I had one line: Vitamin A is good for my eyes. I walked onto the stage, looked at the spotlight, and froze.
You see that once in a while on sitcoms, so I probed for more detail to ensure I hadn’t just usurped a small piece of popular culture as my own past. But, no. The kids on TV are wearing elaborate costumes and playing to big audiences. I’d been paraded out in front of a handful of bored parents with a hand-drawn carrot taped to the front of my T-shirt. And I didn’t do anything melodramatic like cry or wet my pants or make a big scene. The teacher prompted me by saying my line, I repeated it clumsily, and then the banana took the stage and announced its potassium.
Nailed it.
I blinked away the sunspots, strode out onto our salty concrete stoop in my socks, and called out, “Bly!”
Halfway down the walk, he turned around and narrowed his eyes. I held up the travel mug, and he jogged back to the house. As he took the coffee from me, a car alarm went off. Luckily the handoff had already transpired. I was so startled, a fraction of a second sooner and we’d both be wearing it.
“Let me lead,” he muttered, and I gave him a small nod. He reached for me with surprising tenderness, cupped the back of my head, and pulled me in for a kiss. He was just about Jacob’s stature, but he didn’t kiss like Jacob. No tongue. And no goatee. But it was the less obvious details that really stood out.
Jacob and I did our kissing in private. Not because we were embarrassed, and not because we thought we were doing anything subversive. But with our jobs being what they were, and with him still getting recognized now and then from his various appearances on the news, it just felt prudent to keep our private life private. And even if we were out among friends—which we did so little, I could probably count the times on one hand—public displays of affection felt so unfamiliar, we didn’t normally indulge in anything more than a glancing kiss.
Bly held himself differently than Jacob did. When Jacob pulled me close, it was as if we tried to fit together with our whole bodies. With Bly, his posture felt stiff, and the only points of contact were from the shoulders up. Even with a cup of coffee between us, Jacob would’ve managed to mash together a lot more than just our faces.
And finally, Bly smelled different. Not superficially, like aftershave or hair product (he didn’t use either one) but something much deeper than that. Maybe it’s body chemistry, maybe it’s diet, or maybe it’s pheromones. The guy whose lips were working mine didn’t smell anything like my man.
I guess that was a good thing.
Bly ended the kiss, then pulled me even closer and put his mouth to my ear. If someone saw us—and given the car alarm still blaring away in the background, at least a few of the neighbors were looking out the window by now—they’d think he was whispering a sweet nothing in my ear. But what he said was, “Think up the backstory on why you call me by my last name, and text it to me.”
Holy hell. I nodded.
He slid me out to arm’s length, gave my cheek a fond caress, and in all seriousness, said, “Bye, hon. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Shit…the guys back at the Fifth would have a freakin’ field day with that. Hell, even Jacob would snigger.
As Bly made his way to the silver Lexus with the rainbow sticker, I wondered vaguely when he’d moved it to the street. Probably while the crew was switching our bedrooms around. I marveled at the foresight. And then I wondered how I ever could’ve thought I was skilled at lying, when I was such a rank amateur, it wasn’t even funny.
He drove away, and the car alarm conveniently died—an alarm that was likely not even connected to an actual car, but a small setup the FPMP hid in an electrical panel on a telephone pole. Across the street, curtains moved. I realized my socks were starting to stick to the frozen concrete and my feet were throbbing with cold, and retreated to the safety of the unfamiliar house.
It took me three more cups of coffee, but eventually I thought up a story about being bullied by a kid at school named Jack. I thought it was pretty creative, since I was never actually bullied until I checked into Camp Hell. After fourth grade, I was a year older than my classmates, and from sixth grade on, it was two. So if anyone was looking to pick a fight, they’d go find a less daunting target.
I scowled open my phone and said, “Tell Bly that ever since Jack Wang dunked my head in the toilet on a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry, I’ve had an aversion to the name.” The text whooshed away. He replied a few seconds later with a thumbs-up.
