Warped (21 page)

“Dad!” Tessa cried. A terrible sense of helplessness flooded her. There was nothing she could do to prove that Gray Lily was lying. There was nothing she could do to get Will back.

“I’m just pleased to have the tapestry back,” Gray Lily said. Her tone was reasonable. “It has been in my family for generations.” She gave Jackson Brody a small, careful smile, her lips pressed firmly together. There was no hint of the ugly blackness inside. “Honestly, you have no idea the
sentimental
value it holds for me.”

The black bag rustled as if something inside was moving. Quickly Gray Lily gave the bag a shake and pulled the plastic drawstrings tight.

Tessa stared at Gray Lily, shaking with anger and despair. “You lying bitch!” she whispered.

Gray Lily stiffened, narrowed her eyes until they were black slits and focused a stare of such intense hatred on Tessa that Tessa trembled.

“Tessa!” Her father’s voice was sharp. “That’s enough.”

“I’ll be going now,” Gray Lily said softly. “You see, I have work to do that cannot be put off any longer.” Her mouth twisted in a small, secret smile aimed right at Tessa as she turned away. “Just so there will be no hard feelings, I’ve left a check for the agreed amount at the store, Mr. Brody.” She frowned faintly. “It appears that you’ll need it. Your daughter has made quite a mess in there.”

“Yes,” mumbled Tessa’s father. “All right.” He spoke absently, still holding on to Tessa with a protective grip.

Gray Lily looked at Tessa. “And I will want my book back as well.”

She must not have seen it
, Tessa realized.
She snatched the tapestry from the studio wall but the
Texo Vita
must still be in the bag up in the studio
.

“I don’t know where it is,” said Tessa.

“She’ll find it,” said her father.

Gray Lily nodded. “Perhaps your daughter would be good enough to bring it to my hotel, let’s say by Friday evening? I’m staying at the Portland Regency. Then all will be settled.” The words sounded so calm, so reasonable, coming from such a frail-looking elderly woman. But Tessa heard the venom hidden within them.

Tessa’s father looked at her questioningly and spoke. “Maybe I should bring it—”

“No.” Tessa broke in. She stared at Gray Lily. In the woman’s sinister black eyes she saw a wicked kind of amusement, and a challenge. “This is all my fault,” Tessa said slowly. “I’ll bring it. I want to.”

“Thank you, my dear. Please don’t be too hard on the girl, Mr. Brody,” Gray Lily added in a prim tone. “When we’re young, we sometimes . . .
tangle
with the wrong sort of people. We get ourselves in trouble.” Her eyes slid over to Tessa as she smiled once again.

Tessa’s face was streaked with tears and dirt, and she wiped a shaky hand through the mess as she watched Gray Lily walk away.

Chapter 32

“W
e’ll have to close the store while we clean this mess up,” said Tessa’s father, surveying the damaged bookstore. “It looks like a wild animal came through here.”

Pretty much
, thought Tessa.

Her father glanced at her as if he thought she might sprout fur and fangs any moment, but Tessa said nothing. In a way, she felt like leaving everything the way it was. Shattered glass on the floor, claw marks dug into the wood, doors ripped from hinges. Everything looked exactly as it should, exactly the way she felt inside. Torn apart.

Tessa couldn’t stop seeing Will de Chaucy’s face, hearing his voice, feeling his kiss. She could still taste his lips. Her heart had been turned inside out by that one kiss, left open and exposed. And now he was gone? She couldn’t think about anything beyond that fact.

She had to fix things. She had to explain this whole mess to her father. But how? She’d seen Will come out of the tapestry with her own eyes and wasn’t even sure
she
believed it. Most parents, after hearing a story like that, would have her in lockdown, peeing into a cup.

She approached her father. He was standing in front of the smashed display case. Just standing there, looking as if he didn’t know where to begin. “This was the last thing I needed right now,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” Tessa felt as though she’d said that about a hundred times and it still wasn’t enough. “Dad. I want to explain,” she began. “I met Will de Chaucy a few days ago. He’s from England.”
Just keep it simple. No need to specify the
century
he came from
. “Will was in trouble, Dad. I was just trying to help him.”

