chapter four

“… all right?”

I blinked. I knew I’d lost time—not much time; it was still daylight, the van was still there, it was still cold, Cathie was wearing the same clothes—but I didn’t dare look at my watch. Not that I had many secrets from her. We grew up in the same town, by which I mean the same lunatic asylum. Except we don’t call it that anymore. It’s not nice.

Still, though I loved my friend, I’d never felt she needed to know every single second of every single time my body was hijacked. I don’t even tell my shrink about every second. Except we don’t call them that anymore. It’s not nice.

“Can you believe it?” I asked, hoping to get her off the trail. “Moving Day? Isn’t it wonderful?”

“No. No.” Cathie shivered, rubbing her arms through her deep-green Gore-Tex parka. She was also wearing black snow pants, even though she only had to walk back and forth from the moving van through the front door—about twenty feet total—and it was thirty-some degrees out: balmy, as she’d pointed out. Cathie hated being cold almost as much as she hated being audited. “Don’t remind me. I don’t need any more horrific pics in my head.”

“Now, now,” I said mildly. Cathie also liked the status quo. For years her brother had been her brother and her friend had been her friend. She’d compartmentalized her life so well, Patrick and I had only just met a few months ago. Now her brother and her friend were a couple. Abort! Abort! Shifting status quo! “You know you’re my favorite.”

“Sure. You say that now.” She peered into the back of the moving van, which was rapidly emptying. “You know, it’s pretty great. I gotta give it to Patrick. Well … some of the tiles don’t line up exactly on the south side of the kitchen. And one of the light fixtures is a few degrees lower than the other ones in one of the bedrooms. But it’s a fixer-upper.”

I smiled and said nothing. The house was brand-new and perfect. There wasn’t so much as a crooked seam (or whatever houses had that traditionally needed fixing) to be seen. But Cathie was particular.

“Last chance to change your mind. Say the word and we can hijack this U-Haul.”

“Did you set aside enough time in your schedule to be arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for motor vehicle theft? And then maybe sued in a civil trial for punitive damages?”

“No.” She kicked at a frozen tuft of grass. December without snow was just wrong, especially in Minnesota. A few days last week of forty-plus weather had gotten rid of the little snow we’d had. On the other hand, now that I was a homeowner and no longer an apartment dweller, I’d have to do things that homeowners did. Shovel. Mow. Start meaningless feuds with next-door neighbors. Garden. Can. Pickle? “Damn it, no, I didn’t.”

“Another time,” I comforted her.

My baker-boyfriend, Patrick, came bounding out the front door, in his enthusiasm coming across an awful lot like an Irish setter with an unbelievable upper body and denim shorts.

(Yes, Cathie loathed the cold and overdressed for it. Her brother refused to acknowledge it and wore shorts all year round. You’re right to be confused. When my life settled down, I’d have to devote some research time to the Flannery clan, which in its own way was almost as weird as my own.)

Our dog, Pearl, ran out beside him and I smiled to hear her bark. A black Lab cross, she’d been rescued from an abusive douche just a few weeks ago and was normally too conditioned to bark. The douche, incomprehensibly, wanted a dog but disliked barking. He was still in the hospital, which was as cheering as it was guilt-inducing.

“Our” dog meant mine and Shiro’s and Adrienne’s. Adrienne had snatched her, Shiro had tolerated it, and I had decided the dog could stay in our lives. This led directly to my agreeing to move in with Patrick—my one-bedroom Burnsville apartment was not dog-friendly. Regardless of the inconvenience, I had a lot of respect for the small black puppy—the vet figured she was about a year and a half old, and due to malnutrition would only grow to about two-thirds the size of a Lab. I thought that was sad; Shiro thought it proved the dog’s intelligence. “Clever girl, keeping herself small for convenience’s sake,” she’d told Patrick.

I leaned down and gave her a pat on her small sleek head. She had no idea it was Moving Day, just that she was with us and hadn’t seen the douche in weeks. Good enough.

“All done, huh?” Patrick swooped down and scooped me up in a hug. I was gawky and tall, about six feet, but he made me feel petite and cute. My feet dangled several inches from the sidewalk, and Pearl darted beneath them to snuggle around Patrick’s ankles. (She was small and entirely black except for her white paws and a small round, white blob of fur on the top of her head: Pearl.) “They’ve got all the furniture in places where I think you’ll like it. Okay?”

“Are the beds in the bedrooms?”

“Yup.”

“Boxes marked KITCHEN in the kitchen?”

“Yup.”

“That won’t do at all,” I said, smiling. He bent down and we rubbed noses, our faces so close his was out of focus. Not for the first time I was aware that if you looked at Patrick and Cathie together, it’d be a tough guess that they were brother and sister.

They were redheads, but hers was a bright copper and his was a deep auburn, so dark it was black cherry rather than red. He towered over pretty much everyone, especially his little sister, and was muscular where she was small and slim (baking gave him an unreal physique … flour and sugar and butter in big enough quantities are quite heavy, and cupcake pans aren’t featherlight, either).

Then there was the ten-year age gap between them, but I wasn’t getting into that now. It had … unpleasant associations for them. Not for me, though. I was fine.

I looked into Patrick’s out-of-focus face and thought it was a perfect moment, even with the approaching car engine in the background. “I should have told you I want to sleep in the kitchen and fry eggs in the bedroom.”

“Yeah, that sounds exactly like what you think goes on in bedrooms, dumbass.”

Patrick’s arms involuntarily tightened so much I groaned and gasped for breath. We all glanced over at the car that had swung into the

(our!)

driveway behind the moving van. My partner, George Pinkman, waved a cheerful greeting, by which I mean he flipped all of us off. With both hands, so he was in an especially good mood.

“What’s that doing here?” Patrick asked, mouth going thin with surprised distaste; he would have been happier to see a worm crawl out of his watermelon salad.

(Weird, right? Watermelon was a fruit. And not a fake fruit like a tomato, which tasted like a veggie but called itself a fruit: watermelon was a fruit. But Patrick treated it like a vegetable, slipping it into salads with salt and pepper and oil and vinegar.… Not all the crazies, I can tell you, are in therapy.)

Pearl sensed the tension, darted off the sidewalk, stress-pooped in the frozen grass, then turned tail and darted into the house. She was a stress-pooper and a stealth-pooper, but she was learning fast and, given all that she’d adapted to in a short time, keeping our patience wasn’t too much of a trick.

Besides, George occasionally brought about the same impulse in me.

I knew why he was here, but I decided to let George be the bad guy; he was so good at it. There was only one reason he’d show up on his day off, on my day off, on Moving Day, and it wasn’t to drop off a housewarming plant. Unless he’d peed in it first.

But he still wouldn’t swing by on his day off. He’d swing by on the way to work, tossing the peed-on plant from his ugly car and laughing like a crazy man as it smashed on our sidewalk and sprayed dirt everywhere. Yes, that was George Pinkman’s idea of a housewarming gift.

“God,” he said, clambering out of his awful, awful, awful Smart Pure coupe (in festive Jordan-almond green). “It looks like Martha Stewart threw up here. Just barfed, and some cutthroat real estate agent came along and put up a FOR SALE sign in the middle of it until you idiots bought it.” His burning green gaze settled on me, which was awful. “Got a dead guy, Cadence. Time to swap out your granny panties for big-girl ones.”