7

Calliope tried, and failed, to keep Josh from seeing she was crying. “Okay . . . okay, just . . . explain it to me again, please?” Josh gave her a look she knew well enough. She shook her head. “I’m not trying to be difficult; I’m just having trouble understanding, okay?”

“It’s not complicated, Calli.” Josh leaned forward in his chair, rested his elbows on his knees, and wove his fingers together. His eyes were on the carpet, though, not her, as though he were reading from a note card she couldn’t see. “I don’t think this—the band—is getting us where we thought we’d be, and honestly I’m too old to keep banging my head against the wall, hoping it’ll eventually punch through.”

“You’re too old?” Calliope made a face. “You just turned thirty. Barely.”

“And I pay my rent—barely—by playing bar gigs.” His tone was that of someone who’d already said the exact same thing several times before—which Calliope realized he had. “I’m done, okay? I have to be done.”

Fresh tears stung her eyes. She shoved at them with a fist, sniffing hard.

Josh’s face was a mask. “I’m sorry this is hurting you so much.”

She sniffed again, glancing up, then away. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“Well, it’s hard, Calli, when—” He stopped himself and sat back in the chair, shaking his head, lips tight.

“What?” She saw his expression and looked away. “I can’t read your mind, Josh.” She looked back at him. “Please.”

He didn’t look away, but didn’t answer, either. She waited; she wasn’t as good at it as he was, but this time it was enough. He sighed through his nose, his lips still tight, and gave a small shake of his head. “I wasn’t really expecting you to get that upset, I guess.”

She stared at him. “Really.”

He ignored the sarcasm. “It caught me off balance. I wasn’t ready for it.”

“You—” She stopped, looked down, and worked her jaw while she thought of a way to say what she was thinking that didn’t end with her screaming. “I’m not sure how you’d think I was going to react.”

“Not like this,” he replied. His voice was a mixture of bemusement and anger. “Jesus Christ, Cal, you didn’t so much as reach for a Kleenex when we broke up; why—”

“I knew that was coming!” She flung her hands away from her body, her fingers spread wide and aching from being clenched in her lap for so long. The motion left her feeling stupidly overdramatic, and she curled back in on herself, her eyes dropping to the floor.

The words hung, vibrating, in the air of her (once, their) apartment. Calliope imagined she could see them, glowing like a sign, waiting for someone to read them before they faded away.

“Well, that makes one of us.” Josh’s voice was quiet, soaking up and stealing away the energy of Calliope’s shout. “But then, I was always stupid about things like that.”

She frowned, still looking at the floor. “Is that what this is about?”

He closed his eyes, as though the question made him tired, and shook his head. “No.” His eyes met hers; he seemed to lean into the gaze, as though he could push some kind of understanding through the connection. “This is about me, leaving the band. Doing something else.” He dropped back into the chair and quirked a tiny, self-effacing smile. “Growing up.”

Calliope managed not to react to those last two words, for all that they hurt the worst of anything he’d yet said; she could see he hadn’t meant it as an attack, and she was well and truly sick of making him feel bad for every single thing he said.

“Okay,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Okay.”

Josh watched her, his face cautious. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.”

Calliope opened her eyes only the bare minimum necessary to get a hazy impression of her surroundings. Morning light was stubbornly attempting to force its way into the room, but in the gloom the figure sitting on the edge of her bed was little more than a dim silhouette. She closed her eyes, letting out a deep sigh.

A moment later, her body tensed, and she jerked into a sitting position, leaning back from the stranger in her room.

She blinked her eyes hard until the edges of objects and her visitor came into focus. Another few seconds passed as she stared through sleep-wrecked hair, then dropped back to the pillow with another loud sigh that ended with “Hey.”

She caught a small smile on Tom’s face. “You always wake up so gracefully.” His voice was quiet and calm, pitched to wake a person up gently.

“Mmm.” She tried to inject a matching amusement into her voice, but it sounded false even to her—like a different kind of emotion entirely. Bitter. Silence built up until the two of them being on the bed together felt awkward.

Tom unfolded the leg he’d tucked under himself and set both feet on the floor, turning away from Calliope. “They said you stopped by last night.”

Calliope stared at his back until the words made sense. “Oh.” She finger-combed her hair out of her face and nodded. “Yeah. The club. Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t have you come back.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “We had a bad first set and I couldn’t really talk—trying to get my head on straight.”

“It’s fine,” she said. The words came out precise and short, and Calliope could see Tom’s shoulders tighten—she sounded angry, and couldn’t seem to stop it.

“Okay. I just wanted to apologize.” He stood up.

Calliope’s chest tightened, and she said the first thing she could think of. “And . . . sneak into my house and watch me while I sleep.”

Tom turned. “What?”

Shit. “Kidding. It just . . .”—she pushed herself up to the head of the bed and drew her legs up—“surprised me. I don’t wake up very well, right?” Tom didn’t immediately reply. In the shadowed room, she couldn’t make out his eyes. “What—”

“I made you some coffee.” He turned and walked out of the room.

Shit. “Wait. Tom . . .” Calliope shoved the covers out of the way and rolled across the bed and to her feet. She was still wearing everything but her shoes from the previous night—no surprise, since she only vaguely remembered getting home.

He was walking out of the kitchen and pulling on his jacket when she walked into the front of the house. “I didn’t mean to show up where I wasn’t invited,” he murmured, his eyes on anything but her. “You showed up at the club.”

“I did,” she agreed.

“I figured you wanted to talk,” he continued as though she hadn’t spoken.

“I did,” she repeated. “I’m sorry, I just made a bad joke. I didn’t mean anything by it. Please.”

He glanced up at her, shoved his hands in his pockets, and leaned against the wall. Not great, but not leaving. She took what she could get.

“Thank you,” she said, letting out a pent-up breath. “Do you want some of that coffee?”

He hesitated in the way he did when he didn’t want to say what he was thinking; normally, Calliope found the habit irritating, but at the moment she was just as happy not knowing what was going through his head. “I’m good,” he replied. “Already had too much today.”

And now you give him a little smile and ask if he’ll still be there in a minute if you go in the kitchen and get some for yourself. He’ll like it.

But she didn’t. A perverse part of her refused. Somehow, that was letting him win. Somehow, that was a bad thing.

The problem was it left her with nothing to say, even though she’d been the one to stop him, and the silence between them built up again.

Tom saved her. “Toby said you promised him you’d come back and sing sometime.”

Calliope let out a short, surprised bark of a laugh. “Oh really?” She shook her head at the ceiling. “I think he might have been overstating my part of the conversation.”

“He said you left pretty quick.” Tom’s eyes were still anywhere but on her. “With a friend?”

“It was just work.”

He studied her in morning light coming in through the front window. His expression was carefully neutral. “Well, he wasn’t totally wrong, then, if you were working on something with Joshua.”

“I—” Calliope felt her eyes go wide as she turned and focused on him. “Oh. God. I didn’t—”

“Didn’t wh—”

“Josh is—”

dead

“missing.” She heard her voice shake. “The police are still trying to figure out what happened.”

Tom frowned, pushing away from the wall and moving a few steps toward her. “He called you—”

She nodded. “Last n—” She shook her head. “Two nights ago.”

“Three,” he murmured. At her look, his brow creased. He extended his index finger. “Last night, you were at the club.” A second finger. “Night before, you didn’t come home.” A third finger. “Joshua called in the middle of the night.” He turned his hand toward her, palm out, fingers still extended, and waggled them.

Calliope looked past the fingers at him. “I was at the office.”

His eyes slid away from hers. “I didn’t ask.”

Heat bloomed in her face. “I was trying to help the cops with Josh—I was digging through files.” She scowled in annoyance. “And how do you know I wasn’t here?” Her voice sounded loud in her own ears.

“You told me to come by and pick up my stuff.” Tom’s voice was calm and quiet. For Calliope, that was one of the most annoying things about arguing with him. “I waited about an hour past when you’d normally get home, then I took off.” He stuck his hands in his back pockets. “I drove by after the show, but your Jeep was still gone. I went back to Sean’s.” His eyelids dropped, concealing his expression. “I wasn’t stalking—just following orders.”

Tom wasn’t the easiest person to read, but that small signal was at least something Calliope understood. She sighed. “I’m really sorry I said that, okay? It was just a joke. A bad joke.”

“It’s okay.” His mouth moved in an unexpected smirk. “It is a little stalkery when you list it off all at once, especially when you throw in the Cullenesque sleep-watching.” He crossed his arms and faked a shudder. “Now I feel dirty.”

Calliope laughed—a genuine, cleansing thing that felt like washing her face with cold water. Tom spread his arms, head tilted and eyebrows raised. Calliope nodded, took two steps to close the gap, and wrapped herself in him.

Above her, Tom murmured something unintelligible. “What?” she asked.

He lifted his head. “Did your all-nighter at the office help?”

“Maybe.” She told him about the answering machine message and its impossible time stamp.

“Jesus, they think he’s dead?” He squeezed her harder. “What kind of jobs are you two working on?”

She shook her head, her face still against his chest. “I don’t know what this thing was—I never had anything to do with it.”

