Chapter Five
I go back to bed, go through my routine all over again, and I take my damn pill this time. I sleep in snatches, but I don’t
dream again. And when I wake up to daylight streaming in the dusty window of this airless room, I know I didn’t go anywhere
else last night.
Thank God.
Because the routine works. Whatever I thought was happening last night when I woke up was clearly a product of sleepwalking, the thing that can only
happen by not following my routine. It’s absurd to imagine I somehow dreamed something from this creepy town before coming here for the
first time.
It’s just the way my warped brain works. I know this, and I’ve spent too long in my own fractured sanity to get so . . . amped over it.
Stick to the routine, stick to the coping mechanisms, and I can function like someone normal. It’s an important and hard-won life lesson I can’t lose just because I’m somewhere new and unfamiliar.
The sunlight and the dust motes make everything that happened last night seem ridiculous, up to and including creepy faces
and antagonistic alleyways.
I get out of bed and shuffle out into the living room. There’s a neatly folded blanket and pillow on the couch, but no Logan.
But since the house is barely big enough to hold my arms out straight in, I see him sitting at a table in the kitchen that
could maybe fit two.
He’s got the legal documents from our grandmother’s lawyer spread out in front of him. More importantly, there is no coffee
brewing. There is no hint of any coffee at all.
My twin knows me very well, because he doesn’t even look up at me. “We’re going to have to go to the grocery store for supplies,
but our meeting with the knitting shop people is in thirty minutes and the closest grocery store is at least twenty away.
However, before you freak out, there appears to be some kind of diner across the street. A diner will have coffee.”
I shove my wild hair out of my face. “Get groceries delivered. Just because we’re hanging out on the prairie doesn’t mean
we have to act like pioneers.”
“I couldn’t find any local delivery.”
“Logan. If you wanted to slowly kill me, couldn’t you have just locked me in a shipping container and hoisted me into the
ocean?”
“Too expensive,” he retorts, still not looking up from his papers. “But I’m starving. Hurry up and get ready or I’m leaving
without you.”
I take a long time getting ready, just to irritate him. I do my hair and makeup carefully because it makes me feel better
and less like my sleepwalking and issues are stamped across my face.
With the right armor finally applied, I am Lexi Darling, totally with-it textile designer and normal functioning human being.
On any other day, Logan would have left without me. But when I return to the kitchen, he’s still sitting there. A reminder
that last night was a lot like that period of time when we were kids and my various night terrors and anxieties seemed to
touch . . . everything.
Obviously, we don’t mention it.
We step out into a warm, sunny morning. The exact opposite of what it was last night. I dressed for a frigid October winter
and it feels like the dog days of August now. I am immediately sweltering. “What the hell? Why is it hot?”
I glare at Logan. Naturally, he’s dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. Like he knew. He shrugs at me, and this is so par for the
course I can only sigh and start walking. With daylight streaming down, the grassy yard seems almost cute. There is, indeed,
a decorative gnome peeking out from the brown weeds. And the alley next to the knitting store no longer looks like a fast
track to my own doom. It’s just an alley between two buildings.
Just as I am a little bit psycho, as my therapist manages not to say directly.
I try not to think about it.
But the minute we get to where we parked our car on the street, I can’t help but notice that the clock tower of doom is looming
there again. Still. It’s nearly glowing white in the sunlight, which feels scalding against my skin. The black of its face is just as shiny and
the gold of its arms glitters in the sun.
What is that monstrosity doing in this otherwise unremarkable little town? I guess it must be like all the other towns around
here, assuming there are other towns around here. And despite the fact there was precious little evidence of any such habitation on the highway last
night.
I remember the barren fields and desolate, abandoned remains of old structures, and shiver.
We cross the narrow main street that seems a lot more small-town America than horror show in the morning light, though I am a New Yorker and can easily confuse the two.
But the ominous, dark buildings from last night are much cuter in the sun.
They are all different varieties of old brick, with long, narrow windows on the second and sometimes third stories.
Many of the shops on the bottom are painted in bright colors.
There are awnings and cute signs and old-timey-looking black lampposts—none of which I can recall being lit last night, or at least, not lit as brightly as they should have been.
There are signs of fall everywhere, from hay bales and pumpkins to scarecrows propped up in the shop entryways.