One fire doused. A dozen more smoldering somewhere under the floorboards just waiting to singe my credibility.
I stared at the emoji for a few seconds, then swiped over to my contact list. Jacob and I weren’t in the habit of saying anything on our phones we’d need to deny in court, but day-to-day details were fair game. I unblocked his number, tapped his name and found the last thing he’d sent me.
I’ve got it.
That was his reply to Want me to pick up dinner?
Mundane message. Totally utilitarian. But somehow, the words I’ve got it were so very Jacob, they left me feeling all sappy. My thumb itched to tap out some kind of message to him, even as little as a stupid emoji. Something to let him know I was thinking of him. That I still existed.
It wasn’t as if we’d never spent the night apart before. He’d taken a couple of trips to handle family business in Wisconsin while I was too embroiled in a murder investigation to leave. We were still in the same city, I reminded myself. In fact, I could hop in a cab and accost him on his way to the office, if I had a mind to. The I’ve got it was three days old—we didn’t really text each other as much as normal couples did. Mainly utilitarian things. It shouldn’t be any big adjustment to be prohibited from contacting him.
All of that might be true, but none of it mattered.
When I re-blocked his number, it felt like I was blocking out the only good thing in my life.
8
Having a completely different house was difficult enough. Add a completely different morning routine to that, and it was probably for the best that I woke up way too early. I dumped the used coffee grounds down the garbage disposal, then went upstairs to attempt to emulate the hair regimen the FPMP stylist had shown me.
The movers hadn’t switched our bathrooms around, just the bedrooms, so I headed up to the big, cushy third-floor en suite. The cannery might be big, but its bathrooms were afterthoughts decorated in weird eighties pastel colors, and the one by our bedroom was just a toilet and sink. This bathroom had not only a shower, but a bathtub too—a tub with Jacuzzi jets, no less. It was easily big enough to fit both Jacob and me. But I wasn’t going to be thinking about that. I turned my attention to my hair.
The long stubble on my face was getting soft, and I didn’t much mind it, other than the weird flecks of red and gray lurking among the black. I smoothed on some moisturizer to quell the itchiness, then moved on to the rest of the bottles and jars. The stylists had set me up with a ridiculous amount of stuff; a lot went into making my hair look like I hadn’t washed it in a week. I worked through the pomades and texturizers, layering them like I’d been taught. Sticky, but at least they smelled good. They’d leave me with some serious hat head later. I supposed that was the point, making me look less like an ex-PsyCop and more like a stay-at-home douchebag.
The pomade was kind of citrusy and the texturizer was scented with coconut. Together, they smelled like pie. Key lime pie with toasted coconut baked onto the meringue.
If I wanted pie, I’d have to get it while Bly wasn’t around—but since I was flying solo for part of the day, that wouldn’t be a problem. I was always hearing about bookstores selling everything but books. Maybe the one I was assigned to sold dessert. I grabbed a pair of ridiculous jeans from the master closet and started hashing out my game plan to score some pie. I was sniffing my fingers wistfully, walking past the weight bench, when it hit me: decomp.
The thought of eating was suddenly a whole lot less appealing.
; What if I’d missed something, back when Carl and I salted the place? Ghosts are weird. Some are as persistent as a coffee stain, while others only show up on their own mysterious timetables. I’d never smelled a spirit before—and supposedly my brain was highly visual—but I wouldn’t exactly rule out the possibility of a stinky ghost, either. Especially a sad old lady who was upset it took someone nearly a month to wonder why they hadn’t heard from her.
I planted my feet, took a few cautious breaths, closed my eyes, and visualized a blob of white light, up there somewhere in the sky. I teased out a filament of power, the tiniest thread, and coaxed it down. When it pulled in through my crown chakra, I felt the me that I was…expand. Or grow heavy. Or maybe solidify.
Hard to put into words. But I did feel something.
I focused hard, really took my time, and filled up on the white light until I started worrying too much about what I might see when I finally opened my eyes.
