Someplace to Be Flying (42 page)

The crows settled back on the roof of the school bus and perched in a line along the edge of the roof. One of the dogs returned to the couch to stand by the woman. The other two stayed closer to Kerry and Rory, trembling as though they were only waiting for the woman’s word to attack.

She should have listened to Annie, Kerry thought. Instead of trying to force the issue, she should have waited for Jack to come to her. All she had to do was look at this woman to know they weren’t going to find any help here.

She glanced at Rory. We should go, she wanted to tell him, but he was obviously not going to let either the woman or the dogs deter him. “Hi there,” he said. The woman didn’t answer. “Is, um, Jack around?”

The woman sat up and swung her legs to the ground. “Christ,” she said. “You’ve really got some nerve coming around here.” Rory held up his hands, palms up. “Look, we’re not here to cause any trouble. We just wanted to have a word with—” “Take a hike, or I’ll sic the dogs on you.”

Kerry had definitely never seen this woman before, and she was pretty sure Rory hadn’t either, so why was she so angry with them?

“Okay,” Rory said. “We’re going. Could you just tell Jack that we were looking for him? Tell him Rory and—”

“I
know
who she is. What makes you think Jack’d ever want to see her?”

Kerry found her voice. “Annie said he knows who my parents are.”

“Annie.”

“Annie Blue. Do you know her?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What’s she got to do with any of this?”

Kerry turned to look at Rory, but he only shrugged as if to say, it’s your call. So Kerry took a steady breath. Trying to ignore the dogs, she went on.

“It’s kind of complicated,” she said. “Do you know Maida, too?”

The woman’s gaze went from Kerry’s face to Rory’s, then settled back on Kerry.

“What’s Maida to you?” she asked.

“She’s my friend,” Kerry said.

“Your friend.”

Kerry nodded.

“I don’t believe this. The crow girls are your friends? Do they have any idea who
you
are?”

Kerry was getting a very bad feeling about all of this. The woman was making it out like she was some kind of monster. But she nodded again.

“Annie didn’t want them to tell me. She said Jack should be the one.”

The woman studied them for a long moment, then seemed to come to a decision. The hardness left her features and she sighed. The dogs relaxed and lay down in the dirt. The crows began to groom their already shiny black feathers.

“I’m Paris,” she told them. “I’m a friend of Jack’s.”

“Could we … would it be all right if we talked to him?” Kerry asked.

“Jack’s not here.”

“Do you know where we could—”

“He’s disappeared—he and Katy both.”

Kerry felt as though her heart had stopped. “K-Katy?”

“I thought you were her when I first saw you coming, but when you got closer I knew you were her sister Kerry.” A faint smile flickered on Paris’s lips. “No offense, but Katy’d never wear a dress like that.”

Kerry absently smoothed the fabric against her stomach. No, Katy never would.

“You … know her?” she asked in a small voice.

“Well, sure. She’s been hanging around with Jack for a couple of years now and she’d come by the ‘yard with him all the time.”

Kerry was speechless. After all these years it was hard to accept that Katy was really and truly real. It was so much easier to go along with the party line as put down by her parents and Dr. Stiles. When you’re diagnosed as delusional, it’s hard to believe that something really happened, even if you thought—you were sure—you’d experienced it.

“Wait a sec,” Rory said. “Are we talking about your …”

He let his voice trail off, but Kerry could have finished what he’d left unsaid: her imaginary sister.

“My twin sister,” she said aloud.

“But I thought …” He shook his head. “Never mind.”

Kerry returned her attention to the woman on the sofa. “Why were you so mad at us when we first got here?”

“Because Katy told Hank that you’d come to Newford to kill her.”

Kerry’s eyes went wide with shock. “To
kill
her?”

“Well, not stick a knife in her or anything that dramatic. What she said was”—Paris suddenly looked apologetic—“that you could disbelieve her into not existing. Not from far away, but if you were physically with her and you could look her in the eye and still say with conviction that she didn’t exist, then she wouldn’t.”

“I…”

Kerry didn’t know what to say because she knew it was true. Not that she’d ever deliberately will Katy to not exist. It was that she desperately wanted to be normal, to live a normal life, and she couldn’t do that if she kept imagining that she had a twin sister. So in a way she’d been perfectly willing to kill her off by not believing she existed.

