So Many Secrets ~ Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Six

Jakob met her at the door with a blister-pack of Gravol. “The dead, sestranek? You contact the dead? I’ve told you what it’s like.”

“I wanted answers.”

“You wanted risk. The dead can neither be predicted nor trusted—and you know that too.”

So then perhaps she wasn’t Vince Haslom’s daughter? Her knees floated, relief, yet a Shadow of Silva, roundly pregnant, wafted in then wafted out and her breath shuddered.

“I’ve been moving heaven and earth to keep you out of danger!” Jakob railed.

She tossed the Gravol aside. “I am not glass nor a child!”

His lip curled. “My family is dead, sestranek. Every person I love. Except you. You are all I have.”

“I…you….you have your matka. Auntie Danieta—”

“Left me, left everyone, to live all over the globe. But you…”

—never did—

She stepped back. He looked hellish. Too thin. A blue cast under his skin. How many days had it been since she’d seen him? How could he look so bad, so fast? “Jakob, I…I wasn’t thinking about risk. I just…I want this to end.”

“End.” He shot a hand through his hair. Began pacing. “And where was your sea-eyed Knight tonight? Brophy? He was supposed to be with you.”

Clearly for once his precognition had missed the mark. “He was, but not like you seem to think. We…don’t get along.”

“So sleep with him. You’ll get along better.”

“The man who wants me safe also wants me to have random sex?”

“There’s this remarkable device called a condom, Natasha—”

“Dost! My God Jakob, you will be the death of me.”

“Ne. No. Not me. Never.”

“It…” She stepped back. “It was just an expression, bratranek.” Where on earth was his humor? Sensibility? He was so wrapped up in what had happened to her—what had happened to him?

“Your retching burst a blood vessel in your eye, Natasha.”

It had? “It…was intense.” Which eye? she wondered, right or—

“Left,” he said. “I need to show you something.” He drew out his cell phone, swiped the screen. “Seems you were right. Recognize?”

The person in the photo was grainy, yet the features—“That’s my waiter.” Who’d served her the margarita earlier.

“He is also Walter Galinko. He commutes here from Cascadia.”

“H-he served Sabrina and Jessalyn tonight too.”

“You say serving. I say casing his victims.”

She wrapped her arms ’round herself. “A Galinko with preternatural abilities strong enough to turn the whole world into ink.” She was angling for flip, but her voice trembled. “H-how proud his family must be.”

He cocked his head. “The dead you called knew nothing of this Galinko?”

She uttered an abrupt, unhappy laugh. “The dead I called couldn’t care less if his son or daughter both get murdered. Jakob…sit.” She pointed to the sofa, beside a sleeping Shoes.

He sank and a mass of Shadows she could not define sank with him, all meaningless shapes and movement. His confusion over her past? Or her own? “Vincent Haslom,” she said, and the Shadows seemed to lean forward as she told him everything.

His large eyed astonishment made him look like the little boy whose pictures Baba had held onto well after he’d become a teenager, then a man. It made her heart ache somehow, and when he said “No. That can’t be” she wanted, strangely, to cry. “Ne,” he insisted. “Haslom cannot be your tat’ka.”

‘Daddy’. Something about the endearment made her chest twist and she found herself reluctant to say “Just…ask your matka.”

He gaped. Quickly recovered himself. “My matka,” He cleared his throat “Would certainly not have approved of an affair.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Nor of me, really.”

Meaning his ever-changing cast of married women. She wrinkled her nose. “She’d likely disapprove of me too.”

He cut her a look. “Does your Sea-Eyed Knight know about Grigori?”

“Gregory,” she returned, flat, no accent. “And why would Brophy care?”

Something playing with his expression reminded her of Sabrina. “Dost!” she scolded. “The Knight Crawler is in love with his drug-addled girlfriend.”

“In love with? Or bound to?”

She blinked. He laughed, mirthless. “It has been my experience, Natasha, that you grow to loathe those you’re bound to, not love them.”

She regarded him. “Are we talking about Brophy? And if not, who are we talking about?”

His lips jerked, a rough smile. “Sit, Natasha. Your pacing is unnerving your creature.”

Shoes mewed and Natasha patted her absently as she sank down beside him—then she glanced at him, sidelong. “Jakob, do you…feel beholden to me?”

He gawped. She waited. Then “Natasha,” he said, clear and slow. “Do you remember when we were children and I had that…that accident, broke my arm?”

How could she forget? “You and Auntie Danieta came to visit and there you were in a cast. Baba fell to pieces—‘Ach, my Jakob Michael!’—then cooked you twelve plates of everything you loved. Do you remember?”

He grinned.

“I was jealous,” she confessed.

“Really?” He laughed. “I didn’t know.”

She swatted him.

“No, really! I only remember what you said. Do you?”

Of course. “I begged Baba and Auntie to let you come live with us. It seemed to me then that the city where you lived was a scary place. Where older, stronger bratraneks got broken arms.” She smiled, leaned her head on his shoulder. “I was worried about you.”

He placed his cheek on her hair. “Yet you ask if I am beholden to you. Natasha, no one has ever loved me like you do.”

Tears gathered in her eyes. “Jakob—”

“You wanted to rescue me back then. Just like—” He tossed a thumb toward Shoes.

“I still do.” She turned, faced him. “Tell me why you look so dreadful.”

He tsked. “You’re beginning to insult me like your idiot Railey.”

“As if Railey has ever thought you look dreadful. Open your all-seeing eyes, bratranek. But first: Tell me.”

He fell quiet, obviously debating, then “Galinko.”

Her heart began pounding. “W-we need to tell the policii—”

“Ha! The police, myself, and any member of the Galinko family is an unholy trinity.”

“So then—”

“I need you to stay with your Sea-Eyed Knight and the– er – your sister. Galinko…will be leaving.”

A leaden weight dropped her heart and “Jakob,” she began, but an old Shadow floated forth, a little boy with a stiff, white cast on his arm. ‘You have to be careful,’ it said. ‘If you’re not careful you get hurt really bad.’ His eyes looked solemn and sad.

His eyes still looked solemn and sad.

She grasped his gaze with her own. “How do I help you?”

He shook his head. “Ne, Natash—”

“Dost! Whatever you are planning, whatever you do—Jakob, I will make certain you never get caught.”

***

“Don’t hang up.” Owen shouldered his way into his parents’ home, muscle memory attending to the lights while he focused on his phone. “Where are you?”

“In your ear, Night Crawler. You alone now? I heard that woman with you. She sounded sexy.”

“No, she sounded scared.”

“Ah. The Night Crawler’s found a damsel to rescue.”

Any irritation he felt was eclipsed by a sudden recollection of two seemingly meaningless words that had drifted through his thoughts as he’d crouched before that tombstone the Tsarina had shown him. Knight Crawler. He laughed, sharp and humorless. “Christ, is she saying that wrong.”

“What?” Sondra rallied. “So she’s not a distressed damsel? Why? No body to go with that soft, sexy voice?”

When had she become petty? “Where are you?” he barked. “I looked for you at your treatment center.”

“You…I…left there.”

Obviously. “Dammit, Sondra, they won’t hesitate to take you into custody—”

“Night Crawler, please. Just…can we just talk? Pretend things are the way they used to be?”

“No. I—” He faltered there in his mother’s kitchen, upon a glimpse of himself in the night-darkened window. All beard and hair, yet still standing in the place where he’d grown up. A place where his mother would demand, much like Steve, that he clean himself up.

“Tell me about this investigation you’re doing,” said Sondra.

He sighed.

“Night Crawler, please. Let’s…let’s just be cops again. Just…just for tonight.”

Would that help her off the ledge she was so determined to teeter on? He dropped down to the table, started talking.

She listened like the cop—the excellent cop—she’d been, frequently peppering him with questions, the first one, “Is she delusional?” after he said

“The Ten Code, 10-30 M, what is that one?”

“Danger,” she answered. “Mental case. Head case.”

The Tsarina wasn’t nuts. “Sondra, the things she’s told me…she’s bang on.”

“Huh? Who? Oh. The psychic.” She sounded distracted. So much that he could all but see her ruffle her red hair, just like she always used to when she was thinking. “Your perp,” she said then. “And these fairytale references. Think this weirdo is living out a story?”

His gut told him no. And also said “He feels wronged. Like a fairytale victim. You know how the roles are always exaggerated in those stories—the victims are always really wronged: starved, locked up. Cannibalized.” All the things that had horrified Natasha.

And the punishments for the villain are always exaggerated too,” added Sondra.

“Yeah. ‘Fairytales often end violently’,” he quoted. “And not only that, but the retribution for the villain is always exquisitely timed.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s always dramatic, how the ogre gets ate, the wicked queen gets burned up, or whatever. But that’s part of what’s been picking me: why is the threat maker waiting to deal their so-called big death blow? If they’re into all these theatrics, then what’s with the taunting and cat-n-mouse crap?”

“You’re thinking like a man,” Sondra laughed, irony crouched in the sound.

He frowned.

“And Night Crawler, you’re also looking for a man.”

He flopped back. “Well, fuck.” A perp who skulked in the shadows. Who threatened instead of just waging war with guns blazing. Who took pleasure in horrifying by nailing a kitten to a stoop—and then in humiliating by calling someone ‘beloved’ when they knew damn well that same person had ‘No Friends To Show’. “A woman,” he said.

“A complete bitch,” Sondra replied. “You’re looking for a chick with an anvil-sized chip on her shoulder.”

He rapidly woke the mouse on his laptop. Which members of the Galinko family were women? Which members of Alberta Unsolved were female? He raised the website, scoured the message board. Would Natasha be able to touch these names and tell?

“Owen?” said Sondra as his eyes enlarged, took in a new message directed to him.

“Yeah?” His gaze was hitched to a line that read @Night Crawler.

“Can…can we meet?”

He choked a little for there, on the screen, it also said We need to meet. “When?” he said and could feel the adrenaline the Tsarina had spoke of, coursing up his spine.

“Soon?” asked Sondra, and on the screen it said Tomorrow

“Yeah,” he agreed more to the screen than to her, looking at the sender field. It read ThirdEye20/20.

©bonnie randall 2005

So Many Secrets ~ Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Five

In the dashboard glow she looked ghoulish; dark half-moons under her eyes, and so pale the blue dash lights made her face look luminous. He reached to turn the stereo off. She beat him to it, turned it up. “Trust me,” she muttered, then tossed him a look. “Although I know that’s difficult.”

“You’re awful lippy for a shut-in. You steal all your best lines from TV?”

He didn’t need to be psychic to feel how much she wanted to clock him, but it was worth it. Riling her up seemed to make her forget to keep shrinking away from her window and its proximity to the cemetery. “Tell me what really brought you to Vestemere,” he said.

“Tell me how you know I’m a shut-in.”

“I’m a cop. It’s my job to find out things.”

She regarded him and—Christ!—there was puke on her shirt. So much blood it looked like she’d been flailing a scalpel in some primitive sort of O.R. Still, she looked regal. Tsarina.

“Stop calling me that,” she snapped, then fixed him with a gold stare. “‘I am a cop,’ he says, yet he sings when he builds houses for Blue Eyes. Off-key and often with the wrong words, yet…he sings.”

He set his arms in an X over his chest.

“You never sing when you police your Downtown East Side. You’re too busy being alert and…” She closed her eyes. “Feeling adrenaline. Like lightning up your spine. You felt it again, out there, tonight.” She pointed, no looking, out at the graves. “You…like that feeling.”

Yeah. He did.

“But you don’t sing,” she said softly.

That pissed him off. Kind of. Her upside-down smile, what she said…it also made him want to talk. Confide.

Maybe that was why he felt pissed off.

“I came here with my cousin,’ she said then, switching gears, and he listened, learning terms like ‘Shadows’. ‘Blocked with ink’ And ‘Fairy tales often end violently’. There he stopped her.

“What do you know about that?”

She offered empty hands. “I’d never read a fairytale in my life before I came here.”

Hence her uptight abhorrence about the stories. It had not been an act.

“And what have you found out?” she asked.

“Galinko,” he said, smacking the proverbial card on the table. “A website on unsolved crimes seems to think your family hung and gutted him.”

She visibly curdled. “I…I did not do that.”

Christ, obviously.

She didn’t notice him roll his eyes. Started knitting her hands. “The Galinko family, they’re…stiff. Disapproving. Churchy. What we are, Jakob and me, what we can do—”

“Second Kings Seventeen and Thirteen,” he said.

