by Lissa Kasey
Alex took it and sat down at the mid-arm machine, threading it as though he’d done it a thousand times. The contrast between machines stark, as the mid-arm he sat at had an elongated neck, and was built into a flat surface with the table to allow more movement space. The free motion foot was already on the machine, feed dogs lowered. Alex wound a bobbin of thread, then set the machine to ready, a familiarity with the machine he hadn’t had with the standard one.
“That’s not normal?” He asked quietly.
“Normal for who? Why does normal matter?” I held out the quilt for him. “We talk about normal way too much for men who are not average in any way.”
Alex grinned. “Your ass is beyond average.”
“Perv,” I teased him.
“But it’s your eyes I love best. And those little freckles across the bridge of your nose.”
Now it was my turn to blush. “Distractions aside, do you want to do this?”
He let out a long breath, adjusted the quilt into the machine, setting the foot on the edge, and stared at it. He ran through a fast outer basting stitch before re-centering the piece in the middle to work on one square at a time. After a minute he began to move, hands guiding the fabric with that same magic he’d displayed at the quilt shop.
“You okay?” I asked perching in a chair beside him, my back to the rest of the room, still keeping one eye on the chair with the cat, and one on Alex.
“Feels like I’ve been doing this forever,” Alex said. I barely heard him over the whir of the machine, his voice small and uncertain. “Natural. But it’s not really mine, yeah?” Alex said. “It’s cheating.”
“She gave you the skill because she knew you had the vision.”
“You don’t know that.” He paused, having finished one of the squares in a mix of textured lines, curves, and designs that made the space unique and intricate.
“She said the others in the shop, and her own kids, didn’t have the skill for it? A bit like art overall, I think. Someone can admire art, even love looking at it, but that doesn’t mean they can create it. You can create it; she simply gave you the muscle memory in which to create the vision in your head.”
He stared down at the piece. “I can sort of see what some of the different patterns would look like before I sew them. Even feel the direction I need to move my hands to get there.”
“Okay. How do you feel about that?”
He frowned at me. “You sound like my therapist.”
I laughed and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. “Does your therapist do that?”
“No, thank God. She’s in her sixties.”
“Does she promise to finger press you later?” I whispered into his ear.
He gasped, and I knew that tiny suggestion would make him hard. “Stop, your friends are here.”
“Do you want to keep working on that, or take a break?” I prompted him, like I was offering more private things than getting him food.
He eyed me, then the quilt. “I think I can finish it pretty fast. I see it all in my head. Then we can head out for an early dinner?”
“Sure. I’ll work on the binding while you do the quilting.”
“Binding?” Again, he had no idea. It was interesting how specific the knowledge given to him by the ghost was.
I waved my hand at him and the machine. “Get to work with you.”
“Wow, slave driver much?” Alex said, going back to his stitching. He kept most of the sashing to simple edge to edge swirls, made little flowers in the cornerstones, and full feathers in the larger squares. His seamless transitions made me stare in awe for another few minutes.
I had to shake my head to snap out of it. “You denied me sex. Therefore, I will make you work.”
“Boy…” Jonah teased from somewhere behind me.
Alex’s cheeks began to pink. “Didn’t deny. Just want to finish… I can feel it. See it.” He continued his stitching, flying through squares while I cut the binding.
Chapter 14
Melissa reappeared a handful of times and I worked hard to ignore her small interactions. Mostly she approached Freya. Very little ruffled Freya, but I could tell she was getting annoyed.
“They won’t tell me anything,” Melissa complained.
“Maybe they don’t know anything,” Julie replied.
“Let them work,” Jonah said. “It’s their job.”
“Shouldn’t they have a ton of people searching? Call for volunteers? Have hundreds of people combing the woods?”
“Real life is not like TV,” Chad pointed out. “I watch a lot of true crime stuff, and rarely do they spend a lot of man hours and people searching for an adult. Kids, yes. Because kids get lost. Adults go missing and it’s usually them escaping something, or them murdered and hidden somewhere.”
“Micah vanished but wasn’t murdered. People looked for him.”
I sucked in air and sat down on my knees beside Alex. He was completely lost in the art now. Halfway through the piece, flowing over stitches flawlessly, a bit like the magic he claimed I had. I glanced around, wondering if the cat was still there.
“His was sort of a special circumstance. Vanished in a state park while surrounded by the people he came with. Even then I think it was Tim who began the search, and called for backup. The park rangers are used to people going missing, so they began to search too. That’s normal for state parks, I think.” Chad seemed a fountain of knowledge.
“We should push for them to search then,” Melissa said.
“Those woods are less than ten acres. It is not a state park,” Freya pointed out. “If anyone goes missing there, the police will find them if they are still there.”
“But they haven’t come back yet,” Melissa said. “How do we even know they are searching?”
“Because we expect the police to do their job?” MaryAnn asked.
“None of you care!” Melissa shouted at them. “She could be dead and none of you care!”
I scooted closer to Alex, careful not to touch the leg he was using to press the pedal, but leaning against his hip. He paused and glanced at me, looking at the group for a moment before his gaze fell behind me. He frowned. Was the cat still there?
