The first thing that greeted me when I opened the door that led from the garage to the house was the scent of the all-natural lemon verbena cleaner I used to mop the floors and spray down the countertops. Wrinkling my nose in confusion, I looked around and noticed that everything in the kitchen was sparkling clean. The chrome faucet practically glittered in the fluorescent light from overhead.
“What the…?”
Gort came bounding up to me, mouth open in a doggy smile as he headed toward the bag of sandwiches I held.
“No chance in hell, Gort,” I chided him. “It’s kibble time, and you know it.” After setting the bag on the unnaturally gleaming counter, I went to the top shelf in the pantry where I kept his big bag of dog food. It was the only place I knew it would be safe. I took it down, still looking around in confusion. Now, I was a more or less neat person, mostly because I hated clutter. However, my schedule was hectic enough that my cleaning routine mainly consisted of wiping things down and hoping for the best. It had definitely been a while since the house looked as if a professional had gone over it.
The stranger appeared around the corner between the kitchen and the dining room, a roll of paper towels in one hand and the spray bottle of verbena cleaner in the other. “Hello.”
I startled and dropped a few stray pieces of dog food, which Gort happily pounced on. “Um…hi.” Pointing with my free hand at the model-home perfection of the kitchen, I asked, “Did you do this?”
“I hope it’s not a problem,” he said, looking a bit sheepish. “I felt as if I should be doing something besides sitting and watching the television.”
A problem? No, having a stranger who looked like an underwear model doing maid duty while I was at work was definitely not a problem. “That’s — that’s great. Really. I just haven’t had much of a chance to clean lately….”
The slight frown that had creased his dark brows erased itself. “Good. I got the idea from a commercial on your television.”
It figured. Daytime television tended to be dominated by advertising geared toward stay-at-home moms — cleaning products, educational toys, the odd ad for a vocational college for those who might decide that getting out of the house sounded like a really good idea after the umpteenth diaper change that day. I found myself staring at the swell of his biceps below the baggy Hawaiian shirt and forced my gaze upward. Not that that really helped, either; those eyes were the most amazing green I’d ever seen.
“I brought some sandwiches,” I said hastily, recalling the bag on the counter. “Hope you like chicken pesto.”
“I — I don’t remember.”
“You’ll be fine.” If his appetite this morning as he put away all the remaining multigrain waffles had been any indication, he’d most likely devour pretty much anything I put in front of him. Not that I’d met anyone yet who turned up their nose at the Wildflower Bread Company’s sandwiches…well, unless they ate a gluten-free diet. And since the stranger had happily devoured those waffles earlier in the day, I figured the sandwiches must be safe.
I took the bag over to the small café-style table next to the window, then went back to retrieve a couple of glasses and the pitcher of sun tea from the refrigerator. He seemed to understand what I had planned, and so he took one of the seats and waited for me to sit down as well. After I pulled one of the sandwiches out of the bag and handed it to him, he said,
“Grayson.”
“Excuse me?” I paused with one hand still inside the paper bag.
“You can call me Grayson.”
A little thrill went through me. Maybe he was finally starting to remember something. “That’s your name?”
He shook his head. “No. I saw someone named that on one of the shows on your digital recorder, and I thought it sounded like a good name.”
Good thing I didn’t have anything more incriminating than old episodes of Drop Dead Diva on my DVR, episodes I refused to erase even though the show had been canceled years earlier. Then again, the name wasn’t a bad choice. After all, the fictional Grayson was also tall, dark-haired, and gorgeous. “So…Grayson…you still don’t remember anything?”
Another head shake. I noticed he was careful to finish chewing before he replied, “Nothing. Just darkness. Everything was black…and then I saw the lights of your house, and I followed them.”
Pouring iced tea for both of us gave me time to think. “So, nothing at all…no explosion, or bright light, or anything like that?”
