Storm in a Teacup (33 page)

"Do that." Laura hangs up her phone. "I'll ask the others if they heard from her."

By the others, she means the pair of staff witches she has who work here part time. It's doubtful they'd know anything more about Alice than I do, but maybe she called one of them if she'd had an emergency.

I head back to my desk, almost touched by Laura's concern. For someone who rags on me for missing time, she's quick to assume the best of Alice.

Maybe I ought to be offended instead of touched.

Mediators who don't show up to work are just assumed dead.

By three-thirty in the afternoon, no one has managed to find so much as a lipstick smudge to hint at Alice's whereabouts. No family, and from what we can see, no friends.

Maybe I judged her a little too snottily over her parade of boy toys.

Loneliness is its own punishment.

I don't think I realized how lonely I was until Mason plunked his bare ass on my sofa.

No one at the office has gotten anything done today, something I'm reminded of as I sit with my elbows propped against the cool laminate of the conference table to watch Laura argue with the cops.

"No one can find her. Isn't that the definition of missing person?" Laura pauses, mouth open, tip of her tongue twitching like she got cut off and words are jostling to get out. "To hell with forty-eight hours. She doesn't have any family. You can't do anything?"

I've got to give Laura her due — talking to cops like that is something usually reserved for really stupid fuckers and Mediators.

Laura hangs up the phone. "They won't help."

"I figured as much." I've seen enough procedurals to know the forty-eight hours spiel. "I'm going to go over to that old lady's house. See if she's seen Alice."

For once, Laura doesn't question me leaving in the middle of the day. She gives one sharp jerk of her chin that I take to signify a nod.
 

The streets are almost empty in the mid-afternoon lull. I reach Hazel's house in seven minutes, and I don't even have to knock to see that no one is home. It's the first time I've been by here where the house was empty. The boards of her small porch creak under my feet. I peer through the window. The curtains are drawn, but they're made of a light, filmy gauze. Her living room looks just as I saw it last time, but lacking both Alice and the buzz of tension. Clean. Organized. Decorated with oddities.
 

The necktie chair skirt mocks me through the mist of gauzy curtain.

Hazel's not here, and neither is Alice.

I never did get Hazel's phone number. No way for me to call her, which means I'll have to stop back later.
 

I head back to the office. Laura bustles out of the conference room, shoulders straight and tight until she sees me. Then the air goes out of her stance, and she slumps against the wall.
 

"You didn't find her."

"No one was there." I flop down in the reception chair, looking around Alice's desk. "Have you gone through this yet? She might have a datebook or something. A list of conquests. Voodoo dolls. I don't know. Anything."

Laura shakes her head. "Go ahead and look."

I pull open the drawers one by one. Post-its, paperclips, a couple legal pads of varying sizes. Nothing personal except for a tiny blue rubber ducky with devil horns that sits on top of her computer monitor. Everything is tidily arranged. Alice always took care to do her job well, even if we never really thanked her for it.

I shouldn't put her in the past tense. She could have gone off on a bender and is sleeping it off. "Did you happen to check the drunk tank?"

"Alice didn't drink." From the other side of the desk, Laura's eyes look down on me. In more ways than one. "If you'd ever talked to her for more than five seconds, you'd have known that."

Ugh. I get it. I get it. I'm detached. Just because Laura's right doesn't mean I don't already feel awful about it. And I do. I was so used to our receptionists bailing — at least indirectly because of me — that I didn't take the time to get to know her. Now I have to find her, and I don't know enough about her to do it well.

If she hopped a plane to Tahiti, I wouldn't be able to follow her. That's why Mediators don't make good investigators. Hard to follow leads when you can't, you know. Follow.

There are two drawers left to check. The first contains a box of tampons that also houses a box of condoms tucked in with the regulars and supers. I raise an eyebrow, but push the box to the side. A tube of bright red lipstick. A mini hairbrush. A hot pink makeup bag.

I pull the zipper on the makeup bag. It only contains another lipstick, a compact, and a small plastic tube with a few cotton swabs. And a travel mouthwash, some of which has spilled in the bag, giving off hints of wintergreen.

Tucking everything back into the bag, I arrange it all in the drawer just as I found it. No datebook, no anything. Futile hope; everyone uses their phones for those things now.
 

The last drawer holds a couple pairs of still-packaged sheer stockings, a bottle of clear nail polish, and a pair of fuzzy slippers with ducks on them.

"Her feet got cold at the desk because the AC vent's right under it," Laura says. "She wore those sometimes."

I never noticed.
 

I frown at the drawer. Nothing I can use to find her.
 

Laura turns to go back to her office.

"Wait." I kick the drawer shut with my right foot and hop up.
 

Laura stops and turns to look at me. "What?"

"Her phone. She had a smartphone, right?"

"Yes. Your point?"

"My point is that if she has it with her, we might be able to track it." I waggle the mouse, and the desktop computer whirs to life. "Do you know her personal email address?"

I tap out the website into the browser and enter the address Laura gives me. AliceInChains. Cute.

The password is a sticking point. "Any idea?"

Laura shakes her head.
 

