Life Guards in the Hamptons (26 page)

“D
O YOU KNOW ANY HYPNOTISTS?” I asked Susan when I went home to drop off Little Red. He’d had a good day, too. He’d peed on every street sign and hydrant in town, barked at every car that passed with a dog in it, and ate Mrs. Terwilliger’s sandwich out of her tote bag when I went to the library to get books on hypnosis. And another one on mythological monsters that I didn’t ask for.

“Grandma says it won’t work.”

Grandma Eve did not believe in modern medicine, the Internet, or the two-party system of government. “How can she know? I’ve heard it’s a respected practice now. All these books say so.”

Susan kept moving things around in the refrigerator, maybe looking for the quiche for lunch. “They tried it on me at the hospital during chemo. They said it could help me relax and not get so many side effects from the drugs. It didn’t work. Grandma says it’s because we have a barrier in our brains.”

“We, as in the Garland family?”

“We, as in Paumanok Harbor talents. It won’t work on Joe if you tell him in advance, or you if you realize someone is going to do it to you. She didn’t know if any of us could be taken unawares. Said it had something to do with protection, so no one could invade our minds without permission or steal our powers.”

That was good to know. I’d always worried that some
of our telepaths could read my thoughts. On the other hand, I kept looking at the picture of those faucets, sure I’d seen them somewhere. “Maybe you could ask your mother if anyone knows a hypnotist anyway. I’d cooperate, if that helped, and if someone I trusted were nearby to keep it honest.” Asking anyone else, like Grant if he ever replied, meant sending a message to DUE to check the rosters, waiting for clearance to open private files, then waiting to see if the esper would come. That could take days, days we didn’t have, not with a life at stake. Not with a vengeful sea serpent on the loose during hurricane season.

“I wish I could recall where I’d seen them. Maybe I flipped a page in a magazine once and I’m wasting my time.”

“While you’re at it, maybe you could recall what you did with my quiche.”

“Will you come with me to a house on Shearwater? Martha thinks she saw a similar bathtub there.”

“A house or the House?” She knew by looking at me. “Not on your life.”

“Then I ate your quiche for breakfast.”

“Both portions?”

I didn’t have to answer. She took another look at my guilty face—or my jiggly ass—and asked, “What if I said I’d go with you?”

“I still ate it for breakfast, but I’d buy you lunch.”

“Not worth it. You owe me lunch, anyway.”

“You’ll have to take a rain check. I need to get to Matt’s by twelve.”

“Why, he turns into a pumpkin at noon?”

“No, but his office closes then and he might go off with Peg and the dogs. I need to talk to him.”

“Well, whatever you said to that bird worked. I slept better than I have in days. And Grandma says the birders aren’t a problem anymore. They’re all too afraid of getting robbed or having their identities stolen. Everyone else is out looking at the shipwreck and watching for new kinds of dolphins.”

“I’ll take the signs down, then, so we don’t scare off any farm stand customers.”

Before that, I made calls and left messages: Could my father have meant hypnosis? Did my mother have enough homes for the greyhounds, because the guy here wasn’t suitable? And Grant again, a long-distance, long message about Martha and monsters and where the hell was he? Then I gathered some old leashes—my supposed reason for calling on Matt—and headed for the door, without Little Red.

“Sorry, pal, but I don’t trust the big pups yet.” Actually, I didn’t trust Little Red not to pick a fight he couldn’t win. The phone rang while I broke a wait-here dog biscuit in pieces for him.

Speak of the devil. Or the devilishly appealing. Matt called me. He needed me. He wanted my company. I put the leashes back in the drawer.

He sounded desperate. “She keeps crying. I told her to make herself at home, she cried. She came to the office, saw a sick cat, and cried. I said the dogs are doing fine, even Mollie, she cried. Frankie wants to show her his new Land Rover, she cried. I need to get out of here before I strangle her, or start crying myself. Let Frankie hand her tissues all afternoon.”

I was laughing, and glowing.

“It’s not funny. I’m running out of tissues. And bedding. More company arrives tomorrow, and I never bought any sheets or blankets for the second guest room. Will you help me?”

“Only if you’ll come with me to a haunted house.”

“Great. That’s my kind of woman. No dinner, no movie. So far we’ve been to a swamp, a sea rescue, and now we’re chasing sheets and specters. You’re a cheap date, lady. I thought I’d have to bribe you with an ice cream cone at least.”