“But you wouldn’t do that, would you?” Paris was saying. “I mean, you look so …” She shrugged. “You know. Nice.”

“I … I’m not so nice,” Kerry said.

Paris’s pencil-thin eyebrows rose quizzically.

“I didn’t want to believe in her,” Kerry explained.

“But the crow girls …”

Kerry sighed. “Why does my having made friends with them make such a difference?”

“Because according to Jack they’ve got bullshit detectors like you wouldn’t believe. They’d never befriend anyone who’d … you know …”

“Kill their own sister?”

Paris gave a reluctant nod.

“I didn’t want to believe in her because nobody else could see her. She’d make trouble, but I’d always get the blame.”

“But siblings do that to each other all the time,” Paris said. “My brother and I were always at each other’s throats when we were little kids.”

“Yeah,” Rory said. “But you didn’t spend ten years in a mental institution because you believed he was real, did you?”

Paris looked from one to the other.

“Is this true?” she asked Kerry.

Kerry nodded reluctantly.

“You were right,” Paris said. “This is way too complicated. Christ, I wish Jack were here.”

“You said he disappeared?” Rory asked.

Paris nodded. “Maybe you guys should come back to the ‘yard with me,” she said, standing up. “We could talk to the others and see if we can make any sense out of this.”

“What yard?” Rory asked.

She pointed in the direction of the junkyard. “My family runs it.” She gave them a faint smile. “Not the family I was born into, but the one I acquired.”

Both Kerry and Rory hesitated.

“It’s okay,” Paris said. “They’re good people.”

“But if they’re on Katy’s side,” Kerry began.

“I don’t think this is about sides, do you?”

“No,” Kerry had to agree. “I guess it’s not.”

Hank was reluctant to let Lily go off on her own the next morning.

“These guys are too unpredictable,” he’d told her while they were having coffee and toast on her front porch. The kitchen was still too rank to think of eating in it. “We don’t know what they’re going to do next.”

“I don’t think they’ll try anything in broad daylight,” Lily said. “And we both have stuff to do.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I won’t be long,” she said, “and then I’ll come straight home and lock the door and I won’t let anyone in unless they know the secret password.”

“I don’t know the secret password.”

She’d grinned. “So you see how safe I’ll be.”

“But—”

“I won’t do anything stupid, Hank. But I’ve got to get these color rolls developed this morning, pick up some replacement chemicals for what those guys trashed in my darkroom, and then develop all my black and whites. I promised Kenny I’d have them to him by five this afternoon.”

So he’d let her convince him, but no sooner had she driven off than he began to
worry.
He was cursed with an overactive imagination. Most of the time he could shut it off, but that didn’t work as well when he was worrying about someone else. And it didn’t work at all this morning. To try to get his mind off it, he took their dirty dishes upstairs and washed them, then called Paris’s apartment. She wasn’t home and neither was she at the Buzz when he tried to get her there. Finally he called the junkyard.

“Anita says she was staying at Jack’s last night in case anyone showed up there,” Moth told him.

“So there’s still no word?”

“Nothing.”

Hank sighed. It was past time to stop by the house on Stanton Street when Katy had told him her sister was living. But what would he say to the woman? I know you’ve disbelieved your sister out of existence. Yeah, right.

“Did you talk to Eddie for me?” he asked.

“He wouldn’t go for it.”

“But—”

“It’s not that he doesn’t want to help us,” Moth said. “But he said setting up a meet with the Couteaus is like taking a gun and sticking it in your own mouth. They don’t negotiate.”

“That bad.”

“Worse. But Eddie wanted you to know that he’s going to fix things up for you. ‘Tell Hank his problems are all going away,’ is how he put it.”

Hank didn’t like the sound of that at all.

“What do you think he meant by that?” he said.

“Beats me,” Moth said. “I didn’t want to ask.”

Hank carried the phone over to the window and looked out at the unfamiliar view. The quiet street was as alien to him as the junkyard would be to Lily.

“How’d our lives get so complicated all of a sudden?” he said.

“By not minding our own business.”

“It’s not like I could’ve walked away from any of this.”

