“Oh that’s comforting.”
“Hey, you asked.”
It was one thing knowing LaRue also seduced men, it was another having my boyfriend used as an example. I toyed with my beer thinking of a way to direct the conversation elsewhere when I realized the bottle was half empty. I nearly got off the couch before my conscious mind stopped the rest of me from automatically grabbing a third. I didn’t want to drink too much if we were headed out.
“Tell me, this bit of fluff, whoever he is, when you and LaRue are done with him, would he still be breathing?”
She took a drink and made a popping noise when the bottle came out of her mouth. “Maybe not.”
“Right, so that’s out. Give me another idea?”
“Male strip club?”
“In Osceola? Seriously?” I tilted the bottle back. Discretion be damned.
“Hmm, fair point. I could get Douglas to dance for us.”
And I spit beer all over her, the couch, and my own face.
“What?” she asked on her way to the kitchen for a paper towel.
“Douglas? Dance naked? Never happen.” I shook my head and blotted up the mess on my T-shirt.
“He’ll do whatever I ask,” she said simply, but her smile was too mercenary for my taste.
“He’s Douglas,” I practically shouted at her. “We went to boot camp together. We learned to clean M16s in the same mud. We fought together. I do not want to see him try to dance naked.”
“Calvin?” she asked.
I glared at her in reply.
“Oh like you’ve never thought about it.”
I gave her a second glare on my way to throw out the paper towels.
“Okay, what does that leave us?”
“Flanagan’s.”
“Of course, I should have suggested it in the first place.” And her smile was as innocent as a lamb.
Flanagan’s meant to be Irish, what with the Guinness on the menu and the occasional live Celtic music, but Osceola didn’t have much of an Irish population, so it was just the local pub. Jo flirted shamelessly with the bartender all night. The poor sop kept giving her beers she couldn’t drink. She slipped each one to me with a warm smile for him. By the time we parted ways, magic told me bartender boy would wake up a pint or two low the next morning. LaRue might be worried she needed someone to love, but Jo was handling things okay. A few months back she’d been fed off of by a succubus. The succ used Jo’s memories of sex to keep her trapped in a hotel room. If she was up to flirting, her recovery was going pretty well.
The next morning, I took a long shower, debating what to wear when I met Ted’s dad. I almost picked a church dress, but decided not to. Ted liked me in jeans just fine, his dad probably would, too. Jo’s impromptu visit had pushed back the kitten’s arrival until at least sunset, meaning I had time for makeup. Only tiny bit though, eye-shadow in an attempt to make my eyes more blue than gray and a hint of lipstick. My hair got done, too, using the clear goop Ted left behind in my bathroom. I probably wasn’t using it right, but it gave me a few more curls than the usual dark waves. My shirt came from a shopping trip with Jo, the soft fabric covered the silver bands in my arm, and the delicate china blue color made me look feminine. I looked casual, but good. Ted’s dad wasn’t going to know what hit him.
4
“Good morning.” I walked into Ted’s living room in a cheerful good mood. It stopped when I saw his face. “Another bad night?”
“Not after I turned the ringer off on the phone and silenced my cell phone.” He offered me a quick kiss. Instead, I kissed him deeply, cradling his neck with my hand, making the moment more as I used magic to feel the inside of his head. The images came through crystal clear. The phone calls started after I left and kept up until he stopped them. The nightmares started after that.
“Should I be worried that you put on more makeup for Dad than you do for me?” he teased when I stopped peaking inside his head.
“Nope. I’m just trying to make a good impression, sort of like you are.” Ted wore one of his nicer button-down shirts, freshly ironed and smelling of starch. His dark jeans were new, too. Like all of his jeans, they didn’t come from around here, not from the mall two towns over or the men’s shop downtown. They had to come from LA or at least, someplace where a designer knew how to cut the fabric just right and paying more than a hundred dollars for a pair of jeans was normal. It wasn’t normal here, but I loved the way it worked out.
“Guilty as charged,” he admitted. “Sure you want to do this?”
“Positive.”