“Good.” Calliope tensed in his arms, and he could clearly feel it. “Sorry, I just mean it’s kind of crazy, you know? Even if he’s okay, the idea that he could be on a job that dangerous—”

“It’s just work.” She heard the defensiveness creep into her voice and hated it more than a little.

“You’re not saving the world, Calli, you’re tracking down skip traces.” He gave her another hug, hard enough to squeeze the latent tension out of her. “There’s a point where you have stop and say ‘This is not worth my life.’ ”

“I know,” she murmured.

“Does Joshua?” She pulled her head back and looked up at him, expression carefully neutral. “He’s kind of a paladin, is all I’m saying.”

She nodded and leaned against him again. “He knows. He’s lectured me about it often enough.”

“Mmm.”

“Anyway,” she said. “There’s the phone call. He’s not dead, even if he is in Iowa.” Tom’s low chuckle carried into Calliope’s chest, easing her worry a fraction. “It’s worse than that,” she said, riding the momentum of Tom’s amusement. “The only lead I’ve figured out might mean I have to go out there myself.” She let the statement trail off into a small laugh, but stopped when there was no answering sound from Tom. Around her, his arms had gone unresponsive, dead weight holding her down rather than a comforting embrace.

“Go out to Iowa.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Maybe?” The change in his mood left her off balance. “I’m not sure yet if it’s even—”

“You told me once you’d never go back there,” he said. “ ‘Not for anyone.’ ”

Calliope’s breath went cold inside her chest. She stepped back out of Tom’s embrace; he let her go without a hint of reluctance. “That was something else entirely.”

He nodded, moving slowly. “Well, it was me.” He said the words the way someone might say mostly cloudy. “Not Joshua.”

Her eyes narrowed. “He might be dead. Definitely in trouble.”

“And you’re running off to save him.” Tom’s mouth twisted, as though he’d just realized a new kind of pain. “Right into the same thing that he ran into. Blind.”

“I don’t—”

“No.” He shook his head. “You can’t do this.”

She sighed. “Listen—”

“No.” He leveled a long, calloused finger at her. “For once, you listen.” Incredibly, even now, he wasn’t raising his voice; Calliope wondered if he even knew how. “You—” His eyes came up to hers, and he stopped. For a few seconds, his finger continued pointing at her, then he lowered it. He took a breath as though he were about to say something, held it, shook his head, and let it out in a long exhalation. Calliope blinked when he turned to the door and opened it on the chilly morning.

“What . . .” She couldn’t think of anything else to say, but it was enough to make him stop, at least for a second.

He turned just enough to look at her sidelong over his shoulder. “You’ve already decided you’re going,” he murmured. “I don’t know if you know it yet, but you have.” He turned back to the open door, straightened his shoulders from his subtle, perpetual stoop, and stretched. His next words were spoken to the open morning air. “And you’re going for Joshua, pure and simple, and I don’t know if you know that, either.”

Her throat grew tight. “That’s not fair.”

“I love you,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. “I’m going to be crazy worried about you until you come back.” He moved out onto the front step and turned back just enough to reach the door handle, without meeting her eyes. “So, please come back.”

“Tom—”

“I love you. Be careful.”

The door closed. The house might have been dead quiet, but Calliope couldn’t tell over the pulse beating at her ears.

 

When the phone rang, Calliope—still standing in the entry-way, staring at the door—jumped as though she’d been electrocuted.

She fumbled the phone out of the pocket of her jacket where it hung on the back of a chair. The screen displayed a number she already recognized, and she thumbed the answer button. “Good morning, Detective.”

“Likewise, M—” He paused. “Calliope.”

“Well done,” she murmured, trying to inject some kind of amusement into her voice.

“Thank you,” he deadpanned. “I practiced. How was your Halloween?”

“Eventful, but nothing worth reporting to precinct.” Despite their conversation the previous evening, Calliope felt only the barest flicker of guilt at this evasion, remarkable only because it was there at all.

“Fair enough.”

“How did your partner’s boy do with the records down at the office?”

“My—” Calliope could hear a moment’s hesitation in Johnson’s voice.

“Walker.”

“Ahh. Yes.” Johnson took a breath. “Technically, Special Agent Walker is not my partner—I am a liaison between his office and the department. I facilitate what I can, but he is directing an investigation in which I have no official role or jurisdiction.”

Calliope could hear an overcareful precision in his tone and wording. She was willing to bet he was, at some level, vein-poppingly livid about something, but too good a cop to let it show. She’d also put a smaller bet on the source of his stress. “Things a bit tense down there?”

Johnson didn’t respond immediately. “The agent didn’t have much luck last night—or this morning, come to that.”

Calliope winced. “Our filing system is a little arcane.” She let her eyes drift to the front window, but Tom’s car was long gone. “I could come down and help sort it out for him for a while, if you’d like.”

“Special Agent Walker has assigned a second agent to the files,” Johnson not-replied.

“I could still speed things up for them, even if there’s nothing to find.”

She heard Johnson exhale over the line and knew they’d gotten to the part she wouldn’t like. “Special Agent Walker doesn’t believe that your help will be necessary.”

Calliope turned that over in her head. She chose each word as she went, moving through her reply as if each syllable were rigged to explode. “Would Special Agent Walker like me to stay clear of his agents while they work through the files?”

Another small exhalation she didn’t imagine Johnson realized she could hear. “He would.”

Calliope closed her eyes. “Has he filed any paperwork or given specific orders to that effect?”

“He has.”

“He’s keeping me out of our office.”

“Yes.” The detective cleared his throat. “The file system was very confusing.”

“He thinks I’m obstructing.” Her lips felt cold; numb. “Or he thinks I’m a suspect.”

“No.” Johnson’s tone was adamant, but he hesitated after the denial. “Not a suspect,” he finally added.

Not a murder suspect. That’s a comfort.

“Do you think I’m obstructing, Detective Johnson?”

“I’m not heading up this investigation, Calliope,” he replied, laying a soft emphasis on her first name.

“That’s a pretty cheap sidestep, Darryl.”

“I’m not even seconded onto it,” he protested. His voice was even, but contained more than a little disgust. “I’m not exactly welcome around Walker either, now.”

Realization came to Calliope, accompanied by widened eyes. “You went off on Walker?”

“If you need to reach me in the next few days,” Johnson replied, “use my office number—I’ll be at my desk.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not at all.” He cleared his throat. “As an upside, I can get home early and see my kids before bed this week.”

“Congratulations,” Calliope said.

“Thank you.” Another pause. “I was hoping you might have thought of a more productive angle than the files in your office to work on, anyway.”

It was Calliope’s turn to deadpan. “I did say I’d tell you if anything came up.”

“And I’d like to hold you to that,” Johnson said. Calliope heard his chair creak and imagined him leaning forward over his desk, shielding the phone from the rest of his office. “Though I have to warn you: given my new working arrangements, it may take quite some time before I’m able to share any new information with Walker.”

Calliope laughed; after her talk with Tom, it was a relief. “I’ll take that under consideration, Detective.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Johnson replied. There were a few moments of silence. Calliope could smell the coffee Tom had made, but couldn’t bring herself to have any. Yet. She knew she would, eventually, and that it would make her feel guilty, and that that would make her angry; first at herself, then (mostly) at Tom, even—

Detective Johnson cleared his throat. “Is there any new information?”

“Sorry.” Calliope shook the thoughts away. “I was just . . . planning my day, I guess.”

“You don’t make it sound like it’s going to be a very good day.”

“Eh.” She dropped onto her couch. “That’s how it goes sometimes. Let’s talk about the other thing.”

Again, she heard a chair creak on his end of the line, and her mental image showed him leaning back. “I’m going to take a stab and guess it has something to do with the fat man that Joshua mentioned in his message.”

Calliope blinked. “You know you’d make a pretty good detective, Detective.”

“Sometimes,” Johnson replied. “Not so much in this case.”

“How so?”

“Two reasons.” Johnson shifted in his chair again, though not so much as he had. Calliope didn’t get the impression that he was very used to sitting while he worked. “One, it was the only thing that even vaguely resembled a lead, unless you were withholding evidence, which I don’t think you were.”

“Thank you,” Calliope said, and meant it.

“You’re entirely welcome.”

She got up and wandered away from the couch. “You said there were two reasons.”

“I did.” Calliope could hear him lean forward over his desk again. “The second reason is—yeah?” The last word came to Calliope slightly muffled, in a different tone of voice; Johnson had been interrupted at his desk by another officer. Guessing from the tone of his voice, Calliope didn’t think it was a superior, but neither did she think it was anyone he particularly liked. Johnson’s end of the line became completely muffled; Calliope could only make out that there were two men talking. She rummaged around the kitchen while she waited; first a cupboard for a mug, then a drawer for a spoon—pulling items out by absentminded habit. She was just setting the sugar back where it belonged when she heard Johnson’s hand come away from his mouthpiece. “Sorry.”

“No worries,” she replied. “That’s the job.”

“That’s the job today, yes.” Johnson sounded annoyed. “But I can deal with that later—the second reason is something you should know about.”

“Yeah?” Calliope sipped from the mug in her hands.

“Our . . . mutual acquaintance?”

Calliope’s brow creased. “Walker?” she hazarded.

“Exactly. Our mutual friend has been very interested in the fat man reference as well.” Johnson’s voice lowered. “That’s mostly what he has his boys looking for in your agency’s files: some kind of record of him. Pretty obsessive.”

“That,” Calliope observed, “is something I am absolutely sure he’s not going to find.” She took another sip. “And not because I hid any files. It just doesn’t exist.” She reconsidered telling Johnson about her whole weird evening, but decided against it. It felt too personal, like describing a vivid dream to a stranger. “I . . . know who it is now, but I can absolutely guarantee we never did any kind of work with the guy in the past.”

“But you’ve spoken with him.”

“Yeah.”

“And he told you . . .”

“Nothing.”

Silence on the other end of the line. “That doesn’t sound like much of a lead.”

“He was—”

Forbidden from conducting business on Halloween.

“—busy. Told me to come back later today.”

“Doesn’t sound very helpful,” Johnson said. “Or safe.”

“Helpful? No, he isn’t. But safe? He’s a downtown suit.”

Kinda.

“He’s not a threat,” she said, trying to sound sure. She turned the mug in her hands. “And if he were, I could outrun him.”

“Ahh,” Johnson said. “The nickname’s accurate, then?”

“You have no idea.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t.” Johnson’s voice shifted to Serious Cop. “This isn’t my case, Calliope, and I told you to let me know if you found anything out, which you did. I have no reason to suspect you, and I don’t . . .” He sighed. “With that said, this isn’t my case, and you need to understand how your involvement would look to anyone else, and that none of it would break in your favor right now.”

“I do.” She considered what she’d told Tom. “I think it might mean I have to go out there.”

“There?” Johnson turned that over in silence. Calliope let him work it out. “Iowa.”

“Yeah.” She tried to keep the tone of her voice neutral, but to her ears, it didn’t seem as though it worked. “Maybe.”

“You said your contact hadn’t told you anything yet,” Johnson countered. “What makes you think you need to go out to where your partner—” He caught himself. “Out there,” he finished.

“I—” She paused, brought up short. Now that she thought about it, she’d had no reason to tell Tom that this morning. Somehow, her half-awake brain had munged all the stuff going on in the last few days into a half-sorted pile, and extracted—

“ . . . you can’t take her with you.” The vagabond in the doorway stepped into the room. “You can’t. She’s not part of this. You can’t—”

“It’s just a hunch,” she said.

Detective Johnson didn’t say anything for a few moments—long enough for Calliope to wonder if he was actually going to say anything, or simply wait for her to offer up something more compelling, less crazy. Finally: “Last year, I got put on a missing persons case.”

Calliope frowned. “Oh-kay.” She thought for a moment. “You’re homicide.”

“I am,” he agreed. “It looked pretty bad.” He paused. “It was a kid. A little girl.”

“I’m sorry,” Calliope said, still frowning. “I’m not sure—”

“The parents were very scared,” Detective Johnson continued. “And a lot of us working on the case were parents. A lot of dads and moms trying to figure out what happened and how we could find the kid.” He took a deep breath. “We had a lot of hunches. Hundreds.”

Calliope bent her head. “But it turned out to be a homicide case all along.”

“It did.” Detective Johnson said. “I’m not saying anything about your partner—honestly, there’s too much weird in this case to rule anything out—but make sure you know where your hunches are coming from. Make sure you know your reasons.” Another voice spoke in the background on Johnson’s end of the line. He muffled the phone again, said a few words, and then came back to her. “I need to go.”

“Absolutely.”

“Please contact me if you get any more information.”

“I will,” she said, her voice soft. “Promise.”

“Good.”

He hung up. Calliope stood, facing the counter for a few more seconds. Then she shook herself, set the phone down, and picked up the mug.

The mug filled with coffee.

Which she’d fixed without consciously realizing what she was doing.

It smelled really good.

She let out an explosive, wordless sound of annoyance, dumped the mug in the sink, and stalked out of the kitchen.

Calliope stood in front of her mirror, wringing water out of her hair with a towel, her eyes tracking the dark water spots across the shoulders of the clean T-shirt she’d pulled on after her shower. Behind her, in the mirror, the bed was rumpled, the sheets twisted—proof enough of a bad night’s sleep, even if she couldn’t also feel it in her neck and back.

“You always wake up so gracefully.”

She scowled and tossed the towel over the shower rack, then started for the door of the bedroom. But she lost momentum and stopped after only a few steps. The crease across her brow deepened.

“Make sure you know your reasons.”

Still facing the mirror, she turned her head, wincing at the pain in her neck, and checked the clock. Still morning. Early. Most of the day to kill, banned from the office.

“But those aren’t the only old files to check,” she murmured.

She finger-combed damp hair out of her face, blew out a long breath, and glared at the disheveled bed lurking behind her in the mirror.

Reaching behind her, she twisted her hair into a loose knot, turned, stepped up to the bed, and tugged the covers into an approximation of order. That done, she dropped into a crouch, reached underneath the bed and, after several half-voiced growls and curses, fished out two oversized, dust-coated shoe boxes, one labeled BAND STUFF; the other, NOT BAND STUFF.

She swiped at BAND STUFF with the edge of her hand and wiped the resulting film of dust on her jeans as she flipped the lid up.

Unlabeled demo CDs lay in a stack on top of several T-shirts folded with the rigid precision and sharp edges of an American flag presented to a soldier’s widow. The other end of the box was a collection of flyers from clubs throughout Silverlake and Echo Park, bar coasters, clippings of reviews, and a small jumble of junk masquerading as mementos. All told, the box was two-thirds full, arranged like a memorial shrine for a distant relative.

Calliope riffled the edges of the CD cases, rolled her eyes at the ridiculously overenthusiastic headlines, and flipped the lid shut before pushing the box to the side.

Sitting back on her heels, she pulled the second box to her and hooked her fingers under the rubber bands that held the bent, center-bulging lid of not band stuff in place. The smooth outward tug pulled both rubber bands off simultaneously with a muffled snap-pop, and the lid immediately eased upward a half inch. Calliope lifted it and set it aside, scanning a heaped stack of paper and photos that—as far as organization went—had more in common with a clothes hamper than the band box that sat nearby.

The topmost slip of paper—a barely legible handwritten note—slid off the stack and onto the floor. Calliope picked it up, thumbed it open, and tipped her head to read the words she already knew.

 

Hiya!

 

I think I found an APARTMENT!

I know we said we were going to wait to look at an APARTMENT.

But it’s a good APARTMENT.

You should see this APARTMENT.

It’s a good APARTMENT.

I love you, and will listen better next time.

 

—Josh

 

P.S. APARTMENT!

 

She refolded the note and set it back in place. Leaning forward, she picked up the overstuffed box, rose up, and dumped the contents onto the bed.

“I want a face to kiss.”

Calliope, curled up in an overstuffed chair widely considered the ugliest and most comfortable in the city, speaks (loudly) to an empty room. Earbud headphones dangle from her neck; she holds a book half closed in her lap, one finger marking her place, and listens.

Several seconds later, a door opens and footsteps move in her direction—a steadily increasing drum roll cadence. Josh slides into view, tipping his weight at the last moment to lean against the room’s door frame, his arms crossed. He raises his eyebrows, assuming the bored expression of a Bond villain, and says “Sorry?”

Calliope settles into the chair, a smirk poking dimples in her cheeks. “I . . . want a face to kiss.”

He tips his head, brow furrowed. “I see. Well . . .” He glances over his shoulder and down the hall. “I can check the take-out menus—see if the Thai place has ‘face’.”

Calliope raises an eyebrow, fighting to control her expression. “I do not think you understand.”

Joshua cocks his ear toward her. “I don’t—”

“I.” She points at her chest. “Face.” She points at Josh, then swings her finger in a lopsided oval. “Kiss.” Again, she points at herself; specifically, her mouth.

“Ohhhhh . . .” Josh exclaims. “Right.” He rushes straight at her, building momentum and dropping to his knees halfway across the room to slide the rest of the way to the chair.

“Oh god,” she says, lifting her book in front of her as a shield. The chair lurches and thuds against the wall. She lets out a small, much-delayed yelp and peeks from behind the book.

Josh waggles his eyebrows at her from a few inches away, still fighting for balance as he leans forward on one knee. “Hi.”

“Hello,” Calliope drawls, pulling her book slightly out of the way and tilting her face to the side. “Kees me.”

He tips his head toward her, his lips a bare inch from hers. She feels his weight shift, catch, and shift again. “Crap,” he comments, then crashes to the floor in front of the chair.

Her laughter rolls out of the open third-floor window, loud enough that several people on the street below look up at the sound.

 

“I want to go there.” Calliope sits on the futon with her feet tucked under her. It’s one of only three pieces of furniture in the apartment (not including the stool shared between the keyboards and drum set), and obviously the most used. She indicates the small television screen across the room with her spoon, then scoops up another bite of cereal. Outside the window, it’s dark.

Josh glances up at the screen from where he sits at their keyboard, scratching at a score sheet and testing out chords. The set is muted, but the camera pans slowly over lush foliage and stone pyramids. “Belize?”

“Is that where that is?” Josh gives her an amused look and she whirls her spoon above her head. “Yes! Belize! My one and only dream! The place I have wanted to visit since . . .”

