The Dirt on Ninth Grave

  I snapped to my senses. Reyes dropped his hand but didn’t look at Ian, almost as though he knew that would infuriate Ian more. Reyes could have argued. Hurled insults. Physically attacked him. None of those things would outrage a man like Ian more than being ignored.

  And boy, did it work. Ian’s anger shot out of him like a lightning strike. Reyes either didn’t know or didn’t care.

  “If you aren’t part of this investigation, you need to leave.”

  Francie was watching us, too. Well, pretty much everyone was watching us by that point, including Dixie. She’d been at the bank when everything went down and came back to a plethora of flashing lights and police units. That had to be a little disconcerting.

  “Officer, he works here,” Dixie said. “I asked him to come in to help me with some boxes out back.”

  Ian stepped closer to Reyes. “Then help.”

  “Thank you,” Dixie said, tugging at Reyes’s shirt.

  Reyes winked at me, then obeyed the harried woman. She was genuinely worried about him, even though he wasn’t.

  I was still recovering from the wink when Ian walked over to stand beside me. He rested a puppy-dog gaze on me. An expectant one. I got the feeling he thought I’d fall into his arms with relief that the ordeal was over. That he’d come in on his day off to see about me. That I was now even more indebted to him and couldn’t deny the fact that I owed him my life no matter how cra-cra he was.

  “Excuse me,” I said to him, a sharp edge to my voice.

  I’d spotted Francie and wanted to know if any of that did the trick. If she didn’t fall for Lewis now, one of the bravest men I knew – and one of the only men I knew – then it just wasn’t there. You couldn’t force another person to like you. No one could. I took Ian as a prime example of that. But if she didn’t see what was in front of her, she didn’t deserve him anyway.

  “What did you think of Lewis?” I asked Francie.

  She was leaning against the drinks counter, tapping a text into her phone.

  “Pretty brave, right?”

  “Please,” she said. “I know what you’re doing. This doesn’t change anything.” She offered me her best smirk. It was really pretty. Right before she left me standing there, she whispered, “Game on, bitch.”

  Uh-oh. I had a feeling we just became enemies. Oh well. Every girl needed a harmonious balance of good and evil in her life. Otherwise, we’d take everything for granted. And if she thought she was going to wrest Reyes away from my hot little hands, the game was most definitely on. I couldn’t fight a ghost, a lost love that haunted Reyes night and day, but I could fight a redhead who cared more about her hair than the environment, four-inch advantage or not.

  Speaking of brave, I tried Erin next. We had yet to speak after the picture debacle, but she’d rocked that whole man-waving-a-gun thing. I thought she was going to tackle him for a minute. We might not have been on speaking terms, but nothing brought people together like tragedy.

  I walked up to her, a timid smile on my face.

  “Don’t even,” she said before I uttered a syllable. She turned and walked away with a roll of her eyes.

  I let a sigh slip through my lips. Maybe it was two tragedies.

  I wondered how Lewis was holding up and found him in the storeroom, sitting on the cot, with a furious Shayla-fairy tending to his swollen elbow. He’d landed on it when he fell.

  “I hope your arm falls off,” she said, her feisty side surfacing under all the pressure.

  The look that Lewis gave her had me believe that all things were possible. He was smitten in the worst way. I stood befuddled. It took something like this for him to see her? Who’d’ve thunk?

  I could only hope he wasn’t too late. She seemed pretty pissed.

  Tears filled her crystalline blue eyes, eyes so light they almost looked clear. Add to that a tiny freckled nose and bow-tie mouth, and you had one gorgeous fairy. She was about two feet shorter than he was, but that would make their coupledom all the cuter. I saw good things coming from this.

  “You want my arm to fall off?” he asked, wincing when she slapped on an ice pack.

  Or not.

  “Why? I won’t be able to play anymore. Something Like a Dude needs me.”

  She turned and walked away from him, a bright spark of anger lighting the room. For me, anyway.

  When she walked back to him, she hit his arm with a doll-like fist.