“You know you’re going to have to hear stories about me? There’s like a million of them.”
“Darn, I was hoping for a billion.”
“Uh-huh, remind me not save you when he starts the little league games play-by-play.”
I laughed and followed him out to the garage. Ted’s boxy gray Subaru took up less than half the space. It wasn’t very impressive but as we wound our way through highways and into the city, I was grateful for its predicable safety. Eventually, we stopped in front of a 1950s rambler, a concrete house painted a cheerful yellow. Nothing moved on the wide stone porch, where bright green ferns crowded the space. For a minute everything stood still, quiet.
“So this is it?”
“Yup,” Ted said. “No turning back. Nervous?”
I tried to laugh but didn’t quite pull it off. “Some days I think you can read minds.”
“Maybe. But reading body language is just as good.” He gave me a quick kiss. “Here he comes.”
“Ted? Is that you?” the owner of the house, presumably Ted’s Dad, called out from the porch and everything started again. First a cat ran out from his feet, then a breeze picked up and all of the plants waved in it. Ted got out of the car first. I pushed my nerves aside, took a deep breath and joined him.
“Good to see you, son.”
“Good to see you, Dad.” Ted wrapped the man in an embrace. Not a cheap half-hug or some attempt at being manly but a full-on hug. I watched trying not to stare. If you ignored hair color, Ted could have been hugging his mirror image. A little older, without the definition in his shoulders, and add a roll of flab by his waistband, but the same build, the same height. A loud meow came from the ground and Ted stepped away.
“Hi-ya Maxie.” Ted scooped up a large gray cat. I shifted my weight, standing in the sun, not sure how to introduce myself.
Ted’s dad solved the problem for me. “And you must be Elisabeth.”
“That’s me. It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Falconer.” He’d come around the car, so I held out my hand.
“Call me Dave.” Ignoring the hand, he pulled me into a brief hug. I caught waves of pure happiness off him before he released me. “It sure is good to meet you. I’ve been hoping he’d bring someone home for a really, really, long time.”
“Gee thanks, Dad,” Ted called out while he cradled the cat.
“No offense, of course.” Dave winked at me as he said it.
“And this is Maxie.” Ted held up the very large feline who blinked at me.
“Maxie,” I nodded, but the cat didn’t reply.
“She slept on the end of my bed for what, seven years?” He looked at his Dad for confirmation.
“Eight at least. You’d never believe the nonsense she put me through when I moved that bed out. It was like I ended her world.”
“A boy and his cat, huh?”
“Sure as hell wasn’t going to be a boy and his dog,” his father replied. We were quiet for a minute, all of us thinking about dogs and wolves but no one saying anything. “Why don’t you come inside? I hear there are some pictures you want to see.”
We stepped into a small living room with a smaller TV. Bookshelves lined the far wall, holding a collection of adventure stories and nonfiction. Nearer to me, on top of the fireplace mantle, a collection of portraits of Ted and his father ranged from elementary school to boot camp graduation. Each knickknack on the shelf had a story, and before lo
ng I heard about the key to Ted’s first car, the snow globe holding his prom picture, and a shark tooth from a trip to Florida when he was eight. After that, the photo albums came out, and each picture was another tale that needed to be told.
I paged through, listening and laughing. Ted’s first day at kindergarten, his first bike ride. Pictures from each first day of school, and the photos from various little leagues. Neither Dave nor Ted mentioned the pictures that weren’t there. Not a photo of him from nine to twelve, years missing from his life like someone stole them. Worse, there wasn’t a single photo of his mother. It was as if Ted and his dad had always been a pair, never part of a trio. There were happy stories, well-documented celebrations, and triumphs. The albums weren’t sad or empty. I only noticed his mother was missing because I knew she should be there.
“Are you thirsty?” Dave asked me after a long minute of laughing over another funny story.
“A little.”
“I’m parched.” He turned from me to Ted. “Why don’t you go pick some oranges for fresh juice?”
“Because you keep oranges in the fridge,” Ted reminded his father.
“Fine.” Dave smiled a little. “Why don’t you go outside so I can talk about you?”
