Chapter 38 Clarice
CLARICE
Noah proved to be a massive, humorless man in a black suit who smelled like cleaning fluid and peppermints, while Aiden was smaller, nervous, and bespectacled.
They were driving a black SUV and came to the door with disciplined caution.
Clarice invited them in while she shut off the fireplace and turned the heat back down.
“There’s not much I can do about the French doors,” she sighed.
“The whole place is probably going to freeze solid.”
“It’s a crime scene, ma’am,” Aiden pointed out. “Please stop touching things.” Clarice locked the door behind them carefully, as if it mattered, given the hole on the other side.
Juliette’s safe house was a completely unremarkable family home in the Grove neighborhood. Clarice noted the high privacy fence and the nice snowy landscaping. It was a good location and a nice big house. It would fetch a high price on the current market.
“We don’t have rooms for everyone to have their own space, or enough agents to protect everyone in their own homes,” Aiden explained. “You’ll have to bunk together for a bit. The kitchen is stocked with basics.”
“I’m starving,” Clarice said as she scrambled from the car. Her stomach was in miserable knots of emptiness.
Gil met them at the front door and Bruno scooped him up in his arms and clung to him until Gil squirmed to get down. “You’re SQUEEZING me! I got a POPSICLE and rode on a BUS.” He didn’t seem to notice Clarice at all.
Clarice recognized a few of the people, mostly from her binder of interest, and Bruno introduced the rest. Vivian was dishwater blonde and buxom, bouncing a fussy older baby.
Logan was talking earnestly to Juliette about protecting a farm.
A penguin was waddling around with a filly and a puppy, and several other kids were toddling and shrieking and pelting around.
For them, this was clearly a giant festive sleepover, and the happy atmosphere was genuinely contagious, if quite crowded.
A figure at Clarice’s elbow proved to be Weird Wendy from the DMV. “If you want some food, there’s a pizza in the kitchen that’s going fast. Darius has already had four slices.”
“Five!” Darius corrected from the couch where he was hunched over his phone. “Hi, Dr. Martin.”
“I had TWO!” Gil crowed. Then he was back to the races down the long hallways with the other kids.
Clarice trailed after Bruno into the kitchen.
He introduced her to Chloe, who was talking sternly to the fuzzy baby penguin who was now splashing in the puddles that had melted from someone’s snowy boots, and Addison, who was cradling an infant.
Clarice desperately wanted a peek and a cuddle, but wasn’t sure it would be welcome if she asked.
Was she the only human here? She wondered what they all were.
A big Black man was taking another pizza out of the oven. That was Roderick, Addison’s husband; Clarice knew him as a local plumber who sometimes did odd jobs for Veronica. “Hot!” he warned. A little red-haired girl folded her arms at him. “Not hot,” she scoffed. “Not hot at all.”
“Well don’t touch, okay Lucy?”
She looked like she might protest, but Gil hollered from the hallway, “WE’RE PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK!” and she turned to join the play.
“WAIT FOR GABBY!” a little brown-skinned girl wailed, falling down onto four legs as a wolf pup to follow. Clarice tried not to stare at her transformation.
“This pizza is adult-temperature right now, you want a slice?” Roderick’s gaze was appraising, but not unfriendly.
Clarice came shyly forward. “Two, please. If there’s enough.”
“Plenty. You?”
“Yes, please,” Bruno said. “I’ll start with two. I skipped lunch and nearly froze to death several hours ago and that apparently works up an appetite.”
Clarice had forgotten that her wrists had red marks around them from the zip-ties until she saw them when she reached out her hands to take a plate from Roderick.
“You didn’t tell me you’d gotten hurt!” Bruno said accusingly.
“It wasn’t like I was the one dying of hypothermia,” Clarice said, tucking her sleeves back down. “You had a lot going on.”
“What happened at Tiny Paws?” Bruno asked, after wolfing down his first slice.
Roderick gave Clarice an appraising glance, then looked back at Bruno.
“They were expecting to have the element of surprise, but they were the ones that got the shock. The kids had all been bussed out before they got there, and instead of story time, they busted in on a few armed agents and a collection of pissed off shifter parents.”