“Today?”

“Since years ago.” She juts out her chin at him.

He grins. “Today?”

“Since before I could say the name.” She takes another bite of cereal.

“Which”—he sets his pencil aside and pushes the rolling stool toward her, easing off it and onto the couch next to her—“was today, since you didn’t know the name until about ten seconds ago.”

She pulls the spoon out of her mouth. “Details,” she enunciates, chewing.

“Mmm.” He props his feet up on the rolling stool, watching the footage of Bermuda-shorts-decked tourists sweating their way up the side of a steep stone structure. “It looks pretty cool.”

“I know, right?” She watches in silence, then returns to her bowl. “Someday,” she murmurs.

“Someday,” he repeats. They watch the images dissolve one into the other, the only sound the crunch of Calliope’s cereal as she eats. Josh looks at her sidelong, then pushes himself into a sitting position, turned halfway toward her. “You know, we could get out of here for a while.”

Calliope looks at him, swallows, and says, “You mean go on the road again?”

He shakes his head. “Nope.”

“Good.” She sips milk from the bowl. “Because the ‘on the road’ thing didn’t work so well last time.”

“Agreed.” He scratches at his cheek stubble. “I meant just us going somewhere.”

“The van’s toast,” she replies. “Twelve huunnnndred dollahs feex.”

“Maggie said we could borrow her car anytime. She never drives it.”

“True . . .” Calliope allows. “But we can’t really afford to go anywhere.”

“Unless we go somewhere we know people we can stay with.”

She eyes him, making a skeptical face. “What, like Penny?” She softens her expression. “I mean . . . no, I’m sorry, she would totally let us crash, but it’s been raining up in Portland for, like, forty-five days straight.”

“Sure. Good point.” He settles back into the futon and turns back to the screen. A few seconds later, he lifts his head and looks at her. “We could go somewhere it’s not raining.”

Bowl raised to her lips, she hesitates, then sets the bowl down, shakes her head, and starts to get up from the futon. “No.”

“It’s an easy drive.” He leans forward again. “You told me you’ve done it lots of times.”

She moves to the sink in the area just past the front door that had passed for a “kitchenette” in the rental ad. “Yeah, I did. I also said I didn’t ever want to do the drive again.” She sets the bowl in the sink, drops the spoon in, and runs water over the clatter. “Or go at all,” she mutters. Over the sound of the water, she says, “We have to finish the new demo.”

He pushes himself up and perches on the edge of the cushion. “We always have a demo to do,” he counters. “And we don’t have a job lined up until the nineteenth.” He spreads his hands. “We save all our money for gas, sleep in the car, and we could stay out there for a couple weeks, no problem.”

“A couple weeks?” She clenches her shoulders in a not-entirely-mock shudder. “I wouldn’t last a couple days. No.”

“You said you wanted to get away,” Josh wheedles, smiling.

“I said I wanted to go someplace nice.” She swirls soapy water around the bowl harder than necessary and blows drifting hair out of her eyes. “Someplace exotic.” She looks sideways at him over her shoulder. “Driving to Bumfuck, Egypt, is not exotic.”

He stands, sidling across the room toward her. “I bet someone out there is raising a camel.”

“No.”

“ . . . or a llama. That’s exotic.”

“No.”

“Llllllama.” He slips his hands around her waist.

“No!”

. . . a ringing slap. Bright red handprint on her cheek. Surprised tears in wide eyes . . .

She shakes her head to banish the thought, yanks the faucet handle down, and jerks away from him, grabbing a dish towel. “I don’t want to go back there. Ever. Jesus. Fucking listen.” She turns to walk away, stops, turns back toward him, stops, and finally turns back to the sink and grabs the bowl with a towel-shrouded hand.

“Hey.” His voice is soft. He starts to reach for her again, but she moves her shoulder away before she can stop herself. He stops, lets his hand drop. “Sorry,” he murmurs, barely audible. She doesn’t reply, and after a few awkward seconds, he walks around her and down the hall to their bedroom.

Calliope doesn’t look up or watch him leave. Once the bowl and spoon are wiped down, she sets them in the drying rack, moving as though she is afraid they might break, or that she will. Once done, she hangs up the towel and leans on the sink.

The door to the bedroom closes, leaving her in silence, alone in the kitchen.

Just like before.

“Dammit.” Her voice is a whisper.

Calliope jerked up from where she’d been curled on the bed, surrounded by old pictures and handwritten notes. For a moment, she didn’t know what had woken her; then the knock came again—the kind of sharp, piercing rap that very few people could manage without using an actual knocker.

She didn’t move, though, until the knock came a third time. When it did, she lurched to her knees, bounce-stepping across the mattress as carefully as she could to keep from bending photos. Papers drifted to the ground in her wake; she pulled the door to the bedroom closed as she left.

She checked the peephole, but saw no one and jerked the door open, stepping outside to call back whomever had knocked. She stopped after a single step forward.

“Hey,” Vikous said, his face shadowed by the sweatshirt hood. He shoved his gloved hands into the pockets of his coat. “Ready to go?”

Calliope didn’t reply. After a few seconds—during which she leaned forward far enough to check the street in both directions, as though hoping there might be someone else waiting—she stepped back and crossed her arms, leaning on the doorjamb.

Vikous sighed in a way that made his chest rumble. Unconsciously mirroring Calliope, he checked the street to either side as well. “Might not be such a great idea having a long conversation out in the open.” He turned his attention back to Calliope, whose stony expression had not changed, and shrugged. “Just saying.”

Calliope’s eyelids lowered in annoyance and she looked away, her jaw working. Rummaging through her old life, sloppily jammed into a shoe box, had left her in a foul mood. It was everything she could do not to simply shut the door in Vikous’s face, but she suspected she’d feel that way regardless of who was standing on her front step.

Finally, she turned and pulled the door open, motioning him inside with a twitch of her hand. Vikous seemed to accept this—wisely—as the best invitation he was likely to get and stepped inside, then moved out of the way as she swung the door shut and walked back into the house, dropping into an oversized chair in the corner of the living room. He sat down across from her.

She looked up and frowned. “You don’t need the hood in here.”

At this, he hesitated. After a few moments, he reached a gloved hand up and pushed away his hood, then sat back.

Calliope’s eyebrow quirked. “That face paint has to be itching like hell by now.”

Vikous’s bead-black eyes stayed on hers, shining in the midst of the paste-white face and violently reddened mouth and lips of the clown’s face that she’d first seen on him the night before. “Not really.”

“How—” She cut herself off, fighting another spike of irritation. Any other time, curiosity would have pushed her further, but not today. “Never mind.”

“Fine.” He pushed himself forward and cleared his throat. “What—”

“Why are you here?” she interrupted.

“You have an appointment with Gluen.” He folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in the chair. “Figured I’d tag along.”

“That’s tonight.” She glanced at the cheap plastic clock hanging on the wall. Several hours later than she’d expected—she'd dozed off for longer than she’d thought—but still nowhere near nightfall.

“Yep,” her visitor replied. Calliope waited, but he offered nothing further. Her eyes narrowed.

She stood up and walked toward the kitchen. “You want coffee?”

Vikous ignored the delaying tactic. “Coffee’s fine. No sugar. Put yours in a travel mug, if you’ve got one.”

The two didn’t speak. There was no sound except the clink of cups being moved and filled, then Calliope returned and handed Vikous a cup. She sat down with hers—heavy, ceramic, and terrible for travel—held between both hands. “The cops called back this morning.”

Vikous reached up, scratched at the corner of his mouth, nodding to himself as though confirming a suspicion. “You don’t say.” He took a long drink from the steaming cup and grimaced, his lips stretching back. “What did—” He interrupted himself, his face suddenly sharp. “Did you tell them about me?”

“Homeless stalker guy?” she said. “I mentioned you yesterday, but didn’t say much.” She took a drink herself, her mouth twisting. The coffee was still hot, but had been cooking down since early this morning, untouched. “Hot” was the only thing it had going for it. “I didn’t want them worrying about something that didn’t have anything to do with the case.”

“Did they buy that?”

“Buy it? Hell, I believed it when I said it; there was nothing to buy.”

“But they let it be?”

Calliope frowned, her head tilted. “Johnson did. Walker got a little squirrelly about it for a while.”

“Which one’s Walker?”

Calliope described the sharp V’s of the federal agent’s features. “Why?” she asked.

He shook his head and took another drink, swallowing forcefully. “Just wondering. Walker’s an . . .” He shook his head. “Interesting name, at least.”

His questions had reminded Calliope of something else. “Walker said that a homeless guy was seen around the place where Joshua was—” She looked down at her coffee cup, clenching her jaw. “Where they found the body.”

Vikous looked at her over the rim of the cup. “Yeah?”

“Was there?”

He finished his drink and let his eyes slide away from hers into the empty cup. “Might have been.”

“Was it you?”

He shook his head. “It’s a very long way,” he said in a different, softer tone of voice.

“I realize that. I’m purposely living about as far away from there as you can get without learning another language.”

He looked up at that, then shook himself free of the quiet in the room. “So what did Detective Johnson and Special Agent Walker have to say?”

