite the bitter bite of the fruit.
Chapter Eleven
Morgan woke me up on purpose at eleven a.m. the next morning.
I say on purpose, because there was no way she was making that much noise without doing it deliberately. I came out to the kitchen to find her slamming cookie sheets into the drawer below the stove.
I hadn’t known that we had any of those around.
“Oh my god... what are you doing?”
“Just a little spring cleaning,” she replied, banging a muffin pan against a cake pan.
“It’s November. Either you’re early or really late.” I sat on a bar stool, realizing this was going to take a while.
She ignored me. For another twenty minutes.
Great. I kind of wished that I could suffer from hangovers so I’d have a reason to pop a few aspirin and go back to bed. For someone who wanted me to get out of bed so badly, Morgan certainly didn’t seem to have a need for me.
“Do you plan on ignoring me much longer?” I asked, trying to spin an unfortunate orange on the tip of my finger like I had skills or something. All I ended up doing was shooting the soon-to-be-damaged fruit across the kitchen, almost popping Morgan in the back of the head.
She turned to glare at me.
“If so, I’m sure I can be just as ignored by some of my clients, and get paid for the time I spend dicking around.”
Morgan turned on the garbage disposal. Well, that was certainly an answer.
I retreated while I still could and took an easy-to-defend position in my office. What the hell was up Morgan’s ass? It had to be my date with Linc, but I didn’t understand that any more than the more unlikely reasons. Wrap your brain around that one.
Hell, it’s not we were dating or anything. We had an understanding. And I sure as hell wasn’t wearing a chastity belt—we’d had conversations about my sex life and she didn’t seem bothered by any of that, so I just didn’t get it.
I might have to rethink the whole sleeping with women thing—they were too complicated. Ah, who was I kidding? That would be like turning down a dream vacation to Italy because it took too long to fly there.
I picked up my cordless and called one of my favorite customers.
“Dang, girl. Did you forget about the time change again?”
I glanced at the clock. “Shit, sorry Vera. At least I called after eight this time.”
Vera chuckled and I could hear the sound of sheets rustling.
“Now you know,” her voice dipped low and sultry “I’d never mind waking up to you, but I’d definitely expect some spooning afterwards. You keep that in mind, Cookie, next time you interrupt my dreams.” A smile split my face in two. I loved Vera, even if she never gave up trying to get in my pants. I knew it was never going to happen and so did she. It was just our thing, I guess.
I laughed and rested my head back on my chair.
“I’m not kidding! I was having a good one too. I was trapped on a deserted island with Ellen and Portia. It was great, one kept my sides a ‘splittin while the other like to walk around in a coconut bikini. Talk about a good time. ”
I reminded myself not to encourage her. If she went into too much more detail, I’d end up hearing about the great sunscreen debacle or how they all feasted on sushi every night. Time to get down to the reason I called—business.
“So, have you had a chance to look over the proposals I sent over?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she replied.
I heard a toilet flush in the background and I laughed silently into my cupped hand.
“And... they’re good. I think you’ve captured exactly what we set out to do when we designed the Sheena.”
“Well don’t give me too much credit. It was kind of a no-brainer,” I volunteered.
“I see your point—for a guitar collection inspired by the 80’s riff queen herself, you could only go in so many directions.” Vera rattled some dishes in the background.
What was up with everyone being so damned noisy today?
“Ego, sufficiently checked.” I shuffled some folders around on my desk until I came up with the one I was looking for. “But give me some credit.., I managed to give you not one, not two, but three classy options. That was not easy when my inspirations were big hair, purple leather and legwarmers.”
“You got me there,” Vera agreed, while her herd of Chihuahua’s barked in the background. “I’m heading into meetings this morning, so I’ll give you a call later this afternoon to let you know what they decide. Oh, gotta run—Princess Buttercup is piddling on the carpet.”
The connection ended abruptly, somewhere between Vera shouting “Should’ve adopted the Shitzu!” and “No, no, no!”
I sighed and returned the phone to
its cradle.
No sooner than I’d set it down, than it rang. The caller I.D said it was Pete calling.
“Hello?” I answered doing my best June Cleaver impersonation.
“Claire?” Pete asked.