“Yes.” She crumpled in her seat like so many other witnesses he’d seen, weighted with the relief of being understood. “I’ve scrubbed that Bible verse off my house a thousand times. Yet, if one of the Galinkos is this threat-maker, then they too are psychic, so…” She trailed off, brow folding. “…I guess it seemed like a better theory when it was just in my head.”

He grunted. “Welcome to policing. Tell me about your cousin. He really a collectables dealer?”

Yes. And does he use his clairvoyance to cheat people? Often. Next question?”

“He really setting up a store here?”

“No. And not in Cascadia, either. That’s where he senses our threat-maker is holed up.”

Same town where Cory Chandler lived. He tabled this, said “He looking to have an affair with Jessalyn Haslom?”

“Wha—no. Absolutely not.”

“You sure? She’s an artist, he’s a collector—”

“And if he wanted to add to the appallingly long list of married women he’s deflowered, he’d be far more gratified by her husband being alive and bested, not dead.”

Huh. Real stand-up guy. “Okay, next topic: You just tried interrogating Vincent Haslom about his Galinko. You’ve surmised that the Galinko family is the link you share with Rob.”

“Yes.” She stiffened, prim. “That…that is the only link.”

Horseshit. Her hands had just started re-knitting. Yet he tabled this too and shifted his car into gear, began creeping away from the graveyard.

“Thank you.” She sagged again, replete with relief.

Pity stabbed him in the chest right where she said Rob would be injured. Killed. He looked at her. “What did Vince Haslom tell you?”

“Nothing I valued,” she retorted, and stared out her passenger window.

Her reflection was twisted. Pissed off. His mouth curved into a sardonic corkscrew of its own. “Well, old Vince never was the type to make anything easy.”

“Horrible man,” she said, mostly under her breath, and he wondered—what the hell had Haslom’s ghost done? Christ knew the old prick had always looked at him like he was dog shit staining his shoe.

“He hurt you?” he asked, too sharp, for she immediately flinched.

“N-ne,” she said, but distraught, and with more hand fretting. “It’s just…I’m not a medium. Not usually. I didn’t know how sick it would make me to…call the dead.”

She shuddered, and as he felt himself do the same the stereo switched tracks. An ancient Eagles tune, Witchy Woman. Grimacing, he flicked it off. She quickly turned it back on. “Owen, this needs to be private.”

“From who?”

“Jakob. I…I need to sort out how to tell him about…Haslom.”

Didn’t she say she’d told him already? He lifted an eyebrow.

“He can’t hear me through music,” she added.

Really? He cocked his head. “What can’t you hear through?”

She looked surprised. “Many things. Most things. I…I’m not like him. I am not a strong psychic.” She pulled a face at his expression. “I am not usually a strong psychic. I only see the past and even then, I have to have touch as a conduit. Though I can prevent it with massage oil. Massage…it’s a good career for me. Then I can touch people and not…”

She fell quiet and he sailed back to how he’d crowded her against her front door. “I don’t like you.” “I know. No one does.” He wished he could chew the words back in. Swallow them whole.

She turned, faced him. “You do not have to pity me, Owen Brophy.”

His shoulder twitched, unnerved at how aptly she’d raided his thoughts—and irritated too. “Why the hell do you stay where you know you’ve been branded? You have to know it isn’t you. Because even despite circumstances, you’ve already made friends here.”

“With one person! Jessalyn Haslom can’t stand me.”

“Jessalyn is a suspicious cop’s kid who’s not just abrasive with you. You should hear some of the things she’s said to me. Or seen her go toe-to-toe with Sab.”

She looked skeptical. Talk about ‘suspicious’.

“And besides Jessalyn or Sabrina, you have Rob wrapped around your little finger.”

She flinched and looked…aghast, he believed the word was. What a puritan. He could not resist poking. “He’s quite taken with you.”

Her sunrise eyes were large enough to swallow her face. “Rob is….are you implying….ne. No. He is devoted to little Heart Face, wise Policii Brophy. You forget. I see.” She touched her temple.

“Thought you said it was only my head you could burglarize and paw through like a book.”

“A comic book,” she said acidly. “And it is. I’m not talking about my Shadows. A woman doesn’t need preternatural abilities to see how a man looks at someone he loves.” Her face softened then and despite the blood, the puke, and her fear, she truly was beautiful. Ethereally so.

“Plus,” she said, “she’s having his baby.”

“Jessalyn?” He blinked. “Her too? Sab’s pregnant.”

She didn’t ask how he knew, bust him for one more thing he’d eavesdropped on, and instead gasped as her gaze trickled up the block. “Pull over!” she said. “Right now!”

He obeyed, quickly wheeling to the curb.

“Jakob.” She pointed toward the cottage where a silver—holy shit, that’s a Maserati!—vehicle was parked outside. “I’m not sure I want him to know that I’ve talked to you.”

“So you don’t trust him.”

“No, I want him to trust me.” She swiveled to face him. “But before I go I want to check a theory.”

He jacked a brow.

She lifted her palm, fingers splayed. “Give me your hand, Policii Brophy.”

“Owen.”

“You say Tsarina, I say policii. And close your eyes.”

He hesitated.

She sighed. “Owen, please.”

Please, Owen. Her plea from when he’d pinned her to the door. He raised his hand. Shut his eyes.

Their skin met and that rush, electric euphoria, coursed through him. He heard her gasp and “Natasha?” he murmured. What was that sensation? Did she feel it every time? But then…footfalls. Footfalls fell over anything he might say, methodical and crunching through…he listened. Dry grass? An inward scene floated into focus.

“Do you see that?” she whispered.

Yes. They stood in the middle of a prairie. An endless vista. He could see forever yet…could see nothing at all; it was twilight and everything was monochromatic, blacks and greys. “Is it supposed to be black and whi…” he began, but his voice dwindled as fog drifted around his ankles, clouding as he crouched. There was a bouquet of fluffy flowers clenched in his hand, and “Tsarina,” he heard himself say, quietly, then placed the flowers at the foot of a tombstone. BELOVED, it read and, above: NATASHA NOREENA NIK—“Jesus!” He yanked his hand back. The prairie disintegrated and they were back in his car, faces lit by blue dash light, not twilight. “That date. It’s less than a month.”

“I know.” Her eyes were enormous.

“You didn’t tell me you were on this bastard’s hit list too!”

“I…” She shrank from his tone. He didn’t care.

“Dammit, Tsarina, there’s nothing more frustrating than when a vic withholds information!”

“Y-you saw that Facebook page before I did! She has a knife in her chest!”

“And you said that a lot of this stuff is symbolic! Now I see that you’re about to be murdered?”

She fretted. “I just wanted to see if I could show you the date. If you could see what I see the way I see you. I…I didn’t think you’d care—”

“Jesus Christ, Natasha, I’m a cop. Of course I care if someone’s about to get whacked.”

“You…yes. Of course. You care because you are a cop. Policii.”

This time it didn’t sound like an insult. She was trying for a smile.

Screw that.

She shrank even smaller. “Owen, I…I told you before, I really don’t have that many people in my life who would care if I was dead.”

Their eyes met and, internally, within him, he felt it start to rain. He shook it off, said “How the hell do I shut you out of here?” He pointed to his head.

“You…just did.”

He squinted.

“I smelled rain and your Shadow…it held up an arm, blocked me so I couldn’t see.”

He glanced down at his forearm.

“Not…this arm.” She placed a gentle hand on his wrist—then jerked back as if she had burned him. “Your Shadow,” she said. “Here.” She touched her temple. “How did you…not even Jakob can do that.” She beamed a little, impressed.

He didn’t know what to say.

Her grin fizzled and she cleared her throat. “There is something else I need to tell you.”

“Oh? Just one thing?”

She scowled. “I am not withholding information on purpose.”

He believed her. She was just…inexperienced. And painfully awkward. “Okay.” He beckoned with his hands.

“That portrait Jessalyn painted of the psychic, Calling in Light?”

Which was MIA right now. “Yeah?”

“Well, I tried it. Calling light instead of Shadows. And it broke through the ink block. Just pinpricks, but still. That…that’s what I was doing when you came to the cottage tonight.”

“You were surrounded by bloody Kleenex when I came to the cottage tonight.”

“Ja.” She waved this off with a hand. “Because it is difficult, but I still saw something. Heard something, more accurately. I think it’s a date or a time of some sort. Ten-thirty M. Could that be May? Next month? Does it mean anything to you?”

“Ten-thirty,” he repeated. It rang vague bells. Why?

“M,” she added.

Ten-thirty M. Ten-thirty…“Wait,” he said, it was dawning.

“Um…your phone is ringing.”

He heard her, but only absently. Ten-thirty. 10-30. It was a ten code. A police code.

“Owen. Your phone is ringing.”

Dammit! He pulled his cell from his pocket. It was set to silent, yet the screen was lit up with a call. “Look,” he said, shaken. “You need to stop doing stuff like this and listen—”

“No, you listen. Pick up. It…it’s your girlfriend.”

He glanced at the screen. An unfamiliar number. Sondra. Where the hell was she?

“I…I’ll give you privacy.” Natasha reached for the door.

“Wait! Ten—”

“Owen, answer your phone. A woman…a woman doesn’t need preternatural abilities to see how a man looks when he loves someone…remember?” Her mouth fell into its upside-down smile.

And, inside, rain started to fall. “Tsarina—”

“Your phone, my subject,” she said, exasperated, then slipped outside.

“Wait!” he barked, and swiped his screen, snapped “Wait!” into the phone too.

Outside, and illuminated by a weak pool of streetlight, her clothes were even filthier, and her gold eyes…Christ, she looked sad. Unbearably. He pinned his gaze into that sorrow. “Meet me tomorrow.”

Her head waggled, uncertain.

He rattled off his address. “Just down the street. Private. Natasha, I can help, you.”

She shrank back, withdrawing.

“You can help me.”

She hesitated, clearly torn.

“Rob’s my best friend,” he tacked on, angling for guilt. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He reached over, slammed the passenger door shut before she could say no, then drove away.

©bonnie randall 2005

So Many Secrets ~ Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter 24

That was twice now the Tsarina had lopped off his balls, this time tossing them into the mess of peanut shells on the barroom floor. “’Scuse me, ladies,” he said, and pivoted to follow her.

“Owen wait,” called Jessalyn. “You need to know the latest.”

“Latest what?” Sabrina, narrow eyes and flinty mouth, sized them up. The CEO, he thought, and a hitch found his chest. Where did the wild, uninhibited Sabrina he grew up with flee to when the CEO in her took over?

Maybe to the same place where the ‘clean-cut cutie’ she’d called him stayed hidden.

She had two fingers pointed, a vee aimed at them both. “Exactly what the hell is your problem with Natasha?”

Jessalyn flicked a shoulder, and Sabrina’s eyes crackled. “Uh, no,” she said. “You don’t get to pull your prima donna artist bullshit with me. And you.” Her colorless gaze impaled him, making him bristle just like he used to when old Vince Haslom would glare at him from down his haughty nose. “Both of you purposefully make Natasha feel small every chance you get. And if she’s done something to earn that? Spit it out. But if this is some sort of mean girl horseshit—” She glared at Jessalyn. “It stops now.”

Jessalyn, ever the pugilist, jabbed her chin out. “She and her cousin are terrorizing me—us,” she amended. “Me and Robbie.”

Sabrina snorted.

He cleared his throat, faced her. “Rob and Jessalyn have been receiving weird threats. Passive-aggressive stuff. Cryptic and creepy. Then, before her art show, whoever the threat maker is got more ballsy, came right up on their doorstep, left a note and…” A tortured kitten. Jesus! “…and blood. The note said ‘The little princess should suffer’.”

“And today the entire collection I sold at my show was shipped back to me courtesy of someone who calls himself Third Eye 20/20.”

Shit. Really?

“Except for one painting.” Jessalyn added, and gave him a meaningful look.

Calling in the Light. The portrait the Tsarina had wanted.

“And you think it’s Natasha,” said Sabrina.

“Or the cousin,” said Jessalyn.

Sabrina peered at her. “And how about your Dad? What does he say?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means he once policed out in eastern Alberta,” Sabrina replied, then tossed a thin smile his way. “Or did you think you were the only one who could dig up history, Badass?” Back to Jessalyn. “Your C.C. made a mission out of nailing my poor, maligned father—sarcasm intended—for shit he also pulled out on the prairie. So how are they, our dear daddies, connected to Natasha and this cousin of hers? Or did neither of you ever consider that maybe they’re victims of something too—and that they think you’re up to something?”