“It was just Johnson.” She scowled. “They’ve gone over Josh’s last message and can’t get anything more out of it.” She blew air between her teeth in disgust. “The official opinion is that the time stamp is a hardware malfunction.”

“The one that says the call came in—”

“After he supposedly died.”

“So they’re giving up?”

“No.” She told Vikous about being blocked from returning to her office while Walker’s people searched the files.

“That’s an awful lot of work to find something they heard about on a malfunctioning answering machine,” Vikous observed.

“Kind of what I thought,” Calliope replied. “But Walker and I didn’t really hit it off; I figure it’s just him pulling a dick move to amuse himself; mess up our files, leave them for me to straighten out. It’s happened before.”

“Sure.” Vikous tipped his head to the side, as though mulling over possibilities. “Or they’re actually trying to find out more about Gluen.”

“Why would they? There’s no real reason, from their point of view.” She stood up. “They don’t know half of what I do, and I don’t know a goddamn thing.” She looked at Vikous. “Do I?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Vikous said, “but you’re not wrong.” He stood up and handed her his empty cup. She’d barely touched hers. “You wanna fix that?”

Her brow furrowed. “How?”

“A little side trip before going to see Gluen.” He made a show of looking out the front window of the house. “It’s why I showed up early.”

“Some cunning plan, like last night?” Calliope turned back to the kitchen and walked away. Vikous watched her back, then followed her as far as the archway. She looked up from the sink as she emptied her mug. “What if I say no?”

“Then you say no.” He shrugged in a way that made his coat shift in unusual ways. “It’s not a big deal—just something maybe-useful.” He leaned against the archway. “If you want to hang out here for hours, pining for the moment you can go see Gluen again, that’s your call.”

Calliope turned back to the sink to rinse out the cup. “When you put it like that, not going along sounds pretty stupid.”

“Only if you don’t like Gluen.”

“Which I don’t.”

“No one does,” Vikous replied. “Even among his own kind, he’s considered creepy.”

“What’s—” Calliope cut herself off with a shake of her head, pulling down a towel and drying her hands.

“What’s his kind?” Vikous asked for her. “Short question. Long answer. Come with me and we can start working through it.”

She turned back to Vikous, who returned her look with his impossible black eyes.

This time it was Calliope who gave in. “Where are we going?”

“Kegeln,” Vikous replied.

Calliope looked from the sign above the building’s entrance to Vikous, standing on the other side of her Jeep. “Bowling?”

“Kegeln,” Vikous replied.

“Which means?”

“Bowling,” he said, walking toward the entrance.

Calliope scowled at his back as he strolled across the mostly empty parking lot, then followed him.

Vikous was already at the cashier’s counter (old; repainted so many times that the corners were rounded and each nick and chip looked like a bite taken out of a jawbreaker) when she entered. A young girl with half-lidded eyes and a face full of silver piercings asked him a question as she opened the till to make change. He turned to Calliope. “Do you need shoes?” Calliope raised an incredulous eyebrow. His face moved in a way that Calliope associated with rolled eyes—an expression somewhat wasted with him—and he turned back to the girl. “Yeah, she needs shoes.”

“ ’Kay. Do you?”

“I’m not bowling.”

The girl shrugged and reached under the counter, pulling out a pair of worn leather shoes that she pushed across the counter to Calliope.

Calliope eyed the shoes, turning them to check the size tattooed on the back. “Good guess.”

The girl snorted and shook her head. “Whatever, man.” She wandered down to the other end of the counter.

“Nice.”

“Grab your shoes,” Vikous said, heading for one of the lanes. He held a scoring sheet and half a pencil in one hand—the alley hadn’t been updated with computerized scoring systems. Vikous settled into one of the orange, contoured fiberglass chairs at the lane’s tiny, stained scoring tables; Calliope sat at the creaking players’ bench across from him and set her shoes beside her.

She looked around. “This place is kind of a dump.”

“Mmm.” He pivoted away from her in his chair, cracked his knuckles, and hunched over the scoring sheet. “Keen eye for detail. You’re up whenever you’re ready.”

Calliope stared at his back. “You seriously want me to bowl.”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

Vikous sighed, his head sagging over the score sheet. “I just do, all right? A little trust?”

Calliope snorted almost exactly the way the girl at the counter had, but reached for her shoes. Vikous said nothing. Once she’d pulled the shoes on, she rooted around the ball racks until she found one that seemed to suit her hand well enough and returned. “Now what?”

He looked up at her. “You don’t know how to bowl?”

“Of course I know how to bowl,” she replied. “I practically grew up in a bowling alley, watching my folks. I mean do you want me to throw it left-handed, or with my eyes closed, or keep track of which odd-numbered pins I knock down, or what?” Vikous looked at her as though she’d lapsed into another language. She returned his stare. “What?”

His mouth opened, then closed. Finally, he said, “I just. Want you. To bowl.”

“Okay.”

“ . . . have to make it so complicated.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just, please—”

“Perhaps,” said a voice behind them both, “you’d like something to drink before you get started?”

Calliope turned. A man stood there, wearing the same tunic-style shirt as the girl behind the counter. He was older and almost certainly related—he had the same delicate, fine-boned facial features that the girl’s piercings had largely occluded. Calliope couldn’t decide if he was the girl’s brother or father—he seemed too old for the former and too young for the latter. She settled on “brother” more out of optimism than any telltales.

She brushed her hair back. “Yeah,” she agreed. “A drink would be good.” She smiled. “Anything you can rec—”

“We’re not staying that long,” Vikous interrupted.

Calliope paused, gave a tight smile that didn’t expose her teeth, and pivoted slowly on her heel to face Vikous. “I’m thirsty.”

“No,” replied Vikous. “You’re not. Not here.”

“What—”

“We’re fine, thanks,” Vikous said, leaning out in his chair to speak around her.

“The lady . . .” her pretty waiter protested.

“Is with me,” Vikous growled. “And I know how long we’ll be here for.”

Tension hummed in the air around Calliope. “As you say,” the man replied. Calliope could almost imagine an accompanying bow to go with his obsequious tone. Then he was gone; Calliope could feel him leave, as though a source of heat had been removed from behind her.

Vikous looked up at her from his chair, his black eyes unblinking. Calliope met his gaze until her eyes began to feel dry, then walked past him, approached the lane, threw her ball into the gutter, and stepped back to wait by the ball return.

 

“Twenty gutter balls in a row.” Vikous led the way out of the bowling alley, pivoting on his heel to hold the door open for Calliope, who stalked by, the muscles in her jaw working. “That’s a pretty impressive temper you’ve got.” He let go of the door and rubbed at the side of his face. “I should have guessed that from the first time we met, but—”

“What the hell is your problem?” Calliope whirled on him, continuing to walk backward across the lot. “I’ve never—” She stopped, and stopped walking, a deep crease between her raised eyebrows.

Without turning her head, Calliope took in the bright lights illuminating the dark lot, still mostly deserted, and the garish neon that lit up the bowling alley’s sign. Her eyes came back to Vikous. “What did you do?”

Vikous lifted a hand to his chest, fingers splayed, and struck an affronted pose. “Me?” His hood swayed back and forth in denial. “I didn’t do anything.”

“We got here at four in the afternoon.” She pointed behind her, toward her Jeep, as though indicating proof of their arrival. “I bowled one game—”

“I dunno if you could really call that bowling,” Vikous interjected.

“Shut up,” Calliope barked. “It was daylight out, and now it’s . . .” She looked up, waving her hand at the dark-but-never-starlit sky of the city.

“Probably around eight. Eight fifteen, maybe.” Vikous’s smile showed teeth, visible even within the shadows of his hood.

Calliope’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Really?”

“Explain.”

He raised his hands in surrender, then dropped them into his pockets, watching her, his head slightly tilted within his hood. Finally, he asked, “You ever noticed that there’s no windows in a bowling alley?” Calliope held her scowl and didn’t reply. He nodded as though she had and strolled past her toward the Jeep. “There’s a reason for that, sometimes, and it’s not to cut down on sun glare.” He turned once he reached the Jeep and rested his elbows on the hood, looking back at the bowling alley. Calliope had followed him, but at a distance, and stayed on the other side of the vehicle.

Still looking at the neon lights of the sign, Vikous said, “There are a lot of stories you tell each other that are almost-but-not-quite right, you know?”

He looked at Calliope, who gave her head a short shake and looked away. “No, I don’t.”

“Sure you do.” He flipped his hand up, as though throwing trash into the air. “The three little pigs were the good guys. The bears forgave Goldilocks. Only one prince hooked up with Rapunzel. Sleeping Beauty was put in a hundred-year coma for no reason.”

Calliope shook the distractions away. “What’s that got to do with this?”

He paused. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a story about a guy who met some mountain elves while they were bowling, and the next thing he knew, twenty years had gone by.”

Calliope’s eyes narrowed in thought, then widened as she looked back at the alley. “He drank something of theirs.”

“That definitely didn’t help,” Vikous allowed. “But mostly, I think it was the bowling.”

She glared at him. “You knew this would happen.”

“Of course I did. I was counting on it.”

“You did it to me.”

“I did it to both of us,” he pointed out. “And I didn’t do it.”

