Snowblind(46)

Harley sighed and slouched in the seat, leaning his head back. Idly, he slipped his cell phone out and glanced at it to see if he'd had any calls or texts. In the past couple of days he'd left three messages for Jake Schapiro and hadn't heard back. Something was definitely going on with Jake and Harley worried that his friend was in some kind of trouble. Had he not gone out to the house and seen Jake with his own eyes, he might have been worried that he had somehow offended the guy. But whatever had gotten into Jake's head, he hadn't seemed pissed at Harley. Just preoccupied and a little paranoid. Harley thought of the way the shades had all been drawn and how strangely Jake had acted when he'd gone to the door. At first Harley had thought Jake had a woman inside, but when he'd ruminated on it later, he'd decided that didn't seem likely. If he'd been having some kind of torrid sex weekend, that would explain how tired he looked and maybe-just maybe-the shades being drawn. But Jake had been unshaven and appeared not to have taken a shower. He'd looked skittish and not a little ill. That wasn't the look of a man who'd fallen in love, or even a guy who'd gotten very lucky.

What the hell are you up to? Harley thought, checking to make sure he hadn't missed any texts.

"What are you hiding?" he said aloud, and then he frowned. The question had come unbidden, as if surfacing from his subconscious, but now that the idea had been voiced it stuck in his mind.

The way he'd stood in the doorway that day, blocking Harley's view into the house, holding those cards  …

Harley stopped breathing. Closed his eyes and focused on his memory of those cards. He leaned forward and put his forehead against the steering wheel, slowing exhaling.

"Oh, fuck," he whispered in the confines of the car.

He'd thought they might be playing cards, even tarot cards, but something about them had been familiar. He hadn't seen the backs of the cards or he would have recognized them right away. The way Jake had been holding them, he'd gotten only a glimpse of the front, and even then only the mostly yellow borders at the tops of the cards. They had seemed familiar and now he understood why. He'd played the game often enough as a little kid.

They were Pokémon cards.

A dreadful suspicion filled Harley. He stared out the windshield at the National Grid crew but barely saw them, his mind turning inward. What the hell was Jake Schapiro doing playing Pokémon with all the shades drawn, and whom had he been playing it with?

He reached for the radio but his fingers froze a few inches from it. This is Jake we're talking about, he told himself. The guy's your friend. You're gonna ruin his life on a damn hunch?

No. He wasn't going to do that. He felt guilty enough just to be thinking the things he was thinking. Jake Schapiro had never been the kind of guy to share his most intimate emotions or his secrets, but the same could be said of Harley. They were friends, and he had never gotten any indication that there was anything deviant about the guy. He had to go about this carefully.

Please, he thought to himself Please, don't be a monster.

His cell phone had been acting hinky ever since the storm began, so it didn't surprise him that his call didn't go through the first time. By the fourth try, he'd grown frustrated enough that he was on the verge of leaving the National Grid crew on their own, but then the static on the line cleared and he heard it ringing.

On the fourth ring, there came a fresh burst of static and then a voice. "This is Keenan."

"Detective, it's Harley Talbot. We need to talk."





As night came on, Ella popped a fresh pod into her coffeemaker and hit the button, listening to it gurgle and hiss for a few seconds before the French roast began to flow into her mug. Just the smell of it was enough to please her. Once she'd added the cream-she wouldn't dare taint it with so much as a grain of sugar-she held the mug up and blew ripples across the liquid surface. The coffee would help warm her. Even with the heat on and the thick, black sweater she'd donned, the view out the kitchen window made her shiver. The storm raged out there and it didn't look like there would be any end in sight.
     
 

     

Part of her was relieved. Business at The Vault had been thinner than usual with all this inclement weather and somehow it had lifted the burden of worry from her shoulders when she had realized that she had no choice but to stay home and keep the restaurant closed.

Of course, home had its own worries.

Ella sipped her coffee and tried to ignore her fears.

"Hey."

She flinched, spilling hot coffee onto her hand.

"Son of a bitch," she said, putting the mug down and rinsing her hand in the sink.

TJ came over and ripped a paper towel off the roll, wiping up the mess with a penitent expression.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you."

"I'm just jumpy," Ella said. One hell of an understatement. "Been jumpy all day."