“No.” He frowned as he reached for his glass of tea. “That is…I’m not sure.” The frown deepened. Up close like this, I could see a few more traces of the damage he’d incurred in the desert, the smallest patch of flaking skin on his forehead, a slight redness in his eyes. Still, he had shown remarkable powers of healing. If those powers continued at this rate, by the following day, there shouldn’t be any trace left of his time in the desert.
I remembered that I had a sandwich to eat and took a few bites of my own food. “You’re not sure? So maybe there’s…something?”
“I — I don’t know.” He set down the glass of tea and stared across the table at me, eyes like chips of green glass against the browned skin. “There was…a light? I don’t know if that’s the right word. Something that burst over me…everyone around me…and then darkness. I don’t remember anything after that.”
It could have been a crash of some sort. True, I hadn’t heard anything about an accident like that, but that didn’t mean much. Just because the aliens had been scared off didn’t mean the government wasn’t still testing all kinds of crap in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. Grayson could have been part of some sort of failed test flight or something. But I’d never heard of government agents leaving one of their own behind, especially if the person in question was a highly trained pilot.
“It’s okay,” I said in soothing tones. The look of distress in his eyes was real, and I suddenly wished I hadn’t tried probing into his origins quite so soon. Yes, at some point I’d have to do my best to track down who he was and where he came from, but for God’s sake, the guy had just collapsed in my living room the night before.
“I don’t know,” he replied, and that green gaze seemed to shift from me to some indeterminate point down the hallway, beyond the front door. “I don’t know if it is.”
Lance
He hadn’t really intended to go into the UFO Depot today, but after last night’s sighting, he figured he owed it to Kara to at least give her the straight scoop in person. Paul, of course, had already told Persephone, and Lance guessed she’d passed the information on to Kara. If he didn’t go in and tell her what he’d seen with his own eyes, he knew she’d be more than a little put out. Michael she’d let off the hook because this was the high season for him as well — he was off this afternoon conducting one of his “spirit walk” tours of the vortexes. Even shamans had to pay the rent.
The roughly paved lot outside the store only had a handful of vehicles parked in it, one of them Kara and Kiki’s garishly painted “UFO Night Tours” van. It made good advertising, but Lance knew Kara hated it and only used the van when actually ferrying tourists out to one of her tours. Kiki, on the other hand, loved driving it all over town. Subtle, Kiki was not.
A pair of tourists chattering away in Japanese pushed past him as he entered the store. They clutched multiple shopping bags against themselves as they went, so it seemed at least Kara had made a decent sale. Good. Maybe that would put her in a better mood.
As he entered the store, a blast of cold air greeted him. With the monsoon rains had come their accompanying mugginess, and he was glad Kara had decided to put comfort ahead of her electric bill. This type of conversation could be tricky enough without dripping with sweat into the bargain.
“Hey, Kara,” he said, knowing it was probably better to launch a preemptive strike rather than let her get the first word in. “I suppose you heard about last night.”
“Persephone might have mentioned something,” she replied. Her expression didn’t seem particularly irritated, but he knew her well enough to recognize that certain lift of her chin, the one that meant she was more than a little annoyed.
“Well, I figured the grapevine would get to you first, so I could take my time. Not as if anything was likely to change between now and then.” Which was more or less true. The aliens in general were active at night, using the darkness to conceal their doings.
“I suppose.” She made a show of tucking a credit card receipt under the money tray and then closing the cash register. “Seph thought I should ask you to come along tomorrow night, but Michael already said he would.”
Hell. It would make more sense for both him and Michael to be there, since there was no telling what the aliens might be up to. Kara was smart and tough — and could both drive and shoot pretty well — but those skills might not be enough when push came to shove. When going up against extraterrestrials, you stood a better chance if you had something a little extra yourself to bring to the table.
But dragging a bunch of rubes out to Boynton or up Schnebly Road on a Friday evening wasn’t exactly what he had planned for the weekend. Then again, after going four rounds with Ms. Newport Beach the night before, he thought he might be okay for a while.