  “Ouch,” he said, rubbing the spot though it couldn’t have hurt that bad. While he was confused, he was also hopelessly intrigued.

  She hit him again. Then again, her punches barely making contact. It was all for show, an outlet to filter her anger. Her feelings of helplessness.

  He held up a hand to stop her and said in his own defense, “I could’ve died today.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Tears slid past their gilded lash cage and over her freckled cheeks. She slapped his hand away and hit him again, her frustration palpable.

  In a movement that surprised even himself, he bolted up and pulled her roughly into his arms. She fought him at first, then buried her face in his chest and hugged him to her. Her shoulders shook softly, and he kissed the top of her head.

  I stepped away, unwilling to taint this beautiful moment with fist pumps and whoops of success no matter how badly I wanted to celebrate that small victory. I’d take it. Victories were good no matter how small.

  Dixie had really put Reyes to work. He was busy rearranging her office, the hussy, and I worried about his wound. About his darkness. And about the kiss I’d given him. Was he really frozen in time like everyone else? Was it all just an act? I would die if it was. I’d crawl under the table and wither away. I’d professed my love. Said I’d loved him for a thousand years. How amazingly lame was that?

  I totally needed a girl’s day. Cookie would understand. She was psychic, after all. Surely I could tell her about my… gifts. Surely she could help advise me on what to do with Mr. V. With his family. With Reyes.

  I mean, I knew what I wanted to do with Reyes, but maybe she would know what he was.

  Please don’t be evil. Please don’t be evil. Please don’t be evil.

  Thankfully, the cops hadn’t taken my tip money as evidence. I took out my day’s earnings to see how much I could spend and how much I needed to set back – that phone wasn’t going to buy itself – and found the hundred nestled among the smaller bills. I fished it out, planning to break it, but realized it had writing on the other side. Someone had written across it in pencil, so light I could barely read it, so I raised it to the sun streaming in the window again.

  There, written in French, were the words Je t’ai aimée pendant mille et un. –R.

  I stilled. Read it again. And again. Je t’ai aimée pendant mille et un. –R.

  I’ve loved you for a thousand and one. –R.

  I spun around, rushed back to Dixie’s office, but he was gone.

  12

  Signs you drink too much coffee:

  Your eyes stay open when you sneeze.

  —INTERNET MEME

  Cookie and I did get pedicures and mucho grande mocha lattes. On her, though. She’d insisted. I wasn’t sure I’d ever had one, but I knew damned well a pedicure was going to become one of my weekly routines. The phone might have to wait. Apparently I was made to be pampered.

  After my toenails turned a pretty shade of Mocha, which bizarrely matched Reyes’s eyes, we drove to the Rockefeller mansion. We’d been talking about going out there for two weeks, but the mansion only opened at certain times during the year. Thankfully, Cookie got us on a list, and when the caretakers were giving a special tour to a group of third graders, they’d called and invited us to join them.

  Cookie was a little worried about the kids, but they were third graders. I assured her I could take them if it came to that. And I was certain I could. As long as they didn’t gang up on us, we were good.

  The mansion itself, a National Historic Landmark, was absolutely stunning.
The Rockefellers had completed construction of Kykuit – Dutch for “lookout” – in 1913. Sitting north of Sleepy Hollow, it was a sprawling, forty-room stone mansion with gorgeous architecture and incredible gardens. Every room we entered wrenched a tiny moan of ecstasy out of me.

  Thankfully, the kids were great. Besides a few odd looks, and one kid informing me that he knew how to satisfy a woman – Seriously? That shit started in the third grade? – we had a wonderful time looking at all the furnishings and artwork.

  “I have to start saving my tips,” I told Cookie. “I want this.” I raised my arms and indicated my surroundings with the gusto of inspiration.

  “You want this bathroom?” she asked me. We were in the bathroom at the time. “I know a good decorator. He could make your bathroom look like this one.”

  “No. I want it all. Someday.”