I decide I do not really like scarecrows, but then, maybe that’s what I saw in the window last night. A stray scarecrow.
Right across the street from the mouth of our alley there is a building that houses a diner and an . . . antique shop? They
seem to be the same business, or at least, they both have real estate on the same sign, with various arrows. Swamp Fox Shoppes, the sign says at the top.
I’m not sure I want to know what a swamp fox is, particularly in Iowa—a place I don’t exactly associate with swamps. Not that I have spent a lot of time thinking about Iowa or what to associate it with.
I’m sweating from a walk across the street, and not because I’m out of shape. I am used to walking. I am not used to being
dressed inappropriately for walking. I shove my sleeves up to my elbows and curse myself for knitting my colorwork sweater—one
of my own designs—with the warmest merino/cashmere blend I could find at the iconic Purl Soho yarn shop in Manhattan before
it closed.
Inside, there’s some relief from the heat, but only some.
“Wi-Fi. Blessed Wi-Fi,” Logan says, because he hasn’t looked up from his phone throughout the entire trip from our door.
There’s a sign that tells us to wait to be seated, but Logan doesn’t see it because he’s connecting his phone to the internet as he slides into the nearest booth.
Because nothing is more important to him than his ability to make his seven thousand daily calls.
“We’re supposed to wait—” I tell him.
But the short waitress with a close-cropped cap of red hair, who’s pouring coffee two tables over, waves it away. She’s wearing
a name tag that say Marleen, which feels right. “Go on and sit right there,” she says, not so much kindly as matter-of-factly. “Someone will be with you
guys in a minute.”
Of course. If I’d done it, Marleen probably would have scolded me right out of town.
I slide into the booth, surprised to find it . . . not sticky. There are menus already on the table and I pick one up. It
is sticky. But there’s an array of breakfast offerings and I am starving. Not enough to eat the Meat-splosion Breakfast Sampler, but I wouldn’t say no to an eggs Benedict with spinach and hollandaise
on the side. A decadent upgrade from my usual egg white omelet with extra veggies.
The menu offers neither. The coffee selection also leaves quite a bit to be desired, as they don’t seem to do anything but
drip. With half and half, cream, or whole milk. That’s it.
I flip the plastic menu pages, past the questionable pot roast suppers, grilled cheese bombs, and loose meat sandwiches—whatever that is, the horror—to the back. Then again. “This can’t be the whole menu.”
“Looks good to me,” Logan says cheerfully. “And here comes our server. I’m ordering whether you’re ready or not.”
Our server this time is not the woman who greeted us, but a man. Dressed in battered boots, faded jeans, and a T-shirt with
a screen-printing of that damn clock tower on it.
I’m not sure how long I stare at his chest before he seems to notice.
Or when I switch to staring at his chest, not the tower on it.
“Morning,” he offers in a low voice, deep and interesting. “What can I get you?”
This man—this waiter in a diner that is also an antique store and has an affinity for foxes in swamps—is unreasonably attractive.
Yet, he looks as if he has really, truly never considered that attractiveness a moment in his life. Those jeans are faded
from time, not chemicals. Those boots are battered by years of use, not design. His hair is dark. There is no beanie or manicured
facial hair in sight.
I have the strangest urge to touch him.
And he has the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen, like a whole wild pageant of springtime in Central Park, so bright it puts the concrete
of Manhattan to shame.
This man is hot. This is not a figment of my overtired imagination. It’s not even because I’m adrift in the flatlands and desperate for something
that isn’t creepy.
This is the kind of hot that transcends location.
But even as I think that, I know it can’t be true. My eyes meet his and something changes. He looks stunned, I think. It’s
all green and wild—
I have a quick flash of that chiseled face in the window that I imagined. I tell myself it was a scarecrow, not him, but I remember that jawline—
And then he jerks his head back, slightly. His green eyes look arrested for a moment, then darken. It’s like he rode out a
small, private earthquake.
But he looks at me like I did something to him.
It feels like a slap.
On the scale of things that have happened to upset me since arriving in Midas, Iowa, it shouldn’t even register, but it does.
There’s something about this man, so rugged and beautiful and offended by me. I look down, feeling as confused as if I asked him out and was flatly, rudely refused.
My brother is oblivious, because…men.