“Oh, but I do,” I say with a straight face. “Big steel testicles that clang when I walk.”
“I was wondering what that noise was,” Suzanne shoots back. “I thought maybe you had the Liberty Bell stuffed up your vag.”
Then we’re laughing. It feels good after all the tension and confusion of the past few days.
She asks, “All kidding aside, how are you? Really?”
I sigh, glancing back at the house. “I’m fine. A little weirded out about Theo, but that’s nothing new.”
Suzanne arches her brows. “Don’t tell me he glared at you again. Coop let me in and said everything was going great.”
I meet her gaze, relieved to have someone to talk to about the subject of Mr. Mysterious. “Theo showed up before the firemen did last night. He got here when I was still on the line with 9-1-1. He had to be, like, right outside the house.”
She does a slow blink that’s almost comical in its exaggeration. “In the middle of the night?”
“I know, it’s weird, right?
Her expression turns horrified. “You’re not saying you think he’s responsible, are you?”
“Oh, no, not at all,” I reassure her, because she looks like she might pass out at the thought. “The outlet where the fire started has been making strange noises since I moved in, and all the lights in the house flicker. I knew the wiring was shot. And Theo had to break through a wall with a sledgehammer to get to where the flames were. There’s no way he could’ve started anything.”
Suzanne looks confused. “Break through a wall?”
“The fire started between the walls. Something to do with an arc failure. The firemen explained it, but the bottom line is that Theo, somehow, was outside my house when it happened. The question is why?”
Suzanne runs a hand over her head, smoothing away a few dark tendrils that have escaped from her ponytail and are trailing into her face, teased by the ocean breeze. “Did you ask him?”
“Of course I asked him. And he did his usual impression of a slab of granite and refused to answer.”
I don’t mention his strange note. It feels too intimate, as if telling someone else would be breaking a confidence. Spilling a secret meant just for me.
Suzanne draws a breath, shaking her head. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. He does have a reputation for being nocturnal.”
“Yeah, one of the firemen said that he wanders around at night, keeping his eye on things.”
“So maybe just chalk it up to coincidence. He happened to be wandering in your neighborhood at the right time.” When I give her a dubious look, she adds tartly, “Hey, you’re the one who thinks everything is pure chance.”
There’s chance and then there’s circumstance, and I know Theo’s arrival wasn’t a random event. He was here at that time for a reason, even if I don’t understand what that reason is.
Yet.
My intuition and common sense both tell me it has to do with whatever his obsession is with the Buttercup. He’s already admitted in an email that the house feels like true north to him. But no matter how obsessed I was with something, I wouldn’t be hanging around it in the middle of the night.
Have you forgotten all the midnights you spent on your knees on the banks of the Salt River?
The thought sends a spike of pain straight through my heart, as if it’s been lanced by a spear.
Suzanne glances at me sharply. “You okay, sweetie? You just went white.”
It’s times like these I wish I had a face that didn’t display every emotion I feel like a neon sign. Normally when I get emotional, I try to cover it up with a laugh or a sarcastic comment, but something moves me to tell her the truth.
Looking out at the white-capped waves, I blow out a hard breath. “After my husband died, I used to go to the bend in the river where I’d scattered his ashes and sit there for hours by myself. Sometimes all night. I’d sit and listen to the crickets and watch the stars move across the sky and talk to him. I’d tell him everything I was doing, how life was going, what new movies were out that he’d want to see. It took more than a year before I realized I wasn’t really mourning him.”
My voice drops an octave. “I was waiting for him to come back.”
I meet Suzanne’s startled gaze. “Cass was gone for fourteen months, and I still didn’t believe it. That’s when I started going to therapy, because I knew my heart couldn’t be trusted to tell the difference between reality and a beautiful, long-dead dream.”
Suzanne looks traumatized by my confession. She says faintly, “Oh. Honey. That’s…”