Chapter Fourteen #2
“Did you...?” Shepherd asked quietly, trailing off as he nodded toward Ruby.
Kel supposed he couldn’t be offended. He’d been the one to tell Shepherd how hard it was to abstain from using the smoke.
Besides…
“Not this time,” Kel said.
Ruby spat the pills the nurse had given her into her hand. She dropped them onto the gravel path as Kel wheeled her toward the small, white-painted gazebo.
“So what you’re telling me is that your grandfather is…a demon from Hell?” she said.
Kel screwed up his face as he parked Ruby under the ivy and put the brake on. The urge to tell the truth had felt like a good idea at the time. Not so much now he heard it out loud.
“I guess, yeah,” Kel said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
Ruby wiped spit and chalky residue off her hand with a tissue.
“Well, thank God that didn’t come out when my daddy was alive,” she said. “I’d have never heard the end of how he’d pegged Ezekiel from the start.”
Shepherd, who’d fallen behind to watch the old people on golf carts like it was NASCAR, caught up with them. He handed Ruby a bottle of water.
“You’re taking this well,” he said.
Ruby took a drink. Water spilled from the corner of her mouth. She blotted it on the back of her hand.
“Always did have a hole in my chin,” she said with stubborn dismissiveness.
Then she shrugged as she slotted the bottle of water carefully between her knees.
Her hands, still bruised from IVs, fiddled with the cap.
“And I’m a Laker; we roll with the punches.
Besides, I nearly died. That makes a woman think.
It’s good to know that when I get to where I’m going I’ll have friends. ”
“...and Grandad being a demon isn’t a problem?”
Ruby snorted. She gave up on the cap and thrust the bottle impatiently toward Shepherd. He took it and twisted the cap back on, looking around for somewhere to set it.
“Well, I never thought he was an angel,” she said tartly. Then she reached up and touched her temple. “And I…She knew already. Or she did. That girl. Who was me.”
Kel traded a worried look with Shepherd.
“Ruby, you OK?” he asked.
She gave him a scathing look. “What sort of fucking question is that?” she asked. “I had a stroke, and now I have to try and understand why I remember a whole year of my life twice. Under the circumstances, I’m pulling this off pretty well.”
“I…yeah…fair enough,” Kel said. “So you remember Grandad.”
Ruby waved her hand at him. “I always remembered him,” she corrected. “But it’s like…it’s like if you took IT, and ripped out every page that mentioned Pennywise. Now I have all those pages back, but they’re not in any order.”
She gave a thin laugh and admitted, “Or I’m senile. I’m not sure which is worse.”
“You’re not senile,” Kel reassured her.
Ruby held up her hand in a ‘slow your roll’ gesture. “I’m also not sure which is better,” she said. “I’m not ruling anything out just yet, so I’d ask what you need now.”
Kel looked down at his feet as he organized his thoughts. …that was going to take him all day. He rubbed his knuckle against his forehead, jettisoned all the things he wanted to know and half of what he needed to know. That just left the problem in hand.
“Easy said that Albert hated him, that he’s thwarted Easy all these years just from spite?”
Ruby nodded. “Sounds like Albert,” she agreed. “He hated Easy. Always told me to…oh shit, he was my friend? We were friends. Me and Albert? That’s why he let you con him all those times. I thought that Dio Madden was just a slow learner, but it was Albert. Soft bastard.”
She looked soft for a second and then winced as she rubbed her forehead.
“It’s more than a year. Albert lived near me.
His mama ran the funeral parlor, and his daddy ran off.
It was Easy who had the money, who lived in Madden…
Harlow. Harlow House. Everyone called it Hell House, back then.
Now no one does. It wasn’t just me. The whole town forgot it?
Why would Easy do that? What did it matter? ”
“I don’t think he did,” Shepherd said. “The house did. It was trading under a new name, and it filed the proper paperwork.”