  “Right? This would rock, but I’m not sure it’s really your style.”

  “Why not? You think I don’t have enough blue blood?”

  She crinkled her nose in thought. “I think you don’t have enough of a competitive spirit. Or enough arrogance. I heard that John D. Rockefeller Jr. built it only because his brother built a 240-room estate nearby.”

  “Oh. I might have agreed with you if not for the pedicure.”

  She chuckled as she powdered her nose. “The pedicure?”

  “Yep. You’ve spoiled me, introduced me to the finer things in life. I need to be pampered. To have my nails done by someone else. To have my feet massaged.”

  “I think I know someone who would massage your feet free of charge.”

  A tiny thrill laced up my spine at the thought. “I don’t know, Cook. I think he’s pretty hung up on his ex.”

  “I get that, but he is so into you, it’s unreal. Surely you can see it.”

  “Sure I can, but that doesn’t make him any less hung up on his ex.” I leaned closer to the mirror, wondering where the dark circles came from. Probably a product of my night in a car. With a cat. And Reyes’s jacket. So it wasn’t all bad. “I’m hoping she was an absolute bitch. That way he can get over her faster.”

  She shook her head and snapped her compact closed. “Okay, I am as hot as I’m going to get for the moment.”

  “Which is smoking.”

  “Aw…” We high-fived, ignoring the girl washing her hands who wore enough makeup to go clubbing with us.

  “Are you sure these kids are in the third grade?” I asked Cookie.

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “Okay. Just checking.”

  “So, what now? I’m famished.”

  We’d finished up the tour and were about to head out. “Food good,” I said, doing my best Neanderthal impersonation. “I just need to make pee-pee. I’ll be out in a sec.”

  “You got it. I want to snap a shot of a table I saw in the great room. I’ll meet you outside?”

  “I’ll be there with bells on.”

  Cookie left, and I entered one of two stalls they’d set up to accommodate the tourists. I couldn’t imagine the Rockefellers had needed stalls.

  When I stood to pull up my jeans, something nudged me. I fell back onto the toilet with a squeak and looked up into the mouth of a horse. I gasped as it pushed farther into the stall and nuzzled my neck. It was a gorgeous tan with huge brown eyes and eyelashes as long as my pinkies.

  “Oh, my goodness,” I said, petting its nose and hugging it to me. “Aren’t you a pretty” – I looked out the slit on the side of the door – “girl? Yes you are.”

  She whinnied and nodded her head. “Yes you are. I’m going to pet you and nuzzle you and take you home. I have a ball of fur just vibrating with energy that would love to meet you.”

  I realized at that moment that there was a girl in the next stall.

  “Misty,” she said, talking softly as I kissed the horse’s nose, “I think the lady in the stall next to me is talking to her vagina.”

  I sucked in a horrified breath. “Did you hear that? She called you a vagina. That’s just wrong. So, so wrong.”

  She nodded in agreement again, huffing out a puff of air as though disgusted. She was absolutely adorable. And she was my first departed horse.

  “Okay, I have to pull up my pants now.” Standing in a tiny stall in which a horse was taking up the majority of the room was easier said than done. I finally got my jeans fastened and opened the door, where I came face-to-face with, you guessed it, a headless horseman.

  My gaze rocketed past black riding boots, black pants, and a billowing black cloak to the rider’s face. Or where his face should have been. The space above the collar where one usually finds a head sat empty.

  I screamed and fell back. The horse reared up then retreated a few precious steps. It was enough for me to scramble past and run for my life. I sprinted through the gift shop and out the front door, asking no one in particular, “Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  The headless horseman didn’t follow, thank God. I slowed my steps as I descended the outside stairs and forced myself to calm down. Glancing back every few seconds, I went to the car, a coppery crossover, to wait for Cookie.

  “There you are,” she said when she found me. “You seriously need a phone. I thought you were still inside.”

  “Nope.” I shifted my weight from foot to foot waiting for her to unlock the doors. She did so, and I practically dived inside.