“Bullshit.”

He crossed his arms across his chest, a ghost of his former good humor still clinging to his features. “If I say ‘let’s go stand out in that big river’, and we do that, and our shoes get wet, I didn’t make our shoes wet: the water did. It’s what water does.”

“You knew it would happen,” Calliope snapped. “And you didn’t tell me. You stole from me.”

“I hid us,” Vikous growled. “I took us both entirely off the map until we needed to meet Gluen.”

“Without explaining it or even asking me,” Calliope countered. “Johnson could have called again. Josh could have called again.”

“Oh, please.” Vikous’s face twisted in annoyance. “We both know that’s not going to happen.” His voice lost force as he spoke the last word. He looked at Calliope, who was staring down at the pavement, her jaw clenched.

Vikous cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

“I’m going to the appointment,” Calliope said. Her voice was tight and quiet. She walked to the Jeep, her boots rapping on the pavement, and unlocked the door.

“I should go with you,” he said.

“Fuck off,” she replied, in the same hard tone. “Walk.” She swung into the vehicle, slammed the door, started the engine, and left.

The same security guard from the night before sat behind the lobby desk. “Hey,” Calliope said, nodding at him with her chin and settling her arms on the counter in front of him. “I’m back.”

The guard didn’t rise from his chair. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “There are no visitors allowed after seven.”

She gestured at the elevators. “I was here way after that last night, and you sent me right up.”

He looked up at her, narrowing his eyes as though he were trying to make out a small object at a distance. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember that.”

“I was wearing a fedora and a gray suit coat for a costume?”

He thought for a moment and shook his head.

Calliope pursed her lips, unwilling to play her trump card, but finally relented with an annoyed sigh. “I was here with the clown.”

“Oh.” The man’s eyes widened—not as much as they had the night before, but more than necessary. “Oh. The party.”

“Yes.” Calliope nodded like a teacher urging along one of her slower readers. “I was here for the party last night, and now I’m back.”

The guard leaned out to look behind her, his brow creased. “Just you?”

“Just me,” Calliope assured him, noting the flash of relief on his face, mixed with an awkward kind of discomfort.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, “but the party was a special occasion.”

“But I have an appointment,” Calliope persisted. “Same guy, same floor, same everything.”

He made a show of checking his ledger, though even reading it upside down Calliope could see her name was not on the page. “No one mentioned it to us. I’m sorry.”

Calliope’s head sagged under the weight of the conversation. “Listen,” she said. “Have you met this fat bastard I’m here to see?”

“Mr. Gluen?” Again, a brief look of panic skimmed his features. “I mean, not that he’s . . . I didn’t mean to say he’s—” He cut himself off with a cleared throat. “No, I’ve never seen it. Met him, that is.”

Calliope smirked. “But you’ve heard.” She leaned forward a bit. “So, based on what you’ve heard, do you actually think you’re doing me a favor by letting me go up there?” She shook her head, keeping her eyes on him. “It’s the last thing in the world I want to do. I hate his guts and, believe me, that is a lot of hate.”

He glanced down at the registry again, eyes darting over the blank lines, then back up to her. “I could call up.”

“Would you?” Calliope settled back on her heels.

He picked up the handset and dialed. Calliope waited. Seconds continued to tick by, marked off by the nervous takking of the guard’s fingernail against the desktop. After about thirty seconds, he covered the mouthpiece with his hand and said, “It doesn’t seem like anyone’s answering.”

“Mmm.” Calliope nodded, trying to keep her face from showing her growing anger. She was already at a slow boil after the fight with Vikous—getting stood up like this was going to permanently damage her mood.

“You know what?” she blurted out. “I can wait.” She waved the guard’s phone away. “Go ahead and hang up.”

He pulled the phone away from his head, hesitating. “Are you sure?”

“As long as you don’t mind me using one of those chairs over there.” She indicated the lobby furniture nearby.

“Doesn’t bother me, but . . .” He hung up the phone and leaned toward her on his elbows. “I’m on shift all night, so you won’t be able to wait me out and get someone nicer.” He smiled, and she returned it, letting him relax.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she assured him, turning toward the chairs but keeping her eyes on him, over her shoulder, as she walked. “I just want to sit down until my friend gets here.” She dropped into an overstuffed leather armchair and let out a sigh that was entirely unfeigned.

The silence following that sigh stretched on for long enough Calliope began to wonder if the guard had caught her last words, but before she could figure out how to continue, his chair creaked and he stood, speaking to her over the tall counter. “Your friend?”

“Mmm,” Calliope nodded, her head resting against the back of the chair. She closed her eyes and concealed a small smile. “He’ll get everything straightened out.”

“The c—” The guard paused. “Your friend from last night?” The tone of his voice—like a boy who found out Mommy was going to tell Daddy what he did—almost made Calliope relent.

Almost.

“Yup.” She nodded, then chuckled. “The funny part is, he was supposed to be here with me right now, but I drove off without him.”

“Really.” The guard’s tone had graduated to a deeper level of despair.

She sat up, as though eager to share the punch line. “Yeah, we got in this huge argument, and I got in my car and took off. I told him to walk.” She laughed again, shaking her head. “He is going to be So. Pissed.” She leaned back into the chair again.

More silence. The guard dropped back into his seat. Calliope began a slow count from one.

She’d gotten to four when he stood back up. “You know what?” he said. “Go on up.”

She turned her head toward him, letting a confused yet hopeful look spread across her face. “Really?”

“Sure.” The guard nodded, swallowing. “It’ll be—” He paused, then nodded again, more emphatically, his eyes on the empty ledger. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

Calliope leaned forward and stood. “I know it will be,” she assured him, starting toward him and heading around his desk to the bank of elevators. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“It’s no problem,” he replied, as he pushed the secured elevator call button at his station. She gave him one more smile, and he added, “I’ll send your friend up too, when he gets here.”

“Excellent,” she said, and stepped into the elevator. The door slid shut with a muffled, heavy thump.

“I’ll send him right on through,” the guard whispered, his eyes looking at nothing at all.

Calliope was expected.

Two guards, their features eerily similar to the staff at the bowling alley, motioned her out of the elevator when the doors opened. When they realized she was alone, they exchanged a look, but said nothing. One indicated she should follow him with a move of his head; the other fell in behind her as they walked to the office.

“My dear,” Gluen murmured, “it’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“I kind of doubt that,” she replied, her voice clipped.

Gluen settled his arms on his desk; the flesh around his elbows splayed out as though he’d set down two plastic bags full of pudding. He steepled his fingers before him. “Manners cost nothing. Where is our enigmatic Vikous this evening?”

“Walking,” Calliope muttered.

“Excuse me?” Gluen’s hairless eyebrow quirked.

“He had better things to do,” she said, raising her voice to normal levels.

Gluen stared at her. As Calliope watched, the corner of his mouth quirked, pulling at his sagging jowls. Then, the other side moved a bit more and his lips parted. His sharp, shining eyes disappeared as his mouth opened farther, squeezing them shut—a thick, wheezing breath hissed into him, then out, then in again, deeper, as though he were about to explode.

In a way, he did.

Gluen laughed.

Anyone, if he is laughing hard enough, could be said to shake. With Gluen, laughter was something far worse. Watching as the fit of amusement overtook him, Calliope did not see shaking; she saw the sagging seam of a cheap garbage bag threatening to split and spill rotten food; she saw the swaying of an overfull colostomy bag being carried at a full sprint, she saw a visual representation of what vomiting felt like—her own gorge rising in response, the bile burning her throat and clawing at the root of her tongue. It was a nightmare worse than almost anything Calliope could imagine.

The fat man laughed harder.

She turned away and squeezed her eyes shut, thinking herself safe until she realized she could still hear him—not the laughter, but the actual swaying, sliding, sloshing movement the laughter caused. She clapped her hands over her ears, groaning through clenched teeth, wanting nothing in life at that moment but for the laughter to stop. She sank into a crouch, locked her fingers behind her head, and clamped her forearms over her ears, squeezing her head so tightly white spots flashed behind her eyelids as she rocked back and forth on her heels, her groan becoming a high, keening thing.

When Gluen’s laughter did eventually subside, Calliope didn’t know it. One of the lithe guards tapped her on the shoulder with two long fingers, then again when she didn’t respond. She opened her eyes just enough to see his impassive, aquiline features, and, at his gesture, she stood and lowered her arms, moving like a gun-shy deer.

In the aftermath, the silence in the room was almost as much of a shock as the sound; Calliope could hear only Gluen’s exhausted panting. Weirdly, with her back to him, he sounded like a much smaller person; each breath was a precise, frail thing that seemed entirely insufficient to the task.

She didn’t want to turn around and see the expression on his face after being all but driven to her knees in front of him, but the only alternative was walking out the way she’d come, which meant going on without what she’d come for, and she’d already gone through too much for that.

She turned, braced for whatever mocking he might muster.

She had no reason to worry. Gluen sprawled in his chair, leaning back so far that he was nearly prone. His tiny gasps rushed into a mouth that gaped disproportionately wide, as though he were a fish trying desperately to suck life from the wrong medium. His face—in fact, every visible inch of him—was slick with sweat. His jowls slid over the folds of skin at his neck like mating eels; the printed silk of his shirt looked more like a full-body tattoo, it was so stuck to him.