“Why didn’t Albert tell me?” Ruby said. “I wouldn’t have listened, but he could have tried.”
The memory of the thick, black cords that had squirmed out of Ruby’s mouth and down her nose was so bleakly vivid that Kel had to look away. He ran his tongue over the back of his teeth, tasting smoke.
“Maybe he was scared of what would happen if he tried,” he said.
Ruby shook her head and went to say something. Whatever it was slurred off her tongue, and she stopped, her hand up to cover her mouth. She took a deep breath, lips trembling, and tried again.
“Was that it?” she asked. “Is that what you needed?”
It wasn’t. But Kel had done enough damage. He forced a smile and nodded.
“That will be more—”
“There was a contract,” Shepherd interrupted him. He ignored Kel’s glare as he stepped forward, head angled so he caught Ruby’s gaze. “Between Easy and…his employer. It was passed on to Albert. What would he have done with it if he wanted to hide it from Easy?”
Kel grabbed his shoulder to pull him back. It didn’t work, and he was reminded again that Shepherd was stronger than he looked.
“It’s fine, Ruby,” he said. “We can work it—”
Ruby waved her hand at him.
“I wouldn’t bother,” she said. “Albert would have left it on the floor. The man once used a settlement check from the factory as a bookmark for six months.”
She laughed in surprise at the memory and then choked on it. Her face flushed red, sweat on her temples, as she clutched her chest. Kel lurched awkwardly forward and tried to gingerly slap her back, without breaking anything.
“I’m not a cat,” Ruby said once she caught her breath, the back of her wrist to her mouth to control, or hide, the droop of her lips. “I…just…what were we talking about?”
Kel glanced at Shepherd, who shrugged.
“Grandad,” Kel said after a beat. He leaned on the back of the wheelchair and craned around to watch Ruby’s face as he spoke. “You said I remind you of him.”
The only reaction to that was a disdainful look from Ruby.
“Bullshit,” she said. “You take after me. I goddamn raised you; I earned it.”
Kel didn’t know what the feeling that clutched in his chest was. It hurt, though. He leaned down and kissed her cheek, ignoring her cat-spit of surprise.
“You do,” he said and flicked the brake off. “I better get you inside. You need a rest.”
“...I was home-schooled by cultists,” Shepherd said as they stepped outside. “I can butcher most animals and speak uncultured Latin; I don’t know anything about neurology. Or it influences complexion. She might remember again. She might not. Which are you rooting for?”
Kel didn’t know. Rather than admit that, he changed the subject by nodding at the Seal of Approval on the corner.
“Want to get a coffee?” he asked. “We can brainstorm our next steps, try to work out what Dio did with the contract.”
Shepherd gave him an amused look. “Really, you think you can find common ground with a man who inherited a haunted house on a gateway to Hell by being too cocky for his own good?”
Kel slung an arm over Shepherd’s shoulders, pulling him in close so he could kiss the side of his head.
“I’m depending on you for the cocky part,” he said.
Shepherd snorted. As they got to the Seal of the Approval, there was a free library set up on a table against the wall. Shepherd paused to browse through the selection while Kel opened the door.
“I’ll order,” Kel said. “Your usual?”
Shepherd looked up from a car manual. “I don’t have a usual.”
“The most artisan thing on the menu,” Kel countered. “Add more whipped foam.”
There was a pause, and then Shepherd’s mouth quirked. “OK, that does sound good.”
Kel rolled his eyes and started on into the shop. He had just let go of the door when Shepherd blurted out.
“Wait.”
Kel shrugged an apology to Emily—she ignored him; he didn’t know why he’d bothered—and caught the door before it shut. He went back outside and looked expectantly at Shepherd.
“What?”
Shepherd held up a book. The font was too decorative to read the title, but there was a dragon foiled on the cover.
“I think I know where the contract is,” he said and tossed the book down. It thumped down on top of a stack of Mills and Boons. “We need to go back to the house.”
“Now?”
“Now.”