Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (29 page)

“Did you find her?”

“No.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

“Tell us about your phone call, Ms. Parker. To an Arianna da Via.” Coutu opened the folder, its pages sliding through the sandwich. I remembered where I’d seen the ham sandwich: in the car parked near Jenny’s house. It’d been Coutu, watching the house. Watching us slip into the backyard, then leave a few minutes later. Watching me get into Ari’s car and drive off.

I consciously did
not
wipe my hands down my pants to dry my sweating palms. My face felt like it’d transformed to cardboard. I wanted to pat my cheeks to make sure they weren’t doing something strange, but I was afraid if I moved so much as a twitch, the truth would spill out. It turned out I really sucked at lying to law enforcers. Lying about electricity I could do all day long, but this was bigger, more important, and had real and severe punishments. I wasn’t cut out for this type of lying.

“‘Midnight, pink,’ and the address,” Coutu said. “What sort of code is that?”

“A childhood one, something we came up with as teens.” I couldn’t have made myself look more suspicious if I tried. Coutu waited, and I added, “I don’t like talking on the phone.”

“You know, in our line of work, what looks fishy, is fishy,” Coutu said. She shifted back on her heels and stared at me with a flat expression that missed nothing. “You’re fishy, Ms. Parker. You don’t have an ATM card or a credit card. You pay for everything in cash. You travel like a CIA operative. You associate with known criminals.”

“I what?”

“You checked her financials? On what grounds?” Hudson demanded.

“As part of this investigation.”

“This doesn’t sound like a routine investigation to me,” Hudson said.

“Jennifer Winters is involved in some suspicious activities. And now it looks like you both are, too.”

“Like what?” Hudson demanded.

“How long have you been working with Grant and Zambo?” Coutu asked.

“Who?”

She lifted a picture from her folder and slapped it down in front of me. The shot had been taken with a zoom lens. It showed me running up a street with the Tupperware of cupcakes in my hands. The plastic container blocked the handcuffs from sight.

“I don’t ‘work with’ Atlas and Edmond.” Annoyance crept into my tone. Where had the FBI been when the cousins had stuffed me into that Tercel? “I didn’t even know their last names. They gave me a ride—”

“You should never get into a vehicle with someone you don’t know,” Sevallo said. “Once you’re in a moving car, you’re captive to the driver.”

“Thank you for the public safety announcement,” Coutu said, shooting her partner a quelling glance. A riding crop appeared and disappeared from her right fist. I would have bet last month’s profits that Coutu was breaking in the younger agent, teaching him the ropes. Her divinations were so literal! Which meant the ham sandwich probably wasn’t ham; it was a bologna sandwich, as in, she wasn’t believing a word out of my mouth.

“We think this was a drug deal that went south,” Sevallo said.

I couldn’t help it: I laughed. I heard my nerves in the sound and cut it off. “I’ve never been part of a drug deal in my life. That”—I pointed at the Tupperware in the picture—“is filled with cupcakes. Edmond wants to start a bakery.”

“Atlas Grant has been brought up on minor possession charges twice,” Coutu said. “Zambo once.”

Coutu and Sevallo waited, as if expecting me to fill the silence. I stared at the picture and tried to remember if I’d seen anyone with a camera. I would have to be more alert if I was going to keep my possession of Kyoko a secret. However, I was positive now that if they knew about Kyoko, they would have mentioned her already. They were fishing. I’d simply added to their confusion.

“If everything was all hunky-dory here, and you left your friends on good terms, why are you running? Why do you look so scared?” Coutu searched my face.

“I was running because I was late. Edmond’s car broke down, and I didn’t have time to wait. That look—” I studied the raw fear on my expression in the photo, then made myself shrug. “I’d have to go back to that day. I had no idea I could make that face.”

Coutu snorted. The bologna sandwich grew six inches. “I understand your apartment was broken into yesterday.”

“Yes.” My fists clenched in my lap.