God, he wasn’t the brightest.
“Yes, what do you want?” I drummed my fingertips on the desk a bit too hard, leaving crescent shaped indentations in the soft wood.
“I’m fine Claire, thanks for asking.” Pete was such an ass.
I sighed loud enough that he should be able to hear it. “I’m working, what do you need?”
“Fine, whatever.” He said.
I wanted to throat punch him through the phone. As long as we’d been married, he knew how I felt about the word “whatever”—it was the slacker’s equivalent to “fuck you” in my book.
I decided to be the bigger woman and ignore him.
“Two things,” he finally said. “First, can you or Morgan pick Quinn up from school today? I know it’s my turn, but a job interview just came up.”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen—my loser Ex-husband was still just as unemployed as he’d been back when I took that fateful trip to the music convention in Florida, hoping to earn myself of a bonus to keep food in the fridge for Quinn. Is it any wonder I was so adamant about hiding every bit of my vampy inheritance from him?
It was enough that I let him keep the house in the divorce and he paid no child support either. Every penny that Quinn needed, I covered. I earned every damn penny I had, and I’d be staked before I’d let him piss it away.
“Fine. Are you going to get her after the interview, or what?” I waited, knowing what was coming.
“Well... I don’t know how long it will be. I’ll just get her another night,” he said.
And there it was. I sucked in a deep breath and counted to ten. Or at least I tried to. I only made it to three before my mouth opened all on its own. “That’s not how this works, Pete. That’s not how any of this works.”
I figured I had about twenty seconds before he hung up on me, so I wasted no time. “This is your night. It’s on the schedule. You know how important it is to keep to the schedule—Quinn needs a routine and stability. She’s not just some shift at a job you don’t want to go to; you can’t trade out for another day.”
“I know that, Jesus. Cut me some slack, will ya? The interview is up the road, I don’t know how long it will run and I’ll still have to drive all the way home afterwards,” he explained.
“Salisbury? That’s little far north isn’t it?” I didn’t see Pete’s little POS truck making it sixty miles to work each day.
“That’s where the corporate office is, but the job is all over the lower Shore.”
I didn’t want to know the details, not really. He could be applying to work at the Peace Corp, donating his hair to kids with cancer and walking old ladies across streets, and he’d still be a giant jackass, in my opinion.
“Whatever,” I said—see what I did there? Used it back on him. Fucktard. “Did you say you had something else to ask?”
“Yeah... I’m planning on going out of town for a few days and I was hoping you’d let me take Quinn along?” He was being positively polite. He must really be hoping I’d say yes.
“You’re going on vacation? Where? Uh, how long will you be gone?” And how the hell was he planning on paying for that?
“Uh... do you remember my cousin Merle and his wife Tish? Well they’ve organized an Adams family reunion next week in South Carolina. I got thinking that it would be great for Quinn to meet all of her cousins. And the reunion is being held at this awesome campground—they have river tubing and zip lines and horseback riding.”
“Sounds fun,” and dangerous. I wasn’t sure I could handle worrying about Quinn for a whole week.
“Great! Quinn’s going to be so excited when I tell her... So I was planning on leaving Saturday, say around nine o’clock?”
I didn’t remember saying yes. “This Saturday? Kind of short notice, don’t you think?”
“Well, I didn’t know about it until a few weeks ago, and I didn’t think, um, it was going to work out, so... you know.”
Interesting. I think I had an idea of how Pete planned on paying for his holiday.
“So who all is going?” I asked.
“What do you mean? Just me and Quinn.” He was quick to answer, like he knew I’d ask.
Of course I would. So he must also know I’d find out if he was lying. Which told me that while his latest strumpet wasn’t tagging along, but she was probably footing the bill all the same.
“Fine, but can you pick her up any earlier, say like eight? I’ve got a thing...” This time of year, the light would still be pale enough that I would only feel like I was being burned at the stake and not melting from a nuclear apocalypse.
The line was silent for a beat while Pete tried to decide if arguing with me was worth the risk. He hated getting up early but didn’t want to piss me off. “Sure, that’s fine. I’ll see you at eight on Saturday.”
