Touched (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (22 page)

I doubted anyone heard him. The men had fled to watch the rustling bag with the reanimated head inside. He started towards the house, a hard exhale from his nostrils moving what was left of my hair.

NINETEEN

The lens of the sunglasses was digging into my lower back painfully as I lay recovering on the couch. It was my own fault for swiping it in the first place then tucking it so near my stitches. Sometimes having people think you're the fainting type works in your favor; that Batten thought I was a fainter was vaguely irritating, but I guess Sherlock was right. I'm a great little actress.

“Would it have mattered?” Batten wanted to know.

“You knew she was blind,” I accused, moving to rest on my elbow. “And that her eyes were gouged out. Right? This was some sort of test. You still don't believe I'm psychic.”

“I believe that you believe you're psychic. Tell me what think you saw.”

Riiight. “Could you reword that so it's a bit more insulting?”

“Tell me, Baranuik.”

“What exactly would be the point?”

Harry, humming a vaguely recognizable tune, brought me a shot of espresso, a No. 2 and a Moleskine, and the cordless home phone. The cops and others had gone, and if it weren't for Mark and I fighting (did we ever do anything but?) the night would've been peaceful at last. I sank my chin into the arm of the couch and listened as Harry's voice hit each note with soft precision; after a minute I was calm. Harry tried to hand me the phone.

“Who is it?” I whispered.

Disapproval thinned his lips. “Vivaldi. Opera No. 7 concerto No. 7 in D minor. Have I in fact taught you nothing at all, in the end?”

I had to smile, which grew into a tired chuckle. “I meant, who's on the phone, doofus.”

He looked down at the item in his hand, seeming surprised to see it. “Ah yes, how foolish of me. ‘Tis your sister on the line.”

“Crapsicles. Not now.” Being the oldest of seven is not always a blessing. “Which one?”

“The one that does not entirely despise you,” Harry remarked flippantly, urging me to take the phone. When I didn't, his frown deepened. “Do take this, lollygagger, I've a delivery from Shield at the door that simply cannot wait. Is the American Express card in your purse?”

“My nightstand, the blue wallet,” I said.

Did Shield, a local blood donor organization that Harry uses once in a figurative blue moon, explain his warmth, I wondered? My gut said he was attempting to pull a fast one, manufacturing a cover-up story on account of my suspicions. Suuuuure, he'd been getting deliveries. He sure as hell hadn't stored them in the boathouse freezer.

I glanced at Chapel to gauge whether he had witnessed one of these deliveries while guarding Harry this past week and a half. I read Gary as curious, the name and idea of Shield seeming foreign to him.

Disappointed, I said into the phone, “Carrie?”

“My infamous sister is alive and well!” Carrie sang. “Well, halleluiah. You ever think some of us might like a phone call when your world goes tits-up?”

She knows nothing, she knows nothing. I made my free hand useful, jotting the psychic impression I'd gotten outside at the mailbox in my notebook, while I kept my voice light, casual.

“What the heck are you even talking about, kiddo?”

“You've made the dinner-hour news. Did Lord Billionbucks forget to pay your cable bill?”

I dropped the notebook and strode across the room to grab the remote from the mantle, flipping the channels until it landed on CNN. Horror gurgled from my throat. “That's my face!”

“I know. Don't you ever wear make up?” Carrie said. “You're too pale to walk around without mascara. Eyeliner. Blush. You can afford make up, you know.”

The entire Baranuik family had profited from Grandma Vi's death, and from Harry's generosity. After Harry paid Carrie three
times what this little cabin was worth and bought her an overpriced townhouse in posh Niagara-on-the-Lake near Mom and Dad's Virgil farm, still she was bitter where Harry's money was concerned.

“Why am I on TV?” I demanded, as though it was her doing.

“They said you were in the hospital again. Is that true? Why didn't you call?” Harder now, with frost in her voice, “Why didn't ‘Harry’ call us?”

Harry, in audible air quotes. Like it maybe wasn't his real name. Like he was an enemy spy on a mission of infiltration or something. Still, of my siblings, she was the only one who didn't outright despise us, so I let it go.

“It wasn't necessary to call because I'm perfectly fine, really.”

“Oh my God,” she said, the panic in her voice causing the Blue Sense to nearly explode in my ear: dread, worry, anger. “You're really hurt!”

“Nope. A scratch.” I pshaw-ed, dredging up whatever psychic wall I could manage.

“This has nothing to do with the shooting, it's a new injury,” Carrie guessed, her breath quickening. “Did that serial killer from New York track you down? Did he come back? I told you you're not cut out for police shit!”

“You're way off now. Stop it. Jeremiah Prost is in the wind. Just calm down.”

“That's it. You're moving back to Canada. I'm coming to get you.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“It's not safe down there with all the crazy vampires.”

“Carrie, you know damn well there are more revenants in Canada than in the US,” I lied, flapping my arm as though she could see it. “And not all revenants are crazy killers.” I saw Batten's head came up sharply and ignored it. “OK, no more than half of them. Could you calm down?”

“As you can plainly see, dramatic overreaction is entrenched in the Baranuik genes,” Harry commented to Chapel and Batten as he returned to the room with a dark indigo wine goblet in his hand. “Never have I known a conversation between Baranuiks to be touched by either peace or civility.”

I felt Chapel's flush of discomfort as he put two and two together and figured out what was in Harry's goblet, what Shield must be. Flicking a glare at Harry, who had recommenced humming doleful Vivaldi, I turned up the volume on the TV.

“Carrie, honey,” I soothed, “you know how the media blows shit out of proportion when there's no real news. Oh Lord and Lady, I look like I'm dying of consumption. Couldn't they have gotten better pictures of me?”

“Do better pictures of you exist?”

“You meant that in a nice way,” I deadpanned. “Right?”

“All that pretty blond hair and you drag it back into a boring ponytail.”

Not anymore. “Have you and Harry been trading critiques of my ‘do?”

“Yeah, right, on our nightly phone chats,” she sneered. “You look like a drowned albino rat. On a lighter note, who's the delicious hard-bodied hottie bossing you around? Look at those shoulders, those arms. Yowza, that's a big man, right there. Yum.”

The snapshot frozen in the corner of the screen was from Buffalo. The delicious hard-bodied hottie was Batten. He was pointing at a dumpster, his brow furrowed, his lips curled up exposing one pointy-yet-human canine. I remembered the argument, the exasperation in his voice. We'd been driving back to the police station at half past three in the morning from a sixteen hour strained and silent stake out, the day after our first vertical romp. He'd stopped behind the station to toss out our leftovers while I was asleep. I woke up hungry when he parked, and when I'd found out my food was gone, I lost it. He'd been telling me where I could find the rest of my burrito. I'd been telling him where to go. The photographer had caught me in a flash-framed double-shot, half way to enthusiastically flipping Batten the bird with both hands.

“Uh, that's just a cop,” I coughed discretely. “An indescribably annoying Fed.”

“Oh my god, it's him, the one you told me about. You had sex with that guy?” Carrie shouted into the phone. “Holy shit, you lucky slut!”

“Voice down,” I begged, acutely aware I wasn't alone in the room. “Seriously, I'm just fine.”

“Forget what I said before, I do want details,” my sister laughed. “Tell me about his body. Every inch. Start at the shoulders and work your way down. Don't skip a freckle.”

“You're overreacting. Dramatically.” I smiled at Harry then stole a glance at Batten, who was watching my end of the conversation with one eye while monitoring CNN with the other. “We'll talk about this another time. Give my love to mom and dad…”

“He's there,” she guessed. I could picture her swinging her knees up in the chair and settling in for a juicy chat in her sunny family room. “He came to see you. Did I interrupt? My God, you were about to fuck.”

“No!” My cheeks burned. The screen on the TV changed. “Holy hell, that's my office. Why is CNN at my friggin’ office?”

“Someone forgot to water your plants,” Carrie noted. “Probably it was you. You never were good at keeping things alive. Well, except for “Harry”, but how hard is that? Any one of us could have done it.”