He said, surprising even himself, “I’ll come, too.”
Kara’s blue eyes widened before she recovered herself and gave a quick lift of the shoulders. “I don’t need a babysitter, Lance.”
“It’s not babysitting. More like…running interference.”
She raised an eyebrow. He had the stray thought that she was looking particularly good this morning, despite her obvious annoyance. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said she’d gotten laid. Kara wasn’t the type for casual flings, though, and he hadn’t heard that she was seeing somebody. Still, she seemed somehow changed, as if something — or someone — had happened along to give her life some spice.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Actually, he knew exactly how he felt about that particular possibility, but he didn’t want to deal with it at the moment. Brushing away the unexpected stir of jealousy, he added, “You weren’t out there at Secret Canyon — ”
“You’re right. I wasn’t. I never get to be, do I?”
“Trust me, you wouldn’t have wanted to be there.”
“But I’m never given the choice.”
She didn’t even sound petulant, like a child begging for something she didn’t understand. Her tone was calm enough. Maybe it was because she knew she was right. They never did give her the choice. She didn’t have his or Michael’s…skills…and Kiki was always jumping in feet first and worrying about the consequences later. Kara had to be the sensible one, the person who kept everything going. It couldn’t be easy for her, always standing back, but also knowing she was the public face of their group, knowing that the computer at the shop and the desktop she kept at home were probed routinely by agencies so secret, they didn’t have names. She kept enough on those computers to make sure the snoops had something to look at, but all the important stuff lived in the MacBook Air she carried with her everywhere in her oversized purse.
“Sorry, Kara,” he said, and he found he genuinely was. It was times like these when he wished he could kick his scruples aside and take her in his arms and hold her the way he’d dreamed of a thousand times. But he wouldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t do that to her. “I’d feel better if I came along.”
“Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug. “Just no cracks that the tourists can overhear, okay?”
“Is it all right if I think them real loudly?”
Her only response was a roll of the eyes, but he thought he caught a glimpse of a smile ghosting its way around her full lips. Which meant it was okay.
So why did he feel as if things were decidedly not okay?
Kara
After I hung the “Closed” sign on the door at exactly six o’clock, I took a detour down to the outlet stores in Oak Creek to pick up a few odds and ends for Grayson. I had no idea how long he was going to be around, but I did know that he deserved better than high-water pants and the loudest Hawaiian shirts this side of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It seemed reasonable to pick up a few pairs of jeans, a jacket, some flip-flops. T-shirts weren’t a problem; I had stacks of those back at the house. I’d have to take him somewhere in town to get some real shoes, but that could wait. Right then, I wasn’t sure how I was even going to handle parading around town with the guy. Practically everyone knew me…and way more about my personal life than I would like…and someone was bound to ask questions.
I also stopped at Whole Foods to get some organic food to heat up for dinner — veggie quiche, their amazing spinach turnovers — before finally pointing my Prius toward home. By then, it was almost seven, and I hoped Grayson wasn’t too worried that something might have happened to me. Besides, I knew Gort would be jonesing for a walk.
All seemed quiet enough as I pulled into the garage and parked on the left side. The right side of the garage was sacred to my grandfather’s beloved Indian motorcycle, which hadn’t run in more than fifteen years but which I steadfastly refused to sell. I grabbed the bags of clothes and food and headed on inside, wondering what sight was going to greet me this time.
The kitchen was still spotless, of course, but otherwise I didn’t see any real evidence of Grayson’s presence. More notably, Gort hadn’t come running to see me, which was even stranger. Normally, the dog would be waiting at the garage door, tail wagging in anticipation of his evening walk, which he loved even more than a full bowl of kibble.
I put the takeout from Whole Foods in the refrigerator and left the bags of clothes sitting on the counter — it wasn’t as if the jeans were going to spoil. It was as I turned away from the kitchen and toward the sliding glass door which opened onto the patio that I realized where Grayson had gone.