Nothing.
I did a circuit of the top floor just to be sure, then checked the rest of the house too, even the utility room and the empty garage. All clear—no one home but us douchebags. And even more frustrating, once I circled back upstairs, that elusive whiff of decomp was gone.
By the time I crammed myself into the skinny jeans, the used bookstore was open, and I was eager to get out of the house where someone had recently died.
Generally, I’m not much of a shopper. Shopping creates clutter, and clutter makes me anxious. But having access to the stores in Boystown without playing the “where can we park” game wasn’t exactly a burden.
The stores were patchy, some new and upscale, some old and weird. The used bookstore fell into the second category. While the consignment store next to it had a window display that Macy’s would envy, Twice Told Tales had stacks of disintegrating books in the window, and green shag carpeting older than me. It smelled, too—not like decomp, but mothballs, crumbling paper, and a very complex dust.
Needless to say, there was no pie.
As I stood inside the door, blinking, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dimness and the clutter, a bald, bearded, middle-aged white guy behind the counter said, “No bags allowed.”
I blinked a few more times and said, “I’m not carrying a bag.”
He glared at me as if that detail was inconsequential. “Just letting you know the store policy. No bags.”
Since I was now a stay-at-home douchebag, I allowed myself to indulge in a public eye-roll. It felt pretty good. Maybe undercover work wasn’t as bad as I thought. At least not while I was alone, without attempting any sort of meaningful conversation.
The wooden shelving stretched floor to ceiling, and even I couldn’t reach the top shelf, but there was a rolling ladder available for souls more intrepid than me. I wandered through the shop, watching, listening, shoring up my defenses in case any deceased prior owners of the merchandise were inordinately attached to their books. But no. The place was dusty and cramped and overfull…but it was clean—no ghosts.
Unfortunately, Hale wasn’t there, either.
Hopefully, it wasn’t uncommon to browse a bookstore for a really extended period of time. Because as I wandered up and down the aisles, a few more customers came in, but none of them were Hale. Eventually, I found myself in the paperback section, where a few of the authors on the spines looked familiar. Jacob tends to have one or two books going at all times. I’m not sure how much of the plot he actually remembers—they’re all the same, essentially—but every now and then he’d slog his way through to the end, and then a slight variation on the theme would appear on the nightstand. I was shopping for him, I realized. Which was ridiculous. Not only was I fake-married to Bly now, but I had no idea which ones Jacob had already read.
I was considering one with a dramatic haunted-looking house on the cover anyway when a new customer arrived. I might have spaced out on their arrival, which would suck, since the whole reason I was there was to stake out the customers. But the bald guy at the counter helpfully made sure I couldn’t miss it. “Ma’am? Ma’am! No bags allowed. Hello, yes, I’m talking to you. No bags.”
“This is my purse,” a woman replied, mildly baffled.
“Purse, satchel, tote, backpack, valise…guess what they all have in common? That’s right, they’re bags. And they’re not allowed in the stacks.”
I rounded the endcap. The recipient of the verbal tirade was a Caucasian woman around my age, with an expensive-looking down jacket, tall boots, and big woolly mittens. Her bag looked just as pricy as the rest of her outfit. She’d spent at least as much time on her hair that morning as I had. In fact, everything about her screamed money. And she was fit in the way that suggested she probably spent a good portion of that money on a personal trainer.
My initial impulse was to march up to the counter and tell the guy to relax. She obviously didn’t need to shoplift a fifty-cent paperback. But then I realized the impulse to put a complete stranger in his place just because he was annoying was not actually a part of my personality I’d been born with. It was something I’d picked up as a patrol officer, back when I first got out of the Police Academy. And also, I was currently standing as if I was wearing a baton and a bulletproof vest. I lost the aggressive stance and let my shoulders slump.
“What’s the deal?” I said—because the guy had rubbed me so wrong, I couldn’t just let it slide. “You got some kind of vendetta against bags?”