“Alex?” I whispered.
“Sit on my other side,” he instructed.
I blinked at him, but crawled around to the opposite side of his chair and wrapped myself around his other leg. He returned to his sewing, occasionally looking up, and toward the machine we had been using. I wondered what he saw. The cat? Perhaps even Byrony’s ghost? He didn’t tell me, and I was okay with that. Instead I focused on watching him stitch and tuning out the others. Even as the argument escalated.
“We do care. That’s why we are trying not to get in their way,” Nicole defended.
“None of us are from here,” Julie pointed. “Except Freya. I wouldn’t know what to look for even if we were out there.”
“How hard is it to look for people?” Melissa demanded.
“If you’re so worried then why aren’t you out there?” Jonah asked. “We all stood on the back porch watching the police for a while. They are in the woods. Not just one or two of them, but many. You saw them same as we did. They asked us all questions. Talked to everyone. If someone hurt Byrony and Joe, they are the ones equipped to help them. And as a black man, I can assure you, there are only a handful of things I trust the police with. Finding a famous white girl and her boyfriend, is one of them.”
Melissa paced. And I could almost feel the anger and tension rolling off of her. Her hands were clenched at her sides and she vibrated with an energy that indicated she wanted to hurt someone.
I suspected it was more self-loathing than anything else. A frustration of being unable to really do anything perhaps. And I tried to understand, if it was Alex missing, I’d be freaking out too. But not on the only people I had for support right now. Alone in another state without Alex? I’d have turned to Freya and Chad and MaryAnn for comfort. Maybe Melissa didn’t feel close
enough to any of them to find something other than rage.
“The detectives on site said they would let us know if they needed anything,” Alex said, glancing up a time or two. His gaze fell back to the other machine often enough that I worried at my lip over what he was seeing. “It’s my understanding, that this early in the process, they are ruling out all possibilities.”
“What other possibility could there be?” Melissa demanded.
“Dozens,” Chad chimed in. “They got lost. They caught a ride with a friend. They wandered onto someone else’s property. That one of them was hurt and the other took them to the hospital. There are dozens of possibilities. Not all of them mean they are missing or hurt. We see stupid drunk kids back home do really dumb things all the time. They get reported missing and someone finds them at a friend of a friend’s house ‘cause they were too drunk to remember how to get home.”
“They weren’t drinking,” Melissa defended.
“Do you know that? You left them. They could have done anything after you left,” MaryAnn pointed out. “Look. I’m worried too. But getting mad at us is not going to bring them back.”
And wasn’t that the truth? How many times after Alex had gone missing, did Lukas scream at me or Sky, or even his fellow cops? He lashed out until they forced him onto paid leave, requiring him to see a therapist before he had any chance of returning to work. He hadn’t gone. Not until Alex came home. Sky said Lukas was going to therapy now, twice a week. It was that or give up his job. He hadn’t really had enough time to experience change from his sessions, but I hoped it helped them both.
Finally, Alex stopped the machine, finished with the stitching. Edge to edge filled with design. He freed the piece from the machine and took it back to the cutting table, taking a wide berth around the machine we had used to sew it together. I frowned at the empty space.
“What’s next?” Alex asked.
“We trim the extra off and bind it.” I looked at the regular machine.
“Maybe we can use a different machine?”
“My regular machine is in our cabin.” I glanced at the clock. It was almost three in the afternoon. “Why don’t we trim it and then take it back to the cabin.” I’d be thrilled to escape the group right now. The anger, frustration, and irritation was growing among them like a tangible thing. They still bantered back and forth, arguing about things they could do, should do, and whether or not the police would let them. Tuning them out was the only way I could breathe through all that aggression and the lingering sense of unease that filled my gut.
“Sure. Then we can head out to dinner.” Alex laid out the quilt, holding up the ruler and rotary blade for me. Getting away from the house sounded like a good idea too. He kept glancing at the unused machine, gaze flicking to meet mine several times as he seemed to be telling me to stay away from it too.
I trimmed the piece with practiced efficiency, threw the waste away, and folded up the quilt, gathering the binding I’d created so I could finish it later. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow morning for the first day of the convention,” I told the group as I followed Alex to the door.
“You won’t be back later?” Julie asked.
Not if I could help it. I needed to be away from them if I was going to last the rest of the trip without screaming at someone.
“Nah,” Alex said. “We’re going to eat out and then have a quiet evening in. I think we could both use the rest.”
Everyone wished us well, except Melissa, who seemed to glare at us on our way out. I admit I didn’t understand her. When Alex vanished, I’d spent a lot of time badgering the police and Lukas for any news. I’d also wasted a ridiculous number of hours watching the camera feeds from my garden, like it had some sort of portal he would magically reappear from. If Alex had gone missing from the woods, I’d be out there, either bothering the cops, or searching myself. Maybe they’d told her they didn’t want her around? If she had bothered them as much as she was bugging us, then perhaps that was the case.