“That, too.” This was a date? To buy bedding for his company? “So who’s coming?”

A marine biologist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute was on the way, an old friend from vet school. An expert in the field, she was coming about the new dolphins.

She? I should help pick out sheets for an old college
buddy who happens to be female? How about cheap ones that scratched and tore when you moved your toes? Or blankets that gave you rashes if you didn’t wash the dye out first? Yup, ugly jealousy ripped through me again and I almost said I didn’t want to go with him, anywhere. Maybe I understood my mother for the first time in my life. She always accused my father of being unfaithful, even when he swore he wasn’t. They’d split up eventually, after screaming at each other for years, which might be why I ended up in a shrink’s office. Did she love him so much she thought every other woman in the world wanted him? A pot-bellied executive? She definitely believed he wanted them.

Maybe I should back out now while I still had a chance, and a spark of sanity. However—I try not to use “however” in my books; too old-fashioned for my readers—however, he intended the marine mammal expert to sleep in her own bed, in a separate room. And I needed him to go to Shearwater Street with me. And I refused to become my mother.

“So are you free?” he asked.

Like a bird, albeit—another word I loved and kids would sneer at—a bird that didn’t know whether it was coming or going. Like Oey. Glub.

I met Matt at his office to save time. The waiting room was empty except for Melissa, who was gathering her purse and keys and sunglasses. Today she wore gray, head to toe: gray tights under a short gray piece of fabric that hardly qualified as a skirt, and a loose gray cross-under-the-boobs blouse that looked like a shroud. Her black hair still had its limp white streaks except, today, silver showed at the tips and temples. She wore heavy black eyeliner, and had heavy dark circles under her eyes. Either she’d given up on the skunk look and decided to go trick or treating as a raccoon, or she hadn’t slept in days.

“Are you all right?”

“What’s it to you?”

Whoa, a rabid raccoon. I backed away. “Sorry, you just look tired.”

She slammed a drawer shut. “It’s this shit job. Dogs messing in the lobby, having to commute to Hampton Bays in the stupid traffic. Now this dork town is all filled with porpoises and stranded passengers. Who gives a rat’s ass?”

“There’s a lost professor, too. We’re searching everywhere. Here, maybe if you look at this picture, you can recognize the faucets. You might have gone to a party there or something.”

Melissa shoved past me without looking. “You can shove it up your—”

Matt came out from the back. “Hey, Sissy, no call to be so rude. Two of my clients grumbled about you this morning.”

“Those jerkoffs can all go fu—”

I broke in before things got uglier. “‘Sissy’?”

Matt tried to put his arm around her. She cringed, but stayed beside him. I guess she needed the job, jerkoffs or not.

“Her baby brother couldn’t say Melissa, so he called her sis, or sissy. It stuck.”

“Like a piece of dog shit on your shoe. No one outside the family uses it, so don’t get any ideas.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.” You euthanized animals with rabies; you did not make pets out of them. “Melissa’s too pretty. Sweet, like in mellifluous.” And Sissy Kovick didn’t sound half as hip as Melissa tried to be.

Matt squeezed her shoulder. “I told her lack of sleep is making her grouchy, but she’s young. Kids party. We forget.”

We forgot a lot, these days. Like I forgot to warn her about Axel Vanderman before she flounced out of the office.

Matt shut the door behind her and put the closed sign out. “Whew. I guess she’s not happy here, so far away from her friends and all. She seemed content last month when she was dating some guy, excited even. He broke up with her last week. Poor kid.”

“What kind of man wants to put up with that kind of— That is, did you meet the guy?”

“No, they always met near Hampton Bays. That’s what she told me.”

“Well, it’s only for a few more months if she’s going back to college in January. And maybe she’ll get over him by then.”

“I’ll miss her.”

Now that’s kinship loyalty, missing the wormy apple on your family tree. “Um-hmm.”

He knew I didn’t see any big loss. “She’s great at the patient records and payrolls and bank accounts. I’ll have to hire both a receptionist and a part-time bookkeeper when she leaves.”

“Yeah, but you’ll keep all your clients, which is more than I can say if Melissa stays.”

“She’ll get over her disappointment long before then. You’ll see a different kid when she does.”

