by Julie Kenner
Was it any wonder I was in a groggy haze when Marybeth Allen, our association president, had called to rope me into the committee chair position?
Seriously, I should learn not to answer the phone.
I didn’t want to dump all my Easter purchases out onto the dusty shed floor, so I grabbed one of the paper lawn bags Stuart keeps for clippings and transferred the contents of the tub into the sack. Tomorrow I could transfer everything back to the tub—after a good dosing with laundry soap, bleach, and Lysol.
Next, I headed toward the dinosaur and transferred the wiggling, jiggling, apparently very pissed-off limbs into the tub. The fingers were the worst. Like maggots, they inched along the bottom, glowing slightly in the dim light.
I slammed the lid on tight, then carried the tub back to the shed. Despite holding all the parts to build a complete zombie, the tub wasn’t heavy. Zombies are odd creatures—no personality, no blood, next to no weight, and unimaginably strong.
The strong part of the equation could be rather unnerving. The featherweight characteristic, however, came in quite handy.
I slid the tub back into the shed, planning to move it to my car after Stuart left for the office. Then I’d take it to Father Ben at the cathedral. Father, I’m sure, would be thrilled to know that among his many exciting duties as my alimentatore , the disposal of zombie parts ranked high.
He’d already engaged in plenty of demon disposal, so this new addition to his Forza résumé shouldn’t be too much of a burden. And, hey, it was better than me dealing with it.
Speaking of demon disposal, I grabbed a tarp from one of the pegs right inside the shed door. Meant to cover piles of dirt during landscaping, I’d recently discovered that they make great covers for dead demons. That, frankly, is the key to running an efficient household—finding multiple uses for everyday items.
I headed around the shed, tarp in hand, planning to toss a cover over my dead demon. Unfortunately, I stumbled across a little flaw in that plan: I couldn’t cover the demon with the tarp, primarily because there was no demon to cover.
Instead, I was looking at a big, empty space. A space where—less than an hour ago—I’d crammed a dead demon. Now there was nothing.
And I had no idea where he’d gone.
Four
By the time breakfast rolled around, I realized who must have moved my demon: Eddie.
That made perfect sense, of course. Unless he’d been sleepwalking, he had to realize what I’d been doing outside before Stuart’s untimely interruption. And Eddie wasn’t a stupid man; surely he’d picked up on the fact that I hadn’t exactly been free to clean up my own mess.
My only question now was where had he hidden the body.
When I’d first started hunting, demon disposal wasn’t an issue. Hunters were trained to exterminate the beasts, not clean up the mess left behind. We’d do our part, then call in a disposal team, a specially trained arm of Forza dedicated to making the empty demon shells disappear. Much like Roto-Rooter, one call did it all.
Because there were no disposal teams operating in California—much less San Diablo—I was pretty much on my own. Which meant that as soon as I retrieved the body Eddie had hidden, I needed to get it to Father Ben to hide. Either that or to David to work his high school chemistry magic on it—the details of which I hadn’t yet brought myself to ask about.
First, though, I had to feed my tiny little eating machine. I’d been awakened at five forty-five (who needs sleep, really?) by a rousing chorus of “Mommy-mom! Mommy-mom! Mommy, Mommy, Mom,” sung more or less to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” Despite the little devil standing right at the side of our bed, Stuart managed to sleep through the concert. I, however, came immediately awake.
Now, my tiny tenor was perched precariously on his haunches at his place at the table, his high chair tucked forlornly in the corner next to a box full of empty egg cartons that I’d been collecting for months from all our neighbors.
I cast a look of despair toward the boxes. The neighborhood party was in exactly one week, and I hadn’t exactly been stuffing Easter eggs with lightning speed. On the upside, Laura was coming over today to help with that very thing. On the downside, I now had more on my daily plate than preparations for a festival populated with—at a minimum—one hundred and twenty children and their various adult counterparts.
While I was feeling sorry for myself, Timmy was standing on his chair, one knee about to slide onto the table. He had his eye on the pepper shaker, and if he got there, the whole family would regret it.
