Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (17 page)

The room was filled with his good earth scent.
Breathing it in, I gestured up to the lights. “Are you a Christmas hound?”

“Actually, no.
I just like how they look,” Zakia said. He picked up some dirty clothes in the corner and dropped them into a hamper.

I liked the lights as well.
It gave the place a cheery, friendly glow. This wasn’t as bad as I’d thought from the outside. He even had a window, which overlooked a shadowy place among the trees. Leaning against the doorway, Zakia said, “There really isn’t much to see, I guess.”

“You’d rather live here than in your house?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Zakia said at once. “I can play music as loudly as I want and it won’t bug anybody. Never have to wait for the bathroom and I don’t have to share the remote. This place is all me.”

“Doesn’t it get lonely?”

He laughed. “Hang out on this street much and you’ll be wanting a spell of peace soon enough. Coopers can make quite a ruckus.”

Barely h
olding up two tipping lines of books on the shelf was a picture of Zakia and Lotus. I picked it up and spread my fingers to brace the books while I looked more closely at the shot. Behind the two of them was the reservoir, or perhaps it was the lake that Grandpa Jack was going to in order to fish. Dressed in swimwear, both looked happy. This was a recent shot, Lotus looking no younger than the age she was now. I put it back on the shelf and said, “Don’t you have a picture of all of you?”

“No,” Zakia said.
“There’s probably one in the house somewhere. We aren’t big on picture taking in our family.”

“Think it steals the soul?”

“Just can’t everyone to stand still long enough. Like herding cats.”

Wondering how this handsome, friendly guy couldn’t have a soul, I asked, “What are all of your brothers’ names?”

He spied a sock on the floor and whisked it up to the hamper with his foot. “The oldest is Jeremiah, and then there’s Brecken and Eliseo, Jaden and yours truly. They’re closer in age, those four, than they are to me. The girls are Willow, Laurel, Ivy, Sage, and Lotus. Any reason you’re interested?”

“You just have such a huge family,” I said, floundering to find a way to ask what I really wanted to know.
I picked through the books and saw nothing unusual or telling. “When are you going to vacation to see them all?”

“
Next summer. I might stay in Montana for a while, send a few cousins back in my place to work the shop. They all want to see California.”

“Do you want to see Montana?”

He grinned lazily. “Nah. But we’ve got family all over the country, so I can pick and choose where I want to go. It just depends on my mood.” Outside, the men called to us. We walked over to say goodbye and I reminded Grandpa Jack about his carrots. He made a face and the two headed out on the trail. I watched them go.

When I turned
around to go back to the mail truck, Zakia had changed to jeans and a T-shirt. He closed the door to his shed and said, “I’m off to work.”

“Do you want a ride?” I offered.
“I’m going back that way. Or I’m going to try. My sense of direction is three degrees above miserable and two left of clueless.”

He brightened.
“That would be great! You should come in and see the shop. Maybe you’ll find something that you like.”

As we walked back to the
road, I realized what had been missing from his room. “If you’re homeschooled, where are your textbooks? I didn’t see anything academic in there.”

“Did you look under the bed?”

“No.”

“There you go then,” Zakia said, and he laughed.
I laughed along, even though I was embarrassed at my prodding. It just made no sense to me how the Graystones didn’t like one of the nicest guys I’d ever met. We climbed into the mail truck and I made a U-turn on the road to go back. It was still early, but people were waking up in the houses. Lights were on and a door of one house opened to release a tumble of dark-haired children. They raced around the side to the backyard, although I slowed in case any sprinted for the road.

“That girl sort of looks like Lotus,” I commented about the last child out the door.
“Same hair, similar face.”

“She’s a Cooper,” Zakia said.
“Our genes overpower city folks’ genes every time. Lotus should be back tonight or tomorrow.”

“Where is she?”

“Out camping somewhere.”

“
Alone?
” I cried.

“Of course alone.
No one else wants to tromp around the way she does, dodging poison oak and clipping plants. She’s having a great time, wherever she is.”

This family!
“But she’s too young to be on her own like that. Don’t you worry about something happening to her?”

“Like what?”

“Like kidnapping!”

“Pity the kidnapper who tries to take on Lotus.
She’s a spitfire. He’ll have his butt handed to him in five seconds flat.”

That was a horrifically naïve attitude.
We coasted past the other houses. Outside the Kreeling house at the end was a girl in her mid-teens dressed in jogging clothes. Her hair was white blonde and pulled back in a ponytail. The muscles in her arms made her look like a bodybuilder. She was stretching her calves against the side of the house. Looking over to see who was going by, her dark eyes pierced through the window. Zakia nodded politely to her, and she nodded back.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Silea Kreeling,” Zakia said.

I had the sense that he did not like her very much.
It wasn’t hatred by any means, but there was reserve in his voice where none had been before. Maybe she had turned him down for a date, although I couldn’t see why. “She’s built.”

“Yeah, she takes her physical training very seriously,”
said Zakia.

“Is she planning to join the Army?”

“I don’t know. We don’t really chat much. The Kreelings stick to themselves.”

Still appalled at the thought of a preteen roving around alone in the wilderness, I turned past the mailboxes.
These people needed some serious intervention on child rearing. When I checked the rearview mirror, Silea was jogging out the driveway and turning to go in the other direction. She didn’t listen to music as she ran, which surprised me. I thought everyone did that.

“Can I ask you a question?” I queried.
“What do you think about the Graystones?”

A look of dislike passed over
Zakia’s face quickly, but then his features settled back to amiable. “I barely know them. Why?”