Sure, maybe she’ll be human by then. “So which first, sheets or search for Professor Harmon?”

“You really think he’s alive? And in Paumanok Harbor? It’s a long way from Montauk, not even on the same body of water as where the boat rolled over.”

“I know, but we’ve got to look.”

“Then let’s do that first so you can relax.”

How could I relax if we didn’t find the professor? We needed him. I tried to explain it to Matt while he drove, how the wave was no wave, how the dolphins weren’t real, how Oey’d tried to warn us. How the sea god’s enemy could wipe out Paumanok Harbor in one tsunami. How the local psychics showed me the professor lived.

“And Dr. Harmon fixed the Bermuda Triangle when he was still in college. I think it’s the same monster wreaking havoc again.”

We almost hit a tree. “Oh, boy. Listen, a couple of weeks ago I was perfectly normal. I thought the world was, too, following all the usual rules of physics and logic I’d believed my whole life. Then I met you and the universe turned upside down. I saw impossible things, felt totally new sensations, understood the native people weren’t like you and me. Well, not like me.”

“You’re like them now.”

“That’s what you say.”

“You saw the fishbird. They can’t.”

“Okay, reality broke its boundaries and we moved into the
Twilight Zone
. But this … ? This new scenario is really, really hard to take. Horrific beasts, epic battles, vanishing professors.” He shook his head. “I can’t wrap my brain around it.”

And he hadn’t met the House yet.

I could feel the atmosphere change as we drove along Shearwater Street. No kids played in the yards, no gardeners raked or weeded. The air felt different. Or maybe that was my skin crawling, trying to push the car in another direction.

Matt took my hand when we got out of the car and walked up the gravel path to the white colonial. I tried to stop it from shaking. My hand, not the all-too-solid building.

“Come on, it’s only a house. If no one’s home, we can look in the windows and shout for your missing person.”

No one was ever home here. That was the problem.

Matt rang the doorbell, then banged the knocker for good measure. We heard them echo, but nothing else, so he rapped and rang again.

A minute later “Hit the Road, Jack!” boomed in our eardrums. The small wooden portico we stood under really was shaking now. “And do not come back anymore anymore anymore.”

“Some juvenile delinquent’s playing tricks with a karaoke machine,” Matt said, when he caught up with me back at the car where I was tugging at the door handle of the locked SUV. “Nothing else.”

“You’re not scared?”

“I’m too dumb to be scared of a silly prank. Come on, let’s try again.”

This time when he pushed the doorbell he also shouted, “We just want to ask if a professor is here, a Dr. Harmon. We do not wish to bother you. We’ll go as soon as you answer that one question. Otherwise we’ll call the cops.”

“Shame,” sang out. “Shame on you.” Now the door trembled. Not just my knees or the porch roof, but Matt’s hand shook, too.

“That was no karaoke machine.”

His face turned a shade paler. I’m sure mine had no color at all. How could it, when my heart stopped pumping blood at the first notes?

“Listen, Mr. House.” Matt banged his fist on the door. “You can’t scare us away like you do everyone else.”

It can’t? I was ready to run home if that’s what it took to get out of here. If the House wanted the car, fine.

Matt jiggled the doorknob. I prayed it was locked. Matt stepped back. “I can’t believe we’re talking to a house, but you ask him, Willy. Explain who you are.”

I cleared my throat but nothing came out. Matt squeezed my hand. “You can do it.”

Easy for him to say. He had a backbone.

He squeezed my hand harder. I tried again. “I … I am Willow Tate. They call me the Visualizer, but I can’t see you. That is, I don’t want to see inside you. I just need to know the professor is safe. And talk to him about defeating an ancient adversary of his. We’ll take him away if he’s trespassing. Please?”

The old timbers sighed. And then they sang something about tally men and bananas and wanting to go home.

“Huh?” Matt and I looked at each other. Was the House calling us bananas? Now I got insulted. House was the crazy one, not us.

“Does that mean Dr. Harmon is here or not?”

The wall sang again. This time about having no bananas today.

“Do you know where he is?”

Now it was “Home on the Range.”

I thought a second, now that we didn’t seem to be in imminent danger. “Do you mean he is at the ranch where they want to bring horses back? Harborview? Or maybe Third House in Montauk, where they tried to start a buffalo herd?”