“Oh.” Ted left with the cat trailing after him.
“You think he’s gone for real?” his dad asked me.
“Probably.”
“Good.” He reached underneath the coffee table and brought out a dusty photo album. “You’ve seen the official story. Thought you might want to see the unofficial.” His hand hesitated on the front cover. “You know about what happened right?”
“I know.”
“He edited the albums when he first got back. Made two, one with her and one without.” He took a deep breath, his fingers rubbing the cover. “I’ve never seen him look at the one with her. I always hoped he’d get over it…”
“There’s still time.”
“Maybe…then again maybe not. You don’t know if she’s called him?”
“A bunch of times. He won’t take the calls.”
Dave shook his head. “I love my son, but sometimes he’s a stubborn man. If he waits too long, especially now, it’ll be too late.”
His voice held an ominous tone, but after a few seconds, Dave shrugged it off. “Wait’ll you see how cute he looked with chocolate cake smeared all over himself on his first birthday.”
Baby Ted plastered his brown hair to his head with chocolate frosting, then smeared cake around his face for good measure. Beside him his mother smiled fondly. With dark blonde hair and laughing green eyes, she didn’t look like she’d betray her son. The pictures aged, Ted growing up a round bellied toddler, then a gangly five-year-old. His mother grew older, lines appeared around her eyes. She looked tired, but I suspected most moms would. Some of these were duplicates of the photos I’d seen, others only existed in this album. Another cat appeared in a few, sharing his mother’s lap with Ted while she read to them both. The family made Christmas cookies together, washed the family car. All of the usual family photos, but they stopped right around age nine.
I heard a noise in the kitchen, a juicer probably, but I was too caught up in turning the pages to pay attention. The whole family went to Disneyland when Ted was six or seven. They posed with giant costume characters and got caught mid-laugh. Ted wore a too-big-for-him suit at someone’s wedding, his mother wore a floral dress, her hair done. They looked happy. The opposite picture was his parents together, dressed for the same wedding. Smiles, arms around each other’s waist, a happy family.
“Juice is—” Ted stopped mid-sentence, and when I looked up his eyes were on the page. “Juice is ready in the kitchen.”
“Great!” My cheerfulness was as forced as it could be, but Dave didn’t seem to mind.
“Did you find a picture for Gina?” Ted asked me when we got there.
“I’ll take one of the newborn shots, that is, if you don’t mind, Dave?”
“Go ahead, I know I can trust you with it.” He winked at me. “Did you see this?”
I shook my head, then headed over to the kitchen wall. Little tick marks were cut into the plaster. Height marks with dates attached. Just like the photo albums, there was a three-year gap, a bunch of inches where Ted wasn’t home to stand against the wall. I noticed it, but didn’t say anything. Instead, talk drifted to the cat, Dave’s garden, his work at UCLA, my work, Ted’s work, and a host of other things.
By three in the afternoon, Dave started ushering us out. “If you don’t leave now you’ll be stuck on the highway for hours.”
“What if I wanted to show Elisabeth around?”
“Show her quick or take her out to dinner somewhere and wait until the traffic gets lighter,” he instructed. “You’re probably too late already. I should’ve kicked you out at two.”
Ted just grinned.
“You guys fight about traffic a lot?” I guessed.
“Only every time I come home.”
“Every time?”
“He refuses to keep an eye on the time,” Dave admonished. “Refuses.”
“And since Dad turned my room into a library, it’s not like I can stay the night.”
“You have your own house, you don’t need a room here. It’s not natural for children to live with their parents forever,” Dave replied gruffly.
“Another old fight?” I asked.
“The second oldest, traffic is first,” Ted laughed. “Okay, okay, we’re leaving.”
I tucked the picture in an envelope for safety, and got a hug goodbye. Dave made Ted promise to treat me right before he waved goodbye from the porch.
“Not so bad, huh?” Ted asked as we pulled around the block.
“Not at all.” I compared the rambler to my parents’ row home, with its three stories, Mom in the kitchen, Dad sitting in his chair in front of the TV. “What was it like growing up around here?”
