Chapter Three
The never-ending road turns to gravel, and I almost lose all hope just short of seeing the sign that reads Stella’s Salon, 3 Miles. Linzi reminds me to let off the accelerator because the last thing we need is a speeding ticket from a hick town deputy, especially since our parents think we’re in Nashville right now. These are the longest three miles of my life.
We pull up in front of a small white boutique with a cow pasture. There’s an old red barn in the distance, and I struggle to believe that Spence Burks would show up here. Still, that gum-covered receipt says otherwise.
Linzi hesitates as to whether she should knock on the front door, but since it’s a business, she invites herself in. The ding above the door and a sea of cow print welcomes us. From the countertops to the curtains to the hairdryers, black and white cow patterns dominate the room. It smells like cheap hairspray, and I taste it when I inhale.
A lady who’s probably my mom’s age walks out of a back room with a beehive of bleached hair teetering on her head. Her apron is – no surprise – cow print.
“And what can I do for you lovely little ladies?” she asks.
Linzi snaps into CSI mode.
“I was hoping you could give me a little information. I’m trying to find someone who I believe was here within the last week,” she says in her serious voice.
The lady crosses her arms.
“Well honey, if they came in here, I’ll sure bet you I saw ‘em. I’m Stella, and I remember every person who walks through my door. Have a seat,” she says.
Stella points to the spinning chairs. “So,” she says, “tell me about this guy.”
I sit down but instantly lean forward in my chair. “How’d you know it was a guy?”
She waves away my ridiculous question with her hand and laughs. “Believe it or not, I’ve been a teenage girl before. So, spill it. Who ya looking for?”
Linzi does the unthinkable and pulls the Ziploc bag from her purse. She swore the “evidence” had to be concealed or else it could be comprised.
“This receipt is dated…” She stops midsentence and turns the bag in different directions trying to make out the date through the green gum.
“It’s from last week,” she says, sticking the bag back into her purse.
I fall back into the chair.
“He came in a blonde and left with jet black hair,” I say, hoping this will be an uncommon enough occurrence to trigger a memory of him.
Stella buries her face into her hands.
“Oh God, yes, I know who you’re talking about,” she says. “Such a nice-looking young man. Most gorgeous blonde hair I’ve ever seen. I tell ya, people bleach and dye and spend years trying to get that sun-kissed sparkle, and if he didn’t walk in with it and want to cover it up.”
It’s more than obvious that Stella is one of those who has spent years trying to get that sun-kissed sparkle just right. Her hair is more of a fried honey color, though.
“Did he say why he wanted to dye it?” Linzi asks.
She scribbles something in the little pink notebook she brought along for her CSI mission.
“No,” Stella says. “But I told him no one would recognize him anymore, and he said that was exactly the point.”
So he was in disguise! He didn’t want to be recognized, but that still doesn’t explain why he faked his death or came back and snuck me away from a party with him. If anything, it just raises more questions.
“So you dyed his hair?” Linzi assumes.
Stella shakes her head. “Heavens no! I couldn’t bring myself to destroy perfection like that. He said he wanted to go back blonde a day or so later, and I knew if he bleached it, it would be the end of that God-given…”
“His hair was black,” I say, prompting her back to the point of the story. I don’t have time to listen her to bask in the glory of his blondeness.
Linzi continues to scribble everything Stella says into her notebook.
“Right,” Stella says. “We sprayed it black. Rinses out in one washing, looks as good as a dye job, and no damage is done.”
She reaches behind her and grabs a spray paint can to show us the newest device in testing hair colors before actually dying the hair.
I use this as my chance to interrogate about more than his outward appearance.
“He didn’t mention where he was headed or where he’d come from? No small talk?” I ask.
Stella seems like the small talk type, the kind who’d make you talk to her even if you didn’t want to.
“Oh honey, I had to pry the words from his lips. Poor boy didn’t want to talk. He was exhausted, said he’d driven all night. The only thing keeping him awake was the coffee high he was on. He brought the cup in and asked if I’d throw it away for him,” she says.
Stella’s eyes light up. Then her face turns pale. It reminds me of how I felt the moment Mom said that Spence had been dead for three years. If I weren’t scared of giving this lady a heart attack, I’d tell her not to fear anything because she’s already seen the undead and lived to tell us about it.
She jumps up from her chair, sending it into a cyclone spin when she moves, and hurries back to the room she was in when we arrived. I swap glances with Linzi and wait impatiently for Stella to return and reveal whatever sudden epiphany she just had.
Muffled words float from the back, and we hold our breath hoping to hear something that may help. Stella eases back out, her face calm again, with a teenage girl in tow. Her hair is golden brown, and I’m thankful Stella hasn’t tried to bleach it too.
“This is my niece, Katie,” Stella says. “She works here part-time.”
Katie holds up an empty coffee cup.
“His name is Colby Taylor,” she says.
She sets the cup on the countertop behind us, in between my chair and Linzi’s.
Linzi pulls out her cell phone and moves toward the cup.
“Exhibit B,” she says, to no one in particular, as she zooms in on the plastic logo.
Blue squiggles decorate the orange cup. The word Jitters is italicized in purple. Linzi spins the cup around and studies it from all angles.
“He’s a surfer in California,” Katie explains. “My brother is in school on the east coast, so he keeps up with the surf community. There’s a whole east coast-west coast rivalry. Colby Taylor is the west coast surfer.”
It’s only now that I notice her summer tan and hot pink Fort Walton Beach T-shirt. If she thought for a second that I was chasing the west coast surfer, she’d be in my backseat, coffee cup in hand, shouting out directions to the nearest surf competition.
“So you saved the cup because he’s famous?” I ask.
