Bone Crossed (15 page)

He gave me another wary look, but nodded. As he went back inside the house and started up the stairs, Amber told me, “I’d better warn you, my husband is pretty unhappy about the ghost. He thinks Chad and I are making it up. If you could manage not to mention it at dinner in front of his client, I’d appreciate it.”

 

 

 

THERE WAS A BATHROOM ACROSS FROM THE ROOM I WAS staying in. I took my suitcase and went in to scrub up. Before I stripped off my grimy shirt, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Sometimes ghosts only appear to one sense or another. Sometimes I can only hear them—sometimes I can smell them. But the bathroom smelled like soap and shampoo, water, and those stupid blue tablets some people who didn’t have pets put in their toilets.

I didn’t see anything or hear anything either. But that didn’t keep the hair on the back of my neck from rising as I pulled off my shirt and stuffed it into the plastic compartment in my suitcase. I scoured my hands until they were mostly clean and brushed the dirt out of my hair and rebraided it. And all the while I could feel someone watching me.

Maybe it was only the power of suggestion. But I cleaned up as fast as I could anyway. No ghostly writing appeared on the walls, no one appeared in the mirror or moved stuff around.

I opened the bathroom door and found Amber waiting impatiently right in front of the door. She didn’t notice that she’d startled me.

“I have to take Chad to softball practice, then do some shopping for dinner tonight. Do you want to come?”

“Why not?” I said with a casual shrug. Staying in that house alone didn’t appeal to me—some ghost hunter I was. Nothing had happened, and I was already jumpy.

I took shotgun. Chad frowned at me, but sat in back. I didn’t think I impressed him much. No one said anything until we dropped Chad off. He didn’t look happy about going. Amber proved that she was tougher than me because she ignored the puppy-dog eyes and abandoned Chad to his coach’s indifferent care.

“So you decided not to become a history teacher,” Amber said as she pulled away from the curb. Her voice was tight with nerves. The stress was coming from her end, I thought—but then she’d never been relaxing company.

“Decided isn’t quite the word,” I told her. “I took a job as a mechanic to support myself until a teaching position opened ... and one day I realized that even if someone offered me a job, I’d rather turn a wrench.” And then, because she’d given me the opening, “I thought you were going to be a vet.”

“Yes, well, life happened.” She paused. “Chad happened.” That was too much honesty for her though, and she subsided into silence. In the grocery store, I wandered away while she was testing tomatoes—they all looked good to me. I bought a candy bar, just to see how much she’d changed.

Not that much. By the time she’d finished lecturing me on the evils of refined sugar, we were almost back to the house. She was feeling a lot more comfortable—and she finally told me more about her ghost.

“Corban doesn’t believe we’re haunted,” she told me as she threaded her way through the city. She glanced at my face and away. “I haven’t actually seen or heard anything either. I just told him I had, so he’d leave Chad alone.” She took a deep breath and looked at me again. “He thinks Chad might do better at a boarding school—a private place for troubled kids that a friend of his recommended.”

“He didn’t look troubled to me,” I said. “Aren’t ‘troubled’ kids usually doing drugs or beating on the neighbor’s kids?” Chad had looked like he’d rather have stayed home and read than go to play ball.

Amber gave a nervous half laugh. “Corban doesn’t get along very well with Chad. He doesn’t understand him. It’s the old Disney cliché of a quarterback dad and bookworm son.”

“Does Corban know he’s not Chad’s father?”

She hit the brakes so hard that if I hadn’t been belted in, I might have become better acquainted with her windshield. She sat there in the middle of the road for a moment, oblivious to the honking horns around us. I was glad we were in a stout Mercedes rather than the Miata she’d driven to my house.

“You forget,” I said blandly. “I knew Harrison, too. We used to joke about his eyelashes, and I’ve never see eyes like his since. Not until today.” Harrison had been her one true love for about three months until she dropped him for a premed student.

Amber started forward again and drove for a little until traffic settled down. “I’d forgotten you knew him.” She sighed. “Funny. Yes, Corban knows he’s not Chad’s father, but Chad doesn’t. It didn’t used to matter, but I’m not so sure. Corban’s been ... different lately.” She shook her head. “Still, he’s the one who suggested I ask you to come over. He saw the article in the paper, and said, ‘Isn’t that the girl you said used to see ghosts? Why don’t you have her come over and have a look-see?”’