I bit my tongue. That huge thorn in my family's side had not withered over the years: why me and not any of them? Vi's last wishes had named me, but it wasn't written in stone. Harry and I both had the ability to walk away. My family assumed we'd refuse one another. Sitting in the lawyer's office that bizarre evening, buzzing with nervous anticipation, not knowing what to expect, considering one another for the very first time. Me a shy seventeen-year-old Canadian puzzle fanatic in dark-rimmed glasses and ash blonde braids, he a cultured centuries-old British aristocrat. I guessed he would bow out gracefully with an apology, that the apology would be the last I'd hear from Lord Guy Harrick Dreppenstedt of London, England. At the same time, an immediate understanding resonated in me: if he wanted me, I would accept, and on some level, I was already his. Harry could have chosen instead to Bond my father, as everyone expected. Roger Baranuik had been studying for this eventuality, and would have made an excellent guardian, an educated companion. Or, Harry could have gone back to Europe, to his own familiar corner of the world. Instead, he offered me the Bond. And I accepted instantly and unequivocally, plunging the rest of the Baranuik clan into bewildered fury. Together, we had borne their disapproval.

Now, Harry was looking at me steadily from his wingback chair, aware of my reminiscing, eyelids heavy with unspoken pleasure, his gaze wistful. He swirled the contents of his goblet, but his hungry stare yearned for someone warm wiggling beneath him; a shiver tickled my spine and I had to look away.

“All those lovely philodendron, dead.” Carrie asked in my phone ear. “Always surrounding yourself with death. At least you made it with one living guy. That FBI guy looks like one angry SOB. I bet he fucks like a jackhammer. Am I right?”

My cheeks flamed anew. Harry, with his exceptional preternatural hearing, had heard every word my sister said, and his attention was again pulled from the TV to check my face curiously.

“I'm not going to discuss cases with you, Carrie,” I said carefully. “It's unprofessional and probably illegal.”

On TV, a journalist in navy pencil skirt and wildly impractical high heels was talking to a vaguely familiar public relations guy at Gold-Drake & Cross about the spare office beside my former secretary John's desk. The cameraman took a long shot of a door that still bore my nameplate in silver and then for some reason went to black and white like some old detective show. I half-expected the score for Dragnet to start up. “Ladies and Gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true…” The door swung shut. The producers were creating some theatrical metaphor for my career and didn't even realize. If I dared to look at anyone else in the room now, I'd collapse into a smoldering ruin of shame.

“Why this particular psychic?” the journalist wanted to know.

Public Relations smiled his promotion grin: conservative estimated orthodontic cost, eight thousand dollars. “It's the girl-next-door phenomenon. She's an everyday person, relatable, touchable.”

“Hear that?” Carrie teased. “You're touchable. Like quilted toilet paper.”

“Splendid,” I said sourly. “Must be why the world wipes its ass with me.”

Carrie groaned at the public relations guy's expanding on my popularity, and I wasn't sure which made me cringe more: his flattery or my sister's disgust. “Your first and only case ended with you getting shot and a vampire serial killer in the wind,” she said, as
if I needed a reminder. “He's somewhere draining more kids because when it came time to take action, you choked.”

I'd said much worse about my own self, but to hear it from Carrie… I know she thought I agreed. We'd discussed how I felt about it. It didn't make it any easier to hear her flippant remarks. I stiffened defensively and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harry sit up. I felt my jaws doing the Mark Batten Angry Dance while I chewed back comments I'd surely regret saying to the only quasi-friendly sibling I had left.

“As you know, Nancy,” PR guy said on TV, “I can't discuss the details of open investigations with you, or reveal any personal medical information. What I can tell you is that our star psychic will have a ton of fan mail to go through when she returns to us.”

He touched open the door of the spare office, the paint a soothing blue-green. The mail was unbelievable, postcards and envelopes spilling from boxes and plastic shopping bags, propped in the chairs, covering an old unused desk. Parcels were kicked under chairs, stacked in piles on a window ledge. Flowers, teddy bears, cards of condolence. Even jewelry. Public Relations displayed in his palm a necklace with a big heart locket encrusted with blood-red garnets, bearing the sepia-toned picture of the gift-giver inside—a gothed-up young man who couldn't have been more than sixteen with black lipstick and a severely staged-debonair facial expression. The dude had drawn a bleeding heart in the corner in what I sincerely hoped was red marker. I reeled back a step with a horrified urk!

Carrie made a snort of disgust. “Look, that punk is infatuated with you. He wants to be your little fake-vamp love-bunny.”

Harry startled into a hoot of delighted laughter that made Batten and Chapel jolt with alarm. Harry doubled over in the chair, clutching his sides. I'd never seen him laugh so hard; I thought he might actually be breathing. He had to set his goblet down on the coffee table.