“
Adriel is a hard read for me. The other guys . . . live their lives out loud, I guess I would say. But he’s reserved. Kishi is more outgoing, but I’ve only met her once.” Sighing, for stealth was not my strong suit, I said, “You grimaced when I said their name. What? Is it just conflicting pheromones or something?”

“Yes.
We have conflicting pheromones,” Zakia said with a snort. Unrolling his window, he put his feet out. “Haven’t you ever met someone and just not liked them for no reason? You can’t even say what it is. They just bug you.”

“Yeah, now and again.”

“We bug each other. Don’t worry about it. Adriel and I aren’t about to have a fistfight in the hallways of Spooner High. We just maintain some distance and everyone is happy.” Zakia grinned out to the trees and motioned for me to turn. “But if we did fight, I’d win. He’s a scrawny dude.”

Adriel was
n’t as built as Zakia, but he was far from scrawny. “He’s nice.”

“Of course he’s nice.
To you. Your pheromones are lovely.”

I laughed.
“Thank you. I made them myself.”

“Don’t go past it!” he exclaimed, and I hit the brakes just in time to make the last spot at the curb by the store.
This place was so rundown, all but the Botanic Wonderments store. I locked the doors of the mail truck, even though there wasn’t anything tempting inside to steal. Watching this in bewilderment, Zakia said, “You lock the doors?”

“I’m from L.A.,” I
said.

“And the significance?”

“There you lock your doors.”

“Are you in L.A. right now?”

I followed him to the door, where he produced a key and pushed it into the lock. “Obviously not.”

“Then why did you lock them?”

Now it was my turn to grimace, since he was being a pill. I didn’t want to insult the place he lived with a comment of how dangerous it looked. This was his home. “Force of habit.” Seeing his smile widen, I rolled my eyes. Then I exclaimed, “You didn’t have any breakfast!”

He closed the door behind me.
“I’ll walk over to Doozy’s in a while and pick up some eggs and toast. I do that a lot. They have great ice cream, too.”

The store was crowded but
adorable. Along the walls were sheets made into art with pressed flowers and leaves. Petals formed a mountain with deer grazing at the top of one. A sea of little tables covered the floor, each boasting baskets of goods. Fancy paper and envelopes had been decorated with dried flowers along the bottom at one table, and another held bottles of natural shampoo. Notebooks had flowers on the covers and picture frames had them around the edges. I picked up a fat yellow candle with flowers somehow printed on the sides. “These are beautiful.”

“I’m sure it is, whatever
you’re looking at!” Zakia yelled. I followed his voice to the back room, where he was surveying towers of boxes by a door and blowing out his lips. “Surly new deliveryman yesterday. The store had a crunch of customers so Nateso didn’t catch him in time, just came back and found this.” Many of the boxes had FRAGILE and DON’T STACK printed plainly on the sides. One box wedged into the middle of a stack was far smaller than those loaded above it, and the weight had caused its sides to collapse. The room smelled strongly of herbs and alcohol.

“You should complain,” I said.

“If anything is broken, and I’m pretty sure a few things are, I will,” Zakia grunted. He was pulling a box off the top of a stack. “Nateso busted his wrist playing football with the kids the other day, so he couldn’t dismantle this himself.” Carrying the box to a long wooden table, he set it down. “Hey, thanks for the ride.”

I wasn’t eager to get back to the house and be on my own.
And I also had the sneaking suspicion that Nash might be calling for a chat. “Could I help?”

“Sure, if you want.
Why don’t you be quality assurance? I’ll bring them over to the table and you slit the top and see how much is destroyed.”

Picking up a pair of scissors, I opened the box.
There were more of those lovely candles inside, each placed into a groove of a cardboard holder. I checked the layers under the first. “Your candles are fine.”

“
One point to the surly deliveryman,” Zakia said. He dumped another box onto the table. There was a wet spot on the bottom.

“One point taken away,” I said.
He opened up the box while I inspected the final layer of candles and deemed them in good health. I looked over into his box, which was full of shampoos and conditioners. None of the bottles was cracked, but one had opened and leaked all over everything.

“Oh, no, if we have to clean anything, it’s minus two points.
That brings us to negative one point now,” Zakia said. He brought up a bucket from under the table and dumped the bottles into it. Then he set it into the industrial sized sink behind us. The open bottle he dumped into the trash. Wiping off his hands, he said, “You can set those on the candle table out there, if you’d like. I’m going to spray these down.”

Arranging the candles was a peaceful task, one that I completed in five minutes.
I returned with the inventory slip, which I placed on a desk by the computer at Zakia’s request. A fresh box with a wet spot on the top was waiting for me upon the table. The water turned on and off as Zakia cleaned bottles with graceful speed and placed them on a towel to dry.

I slit the tape and looked inside with trepidation.
The wetness had gone through and damaged a notebook, but only one. I unloaded the contents and checked them over thoroughly. “Should I put these out there? The notebooks?”

“No, those are for Christmas.
That’s why they’re only red and green on the covers. Just plop them in the empty candle box and put it by the desk. Someone will deal with it later. Put the damaged one by the computer. How bad is it?”

The
wet stain on the red cover hadn’t sunk through to the pages. “Insides are fine, but I think the cover is likely to dry off-color. If you’ve got a discount bin or something, someone might still want it.”

He examined the stain
dubiously. “This is pretty big. Lotus might want it. She could use this for plant notes and research.”

We dismantled the entire first stack of boxes and started on the second.
A woman came in through the back with a hurried greeting and went out front to get everything in order for the day. Saying that that had been Neala, Zakia sent me out after her with more candles to be arranged. She was setting up the register and didn’t want to talk, so I didn’t say anything to disturb her.