Her father shot her a quick look, his eyebrows drawn together. “What kind of trouble are we talking about?”

Tessa stared back at him, helpless for words.
Oh, just your usual kind
, she thought.
Witches, time-traveling unicorns. You know
.

“It’s not about money or drugs or anything like that,” she said at last. “Gray Li—I mean, Ms. Gerome. She was after the tapestry. I had to pretend it was stolen.”

“And lie to me?” Her father raised his voice, yelling now. Something he never did. “Why couldn’t you just come to me, Tessa? Talk to me?”

Tessa searched for an answer. She straightened the pile of complimentary bookmarks on the counter with nervous fingers. “You wouldn’t have understood,” she said at last. “It’s complicated. And I thought you might get hurt.”

“Hurt? Who’s going to hurt me?” Her father pulled at the collar of his shirt. His face was red, as if his outburst had embarrassed him.

Gray Lily
, Tessa thought.
And in ways you can’t even imagine
. But aloud she said, “Ms. Gerome.”

Her father scrunched his hair with his fingers, looking puzzled. “You thought Ms. Gerome was going to hurt me,” he repeated.

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, Lila Gerome is not”—Tessa hesitated—“who she pretends to be.”

“I didn’t know you’d even met the woman before.”

“I hadn’t,” Tessa admitted. “But Will told me about her. She’s evil. She’d do anything to get the tapestry back.”

“She paid us ten thousand dollars, Tessa. I don’t think she’s been exactly underhanded about things. Or evil.”

Tessa shook her head. “It’s not about the money, Dad. Now that she has the tapestry, Will’s life is . . . in danger.”

“C’mon, that’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?” Her father’s anger seemed to have deflated now. He walked over and gave her a gentle rub on the shoulder. “It can’t be that bad. Tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”

Tessa loved her father so much. She could see how badly he wanted to figure this out. To solve the problem for her, as if she were a little girl again. But this was her problem. She had gotten herself into this mess somehow.
She
would be the one to fix it.

“I’m not being dramatic, Dad.” Tessa tried to keep her voice low and steady, but she couldn’t help it. The fear crept in.

Her father just nodded. He suddenly seemed very tired, and years older. “Tessa,” he began slowly, “I can understand that you might have a hard time with me having, you know, a relationship. But doing reckless things, getting yourself in with the wrong kind of people—that’s not the way to get my attention.”

As his words sank in, Tessa gaped at her father, open-mouthed. “You think I did this to get your
attention?
” she demanded.

Jackson Brody nodded. “Yeah. And I understand. It’s my fault—”

Tessa let out an angry cry. “Dad! This has nothing to do with you and Alicia. This is about
me
and Will.”

“You don’t need someone like that in your life, Tessa. Whatever kind of trouble he’s in, I don’t want him dragging you into it.”

“You don’t know anything about him!”

Her father rubbed his eyes. “Look. Tessa. I know I’ve been pretty liberal and maybe not the best parent around. Things haven’t been easy since your mother . . . ” He shook his head. “But there’s got to be a limit. I don’t want this guy coming around here.” Jackson Brody’s face was suddenly uncompromising. All the softness was gone.

Tessa stared at the floor, choking back tears. Her father’s words shot down the last of her composure.
Coming around here?
He hardly needed to worry about that. Will de Chaucy was gone.

“You’re wrong, Dad,” Tessa whispered. “You’ve been great. Until now.”

Chapter 33

T
hat night the weather changed. An icy blanket of cold air drifted over the coast of Maine. It chilled the moisture on the pavement to a glistening coat of frost and wilted the early April flowers, making crocuses shrivel back to the soil. Even more unusual, the radio announcer talked about snow squalls that had whited out the region as far north as Bangor.

But when Tessa got up, she paid no attention to the weird weather. She was too busy trying to act normal herself. Or at least going through the motions.

She slipped an oversized wool sweater over her leggings and tugged her hair into a high ponytail. Down in the store she brewed coffee and put on her father’s favorite playlist of jazz. The familiar routine did nothing to raise her spirits. It was as if she were performing steps to a dance she used to know, but there was no music. Every so often, Tessa would imagine that she wasn’t even there anymore. That it wasn’t Will who had disappeared, but her.

