“No, you didn’t,” he interrupted, the barest hint of a smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“Fine.” I pulled out a chair and sat across from him. “Is this your only jacket?”
“No,” he said. He wasn’t lying, but that didn’t mean he had another jacket with him. It could still be at his ex’s or something.
“You just chose not to wear one tonight? On one of the coldest nights of the year?” He didn’t answer, so I continued. “Do you need your jacket back?” I started to take it off, but he held up a hand.
“Keep it. It looks better on you.”
Clearly he’d never looked in a mirror. Ever. “It swallows me.”
“I’d swallow you, too, if I could.”
A combination of elation and bewilderment bucked inside me, and I lowered my head, embarrassed. “If you need it back, will you promise to let me know? I should have mine in a couple of days.” Again he didn’t answer, so I spurred him with “Promise?”
I’d placed one hand on the table. He reached over and touched his fingertips to mine. The contact was like an electrical current, and my pulse stumbled on its own beat.
“Cross my heart.”
I pulled my hand away, confused. He was obviously still hung up on his ex. He made no bones about it. But he felt genuine interest in me as well. I just didn’t know how to handle it. If I should steer clear until he recovered from his recent breakup or not. The last thing I wanted was to be the rebound girl. Those relationships never lasted.
Besides, I thought as I offered a quick wave before getting up to leave, I might already have a husband. What would he think of me?
“Can I get you anything else, Janey?” Shayla asked.
The café had begun to fill up with women. Odd how that happened every time Reyes showed up. Shayla seemed to be the only one immune to his charms, and I was pretty sure I knew why. The other two servers had things under control, so I asked Shayla to sit with me a minute.
Tomorrow was a big day. I wanted to give Shayla as much of a fighting chance as Lewis, the busboy, was giving Francie. If all went as planned, Lewis’s cousin was going to fake-rob us. Lewis was going to knock him out, and Francie was going to fall in love. But I had a feeling Shayla deserved his love way more than Francie did. Shayla saw Lewis when Francie didn’t. I felt it every time she looked at him.
“I can sit for a sec,” she said, scooting into the booth opposite me.
“So, what do you think about Lewis?”
I’d caught her off guard. She lifted her fingertips to her mouth to chew on a nail. “I think he’s pretty great,” she said from behind an index finger.
“I do, too.”
One corner of her mouth tipped up as she thought about the man she’d been in love with for probably quite a while. “He was so nice to me in school.”
“You guys went to school together?”
She nodded, her enthusiasm infectious. “Oh, yeah. He was so smart. And he was a geek, but not, like, a total nerd.”
“Yeah, the Star Trek shirt he wears says it all.”
“Right? It’s red. Get it?”
When I frowned, she said, “It’s like he’s tempting fate. You know? Like he’s saying, ‘I’m going to wear the red shirt. Show me what you got, universe.’”
“The red shirt says all that? Impressive.”
She nodded, the barest hint of a dimple appearing on her right cheek. “Most people don’t get him, but in school, he was the smart kid who didn’t act smart. He was nice to everyone.”
I could see that about Lewis. What I couldn’t see was why Shayla didn’t say anything. She never even attempted to flirt with him. “Why don’t you tell him how you feel?”
Her eyes became saucers. “I couldn’t do that. I mean… He doesn’t… He’s not —”
“How about this?” I said, stopping her before she had a panic attack. “How about you say hi. You know, maybe strike up a conversation about his band.”
She melted a little at the mention of Lewis’s band, Something Like a Dude.
“All guys like to talk about themselves. It’ll be great.”
I was doing this because I had a feeling even a heroic stunt like saving Francie’s life was not going to turn her focus off Reyes. Not for long, anyway. Shayla could be there to pick up the pieces of his broken heart.
“At least think about it.” She acquiesced with a nod.
I finished my quesadilla and decided I’d waited long enough. I needed to surveil, to find where Mr. Vandenberg’s family was being held, and to somehow get them help. My strides were brisk as I walked home, but that didn’t keep a car from following me. It was slick black and fancy. I pretended not to notice and kept walking. Eventually the car turned off, and I practically ran the rest of the way home.
Since I had the keys to Mable’s 1990 Ford Fiesta, I ran straight to her backyard and started it up. It was ugly as all get out, but it got me from point A to point B. And, thankfully, the heater worked really well.
I’d looked up Mr. V’s address on the Internet and drove out to Philipse Manor. He lived in a ritzier part of town than I did. Pretty much any part of town was ritzier than mine, but his was super ritzy. He definitely had money. I wondered why the men didn’t just take his money and go. Maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe he had all his income tied up in hedge funds and shrubbery funds and biennial cabbage funds.
I was so bad at giving investment advice.
I drove past the Vandenbergs’ house, parked about half a mile away, started to walk to the house, got back in the car, drove until I was about a quarter of a mile away, then got out again. The icy wind whipped around me and slipped into any opening in my clothing it could find. Where was a supernatural furnace when I needed one?
After risking my life by scaling an iron fence with pokey things on top, I scurried to the dark house. All the curtains were closed, but it didn’t look like a single light was on inside. I closed my eyes and concentrated. Reached out. But I felt no emotion of any kind. My pulse sped up. If they weren’t at this house, the captors could be keeping the Vandenbergs anywhere.
“What’s up, chiquita?”
I jumped at the sound of Angel’s voice behind me and considered exorcising him. But first I had to ask him about the conversation I overheard today.
“This guy giving you a hard time?” he asked me.
“What guy?” I turned to where he’d nodded. An elderly departed man stood not two feet from me, trying to poke me with a stick. An incorporeal one. Had he died with it in his hands? His hands were shaky, so he kept missing, which worked for me.
“I’m kind of investigating something. Can you go into this house and see if anyone is inside?”
“For you, mi amor, anything. And then we can make out.”
“Dude, you are like twelve years old. Really?”
He straightened his spine, rising to his full height. All five feet two of it. “First of all, I died when I was thirteen. But that was years ago. I’m really old now, like, I don’t know, forty or something.”
“I think I’ll pass anyway.”
He shook his head, then disappeared after tossing out a quick “You don’t know what you’re missing.”