I lift the keyboard. We keep the system passwords written on a taped-on sticky. Sure enough, Alice added the password for her work email. Duckling48.
 

If she's anything like most people, she uses the same password for everything.

I type it into the FindMyPhone page.
 

It's correct.

A map of the United States zooms in by itself, toward the east, centering over Tennessee.
 

At least she didn't go to Tahiti.

Nashville sprouts up on the screen as the view veers away from downtown. There's the Parthenon, The Hole...

My heart gives a hiccup before the screen even stops.

Alice's phone is at Hazel Lottie's house.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

For the second time in an hour, I'm standing on Hazel's front porch, trying to burn holes in her gauzy curtains with my eyeballs.

I can't see any evidence that she's been home since I was last here.
 

There's also no evidence of an alarm system.

I pull up the welcome mat. No key. There are a few planters of pansies on the porch, but they're not hiding any keys either.

The screen door squawks when I pull it open, and I twist the knob.

It turns easily under my hand. I want to snort. Old Hazel apparently isn't worried about anyone coming in to steal her denim coasters or other hobby projects.

I close the door behind me, nostrils prickling at a strange odor. Nothing looks wrong in here. Everything is in place. Nothing overturned or smashed. I duck into the kitchen, where the smell strengthens. It's not the tang of blood that makes me sniff about like a hound. It's more acidic. Grating instead of sharp.

Hazel keeps her kitchen as pristine as the rest of her home. But there's a smear on the floor, dried and crusted over. It's a pale orange and looks like someone did a hasty clean-up on it, judging by the way it's smeared across a foot long chunk of olive green linoleum. If she'd had paler flooring, I might not have noticed.

Crouching down, I give another experimental sniff. The acid-y odor is there, a little stronger, but stale. Like old bile.

Vomit.
 

I'm looking at a dried, half-wiped puddle of puke.

As far as bodily fluids go, barf is at the bottom of my list along with the stuff that comes out the other end.

And as far as clues go, this one's about as useful as it is pine-fresh. Which is to say, not at all.

I walk back into the living room. Each time I've been here, I was settled on the couch. I sit in the same spot again, looking at the chair across from me where I last saw a very confused Alice.

The chair skirt of neck ties still makes me want to upchuck, but I resist the urge. Above the chair is the same shelf of knickknacks and tchotchkes. I stand and walk over to the shelf, plucking a lumpy figurine at random to look at it.

I almost drop it.
 

At first glance, I thought they were gargoyles. Little critters made of stone to ward off evil.

They're not gargoyles.

They're demons.

I'm holding a tiny slummoth. The rest cover almost every breed of demon I've ever seen.
 

Why would an old lady who makes household crafts out of old clothing have a shelf full of demon figures?

The shelf looks so innocuous from across the room. I never would have thought to look closer.

I replace the mini-demon with a shaking hand. I don't like the thought that swirls in my mind, trying to coalesce. Instead of letting it, I ignore the prickles of unease and walk down the short hallway. Four doors. One's a closet. One's probably the bathroom. Which leaves two bedrooms.
 

The first door I open is the bathroom. It smells like Ivory soap and grandma. The vomit-odor doesn't reach this far. I shut the bathroom door and pull open the next.

It's clearly a guest room and Hazel's craft room combined. The dark orange walls are the color of the sunset, matched by the quilted cover on Hazel's sewing machine that sits in one corner. Clear plastic boxes of fabric swatches make a tidy pile next to the sewing table. Scissors, thread, seam rippers — every instrument is arranged in almost military precision.
 

A double bed takes up one wall. There's a dent in one pillow, and the sheet lolls out from under a salmon-colored quilt that has several rumples as if someone got out from under it and jerked it up to the pillow without any attempt at making it pretty.

Two hasty marks in an orderly house. Hazel's far from hasty. I think of the constant smudge of lipstick on Alice's tooth. This looks like Alice. I step closer to the bed. There's an end table on the opposite side, and it holds an unplugged alarm clock. No bright digital numbers. Frowning, I make my way over to it. Alice's phone is on the floor, plugged in and fully charged.

Alice spent the night here?
 

What would make her vomit on the kitchen floor?

Now that I'm on the other side of the room, I see the closet. I step back around the bed and pull back the gliding door, which accordions into four hinged panels.

There are no hanging clothes, no moth balls, nothing normal.

Instead the inside of the closet is stocked with shelves. No. Not shelves. Cubby holes, like you'd see in a kindergarten classroom. They're numbered. Ten high by ten wide. One hundred smallish squares. They're filled up to number eighty-three.

I don't know what I'm looking at. The cubbies each contain something small. One has a scarf, another a necklace. I peer closer. Number forty-seven has a CD in a jewel case. The Righteous Dark.

Lena Saturn's band.

My throat feels like I've taken a blow dryer to it. I swallow, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
 

Box eighty-three.
 

It holds a tube of bright red lipstick. Identical to the one I found in Alice's desk today.

I take a step back. Then another. My knees feel slushy, like there's nothing in them but half-liquid ice. I sit down on the edge of the bed, looking at the grid of lives turned into trophies. Are they trophies? Am I looking at a shrine?