Worse, his proportions were wrong. Before, he had been grotesquely obese; uncommon, but hardly unique—strange enough Calliope could never quite ignore it. Now, it was as if he had come undone. His abdomen on the left side sagged out and hung over the arm of his chair, apparently held in place by nothing except the clinging silk of his shirt. On the same side, his ear had grown twice the size of its counterpart, while his right eye sagged in its socket, lower than the other by at least a half an inch and looking for all the world as though it might fall out and roll down his cheek.

A low, impressed whistle wound through the room from the doorway. Calliope turned to see Vikous, his hands in his pockets, shaking his head slowly and clicking his tongue. “My goodness, Gluen,” he drawled, his voice rough. He took a few easy steps, stopping just short of the desk. “You’re really letting yourself go these days.”

Still panting, Gluen could manage only a gesture in reply; his arm rose a bare inch from the chair, one quavering, nearly triangular finger indicating Calliope. Incredibly, his breath hitched and the corner of his gaping mouth quirked upward, as though his laughter might return. Despite her earlier resolve, Calliope tensed, ready to flee to the elevator.

Vikous looked over his shoulder at her, his eyebrows raised. “You did this?”

Calliope shook her head, at a loss. “No. He—” She swallowed against the burning in her throat and tried again. “He started laughing.”

Vikous’s eyes widened, more in astonishment than any kind of worry. “What did you say?” Before she could answer, he waved the question away. “Never mind. Go . . .” He gestured at the doorway to the office. “Go grab some water. I’ll fix this.”

Calliope’s eyes slid back to Gluen; she didn’t bother trying to hide her disbelief. “How?”

Vikous shook his head. “You couldn’t handle the bowling alley,” he murmured. “Trust me when I say you don’t want to know about this.” Calliope felt the urge to voice some kind of protest, but she let it go.

At the doorway, she turned, her mouth open to call something back, but Vikous was right there, his hand on the door. “Sorry,” he said, his voice gruff, but not unkind.

“Me too,” she murmured, hoping he understood.

He nodded and pulled the door shut.

The last thing Calliope saw was Gluen’s eyes, filled with suspicion, watching her companion as Vikous turned away from her.

“Come on back in.” Vikous stood in the doorway, silhouetted in profile.

Calliope stood. She’d been waiting outside the office for the better part of a half hour. In that time, she’d realized she’d lost more than that during Gluen’s laughing fit. She didn’t like to think about how far away she’d gone in her own mind to survive it, and she had no desire to go back into the office again.

“How bad is it?” she asked. “What happened?”

Vikous paused. “You want to know?” His voice was low, darkened by a shadow of irritation. He hadn’t turned toward her. His head was lowered and cocked slightly to the side; he seemed to be watching her sidelong. “Because it doesn’t seem like you really want to know about any of this.”

Calliope worked her jaw. “I said I was sorry.”

“Okay.” He straightened, sniffed, and cleared his throat. “Everyone has to keep control over themselves, or bad things happen. That’s just life.” He jerked his head toward the office. “Sometimes those bad things are more obvious than others, and the way they lose control is a little weirder. That’s what happened: you said something funny, and he lost it.”

“I didn’t say anything funny,” Calliope replied. “He asked where you were and I said you had something better to do.”

“Ahh,” Vikous said.

Calliope waited, but he said nothing else. “What? That’s not funny.”

“It is if you’re us.” He motioned with one hand. “Come on.” He turned away and returned to the office.

Reluctantly, she followed, keeping her eyes averted until she was close enough to Gluen’s desk that there was simply nowhere else to look but at their host. When she did, her eyes widened. “Damn,” she breathed.

Gluen glanced up from a stack of papers he was skimming. “And with that, both our lovely Miss Jenkins and her profanity reenter the scene.” The corners of his mouth turned up in a perfunctory socialite’s smile that never reached his lips, let alone his eyes. “Lovely.”

Calliope stared back, lips slightly parted, brow furrowed. Gluen returned her look with one of calm reserve. His clothing was the same, but immaculate and fresh. He not only showed no signs of the previous trauma, but was actually improved from when Calliope had first arrived. She looked at Vikous, at a loss for words.

“I am not, I assure you, unfamiliar with the wonder and astonishment my presence engenders in the fairer sex.” Gluen picked up the stack and handed it, without looking, to one of his guards, leaving one sheet of paper on the blotter. “But I’m on something of a tight schedule for the rest of my evening, so you will excuse me if I move things along.”

“How—” Calliope turned back to Gluen. “When we were talking before, and you asked me where Vikous was—”

“That’s not a conversation I wish to revisit, Miss Jenkins.” Gluen scratched lightly at the corner of his mouth with a fingertip. “I’m sure you understand.”

“Not even a little bit.”

“Yes, well.” Gluen folded his hands on his desk. “That’s not a problem with which I can help.” His eyes flicked to Vikous. “I’m not convinced anyone can.” He sniffed. “But a spark of curiosity, however dim, shows some promise. Perhaps you will find your Professor Higgins.” Gluen leaned back, causing a now-familiar ripple beneath his clothes. “The goal of your quest lies, of course, within the Hidden Lands.” His fingers played over the single paper on his desk. “Your lost young man—”

“He’s not my man.” Calliope muttered, defensively. “And what the hell are the Hidden Lands?”

Gluen shrugged. “Mr. White is something to you or you are something to him; in any case, you are tied to one another in such a way as makes your involvement requisite.” He peered at her. “You . . . have a talent? You dance? Draw? Perhaps sing?”

Calliope frowned. “No.” She glanced at Vikous. “Not anymore.”

“You did.”

She paused. “Yeah.”

Gluen smiled. “The adoration of the crowd is truly a wondrous thing. One may almost become . . . hungry for it.”

“The point,” Vikous said. “Stay on it.”

Gluen shot Vikous a look composed of equal parts frustration and annoyance. Vikous returned the look with nothing more than a raised eyebrow, and the fat man relented and returned his attention to Calliope. “As to your question, I will not waste my time or yours explaining something as elementary as the Hidden Lands.” He indicated Vikous. “That is your guide, in case the two of you require introductions; it is your guide’s responsibility to explain such rudimentary things.”

Vikous grunted, but it didn’t sound like dissent. Gluen continued, “White’s death locale is significant. You will find his killer there. He is waiting.”

Calliope shook her head. “Josh can’t be dead. I got a call from him two hours after he was supposed to have been killed.”

“Certainly. How else would you expect—” Gluen blinked once and turned to Vikous. Calliope felt her annoyance flare. “This hasn’t been explained?” he asked.

Vikous didn’t answer.

Gluen stared at him, then: “You are her guide.” It seemed to be an admonishment. Vikous’s eyes narrowed.

“Y’know what? This is crap.” Calliope’s voice sounded shrill even to her. “This information is nothing but made-up names and bullshit, so just give me his other message.”

Gluen smiled, though there was no humor in it. “Very well,” he said, his voice a quiet rasp. “Vikous, wait outside.”

 

“I want to apologize, my dear,” Gluen said.

“Sure.” Calliope spat the word out as though it tasted bitter.

Gluen inclined his head a fraction, barely enough to add another roll of flesh to his neck. “We are not on the best of terms, you and I, but I want you to understand—truly—that I wish my role in this had been explained to you more fully before we reached this point.”

“Whatever.” Calliope closed her eyes, trying to keep her anger in check long enough to get what she came for. “Won’t be the first time I don’t understand what the hell’s going on. Just give me the message.”

Gluen watched her, his sagging face solemn. “I won’t annoy you further by asking if you’re sure, but once more, before we begin, I want to say that I am sorry for this.”

“It’s—” Calliope bit down on her reply, which she could feel growing into a shout. “It’s fine,” she continued in a more normal tone. “Could we just get this done? It’s late.”

“Of course.” Gluen motioned with one sagging arm, and his assistant left the room, closing the door behind him. “If you’ll give me a moment to recall things exactly,” he said, then closed his eyes and lowered his chin in concentration.

Calliope looked away; in that position, Gluen’s mouth was almost entirely concealed in the puffy expanse of his face. He could probably smother himself in his own flesh if he tried. After the laughing fit earlier, it was almost impossible to look at him without seeing his body misshapen and rearranged.

“Hi Calli.”

Calliope jumped and whirled toward the door, but there was no one there.

“I’m over here, ya goof.”

Calliope turned back to the desk, her mouth already opening to form the question, when she froze.

“Hey.”

The voice—Josh’s voice—came from Gluen’s mouth, clear and unmuddled in the way the fat man’s usually was. Worse, the doughy expanse of his face had changed; shifted and re-formed around his eyes and nose and mouth to look like the man whose voice she heard. Her own mouth opened again, then closed.

“This isn’t how I was hoping to talk with you next,” the voice—Josh—said, “but the phone was too . . . hard, and I wanted to make sure you got the message.”

Calliope reached backward, searching desperately for the edge of a chair. Her fingers brushed its edge, and she gripped it so tightly the wood creaked. She shuffled sideways and lowered herself to the seat, her eyes never leaving the familiar features surrounded by doughy flesh.