I sighed as we made our way across the lawn. There were police in the woods. I could see them, a handful of who seemed to be moving methodically through the area. So they were searching. Had they found anything yet? Perhaps were looking for evidence?
“The aggression did something to the cat,” Alex said as we reached the cabin door and I unlocked it.
“What?”
“It was changing again. Like morphing into something big, dark, not defined. I think the negative energy did that.” Alex stepped inside and set the folded blanket down on the small table beside my machine. “Let’s not work on this right now. Let’s go out.”
I stared at him, trying to read his expression. It was worried, but not panicked. “You okay?”
“Mostly,” he said. “I guess I sort of get what it feels like to be around someone missing now. I mean, I know she’s dead. I saw her ghost. But I wonder if we should be doing something?”
“Have you seen her ghost again since last night?”
“No. Just the cat.” He shivered. “Whatever it was changing into, it was something I hope to never see again.”
“I wonder if that happens to all ghosts.” Maybe that’s what really transformed those lingering memories into something that terrified people.
“Perhaps those that linger,” Alex said without really committing. Neither of us knew. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “You don’t believe in ghosts,” he reminded me.
“But I felt something, saw something. If not a ghost, then what? Ghosts are associated with bad and scary here in America. That’s not how I was raised.”
“Does that mean the ghosts are different here? Or the perception of them is different here?” Alex asked.
I stared at him as I stepped inside and closed the door, reaching out to wrap my arms around him. “Why are you so smart?”
“Not sure most people would agree with you.”
“Most people are stupid.”
“And you accept right away that what I saw was her ghost.”
“I already told you, I believe you. You are not crazy. Or at least not any crazier than I am.”
He sighed. “Rousing endorsement.”
“Good thing we have each other. Do you want to go home?” I wondered.
“No. Your convention thing starts tomorrow. It’s why we came.”
“True. But weird seems to happen around us.”
He laughed, more self-deprecating than humor. “Weird happens. We need a T-shirt that says that. Or magnets for weird. Or something.” He stepped away from me for a moment to hold out his arms. “Is this appropriate enough dress for BBQ?”
“I love BBQ,” I told him. “Probably my favorite thing about this country is BBQ.”
He nodded. “Who knew? Well Freya knew, but I figured that’s where we would go for dinner. But I have a stop I want us to make first.”
“Okay?” I asked. “And yes, what you’re wearing is fine. If Texans can wear assault rifles anywhere, you can wear a kilt and a Simply Crafty T-shirt to BBQ.”
“Trust me? I have the address, you just need to get us there.”
“All right,” I said after a moment, watching Alex find his wallet and phone. “Hopefully less adventure and more BBQ?”
Alex’s boyish grin eased some of the anxiety I hadn’t realized I’d been soaked in most of the day. “Oh, yes.”
Chapter 15
Before we could leave, we ran into one of the police detectives. He saw us headed to the car as he was coming out of the front of the house and made a beeline for us. My stomach flipped over. He was the sort of man you expected to be a detective, an older white male, with graying hair and a stern expression on his face. His hair was cut only a shade longer than a military buzz cut, so maybe it was growing out and was former Army like Alex? He also had a bump on his nose that meant it had been broken and not set right at some point in his life, though the imperfection fit his face well.
I couldn’t recall if I’d seen him before. Though in the light o
f the afternoon he looked familiar. Had he been the detective who questioned me?
Alex held out his hand, the detective took it and shook it. “Detective Manning. Did you have more questions for us?” Apparently Alex’s memory was working better than mine.
“I did, if you could spare a few minutes. A few things popped up when I pulled up your names.”
Fuck. I sucked in air. Alex wrapped his arm around my waist, but nodded to the detective. “I’ve had an interesting few months.”
“Interesting for sure. Called the NOPD, and there are a still a lot of questions about your disappearance and return,” Detective Manning said.
“For me as well,” Alex agreed. “But I’ve answered everything to the best of my ability.”
“And Mr. Richards,” Detective Manning said, “A bit of history with you as well.”
“Years ago,” I muttered.
“You both mentioned neither of you knew Miss Byrony Cartwright well.” He said.
Alex shook his head. “Never even officially met her. One group meal and then an evening of noise which woke us up. That’s all I know of her or her boyfriend. The evening meal, I admit I was pretty tired from the day’s drive over, so I didn’t pay much attention to her. And all I know of her trek out into the woods is that they were playing with a Ouija board and Freya asked them to take the game to the craft room instead of the dining room. My impression was that she’d encouraged the rest of the group to do a ghost hunt. But you’d have to ask them. Micah and I went to bed.”
“It looks like you’ve had some trouble with her in the past?” The detective looked at me. “We have a social media expert who can give us a lot more information nowadays than a simple background check. There was some bad blood between you two?”
“Years ago. She stole some costume designs from me. It’s a bit like stealing a painting and putting your own name on it. Bad form,” I said. “I don’t do design like that anymore. Got tired of people stealing from me and copying my ideas.”
“Her friend Melissa seemed to think you were pretty angry about it.”