Chapter Eighteen
EVELYN WATCHED ME watching Jacob head off to meet his fate. “You’re concerned about him,” she observed.
Empaths.
I cocked an eyebrow at her.
“No one likes dealing with their boss,” she said. “Even when you have a decent relationship, they’re still an authority figure. And that comes with all kinds of baggage. But he’ll be fine. He’s nowhere near as apprehensive as you are.”
So most empaths would believe. But if Jacob ever decided to go civilian, he’d have a great career as a poker player.
“You don’t know him like I do,” I said vaguely, and headed off to start tackling the paperwork.
It was a slog. It always is, when I have a fat load of “nothing” to write up.
I found myself missing Carl yet again. He might not be much of a conversationalist, at least not when he wasn’t role-playing a normal person.
But he didn’t balk over doing the tedious parts of the job.
Eventually, Jacob rejoined me. I wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d spent with Laura, either, as he found me thumb-deep in helping Blip wend his way through a “solar flare of distraction.”
“Are you…playing a game?”
“I’m focusing,” I said. “Well, in theory, anyhow.” I slipped out my earbuds and tapped out the remaining few lines of my lackluster report. It would have to do. I hit send.
I couldn’t really ask him how his meeting with Laura went.
Not while Big Brother was listening. So on the way home, we chatted about the same things we always did in the car.
What’s for dinner. When the electric bill was due.
Whose turn it was to pick up the dry cleaning.
Normal couple things, we’d both agreed. But I cared so little about them, I was relieved to stop for “groceries” so we could finally talk.
We left our phones in the car, picked the cart with the wonkiest wheel, and strode up and down the aisle where the canned music was the loudest. “What did Laura want?” I asked him.
“Just what she said. A debriefing.”
I gave him the side-eye. “And what else?”
“That’s it,” he said simply. Which only made me more suspicious. What I’d told Evelyn was true, no one knew Jacob like I did. And he was obviously holding back. But if he wasn’t going to tell me under the cover of the squeaky wheel, I couldn’t force it out of him.
“Once the Boswell case is done,” I said, “let’s take a vacation. Pick somewhere and I promise I won’t complain.”
“I don’t need a vacation,” Jacob said.
Maybe not, but I sure did. “Until Evelyn goes back to National.”
The cart squalled to a sudden halt. “Why do you say that?”
Because then he could stop fixating on the SPECs and get his head back in the game, I thought. But I couldn’t come right out and say it. There are times to argue with Jacob by disagreeing with him head-on and giving him a few compelling reasons. This, I sensed, was not one of those times.
“She’s just distracting, is all,” I said.
What I meant was that she was distracting Jacob—keeping him from having his eyes on the prize and doing his job.
But Jacob is patently unused to being criticized, and he took it to mean that I was the one suffering from distraction.
“Agreed. It’s hard enough trying to pin down a shifty repeater without an audience from National. ”
“Well....” I said in my own defense.
“After all, it’s not like you’re just some kind of a machine. A piece of equipment to point at something and see if it’s haunted. You’re a human being.”
Obviously. But I didn’t see how suddenly the hangups I was avoiding talking about belonged to me.
“You’re right,” Jacob said. About what? No clue. “A reset would be a good idea for everyone. Get back to your usual way of doing things. Just you and your talent. Rested and fresh.”
“I’m plenty rested,” I said.
“You don’t need to be brave with me,” Jacob reassured me.
“Hold on, who was being—?” I rattled the cart.
“All I meant was that—” I very nearly blurted out that I missed Carl.
Because Carl wouldn’t be circling around the scientist hoping for a chance to play with the cool toys.
I grabbed a few random cans and threw them in the cart with a clatter.
“I was just used to things the way they were. With a partner who knows my standard operating procedure, an app that does what I expect it to, and ghosts I can see until they’re exorcised. ”
“Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it’s necessary.” Jacob pulled a can of sauerkraut out of the cart and put it back on the shelf. “You don’t need that app.”
“It was helpful,” I insisted.
“When we first met, you were so inundated with ghosts, you needed Auracel to turn them off. And now you can’t see a repeater without an app?”
“Since when are you an expert on what I should and shouldn’t be able to see, when you can’t see anything at all?”