During most of my childhood, the backyard had been planted with grass that my grandfather stubbornly refused to plow under, even though the hardiest of Bermuda tended to wilt under Sedona’s scorching summer sun. After I inherited the house, I had the whole thing rototilled and planted with drought-resistant trees and shrubs, with tasteful groupings of native rock, and a few years ago, Michael had come over and spent several weekends constructing a medicine wheel in the far corner of the lot. While I did my best to maintain the yard, during the summer, I had a tendency to let things go, and weeds had sprouted here and there. Not anymore. A healthy pile of bindweed and other unsightly scrub was stacked off to one side, and the spots where some of the rocks in the medicine wheel had shifted out of place were now correctly filled in.
I didn’t have to look far to locate the architect of all this orderliness — Grayson stood off to one side, Hawaiian shirt knotted around his waist. His torso and arms were paler than his face and neck, but he was still pretty stare-able despite that, stomach flat and rock-hard, biceps knotted with muscle.
He seemed to notice me then, and quickly untied the shirt and pulled it back on. The slanting shadows in the backyard made the light chancy, but I could have sworn he blushed. For the first time, I noticed Gort sitting at attention a few feet away from Grayson.
“Housekeeper and gardener?” I asked, trying to force back some of the heat that had risen in the pit of my stomach at the sight of him half-naked. “Pretty soon, I’ll have to start paying you a salary.”
“Room and board is enough for now,” he said, coming toward me. His posture seemed a little more relaxed now; maybe he was glad I hadn’t done or said anything to give undue attention to his previously half-clad state. “Sorry about the pile of weeds — I didn’t know where I should put them.”
“It’s all right,” I replied. “There’s a bin around the side of the house I use for composting. But you can leave them for now. Hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Then come inside.”
I went back in, both Gort and Grayson trailing behind. The dog pushed past both of us and went to his bowl, which he nudged with a metallic clank when he realized it was still empty.
“Getting to that, Gort,” I told him, and poured out his cup of kibble. He immediately set to, and I turned to the oven and got it preheating. “I’ll have to walk him after he’s done eating,” I said to Grayson, who had been watching from the other side of the counter. “But I’ll start things heating up before that so we don’t have to wait too much longer for dinner.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“‘Go’?” I repeated, and then realized he was asking if I wanted him to tag along on the dog walk. As much as I would have liked that, I knew it would be opening a real can of worms if I went sauntering down the street with Grayson in tow. Sooner or later, people would find out I was shacked up with a man who had wandered in out of nowhere, but I preferred to put off that day for a while longer if possible. “Oh, no, that’s okay — I thought you’d probably want to relax after working out in that hot sun all day. Maybe take a quick shower?”
“Are you saying I smell?”
His mouth quirked a bit as he asked the question, so I guessed he was teasing me. “Not as much as you did when you showed up here last night!”
I thought he’d smile for real at that comment, but instead his expression sobered abruptly. “I hope not.” He ran a hand through his hair, as if trying to gauge its level of greasiness, and shrugged. “I understand. You don’t want to have to explain me.”
Once again, I wondered if I’d stumbled on yet another psychic. Or maybe I just wasn’t used to a guy so capable of picking up on subtext. “Maybe not tonight. It’s been a long day.” Those green eyes suddenly seemed a little too probing, and I looked away from him. Recalling the bag on the counter, I picked it up and handed it over. “Thought you might like some clothes that actually fit.”
He took the bag from me almost without thinking, but then he actually looked inside. Something in his face seemed to brighten, as if that one simple act had helped to reassure him that I didn’t mean to kick him out any time soon. “Well, I definitely need to take a shower now. Don’t want to put clean new clothes on top of this sweat.”
“Good idea,” I said, relieved that he wasn’t going to discuss the dog walk any further.
