Authors: Nicola R. White
I sat up in my seat. “You’re right! And when I told that guy to back off last night and he wouldn’t, I was furious.”
Rachel wrote
anger
at the bottom of her list and circled it. “OK. So that’s the common denominator. Both incidents were brought on by anger. Now what do we do about it?”
“Maybe I should see a doctor?” I guessed.
“I’m thinking not.” Alex raised an eyebrow. “How exactly are you going to tell a doctor your symptoms are superpowers brought on by anger management issues? You’ll be locked up in a mental ward in no time. And assuming someone does believe you, they’ll connect you to the scene of the crime and you’ll be locked up anyway.”
“Hey, what crime scene? I was the one who got attacked.
I’m
the victim here.”
“Yeah, well, you know that and we know that, but why should the cops believe it? They’ve got a puffy dead guy to deal with and you’re the one with superpowers.”
“Alex is right,” Rachel put in. “I don’t think telling anyone is your best bet right now.”
I got up and started to pace. “So what am I supposed to do? Try not to get angry for the rest of my life and hope I don’t Hulk out? And in the meantime, what if the cops do come looking for me? There are witnesses who saw me talking to the guy right before he died.”
My distress must have been obvious to Rachel because she immediately flipped to a new page and started another list. “Just try to calm down. We’ll figure this out. Who was there, and what might they have told the cops?”
I thought aloud. “Well, Nora was there, working. And the dead guy’s friend saw me talking to him. And this other guy, Jackson Byrne, was there.”
“Jackson Byrne?” Alex seized on the name. “Who’s that? You had a look in your eye when you said his name.”
“There was no look in my eye.”
“Wasn’t there a look?” she asked Rachel.
“There was a look,” Rachel confirmed, watching me pace back and forth. “Would you sit down? You’re making me nervous. Do you really think Nora would sell you up the river?”
I snorted. “This isn’t the 1800s—no one says things like that. And yeah, why wouldn’t she? I go to the bar she works at sometimes, it’s not like we’re best friends. She doesn’t know this guy was a scumbag who had it coming.”
Rachel tapped her pen absentmindedly on her pad of paper and I watched her for a second before it occurred to me what a bad idea it was to chronicle the details of my involvement in Miller’s death. I grabbed the pen out of her hand.
“Hey!” she protested. “I was working on that.”
“I know, but this isn’t
Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Would-Be Rapist
. The last thing we need to do is list the suspects and chart the clues. Let’s assume the cops
do
come question me—what are they going to think of witness lists lying around?”
“Oh.” She looked down at her hands and bit her lip. “I didn’t think of that. God, this is so out of my league. I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” I mentally kicked myself for snapping at Rachel. She was doing her best to deal with a wild situation. We all were. “You guys are beyond amazing. I can’t believe you’ve got my back on this. I just dropped some serious crazy in your laps and the first thing you did was ask how you could help.”
I sat down on the arm of her chair. “And I take it back about Nancy Drew. We totally need a Nancy—and you even have the red hair. Alex and I are like the less cool, sidekick cousins.”
Alex narrowed her eyes at me. “Speak for yourself.”
“Save it, Bess,” I told her dryly. “Or do you want to be Cousin George?”
“Ugh, fine. I’m Cousin Bess. So what are we going to do next?”
“I think we need to go back to the bar and look around,” Rachel said slowly, thinking out loud. “That should help us figure out how to deal with the cops.”
“Good idea,” I said. “If you guys can handle that, I’ll go talk to Nora and see what she might have told the police.”
“All right, we’ve got a plan.” Alex grinned. It was the first real smile any of us had managed. “Now let’s go solve some shit.”
Chapter 3
After Alex and Rachel left to check out what was happening at Spyder’s, I called in sick to work and did a quick Google search for Nora’s contact information. It pained me to think of the tips I’d miss at the restaurant, but after last night and this morning, there was no way I’d be able to last a whole shift without dumping a plate full of food in someone’s lap, as distracted as I was. After coughing weakly into my manager’s skeptical ear, I headed for my car and soon pulled up in front of Nora’s Poplar Street address. It was a small house with a postage stamp of a front yard. The old yellow siding was faded, but the grass had been cut recently and there were a few well-tended hanging baskets on the porch.
I went up the steps and knocked on the door. Tiny, quick footsteps pattered toward me from inside the house and a little girl opened the door to look up at me with big eyes.
“Is your mom home?” I asked her.
“I know you,” she answered, and I frowned. Though I’d seen her photo, she’d never laid eyes on me before in her life. I waited, but she didn’t say anything more.
“Are you supposed to answer the door on your own?” There was still no answer, so I prompted her again. “Is your mommy here?”
“Nora’s not home,” a man said from behind the door. His voice sounded like good tequila tastes, somehow smooth and rough at the same time, and I remembered wondering what it would be like to lick some off of him. Heat crept up the back of my neck as the door swung open the rest of the way and I found myself face-to-face with Jackson Byrne.
“Ruby, go play in your room for a while,” he said to the little girl before turning his attention back to me. “Nora’s down at the police station giving her statement about whatever it was you got her mixed up in last night.”
His voice was hard and unfriendly, and I swallowed nervously. My hopes of persuading him and Nora not to tell the cops about me were evaporating quickly. Jackson’s scowl said he wondered why I wasn’t down at the station with Nora—preferably in handcuffs. The man could glower like nobody’s business.
He started to shut the door on me.
“Wait!” I put the toe of my sneaker in the door to stop it from closing in my face. He didn’t notice in time to keep from shutting my foot in the door. Or maybe he did and just didn’t care. Either way
—ow
. I tried to pass my grimace off as a winsome smile.
He crossed his arms over his broad, well-defined chest when it became clear I wasn’t going away. “What do you want?”