I figured I’d been pushy enough, so I asked a question that was less intrusive. “What does the ghost do?”

“Moves things,” she told me. “It rearranges Chad’s room once or twice a week. Chad says he’s seen the furniture moving around.” She hesitated. “It breaks things, too. A couple of vases my husband’s father brought over from China. The glass over my husband’s diploma. Sometimes it takes things.” She glanced at me again. “Car keys. Shoes. Some important papers of Cor’s turned up in Chad’s room, under his bed. Corban was pretty mad.”

“At Chad?”

She nodded.

I hadn’t even met him, and I didn’t like her husband. Even if Chad was doing everything himself—and I had no evidence to the contrary—throwing him into reform school didn’t sound like the way to make things better.

We picked up a morose Chad, who didn’t seem inclined to converse, and she quit talking about the ghost.

 

 

 

AMBER WAS WORKING IN THE KITCHEN. I’D TRIED TO HELP but she finally sent me to my room to stay out of her way. She didn’t like the way I peeled apples. I’d brought a book from home—a very old book—with real fairy tales in it. It was borrowed and I’d have to return it soon, so I was reading as fast as I could.

I was taking notes on kelpies (thought extinct) when someone knocked at my door twice and then opened it.

Chad stood with a notebook and a pencil in hand.

“Hey,” I said.

He turned the notebook around and I read, “How much is my dad paying you?”

“Nothing,” I said.

His eyes narrowed, and he ripped away that page and showed me the next one. Evidently he’d thought about this for a while. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

I set my book aside and stared back at him. He was tough, but he wasn’t Adam or Samuel: he blinked first.

“I have a vampire who wants to kill me,” I told him. Which I shouldn’t have, of course, but I wanted to see what would happen. Curiosity, Bran has told me more than once, might be as fatal for coyotes as it is for cats.

Chad crumpled the paper and mouthed a word. Evidently he hadn’t expected that response.

I raised my eyebrow. “Sorry. You’ll have to do better. I don’t lip-read.”

He scribbled furiously. “Lyer” said his paper.

I took his pencil, and wrote, “liar.” Then I gave him back his notebook, and said, “You want to bet?”

He clutched his notebook to his chest and stalked off. I liked him. He reminded me of me.

Fifteen minutes later his mother barged in. “Red or purple?” she asked me, still sounding frantic. “Come with me.”

Bewildered, I followed her down the hall and into the master bedroom suite, where she’d laid out two dresses. “I only have five minutes before I have to put the rolls in,” she said. “Red or purple?”

The purple had considerably more fabric. “Purple,” I said. “Do you have shoes I can borrow, too? Or do you want me to go barefoot?”

She gave me a wild-eyed look. “Shoes I have, but not nylons.”

“Amber,” I told her. “I will put on high heels for you. And I will wear a dress. But you aren’t paying me enough to wear nylons. My legs are shaved and tan, that’ll have to do.”

“We can pay you. How much do you want?”

I looked but couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “No charge,” I told her. “That way I can leave when things get scary.”

She didn’t laugh. I was pretty sure Amber used to have a sense of humor. Maybe.

“Look,” I told her. “Take a deep breath. Find the shoes for me, and go put your rolls in the oven.”

She did take a deep breath, and it seemed to help.

When I went back to my room, Chad was there again with his notebook. He was staring at the walking stick on my bed. I hadn’t brought it with me, but it had come anyway. I wished I could ask it what it wanted from me.

I picked it up and waited until he was looking at me so he could read my lips. “This is what I use to beat problem children with.”

He clutched his notebook tighter, so I guessed his lipreading skills were up to par. I put the stick back on the bed. “What did you want?”

He turned his notebook around and showed me a newspaper article that had been cut out and was taped to a page of his notebook. “Alpha Werewolf’s Girlfriend Kills Attacker” it said. There was a picture of me looking battered and dazed. I didn’t remember anyone taking pictures, but there were large chunks of that night I was pretty shaky on.

“Yes,” I said, like my stomach didn’t suddenly hurt. “Old news.”