Sort of. Twice now his head had kicked out that little fantasy of Natasha drowning in a rainstorm of tears. He glanced over at the swinging saloon doors she’d escaped through, but then Jessalyn, in a tone of syrupy pleasantness, said, “You know, Sab, whenever you point the finger at C.C. I can’t figure out whether it’s because you think everyone’s dad is a bastard, or if you just want them to be.”

Ouch. That was low. He peeked to see how it was taken.

Sabrina’s smile sent ice up his spine. Why, hello, Vincent Haslom.

“What I think,” she said, “is that your father was a cop. And as a cop his toes would have always been in and out of some damn toxic water.” Again she stabbed him with a gaze. “Am I right? Hell, look at yourself. You know I’m right.”

He inhaled, but whether the breath was indignation or guilt, he wasn’t sure.

“Ever read Nietzsche?” asked Sabrina. “He said ‘when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you’. That’s cops. All cops. Or why do you think so many of them are drunks, or druggies, or can’t keep their damn pants on for anyone other than their own wives?”

“C.C.—” sputtered Jessalyn and Owen found himself floundering too, wanting to defend himself. Defend Sondra. Yet nothing he could say could refute a single point Sabrina made.

“C.C.’s no different,” Sabrina snapped. “And if you really think he is, you’re a silly, naïve child. And I love you anyway, Jessalyn, you know I do, but I will not tolerate cruelty to anyone who doesn’t deserve it—and I sure as hell won’t stand for anyone being cast as a saint when he’s nothing more than a mere human being. I kept enough secrets and appearances growing up, and I sure as hell endured enough cruelty for ten or twenty people—so did your husband, by the way—so I’ll never sit back and watch bullshit being dished out.” She gathered her bag, then fixed him with a look. “You must have thought I was joking when I said ‘be nice’, eh, Badass? Well, I wasn’t. And I will be watching.”

She sailed out, feet smooth and head high. He exhaled as the doors swung behind her. “The CEO has left the building,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” agreed Jesslyn. “You going to obey?”

“Hell no.”

***

The Tsarina was visible through the cottage window, kitten on her lap and hands curved into the shape of a cup. Filled with potato chips? He squinted, but…no. She was bleeding. And piles of wadded up Kleenex littered the ottoman before her, all dappled scarlet. Grimacing, he rapped on her door.

She stiffened, he could see her posture through the glass, and more spotted Kleenex fell to the floor as she rose. She opened the door, but only a crack. “What?”

He turned on the million watt smile. “You in a better mood? We didn’t finish our chat.”

“I am not talking to you.”

He slid his foot between door and jamb. “Oh, I think you should.”

“I…I’m calling Sabrina.” With one hand fast on the doorknob, she reached blindly with the other for her cell.

“I wouldn’t bother,” he said. “She’s the one who asked me to come.”

Hurt slid across her face and he winced, but then “No.” She peered at him. “You’re lying.”

Of course he was lying. Yet in that moment her stance had gone slack and he was able to push the door wide enough to crowd past her, get in.

She inhaled, the sound unmistakably fear, and her gold eyes became big, looking for escape.

“We need to talk,” he said amiably, but her face. It churned the guilt inside, sharp and twisting.

She whispered “Get out”, voice scarcely more than a breath.

“Natasha,” he said, but she, like he, was watching body language, and as he stepped forward she ducked under his arm, made for the porch.

He spun and shot a hand out, slamming the door with a crack that made the walls quake. “I said let’s talk,” he murmured, butting his mouth up next to her ear.

Her scent—roses and fear—roiled the guilt in his belly. Still—“Here’s the thing, Natasha.” His voice moved silken tendrils of her hair. “I don’t like you.”

“I…I know,” she whispered. “No one does.”

His chest tightened. He clenched his jaw. “And?” he said. “Why is that?”

“I…” Her knuckles stood out, white and lumpy as she clutched the doorknob. “You wouldn’t believe me.” The whisper stuttered out.

He kept his mouth on her ear. “Try me.”

“N-no. No.” This, stronger.

“Would it help me trust you?”

She laughed, mirthless, and when she shook her head the scent of roses was frantic. “God, no.”

“Why? Do you have a criminal record, Natasha?”

The skin behind her ear fluttered with goosebumps, yet “N-no!” she exclaimed. “I-I’ve never hurt a soul in my life.” A tear, opaque and rapid, slipped down her cheek.

He squeezed his eyes shut. No guilt, he told himself. No regret.

Still, a quiet sob escaped her and it pissed him off, how it gripped his ribcage like a snakebite. Speaking through gritted teeth, he tried different leverage. “You’re hiding something in your bedroom.”

“N-no! I’m not! Nuh-uh!”

So quick and frantic. Christ, she was the world’s shittiest liar. And he was the world’s cruelest prick. “And that facebook profile, Sleeping Beauty. It isn’t yours yet you said that it was.”

“It…is.”

So dubious, like she knew not to even believe herself. He said “You’re covering for someone.”

“Ne! No.”

“You are lying for someone.”

“N-no.”

So uncertain. A lie she did not want to tell. At last they were getting somewhere. “Lying for who, Natasha? Give me a name. Let me help you. Tell me who.”

“Y-you’re the liar! I’m not telling you!”

Petulance? She was practically pissing her pants and yet she was petulant? He stepped closer, chest hard against her back. “Oh yes,” he breathed. “You’ll tell me.”

“N-no.” Her face was so close to the door she could scarcely shake her head.

He stepped closer.

Her breath shook and “P-please, Owen,” she whispered.

His heart contracted. She’d never called him by his first name and now he had to clench his jaw against a craving that just wanted to pull her close, give her comfort. Instead he made himself growl. “Tell me or I’ll kick your bedroom door down. Give me a name or I’ll ransack your room till I find—”

In a trice his flat hand was pried off the door and she slammed her palm against his.

A rush, like an ocean wave of something electric, something magnetic, swept into him and he teetered, leaning into it. A word occurred—seduction—and he wavered, wanting more. Then she said “You never used to like stupid milkshakes that look like someone threw up the lawn.”

Wha—? He blinked. Weaved. Couldn’t orient.

She clamped her opposite hand on his wrist, kept their palms together. “You…you fed your broccoli to the dog beneath the table. You were eight, and when your matka caught you she took your plate away. She sent you to your room without supper, but then….”

He swayed as the tide of electricity, of euphoria, intensified. Every centimeter of his skin was afire.

“Your…Grandma was there, except you called her…Boss?” It came out like a question, then—“Yes,” she said. “Boss. Boss felt sorry for you, so when your matka wasn’t looking she made you jam sandwiches on thick slices of homemade bread. You shared them up in your room with a carton of chocolate milk.”

Yes. That’s exactly what had happened.

Tears trickled down her face. “Then, before Boss died, you reminded her of that story in the nursing home. You hoped it would make her open her eyes.”

It hadn’t. And the anguish that gutted him then enraged him now. He yanked himself free and “Where?” he sputtered. “Where did you…how did you…who told you that?”

“You told me that!” She pointed to his palm. “You want to know who I am? I’m the person you mock and call Tsarina, thinking I can’t hear you. I’m the person who can’t sleep because I see horrible things about people I don’t even know. I’m the person who never asked for any of this and damn well doesn’t want it, yet despite that, I’m still the person you’d like to throw a rock at right now!” She whirled then, bolted out the door.

Fuck! “Tsar—Natasha!” He couldn’t follow. Legs were a mess of shakes. That broccoli story, him and Boss…it was colorless. Innocent. Still, it had been a part of Boss he’d for once never had to share with his siblings, so he’d never told a soul. And when Boss had been floating in that blank space between life and death, he’d been so sure it would rouse her, make her gather him close as if he were still just eight. Now he stared down the empty street. He hadn’t meant to lose his temper. Hadn’t known how to react. “Grab Natasha Nikoslav’s hand. Then tell me why you think people are prickly. “A psychic,” he whispered. He’d never encountered one, but other cops (Cory Chandler would no doubt count himself among them) spoke of them with reverence and awe. Hell, he’d even seen fist fights bust out in squad rooms when skeptics laughed, trying to make the believers look like fools. Now he opened his hand and scraps of that same seductive electricity still skittered over his skin. “Where are you?” he murmured, and moved out the door.

A yowl resounded near his feet. Her kitten, Shoes, was hobbling outside too, mewing and dragging its injured leg. “C’mere.” He scooped her up.

The kitten hissed. He clucked his tongue. “Like Mama, like baby? Don’t be scared.” He examined the bandage boot on its paw. “What sort of sicko tortures an animal? A baby?” He carried it through the cottage, looking for something to distract it from crying at the door.

Two fussy food bowls were set out in the kitchen, one with mush, one with milk. “You’re spoiled like the moppet,” he said, and dumped the milk out, replaced it with water. “She’s trying to pamper you. She doesn’t even know that milk’s bad for your tummy, right, little girl?”

The kitten mewed. He chucked it under its chin. “Where d’you think she went?”

The kitten lapped water, parched, and as its little body started to vibrate with purrs, he recalled what Jessalyn had said on their way to Vancouver and his gut sank. “Aw, shit, kitty. I think I know exactly where to find her.”

***

Her feet pelted up the sidewalk, falling silent once they sank into the cemetery’s manicured lawn. “Vincent Haslom,” she panted. “Come.”

A thin sort of quiet tided through the graveyard. “Please,” she whispered. “I need answers. I need to get out of here.” She could still feel Owen Brophy’s breath on her ear. Her heartbeat was still jacked and too loud.

And peonies, stupid peonies, had fallen before her feet all the way over here. “Don’t show!” she hissed and they withered while around her the night remained vacant. She approached Haslom’s tombstone, trailed a fingertip over the indent of letters ENDLESS SLEEP. “Please.” The stone was rough and cold. “Come.”

Silence, then…the wind chimes trilled. Her ears pricked and as she turned to them a scent registered. Cologne. Expensive. Male. She squinted down the long row of tombstones, gaze swallowed by the silken darkness of nothing—yet the air was alive, a glittering electricity making her skin zing.

“She named you Natasha.”

She whirled.

Vincent Haslom was no Shadow. Shadows, no matter how sharp they could be, still always looked like film projections. This… “Flesh and blood?” she whispered.

“She said she’d never call you anything ethnic.” He watched her, colorless eyes identical to his other daughter. His real daughter.

“Y-you,” she croaked, then swallowed. “I need you to tell me where the bones are. Galinko.”

He leaned against the tree next to his tombstone. “I always wanted you to come here because you knew it was home. Yet you’ve come because of them.”

‘Them’. Blue Eyes and Sabrina and Heart-Face.

“What a waste.”

She growled, a primitive sound. “They are your children.”

He rolled colorless eyes. “When someone gives you a gift you don’t want, is it still really yours?”

She choked. Stared.

“Robert married that cop’s kid for spite.”

“No! He loves—”

Haslom laughed and it echoed, silent thunder. “And then there’s the man that bitch who stole my company landed with.”

A gasp of outrage squeaked in her throat, but—The dead have no filter. The dead have no filter. She repeated it, grinding her teeth.

“It is obvious what you think of me, darling daughter.”

“I am Silva’s daughter.”

“And she helped me hide those bones you seek back in Alberta. So was she really a better parent than I would have been?”

“She…you…she was a seventeen year old child and you…you bedded her!”

“Who bedded who?” Thunder-laughter shook the windchimes in the tree. “She was never a child, darling girl.”

“I’m not your girl.”

The mirth fell off his face. “I would have given you everything. Every company. Every dime. She forbade it and I…I would not defy her, but Natasha, my daughter. I love you.”

Her skin crawled, and as he approached her nausea crested. Her bowels became loose. Was this…normal? “Jakob?” she called, forgetting, as she swallowed bile, that he could not hear her, calling aloud.

Haslom raised both eyebrows. “Ah, your real family. Jakob Antonovich.”

How did he know the name Antonovich? “Nikoslav,” she spat, and flattened a hand over her turning stomach. “He is a Nikoslav like I am a Nikoslav.” She retched then, barely making it behind the tree.

Haslom drifted with her, and in a tone smooth as cream said “Your cousin Jakob knows—or, rather, knew—a Galinko too.”

“Implying something?” She glared at him through the fall of sweaty hair over her eyes. “Jakob is no killer.”

“No. More like an assassin.”

“Stop it.” Stop it.

—Jakob!—

she called

—Help!—

then threw up again, nausea rocketing out of her gut.

“Both of you eschewed the names of your fathers,” mused Haslom, head cocked and watching her swipe her mouth. “One more unique thing you share.”

