Dead Eye (A Tiger's Eye Mystery Book 1) (18 page)

Jack took a huge bite of dessert. “This is delicious, ma’am.”

Aunt Ruby tasted hers, but then shook her head. “No, it’s a little bit dry. Mike, go get the whipped cream I brought.”

Uncle Mike, his fork on the way to his mouth, looked pained, but put his plate down. “Okay, honey. You baked it, the least I can do is get the whipped cream.”

They shared a smile, and a twinge of envy shot through me. Would anybody ever share a smile like that with me? I looked at Owen and suddenly couldn’t see even the chance of it in our future. Sighing, I put my plate down, suddenly not hungry anymore.

“It is delicious, Mrs. Callahan,” Owen said. “So what do you do, Jack?”

“We’re sort of both in the tooth business, Dr. Snodgrass.”

“You’re a dentist?”

“Not exactly. You fix people’s teeth, and I knock them out.” Jack bared his own very white teeth at Owen, who flinched, and I decided I’d had quite enough of all of them.

I jumped up. “All right. Everybody out. I’m exhausted, and my face hurts, and I’ll clean up the dishes in the morning.”

Aunt Ruby gasped. “Tess, I didn’t raise you to be rude to guests.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” I said, not pointing out that they were all uninvited, because yay me, restraint. “But I’ve never had a black eye before, either, and I have a massive headache, which I think is affecting my mood. Yeah, that’s it. So please, everyone. I’ll call you all tomorrow, except tomorrow is Sunday, so maybe I’ll rest all day and call you Monday.”

Aunt Ruby stood up. “I think you should probably miss church, considering,” she said, saving me the trouble of telling her I planned to do just that. I figured God would forgive me for avoiding the collective well-meaning concern of the Southern United Methodist Women’s group until my face healed.

Jack thanked us for dinner, shook Uncle Mike and Owen’s hands, flashed a wicked smile at me, and left. If I’d known it would be that effective, I’d have started being rude earlier in life.

Aunt Ruby and Uncle Mike kissed me and followed Jack out the door, but Owen lingered after.

“Tess, I know you have a headache, but I think we need to talk.”

I blew out a breath. Clearly, I’d been wrong, and God was punishing me for the church thing. I expected the bolt of lightning any minute.

W
e sat out
on the porch swing, even though it was only about fifty degrees outside; Owen in his jacket and me wrapped up in my afghan.

“I think I’m not who you’re looking for, Tess,” he said, and there was so much kindness in his voice that I wanted to cry. But I didn’t, because he was right.

“I’m not the right person for you either, Owen,” I said, smiling a little. “But I’m glad we met, and I hope we can be friends.”

He leaned over and kissed me—a brief touch of lips, and it was over—and then stood up. “Definitely.”

I wanted to tell him what I knew about him, but I didn’t. Somehow, it felt like the wrong thing to do. Instead, I sat in the swing and watched him walk to his car, and felt suddenly more alone than I’d ever been in my life. It was the right thing to do, but my heart still hurt. Maybe I’d never find “the one.” Maybe I’d get another eight or twelve cats, and live out my life yelling at the neighbor kids to get off my lawn.

But Owen and I hadn’t had the essential spark—the undefinable something that made people write love songs and have wild sex and share secret smiles with each other about dessert after nearly fifty years of marriage.

Jack appeared from around the corner of my house just after Owen’s taillights vanished down the road, and somehow I wasn’t even surprised.

“I thought you left.”

“You know I’m not leaving you alone until we catch this killer or killers. But I wanted to give you some privacy.”

“Thanks. I guess.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Did you love him?” His voice was quiet but carried easily in the cool, crisp night air.

“No, I didn’t love him. But I sort of wished I could love him, and he could love me, if that makes sense,” I admitted, uncharacteristically willing to talk about it. Maybe it was the cover of night, broken only by the spill of golden light from the lamp just inside my window. “I could touch him, and that’s pretty rare for me, after all. Above all, though, he’s a very nice man.”

“It does make sense,” he said, and I wondered if he were thinking about Quinn. “You never saw a vision of his death, then?”

“I did see it, that first day he came into the pawnshop. He was so excited about the chair that he reached out and grabbed my hand.”

He walked up the steps and over to me and held out his hand to help me up. “Did you pass out?”

I didn’t need his help, but I took his hand anyway. Because I could, and because it made me feel less alone. “No, I didn’t pass out. In fact, it was kind of peaceful. He’s going to die when he’s very old, in his bed, surrounded by people who love him. I never told him that, though. It felt wrong.”

Jack pulled me up and all the way against his chest into a hug, which I hadn’t expected, and I cried a little bit, which I also hadn’t expected. He stroked my hair, and then he stood back and opened the door for me.

“That’s the very best way to die, Tess,” he said, and I could hear the wistfulness in his voice. “He’s a lucky man, except for losing you.”

I took a deep breath and headed inside. “Well, looking at it honestly, I was never his to lose. Thank you, though.”

When I got back to the kitchen (I’d lied, there was no way I’d leave all that mess in the kitchen and have to face it Sunday morning), my phone was buzzing so insistently that it was bouncing around on the top of my desk.

“It’s Molly,” I told Jack. “She’s playing at the Rat again. Must be on a break.”

When I answered, I could barely hear her over the loud background noise.

“Hey, it’s crazy here, I’m glad you didn’t come, that Gator guy who used to date Chantal is back in town, he just stabbed Hank, and the sheriff took him to jail.”

“
What
?” I was used to Molly’s rapid-fire speech, but I had to be hearing this wrong.

Jack looked up from the table, where he was clearing dishes, and I waved him over and put the speaker on. “Molly, Jack’s here, can you say that again? Gator is at the Rat? He stabbed Hank Kowalski?”

“They got in a big fight, Gator was really drunk and bellowing about Chantal, and somebody must have told him about Hank and Chantal hooking up. Anyway, they went crazy, and their friends starting beating each other up too, and then suddenly Hank was on the floor bleeding.”

Jack leaned forward. “Is Hank dead?”

“No, it was just a slice on his arm, the EMTs stitched it up and gave him a shot and sent him home. But the sheriff took Gator to jail. It took three deputies to wrestle him into the back seat of the car. Hey, gotta go help pack up equipment. Put ice on your eye.”

And she was gone, leaving me and Jack staring at each other.

“This just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” he said.

I nodded. “I feel like I need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the intersecting lines.”

“I’m pretty sure I saw a whiteboard in Jeremiah’s office. We could use that and try to at least come up with a theory tomorrow.”

I didn’t feel up to committing to the plan just then. I selfishly wanted a day entirely to myself to get some sleep or a mani/pedi or go catch a matinee at the movies. I didn’t want to worry about who was trying to kill anybody for whatever reason, and I definitely didn’t want to have to worry about people trying to kill me.

“Fine,” I finally said, sighing. “Tonight, we clean my kitchen, and tomorrow we analyze clues.”

*

At some point
in the middle of the night, I had a terrible, very lifelike, totally confusing nightmare about monsters overrunning the pawnshop, alligators chasing me down the aisles of Super Target, and a motorcycle gang in a bar fight. I woke up screaming, and sat straight up in bed to the sight of an enormous tiger standing next to my bed, tail swishing.

“You’d think
this
would be the scary part. For most people on the planet, waking up to a tiger would be the nightmare,” I told him, trying to calm down.

He yawned, and I tried not to flinch at the sight of his mouthful of giant teeth. Next to me, Lou had no such pride. She meowed and hid her head under my pillow.