Paper towel balled in his hand, TJ leaned against the counter and looked at her. Ella used a dish cloth to wipe the coffee off the exterior of the mug and then took another sip, grateful that she had spilled only an ounce or two.

"What are we going to do about the little old lady in the living room?"

Ella stared at her coffee, not looking up. This was the conversation she'd been dreading all day. With the three of them snowbound together, it ought to have been an opportunity to watch movies or play games, a chance for Ella and TJ to continue to repair the cracks in their relationship and to shower attention on their daughter. That was what snow days were meant for, not this tension, this breathless confusion.

"I don't know," Ella said quietly, glancing at the kitchen door to make sure Grace had not come in after her father. "I thought it must be just a game she was playing, but this morning she's even worse. Even more  …  strange."

Strange wasn't the way she had intended to finish that sentence. Even more of a bitch, maybe. More like an old woman.

"We need to bring her to a therapist or a psychiatrist or something, get her evaluated," TJ said.

"God, I hate that word. ‘Evaluated,' as if human emotions are fucking mathematics."

TJ put a hand on her arm and Ella felt her anger draining away, leaving only her sadness and confusion. She turned to face him.

"You want to take her out in this storm?" she asked.

"No. But I want to make an appointment for her. I'll make some calls, get some recommendations. I know the day's getting away from us, but the doctor's office will probably at least have the answering service covering the phones, even with the blizzard."

"Hell," Ella said, "maybe we should get an exorcist."

A soft, girlish laugh came from the kitchen door and they both spun to see Grace standing there on the threshold, framed in the entrance to the room. Only she didn't look like Grace; not really. Not now that Ella was looking at her dead-on and the girl had surrendered the effort she'd been making at normalcy.

"That's pretty funny," Grace said, her voice the same but with a harder edge. Her little girl, but with a jaded weariness that only adults ever achieved. "I always knew he'd marry a girl with a sense of humor."

"Grace?" TJ said.

But Ella could tell that he no longer believed he was speaking to his daughter. She could see it in her husband's eyes and hear it in his voice and for a moment her heart swelled with terror as she wondered if she might not have been too far off  …  if it was possible, after all, for a demon to have inhabited her baby girl.

"She's here," the girl said, "but I think we all know you're not talking to her right now. Come on, Thomas. You were always very intuitive, for a boy."

TJ raised a hand to cover his mouth, his eyes wide. Ella felt the wave of fear that came rolling out of him and it gripped her as well. Her eyes welled with tears. She had been half kidding before, but her whole world had just shifted.

"What the hell-" Ella began in a whisper.

Then TJ spoke a single word that shut her up.

"Mom?"

Ella turned to stare at him, pieces falling into place in her mind. Impossible pieces. The house was silent except for the brutal rushing of the wind that made it creak and sway and battered it with heavy snow.

"TJ?" Ella said, her voice cracking.

Grace stepped toward them.

"No!" TJ shouted, one hand up, shaking his head and trembling with emotion that seemed caught between fear and anguish. "You stay right there! Right fucking there!"

Grace watched them with ancient eyes. The little girl tilted her head and sighed impatiently, an aura of sadness around her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Thomas. Ella. I swear to you that I didn't plan for any of this, and I certainly never wanted to hurt or frighten you. But it's too late for apologies now, and too late for tears. You're going to have to hide me, you see."

"Hide you?" Ella echoed.

Grace turned to the window, chin high, looking stronger and wiser than any eleven-year-old girl ever ought to look.

"I can feel them out in the storm."

Snow struck the screen outside the window, whiting out the world.

Grace turned back to them and looked at her mother with a stranger's eyes.

"They're coming."





SEVENTEEN





Miri had spent most of the day hiding away from the storm. She'd had to fight the temptation to pull the drapes, order room service, and find a marathon of nineties' sitcoms on TV, ride out the storm with Friends or Seinfeld, which seemed to be on one channel or another twenty-four hours a day. Instead she was out driving in the snow, hands white-knuckled on the wheel. The wind slammed her rental car hard enough to rock it from side to side and the blizzard punched at her windshield, snow falling so hard that her wipers couldn't keep up. She sat forward in the seat, heat blasting at her face and heart slamming in her chest, doing her damnedest to see more than five feet beyond the nose of the car.