“It sounds like they really trashed your place.” Coutu consulted the paperwork, then pinned me with her steady brown stare. “You didn’t report anything missing. Can you tell us why someone would ransack your home? From every indication in the reports, it wasn’t a random crime. They were looking for something.”

“I have no idea what.”

“Does it seem odd to you that you did Ms. Winters a favor a few days ago, and then your apartment was tossed yesterday?” Sevallo asked.

“I guess. But I met Hudson not long ago. By that logic, the break-in could be connected to him, too.”

Both agents regarded Hudson with expressionless faces, and I regretted my words.

“Do you think someone’s targeting me because I helped Jenny?”

I didn’t have to fake the chill my own words gave me. The ninjas were still out there, and they’d found and captured us once already. If I believed Jenny, the mysterious retrievalist had his eyes on me. And now, of course, so did the FBI.

“I sincerely hope not, but unless you cooperate, we can’t guarantee your safety,” Sevallo said. Pink rose petals fell through the air between us.

* * *

“Do you think we’re being followed?” I asked Hudson an hour later as we drove to Ari’s. We’d taken a taxi to Hudson’s mechanic. Once again, nothing had been wrong with his car. Hudson had taken the news almost calmly.

“We’re persons of interest in an FBI investigation, so, yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s someone tracking us.” His silver terrier perched on the dash, life-size and staring out the front windshield.

“You were quiet in there,” I said.

“I don’t like aiding Jenny. I don’t know what she’s got on you. And I don’t expect you to tell me. I get it. Whatever secret is big enough for you to do this for her is probably too big to share with someone you just met, despite all we’ve been through together. Or, shit, maybe I don’t get it. But I’m not going to push you to tell me. I just . . . I don’t like lying to the feds.”

I opened and closed my mouth, swallowing knee-jerk lies with a chaser of toxic guilt. The urge to tell Hudson the truth—to tell him about my curse and my fears and how Jenny was leading me around by them—almost overwhelmed me. Almost. A lifetime of self-preservation kept me from speaking.

“Whatever it is she’s got, it’s a well-buried secret. You seem innocent, in real life and on paper.”

“You checked on me?” The question came out high.

Hudson glanced at me. His knuckles whitened around the steering wheel. Apparitions cropped up with alarming speed around him—black-frame glasses, a toddler-size marble cherub flapping in the backseat, and rotten banana slices pooling around his waist. On the dash, the terrier doubled in size atop a Chance square. “Yeah, I checked on you.”

“When?”

“Yesterday morning.”

After our amazing first night together and right after finding out I had no TV. I wondered if that had been the final straw to force him to turn his scrutiny on me, or if he’d planned to investigate me before he’d accepted my invitation for a nightcap.

I should have been angry, or at least felt like he’d violated my privacy, but the invisible scales in my head weighed his action against my guilt and came out balanced. “Thank you,” I said softly. “For not pushing for the answer and for lying to the agents. And for helping me even when you didn’t know me. And for continuing to help me now that it’s gotten dangerous.”

“You don’t have a driver’s license.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. “As embarrassing as that is to admit, no. Sorry about the parking ticket lie.”

Hudson didn’t speak for a block; then he said, “What Jenny has on you—is it bad?”

“It would end my life.” I rubbed goose bumps from my arms. “Maybe literally.”

Concern and confusion tightened Hudson’s eyes. “Okay.”

“So what now?”

“I’ll run a check on Atlas and Edmond, now that I have their full names. But our goal is the same: Get Kyoko back into Jenny’s hands. Which means we need to find Jenny. Again.”

“And force her to take Kyoko back. I think that’s going to be harder than finding her.”

We both fell silent, pulled into our individual thoughts. Mine were chaotic and unfocused, hopscotching between gratitude that Hudson was going to continue to help me without prying and fear that the FBI would arrest us. A film of terror coated my thoughts, bristling with anger directed at Jenny. I felt helpless and adrift. I didn’t know what to do next, and I couldn’t see a way out of this increasingly dangerous and illegal predicament.