“It was good. There’s a bunch of stores a few blocks away where I used to get ice cream, a park a few blocks the other way. I walked to my elementary school. I mean, it’s still LA, a big city, but it feels like my neighborhood, you know?”
“No.” I shook my head. “No clue. I’ve always lived in a small town where everyone knows everyone else.”
“Guess I’ll have to show you.” He grinned and turned down a side street.
“Are we going to hit traffic?”
“Maybe. Promise not to tell my dad?”
All I could do was laugh.
The shopping center was actually a strip of shops clustered close together around a train station. We parked on the street and started walking, ignoring the time. The boutiques didn’t much appeal to me, so we got ice cream. There were more stories to tell, places that used to be here, shops that had closed. The city changed so quickly most of what he remembered was gone. It didn’t stop him from telling stories or me from laughing at them. My laughter died when we turned a corner.
“What?”
“That.” I pointed to a store window, where a single brilliant red dress hung over a rattan dressmaker’s dummy.
“The dress?”
I nodded, too awestruck to speak. I’d never owned a bright red dress. For some reason, a dress like that, with a full skirt and tight waist, seemed like it belonged on someone with a different life. I wore Army uniforms and jeans. Sometimes I wore church dresses. The dress in the window, with its low V-neck and complete lack of sleeves would never work in church. Out dancing? Sure. But I wasn’t Jo. I didn’t go out dancing. I needed a dress for Gina’s wedding, but it would likely be my first and last formal occasion as an adult. The dress in the window belonged with someone else, but nothing would stop me from loving it.
“Go try it on.”
“Why? It probably won’t fit. Even if it did, I have no place to wear it.”
“Maybe you need to buy the dress and then you’ll get the place to wear it,” he urged me.
Ten minutes later, I held my breath and pulled up
the zipper. A clunky, old-fashioned zipper, just like the dress had a built-in crinoline. It came from a different time but fit as if it was made for me. I took two steps out of the dressing room and stood in front of the mirror with my mouth open.
“I look like a girl.”
“You always look like a girl.”
“No, I mean I look…” I struggled to put it in words. My breasts showed full and round under the tight top, my arms thin and feminine. The skirt stopped just above my knees, making my legs look long and perfectly curved. The dress gave me an hour-glass figure. It turned me into Marilyn Monroe. “I look like Jo.”
Ted laughed, then pushed my hair aside to whisper in my ear. “You look like you: beautiful and strong.”
I almost shifted my right arm behind me to hide the silver bands, but in this dress, they didn’t really matter. It was magic. In this dress, I was beautiful. I savored the feeling for few minutes.
“Okay, I’ll go put it back.”
“What? Why?”
“I told you, no place to wear it. Let someone who can actually use it have it.”
“Buy the dress,” he told me. “I’ve got someplace you could wear it.”
The shop sold me the dress along with a pair of not-so-indulgent black heels. Ted took me three shops down, and ushered me into a hair salon. After Ted had a lengthy conversion with the stylist in some secret hair salon language, the woman went to work. I got shampooed and fluffed, catching a glimpse of him making a cell phone call. Finished with hair, I went through makeup, and then stepped into the salon bathroom to get changed. I stepped out looking like a million bucks. My hair fell in prefect soft waves around my face, my lips wore the exact same bright red shade as my dress, my eyelids were a soft blue-gray.
“We should call Jo, see if she’s working. She’ll never recognize me.”
“Maybe. After dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“There’s a place I’ve always wanted to go, but I never had anyone beautiful enough to go with me.”
His compliment made me glow with pride. People usually thought of me as strong, probably because of my fake muscles or maybe because I lacked the lush curves of a pinup model. I smiled to myself for the twenty minutes it took to get to the restaurant. When the valet gave me a hand out of the car his glove didn’t stop me from feeling his interest in my cleavage. I took it as a compliment and beamed at Ted as he came around the car. A second valet rushed to open the door for us. We stepped inside a cool glass vestibule where a man in a tux looked up our name.
Missing, Suspected Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective Page 5