She was even glad to hear the bell jangle as Alicia Highsmith walked into the store.

“Good Lord,” Alicia announced. Her sharp eyes swept over the store, as if she was mentally calculating a balance sheet. “Your father told me it was a little accident. It looks like a bulldozer came through this place.”

Tessa didn’t know how to answer, so she just turned away and went back to work. A short time later she could hear Alicia and her father talking in low voices. Probably trying to figure out how to cope with his crazy daughter, who was “acting out.” She wasn’t his sweet, dependable Tessa anymore. Maybe she had never been that girl, Tessa thought. Maybe, deep down, she had always been wild and irresponsible.

Tessa would have loved to escape. She tried calling Opal, but strangely, there was no answer. And there was no call from Opal, no text, nothing.

Alicia stayed, working late into the day, calling a local contractor about repairs to the doors. She and Tessa kept their conversation to a few polite words when they had to speak. It was awkward and awful. But it was better to have Alicia there than to be alone with her father and his disappointment. Later in the day someone else stopped by the store to lend a hand. A fit-looking older man with short, stubbly gray hair arrived, wearing running shorts that showed one of his legs to be artificial. “This is my brother Ed,” Alicia told Tessa.

“Big brother,” Ed corrected her as he tucked Alicia under one arm to hug her. Tessa found out that Alicia was inspired to go into prosthetics because of Ed, who had lost his leg in the Gulf War. So much for her image of Alicia as an over-achieving, money-hungry CEO.

When everyone had gone and it was just Tessa and her father, they turned on the radio as they sat at the counter, eating from cartons of Chinese takeout. Tessa glanced at her father, who was poking a fork into his container of sesame chicken. He’d hardly eaten anything.

Tessa looked more closely. He was pale, and purplish shadows tinged the skin beneath his eyes. When had he started looking so worn, so beaten-down? She must have been too busy, or just too self-absorbed to notice. She watched as he stood and walked over to settle himself heavily in the corner chair.

“Dad?”

“The rotating racks for the paperbacks,” he said. He took a deep breath. “We should put them in the back. For now.”

He was breathing funny too, Tessa realized. As if he had just run up the stairs.

“Dad, are you okay?” she asked, stepping over to put a hand to his shoulder.

He shrugged. “I haven’t been feeling too well.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Not sleeping these past few nights. Been having these weird dreams. Last night I woke up soaked with sweat. Even had to change my shirt. I think I’m coming down with a bug or something.”

Tessa felt his forehead. “You feel kind of warm. Maybe you’d better call the doctor.”

“Yeah. I will.” Her drew back from her touch and nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Tessa.”

The next day was Friday. They opened the bookstore back up, and Tessa stayed busy. In the morning she ran the register and dealt with a small but steady stream of customers. In between she reorganized the business cards and messages on the corkboard next to the counter and updated the bestsellers display shelf at the front of the store. At lunchtime when Mrs. Petoskey came in for her shift, Tessa walked down the street to the Moonstone Café to get a sandwich. It was weird that she still hadn’t heard from Opal. She must have gone away with her folks for a few days during the school break. Still, it was odd that Opal hadn’t mentioned anything about it.

Or maybe she did and I was just too preoccupied to pay attention
, thought Tessa. Her head and her heart had been so turned upside down by Will de Chaucy—who knew what had been happening around her? But she needed to talk to Opal so badly. She was supposed to bring the
Texo Vita
back to Gray Lily tonight, and the prospect scared her out of her mind. What was Gray Lily planning? Opal was the only person who knew what had happened. Maybe together they could come up with a plan and figure out some way to help Will.

Tessa walked into the bustling, dimly lit coffeehouse. The Moonstone was a popular place to hang out, with free Internet access and good food, and many of the small tables were filled with people hunched over their laptops. Tessa surveyed the choices on the blackboard, trying to decide between a panini and one of the giant ragamuffins the café was famous for. She decided she didn’t want to eat after all and had just sat down at a table with only a cup of tea when she heard a familiar voice and looked up.

“Hey, Opal!” Tessa called with a relieved smile.

Opal stopped and turned with a quick, impatient glance. She was balancing a tray containing a leafy green salad and bottled water. “Yeah?”