He flashed a grin at me and headed down the hall toward the bathroom, carrying the clothing with him. Gort let out a little questioning whine, and I smiled, too. “Yes, you silly mutt. Let’s go.”
After that, the evening passed normally enough — or at least as normally as it could, considering that I still knew nothing about Grayson or where he’d come from. Aside from a complete lack of knowledge as to his past or his identity, he seemed sharp enough. Nothing in any of his reactions or his conversation seemed to indicate that he’d suffered any sort of long-term cognitive loss due to his ordeal in the desert. Judging from a few comments he made, I gathered he didn’t know too much about current events or popular culture, either, unless that was just another manifestation of whatever trauma had caused him to lose his memory.
I really would have liked some wine with dinner, but alcohol was probably not a good idea for Grayson, and it didn’t seem very fair to drink in front of him. So we both had iced tea, and I shooed him out to the living room when he offered to do the dishes. Enough was enough. Maybe he was bending over backward to show how useful he was so I wouldn’t kick him out, but I didn’t feel comfortable taking advantage of the poor guy.
Even now, though, as I told him good night and watched him close his bedroom door, I couldn’t keep my mind from ticking away at the problem. Maybe it was long overdue, but I thought I should at least make a call to the Sedona P.D., see if anyone had been reported missing. I wasn’t too worried about tripping any alarms; I knew the chief detective, Lieutenant Gonzales, well enough. He was a straight-up guy. Had to be, since he’d married my college roommate, Jennifer Morales.
So I went to my office and shut the door, then picked up the phone. Of course, the Sedona P.D. was a pretty small outfit, all things considered, and I had no way of knowing whether Joe was on duty that night or not. If he wasn’t, no big deal. I’d try again and call him in the morning.
However, when I dialed the number, it was his voice I heard on the other end of the line.
“Gonzales.”
“Hey, Joe, it’s Kara.” Silly of me to feel such a sense of relief in knowing he was there. Then again, he’d helped me out more than once in the past — minor stuff, like a break-in at the store that turned out to be the work of some bored high school kids, another time when someone managed to walk out of the UFO Depot with a couple hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise without my noticing.
“Hey, Kara. What’s up?”
“Are you busy? Because I can call back — ”
He let out a not very professional-sounding snort. “Busy? My hottest case is the theft of someone’s riding mower up in Shadow Rock. I think I can spare a minute or two.”
I probably should have expected that. Sedona wasn’t exactly a hotbed of criminal activity. Most of what went on was petty theft, residential burglary, minor drug possession. “Thanks, Joe. Actually, I was calling to see if anyone had filed a missing-persons report lately.”
“Why? You find somebody?”
“More like he found me, but yeah.”
A note of warning entered Joe’s voice. “Kara…”
“Come on, it’s me. The guy is harmless. He weeded my backyard for me this afternoon without my asking. What do you say to that?”
“I think you should ask him to marry you.”
“Very funny. Anyway, have you heard anything?”
Joe let out a little chuckle. “Description?”
“Early thirties, I think. Six foot three, one-eighty, maybe one-ninety. Dark hair. Green eyes.”
“Sounds like you ordered him from Tinder or something.”
I wish…. Trying to sound businesslike, I said, “So have you got anyone on file like that?”
“Let me check.”
I heard a clicking noise on the other end of the receiver that I guessed was Joe looking up the information in a database. Were there really that many missing persons in a town as small as Sedona?
A minute later, Joe was back on the line. “Here in Sedona, I got nothing, unless you count Mrs. Haskell calling me for the umpteenth time to complain about her husband disappearing to go fishing on the Verde River. Guess that’s not the sort of thing you meant…and anyway, Philip Haskell is anything but a thirty-something stud with dark hair and green eyes.”
“I never said he was a stud.”
“You didn’t have to. I heard it in your voice.”