She panted around another tide of dizziness. “What do you know of Jakob’s father?”

“More than he was ever able to learn about me, thanks to your matka.”

So cavalier about murder and concealing a body. This was not a dead man with no filter. This was simply who Vincent Haslom was. And his blood seeps through my veins. She threw up again, calling

—Jakob!—

Nothing.

—JAKOB!—

—Sestranek!—

The blast hit her forehead, made her blind.

—Natasha, where are you?—

She clutched her belly, said

—With the dead—

Alarm, Jakob’s alarm, washed through her, and it was like the ground was giving way under her feet.

—Where is your Knight Crawler? Brophy? He is supposed to be with you!—

Since when? She brushed this aside and panted, short, quick breaths to keep the vomit at bay

—Jakob, I need you to tell me how…—

—My God, Natasha, how did you call the dead?—

—…to cope with how sick I feel—

—You don’t cope with how sick you feel! That’s how it is!—

—But he..—

—SPIRIT!—

The shout cracked like thunder through her skull, and Haslom balked, said “What was that?” then—

—BE STILL!—

Jakob commanded, and Natasha teetered, gasping as another bout of nausea bolted up. Then Jakob roared

—SPIRT! SLEEP!—

and her nose burst, a spray of blood, watery and slick.

“No!” shouted Haslom, and she couldn’t tell if he was shouting at Jakob, or crying out because she was bleeding. He reached for her, clutched her face, and she could see he was fading. Still his hands burned like the force of a brand. “Listen!” He held her still. “Galinko was just a coincidence.”

She couldn’t speak. Blood gushed down over her mouth, suffocating her.

“The Grimm Brothers could have met over any case. It just happened to be Galinko.”

“Grimm Brothers?” Her gaze ripped through his colorless eyes. Her Shadows had whispered to her about the Grimm Brothers before—she’d assumed they were referencing fairytales. “Who were they?”

“Ask your cousin,” Haslom barked, then clucked his tongue and held fast to her face, eyes roaming the way she was bleeding. “And call your matka, my child. Tell her…tell her I’m sorry. She was punished because of me. If she hadn’t hid Galinko, the Grimm Brothers never would have worked together so long, and then….that is my only regret, Natasha. I…” Pain puckered his mouth and she shocked herself by clutching his hands, holding them to her face.

“…it breaks my heart every day that your matka was murdered.”

“She was murder—”

—BE STILL!—

Jakob shouted, and what was left of Haslom disintegrated, sinking into the velvet night.

“Dammit!” she cried. “Come! Come back!”

—Natasha!—

“Natasha!”

Jakob in her head. Owen Brophy, calling from down the long row of graves.

—I’m fine!—

this she gave to Jakob then patted her pockets for her phone. She needed music. Couldn’t answer his oncoming blizzard of questions, not right now.

“Natasha!” The Knight Crawler sounded winded. She ignored him, cued up the playlist on her phone. The soothing tones of Handel eased through the cemetery, and Jakob’s frantic shouts faded from within her inner ear. Owen Brophy, though, was now directly behind her—yet not nearly as close as he’d pressed himself back in the cottage. She got the sense that the distance he kept was atonement.

“Can we talk?” he asked.

“No.”

He sighed, noisy. “Look. I didn’t mean—”

“Yes. You did. Don’t back-peddle now and insult us both.”

He fell quiet and she refused to so much as peek at him. Handel drifted, bar after bar, then—

“I know it’s a kitten,” he said.

She stared at Vincent Haslom’s tombstone.

“What you’re hiding in your room. I know it’s a kitten. I knew all along. It…it was just the cop in me bluffing you, Natasha. Not…not the man.”

She spun then, looked him in the eye. “Oh, so you do know they’re different?”

He blinked. Stepped back.

She snorted. “You carry a question around like a placard: ‘Who am I? Who am I?’ Well I can tell you. You’re the one you feed,, Owen Brophy. And that might not be the one you like.”

He jabbed his tongue in his cheek and his jaw twitched. She raised her chin “Want to know anything else?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Why are you bleeding?”

And why did she also smell like vomit? She took a graceless step back. “I…because I can’t always manage what I see.”

He glanced around. “What brought you here? To him?” He jabbed a finger at Haslom’s name.

She pulled a breath in—how much did he know?—and said “Galinko.”

He exhaled. Nodded. “Learn anything?”

Okay, where was the scoffing? The ridicule? The fear? “He…he told me about the Grimm Brothers. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. And he who?” His eyes snagged the tombstone. “Haslom?”

She folded her hands together, aware, suddenly, that she was bloodstained. And did smell like vomit. “I…I would like to clean up.”

He ogled the tombstone, then her, then—“Let’s go,” he said. “I drove.” And tossed a thumb in the direction of the gate.

She grimaced. “You don’t want to ride in a vehicle with—”

“Natasha, I just chased you into a graveyard and clearly almost came face to face with a ghost.”

“No. You wouldn’t have been able to see hi—”

“—so believe me when I say staying here bothers me a hell of a lot more than the smell of barf which, incidentally, I became accustomed to when I worked the Downtown East Side.”

“Doesn’t mean you like it.”

“I prefer it over spooks.”

“And…and over psychics?” Her breath froze, she froze.

“Psychics I can handle.” This, smoothly. “But…you might want to shower after I get you back to the cottage.” His nose wrinkled and his dimples flared then, real, not for show.

She couldn’t smile back. Could not forget the way he had so rapidly disempowered her, mashing her against the cottage door. So when he held his hand out and said “Cease fire?” she could not reach back in détente. Yet a Shadow began to leak into her periphery, and when she peeked another tombstone, her tombstone, stood next to Vincent Haslom’s. Beloved>, it read, and she could feel the mockery in the epitaph.

“Yes,” she said, and shook.

©bonnie randall 2005

So Many Secrets ~ Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter 23

She called Jakob back as soon as Owen Brophy’s tires squealed in fury from her curb. As if he had any right to be angry. “Stupidni policii.”

Jakob answered his phone. “I’ve found something, Natasha.”

She tensed. “Something tangible, or—”

“Psychical,” he said. “This person we’re seeking—they are quite excited about a pregnancy app, like for a tablet or phone. A calendar tracking how far along a woman is with child.”

The old-fashioned term was brief charm before her stomach dropped. Pregnancy? Sabrina was pregnant—and wouldn’t any relative of Galinko’s carry a grudge against both she and Blue Eyes? “Jakob—”

“There’s a skull and crossbones over the screen,” he said. “How melodramatic.”

His nonchalance fell hopelessly short and she wondered—was it his arrogance, or could it be naivete that always made him forget that she was as psychically attuned to his feelings as he was to hers? “I’ve seen that skull and crossbones too,” she said. The night she ran across the orchard in the dark then discovered Shoes, nailed to the doorstep. “They…they’re all in danger.” Adrenaline crackled in her mouth. Robyn had wept in her arms, asking “Is my Mama dead?” and she’d written it off as a child’s misunderstanding. Yet hadn’t Jakob always said that little children were all psychic until they were told it was impossible?

“Bratranek,” she said, and had to sit for how badly she was shaking.

Her bottom landed hard on the flat surface of the fairytale tome, forgotten on the ottoman. She shoved it aside, its weight feeling onerous somehow. “I know who’s doing this. It..it’s a Galinko.”

Silence, yet she could feel fury, old fury, streaming from him. Then—“You think a Galinko can psychically manipulate our Shadows, Natasha?”

The ink spill. She hadn’t factored it in, and now her shoulders fell, defeated as if she’d just won a race only to find out she’d DQ’d.

Jakob said “The Galinkos believe what the prophets in their Bible tell them, Natasha: that seers and second sight come from the Devil.”

There was bitterness in all that irony and it took her aback. She didn’t know he felt just as judged and crucified as she always had, and realizing it now made her feel selfish and small. She set it aside, got back on track. “Before our, my, Galinko and the red brush, Vincent Haslom—Blue Eyes and Sabrina’s father—he killed a Galinko out in the oilfield near Echo Creek.”

Jakob didn’t reply and in his quiet she could hear him, reflecting. She added “And if a Galinko did have preternatural abilities, how better to legitimize them, spiritually, than to use their abilities to avenge one of their own?”

More silence, this time skeptical, she could tell, so she drew a huge breath, ready to add more of it, all of it. But the words locked in her throat, and she found that she reached out, flicked her iPod speaker on instead. “Th-that’s how we’re all connected,” she said then, the weight of omission making her tongue thick. “Through the Galinkos.” Please don’t ask me to clarify. And please don’t ask why I turned on my music.

His silence stretched, made her tremble, and she was about to prattle out more, then— “So what do they want?” he asked, and a black, formless Shadow slithered along with his voice from her cellphone, floated through the cottage. “Would the Galinkos have me raise their dead?”

A rush of chills wracked her.

“Would that appease them? Would it satisfy that sanctimonious, hypocritical, too-large herd of Bible-wielding zealots if I raised their dead and let their dearly departed confess each dirty, vicious thing they did while they were still living?”

She shook her head, a wordless no, and forgot she had music playing and he therefore could not see how speechless and horrified she was at the mere prospect of a resurrected Galinko—red brush in hand and that malevolent, awful slice of smile on his face.

“I would be happy,” Jakob went on, “to call back their dead. Then I could watch their stiff-necked, pious selves fall upon their knees in horror as their dead spoke to them with all the filth and honesty that every departed thinks is their God-given right to share, without reservation.”

For the dead had no filter. He had told her this many times. It was, in part, why he was reluctant to ever use his skills as a medium. The dead could be brutal.

“The Galinkos would beg me to send their precious loved ones back to the grave.”

“W-we need to go to the policii,” she interrupted, breathless. “Real policii. Not Owen Brophy.”

And say what, Natasha? That we psychically know one of the pulpit-pounding Galinkos is threatening Robert and Jessalayna Haslom?”

Would he ever get her name right?

“We don’t know that. We’ve surmised that. And even if we had seen a Galinko, do you think the policii would believe us?”

Yes. Cory Chandler had worked with a psychic. Her Shadows had shown her. “They—”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said and she sensed him about to hang up.

“Wait! How? Is that who you’re tracking in Cascadia? One of the Galinkos from back home?”

A hesitation, so small she would have normally overlooked it, held him silent a moment. Then “Don’t you trust me, Natasha?”

“What does that have to do with it? And who doesn’t trust who? You brought me here but leave me in the dark. You go to Cascadia every day but tell me only cryptically who you’re looking for there. Have…have you known all along it’s a Galinko?”

“I shut you out, sestranek? You’re the one who’s turned on your music. And either way, you say shutting you out, I say keeping you safe. What happened the last time a Galinko got close to you?”

So he had known. “Jakob—”

“Stay close to the sister. I told you before you have an ally in her.”

“So you knew all along she’s in danger?” And what about Robyn, her little sweetheart? Her little niece?

“You’re fine with each other,” he said.

She stomped a foot. “Define ‘fine’, Jakob! Tell me—”

“I’ll be in touch.” He hung up.

he stared at her cellphone, fingers curled and cold around it. “You barely let me say a word then tell me less than that yourself.” She tossed the cell on the sofa. What was his real agenda? And how could he, with his stronger abilities, not see that Vincent Haslom was the real villain here? The Galinkos, no matter what they were, did not necessarily want to speak to their dead— they simply wanted to find their dead, give him a proper burial, bring him home.

Yet they couldn’t. Vincent Haslom and her mother had hidden that body somewhere upon the endless prairie, Silva blackening the wheat fields with ink pools of Shadow whenever someone got near. But then…then she had died too. Murdered, according to Haslom’s ‘fortune teller’. Natasha drew her hands together. “Show,” she whispered, and Shadows whirled, an image of bleached bones scattered amid stubble that looked like anywhere, everywhere, on the eastern Alberta landscape.

She spilled the Shadows from her cupped hands and as they tumbled to the floor, the bones clattered, a muted mimic of how they’d sound if they were real. Gazing out the front window, she looked in the direction of the cemetery. “Huntsman,” she said, “you will tell me where you and Matka hid your Galinko. We will end this vendetta.”

But not before she stuck close to Sabrina, went with her to—of all places—the local bar.

Beer Run had saloon doors and peanut shells scattered on a hardwood floor. “This place should be out on your prairie Alberta.” Sabrina grinned. “Complete with a couple hunky cowboys wearing chaps and no shirts.”

Because crowds of shirtless cowboys typically wandered amok in her home province? Natasha gave her a droll little look.

“Or cowgirls?” said Sabrina, sporting a droll look of her own. “There was once a time when I wasn’t discriminate.”

