From the other side of the birdcage, the man appeared again.
He’d disappeared so quickly earlier that Rachel had begun to believe she’d imagined him, the threat of him. Now, he stared at Rachel, just long enough to lock eyes for half a heartbeat, only his eyes visible to her, his face obscured by the bars of the birdcage.
He turned away, as if satisfied his message had been received. But what message? Who was he?
“What do you want?” Rachel said, her voice too loud, a cry.
Birds squawked, a dog barked.
The pet shop patrons gawked at Rachel: the girl who cried out.
“What is it?” Felix took her icy hand in his warm one.
“Nothing.” She tried to swallow. Couldn’t. Her throat dry as bone dust.
“Nothing? You’re shouting and shaking. Your hand is freezing. Are you sick?”
“No.” She’d be damned if she’d let Felix know some guy glimpsing her for a blink had traumatized her. She didn’t need him thinking she’d gone berserk. She’d been distraught enough since learning just days ago that her birth parents had been murdered when she was a baby, that they had not been killed in a car wreck as her adoptive father had told her years ago. She was still freaked out. Who wouldn’t be? But she didn’t need Felix to think she believed every creep who eyed her was going to kill her. Even if she did feel that way now, about this man.
Truth was, since learning of her parents’ murders she’d felt altered. Alien. And angry. Infuriated. Not at the truth of her parents’ deaths so much as how she’d heard it—from a stranger, a weirdo girl with purple hair at a Family Matters meeting for young women trying to decide what to do about their unplanned pregnancies. Rachel hadn’t been pregnant, thank God. She’d gone to figure out if a predator was using the meetings to select victims. Since she was a little girl she’d helped her father with his mundane private investigation cases, and recently she’d had a fixation with deviant violent criminals and serial killers; so when her father had told her a dead girl might be linked to the meetings, Rachel had investigated, despite her father insisting otherwise. Purple Hair had mentioned Rachel’s parents’ murder in passing, assuming Rachel had known. Shaken, Rachel had holed up in a motel and googled the murders on her phone. She’d not found much, the crimes old. But she’d read a headline and enough to know it was true. Enough to know she did not want to know any more about it.
What galled her was that her dad had thought she was too weak to hear the truth. What bunk. He’d raised her to be, if not tough, then resilient. If she were a boy, he probably would have had a “man-to-man” when she was thirteen. It maddened her. And wounded her, too, that he believed she had so little brass.
And now? If she told Felix some freak staring at her in a pet shop with other people around skeeved her out, she’d look even weaker. She wouldn’t stand for it.
Besides, the man was gone again now.
Vanished.
Where was he?
Felix was speaking, his voice white noise. Rachel pushed past a boy tapping a finger on an aquarium to taunt a tarantula and came to the other side of the birdcages. The man was gone, and Rachel was left with a need to ask him just what the fuck he meant with his leer. Her heart pumped hard. She felt like her old self for a second. Defiant. Able. She felt like her dad’s daughter.
She spun in a circle to try to locate the man, knocking Tarantula Boy. The boy shrieked.
Again, all eyes on Rachel.
Mortified, she slunk out of the store, Felix trailing.
Outside, the dying sun had broken through rain clouds, its reflection mirroring off the dark, wet street, shimmering in the fog and backlighting the rain so it streaked down as flashes of liquid silver.
She did not see the man.
“What’s going on?” Felix said.
“Nothing.” In the few months she’d known Felix, Rachel had never lied to him, not even about nonsense, and questioned why she lied now and in the store to hide her fear. Who cared if she was afraid? It felt ridiculous now anyway, her fear, out here in the open air.
That feeling died quickly.
As she and Felix entered the Lovin’ Cup coffee shop next door, Rachel felt the stranger’s eyes on her again, her face warming, the sensation of that grimy fingertip snaking down her spine again, down and down and down as she sneaked a look back over her shoulder, afraid of what she might see; afraid more to see nothing to explain her terror.