Remnants of my dream floated around in my mind like bizarre puzzle pieces trying to fit themselves together in a lunatic’s landscape. None of it made any sense, at all, so apparently my subconscious was just lumping all of my
scared
in with all of my
crazy
and making nutcase pie in my brain. Except…

“You know what I don’t understand? Walt and Hank are in and out of trouble all the time. The sheriff used to arrest them practically on a monthly basis for something or other. Why would he let Hank go home after a huge brawl like this? Especially since he wasn’t hurt badly enough to have to go to the hospital?”

I looked into Jack’s amber tiger eyes and sighed. “This would be more of a two-way conversation if you’d turn back to human, just a thought. I’m not even sure how much you understand me when you’re like this.”

An electric buzz tingled around and through me, like I’d walked into a supercharged pocket of air, and suddenly Jack was sitting on my bed, staring at me with his green-again eyes.

“I understand everything you’re saying, although I don’t always understand why. For example, the sound of the raccoon family scurrying around outside was far more interesting to me a few minutes ago than the story of the loser Kowalski brothers,” he said. “I don’t get it, either. I know more than a few witches. Spent quite a lot of time with one or two. Olga must be extremely low on the magical power scale if her sons are getting into all this trouble, or she’d find a way to keep them in line.”

“You mean like mind control?” I pulled my legs in closer and hugged my knees, shivering at the thought.

Jack laughed. “No, I mean like threatening to put the whammy on their truck engines, or cause their fishing equipment to malfunction, or turn their beer into swamp water while it’s still in the unopened cans. There are lots of ways to use magic without doing something as completely wrong as mind control. Once you take that step, you’ve gone over the line to black magic, and that has its own really bad consequences.”

“Mrs. Kowalski told me that too. I wonder if Alejandro ever found the black magic witches he was looking for. Although, I can’t imagine that a coven in Miami would have anything to do with the murder of a pawnshop owner in Dead End,” I said.

“None of this makes sense to me. But it’s still the middle of the night. Let’s get some more sleep.”

Suddenly, it hit me that I’d been sitting in the dark, alone in my bedroom with a man. This hadn’t happened in long enough that it was practically a Dear Diary moment. I shivered again, but this time for a different reason, which Jack misunderstood completely, so he handed me the extra blanket at the end of the bed and started to stand up.

“Are you…don’t leave,” I whispered, ducking my head and looking anywhere but at him. “Will you please just sit here with me for a while? I don’t want to be alone with this stuff in my head right now.”

Jack stilled, not moving a muscle for a long moment. Then he nodded and, without saying a word, kicked off his shoes and turned around so he was leaning back on the pillow next to mine.

“I’m sorry. I’m not usually so girly, but—”

“Go to sleep, Tess.” His voice was a warm, soothing rumble next to me, so I curled up, carefully not touching him, and closed my eyes. I was completely sure that I’d never get even a minute’s sleep with Jack in the bed next to me, but at least I felt safe.

The next time I opened my eyes, sunlight was streaming in through my window, and Jack was gone.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Molly sang out from where she was staring into my closet. “We’re going shopping.”

I groaned. “Why do I even bother having a house with a door and a lock? Why don’t I just sleep in the middle of Main Street?”

Molly, dressed in a hot pink sweater, black jeans, and black boots with four-inch heels, turned to look at me, cocking her head to one side. “Is that some kind of riddle? You’d get tire tracks on your ass, that’s why.”

“Right. Sure. Why are you here, again? I thought you’d be sleeping off your late night.” I glanced around, but no human Jack, no tiger, not even a trace of either one remained.

“It’s nearly noon! Get up. You’re buying me lunch at the mall, and we’re finding you a nice, sexy dress now that you’re hanging out with Mr. Totally Delicious all the time.”

I opened my mouth and then shut it again, because I couldn’t really argue with any of that. Or maybe I could, but I realized that I didn’t want to. The shop was closed on Sundays, and there wasn’t any paperwork that couldn’t wait.

After all, even Nancy Drew got to dress up and go hang out with her friends sometimes.

M
aybe I shouldn’t
have had the all-you-can-eat pasta special, because there was definitely more of me than there was of this dress.