Here’s where I tried to be a better person. “Okay. I’ve gotta go, but good luck.”
“Good luck?” he said.
“Uh, with your interview?”
“Yeah, right. Right.” Pete stuttered.
God, he couldn’t even commit to a ten minute lie. I shouldn’t be surprised—he’d ended our marriage via text message when I was five-hundred miles away in another state.
I ended the call without even saying goodbye.
Let the bastard stew on that for a while and wonder if I’d caught on to his lie.
Chapter Twelve
“I don’t understand what in the hell is going on with you.”
I was just about at the end of my proverbial rope. It’d be one thing if I knew what I’d done to piss her off so badly, but the fact that I had absolutely no clue what our problem was—well, that was driving me bonkers.
Morgan stared at me with such venom in her expression, that I was took a small step back. Complete contempt was etched over her face as precisely as if it had been carved in limestone.
However, her lips betrayed everything. They trembled; Morgan was utterly terrified.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she whimpered. “I think I’m going crazy. When I... when I look at you I just want to do sick, evil things to you. I feel so angry all the time. I need to go.”
She pulled away from me and started for the door.
I grabbed her by the arm easily. “Not so fast,” I said. “Let me help you.”
Knowing it was probably a bad idea, given her current state of emotions, I knocked a few bricks out of my mental shields and prepared to soak up some of what Morgan was putting off. At first it was a trickle, but soon enough I felt the magnitude of her troubled mind.
Holy shit. I was definitely not prepared for that.
Here’s the thing... by watching enough television, anyone with half a brain knows that criminals get caught due to unique identifiers. Sometimes it’s a physical clue like a fingerprint that does them in. Other times, it’s not such much as one clue, but the collection of actions as a whole—sometimes called a signature—that connects the dots all the way back to the criminal.
I was willing to bet that this was going to end up like that.
Not only did I feel the perversion of rage that clung to Morgan like a layer of second hand smoke, but I recognized it, you see. Call it a signature or whatnot, but I had experienced this feeling before and I now understood several things.
First, whoever this rage originated from was one sick fuck. The amount of negativity needed to build this king of hatred—well, I’m pretty sure one doesn’t come back from something like that. Like that saying, once you go black, you never go back. Except in this case I’m not talking about a big ‘ol wanger.
Second, whatever was going on was personal. Someone hated me with a fiery passion, though I didn’t have a clue who that might be. Pete was too lazy to muster up this kind of rage, so th
at left me a candidate list of nobody. It couldn’t be a coincidence that I’d experienced this same brand of darkness on the dock a few nights ago and now Morgan seemed to be under its influence as well.
I had to help Morgan, but I didn’t know how.
Until I was able to figure something out, I needed to send her out of the house and away from me. Fairly confident that she wasn’t a danger to anyone else (only me) and should be fine and feel more like herself once there was some distance between us.
“Stay here,” I said, and I ran off to grab the car keys. I came back and pressed them into her hand along with a fifty. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this, I promise.”
She couldn’t meet my eyes, but instead kept her gaze on the floor.
I pulled her into a quick hug. “Go out for the day. Buy some ice cream, walk along the harbor, go browse one of the art galleries in town— anything that will take your mind off of me for a few hours. When you come back later tonight, I will have some answers.”
I released Morgan and she nodded and backed away quickly. She didn’t even take a minute to put on her shoes. She just grabbed up the first pair of sneakers she came to, which happened to be mine, and ran out into the garage. I heard the mechanical door lift and the car back out seconds later.
I wasted no time getting down to business. In my office, I fired up my ancient desktop and waited for my email program to load. If anyone had an idea of what I could do to help Morgan, it would be my best friend, and guru of-all-things-weird, Cassidy.
I just hoped she was going through one of her sociable phases. Over the last few months, I’d noticed that Cass had a tendency to drop off the radar for a few days at a time. On those rare occasions, she’d been unreachable by phone, email and messenger, but she always popped back up a few days later like everything was fine. I knew better though—because she could never give me a square answer about what she’d been up to. About everything else, Cass was a straight shooter, so by being evasive she’d all but admitted she was hiding something.
But now was not the time to worry about things outside of my little bubble. I had enough to deal with in my own tiny world.