Chapter 28
I cleaned up after myself in the pub kitchen and stowed the empties from Quin and Jim in the dishwasher, but I couldn’t face sweeping the floors. Not today, Satan. It had been the longest day in the history of days. Time for bed.
Up at the apartment door, though, the dogs met me with the big eyes, and I knew there would be a note from Oona asking if I wouldn’t mind feeding and walking them again, thaaaaaaanks.
Only about the third or fourth night she’d been out since I moved in. Her life was a mystery to me. What had she done with the dogs before I moved in?
Not like I was in mourning or anything.
But a walk would do me some good, I figured, and maybe that was what Oona thought, too, that my chakras needed a bracing walk.
I harnessed up the dogs, and let them into the alley with the usual prayers. Outside, it was already midnight-dark, even though it was still only early evening. We slid over black ice to the police tape pulled across the alley. Were we not supposed to cross it?
Promising myself we’d come back through McPhee’s, I ducked under the tape and quickly out the other side.
Did the five-second rule work for forensics?
On the street, I let the dogs pull me along wherever they wanted to go. My hands were freezing, pinched and red from the cold. But it did feel good to move, to suck the sharp air into my lungs, fill them up.
As I started singing, the dogs stopped and glanced back, then forged ahead. The empty street bounced my voice along the bricks and concrete.
I should have been thinking of Joey. And I was.
But what kept crowding Joey out was Alex, what he might have done.
I couldn’t believe it, and yet I also couldn’t dismiss it.
He’d never taken to Joey, I don’t know why.
Maybe he thought Joey wasn’t a match for me or was too matched to me.
He was protective of me, and of course, we’d both thought Joey had run off with the rent money. And my self-respect.
Maybe I had called Joey a dead man one time too many.
Even through the cold, I felt a chill. My bones were hollow, rattling behind the dogs up Milwaukee Avenue through a tunnel of new mid-rise buildings, FOR LEASE signs in all the storefront windows.
Above, pricey condos, second homes, rental investments, no one home.
There used to be a taco place on this corner, a big grassy side lot with picnic tables for hot summer days.
A summer day was myth, here on this street, but I was hungry for the hope that winter would eventually—eventually—come to an end, and this would all be some kind of misunderstanding and Joey—
But nothing could ever be the same again. This winter would never end.
What had I been singing? I’d lost the tune, or the taste for it.
I didn’t have a song for the noise I felt rising up from my gut: pain and hurt and fear. And—
Raw animal loneliness.
I let it loose and it came out as a mewling cry, then before I could clamp down on it, built to a wail, a howl from the bottom of a cavern, echoes against the buildings coming back in a sort of sloppy harmony.
The leash on the dogs went slack as they doubled back to check on me.
I patted at them, reassuring them, and urged them forward.
I’d heard something melodic in the sound I’d made, and tried it again as we walked on, letting whatever noise came to me rise, rise until I wasn’t crying but singing. A wordless tune made of sorrow, made to carry it. My feet on the ice kept time, a percussion of a sort.
And then I picked up another layer, the scratch of another set of footsteps behind us. The dogs pricked up their ears and rounded, high alert, barking and pulling.
“Hey,” I said as the reins went taut on my wrist. I had to dig in with my boot heels to keep them from dragging me.
The man was more than a half block back, minding his own business. He’d slowed to peer into a storefront, hands in the pockets of his long coat, his profile and cap pointed back so I couldn’t see him well.
Bear didn’t like the look of him, though, and set his snarl to discouraging.
“Bear,” I snapped. “Come on.”
But Bear dug in. The roll of his growl rose into a higher part of his throat, changing gear.
Down the street, the guy flicked a glance our way, his flat cap hiding his face, then went back to window shopping.
I pulled at the leash until Bear finally gave in. He wouldn’t walk ahead of me with Lemondrop, though. He insisted on walking at heel, like a show dog, pausing to look back every few feet. When Lemon stopped to yellow the snow, Bear kept watch.
We crossed Milwaukee Avenue and headed back the way we’d come. Bear kept his guard up as we passed the guy on the opposite side of the street, and after. I looked over to see what had been so interesting in the storefront window—
A sign read FOR LEASE.
I pulled up short. The storefront was empty. All of the windows on that block were.