When we pulled up, Ari sat on her porch, worry clouding her expression, winged aluminum soda cans circling her head. I tensed at the sight. Ari had developed a fear of flying when we’d still been in high school, which was when the soda-can apparition had first appeared. Over the years, the apparition had taken root and was now associated with fears of all kinds. I expected the cans to disappear when she saw us, but instead they multiplied. A queasy feeling rolled through my middle.

I jogged up the short walkway and she rose to meet me halfway.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “I expected you hours ago. What happened to your nose?”

“We were delayed by the FBI,” I said.

Ari’s brown eyes rounded in her pale face. “What’d they want?” she whispered.

Hudson opened the door to the house, and I went inside, Ari on my heels. “They wanted to ask us about Jenny. They’re doing some sort of investigation on her. Jenny said we tipped them off.”

“You spoke with Jenny?”

I caught Ari up on our adventurous night as succinctly as possible. Ari collapsed into a chair when I described the ninjas’ attack, then leapt from it when I summarized Atlas and Edmond’s rescue, which necessitated confessing to my first kidnapping by the cousins. She flopped back down when I told her Jenny’s brief, unsatisfactory explanation of why we needed to continue to keep Kyoko hidden for her.

“This is unacceptable,” Ari said. “I wouldn’t even ask something this bizarre, this . . . dangerous of you, and you’re my best friend! Where does she get off on dragging you into this mess?”

“I’d like to ask her that, too, but she’s disappeared on us again,” Hudson said.

“Have you tried calling Sofie recently?” I asked.

“I tried.” A queue of aluminum cans spun faster through Ari’s midriff, phasing through the chair and back out. Every third can resembled a coffin. My heart lurched. “I’ve been trying every half hour for the last two hours. I was just about to head over there when you got here.”

My stomach knotted. Sofie could have gotten wrapped up in a painting and not heard the phone ring, but it wasn’t likely. She also could have left the house and forgotten her phone, she could have forgotten her charger, or her phone could be broken. None of those scenarios made me feel better, though.

“Can we borrow your car?”

“We don’t need to borrow her car,” Hudson said. “Mine’s working fine.”

“For now.” I’d been in it for fifteen minutes. It wouldn’t make the drive to Annabella’s on top of that. Ari, thankfully, understood without me needing to explain.

“Here. I just filled the tank.” Ari peeled her car key off a ring and handed it to Hudson. “No elephants allowed inside, okay?”

I wasn’t in the frame of mind to hold up a conversation during the drive, and fortunately, Hudson wasn’t feeling chatty, either. I concentrated on counting the billboards, then finding the alphabet one letter at a time in the signs we passed. When that didn’t work to mask my worry, I feng shuied Hudson’s house.

All soothing thoughts flushed from my mind when Hudson pulled into the circular drive and Dali bounded through the open gate to the backyard, barking excitedly. I swung out of the car and suffered Dali’s excited licks and wriggles. The front door to the house hung open. My skin shrank.

“Sofie!” I shouted.

Hudson rounded the car. A small shark leapt from the concrete to swallow his hand to the elbow. When he looked at me, the shark doubled in size; then Pac-Man erupted from his stomach, opened its mouth, and swallowed the tail of the shark. It kept chomping its way up Hudson’s arm, devouring the shark in wedge-shaped bites, leaving Hudson’s bare arm behind. If I hadn’t already been freaked out, that would have done it.

“Hang on, Eva. There could still be someone here,” Hudson said when I rushed to the backyard gate.

“If there was, Dali would have told us,” I said.

Dali circled Hudson, licking at his fingers and feet and anywhere in between he could reach. When I pushed the gate open, Dali rushed to me, barking, then whined when I shushed him.

The backyard was a trampled mess. I’d seen the pool cleaner after weeklong fall storms. The grass looked like a pack of starved voles had been released, followed by foxes, and capped off with a herd of horses. Two heavy divots plowed from the pool to the carport. Aside from Dali’s muffled woofs of disapproval, the backyard lay ominously quiet.