Hurt flashed in Jacob’s eyes. I hadn’t meant to snap at him—I just wasn’t any good at handling criticism.
Not over an ability that normally came to me as easily as breathing.
We abandoned our cart of random canned goods mid-aisle and stomped to the car in silence.
And not because we suspected our vehicle was bugged.
By the time we got home, neither of us was great company.
We ate leftovers in sullen silence, both feeling wounded and misunderstood.
And I headed up to bed early while Jacob was filled with the sudden urge to clean the kitchen.
I lay in bed, glaring at Blip, wishing I had the psychic power to turn back time and stop the app from updating.
Meanwhile, Jacob expressed his displeasure by walking around extra hard and slamming cabinet doors.
Blip did a stupid cartwheel. Wanna coast into dreamland?
What I wanted was to punch that damn goldfish in the nose.
Did goldfish even have noses?
I sighed.
I felt like a heel. The only thing Jacob had ever wanted was to be a psych.
And the fact that he’d been one all along was less satisfying than finding out that Dorothy’d been in Kansas the whole time and Oz was just a metaphor.
Because in Jacob’s mind, psychic powers were something you could see and hear and put to good use.
Not vague impressions that left you second-guessing everything.
So, if anyone should get why I found the Boswell apartment phenomenally frustrating, it was him.
Blam—a drawer shut. The silverware drawer, judging by the faint rattle. Then the trash can closed with a firm plastic clap. Amazing how specific sounds could be. Even filtered through the floorboards.
As I considered this, a snippet from our interview with Kostic bobbed up to the surface of my consciousness. He’d been visiting the downstairs neighbor, and the TV was too loud on the floor above them.
I hopped out of bed and hurried downstairs, finding Jacob scrubbing at the kitchen counter like he wanted to make it scream uncle. “We haven’t talked to all the neighbors,” I said.
He looked up and his expression shifted from annoyance to curiosity at the excitement in my tone. “What do you mean?”
“The haunted apartment. Maybe something was playing on TV at a time of day the tenant was at work. Not because it was haunted.” Not yet, anyhow. “But because there was someone home who wasn’t on the lease.”
Jacob messaged HQ to request a writeup on the apartments on the floor below Boswell’s.
I suspected he was eager to think about something other than the frustration at our lackluster performance—I sure as hell know I was.
But I could hardly act like the conversation over the shopping cart had never happened.
“Jacob….”
He looked up from the text he’d just sent, eyebrows raised.
I cleared my throat awkwardly and decided to lead with those three little words that would melt anyone’s heart. “You were right.”
“We’re both under a lot of stress,” he began, but I plowed ahead.
“Binaural beats seem to help me focus, but now that the app is all screwed up, it’s not doing me any good.
I was so hung up on wishing it could be like it used to that I didn’t see how much of my time it was wasting.
No more app. No more worrying about how things might be different.
I’m forgetting about the damn app and getting to the bottom of this apartment once and for all. ”
Jacob nodded slowly, digesting my apology. “You know that I’m here for you. However you need me.”
Unless it meant dealing with all the red tape—though I didn’t mention that. Jacob and I were a team where it counted. He might not like paperwork any more than I did. But I trusted him to have my back, even when we disagreed about the particulars. And that was worth everything.
The next morning, a dossier on the downstairs neighbor was waiting on our phones, so Jacob and I headed back to the apartment building in hopes of finding out something useful.
Murray Haskel was a retired widower who’d been in the building for nearly a dozen years, which meant he’d lived below Kostic, Sledge and Boswell. He’d never incurred so much as a parking infraction, so I expected he wouldn’t mind treating us to a little chat.
And how wrong I was.
When we knocked on his door, he opened it only as far as the chain, and lined us up with one squinty eye. “I’m not interested.”
“I’m not selling anything.” I pulled out my ID.
“Victor Bayne.” I left off the “Agent” and also the “FPMP,” hoping a friendlier approach would soften the guy up.
It didn’t, not really. But at least he didn’t slam the door.
I explained I had some questions about the apartment.
I told him it would really help us out if he could tell us what he knew about his upstairs neighbors.