“Bottom in your chair, young man,” I said, moving to rescue the salt and pepper before heading back to the pantry. I opened the door—noting right away that there was no dead demon sprawled on the floor—then tried to divine something both delicious and nutritious to plunk in front of the kid for breakfast. Not managing that, I went the merely delicious route.
“Trix or Frosted Flakes,” I said, holding up the only two cereal boxes I’d found in our mostly bare cupboard. I added yet another trip to the grocery store to my daily to-do list, right under “investigate Sword of Caelum,” “find missing demon,” and “dispose of body parts.”
Honestly, I needed to break down and buy an organizer.
At the table, Timmy slid out of his chair and trotted to the refrigerator. He grabbed the handle on the freezer side and tugged, little arms straining. When the door finally popped open, he stepped back, eyes as wide as if he’d just discovered nirvana.
Too late, I realized what he was looking at.
I lunged to shut the door even as my toddler lunged to grab something. And despite all my Hunter training, he was faster. What can I say? A toddler on a mission for chocolate is not a creature to be toyed with.
He emerged from the freezer victorious, a packet of M&Ms in his hand and a huge grin on his face. I’m a sucker for frozen chocolate, and apparently the little devil had spied my secret stash.
“Chocolate!” he said victoriously, clutching the bag as he marched back to the table. “Mine!”
I intercepted, scooping the kid up in one arm. “Whoa there, little guy. That’s not a Mommy-approved breakfast product.”
“Nooooooooooooooooooooo!” he wailed. “My candy! Mommy, I. Want. My. Candy!”
“I know you do, mister. But Mommy wants you to grow up healthy, okay?” Not that sugared cereal was that much better than M&Ms, but we all have our lines in the sand.
“No.” His little forehead furrowed, and he frowned, putting on his best pout. The one that, in his almost three years of life, he’d learned worked best on Mommy. “No, no, no.”
Not today, buddy.
“Sorry, kid. Between the two of us, I need it more.”
He clutched the package tighter and turned his back to me.
“Timmy . . . What’s the rule about arguing?”
He appeared to consider that one, and then he peered over his shoulder, his grin wide and toothy and positively adorable.
What can I say? The kid’s gonna grow up to be a people pleaser.
“Please,” he begged, drawing the word out and infusing it with a million kilowatts of whine. “Please, please, please?” His little hand went to his chest, rubbing the way he’d seen on Signing Times. That’s what I get for plunking him down in front of educational programming: begging in two languages. If I let this go on much longer, I’d probably get a rousing por favor thrown into the mix, courtesy of Dora the Explorer.
“Ain’t happening, kiddo,” I said. “Cereal or toast. Your call.”
He harrumphed—a habit he’d picked up recently, and for which I blamed Eddie—then wiggled in his chair, determinedly silent.
“Okay,” I said, smiling as if I weren’t at all irritated and liked nothing better than to negotiate breakfast in the morning. “I guess you’re not eating today. Maybe lunch.”
I moved quickly to snatch the candy packet, then turned and headed toward the pantry. One glance over my shoulder confirmed that he’d turned, too, and was eyeing
me. Did I mean it? Would I really put up his cereal? Would the mean mommy really let the little boy starve?
Apparently she would, because I opened the pantry door and stepped inside. And no sooner had I done that than I heard shouts of “Tiger! Tiger! Mommmmmmy! I want Tiger!” Because I speak fluent toddler, I shoved the Trix back onto the shelf and poured him a bowl of Frosted Flakes.
“Milk on the cereal?”
That question earned me an enthusiastic thumbs-down, and so I poured his morning milk into a glass and let him eat his cereal with his fingers, picking out each flake and crunching it noisily before finally swallowing when there was no crunch left.
While my little one chowed down, I stuck my head in the garage, half-expecting to find my late-night visitor propped up on the hood of Stuart’s car.