“And never a time when you actually behaved.”

A clatter of billiard balls punctuated the remark and when she looked up her gaze met the sea. Knight Crawler, she thought, but even in her head she sounded a bit breathless. Owen Brophy wore Levis, a black t-shirt, and his long hair tied back in a band. A rumble of thunder, Shadow thunder, filled the bar and all at once, it started to rain. She gasped, but “Don’t run away,” said his Shadow, and walked out of his body, approached her.

“I—” She took an involuntary step back but then another Shadow, her Shadow, stepped out of her and into his path. “You scare me,” it said.

He nodded. “Everything scares you. Everything makes you sad.” He raised his face to the rain. “You cry, all the time.”

She gasped, shocked. No one knew that. Yet before her, her Shadow nodded, no denying.

His Shadow smiled sadly, no dimples. “Come here, Natasha,” it said.

Her Shadow drifted close to his and he carefully, tenderly, slipped his hands around her. “You don’t have to be scared of me.”

“But—”

“You’re so beautiful when you forget you’re unhappy.”

Rain fell harder and she knew then, that it was sorrow. Her sorrow. Her loneliness. Her Shadow shrank, ashamed, but he simply brushed her wet hair from her cheeks. “Who hurts you?” he asked. “Who throws rocks at you?”

How did he know that? How was any of this even happening? Owen Brophy was no psychic—she’d checked.

“I—” said her Shadow, but his hand reached out, touched a mark on her left breast.

Her eyes popped. Oh, my—her Shadow was shirtless! Damn Sabrina for planting that idea!

“What’s this?” he asked and she knew, without having to look, that he was tracing an old scar.

“That…” Her Shadow looked at the floor. “…that rock was sharp.”

His Shadow groaned. “My God, Tsarina. Who does this to you?”

“They…they would like to stone me to death,” she whispered, a confession she’d barely let herself think, much less say aloud. “They would like to see me dead.”

His Shadow stared at hers, horrified, and she watched herself wither within his gaze. “I…I’m not a bad person.”

To her shock, his Shadow yanked hers close, wrapped his arms tight around her. “I know that,” it said. “And I won’t hurt you. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Her Shadow melted against his and as she stood there, watching, she could feel his body heat. His strength. Sabrina said “There’s a table,” but it sounded like her voice came through a wind tunnel, and it was all Natasha could do to follow her, pull away from the Shadows of her and Owen Brophy, let them disintegrate atop all the peanut shells on the floor.

“You okay?” Sabrina frowned and Natasha forced herself to nod, but it took forever to break eye contact with Owen Brophy, her heart pounding and her body…longing. He had held her. Just now, in front of everyone yet in front of no one, he had held her. And she’d never felt so warm or so safe in her life.

She trembled as she climbed atop a stool at the leggy table Sabrina claimed, and when a waiter came ’round she said “Make that two,” when Sabrina ordered iced tea.

Sabrina looked appalled. “But I want to smell booze,” she said. “You were going to have beer.”

Ugh. The smell of beer made her gag, and she never drank alcohol—it made her Shadows too unpredictable. And they were clearly unpredictable enough. She glanced over at Owen Brophy. He was still shooting pool with his brother, Steven, yet she could sense he watched her too. Had he just seen their Shadows in the rain? Anxiety gripped her, but…no. He couldn’t have. He wasn’t psychic. She’d checked.

Sabrina said “A margarita. Strawberry” to the waiter who hurried away.

Oh, damn “Umm…Sabrina—”

“Don’t be embarrassed.” Sabrina rummaged in their table’s basket of peanuts. “A million years ago, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, either.”

Oh, damn indeed. Heat torched her face and before she could deny anything, Sabrina stuck a hand in the air. “Hey little woman!” she called.

Oh, damn again. Jessalyn Haslom had just come through the swinging doors.

“Why the long face?” said Sabrina and Natasha swallowed. How to reply? Then she realized Sabrina wasn’t talking to her.

Jessalyn plopped onto a stool. “I just got screwed by a buyer,” she said, then added “Apple juice” when the waiter returned with the margarita and iced tea.

Natasha’s brow quirked and Sabrina laughed. “Apple juice?”

The corner of Jessalyn’s mouth hiked. “Some might call it a craving,” she said.

Sabrina’s jaw dropped, then she whooped, and there was a whole sentence in the cajoling kick she delivered to Natasha’s shin under the table. A baby, it said. Two babies.

Yet Jakob had seen a pregnancy covered by a poison-green skull and crossbones. Natasha’s stomach kicked over and when Sabrina said “Skoal!” she lifted her drink too, but only to be polite.

The alcohol hit her as Jessalyn said “Fourteen weeks today” and flashed the screen of her cellphone.

The pregnancy app. It had never been about Sabrina. Natasha didn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified, and as her heart pounded, Owen Brophy’s Shadow reappeared, beckoning in the rain. “Talk to me, Tsarina. You don’t have to be scared.”

She looked quickly away.

Sabrina grinned at Jessalyn. “Don’t mind our new gal here,” she said. “She keeps getting distracted by how much she wants to do the Bad Boy Boogie with Owen Brophy.”

“I do not!” she squeaked.

Jessalyn scrunched her nose. “Owen?” she said. “Serious?”

“Yes,” said Sabrina. “She wants to count his tattoos with her tongue.”

No, she wanted to count how many legs were on the table—after she crawled under it to hide.

Jessalyn’s nose was a perma-wrinkle. “But Owen’s all…biker-ish. And you’re so….”

Natasha stiffened. “I’m so what?”

“Exotic,” said Heart-Face. “Gorgeous.”

“Ooh-la-la.” Sabrina chortled. “Beauty and the Beast.”

“Exotic?” Natasha stared Jessalyn down. “I sound like a bohunk and when I’m not wearing t-shirts and yoga pants, I’m wearing t-shirts and yoga pants.”

“And that sexy dress from the other night at dinner, the one that made me want to sell my right kidney for just one day with your cleavage and legs.”

“Cleavage and legs not unnoticed by Badass Brophy.” Sabrina lifted her iced tea.

Natasha scowled. “He has a girlfriend, you know.”

“Well, you don’t see her here, do you? But guess what you do see? Him, looking at you.”

“Of course he’s looking at me. He’s waiting for me to do something wrong.”

Jessalyn sputtered. It pleased her. “He thinks I’m a con-artist,” she added. “He’s even wondered if I am a prostitute.”

“What?” Sabrina brayed laughter. “No he hasn’t.”

Jessalyn stared at her.

“And just because I think he’s attractive doesn’t mean I’m attracted to him,” Natasha tacked on, but had to rub her arms, eschew the sensation of how his Shadow had held her.

Sabrina gawped. “Where did this kick-ass version of Natasha come from? I like her even more. Hear that, Brophy?” she said, nowhere near loud enough for him to really hear. “She is so over you.” She gave him the finger.

“Sab!” squeaked Jessalyn.

Over at his table, the Knight Crawler flipped Sabrina off too, and while Jessalyn giggled Natasha smiled grimly into the dregs of her margarita. Where had this Natasha come from? Perhaps she swam out of the booze. Or maybe she was just feeling confident because she’d finally made a friend, a real friend, not someone who just wanted to throw more rocks at her, like Heart-Face Jessalyn.

“Can I paint you?”

She swiveled. Jessalyn was examining her while Sabrina and the Knight Crawler fired peanuts back and forth across the bar. Jessalyn said “When you forget to be shy and nervous, your eyes duck into some really deep places, Natasha.”

You’re beautiful when you forget you’re unhappy.

Right. And you’re both full of bullshit. “Someone did paint me once.” She straightened, spine like a rod. “I went running one night and some local thugs tossed a bag over my head. They tied my hands to my feet from behind then painted me with a red brush.”

Jessalyn gasped and Sabrina stopped lobbing peanuts. “That…that’s fucked,” she said.

“So no, thank you,” Natasha smiled coldly. “I don’t want to be painted.”

Jessalyn looked ill. Natasha stuck her hand in the air. “I think I’d like another,” she said.

The waiter hurried over and Owen Brophy trailed behind him, all dimples. “You three up to no good?” he asked.

“Oh, absolutely,” she replied.

Sabrina choked on her iced tea and Jessalyn’s mouth flopped open like a puppet with cut strings. Natasha fixed her gaze on the Knight Crawler. “Would robbery be too obvious? Burglary does have a bit more finesse, but how about I just cut to the chase and roll the first old lady I see on the street?”

The waiter returned, a margarita on his tray. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said and dropped three twenties on the table, more than enough for everyone. “I had a good time with you,” she said, looking deliberately at Sabrina, whose face was both flummoxed and impressed. “Goodnight.” She marched away with her head up.

How about murder?” Brophy called, to her departing back.

She turned. “Which role are you auditioning for, Policii Brophy? Accomplice or victim? I’ve not room for both.”

“Burn,” said Sabrina, and Natasha saw her Shadow raise its glass in salute as she shoved herself out the swinging saloon doors.

Her tombstone waited in the future, and her Shadow hadn’t lied when it told Owen Brophy that the citizens of Echo Creek would happily stone her to death. Still and all, she’d never felt so alive in her life.

So Many Secrets ~ Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter 22

Sunlight scratched Owen’s eyelids and he swore at the curtains he’d forgotten to close. Swore louder when his phone chimed with a text—what the hell time was it? It had been well after two when he’d finally got back to Vestemere, and it couldn’t possibly be much beyond that right now. He fished his cell off his nightstand, woke the screen. 6:38. “God,” he groaned, then brought up the message.

Rob. Hey Old Man. I know you got in late last night. Don’t come to work till noon. Thanx.

“And thank you, Rob, for waking me up to tell me that.” He flopped back on the bed, scrolled through any other messages he might have missed when he finally flaked out.

None.

“Dammit Sondra,” he whispered. He’d texted that last number she’d used twice before he finally made himself leave Vancouver, not really expecting a reply, yet… “Where are you?” he’d asked, ’cause it hurt. Fuck, it hurt. He shoved himself up. ‘Play them’, had been the last thing she’d said before she dropped contact. He went to the window. From up here in his old childhood bedroom on the second floor, he could almost see Rob’s rental cottage. ‘Play them’. “Time to chat, Tsarina. You, me, and your cousin. We’ll share notes about a hanged man named Galinko—and how the hell that family ties you both to my buddy.”

He showered. Tied his hair back. Wore a t shirt instead of long sleeves, angling for lots of his ink to show. Time to jack the fear that crawled behind the Tsarina’s eyes whenever she dared look at him. “You are going to talk to me.” He checked his phone one last time (nothing), then slid work boots on, headed across town.

She wore a huge smile when she opened her door and seeing it made his mood that much blacker. But then—“Oh.” She stepped back and the smile fell off her face. “You aren’t Sabrina.”

He cranked on a million watts. “You’re expecting that pain in the ass?”

This teased a tiny bit of smile back in place, albeit upside down. “She and Robyn, yes.”

“Seriously?” He mocked a look all around. “And you haven’t rolled out a red carpet for that kid?”

A giggle, the sound of coins tossed in a fountain, conjured a grin, a real grin, of his own. “You should be kinder,” she said, but was smiling. “She is so sweet.”

“She is so spoiled,” he corrected.

She shook her head, but the same tiny smile played with her mouth and his hands twitched with a sudden need to touch it. To roll the ball of his thumb over her bottom lip, coax it into a real smile, right side up. Instead he inhaled, made a show of it. Not that it was difficult. When she’d opened the door, an aroma had rolled out, smelled amazing. “Cooking?” he asked.

“Baking. Chocolate. What’s…that?” She pointed to the kale shake he toted in its clear plastic cup.

“Protein shake.”

“Ah,” she nodded. “Healthy.”

He wanted to laugh at how her nose wrinkled. Instead he took a big chug of the shake.

She shot a glance to her right, to the closed bedroom door. “I-I’m sorry, but…what can I do for you?”

Fret-fret-fret, her hands had at last remembered who he was, and “Bathroom tile,” he said, and lifted his tool box. And answers, Tsarina. “My brother Steve started it, and—”

“Oh. No. I’m sorry, but…no. That won’t work today.” Another glance at the bedroom door. “Sabrina…she’s coming for a massage treatment, and it needs to be—”

“I will be quiet,” he said, anticipating her. “I’ll even—” He pulled a set of earbuds from his front t-shirt pocket. “Give you complete privacy.” A billion more watts shone on his face.