Katie shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “Have you not seen the guy? He’s so hot, like insanely hot…like the sun hot.”
Linzi raises an eyebrow in my direction. I shake my head because I know she’s asking for permission to search the internet high and low for this Colby Taylor guy, even if it’s just to see if he’s as hot as the summer sun.
“It’s a witness testimony,” she says through her teeth, like Katie can’t hear her anyway.
“If we start looking into him, we’ll convince ourselves it’s him even if it’s not, and you know that,” I say. “Let’s follow the coffee cup, and if the trail goes cold, we’ll search the surfer.”
Linzi nods her head and looks back at Katie and Stella. “Do you have a computer I can use? We have to find this Jitters place.”
Stella motions us to the salon’s office. Linzi does a quick search for a coffee shop named Jitters. She scrolls up and down the screen a few times then looks at me.
“It’s a small chain. There are only three in the country. One’s in New Jersey. Another in Florida. And…Oklahoma! That’s the one! He went from Oklahoma to Tennessee to North Carolina,” she says.
Six hours later, night has fallen, and I drive into a black abyss looking for a coffee shop. I w
ish we’d invested in a GPS before we set off on this grand adventure of chasing an undead boy. Linzi tries to help by giving me street directions from her phone, but the connection must be slow because she’s rattling off street names that we passed three blocks ago. I stop at a dead intersection and let her phone catch up with our current location.
“Jitters should be two blocks up,” Linzi says. “3108 Locust Street.”
For once her directions are correct. The purple lights draw more attention to the shop than necessary. I’d much rather be wrapped up in hotel bed sheets right now, but with Jitters all lit up in front of me, I know we have to do this. Sleep can wait just a little longer.
The atmosphere is stale inside. No late night computer junkies using up the free Wi-Fi. No scent of coffee, which is a relief because it reminds me of burnt dog food. Instead there’s a strong hint of lemon in the air. A starving musician in the back corner scribbles on a notebook and fills the air with notes from a small piano. The mixture of his voice with the notes is so incredibly beautiful that I don’t even want to step forward for fear of his hearing me and stopping.
He can’t be any older than Spence Burks, early college-aged, with dark hair, a scruffy face, and rubber bracelets lining both his arms. I play out scenes in my mind in fast forward, imagining him playing here in this coffee shop to playing in a huge auditorium with thousands of people singing his words back to him. I imagine girls screaming for him and bursting into tears as soon as his fingers hit the keys and his voice lights up the night sky. And while I know nothing of this guy except that he’s as beautiful as his voice, I know that he’s a forever-chaser.
He pulls back from the piano, grabs his pencil, and sings lyrics to himself, changing words and rearranging sentences, and I don’t know how long it’s been since we walked through the door and became zombies in a trance before he sees us.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, walking toward us. “Can I get you something? Or help you with something?”
His face floods with panic, and he grabs his abandoned apron off the counter. As he pulls it over his T-shirt, his name tag hits the floor and spins across the tile toward me. I drop down and pick up the plastic, running my index finger over his name. Tim.
“It’s okay,” I say, handing him the tag. “I was just looking for someone.”
“Oh,” he says. “I’m pretty much the only one here at this hour. I come straight from night classes. Crowd’s usually dead, so I can work on my music.” He motions around the empty coffee shop.
Linzi yawns behind me, reminding me that she’s still in the room and as tired as I was before I heard Tim playing the piano. She pulls a chair out from a random table and sits down. She’ll never make it as a CSI at this rate. Doesn’t she know they never sleep?
“You always work nights?” I ask.
He nods as he readjusts his name tag on his shirt. “Nine to nine or ten to ten, depends on which classes I have. Twelve-hour shifts, three times a week. They just need someone here really, but it works out perfectly for me.”
Three times a week. I pray he was working the night Spence needed coffee to drive to Stella’s and change into disguise.
“This guy I’m looking for was in here sometime last week, probably late,” I say. I glance around the empty room and breathe in the lemon fresh chemicals. “He’s probably your age, blonde, and was headed out on a long drive, most likely just dropping in to get something to keep him awake.”
Tim stares behind me, like he’s looking for something that is roaming the streets outside.
“Yeah, I know the guy you’re talking about,” he says. He looks back at me. “He said he was driving and needed something with a lot of caffeine. He needed to make it to Tennessee without falling asleep, pushed on time or something.”
The effects of today’s lengthy drive flee from my body. My heart thumps, and my adrenaline surges, and knowing I’ve found the right coffee shop as well as the right coffee shop employee gives me a brand new sense of hope. The paper stars of the universe have aligned and brought me incredible luck.
“Where was he driving from?” I ask.
I pray that Spence was more talkative with Tim than he was with Stella. By the time he reached Stella’s, he was tired and pressed on time. Besides, Stella and Tim are nothing alike. I could see Spence being friends with Tim.
Tim shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, shattering my thumping heart with those few words. “He just said he’d been on the road for a few days, and he really needed to make it in time. I don’t know where he was headed.”
The trail has run as cold as the vanilla frappe I could go for right now. My weariness sneaks back up on me, plaguing me with heavy eyes and sudden hopelessness. I spare Tim from having to let me down any more than he unknowingly already has and don’t ask any more questions.
“But he did ask if he could put up tour flyers,” Tim says. He points to the corkboard near the door. “The orange one. He said some friends of his were just starting their summer tour, and they had a show in this area later in the summer. They’d asked him to put some up on his way through.”
Linzi nearly topples over in her chair. She’s up and over to the board quicker than I could have been already standing. She jerks the orange paper from the board, and her dropped jaw and huge eyes can only mean one thing – The Ocean in Moonlight.