“Statistics show that one in every ten people is a shoplifter.” Oh, how I loved statistics. Especially ones that contained ratios. “I refuse to let thieves run my store into the ground.”
I glanced pointedly at the wealthy woman, then back at the clerk.
“Store policy applies to everyone,” he said. “If you don’t like it, feel free to take your business elsewhere.”
The woman ignored him and turned to me. “Didn’t you just buy the townhouse around the corner from here?”
“I…did.”
“Then we’re neighbors! I live right across the street from you.” Apparently Bly wasn’t kidding about people’s new-neighbor curiosity. She thrust her big mitten toward me. “Terri-Anne Chazen.”
“Victor Baine. That’s spelled with an i. My last name, I mean. Obviously, there’s an i in Victor, too.” I pumped the mitten up and down and wondered if I could possibly sound any weirder.
“Are you busy?” she asked brightly. “I’d love to treat you to a coffee and welcome you to the neighborhood.”
I was about to try and make “Sorry, no, I’m busy pretending to stare at used paperbacks” sound like a plausible refusal, when I glimpsed a hunched figure with a walking stick ducking into a cafe across the street—and he was wearing a cape. Well, more like an overcoat with a cape thing around the shoulders, but still…definitely my guy. “Sure. I could use a coffee right about now.” Plus, I was eager enough to leave the dusty, musty bookstore with its paranoid proprietor behind.
The boutiquey coffee house across the way called See You Latte looked warm and cheerful in the February gloom. A little cute for my liking, but brightly-lit and inviting. No one yelled at us to leave our bags at the counter, either. Plus, there was pie. Not key lime with toasted coconut on top, but a piece of coconut cream paired with a piece of lemon meringue would be close enough.
My target was engrossed in conversation with another old man in the corner, so I grabbed a table where I could keep an eye on the door in case he tried to get away. Terri-Anne ordered a fruit cup and a skinny latte, and did her best not to drool on my pie. She gestured toward my wedding band as I alternated bites of each. “So—you’re married.”
I parroted back the cover story the tradecraft folks had drilled into my head. “Jack and I tied the knot when the state changed its stance on the domestic partnership B.S. and acknowledged a marriage was a marriage.” I noted that she’d been hiding a massive rock under her mitten, stacked over an equally showy wedding band. “You?”
“It’ll be fifteen years in March. And o
ur daughter Madison is starting high school next year.”
There was an awkward pause in which I realized I was expected to say, It couldn’t possibly have been that long—you must have been a child bride. But before I could dredge up the expected compliment, someone else strolled over, walking stick thumping, and joined the conversation.
“Terri-Anne,” he said coolly.
“Sylvester.” Her tone was commendably neutral, but I didn’t need to be a talented empath to pick up the animosity seething between them.
He turned to me. “And you are?”
“Victor.” Don’t spell your last name. “I work from home.”
Smooth. Real smooth.
“Delighted.” He offered me a wrinkled hand with the aplomb of a prince. We shook. I hoped I wasn’t shaking hands like a cop.
I asked, “You live nearby?”
“Indeed. Right on the other side of your south wall.” His eyes twinkled as if he hoped the sound of Bly and me banging would give him a few jollies through the plasterboard. I figured I should try to ease him into a familiarity with the two of us by inviting him to do something normal. In other words, something I never did in real life.
“We should have dinner,” I said. Yep. Sounded normal. “Sometime soon. My husband would love to meet you.”
Terri-Anne piped in. “What a great idea! My husband would love to meet you and Jack, too!”
“Oh, right. I meant, uh…we’d have to do that separately. Our table only has so many seats.”
She said, “I wouldn’t dream of letting you host a meal so soon after you’ve moved. I’m sure everything’s still in chaos. We’ll have it at my place.”
“I really couldn’t trouble you,” I backpedaled.
“It’s no bother. I love to cook. And I love any excuse to put the leaf in the dining room table.”
“It’s just that…Jack…is a really picky eater.”
Murder House Page 5