Didn’t work. She looked…agonized. And sideways again at the damn bedroom door. Whatcha got in there, Tsarina? Time for some charm. “I get it if you’re worried. I am a cop.”

Alarm flared in the tell-tale flutter of pulse in her neck. Good. “And,” he added, “as a cop, I’d never advise a woman to invite a strange male into her house.”

“Yet you were just here a few nights ago, Policii Brophy.”

Okay, so she was as sharp as she was scared. He kept up the full wattage. “Want to call your cousin to come home?”

“He’s not in town.”

“Ah. Over in Cascadia again? He sure ditches you a lot.”

“Cascadia’s not far. I can still easily see his ego from here.”

Surprise choked him with a laugh.

She didn’t join him. Instead kept surveying him, chary and vaguely hostile.

“Sab’s coming,” he reminded. “And I guarantee she’ll kick my ass if I even imagine misbehaving.”

There. A crack in her enmity. The upside down smile. And damned if his thumb wasn’t twitching again ’cause her bottom lip looked as smooth as a rose petal. Regal. Tsarina.

“You are fond of her,” she said.

“Fond…” He squinted “Of who?”

“Sabrina.” The perfect skin on her brow folded, perplexed.

“Oh. Yeah.” Jesus, Brophy. Get with the program. “Totally fond of her. The Hasloms were never from the Brophy side of the tracks, but that didn’t stop us from all being best friends growing up.”

“Or from swapping gum on the bus,” she sallied, but a blush rapidly filled her cheeks, cherry pink.

And he’d thought she was an escort? Christ. She acted more like a virgin.

“I’m not,” she said and he startled.

She cleared her throat. “Sorry,” she said. “D-dry air. What I meant to say was I’m not sure if Sabrina forgot or is just running late. Please…come in.”

Fret-fret-fret. Didn’t her hands get sore, twisting like that? And what would happen if he did what that Alberta cop said and touched them? “Could-uh-could I get you to take this?” He passed her his sweatshirt, slung over his toolbox. “Don’t want it to get dirty.”

She reached out and he purposely let his fingertips connect with her skin.

A pink flower fell onto the floor. “Uh—” he said, pointing, but she didn’t notice as the front door banged open behind them.

“Tasha!”

The moppet, Robyn, barreled in and the Tsarina immediately ignored him, dropping down with arms open. “Hello, Sweetheart!” She wrapped her close. “I’m so happy to see you again!”

The little one clung to her, blind adoration that reminded him of old Cackling Carrie back on the Downtown East Side, how she used to blather on and on about past lives, soulmates, and—“Kindred spirits,” he said aloud.

The Tsarina beamed and damned if his heart didn’t skip. Well, you are lovely, Your Highness.

Confusion claimed her face but then Sabrina came in, all typical cocky swagger—and atypical pallor. “Sorry I’m late,” she rasped, then noticed him. “Hey, Badass.”

“Mrs. Danini.” He bowed. “Hope you don’t mind if I work while you get yourself pampered.” Ignoring the Tsarina’s look of outrage, he pulled the wire out for his earbuds, dangled it for her.

Sabrina shrugged. “I’m so sore I couldn’t care less if you blast your heavy metal through the ceiling.”

Heavy metal? Clearly the tattoos and hair were speaking for him again. All he really had on his iPod were a couple podcasts about baseball.

Sabrina glanced around. “Haven’t been in here in ages,” she mused. “My brother’s done a good job—if you’re into the whole ‘tiny house’ thing. Which I’m not.”

“I am,” blurted the Tsarina. “I…I just love it.”

Sabrina cocked her head. “Rob’s planning to flip it once Badass finishes the bathroom. Make him an offer.”

Oh, I…couldn’t.” She looked at the floor. “I own a business back home.”

Yeah. Where people throw rocks at you.

She threw him a startled glance. Shit. Had he said that out loud?

Sabrina moved between them, peeled Robyn out of Natasha’s arms. “Businesses sell all the time.” This, with a shrug. “I should know.” She smiled then, but Owen could see her expression was canny. “I happen to own a business in your area.”

Aha. So she wasn’t just blindly accepting. Good job, girl. Grinning, he lobbed a glance at the Tsarina.

Who was unmistakably astonished. “In Echo Creek? A business? Which one?”

“Not in Echo Creek, near Echo Creek—though the head office is in the city of Edmonton. Haslom Explorations.”

“Oil?” asked the Tsarina.

“Drilling, to be specific.”

The Tsarina looked troubled—and confused. “I…haven’t heard of it.”

He couldn’t tell if she was lying.

Sabrina lifted a shoulder “Lots of other companies just like it out there in Dirty ’Berta.” She grinned. “Now can we…”

“Get started? Of course. I—” She gave him an awkward, apologetic look. “Excuse us”, she said, then, remembering that she still held his sweatshirt, pivoted to a hook near the door.

“And you dropped this,” he added, pointing to the flower.

She looked. “Dropped…what?”

“A flow—” No flower. It was gone. What the hell? Did the moppet take it? He looked, but Robyn was already busy at the coffee table with a box of crayons. “Umm.” He felt his million watts wobble on his face. “There was a pink, puffy flower right…there.” He pointed.

The Tsarina stared and Sabrina chortled. “You see a few pink elephants too, Badass? Sniffing tile glue probably isn’t your thing.”

He scowled. “Go get your knots ironed out, Big Mouth.”

She sashayed away. “No peeking at my stellar shirtless form while I’m getting a rub-down, Brophy.”

“In your dreams, Danini.”

The Tsarina squeaked “I’ll drape you!” then trotted after her. Owen shook his head. An uptight prude he’d had pegged as an escort. “Good work, Detective,” he muttered, then slipped his earbuds in and left his iPod off. Propped the bathroom door wide enough to listen.

Sabrina said “You were going to tell me about the rat bast-ah….creep.”

Oh, right. The ex boyfriend. What had been the problem? Had he worn his bowtie too tight? Not held the door open long enough? C’mon, Sab. You’re suspicious too. Get to something about Galinko.

“You…you’ll think less of me,” warned the Tsarina.

Oh, Christ, why? Had she picked someone who hadn’t known proper wine pairings? Had he worn a cologne that once clashed with hers?

“He…was married,” she said. “Still is married, actually.”

Okay, that did surprise him. He peeked out of the bathroom. That why locals in your little town throw rocks at you, Tsarina? You get caught servicing a married man?

She looked his direction. He ducked back in and started chipping tile. Quietly.

“An affair,” Sabrina said, and he could hear her shrug. “It happens.”

“I’m not quite so blasé about it yet,” the Tsarina replied.

Ah, so Married Man knew lots about wine pairings and his cologne had been perfect. Owen tossed a piece of tile down, too savagely, and when it shattered he called out “Sorry!”

“Keep a lid on it, Badass,” Sabrina shouted back.

Jesus. No wonder he and Rob used to hide all her stuff on her when they’d been little.

“You know,” she said then, speculatively, “the only time I ever heard my old man actually sound human was when he talked about the woman he had an affair with.”

Really? Owen edged closer to the door, hammering at the tile softly.

“Your…your father told you he had an affair?”

Sabrina barked, an unkind laugh. “Please. He didn’t tell me anything. I found out after he died—he’d gone to fortune tellers, can you believe that?—and had the sessions all recorded on tape. Cassette tape. Real old school.”

Owen listened. A psychic? Cory Chandler had also consulted with a psychic—about Vince.

“Took me forever to find something to play them on,” Sabrina continued. “Finally found something at a thrift store.”

Yeah, yeah, Sab. Get on with it.

“Listening to my Dad in those recordings…I heard a different person. He sounded…”

She trailed off and Owen found himself making a hurry-up gesture with his hand.

The Tsarina, though, simply said “He sounded softer?”

“Softer,” Sabrina reflected. “Yes. Good word. He was always so…God, he was harsh. Snappish even on a good day. But on those tapes with those fortune tellers he was…”

Again she ran out of words. And again the Tsarina provided one for her. “Vulnerable?” she asked.

Vulnerable.” Sabrina agreed. “Human. Even though most of the recordings sounded like hokey bullshi…ah...nonsense. Generalities anyone could spout off if they’ve observed enough people for enough time.”

“Like you,” the Tsarina said softly. “You’re a good judge of character.”

Why? Because she consistently referred to him as ‘Badass’? Although…the Tsarina’s was an interesting—and accurate—observation. He kept his gaze trained on her.

“Who knows? Maybe I owe the old bastard something after all,” Sabrina said, then flinched when Natasha hit a tender spot. “Yowch!”

“Sorry,” the Tsarina winced and visibly eased up on the pressure. Then she said “Did…did any of the fortune tellers ever let your father know what happened to the girl—er—lover he asked about?”

A visible shudder fluttered the sheet Sabrina had been draped with. “Just one. That was the last recording I listened to, and the one that taught me to never—ever—eavesdrop on even a dead man’s voice again.”

Owen shooed a rogue shiver from his shoulders, silently popped more tile off the wall.

“What-uh-what did the psychic say?” asked Natasha, and his ears perked. ‘Psychic’, not ‘fortune teller’? The subtle shift in wording was not lost on him and again he glanced out at her. What do you know, Tsarina?

“I can quote it,” said Sabrina, and Owen ducked back into the bathroom. “’Cause God knows I’ll never forget it. The fortune teller said ‘The person who murdered your lover will also kill your son’.”

Natasha dropped a squeeze bottle of massage oil, startling when it hit the floor at her feet.

“I’ll get it, Tasha.” The moppet scooted over and handed it back to her, face adoring.

The Tsarina crouched, kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

Robyn beamed but Natasha, as she lifted herself back to her feet, was a mess of tremors. “You…you didn’t mention that his lover was—”

“—murdered?” said Sabrina. “I didn’t know till I heard that tape. And who knows? It might all be malarkey too. It was only some dime-store psychic, but still…I’ve had the creeps ever since because the ‘son’ that fortune teller referred to—he’s my brother.”

“Blue Eyes,” said Natasha, an unconscious blurt that embarrassed her. Owen could see it on her face.

But Sabrina laughed, the tension cut. “Good name for him. Big, innocent, blue eyes—but don’t let those baby-blues fool you. Robert only acts like the boy next door.”

Really? Although that did jive with the crisp, cutting businessman Owen had already been exposed to a couple times since he’d come home.

“Robert never wants anyone to think he’s like our Dad,” said Sabrina. “But here’s the thing: Rob’s no fool, and he may be a hell of a lot more honest than the old man ever was, but that doesn’t mean he’s not every bit as sharp.”

And with that she fell silent, leaving Owen to steal glimpses of the Tsarina in the mirror. She was pale. Visibly unnerved. Why? Had it been the murder talk? Or was it because Sabrina had told her Rob was no dupe? Either way, how many bodies had there been out in Alberta? And how much did Rob—who he agreed was no dupe—know about how the Nikoslavs were connected to Galinko? Minutes ticked by in silence then a tiny voice, the Moppet’s, intruded on his thoughts. “Is my Mama dead?”

“What?” the Tsarina sounded both startled and hushed. “No! Sweetheart, why would you even ask—”

“’Cause look.”

Owen peeked and Robyn, eyes glossy, pointed a chubby finger at Sabrina, slumped and sleeping.

“No, baby. No.” The Tsarina rushed forward and scooped Robyn up, used the hem of her t-shirt to mop tears that had already started to roll. “Mama just fell asleep, honey. That is all. Mama’s sleeping.”

A watery sniffle replied and Owen braced himself when the little one drew in a big breath for a sob.

The Tsarina fretted. “I…would you like a cookie?”

Sniff-sniff-sniff was the only response.

“I have cookies!” she exclaimed and Owen grinned at how desperate she sounded. Still want lots of nieces and nephews, Tsarina?

Robyn sniffed deeper, her small chest was shuddering, and one glimpse of Natasha’s face in the bathroom mirror made him laugh into his palm at how fraught she looked. Then a yowl, ungodly and plaintive, made him cringe and “What was that?” the little one asked, and started to bawl.

Jesus. Was Sab dead? How could she sleep through this circus?

The snort of a loud, loose snore resounded in answer, and “Shh-shh-shh!” said the Tsarina, then bustled, past the bathroom door, the wailing moppet in her arms.

He stuck his head out and faked plucking an earbud from his ear. “You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” she snapped. “Thanks for grinning.”

He tucked his bottom lip between his teeth as she rushed into the kitchen. “Wait here,” he heard her say to Robyn, then scurried back up the hall.