And I tried to commiserate about how thin the walls were in “old buildings like this.”
It was a pretty good spiel. But Haskel wasn’t biting.
“No idea who lives up there.”
“Not now,” I clarified. “The apartment is vacant. Erm…it is vacant as far as you can tell, isn’t it?” The squinty eye narrowed. “No voices, no TV?”
The distant strain of a laugh track filtered down from the third-shift worker’s place.
Haskel looked me dead in the eye and said, “I never hear anything.” And before I could wedge a foot in the door, he shut it with a forceful click.
“Let’s get Evelyn,” Jacob said. “We could really use an empath.”
“And give this guy time to suddenly remember he’s got somewhere else to be?
” I planted my hands on my hips and glared at the closed door.
Jacob had the good grace to not insist on heading back to HQ.
I swallowed my pride and said, “Maybe you should give it a shot.” After all, I wasn’t the only one to fall hard for Jacob’s charms.
Jacob mirrored my stance. “I don’t think he’d open up that door for anything.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” a voice piped in from the stairwell as someone tromped up to the landing.
A twentyish woman with a pierced septum rounded the corner to join us.
Her sweatshirt was ratty and her Doc Martens had seen better days, but her lime green manicure was pristine.
She shouldered between Jacob and me, brazen as you please, banged on Haskel’s door with a knock any cop would envy, and bellowed, “Doordash!”
Haskel’s door jerked open about three and a half inches. The delivery woman fell back a step. “Well?” Haskel demanded. “Hand it over.”
The woman cracked her gum thoughtfully and glanced down at the McDonald’s bag in her hands. “Doesn’t fit.”
A hand shoved through the door crack and mad a grab for the bag. Doordash leaned casually to one side and left him swiping at air. “What’s the matter, is your door broken? Maybe you should think about that before you enter 300 characters of custom instructions.”
“The last time I okayed someone to leave it at the door, they practically pitched it at the front of the building—from across the street! Now give it over before my hotcakes go solid.”
“Do you think I enjoy walking up all those stairs? Like I do it for my health? I’ll tell you something. Most people appreciate it when someone goes above and beyond. But not only have you never once tipped me—you went out of your way to three-star my last delivery.”
“What do you want, a parade? It was average!”
“Anything below five is a problem! Anything below five!”
“How was I to know?” Haskel made another ineffective swipe. “Just give me the damn food or else you’ll count yourself lucky to see three stars again!”
“You want your food?” The woman flashed a sinister smile, then deliberately let go of the bag.
It dropped to the floor with a papery rustle…
and then she proceeded to stomp it like a flamenco dancer.
When she picked it up, it was flatter than a single flapjack and a drop of glistening syrup dangled from the corner.
“Oh look, it fits,” she said, and shoved it through the crack.
The door slammed shut without another word.
“That was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever seen,” I said. “But won’t you get in trouble for it?”
Doordash gave an easy shrug. “Nah. I quit yesterday—I just spotted one of the other drivers and let him think he was charming me into doing him a little favor. Creep. This was my going-away present to myself. Now, what was it you wanted to know about this place?”
Turned out, Natalia—I could hardly keep calling her Doordash, what since she’d quit and all—had been delivering to the building for nearly three years. Long enough to remember Kostic (a “sweet old guy”), Boswell (“tin foil hat”), and, most importantly….
“Her name was Sarah.”
Jacob’s eyes narrowed. “That’s some memory you’ve got.”
Natalia shrugged. “Usually I only remember the really good, or really bad tippers.” She cut her eyes meaningfully to Haskel’s door. “But one time I dropped off some Chinese takeout and she answered the door in super dark sunglasses. And the name Sunglass Sarah kinda stuck.”
“And it was Sarah’s name on the delivery?” I said.
“Must’ve been—it’s not like we had a big conversation.”
“And you’re sure it happened, when?”
“After the old guy moved out.”
I wished I could have given Natalia all the stars. Because not only did I know for certain there’d been a woman in that apartment—but our team in Records now had somewhere to start looking for proof.
Today’s visit had been more fruitful than we dared hope, no thanks to Murray Haskel. I slid a card under his door anyway, in case he had a change of heart… But I wasn’t about to hold my breath.