God. What a question. What did I want? I wanted to convince him and Nora not to tell the cops I’d been at the bar the night before. I wanted to go back in time and fix things so none of it had ever happened. I wanted to find the words to explain everything so they’d believe me.
Instead, I just blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I’m not really like that, you know. I don’t just go around making out with strange men in bars.”
Shut up, shut up.
But my mouth kept going. “I mean, I don’t usually do things like that at all. With men.”
His forehead wrinkled as he stared, studying me like I was some kind of bizarre specimen outside the realm of normal understanding. “I’m more of a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of guy,” he said after a while.
“Oh! No!” I realized what he meant. “I don’t mean that I don’t do…things…with men. I’m not gay. Not that I have a problem with that. My roommate, Alex, is actually bisexual. I just mean that I’m not. Gay, that is.”
He kept staring and I fidgeted miserably on the doorstep. My mission had been a dismal failure so far. I was disgusted with myself for blurting out Alex’s name like she was my token gay friend and I had something to prove. And then there was the fact that I’d made a complete fool of myself in front of Jackson Byrne—again—but I couldn’t leave. Not with so much on the line.
I had to find a way to convince Jackson and Nora to help me, or die trying. Likely of embarrassment.
Humiliation sloshed inside of me, and it took actual, physical effort not to spew more word vomit into the air between us. Why hadn’t I just hauled the body into the tall grass at the edge of the lot, where it might not have been discovered for a few days? But no, I had to leave it crumpled in a heap next to Nora’s truck, where she was guaranteed to trip over it.
Luckily, my thought of Nora seemed to summon her, and she pulled into the driveway with a rattle and wheeze from her rusty old pickup, rescuing me from my stalemate with Jackson. When she swung down from the truck, her daughter came bouncing down the front steps toward her. Nora hefted her up onto her hip and introduced me while Jackson continued to glower.
“Tara, meet Ruby. Ruby, Tara.”
My heart pounded. What was her angle here? If she was introducing me to her daughter, she couldn’t think I had anything to do with the body. Right?
“You must be here because you’re wondering how much I told the cops about what you did to that guy.”
Or not.
My mouth went dry and I had to grab the porch railing for support. This was not good. This was so far from good, it wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as good.
“It’s OK,” she said, taking in the look on my face. “I told them you were there, but left long before he ever showed up.”
“Why?” I croaked. I’d expected it to take a hell of a lot more persuading—not to mention lying—to convince her not to incriminate me.
She shrugged. “I think I have a pretty good idea what happened.”
“You…do?” I wheezed. I doubted very much that she had any idea.
Nora straightened up and set Ruby down. “Why don’t you and Uncle Jackson go back in the house and start making lunch?” she told the little girl. “You can set the table. One extra place for our guest, please.”
Uncle
Jackson?
I leaned closer, not sure I’d heard correctly. That sounded much better than, say, Daddy. Not that I had a shot with him. He probably thought I was a total slut after what he’d seen at Spyder’s. Not to mention a complete idiot. And a murderer.
Nora and I watched Jackson disappear into the house with the little girl after shooting me one more dark glare, and I shook my head in disbelief at my reaction to seeing the man again. I had a murder investigation to worry about, and I was fantasizing about jumping his bones. Maybe it was a reaction to Miller’s attack on me the night before? Like how near-death experiences were supposed to make people feel more alive. At least, that’s how it worked in the movies.
“What do you think you know?” I asked Nora when they were out of earshot.
She turned wide, brown eyes on me and answered my question with one of her own. “The Kindly Ones have returned, haven’t they? And you’re one of them.”
“The who?”
“The Kindly Ones. You know, Furies.”
Personally, I wouldn’t have described giving someone the kiss of death and leaving a bloated purple corpse behind as
kind
, but thanks to Rachel, I did have a vague idea what a Fury was. What had she said about them when she’d been going through her Classics phase?
“Furies. Like Greek goddesses of revenge?”
Nora nodded. “Exactly.”
“You think I’m a Fury.” The skepticism in my voice was impossible to ignore, but Nora just looked at me and arched an eyebrow. Clearly, she thought I was trying to deny it. Little did she know I just had no idea what she was talking about. And since one of my best theories so far was that I was the She-Hulk, I figured I should hear her out. I was hardly in a position to deny the impossible.
And besides, she was offering lunch and my appetite had returned with a vengeance. I wasn’t usually a huge eater, but my empty stomach growled like an animal and I suddenly felt like I might pass out if I didn’t eat something soon. It felt wrong somehow, to be concerned with a mundane thing like eating after everything that had happened, but I couldn’t help my body’s response to the promise of food any more than I could control my reaction to Jackson, so I followed Nora up the driveway and into the house.
The interior was a lot like the outside, a little worn, but tidy and looked-after. The front door opened into a homey living room, leading to a kitchen just beyond it. To my left was a row of coat hooks with a jumble of flip-flops and sneakers on a mat underneath. The masculine leather jacket and heavy brown boots mixed in with them looked out of place, and my heart rate sped up when I remembered my first glance at Jackson the night before.
I heard Ruby’s voice in the kitchen and Nora led the way without stopping to take off her sandals, so I left my shoes on too and followed her. Pathetically, I brushed my hand over the sleeve of the leather jacket as we passed. I had an urge to bury my nose in its soft folds and inhale the male scent that clung to it, but managed to restrain myself.
When we reached the kitchen, I paused in the doorway to take in the domestic scene in front of me. Ruby stood on a plastic footstool in front of the counter, where she was stirring a bowl of pancake mix. Jackson was next to her, teasing the little girl as he poured the first batch into a frying pan on the stove. They both looked up when we came in and wary distrust clouded Jackson’s features, chasing away the open, good-humored smile he’d worn just seconds before.