He peeked and saw her open her bedroom door, just a crack. Then she bent over (okay, how the hell could she look that good in yoga pants when she ate nothing but cookies and crap and sneered at things like his kale shake?) and scooped something up. He ducked back into the bathroom as she rushed back, but not before noticing something fuzzy in her hands.

“Here,” she said breathlessly, voice back in the kitchen. “Look what I found!”

Robyn hiccupped once. Twice. Then “Ooooh,” she said.

“This is Shoes,” the Tsarina announced, and Owen leaned to peek with one eye. She was sitting on the floor, legs outstretched and—Oho! That was what she’d been hiding in the bedroom. A kitten, resting on her knees.

“Careful Sweetheart,” she told Robyn. “Shoes has an owie.”

True enough. The kitten’s paw was bandaged up.

“Why?” asked the moppet, big-eyed—but no longer crying. Owen grinned. Well played, Tsarina.

“Because…when I found her she was hurt.”

Robyn gasped yet did as told, stroked the kitten with only one little finger. “Where did you find her?”

A hesitation, then—“I rescued her so she’ll be safe,” the Tsarina replied. “Someone...hurt her.”

That wasn’t what the kid asked yet even so his gut dropped to his feet. She’d found her? And had there been blood on the porch where she’d made the discovery? A nail gun lying there too?

“Someone hurt her,” said the moppet and uh-oh. Her eyes pooled again. “Poor little Shoes.”

Her lip wobbled and “No, no, no!” Natasha said hurriedly. “Not so much poor little Shoes. Look.”

He watched as she tenderly lifted the kitten’s uninjured paw, brushed the fur back. “Claws,” she announced gravely. “Little Shoes can look after herself too.”

Robyn smiled, watery, but appeased. “But you’ll still keep her safe, right?”

“Right.” Natasha smiled, upside down, and Owen felt his thumb twitch again. He stuck it through his belt loop while, on the kitchen floor, Robyn wriggled, wriggled, then—“Why, look where you are!” laughed Natasha.

She had maneuvered herself alongside the cat and now sat on the Tsarina’s lap. Owen shook his head. Natasha Nikoslav, the fairytale queen, small animals and children, falling at her feet.

“Tasha?” the moppet asked.

“Uh-huh?” She was rocking her and petting the kitten.

“Is Mama sick?”

“No, baby.” She craned to see the little one’s face. “Why do you keep asking?”

“’Cause she sleeps all the time. Even when we try to play.”

Her little lip went wobble, wobble, but the Tsarina just smiled, brushed the hair off her face. “Well, Mama is tired, honey but not ’cause she’s sick. She’s just…”

Ah. Owen grinned, piecing it together.

“In a few more days, Mama will not feel tired anymore,” she finished.

“How many days?”

“Not many.”

You sure?”

“I am sure.”

Robyn stuck out her pinkie. “Promise?”

“Yes, I promise, but…” She looked mystified. “What am I to do with this wee little finger?”

Robyn giggled, a sound so sweet…okay. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, having nieces and nephews. “You pinkie swear, silly.” She wrapped her tiny digit ’round Natasha’s larger one, then shook.

Out in the living room, Sabrina stirred and as she rose he ducked back into the bathroom, pried more tile from the wall with busy-sounding crashes.

Sabrina ambled past, into the kitchen, and “Well, look at you two…oh,” she said. “Natasha, that…that’s a cat.”

“It’s Shoes!” said Robyn. “Hi Mama! I thought you were dead but Tasha said no. I still cried.”

Sabrina sighed. “Little Bird, I keep telling you I’m not dead. Here. Listen to my ticker.”

Robyn’s giggle made him grin.

“Now hurry and get your colors picked up, that’s my sweet bird. Natasha,” Sabrina said, once Robyn had rushed out of the kitchen. “You have to get rid of this cat. Robert hates cats. He’ll have six shit fits if he knows you have a cat in his house.”

Owen peeked. The Tsarina looked miserable. “But—” she began.

“I’ll help you re-home it,” said Sabrina. “And I won’t say a word. But no cat, Natasha. Not here. Bar later?”

“I….but…you can’t drink!”

“I know. But I can still smell it. And I like iced tea—and your company. Yes?”

The Tsarina clutched her kitten to her chest, looking woebegone. “I…sure.”

She slunk past the bathroom moments after Sabrina and the moppet were gone, the kitten aptly hidden in the up-tucked hem of her shirt. He heard her open, then quickly shut, her bedroom door, and when she passed him again he feigned popping his earbuds out. “Sorry,” he said, “did you say something?”

She blinked as though just remembering he was still there. “Ne,” she mumbled. “No.”

“I’m almost done here,” he said, and faked putting the earbuds back in.

She nodded, preoccupied, and waved an absent hand, carried on into the kitchen.

He glanced out the bathroom door as she put her cell phone to her ear. “I obtained us a new problem,” he heard her say, then “Well…actually two new problems. Jakob I need to talk to you about….about matka.”

‘Matka’. She’d said the word before, but when? And what did it mean?

“And also Shoes.” She paused, then “What? Why?” she asked hotly, and “No. No. You know I hate calling you that way.”

What way? Online? Skype?

“It’s a habit I—we—need to break. It’s not…not natural.”

Owen squinted as if this could bring some sort of sense into what he was hearing. She said “Yes, I’m aware phone cables and fibre-optics and satellites are also not natural. Jakob, must you be this way? Anyway—what?” She paused again and this time he could somehow feel fury within her silence. He started packing up quickly, intuition propelling him.

“Really?” she said, bone-chill cold. “Just like you don’t listen to music when you’re supposed to?” She hung up.

He was out on the step when she caught up to him. “Policii Brophy.” Everything in her tone sliced his balls off. It took work not to cringe. “Please don’t leave without these.”

He turned. She was holding a bag of fresh rolls and cookies. “Uh…thanks, but I don’t eat that sort of—”

“These aren’t for you.” Her smile could freeze Hell. “They’re for Steven.”

‘Steven’? He rolled his eyes.

Big mistake.

She marched up to him, grasped the earbuds from where they now dangled on his shoulders. The plastic-coated wires sizzled against his skin as she jerked them away. “These don’t do you much good when they’re not even plugged in. Unless of course your goal is to eavesdrop, in which case they did an outstanding job of making you look like you might actually be a decent human being.”

His mouth flopped open. “I—”

“I’m here to help my cousin,” she said. “Nothing more, nothing less, not a lie.” She enclosed the wires of his earbuds in her palm. “So now that you know that, you don’t need them anymore—but I do. They’ll make walking around your charming town that much more pleasant. Now get the hell off my step before I call your old friend Rob. And Sabrina.”

She slammed the door in his face before he could utter a word.

©bonnie randall 2005

So Many Secrets ~ Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter 21

In daylight, Natasha could see that the foliage in the cemetery was fruit trees, a contradiction that struck her abhorrent. That something life-giving—edible—was grown from the rot of the dead….? Her stomach blanched, and as an apple blossom brushed silkily against her cheek this too made her shudder. Apples, the fruit of knowledge. She re-faced Haslom’s marker—

ENDLESS SLEEP

—keenly aware that it was knowledge she’d come for. “Vincent Haslom,” she murmured. “Will you come if I call you today?”

A breeze moved through the graveyard and a distant set of windchimes trilled like the sound of tinkling laughter. Startled, she looked their direction.

No Shadows.

“No matter,” she whispered, but shakily. She had watched Jakob communicate with the Dead many times, not with “Show” like when they commanded their Shadows, but instead—she mimicked him, open palms to the sky “C-come,” she said.

Nothing.

She cleared her throat. “Come.”

Sun beat through the trees, a wash of light and silence. She stared at ENDLESS SLEEP. “Wake up,” she spat. “Come. Come tell me who you killed in Alberta. Come tell me whose body she helped you hide. Come tell me: does that person’s descendants now carry a grudge against…against…” She looked away from the tombstone. “…against your descendants?”

Nothing. Not even windchimes, pealing laughter. Her open palms fell to her sides. What had made her think she could be Jakob? He was stronger, would always be stronger, both her auntie andhis father had been psychic. Her father, though…she kicked the tombstone. “Damn you, then Show!”

Eager Shadows skirled in her ears, a screech making her wince as the landscape grew dark. “V-vince Haslom?” she whispered, but the Shadows formed smaller shapes, feminine, and one—Silva!—strode past her, brusque. Then a second Shadow, Auntie Danieta, Jakob’s matka, rushed, a flurry at Silva’s heels. “Stop!” Danieta panted. “Silva, wait.”

Her mother whirled, silver hair, gold eyes, and majesty as she sneered at her sister. “Why? So I can hear more preaching, Danieta? More of your self-righteous sanctimony?”

Danieta’s jaw went granite. “You would really condone sleeping with a married man, sestra? A married man with a child?”

Silva tossed her head, hair catching light. “Love knows no rules, sestra.” Each word was punctuated by a sharp poke into Danieta’s chest. Natasha grimaced along with her Auntie’s Shadow.

“But that does not mean there are no rules!” Danieta rubbed her chest where Silva had jabbed her. “Please, Silva. Try to understand—”

“Understand what? That people become possessions once they wear a gold band? That’s not love, Danieta! That’s ownership. That’s greed.”

Danieta’s gaze flashed, all entreaty gone. “None of this would be such a mess if you hadn’t helped that…that bastard hide Galinko!”

Galinko? Natasha stopped breathing. The man Haslom had killed had been named Galinko? The teenager who had ambushed her, swiped her with the red brush—and kicked me! He kicked me! He broke my ribs!—he too had been Galinko. “No,” she murmured, but a churn in her belly said yes, and her thread of Shadows became lost as she sank down, shocked and trembling against Haslom’s grave. Galinko. Two dead men named Galinko—and both deaths hidden by two women named Nikoslav. Silva, and…“Me,” she whispered, and memory rushed back with clarity. She had been with a doctor when her assailant (Galinko!) had died—red paint had seeped into her left eye and she’d needed treatment. Later, she’d been wearing an eye patch when the policii arrived, and that, along with her broken ribs, had made it difficult to answer the door at their sharp knock.

The officers had quickly concluded that she could not possibly have been strong enough—or have seen well enough—to have hung and gutted someone in an act of revenge. But—“Where’s your cousin, Ms. Nikoslav? People say he’s awful protective of you.”

Where was Jakob? She hadn’t known. Hadn’t needed to know. Jakob was always with her; she could hear him, in her head, just like he could hear her in his. “I know you get lonely, little sestranek.” Something he’d told her since they were just children. So no matter where I am we can always talk.”

She’d called him then, frantic

—Jakob? Where are you?—

and eternity had slipped by before

—Vancouver—

he answered.

—Tell them I am in Vancouver—

Vancouver. And wasn’t it ironic that he was also there now? Yet….back then, Auntie Danieta, having moved to the coast by that time, had confirmed the same: “Jakob was with me in Vancouver.”

Natasha had wondered ever since if the real reason Danieta had then quickly relocated to Europe was to stay out of the sight and the mind of the policii, lest they reopen the investigation on her son. You would have to really love someone to cover for them if they caused someone to die. When she’d said it this morning she’d no idea what they—all of them, apparently—had done. “But…what about Elayna?” How was she connected to any of this? Could Cory Chandler’s lament to ‘be true’ be nothing more than her Shadows showing unrelated events from the past? Or…a question darkened her gut, made her inch away from ENDLESS SLEEP. What had Elayna’s name been before it was Chandler?

The windchimes, trilled again, said Galinko.

She jumped up. She needed to get to the gallery.

***

Owen needed to get to Sondra’s treatment center. He’d prodded Jessalyn to spill everything to Cory: the storybooks, the threats, and the connections to Echo Creek and Vince Haslom—and as she ’fessed up, he watched his old teaching Lieutenant.

Cory’s face remained impassive, an expression Owen had worn himself back on the streets. Yet seeing it on Jessalyn’s dad made him wonder: did civilians have any clue how many times cops were just as unnerved by things seen and heard as the public was?

And Cory was disquieted. After hearing it all he said he’d take Jessalyn back to the Okanagan in his vehicle—he had more questions he wanted to ask—and that left Owen on his own with her truck. So now he cruised the Downtown East Side, eyes scanning the streets for anyone he once knew. The informants. The junkies he’d busted. The junkies he’d trusted.

The junkies who’d trusted him.

No one looked familiar, and he’d texted the last number Sondra had called from but got no reply. But then again, she was in rehab—and the facility she’d been mandated to was miles away from here in Vancouver’s East Hastings.