He turned the page, and I saw he had another observation for me. “There R no vampyrs.” I guessed spelling wasn’t his strong suit. Even at ten, I’d been able to spell “are.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “Good to know. I guess I’ll go home tomorrow.”

He dropped his hands to his sides, the notebook swaying back and forth with irritation like a cat’s tail. He knew sarcasm when he heard it, even if he was lip-reading it.

“Don’t worry, kid,” I told him more gently. “I’m not a part of the plot to send you off to kid-prison. If I don’t see anything, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to see. And I’ll tell your father so, too.”

He blinked his eyes furiously, hugged his notebook again. He lifted his chin—a smaller, less-stubborn version of his mother’s. And he left.

 

 

 

AMBER TROTTED UP THE STAIRS DOUBLE TIME AND waved to me as she went past. I heard her knock, then open a door. “You need to clean up, too,” she told her son. “You don’t have to eat with us—there’s a plate in the microwave—but I don’t want you scuttling around trying to be unseen, either. You know how that irritates your father. So comb your hair, wash your hands and face.”

I stripped off my clothes and pulled on the purple dress. It fit just fine—a little tight in the shoulders and snugger in the hips than I preferred, but when I looked at it in the full-length mirror, it looked just fine. Amber, Char, and I had always been able to trade clothes with each other.

The heels were higher than was comfortable, but as long as we were staying in the house, they should be all right. Char’s feet had been smaller than Amber’s and mine. I brushed out my hair again, then French-braided it. A touch of lipstick and eyeliner, and I was good to go.

I wished it was Adam I was about to eat with instead of Amber, her jerk of a husband, and some important client. It was enough to make me wish I had a plate in the microwave, too.

NEITHER OF THE TWO MEN WHO ENTERED THE HOUSE was handsome. The shorter man was slightly balding, with plump hands that had three thick gold rings on them. His suit was off-the-rack, but the rack had been expensive. His eyes were pale, pale blue, almost as pale as Samuel’s wolf eyes. The resemblance made me want to like him. He stood by almost shyly as the other man hugged Amber.

“Hey, sweetie,” Amber’s husband said and, to my surprise, there was honest warmth in his voice. “Thank you for fixing dinner for us on such short notice.”

Corban Wharton was striking rather than good-looking. His nose was too long for his broad face. His eyes were dark and wide-set—and smiling. There was something solid and reassuring about him. He was the kind of person that you’d want beside you in a courtroom. When he looked at me, he frowned briefly, as if trying to place who I was.

“You must be Mercedes Thompson,” he said, holding out his hand.

He had a good handshake, a politician’s handshake—firm and dry.

“Call me Mercy,” I said. “Everyone does.”

He nodded. “Mercy, this is my friend and client Jim Blackwood. Jim—Mercy Thompson, my wife’s friend who is visiting us this week.”

Jim was talking to Amber and took just an instant to turn his attention back to Corban and me.

Jim Blackwood. James Blackwood. How many James Black-woods were there in Spokane, I wondered in dumb panic. Five or six? But I knew—even though the strong cologne he wore kept me from scenting vampire—I knew I wasn’t going to be lucky.

He’d think I smelled like I had dogs, Bran had assured me. And even if he didn’t, even if he knew what I was—I was just visiting. He couldn’t take offense at that, right?

I knew better. Vampires could take offense at anything they liked.

“Mr. Blackwood,” I greeted him, when he looked away from Amber. Keep it simple. I didn’t know if vampires could sense lies like the wolves could, but I wasn’t going to say, “It’s very good to meet you,” or something similar when I was wishing myself a hundred miles away.

I did my best to keep a social smile on my face while stupid thoughts began to pile up. How was he going to eat with us? Vampires didn’t. Not that I’d ever seen. What were the chances of a vampire’s showing up and it not being some plot of Marsilia’s?

Blackwood hadn’t sounded like a vampire who would do anyone’s bidding.

“Call me Jim,” he told me, just a hint of a British accent shading his voice. “I’m sorry to intrude on your visit, but we had some urgent business this afternoon, and Corban insisted on bringing me home.”

His round face was merry, and his handshake was even more practiced than Corban’s had been. If it weren’t for that little talk I’d had with Bran, I’d never have known what he was.