Nothing. And just to be certain, I poked among the garage sale boxes that littered my old parking space, but all I found was bags of outgrown clothes; baby toys Tim had outgrown; boxes of VHS tapes we’d replaced with DVDs; two sets of dishes, each missing at least one part of a place setting; and boxes of other assorted family junk that I hoped would one day become some other poor sucker’s family treasure.
By the time I came back into the kitchen, Allie had stumbled downstairs, looking about as bedraggled as I felt. She grunted something that I interpreted as a greeting, then opened the door to the refrigerator and shoved her head inside. I eyed the back of her head suspiciously. “You didn’t go back outside last night, did you? Clean up the mess we left?”
She emerged with a strawberry yogurt in one hand and a string cheese in the other, her face an expression of utter disgust. “Eww! No, thank you.”
Considering the condition of her bathtub and closet floor, the idea that she’d rushed to clean up probably was a bit optimistic.
“Had to make sure,” I said, moving to the table to see how my youngest was getting on.
“Wait, wait,” Allie called, kicking the refrigerator shut before trotting after me. The disgust on her face had evaporated, replaced by wide-eyed interest. “Do you mean they’re missing?”
“Just the intact one. The other’s now in a big plastic tub.”
“But . . . but . . . where did it go?”
“I wish I knew.” I also realized I hadn’t told David about this newest twist in my demon drama.
“What’s wrong?” Allie asked, and I realized I was frowning.
“Nothing,” I said automatically. Then I decided that wasn’t fair. “I called David last night to tell him about our adventure, and he hasn’t called back.”
“Oh.” She took a bite of yogurt. “Are you worried?”
“No,” I lied. “Of course not. He probably just hasn’t checked his voice mail this morning.”
“You don’t think our visitor had a friend, do you?” she asked, now looking about as concerned as I felt.
The twist of worry in my stomach grew into a full-fledged Gordian knot and I pulled out my cell phone. Two rings, and I was dumped into voice mail. Again. “Dammit.”
“Do you think . . . ?” She dragged her teeth on her lower lip, her face pinched.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.” Then, “But I’ll run by his apartment real quick anyway. Just to update him.”
“Not like you’re worried,” she said. “You’re just bringing him up to speed. Right?”
“Absolutely.”
She nodded, looking relieved that I was doing something. From my perspective, all I knew was that if something had happened to David, I needed to know about it. I needed to try to help. I needed to do something.
“What do I say to Stuart?” she asked, even as she tugged my laptop off the breakfast bar where I’d taken to keeping it, and hauled it to the breakfast table. I winced even though I knew in my heart she wouldn’t drop it. The thing was still shiny and new, having come into my life only in the last thirty days. Allie had convinced me I needed the thing because sooner or later one of us would be so overwhelmed by the fascinating tidbits of demonic research we were stumbling across in cyberspace that we’d accidentally leave Stuart’s computer on an incriminating page.
The logic, of course, was faulty, since there was no “we.” I’m the complete opposite of a computer geek, and I still believe that Google is a fabulous toddler-age toy I’ve yet to find in the board game section at Target. In other words, I was never the one engaging in the research, and Allie was crafty enough to know how to delete histories and brownies and cookies or whatever, and all those other electronic clues.
Bottom line: My kid wanted a laptop to more-or-less call her own. And I’d indulged her.
And since she taught me how to use e-mail, I’ll have to admit it doesn’t suck.
“Mom! Hello? Quit worrying I’m going to drop it and answer the question. What do you want me to tell Stuart?”
I grimaced, because my daughter was becoming wiser with each passing day. And also because it really was a darn good question. I ran my fingers through my hair, considering even as I pulled my unwashed hair back into a ponytail with an old newspaper rubberband I saw lying on the counter. “Milk run,” I said. It was the best that I could think of.
I grabbed my keys and my purse and headed for the door. I was stepping onto the front porch, my hand on the knob to pull it closed, when Allie pounded into the entrance hall.
“He answered! Just now. No idea why he didn’t call, but he sent an e-mail.”
Relief undulated through me, and I held on to the doorjamb, feeling a mixture of elation and nausea. “What did the message say?”