“Josh?” Her voice was a whisper even she could barely hear.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” he said. “And I’m sorry. I’m really . . .”—his eyes closed—“really sorry, because you aren’t going to like any of this.”

His eyes opened again and met hers. They were the same blue she’d always remembered.

The street was quiet. By Vikous’s reckoning, it was at least four hours past midnight.

They stood in the street itself, near the curb, directly in front of Calliope’s Jeep. Vikous looked first at the front grille of the vehicle, then at Calliope. Calliope was looking only at the grille. Her eyes looked through and far past the vehicle with the same expression of blank apathy that they’d had since the two of them had left Gluen’s office thirty minutes ago.

They’d been standing in front of the Jeep for a quarter of an hour.

“It’s getting late,” Vikous said for the third time. “We should get going.” He watched his companion, gnawing on his cigar. “Calliope—”

She pulled her keys from the pocket of her jacket and held them out to him. She didn’t look at him or give him time to react, and they fell from her hand to the pavement with a small clash of metal-on-metal-on-pavement. “Drive for me.” She walked to the passenger side of the vehicle. Vikous followed her with his eyes. Finally, he bent and retrieved the keys, unlocked the doors, and started up the vehicle.

“Where to?” he asked once the motor was running.

“Home.”

Calliope stared blankly through the front windshield as they drove, hunched slightly forward against a cold Vikous couldn’t feel. A silent hour later, he pulled into Calliope’s empty driveway. There were no other cars there, or on the street. He turned off the engine, relaxed into the seat, and waited. Calliope continued to stare into the distance far beyond the garage door they faced.

“I want to kill him,” she finally said. Her voice was quiet, in the small cab of the vehicle at the darkest hour of the night.

“Gluen?” Vikous said. Calliope didn’t respond but turned her head toward him and met his gaze. Vikous looked away first. “He’s a messenger.”

“Yeah,” Calliope said. “And you’re the guide.”

Vikous became very still. After a few moments, Calliope reached over and retrieved her keys, then opened her door and got out, standing in the opening. “Get out of my car. Come back at noon.”

He looked at her. “You blaming me for this?”

Her eyes finally focused on him, but instead of replying she turned and walked to the front door of her house.

“Fair enough,” he said to himself once she had gone inside. He climbed out of the Jeep, pulled up the sweatshirt hood that concealed his face from the nearest streetlight, and walked away.

The light from the hallway fell across Calliope’s bed, glistening on the old photographs scattered across the comforter, mixed with letters and notes and folded music scores. Numb with exhaustion and the meeting with Gluen, Calliope simply stood in the darkness of the room, staring at the scattered mess for several minutes, unable to process what to do next.

Finally, she shuffled to the side of the bed and pawed everything together as well as she could, lowered herself to her knees, and gathered the pile into both hands, turning and aligning the mass like someone straightening out a deck of oversized cards. It occurred to her that the reason the box had been such a disorganized mess when she’d opened it was because she’d done pretty much the same thing the last time she’d put it away, rather than sort things into any kind of order.

She managed to fit everything back into the box on the second attempt. This time, rather than the apartment note, the top item on the pile was a picture of Josh, driving. Afternoon sunlight lit up his face, shone on two days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks. He was smiling.

Of course.

Calliope looked at the picture, her face as still and expressionless as it had been since she’d left Gluen’s office. She reached for the lid, let her hand drop back to her lap, then reached out again and strapped it back in place, moving quickly. As soon as the box was closed, she shoved it and its companion under the bed in a rush, her eyes averted. The NOT BAND STUFF box hung up on the frame and she had to push it harder—almost punch it—trying to get it to move. Finally, she did punch it to get it to slide underneath—once, then again to finish the job. The frame left a gouge in the top of the lid.

She sat back on her heels, kneeling in the slice of light from the hallway, her eyes squeezed shut, her breath coming much harder than the effort had warranted.

“I think we ought to take a trip.”

“Nnn . . .” The sound was half groan, half growl. Her fist lashed out, thumping into the side of the mattress, then again. Again. The strikes sped up, both fists flailing at the bed as a wordless, rage-filled scream built up behind grindingly clenched teeth, tears spilling down her face.

The attack came and went like a summer storm; first the flurry, then a sudden cessation punctuated with a few final strikes. Her hands dropped into her lap, their knuckles red and abraded.

Calliope looked down at them, squeezed her eyes shut, and let her head fall forward until it rested on the edge of the bed.

The keys scrape and rattle against the outside of the apartment door, accompanied by a muffled laugh and giggling. After several tries, the bolt finally opens and Josh stumbles through, off balance more because Calliope is trying to climb onto his back than because he is drunk.

Which isn’t to say he’s sober—far, far from it. It’s been a good night.

He drops his keys on the floor, his legs spread wide to catch his balance. Calliope, still hanging from his shoulders, makes another lunge upward. The motion pushes him a half step forward, but he catches himself, then reaches around and hitches her higher, hooking his arms under her knees.

They freeze, in shock that they’ve finally achieved the position they’ve been attempting for two blocks and three flights of stairs, then Josh kicks backward at the door, knocking it closed and almost sending them both crashing to the floor. Calliope lets out an abrupt laugh and kisses his ear. “Strong work, White.”

“Damn right,” he mutters. He lifts his head for a moment, sights in on the futon, and begins a slow stagger across the room.

“Very. Talented. Group.” He punctuates each step with a word as he crosses the room. “Label. Very. Interested.” Calliope gives him a squeeze that threatens to cut off his air. He coughs and takes the last few steps. “Where’s. Your. Demoooo . . .” He overbalances toward the futon, falling like a chopped tree with a shrieking squirrel on its back. Josh turns to face Calliope where she lies. “Hi.”

“Hello.” She waggles her eyebrows. “Kees me.”

He does so. Calliope can feel him smiling against her lips. “It’s a good night.”

“It’s a very good night,” she agrees. Down deep, in a part of her that whispers about not getting hopes up, there is a bitter seed of doubt, but she squeezes it away, pushing it down as far as she can.

“You okay?” Josh asks. He pulls his head back, his face faintly shadowed. Calliope realizes she’d been shaking her head.

She smiles, nuzzling into his neck to hide her face.

He pulls back again, trying to catch her eyes. “Yeah?”

The fear wells up, coming at her from another angle. If he picks up on her mood, he might think she doubts everything that happened tonight, and it will be another fight about all the old things. That thought turns her fear into a self-disgusted kind of anger, and she looks up at him, her eyes bright with forced good cheer. “Yeah. You know what?”

He blinks at her mood shift, but his smile creeps back. “What?”

“I think we ought to take a trip.”

He looks at her, searching her eyes, then tilts his head, as though he hadn’t heard her from all of two inches away. “You mean—” Calliope nods, biting her lower lip hard enough to make her eyes water. Josh misreads it as happy emotion.

“Yes!” He kisses her, hard, and leaps off the futon, swaying only slightly. “Tonight! We can leave tonight. I’ll pack.”

His puppy enthusiasm makes her laugh despite her misgivings. “How about in the morning, baby?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t want to give you time to change your mind.” A second later, his own words sink in and he stops. “I . . . just said that out loud, didn’t I?”

Calliope pushes herself to a sitting position, and he kneels to meet her halfway. “It’s okay.” She cups the side of his neck and strokes his cheek with her thumb. “I’m not going to change my mind.” She kisses him. “Promise.”

“Okay.” He leans into her. They stay that way as the cheap plastic clock on the wall ticks off second after long second. “But I’m still gonna pack,” he whispers.

She laughs again, quieter this time. “Fiiine.” She throws herself back on the futon. “Come take advantage of me when you’re done.”

He looks back at her from the doorway to the bedroom. “Yeah?”

She rests her forearm over her eyes. “Oh yeah.”

“I’ll hurry,” he murmurs, and leaves her smiling.

“Nice place.”

Calliope starts awake. She is still on the futon. The bedroom doorway is dark. The apartment is cold.

A lean silhouette stands at the front door. “I’m sorry to wake you up, Calliope, but we need to talk.”

Calliope sits up, scanning the room, trying to get her bearings; trying to remember what is going on, where she is, where—“Where’s Josh?”

Special Agent Walker sucks air past his teeth, grimacing. “Bad question, Miss Jenkins. Not something you want to get into with me.” He leans against the refrigerator. “Anyway, I’m really here to ask you things, not the other way around.”

Calliope shakes her head, trying to clear it. “What—”

“Another question I’m not going to answer right now.” Walker sucks at his teeth, popping his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Let me try: where’s the Fat Man?”

Calliope blinks, leaning back, her shoulders tense. “Excuse me?”

“Gluen, Miss Jenkins.” Walker’s voice grows rough. “The Fat Man. I’d like to have a talk with him.”

“I don’t—”

“How about this,” Walker cuts in. “You tell me. I leave.” A light comes on in the bedroom. “And you can get back to your regularly scheduled programming.”

The light shifts, pushing back the cold in the room. Josh is—

Calliope squints at the light, trying to remember.

Josh is—

Calliope turns back to Walker, her eyes gone hard. “Josh is dead.”

Walker’s eyes go wide, and everything goes dark.