Didn’t matter. Something had made him need to touch base here anyway, the pit of despair where his brother said the ‘shit of society’ lived. “Not be choice, Steve,” he murmured and slowed to a crawl, lingering until the Downtown East Side had no choice but to be a reflection in his rear view. Still, he wondered: would someone like Steve, with his absolute definitions of right and wrong, ever believe that wrecked lives led to this place, not the reverse? The people here…every one of them had been broken beyond repair well before their feet ever hit the grime of these streets.

Well…almost every one of them. Before Hastings Street, he and Sondra had both been the clean-cut cuties Sabrina had teased him about. But then they’d been assigned here, and…he glanced into the mirror again and the compulsion to crank the wheel, turn around, was so strong he began shaking.

He hit the gas.

The shakes lifted as soon as he crossed into West Van, yet his breath still rattled as he parked in the visitor’s lot of Solstice Treatment For Women, a sixty-bed facility bumped up against what he supposed was its greatest selling feature—an ocean view here on B.C.’s ever-coveted Sunshine Coast.

He hated it suddenly, and longed for the cocoon of the Okanagan Valley, for its fragrant orchards and Vestemere’s sleepy streets, the endless Pacific nowhere in sight.

He tucked his collar up, entered Solstice. Inside, the foyer of quiet colors and dim lights could not quite cloak the undercurrent of detox gripping his nostrils—and memory. Dope smelled different when it left the body than it did going in, became a stench foul albeit faint. He lifted his knuckles to nose and breathed in the blank scent of his skin as he approached reception. “Evening.” He dialed up his billion-watt smile. “I’d like to leave a note for one of your residents, Sondra Mitchell.”

Reception, a woman who looked hard enough to have once been a client, said “I’m afraid I can’t help you. We can’t confirm or deny anyone’s enrollment here.”

He sustained wattage. “Yeah, but I already know she’s here. I just want to pass on a mess—”

“I’m sorry. No.”

He chewed back the urge to bark but then, through the foyer, a straggling group of addicts made a beeline for the door, cigs rolling between their fingers, the one vice they couldn’t break. He cleared his throat and, loud enough for them to hear, said “Really? You can’t even tell me if Sondra Mitchell’s here or not?”

Reception glared, fully aware of what he’d just done, and he felt his big smile become cheeky. “Thanks anyway,” he said, then trooped out after the smokers.

They’d scattered, the flick of their lighters clicking like a chorus. He bopped a look around for any who might talk and—“Hey Romeo,” said a voice at his back.

A human rail leaned against the outside wall, thin hair and skin like a puddle of milk. Methamphetamine. He knew it the way anyone who’d ever hung out on the street could tell a meth head from a crack freak. A needle popper from a garden variety drunk. “Hey.” He gave her a billion watts.

“You talkin’’bout that little redheaded cop who gots her ass tossed here to clean up?”

“Yeah.” He dug in his pockets. Did he have any cash? “Want to pass on a message?”

“I’d loves to, Romeo, but I can’ts. She’s gone.”

Gone? His gut dropped. Milk-skin read his face. “Not dead, Romeo. Jesus.” She took a drag and exhaled a few ghostly rings with a round, ruined mouth. Yep, definitely methamphetamine. “Just gone. Took off late last night.”

Fuck, Sondra! She’d blow any hope at a more lenient sentence.

Milk-Skin smiled every addict’s sly smile. “You knows she shoulda stayed.” She took another drag, blew more rings. “I knows it too, but…” A philosophical shrug. “When you got the jones, you got the jones.”

A jones. Right. The jones that had always been more important than anything—their operation, her badge…him. Why the hell wouldn’t it also be more important than going to prison? Goddammit! He dug deep in his jeans, pulled out a five dollar bill. “Here,” he said, and flicked it at Milk-Skin.

She cackled. “What the hells I’m gonna do with five bucks, Romeo?”

“Go buy some junk from the vending machine,” he told her and memory flashed, the Tsarina with her shopping cart full of potato chips. Surprisingly, it made him smile.

“Aw,” said Milk-Skin, watching him. “You’s thinkin’ ’bout your sweetheart.”

The smile drained off his face. Sondra had cut and run and, like so many times before, he wanted to throttle her.

Hold her.

Tell her to screw herself once and for all.

Race back to Hastings Street to be with her.

Rain began spitting as he climbed back into Jessalyn’s truck, and when he leaned his forehead against the steering wheel, the increasingly heavy patter created a rhythm to drift on.

When he lifted his head Natasha Nikoslav stood up the street, hair plastered to her cheeks and clothes soaked from the rain. “Tsarina?” He squinted, shocked when she looked his direction, appearing to hear him even though he sat, warm and dry, in the cab of the truck.

Then she flinched as something propelled through the rain and hit her. Shit! A rock! And that downpour she stood in—that wasn’t rain.

She lifted one hand, touched her collarbone where the rock had struck. Her fingers came away pink, blood diluted into watercolor from the rain.

That’s not rain. “Tsarina!” he called, for he knew then, what the rain really was. He bolted out of the truck. “Tsarina!”

Hearing the nickname made hurt cut ’cross her face and “Natasha,” he amended, gently, and held out a hand. “Come. Come out of this.”

She winced as another rock hit her. He raised his arms like a shield. “Run. Hurry. My truck is right there. Just ru—”

“I can’t.”

Jesus, her eyes. All red anguish and that, more than the rocks now pelting his back, made him reach out, cup her face. “Natasha,” he said tenderly. “You’re crying. All this rain…it’s from you.”

Her brow knit, uncomprehending.

“Tsarina, what’s happenedto you? Who’s doing this to you?”

“I…” Her gaze clung to his. “I’m afraid,” she whispered, so soft he had to lean in close to hear. “I’m afraid.”

“And sad.” On impulse, he caressed her wet cheeks. “So sad you’re drowning in your own tears.” He reached down then, for her hand.

She ripped back in horror. “Don’t…not my hand! Don’t touch my hand! You…you’ll hate me!” She tore away then, running.

“Natasha!”

Her feet splotched through tears. Puddle after puddle of her tears. His chest hurt as he watched her, and he drew back to gather momentum and give chase.

His head smacked the backrest in Jessalyn’s truck, and as his hand shot out it tapped the horn, making it blare, waking him. Still he stared out the windshield—was she there?—memory now repeating what that Alberta cop said: “Grab Natasha Nikoslav’s hand, Officer Brophy. Then call me back. Tell me why you think people are prickly.”

***

The gallery was a haven of earth colors, hushed music and Antonio the Pirate at the front counter. “Bella Nikoslav!” His wide, welcoming smile was such sweet sincerity that tears pricked her eyes, and when he delivered a rapid peck onto her each of her cheeks, the greeting was so familiar, so European, she felt…

Home. The now-familiar Shadow floated through the foyer.

“Would you like a guided tour today? Or…” His artist’s eye read her face with every bit as much accuracy as she with her Shadows. Everyone is psychic, Jakob was so fond of saying. Sometimes she believed he was right.

“You would like solitude,” Antonio said.

No, she’d actually love company. She always wanted company. But—“Today, yes, thank you.” Today, she needed to reach Elayna alone.

In the portrait gallery, Elayna’s canvas still struck her as a cherubic contradiction of innocence and femme fatale. “Show,,” she murmured, and discreetly cupped her hands. “Was your maiden name Galinko?”

‘Galinko?’

The voice came from behind her.

‘We’ll find him, kamarád.’

Kamarád? “That’s Czechky,” she whispered, and spun to face the speaker.

Cory Chandler’s portrait hung on the wall, a circus of red hair and merry freckles. His Shadow stood beside it, speaking to another that she could not see. ‘I believe in you,’ he said, and thrust a hand out, braced it on somebody’s shoulder. ‘We’ll nail this bastard. He put that body somewhere.’

“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s in a field. Silva helped Haslom hide it in a field.”

A voice replied but indistinct, like it spoke through water. ‘Something’s blocked me. I can’t see. I try to bring light in but it drizzles away, leaves me blind.’

Chandler winced. ‘Please try harder. The family is angry. And I’m trying to do damage control but they’re raging. Call my constables incompetent dogs.’

‘I’m trying, kámoš.’ The reply, more Czechky, meant ‘friend’, and “Who are you?” Natasha squinted, but the Shadows were fog.

‘I’ll show you, Cory,’ said the stranger. ‘Show you what I see.’ A hand, a man’s hand, emerged from the fog, extended the way she and Jakob did when they wanted to connect, to read.

‘Your nose, Kamarád,’ cautioned Cory, but the hand waved this off and Cory touched then, palm-to-palm. ‘Ink,’ he said.

‘Ja. A psychic,’ said the stranger. ‘Another psychic helped Haslom kill Galinko.’

“No,” she whispered, sounding plaintive to her own ears. “She didn’t kill him.”

Yet her own words rushed back, scolding her. You would have to really love someone to cover for them if they caused someone to die.

“Natasha?”

She whirled.

“Antonio said you were here.” Sabrina Danini wore a business suit, tall boots, and a cajoling sort of smile. “I come begging a favor.”

“Ah.” A rapid Shadow—her massage table—unleashed her voice. “You would like a massage.”

Sabrina’s smile became sheepish. “You probably get solicited a lot.”

Solicited? Well, according to Owen Brophy, yes she certainly did. But for actual massages? In Echo Creek? Never. All her clients were city doctor referrals. And now here was irony: a local asking for help and—“I can’t. I haven’t a table.”

Sabrina looked so distressed that she frowned. “Is something going on that you need a doctor?”

A jacked brow. “You’re awful intuitive, newcomer.”

Natasha bit her lip. “I-I’ve just come to know my audience.”

Skepticism. Only for a moment, and then—“I actually have been to the doc.” Sabrina set a hand on her belly. Natasha’s mouth made an ‘O’. “But I’m not through the twelve-week danger zone yet, so…” She raised a silencing finger to her lips.

Natasha blinked. “Not even Antonio?”

“Definitely not Antonio. He’d be crushed for the rest of his mortal days if this baby doesn’t become…well, a baby. And as for me…God, my boobs feel like they’ve grown six cup sizes in six days and my back is so sore. And I’m tired. Even sleeping makes me sleepy and yes, I’m whining. That’s one of pregnancy’s many charming side effects, alongside heartburn and ill-timed farting.”

Natasha laughed. “Well in that case I can help you without a massage table—it’s better when ladies in the family way do not lay flat on their backs.”

“Cause that’s what got them into their mess in the first place?” Sabrina grinned.

“No, Miss Lippy. It’s so they do not cut off blood supply to the placenta. Come to my-er-the cottage tomorrow? Noon?”

“I’ll be there. With my Little Bird, though.”

Robyn. Natasha felt herself glow.

Sabrina grinned. “You two have quite a mutual admiration society going on.” Then she sobered. “But don’t worry. She’s a good girl. She won’t distract you—”

“Sabrina, you know I adore her.”

“Okay. It’s just…not everyone likes kids.”

Vincent Haslom’s Shadow stepped between them, foul and frowning. Natasha glared at it. Go away. I didn’t call you. “Well, I do,” she said, deliberately. “Robyn is always welcome with me. And you are too.” She tossed a sneer at Haslom’s Shadow. You should have wanted her near you, too, Huntsman.

he Shadow reached out like it would stroke her cheek. She recoiled.

“You okay?” asked Sabrina.

Yes. There…was an insect.” Her pulse galloped. That was a coincidence. Just a coincidence. I cannot call the Dead. I tried.

Sabrina said “I thought maybe you shivered ’cause of him.” She cocked her head toward the portrait of Cory Chandler. “Show me a cop who isn’t hunted or haunted,” she mused. “Steve and I—that’s badass Owen’s brother, have you met him?”

“Ja. Yes.”

“Him and I have dissected Chandler six ways from Sunday.”

“And you think he’s a bad man?” ‘Be true’ rang in her head.

“Bad? No. But...let’s just say Cory’s always got an agenda. He never exactly lies, but he never exactly shares, either. It’s like…like he’s always gathering intel.”

Like Owen Brophy. “Ulterior motives,” Natasha murmured.

“Exactly! And knows all sorts of shit he doesn’t reveal. Talking to Cory Chandler is like playing a game with someone who knows rules that you don’t. And don’t ask me how I know all this. I just—”

“You’re intuitive, too.”

“Yeah,” Sabrina answered, but softly, and only after several long seconds. “I guess I am. I…I guess I learned to be.”

Vincent Haslom’s Shadow grinned. Natasha wanted to slap it.

Then it spoke. ‘I never loved her,’ it said. ‘But I would have loved you. Milacek.’

©bonnie randall 2005