“He had to go to L.A., but he’ll be back soon and he’ll call you as soon as he can. And he said if you need backup, to call him. And to be safe. And,” she added, with a bright smile, “he said to give me a kiss from him.”
“That part’s easy enough.” I pressed a soft kiss to her cheek. “From your daddy.”
“I’m glad he’s not dead,” she said, so matter-of-factly it made me cringe, as I remembered how common death was in my youth. We mourned, yes. But we never slowed down.
I shook off the melancholy. Allie was a long way from that life. A very long way if I had anything to say about it. Which, fortunately, I did.
“What do you think he’s doing in Los Angeles?” she asked, as we moved back into the kitchen.
“No idea,” I said, forcing my voice to sound unconcerned and uninterested. In truth, I was as curious as she was. He’d only come back into town yesterday. Why turn around so quickly and drive all the way down to L.A.? “Now that we know he’s safe, I’m less concerned about his specific whereabouts than I am about a certain MIA demon.”
“No kidding.” She headed for the big picture window, presumably to make sure an army of demons wasn’t about to come crashing through. She lifted her thumb to her mouth and began chewing on her cuticle. “So where do you think it could be?”
“My money’s on Eddie.”
“For what?” Stuart asked, dragging his fingers through his hair as he strode into the kitchen. He hooked his arm around my waist, pulled me close, and planted a kiss on my cheek. I was so distracted I barely noticed.
“Kate?” he repeated, as he released me and headed for the coffee maker. “Your money’s on Eddie for what?”
“I—oh—you know. That he’ll make some colorful joke in front of the kids at the festival next weekend, and all the neighborhood moms will shun me.”
“Ah, is that all?” he said casually. “I thought maybe you were wondering where he hid the body.”
Allie clapped her hand over her mouth in time to muffle a squeak, and I spilled the cup of coffee that Stuart passed to me.
“Ha-ha,” I said, forcing a bit of mirth into my voice. “What a thing to say.”
He grinned, clearly pleased with himself. “You’re all so jumpy I figured murder and mayhem must be involved.”
“Always is,” said Eddie, shuffling into the kitchen and taking the seat across from Timmy, who immediately passed him a Frosted Flake. “So who died
?” He looked at me. “That we don’t already know about, I mean.”
“We were just saying that if anyone knew where to hide a body it would be you,” Stuart said, while I glared daggers at Eddie. “Former cop and all.”
“Eh?”
“Your previous profession,” Stuart said, pulling out the story I’d laid on him when I’d first brought Eddie home.
Eddie turned to me, peering at me over half-moon glasses. “He knows about that?”
“That you were a cop, Gramps,” I said, as I grabbed the milk from the fridge and moved to fill up the cup of my toddler, who was now pounding his empty cup on the table and shouting repeatedly for “Mommy, milk! Mommy, milk!”
“A cop,” he said with a snort. “I’ve watched those reality shows. They think they go after some bad characters? They ain’t seen nothing ’til they’ve been trapped in a mausoleum with fifteen—”
“Waffles?” Allie blurted, holding up a box of Eggos she’d yanked from the freezer. I considered kissing her on the spot, then decided to take the more subtle approach and raise her allowance, applying it retroactively, all the way back to infancy.
“My head is swimming,” said Stuart, shooting one final glance toward Eddie, and then shaking his head as if he’d just set aside a Sudoku puzzle that he was never going to work through. “So what fabulous plans do you have for this beautiful Saturday while I’m stuck in my office and Allie is under house arrest?”
He shot Allie a stern look as he spoke, and she held up her hands, each holding a waffle. “I didn’t forget. Honest.”
“Laura and Mindy are coming over, and the four of us girls are stuffing Easter eggs,” I said, as Timmy dumped the dregs of his Frosted Flakes on the floor. “And cleaning.”
“Great,” Allie muttered behind me. “Grounded I can handle. Cleaning and grounded? Not so much.”
“What’d the kid do?” Eddie asked. “Sneak out and get herself caught up in the middle of some bad-ass rumble?”