here again,” Gil ordered. “And change that shirt, for fuck’s sake. I’m sick of smelling it.”
Josh shuffled toward the stairwell. Gil listened to his slow, heavy footsteps on the stairs going up. Belker followed him up. A guard was always stationed outside Josh’s bedroom, and the windows on his bedroom had been barred and alarmed.
Gil leaned back with a sigh and picked up his tablet, resuming the paused video about that crazy town up in the mountains.
There she was, that cute brunette with the big, tilted green eyes. She flapped her hand expressively while she talked. Gil tuned out her yapping, focusing on her full lips and luscious figure. She was sitting at a lunch counter. The camera panned back, showing colorful chalkboard menus.
He paused the video and ran it back. Played it again. What was it about that…?
It was tickling the back of his mind. Those chalkboards. Bright chalk drawings of fruits, breads, cakes, veggies. They were familiar.
Gil dug around in the videos about Shaw’s Crossing until he found another one featuring the green-eyed woman. Her name was Demi Vaughan. She was a local restauranteur. The story involved some strange cult up in the mountains, all of whom had burned to death in a fire over a decade ago. He vaguely remembered hearing about that, back when he was a first-year law student. It had gotten a lot of press.
Now they were saying that the fire was actually a mass murder. That the perp was on the loose. Hah. The world was full of perps on the loose. That was humankind for you. Rolling in their own filth whenever they thought no one was looking.
He set the clip to play, and watched the restaurant owner talk. She was easy on the eyes. Clear green eyes, a full pink mouth. Curly brown hair, twisted into a bun.
“…strange, how many things in this town were taken as deaths by coincidence, or natural causes, like my own father’s death,” she said. “We all felt like we were cursed. Now we know that there’s more to all those unexplained deaths. There’s an explanation, and we have to get to the bottom of this, for everyone’s sake.”
He did a search of restaurants in Shaw’s Crossing. One was called “Demi’s Corner Café.” He looked up the restaurant’s Facebook page to find the address.
Lo and behold. The masthead across the top was a collage of chalkboard menus. Feathery carrot fronds, artfully drawn garlic and leeks, tufts of parsley and basil, baskets overflowing with colorful fruits.
It floated back to him quite slowly. Louisa had done drawings like that. He hadn’t paid much attention to them, since he’d considered it a poor use of her time, but it had amused her to draw decorative chalkboard menus for dinner parties. She’d once done a chalk drawing for the bar mitzvah of a friend’s son. She’d done chalkboard menus for the wedding of a friend of hers, too. One of her own bridesmaids. Taryn was the woman’s name.
He looked up Taryn on Facebook, and scrolled back to the date of the woman’s wedding a little over a year ago. Sure enough, Taryn had posted pictures of the chalkboards. There were over three hundred likes, and a scroll of fawning comments below about how adorable they were, peppered with smiley faces, heart emojis.
The chalkboards for Taryn’s wedding were extremely similar to the chalk art on the Facebook masthead. Bright, playful, silly, frivolous, like all of Louisa’s amateurish art attempts. But Louisa’s style, although childish, was distinctive.
His spirits soared. That dumb bitch. She had sent up a beacon for him.
He slid the phone into his pocket, his balls tingling, and addressed the guard watching the monitors. “You, Belker and Aldo, don’t take your eyes off the kid,” he said. “Erdinger and Jamison, let’s move. We have a lead.”
It was going to feel so good to put this problem to bed.
With a shovel.
8
Nate felt the chill settle in as dawn started to lighten around the blackout blinds. Elisa didn’t say a word, and she didn’t have to. The wild magic they had generated together was circling the drain.
He’d prepared himself for this. It was normal for her to shut down and pull away from him afterward. The woman had mysterious issues that he didn’t know shit about. It would have been a miracle if this hadn’t happened.
Knowing that didn’t make it easier to swallow, however.
That night had torn down all his natural barriers. He’d never felt a sexual connection like this one in