  “You okay, hon?” she asked when she climbed in.

  “Yep.”

  She really needed to hurry.

  “Okay. Oh, did you hear a scream?”

  “No. Someone screamed? That’s weird.”

  “Yes, it is.” Her tone was full of suspicion.

  “I say we go somewhere far away to eat. Like Manhattan.”

  After a giggle, she started the car and backed out. “That would take a while. How about we go somewhere in Tarrytown?”

  “Okay.”

  We talked all the way to the restaurant, which was a quaint little hole-in-the-wall with amazing food. We’d discovered it by accident one day while shopping for flip-flops. In the snow.

  “So,” she said to me, growing serious, “you gonna tell me what happened back there?”

  I’d wanted to spend the afternoon with her, to tell her all my dirty secrets, but how could I do that to her? How could I introduce the world that I can see to someone who can’t and then expect that person to be unchanged? Unaffected? Not that she’d believe me.

  Even with all that, I’d started suspecting a few things myself. I bought the whole story about her friend Charley and how she disappeared, but I still felt like she was holding something back. Like she knew more than she was letting on. And if my suspicions were right, I was about to get a lot of answers.

  There was one surefire way to get those answers: the threat of physical violence.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said, opting for negotiations first. If those didn’t work, then violence. “I’ll tell you everything if you’ll reciprocate.”

  Anxiety spiked inside her, but she pasted on a bright smile and said, “What do you mean?”

  I leaned closer. “You know something. About me. I can tell.”

  “What?” She smoothed her napkin on the table. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.” I raised my butter knife. “I will cut a bitch,” I said through gritted teeth.

  She gasped. Slammed a hand to her chest. Heaved her bosom. “No, please. I swear I don’t know anything.”

  Damn it. I let out a lengthy sigh of disappointment. “You’re not even scared.”

  “Yes, I am,” she assured me with a nod.

  “Oh my God, you’re not.” I dropped the knife on the table. “You aren’t even remotely scared.”

  She hesitated. Chewed on her bottom lip. “Sure I am.”

  “You are, like, the worst actress.”

  She lowered her head in shame. “I am. I’m horrible. Always was. I once got booed off stage.??
?

  “Broadway?”

  “Kindergarten.”

  “Goodness. That’s… harsh.”

  “No, it was bad. My agent had to let me go.”

  “You had an agent? In kindergarten?”

  “Yeah, well, she wasn’t in kindergarten. It was my mom. She was a talent agent in Hollywood for years.”

  “Your mom was a talent agent?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she let you go?”

  “Yes. Not personally, just professionally.”

  “Cook, I’m so sorry.”

  “No, trust me.” She patted my hand to appease my misgivings. “It was for the best.”

  “But why aren’t you scared? I could be a serial killer.”

  “I’m pretty sure you’re not a serial killer.”

  “You don’t know that. Heck, I don’t even know that.”

  “I know.”

  And that brought me back to my point. I leaned closer, let a stretch of several seconds pull the tension tight around us, then asked, “Do you know who I am?”

  She pressed her lips together, an involuntary reflex, then relaxed them. “Yes,” she said, her tone resigned, and a spike of electricity rushed up my spine. “You are my best friend.”

  She wasn’t lying, but that wasn’t what I’d asked.

  “What is my name?”

  With the gentleness of a doe kissing its fawn, she took my hand. “Today, you are Janey Doerr. But I can’t tell you who you will be tomorrow. Who you’ll be next week. I can tell you that no matter who you are or who you turn out to be, I will always love you.”

  Again she was telling the truth. I wilted under the weight of fallen hope.

  “Honey, do you think I know who you are? Who you really are?”

  I lifted a shoulder because I no longer had the energy to lift both. “Do you?”

  “I know that you are kind. I know that you are a good person and that no matter who you were in your past, no matter who you’ll become, you are incredible. You’re special, Janey. God doesn’t make someone like you for no reason. You are here for a purpose. A wondrous, beautiful purpose, and someday you will remember what that is.”