But that meant—
I wheeled around. I couldn’t see him, and that was worse. Was he following me? I could think of reasons, pervy ones. Pepper spray–carrying reasons.
I pulled in the leash so that the dogs stood closer to me.
But then I spotted him. Still across the street, his cap pointed away from me. He was taking a turn into the neighborhood on the far side. Away.
My heart was the percussion now, heavy kick-drum thumps in my chest. I watched until the guy’s back disappeared and then a minute more, just to make sure.
Bear’s ears were still flicked in that direction, tuned for footsteps, for keys jingling in a faraway pocket. Maybe the guy was whistling.
“Who’s a good boy?” I said. “Come on. Take us home.”
Their second favorite word, home. They picked up their pace. Home was where the Wufers were.
THE NEXT MORNING, SATURDAY, I slept in as late as the dogs would let me. When I finally pulled the pillow off my head, Bear was keeping watch at the side of my mattress. Lemon, lying on the floor, gave a big sigh.
Oona’s bed hadn’t been slept in.
Hey, at least one of us was living her twenties. Except Oona was actually fortysomething.
So I fed the dogs and hooked them up for their morning walk, this time keeping an eye out for the guy in the flat cap. Now that he’d drawn my attention, there was something about him that was familiar.
You think so, too? How long has he been hanging around?
On the return toward the apartment, we approached McPhee’s from the south, and I caught movement at the far side of the vestibule. The guy in the flat cap? I stopped, but Bear was on it. He lurched and started barking, and Lemon leapt to join him.
I couldn’t keep the dogs from pulling me a few more feet to see who was huddled at the door. I had a brief burst of hope that it was Sicily before I realized it was Detective Aycock, leaning. “Good morning,” he said to the dogs.
“Hush, Bear!” I said. “Lemon, down. Sorry.”
“No worries.”
“They’re just really protective,” I said.
As the dogs settled at my feet between us, Aycock raised his eyes to me. “They are, indeed. They’d do anything for you, wouldn’t they?”
“Mostly the one thing,” I said uncertainly. I would have specified that the one thing was tear out your throat, except I didn’t think this was the time to make that joke. “They’re all talk.”
“But they’re not the only ones who would do anything for you,” Aycock said.
Were we talking about Alex? Down the street, I saw Ned coming along the sidewalk toward us, but not near enough to derail this conversation.
I realized I was trembling, and that I’d been quiet for too long.
“You don’t want to know why I’m here?” he said.
“Why? Why are you…?”
“I’ve been to see Mr. Hartnett’s sister,” he said, grim-faced. “And she reports that her brother left her home on Wednesday afternoon and didn’t return. And that she has reason—quite a good reason—to believe he might have been coming to see you.”
“But I didn’t. See him.” I sounded wobbly, so I added, “I’m telling you the truth.”
“I would hope so.”
Ned had ducked under the police tape into the alley. Coward.
“Have you checked with Ned? His bandmate? I thought Joey must have gone back to Heather’s Wednesday night,” I said. “But maybe he went to Ned’s. They go to a lot of shows together. He might have crashed on Ned’s couch.”
Aycock’s eyes narrowed. “You said back to Heather’s. Er, Mrs. Varma’s house. Back there on Wednesday.” His voice had shifted to that notebook-open tone. “Why back to her place, Miss Devine? If you haven’t been in touch with him, what made you think he ever left the Varma house?”
“Because … because, I mean,” I stumbled. Because I’d seen him on video that wasn’t supposed to exist? “Because I assumed he was going to work all week, right? The trampoline place. And going … back.”
Yeah, I know what I sounded like, all right? Shut up.
Aycock stared at me a long moment, then finally shifted his attention to the pub. “Black curtains at the pub today?”
“Um, what?”
“The pub, draped in mourning? You’re not opening the pub today? In memoriam, as it were?”
“I don’t actually work here. Alex will— Wait, what time is it?”
“Almost eleven,” Aycock said without looking at his watch.
“He must be running late,” I said. It wasn’t like Alex, but I didn’t know if Aycock knew that.
“It’s a good thing, then,” Aycock said, a little tweak of a smile at his lips that I didn’t trust.
“What is?”
He said, “That you’re here to cover for him.”
I was taking that apart for meaning when he pushed off the wall and said, “You have a good day, Miss Devine. You and … all your pets.”