“Do you have any answers yet?”
“Not many. My dad—” I choked on the words.
“Honey? Harper? Are you all right?”
His endearment melted the ice block in my throat. “I’m. still confused by a lot of things. I don’t want to discuss them now. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“I like hearing yours, too. I’ve been working on a ghost detector. I’m not sure I’ve got it right, but I’ll show it to you when you get home.”
“I’d rather not talk about ghosts right now.”
“All right. Chaos has been chasing things around that I can’t see and she runs over and tries to steal your shoes. But she only wants your shoes. I think she misses you.”
“She just loves shoes,” I said, imagining the crazy little ferret running manically around the condo or Quinton’s bunker, chasing ghosts and giving her wicked chuckle of glee as they fled before her. She’d dived fearlessly into the Grey when we’d first encountered it and taken on the guardian beast single-handed. I’d had a little trouble getting her back. She was fearless, but she’d learned to pick her fights better after that. You can’t win against an invincible force of the Grey, even if the battle is epic, at least to a fuzz-butt who weighed less than two pounds.
A pleasant silence fell between us and I closed my eyes, thinking I could almost see him.
“She’s not the only one who misses you,” Quinton said.
I smiled. “I miss you, too, and I’ll be home soon.” The conversation wandered and drew to a soft close as I dwindled toward sleep.
“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered before I reluctantly hung up and turned to roll into the covers, falling asleep with the comfort of his thoughts wrapped around me.
CHAPTER 12
Will Novak screamed in my sleep. I jerked awake, twisting in my bed to spot the gruesome vision that had awakened me, so realistic was it that I had been sure I was present. I was sick of grim visions. First Cary, the office, Christelle, and now Will, the antiques auctioneer I’d met back when the whole Greywalking adventure started. He’d been in my nightmare of my death, too, but this was not the same dream at all. This was a hopeless, terrifying vision about Will himself.
We’d broken up over the ramifications of my incomprehensible life a year earlier, but I’d kept a soft spot for Will in my heart. He was in England now, working. And he was fine. Or he had been the last I’d heard from him. I didn’t want to relive any of that, either, but it seemed my past—whether connected to my Greywalking ability or not—would not leave me alone.
To hell with it; it wasn’t late over there. It was. I checked the clock and did the math. about 3:30 in the afternoon. I picked up my cell phone and poked the button for his number. In a minute, a male voice answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Michael? It’s Harper Blaine.” Michael was Will’s much-younger brother. He was attending college somewhere in London since they’d moved there more or less permanently when Will and I broke up. Will worked researching provenances—the backgrounds of antiques—for Sotheby’s. It had been a dream offer just when he’d needed it most. We’d tried to keep the relationship going, but the distance and my bizarre job had killed it.
“Oh. Hi, Harper. Umm. can I. help you?” I hadn’t called since Will and I had broken up, and Michael sounded confused to hear from me.
“I just wanted to talk to Will. Is he home?”
“No. He’s at work. He’ll be home in about three hours, if you want to call back.”
“How are you guys doing?”
He replied cautiously. “We’re fine. I’m working on a bike for a motorcycle rally this summer and Will’s OK, I guess. Works a lot. You know: the big brother thing.”
“Yeah, I know that thing. Is he still on your case about school?”
“I’m out for the summer hols soon. He still doesn’t like the bikes, but we get along OK if I don’t cut class too much for them.”
That sounded like the Novak brothers I knew. Michael plunging into his enthusiasms and Will watchdogging him.
So my harrowing dream had been only that—a dream—however disturbing and realistic. No one had chopped off his limbs or stuffed him in a box, and Michael wasn’t a burned skeleton on a garage floor, either. I was still unsettled, but I took a long breath and made myself calm down.
“OK. Well. I guess I don’t need to talk to him, after all. Thanks, Michael.”
“No problem.”
We both hung up in an awkward silence. I must have sounded nuts. I felt a bit nuts, too, for giving in to the need to check on them. The sense of something being out of joint lingered, although there seemed to be no reason for that feeling—just the aftereffect of the dream—and I chided myself for calling. Of course, I wouldn’t have forgiven myself for not checking if there had turned out to be something wrong. Still. crazy ex-girlfriend was not a part I liked playing.
I left a string of numbers on Quinton’s pager that meant I’d been thinking of him. It made me feel a bit like a clinging girlfriend, and yes, it was mushy, but it made me smile and that was a good trick after the fright that had awakened me.
It was too early to show up at my mother’s house. I had no desire to intrude on any private moments between her and Damon. The thought of observing Mother setting another matrimonial trap made me gag, and the false friendliness her current prey displayed on meeting me was just as cloying. My reaction might be due to the contrast between reality and my now-ruined fantasy of what life had been with my father, but I still found Damon and his presence repulsive. Unfair and irrational of me, maybe, but that’s how I felt.
I could just guess at the sorts of heavily varnished tales about me that my mother had been laying on him. Since he hadn’t thrown me out of the house, I had to assume it was the Darling Daughter version and not the Ungrateful Spawn of Satan version—I’d been both before. Considering her performance the previous day, I figured I was probably growing horns in her mind right now. Yet another reason to hold off arriving until after the man du jour had gone and avoid any scenes.
A short workout and a shower didn’t help mitigate the fact that it was the morning after a terrible day and night as much as I’d hoped. It still felt too early, and I hadn’t even changed time zones. I called room service for a pot of expensive coffee and some food and sat down on the bed to prowl through my father’s box again. If I couldn’t talk to him or his no-doubt-dead receptionist directly, I could still try to get some sense of the real man from what he’d left behind. I knew I had romanticized him, just as I had romanticized Cary, but I needed truth now, not fantasies.
Most of the paper in the box was business files, which told me about his patients and his work habits but not much more. I noticed that his handwriting was very precise when in business mode, small and neat. The office as I’d seen it in the past had been wrecked, but the simple Grey memory of it had been squared away and orderly. The writing on his business correspondence didn’t quite cross the line to fussy, but it was careful. In the journals it had been looser but still very legible, which I couldn’t say for most people’s casual writing.
All right: He’d been a bit type A, the sort of man who wore a button-down shirt even on his days off. I could remember him smiling and being silly with me, so he hadn’t been too stiff, but if I was being honest, he hadn’t been the life of the party, either. I had idolized him and built him up as an ideal parent in contrast to my demanding, peripatetic mother. I might not have been right about her, either, but that was not the issue of the moment.
I paused to eat and pour more coffee, and then I shuffled deeper into the box. At the bottom I found a couple of paperback books: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and Chuck Yeager’s autobiography. I’d never read either book, but I knew who Chuck Yeager was and, according to the blurb, the Bester was a sort of space-faring version of The Count of Monte Cristo. Space adventures, ordinary guys rising to heroism and glamour. I hadn’t pegged my dad as fanciful, but it might have explained his marriage to my mother. They had both been starry-eyed, but his romanticism had turned inward while my mother’s had turned outward. If I hadn’t seen the hole where the end of his life should have been, I might have thought his visions had gone as sour as my mother’s and written him off as merely crazy, but that void—whether it was caused by him or something else—and the terror that had poured out of Christelle changed everything. He might have been nuts—he sounded it near the end—but he hadn’t been imagining that something uncanny and terrible had surrounded him.