I bit back a sigh and began to regret making the call in the first place. There were other people I could have asked. Then again, Lance was one of the people I looked to when I needed someone to dig into law enforcement data, and right then, Lance was about the last person I wanted to know anything about Grayson.
“Anyway, over in Cottonwood, I’ve got a man who got in a fight with his girlfriend and took off. Haven’t heard from him since, but I don’t think he’s your guy, either, because the party in question is Hispanic and five foot eight. No one up in Flagstaff, and nothing down in Camp Verde or all the way over to Prescott. I can check Phoenix if you like.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said absently, my brain turning over the information Joe had just given me. Somehow, I knew in my gut that Grayson hadn’t wandered here all the way from Phoenix. “I thought I’d check with you just to be sure.”
“Are you sure everything’s okay, Kara?”
“Of course it is,” I said, an automatic response. “You know how careful I am.”
“True. You have a good night.”
“You, too, Joe. And tell Jen I said hi.”
I hung up and stepped away from the desk, arms crossed as I considered what to do next. The call to Joe had been a long shot. At least I knew he would let it alone, wouldn’t try to press me for more information. After all, wasn’t I Careful Kara? I couldn’t possibly be involved in anything as crazy as letting a stranger with amnesia crash at my house.
Right.
Even though the missing-person angle was a dead end, there had to be something, some scrap of evidence that would help to explain the mystery of Grayson’s origins. But he’d wandered out of the desert with nothing on him, no I.D., no car keys, not a single piece of jewelry, not even a watch. All he’d had was the clothes on his back.
The clothes on his back….
Struck by a sudden thought, I strode out of my office and into the garage. I’d discarded Grayson’s wreck of a jumpsuit out there in a messy pile by the washer and dryer, not knowing what else to do with it. Even now, I didn’t relish the thought of picking up the dirty, malodorous garment, but there didn’t seem to be anything else for it. Using only my fingertips, I lifted the jumpsuit from the ground and spread it across the top of the washer, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything that might provide a clue.
The stink of it rose from the rusty, grayish-black fabric, and I did my best to breathe through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to smell any more than was absolutely necessary. Nose wrinkling, I turned the garment over, but it just looked like a worn-out jumpsuit. It was stained everywhere, holes worn through the knees and the elbows, and with a jagged tear at the bottom of the left leg where it must have gotten caught on some rocks or been ripped by a juniper branch or something similar. Grayson obviously had gone through hell, whatever had happened to him.
As I flipped the jumpsuit back over again, a flash of white at the back of the neck caught my eye. That piece of white was the garment’s tag. Simple enough — it had a stylized American flag and the words “Patriot Uniform Company” woven into the fabric, with the legend “proudly made in the USA” written out below that in smaller type. On the back, it said, “100% cotton, machine wash,” but below that was a tiny number, so small that I had to lift the jumpsuit closer to the bare lightbulb on the wall above the washing machine so I could read it: “23111056.” It must be a serial number of some sort.
“Gotcha,” I said aloud. Of course, it was too late to be calling this Patriot Uniform Company, whoever and whatever they were. But I’d look them up online and get the information together so I could call from the shop in the morning. If they were meticulous enough to be weaving a serial number into their jumpsuits’ tags, then there was a good chance they’d have some information stored on who they’d sold the garments to.
The jumpsuit suddenly seemed too precious to be left lying on the garage floor, so I folded it up the best I could and tucked it into a spare garbage bag before turning off the light and heading back inside. I paused in the hallway outside the room where Grayson lay sleeping, but I heard nothing. Good. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to know about my latest Nancy Drew trick or not. He obviously seemed troubled by the subject of his past, but whether that was because of his inability to remember anything, or whether he actually had begun to catch glimpses of something unpleasant, I didn’t know.
The phone rang as I was halfway down the hall to my office, and I hurried to pick it up, hoping I’d caught it before it woke Grayson. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes after ten. Usually, I didn’t get calls at that hour unless there was an emergency. My heart rate sped up a little as I grabbed the receiver and said, “Hello?”