“I would have liked to have seen that,” Bruno said, sounding surprisingly bloodthirsty. No wonder, since it was his kid they were coming to kidnap.
“Olivia was the real star of the show,” a man named Ian pointed out proudly. No one bothered to explain why, as if they all knew and didn’t want Clarice to know. She tried not to feel left out.
“Thought those goons were going to piss themselves,” Roderick chortled. “’Scuse my language.” He had an arm around Addison and was smiling down at their baby.
Olivia, a curvy Latina woman in a T-shirt that said “O Mg” as periodic elements looked quite satisfied. “I’m not happy I had to do it, but oh man, was it worth the look on their faces.”
“No one wanted a bunch of bodies to explain,” Juliette said chidingly, “or it could have gone quite badly. They got cocky, thinking they could get in and right out, and we got lucky. I wish we’d been able to detain them, but we just didn’t have the numbers or the sit-rep to make it happen without—”
A fresh faced girl with dark hair tripped in and asked politely for a piece of pizza with a charming lisp.
“We’ll talk more,” Roderick promised. “After the kids are down.”
Getting kids down sounded fine in premise, but reality was a whole different ballgame.
They laid out a romp room with pads and air mattresses and blankets until it was one lumpy swamp of cartoon characters and princesses between the couches, each kid with their own designated space, more carefully negotiated than any land dispute Clarice had ever researched.
Clarice took one look inside and backed carefully away to let the parents take turns tucking in, reciting silly rhymes, and kissing foreheads before taking the obstacle course back out to the hall.
Clarice helped clean up in the kitchen, but couldn’t resist ducking out to watch Bruno cover Gil with an Iron Man sleeping bag and scrunch the pillow under his head. They were near enough to the door that Clarice could hear Gil quietly ask, “Is everything okay, Daddy?”
“Everything is just fine, kiddo.”
“Where are your glasses?”
“I lost them in a swimming pool,” Bruno said.
Gil gave a shout of laughter. “THAT’S FUNNY!”
“Quiet now, we’re going to sleep.”
One of the kids across the room gave a fake snore.
“I need a drink!” a peeping voice called.
“I have to pee!”
“I live in a pineapple under the sea!”
Giggles erupted.
“It’s sleepy time, everyone!” A quiet form had come up behind Clarice and spoke gently now: Cherry, the owner of the day care. “Do you want me to tell you a story?”
There was a chorus of agreement.
“You have to lie down, then, and close your eyes, and image yourself in a green field of grass.”
“Are there SPIDERS?” Gil wanted to know. Bruno shushed him.
“There can be spiders only if you invite them,” Cherry said. “They can be your friends, if you want. Because this is a story about friends, but they don’t know that yet…”
Bruno got up and drew Clarice out of the doorway as Cherry settled into a rocking chair and began to quietly tell a story about a cricket and a crow who saw the field in a very different way. For one, the field was a short green carpet, for the other a tall forest of grass blades.
Clarice wanted to stay and hear the rest of the story, but Noah was suddenly looming in the hall before them, holding two suitcases—one of them very familiar. “We brought a selection of your things,” he said gruffly.
“You went to my apartment? You went through my stuff? Did you meet my cat?” Horatio was probably really pissed that Clarice hadn’t come home on time to feed him.
Noah showed off scratches across the back of his hand. “An admirable defender of your space,” he said, as if he was genuinely impressed. “I filled his food dish, topped off his water, and scooped his litter.”
Clarice was a little less mad that he’d rummaged through her things, knowing what he’d gone through.
“Did you find my spare glasses, I hope?” Bruno breathed a sigh of relief when Noah handed them over from a shirt pocket. “I feel like I’ve been walking around in a fog. It’s unnerving.”
“Your room is this way.” Noah led them down the hallway to a small bedroom with one queen bed taking most of the space.
“Oh,” Clarice said, realizing that he’d carried both of the suitcases in there on purpose. “I guess we’re bunkmates.”
There was no time to analyze the only one bed situation she was now in, because Noah had a familiar binder in his hands. “We’ll need you to explain this, Ms. Turner.”