4
Charles Forrester focused on washing the dinner dishes while his wife, Aisha, dried and put things away. It was their custom to do the dishes together most nights, a time to share what they could about their respective days.
“Maybe I should wash the dishes tonight and you dry.” Aisha’s voice was quiet.
It always was unless she was seriously angry or upset, but Charles detected the roughness underneath, the breaks that told him she’d used her voice too much today.
Most people wouldn’t realize her throat had been damaged when she was a girl—testimony to other kinds of damage she’d endured at the hands of a stepfather who objected to having to live in a house with a girl who couldn’t pass for white.
The bastard hadn’t had any objections when he married Aisha’s mother, hadn’t said anything at all until the money from the first husband’s life insurance ran out and he had to pay off his gambling debts on his own.
Considering her background, Charles still thought Aisha agreeing to marry him was a miracle.
“I’m fine doing the washing,” he said.
She held out the plate he’d just handed her. “If you were washing.”
He slipped the plate into the dishwater and washed it.
“You weren’t there in body,” she said when she accepted the now-clean dish, “but in spirit?”
They didn’t have to say where there was. The Isle of Wyrd.
He held his hands above the dishwater, not even pretending to wash a dish. “Why do you say that?”
“There is a look in your eyes when you have to go there. And there is a different look when you have to send someone there.” She hesitated. “Was it bad, this thing you sent someone to find?”
“My new detective lost the coin toss,” Charles replied, scrubbing a pot as if he could erase what made him uneasy.
“But you don’t send the new ones alone. And isn’t the new detective a young woman?”
He nodded. “I was on the phone when they did the coin toss. Once it was done, I couldn’t change the outcome without starting talk that I’m taking too much interest in her, giving her special treatment. The men have…reservations…about her being on the special investigations team.”
“There are female police officers in all the other departments,” Aisha said. “There are female detectives. Why is this different?”
“Because it takes balls to go to Wyrd. You have to be the right kind of man to cross the river and come back the same as when you went.”
“Is she the same?”
Charles washed the last pan and emptied the water in the sink. “They told her too much, Aisha. Showed her too much. I don’t know what it means when the Arcana are that accommodating. Yes, she appeared to be the same—this time.”
Aisha studied him. “What else?”
“The first time I met Lucas Frost, he reminded me of my brother, of how Chad would have looked in his midthirties if he’d lived. Beth Fahey described a man who looked completely different—hair, eyes, skin, even a different height and build.”
“Could it have been someone else claiming to be Lucas Frost?”
“No. It was the same man. It just brought home in another way that we don’t know them, and even what we know might be an illusion. I think what Frost truly looks like is very different.”
“If there is another call, will you send her back there?” Aisha asked.
Charles washed his hands and dried them on the dish towel before hanging it up. “I don’t think I’ll have a choice.” He paused, then added, “I don’t think they’ll give me a choice.”