Ch. 8 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask
Deirdre woke up just after nine in the morning, having collapsed into unconsciousness twelve hours earlier. Surging awake with shock and panic at the smash-cut of one day into the next, she twisted around to grab her phone. Her night’s paperback tumbled to the floor, along with her notebook and memo-pad. Paul had texted her back at 10:16 PM.
‘Just out of the precinct. Exhausted. Heading home. I’ll come by your place as soon as I wake up. Have some ideas.’
She put her phone back down on the bedside table—a reading lamp, a recycled-wood coaster holding a tall mug of water, a stack of notebooks and paperbacks and memo-pads gathering dust—and climbed out of bed. She changed clothes but wore essentially the same outfit. She touched up her hair in the bathroom mirror, still trying to squint wakefulness into her eyes. She refilled Samedi’s supply of dry food and water and headed downstairs.
For breakfast, she fried two organic eggs, free range from a family-owned farm, and stirred a cup of oats, berries, and sliced nuts into a bowl of yogurt. She drank black tea empowered by a simple ritual and the added ingredients of black pepper and dried, ground-up Bee’s bread. She took her tea with a splash of cream. Only halfway through the meal did it occur to her that she hadn’t eaten a proper breakfast in weeks. The realization paused her halfway through chewing.
She might’ve killed the kidnappers and rapists responsible for Razz’s death, the human monster neo-Nazis who’d drugged an unknown number of women into mumbling somnambulance and sold them into servitude—she might’ve sharpened and splintered their last terrible moments alive, but they’d taken everything from her. They’d even taken breakfast.
She finished eating.
Leaving the dishes in the sink, she returned upstairs to clean both of Samedi’s litter boxes. Bagging up the considerable heft of deposits, she carried the excretion back to the kitchen and threw it into a twenty-gallon bin.
The doorbell rang.
Deirdre’s hand reached reflexively for her revolver but somehow she’d forgotten to attach her holster to her belt that morning. Quietly, she padded down the main thoroughfare of her home, unlit candelabra framing her, toward the most secure front door she’d ever imagined. She hesitated between door and stairwell.
“It’s me,” Paul said from outside, barely audible through the steel and lead reinforcements. He continued, “Sorry, I meant…” but the rest of the phrase vanished in the muffle.
It took almost a minute to disengage all the door’s security.
Outside, she found Paul Somers standing next to a bicycle, wearing an overstuffed backpack as an unusual addition to his everyday wrinkled-pants, wrinkled-shirt, tangled-hair look. Noon sun blared down, lighting all green into brilliant emerald. Yet, somehow, deep in the Oceanrest forests, she knew the shadows fell as dark as twilight and a constant mist clung coolly to the ground…
“I meant to text you when I left, but…” he wiped sweat from his brow.
“But what?” she asked.
“Uh…” he hesitated. “Uh…but I didn’t?”
“Oh, cool, sure. Come on in. I love when people show up at my house without any warning.”
“We’re pursuing a killer together.”
“Sorry. I just…” she sighed. “The knock took me by surprise.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” She shook her head. “Anyway, what’s up?”
Paul walked his bicycle inside and the two of them entered her den. She left the frame locks disengaged to save time.
“I was thinking about that case number Rehani caught in that vision the other night.” Paul pulled off the backpack and paused, visibly searching for her cat. “And about, uh…well, how little we really know about what’s going on, here. Except that a psychic tells us that we can help stop it.”
Deirdre had a feeling she knew where this conversation headed. Had she had the same feeling earlier? Is that why she’d cleaned up both litter boxes and refilled all of Samedi’s food? “And your thinking led you where?”
“We know people who might be able to help us,” he sat on her couch, bike leaned against the armrest, satisfied that Samedi licked and dandered elsewhere. “People we can go talk to today.”
“Victor’s kids?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“Nora and Olly,” he confirmed.
She nodded. Victor had recruited her as a once-in-a-while babysitter, which had helped pull her out of her initial depression, but between the siblings’ advanced ages—seventeen and nineteen—and Victor’s strict adherence to quarantine, they hadn’t called her in a long time. And it turned out that grief wasn’t a thing that vanished, merely a thing that waited. She cleared her throat. “It’s a thirteen mile trip.”
Paul set the backpack down by his shins. “That’s why I brought food and water. Do you own a bike?”
She didn’t, but she had Razz’s old one stored in the rubbled wreck that had once served as the Victorian home’s detached garage. “I don’t,” she said.
“Well. If we leave soon, we can still get there by sunset.”
“I need some time.”
“Oh. Sure, no problem. How much?”
“Ninety minutes, give or take.”
His eyes widened. “Oh.”
“I have an hour-long ritual to run in the basement to keep the crops stable, plus I’ll need a half hour to pack.”
He opened his mouth, thought better of saying whatever he planned to say, and nodded instead. “Yeah. Right. So we’ll get there just around or maybe a little after sundown. Is there anything I could help with, or would that just slow things down?”
“I think that would slow things down considerably.”
“I’ll just wait. And, uh…is there any chance you have any psychic downers available?”
About to turn around, she paused. “I thought the dead were being quiet?”
“They are. Mostly. But I can still hear some whispers and…” his jaw worked soundlessly. He didn’t want to say the thing they both knew.
He heard his daughter.
“I’ll see what I have in storage,” she replied.
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