“I suppose,” Moth said, but Hank could tell from the tone of his voice that he didn’t agree. “One more thing. Tony wants you to know that Marty Caine’s been trying to get hold of you all morning.”

“Great. More unfinished business.”

“That’s what happens when you fill your whole dance card, kid. Tony says he’s called the store maybe a half-dozen times and sounds pissed. What’d you do? Send him a book of lawyer jokes?”

“I was heading over to Stanton Street to have a talk with Katy’s sister,” Hank said, “but I guess I’ll stop by Marty’s office on the way.”

“You don’t have to take any crap from him.”

“Marty’s not like that.”

“Yeah, but you’re not his pet dog either. He says jump, are you going to start asking how high?”

“Give it a rest,” Hank told him.

He shifted his view from the houses across the street to the VW parked in front of Lily’s building.

“Those plates on Anita’s bug,” he asked. “Are they legit?”

He could almost see Moth shrug. “Good as. Just don’t ran any red lights while you’re driving it.”

Perfect. Neither Moth nor Anita liked to give the government any more than they had to—neither money nor paperwork. He didn’t blame them. It made life a lot easier when you didn’t exist on paper. But all he needed now was to get stopped by some overzealous traffic cop having a slow day.

“I’ll talk to you later,” he said into the phone.

* * *

Naturally, there were no parking spaces anywhere near the Sovereign Building, so Hank had to park the VW a half-dozen blocks away and hike back to Marty’s office. He stopped in at Mac’s deli to buy three coffees and took them upstairs with him. During the day there was no need to be buzzed into the building, but you had to enter Marty’s office by way of the front office, where his secretary, Robbie Norton, held court. Robbie was a big man, solidly built. More like a linebacker or a bodyguard than Hank’s expectations of a legal secretary. He had fingers like fat sausages and it always fascinated Hank to watch how delicately they could work a computer keyboard.

Robbie looked up when Hank came in and smiled his thanks for the coffee Hank handed him.

“Marty in?” Hank asked.

Robbie nodded. “You wearing a flak vest?”

“He’s that mad?”

“Let’s just say that bringing him a coffee’s not going to come close to smoothing this over.”

“What’s it all about?”

Robbie shook his head. “I’m not getting in the middle of this.” He pushed the “Talk” button on the intercom and said, “Hank’s here.”

Marty’s voice came back, holding the cool terseness he usually reserved for somebody he didn’t respect. A crooked cop. A client who’d lied to him. “Send him in.”

Hank glanced at Robbie, eyebrows raised.

“Good luck,” Robbie said.

He really didn’t need this on top of everything else that was going down, Hank thought as he opened the door to Marty’s office and stepped in. Marty gave him a look that held as much sadness as it did anger.

“The good news,” he said before Hank could speak, “is that Sandy’s out of jail, all charges dropped.”

“What’s the bad news?”

Marty tossed an envelope on the desk. “Here’s your money.”

“That’s the bad news?”

“I won’t be using your sendees anymore,” Marty said.

Hank set the two Styrofoam cups of coffee on the edge of the desk and sat down.

“There’s really nothing more to discuss,” Marty told him.

He was using his no-give lawyer’s voice. Cold. Impersonal. Like he was talking to the press. Or to a staff sergeant at a precinct where one of his clients had “tripped in his cell” and now required stitches and a stay in the hospital.

“Bullshit,” Hank said. “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on here?”

“I just don’t do business your way.”

“Well, let’s see.” Hank counted the items off on his fingers. “So far I’ve interviewed your client and spent a day visiting every tattoo parlor in the city. Seems like pretty straightforward investigative work to me. You planning to use psychics or something now?”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

Hank gave him a steady look. “Never thought so before, but you’re doing a good job of changing my mind.”

Marty returned his gaze, anger barely kept in check. Hank waited him out.

“Cute,” Marty said finally. “But we both know there’s no way Bloom would’ve backed off the way he did unless you leaned on him.”

“
I
leaned on him?”

“I don’t know what you dug up on him, but I know scared and he was terrified when I saw him this morning.”

This made no sense at all.

“You’re telling me that the D.A.‘s office is dropping the charges on your client because somebody leaned on the prosecutor who’s handling the case?”