The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,40

didn’t have to say a word.”

The door popped open, and Jem let the picks fall to the ground in shock. “Dr. Leon, did you just make a naughty joke?”

“I hate you,” Tean said, pushing past him into the condo.

“Gloves,” Jem reminded him. “And don’t say hate,” Jem said, scooping up the picks. “That’s a bad word.”

He shut the door behind him. Tean had already turned on a few lights, and Jem followed a short hall past a closet—coats, umbrellas, and a lot of black flats—and a wall of framed pictures. He recognized Joy as the woman with the shock of orange, curly hair. She appeared in most of the pictures, ranging in age from a teenager to a woman on the cusp of middle age. He didn’t see her wife in any of the images, though, and a second glance confirmed that several of the frames were empty or had pictures that had been severely trimmed.

Tean was standing in a living room that smelled like a resale shop. The furniture, in Jem’s opinion, explained the smell: an orange mohair sofa, a pair of dining chairs with ripped upholstery, and a chunky pair of bookshelves that looked straight out of the 70s. The shelves were empty, and cardboard boxes of books sat on the floor.

“I bet you guys shop at the same place,” Jem said.

Tean glared at him, passed him a pair of disposable gloves, and stalked into the bedroom.

“You could ask about getting a group discount,” Jem called after him.

“We’re breaking and entering,” Tean shouted back. “So be quiet!”

Jem moved through the room quickly, noticing the indentations in the carpet, the nail marks on the walls, the scuffs and scrapes to the paint. He moved into the kitchen and saw a stack of Corel plates taped into a bundle, with $2.99 scrawled on the tape in an unsteady hand. The cabinets were empty except for a single, battered pot with the Teflon coating flaking away inside. In the sink, he found a spoon. At the fridge, he took an extra two minutes to really carefully examine the contents and sound out the words on the packaging to himself so he could say them without looking like a moron.

“No beer,” Jem called over his shoulder, narrating the contents of the fridge, “but she’s got moldy imitation cottage cheese, a jar of jalapeno-and-quince jelly, and a one-pound tub of vegan anchovy paste. Maybe you guys can go grocery shopping together too.”

“Stop talking,” Tean yelled from the other room.

Jem had never heard of imitation cottage cheese, which was apparently a—he had no idea what the word was, so he didn’t even try—product, or vegan anchovy paste, so he hunkered down and examined the containers. Both of them were produced by the same co-op, Heavenly Helpers Organic Farms, which had a PO box address in Heber. He grabbed the cottage cheese and carried it to the bedroom.

Tean was shuffling papers; a stack of documents sat at the foot of an unmade twin bed, and he was obviously working his way through them. The only other furniture in the room was a three-drawer chest painted Big-Bird yellow; judging by the Dora the Explorer stickers that had been only partially scraped away from the side, Jem figured it had previously been in a child’s room.

“What’s this word?” Jem asked, holding out the cottage cheese container.

“Huh? Seitan.”

“I would have said saitan. Like Seinfeld.”

Tean mumbled something.

“Hey, it kind of sounds like Satan,” Jem said.

Tean finally looked up. “What?”

“Seitan. It sounds like Satan. And it’s made by the Heavenly Helpers Farm, which is kind of funny, right?”

“A pun,” Tean said, smiling. “When one word sounds like another, and you’re supposed to hear the other meaning and find it funny.”

“I made a pun.”

“Well, actually you just noticed a possible pun. You didn’t make one.”

Jem tried. He really tried. But he might have done a little stomping on his way back to the fridge.

“Look at this stuff,” Tean said when he came back, passing over a stack of pages. “What do you think about that?”

The printouts were Facebook posts, tweets, and emails. It was too much text for Jem to process in a reasonable amount of time, so he glanced at the Facebook posts first, many of which included pictures of a large man with military-cut hair, often standing next to dead dogs—some hanging from trees by their back legs, some curled up, looking like they’d died in agony, and once just a picture of a severed leg still caught in