“Hey, Kara, I know it’s kind of late, but we’ve been so busy running around that I didn’t really get a chance to call — ”
“It’s okay, Kiki.” I willed my heartbeat to normalize, then said, “So you got into town okay?”
“Oh, yeah, but the traffic was a nightmare. We didn’t even get to the hotel until almost eight. And then Ginger wanted to take us all out — she is so cool, totally bought drinks for the whole table. And we’ve got the coolest rooms at this Chateau Marmont place — ”
“Well, that’s good,” I cut in, knowing if I didn’t do so, I’d probably be subjected to a long description of everything else “cool” in Kiki’s immediate vicinity. “So, what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?”
“Seph has to do some wedding stuff with Ginger, and Paul is meeting with some members of the local MUFON group. Jeff said he’d pick me up here in the morning and take me back to his place, since he doesn’t live far.”
Jeff. I was still less than thrilled about the whole thing, but Kiki was an adult. Let her make her own mistakes. I couldn’t figure out what the hell my sister saw in that scruffy, antisocial computer hacker. He might be halfway decent-looking if he was cleaned up, but a good haircut and a shave probably wouldn’t do much to improve his attitude. And there were plenty of presentable young men in Sedona who would be more than happy to date Kiki, now that she and Adam had broken up, but she was having none of them. Oh, well.
“Going to do a little hacking 101?”
Kiki sighed. “Oh, please, Kara, we’re way past 101. But yeah, he has some stuff he really wants to show me.”
I hope it’s just code he wants to show you, I thought. However, I only said, “Well, it’s good you’ll have something to keep you occupied while Seph and Paul are busy. Doing the same on Saturday, then?”
“Probably. Ginger invited me to the wedding, but I don’t really know her, and I’d feel weird going without a date. And Jeff said he absolutely wouldn’t go any place where he was expected to wear a tie, so….”
“I didn’t think they wore ties in L.A.,” I said absently.
“Well, at weddings.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
There was a short pause. Then Kiki asked, “Is everything okay? You sound a little weird.”
My response was automatic. “I’m fine. It’s been busy, so I’m tired. I was just about to get ready for bed when you called, since I’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
Another hesitation. “Maybe you should cancel the tours this weekend. I mean, with them showing up again and all — ”
“I am not canceling. It’s two full tours. That’s too much money to throw away.” I’m not going to let those aliens chase me out of my own backyard. “Besides, both Michael and Lance are coming, so short of heading out there with a bunch of Army Rangers, I think I’m doing about the best I can.”
“Lance is coming? Really?”
“Really.”
“Well, I guess if Michael is there as a chaperone, you two kids should be safe enough.”
“Very funny.” I wouldn’t let myself think about how much that casual joke stung, about how much I would have liked to drive out somewhere under the stars and have Lance hold me as the warm night wind swirled around us. I cleared my throat. “Okay, Keeks, I’ve really got to get to bed. Call me at the shop tomorrow if you have a chance, but otherwise, I’ll try you.”
“I’ll call you when I can. Jeff has a cellular jammer at his house, so calls can’t get in.”
Of course he does. “Well, all right, but if I don’t hear from you, I’m going to have no choice but to call Persephone to check up on you.”
“I’ll call, I’ll call!” Kiki exclaimed in mock-horror. “Even if I have to go out on the street corner to do it. One big sister breathing down my neck is enough.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” I replied. “But okay. I’ll talk to you later.”
“’Bye.”
I heard the line go dead and replaced the handset in the receiver. It was silly to be worrying about Kiki — she had Seph and Paul with her, and they’d make sure she was fine. No doubt they’d be worrying about me if they knew I had a strange man sleeping in Kiki’s old bed.
Well, I hadn’t been lying about one thing. It really had been a very long day. I’d worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.
Or maybe I wouldn’t. It seemed as if I already had plenty of people worrying for me….