Jo didn’t remember much about the drive back to the 30th Street Station. Or precisely how she came to be on a train again.
At least she managed to get another window seat.
As she settled in and hoped that she would continue to have the car mostly to herself, she took out her phone and checked again to see if Syn had called. She was disappointed to find that he hadn’t. Then again, she needed to reach out to him first, didn’t she.
Instead of calling him, she went into Safari and did a Google search on the lawyer her parents had used—and found the man’s obituary. He had died ten years ago.
Naturally.
To pass the time before the train started moving and she could fall asleep against the window, she played the voice mail that had been left by the unknown number, expecting it to be a scam offer for health insurance or maybe a fake program to help her with student loans she didn’t have.
Hi, Ms. Early. This is St. Francis Urgent Care. You were here about seventy-two hours ago? You left us a blood sample? Well, it turns out that it was contaminated in the lab somehow. We hate to ask you to do this, but could you come in and let us take some more? Again, we’re really sorry. We’ve never had this happen before. It must have been a screwup on their part, but they’re saying they couldn’t read what they had. Thanks. Oh, our telephone number is—
Jo cut the message off. All of that was so not on her list of things to worry about. Besides, she’d essentially been cleared by the doctor and—
Frowning, she rubbed at her nose, a terrible smell invading her nostrils. When there seemed to be no escape from the stench, she leaned out into the aisle. Two men had entered the car at the far end, and it had to be them.
Assuming the pair had strung dead skunks around their necks under their coats.
Jo blinked her eyes and rubbed her nose again. God, she’d never smelled anything so awful. It was like baby powder and roadkill—
All at once, her headache came on with a vengeance, her skull pounding with pain. Clearly, the stink was the trigger.
Nope. Not gonna do this for two hours, she decided. No matter how rude it is to move.
Grabbing her backpack, she got to her feet and shuffled up to the next car in line—and thank God that whatever the smell was didn’t carry into the other space.
Just as the train bumped and started forward, she sat down at a new window seat and massaged her temples. As the agony continued to build, she refused to submit to it. For some reason, she had the feeling it was trying to distract her. Get her off some kind of thought trail.
Even though that was crazy talk. Anthropomorphizing a migraine? Really?
Still . . . that stench. What about the stench—
Even as the vise cranked down harder on her skull, she probed further the conviction that she had smelled that horrible stink before. Sometime recently. Very recently . . .
Going into her phone, she went to her call log. Without knowing what she was looking for, she checked what had come in on, and gone out of, her phone over the last couple of days. Lot of calls back and forth with McCordle. Then there was Dougie looking for money. Telemarketing bullcrap—
Jo sat up.
What the hell had she been doing, talking to Bill at ten p.m. A number of times?
She’d been home at the time. Or should have been. And yet she had no memory of speaking to him then. Sure, they regularly chatted about their little extracurricular hobby with the supernatural—but not after ten o’clock on a proverbial school night. And not over and over again within such a short period of time . . .
No, wait, she thought. She’d been out somewhere. She had gone in search of . . . something.
Yes, in her car. It had been raining—
Moaning, Jo shut her phone down and had to let her head fall back against the seat rest. As she breathed in a shallow way, she vowed to find out where the hell she had gone and why she had called her friend.
She was done with the knowledge holes in her life.
At least a simple mystery like where she had been when she had spoken with Bill had to be solvable.