Darkangel(18)
Too close.
* * *
I came back from lunch a little before one and took over at the store so my aunt could go get her own lunch. She gave me a piercing look before she left, but I didn’t get the impression that she was still angry with me…more like worried, or even afraid. Afraid of what, I wasn’t sure. After my experience with Perry the night before, I certainly wasn’t eager to go back out and test any boundaries.
She only stayed away for a half-hour, which was good, since the tourists were definitely out in force that day. Not that I minded; they kept me busy, and when I was busy I didn’t have much time to think. The money was nice, too, of course, although none of us really needed it. Our homes had been paid for long ago, and the family sat on wealth that had been carefully accumulated during the boom years and then invested just as carefully in the leaner times that followed, when the mine was shut down and most of the non-witch population of Jerome moved on to greener pastures. The clan elders watched over the investments and made quiet payments to all the clan’s members. Of course we were free to earn what we liked on top of that — and we did — but basic survival was never a worry.
As we were locking up, Aunt Rachel said, “I had planned to go over to Tobias’s tonight, but — ”
“You should go,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere, believe me. Well, maybe up to Grapes to get a pizza if we’re not having dinner at home, but that’s it. I’ll watch some Netflix or something.”
Her brow puckered a little at that. She was not a fan of television — we didn’t even own one — but she couldn’t really keep me from streaming videos on my computer. That is, she couldn’t. The connection up here wasn’t always the best. But the weather was clear, so it should be all right. And if not, I had plenty of books to read. Books had been my companions through most of my youth, until I was finally allowed to have a computer when I entered eighth grade.
“All right,” she said at last. “But I’ll just be down at Tobias’s, so….” She trailed off and gave me an uncertain look, as if she wasn’t quite sure what sort of catastrophe might befall me but wanted to make sure I knew she’d be around to help head it off if necessary.
“And I’ve got Floyd Barnett on one side and Cousin Rosemary on the other, so unless you know something and I don’t, and Armageddon is set to happen tonight, I really think I’ll be fine.”
A smile then, albeit a weary one. “You’re right, of course. And you know how to take care of yourself, but after last night — ”
“I still took care of myself. I just did it in a way that the Cottonwood P.D. didn’t appreciate very much.” And did it while practically blind drunk, I thought, but I knew better than to say anything else.
“True.” She reached under the counter and pulled out her purse. “You can finish locking up?”
“Sure thing.” I’d done it many times, but tonight her allowing me to manage the important task of securing the store seemed to take on an extra significance, as if she was trying to show that she still did trust me, despite my foolishness at Main Stage the night before.
She nodded and headed toward the back of the shop and the rear exit. Tobias’s combination house/studio was at the extreme southern edge of the town, right before the houses petered out and the highway took over, but I knew she’d walk it anyway. Everyone walked in Jerome. Why do anything else when the place was less than half a mile from end to end?
We’d locked the front door promptly at six, so all that remained was for me to empty the cash register and put the money and credit card receipts in the safe. Twice a week we’d go down the hill to deposit the cash at the Wells Fargo in Cottonwood, but we wouldn’t be doing that again until Monday.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been left alone in the store at the end of the day, but for some reason a flicker of unease passed over me, a chill, even though I knew that, unlike many of Jerome’s buildings, the one that housed both the store and the two-story apartment where Aunt Rachel and I lived was free of any ghosts or spirits. Although the frightening memory had danced in and out of my thoughts several times during the day, I’d never had a real opportunity to mention the dark figure I’d seen in the bend in the road the night before.
To be perfectly truthful, I’d begun to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. Sydney had once told me a story about her older brother, who was attending Arizona State University, driving home slightly wasted from a party one night and hallucinating a wall stretching across the freeway. The shock had kept him awake and alert the rest of the drive home. Maybe my brain had done the same thing to me, inventing someone standing in the road to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel.