We Are Here (26 page)

Golzen shook his head. “It’s not hard to keep track of what Maj’s up to. I had another idea. I sent them after Maj’s friend.”

“Sent them? Where?”

“I don’t know. Wherever the guy lives. They followed him after you confronted Jeffers in the church last night. They’ll watch Maj’s friend and return and tell me if there’s any leverage we might be able to use on Maj, something from his friend’s life. Assuming you think it’s worth it, of course, after his attitude tonight.”

“Good work,” Reinhart said thoughtfully. “I like what you’ve done there. Let me know.”

He nodded, then wandered off into the shadows in the direction the girl had gone, dismissing Golzen as if he’d vanished, or had never been there at all.

Just until we leave for Perfect
, Golzen thought as he watched him go.
Then you’ll have to find a new dog.

In a way, he almost hoped it
would
be Maj.

He had a feeling Maj might bite.

The first thing Talia did when she got home, as always, was take a bath. When you’re living in a trailer of significant age and lackluster specifications this is not a quick or simple procedure, but it’s hot working behind a coffee machine, and she’d always been a girl who liked to be clean. She supposed there weren’t many people in town who thought of Talia Willocks as a girl these days. But she’d been one once. She still was. Mother fucking Teresa herself must have stopped to gawk at the clouds or check out a cute butt once in a while, even after she looked like she’d been exhumed.

When she was done bathing—she never rushed that part, having always believed in marking out her day into sections, like chapters maybe—she wandered back into her home’s main area, clad in a pink terry-cloth bathrobe (she needed to replace it soon; it was starting to fray on the sleeves and okay, there was no one to see, but you had to keep on top of that stuff). Her living space was tidy. Keeping a place (or a life) in good order merely meant putting things where they were supposed to go, and if you lived in a trailer and didn’t pick up that habit then you were going to be wallowing in a pigsty real fast.

The place gave her everything she needed. She had her sitting area, a pair of two-seater couches in an L shape, the second of which demarked the space from the kitchenette and the table where she ate and did administrative chores … and everything else. The real parts of her life. At present, approximately seven square feet of the horizontal surfaces—a portion of one of the couches, two patches of kitchen, a spot right in the middle of the table, and two apparently random positions on the floor—were home to the sides, paws, or posteriors of cats. Six were currently indoors, the others outside, who knows where, doing stuff, who knows what. A long time ago a man whom Talia had loved used to deliver a stock response to being asked whether he’d had enough pizza yet.

“Is there any left?” he’d say.

“Yes.”

“Well, no, then,” he’d answer, baffled.

Talia felt the same about cats. She knew people who believed nine was too many. For her the words “too many” didn’t compute with cats. Sure, you could be some batty old lady who let the place fill up with fur and uncleaned litter trays, but Talia was not that woman and wasn’t ever going to be.

She wandered around, spending time with each of her friends. They craned their heads up into her hand, or rolled over, or sat focused on some interior thought. Once she’d said hello to each she felt like she was really home, and it was time to get on.

She changed into stretch pants and sweatshirt and put the robe back on over it all, then fixed herself a little food. She didn’t eat much in the evening. She didn’t eat much at
any
time, despite her running gag about stealing the cakes at Roast Me. Either she was falling foul of hidden calories somewhere or her body wanted to be this shape, and she was done pretending she gave a shit. She fixed a vegetable stir-fry with some of the smoked tofu she’d become mildly addicted to, flicking the pan in the way she’d seen that guy do it on television (and that, after some practice, she could replicate without shunting half the contents over the stove). When it was cooked, she reached to the magnetized strip on the left where her cooking implements hung.

Her fingers failed to find what they expected. Her spatula wasn’t there.

She frowned, looked around—and spotted it on the magnetic strip on the other side. Well, that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. That was for the knives. Huh. How had that happened? Nobody else would have moved it. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had been in her home. A long time back it had been a popular destination for those in the county who enjoyed a beer and a smoke while one or more of them played Neil Young songs to varying degrees of recognizability on battered guitars. The younger (and much slimmer) version of Talia Willocks could lay a harmony line on top and, moreover, kept a dependable stock of cold beer in the fridge and made fine brownies too, albeit of the kind that had you staring at the stars and talking all kinds of happy crap by the time you’d finished your second.

Those days were gone, and most of those people had drifted on or gone corporate—George Lofland was the only one she still passed the time of day with. The trailer parties had stopped the day Ed died. The heart had gone out of the town for a few months after the crash in which he was killed along with five other well-liked locals. It was a simple accident, nobody’s fault, just one of those things, which somehow made it worse.

The heart had never quite gone out of Talia’s life, though for a long time its beating had been quiet indeed, and there had been nights in the first months where she’d worried it might slow to nothing. Then one night, sitting in a chair by herself in front of the trailer and pretty deep in the bag, she’d happened to see a shooting star, cheap and easy though that might seem when the story’s told. She’d been seeing them all her life and it wasn’t any big deal, but that had the point.

Not everything is somebody’s fault.

Magic happens, and shit happens, and neither lasts forever. You have to let the instances burn themselves out, arcing over the time horizon, and then get the fuck back on your feet and reengage the fight.

Ed’s dead.

Get over it.

The next day she’d woken up with a vicious hangover but had hauled herself into town and bought a big notebook. That had been the start. She’d written something—and usually a lot—every day since. At first just a diary (which she still kept up, in ordered ranks of identical notebooks on the shelf behind the TV), then the more creative journaling, and finally … the novel. Ta-da.

She looked at the spatula hanging on the rail and decided she must have put it there herself.

Hey, girl, still got some wild in you. You put the spatula on a different rail for once.

Rock and fucking roll.

She fished the food out of the pan and onto a plate and took it to the table. Four of the cats came and watched while she did this, but in a companionable way, as they knew there was nothing on the plate for cats. Talia chatted with them about her day while she ate, and why not? There was nobody to hear.

Three hours later she sat back from the computer and blew strands of hair off her face. Writing always made her hot—though not that kind of hot, ha-ha. It just fired her up. She sympathized with David for the trouble he was having, but it never got her that way. Whether she was updating her diary or plowing into the sequel to
The Quest of Alegoria
(she knew she shouldn’t until she’d heard from David what he thought about the first, but the characters had started doing their song and dance in her head and she couldn’t stop herself from hooking up and seeing where they wanted to go next), words had always come easily. She was a relaxed kind of person, didn’t care much what people thought, and maybe that helped. David was a nice guy and she still hadn’t gotten over how touched she’d been by his offer to read her book (she got the sense that he thought fantasy was beneath him, and that was okay; a lot of people did), but he was kind of …
uptight
. Actually, that wasn’t the word.

Talia put her elbows on the table and concentrated. Words were like cats (if you thought hard enough about it, pretty much everything was like cats, or unlike them, or whatever). Chase after cats or words and they’ll outrun you every time. Sit still, act like you don’t care, and they’ll be all over you (another lesson that David could benefit from learning).

It wasn’t
uptight
, it was …

Guarded
. Yeah, that was closer. He was friendly and all, and obviously loved Dawn to death, but it was like his eyes were turned in—as if what happened inside his skull was the realest thing in his world. Talia loved to write, but she knew the difference between inside and out and which was important. She wasn’t sure David
did
know this, and she’d been nearly blown out of her panties when he’d blurted out his news about the baby. It was touching as hell but out of character, as if he’d decided that it was worth interacting with real people for once. Of course, with what had happened to his parents, maybe it wasn’t so surprising that he took a cautious approach. Maybe that was simply good sense, and one of these days he’d see his own shooting star—or hopefully something less obvious, as Talia believed David might think wake-up calls delivered via shooting star a little beneath him, too—and relax a little.

Clichéd though the star had been, it had worked. You didn’t need fancy, not with things that counted. Ed used to say you could play half the songs in the world (and pretty much all of the good ones) with just three chords.

God, she hoped David liked her book.

If he did, surely that was a good sign. In her heart of hearts she knew she wrote for herself, but shit, a little money would come in handy and it would be kind of cool to go into libraries and see her book there, women waiting patiently for their chance to take it out and spend a little time in Talia’s world of wonders.

We’ll see. No point waiting on it. Not when there’s so many more words out there to write.

She had her hands raised to go back to typing when she noticed something was up with the cats. During the time she’d been working, the cast of feline companions had been in flux. Some went out via the flap in the door; others came in. It was getting late now, though, after eleven, and … she counted, and confirmed what she’d already known (if you love cats, you know if they’re around without having to check)—everybody was inside. All present and accounted for. Five spread over the couches. Two underneath them. And two …

It was the two on the table she noticed first. Sandy and Pickles. They’d been curled up at the far end (they were siblings and usually slept together) and then both raised their heads at the same time and stood up.

Talia heard a rustling, looked around, and saw most of the cats on the couches had done the same.

She wasn’t fussed by this—they did it all the time, feline senses picking up on small creatures of the night unwisely straying too close outside. A mouse, vole, rat, whatever. At this time of night most of the cats would muse on it for a minute and then settle back down, reasoning that there’d be plenty of opportunity for terrorizing wildlife the following day, and it was late, and really it was pretty comfortable and warm inside.

Only Tilly—who Talia saw was now jumping down from the couch, tail up—would generally elect to make something of it. Though the smallest and one of the oldest of her cat friends, Tilly operated a Zero Tolerance and Nuke From Orbit approach to anything that strayed near her territory, and could be guaranteed to go and chase the living crap out of whatever was outside, sometimes returning with the remains in her mouth as an offering to the big human she lived with.

Now, however, she saw that Tilly had hesitated about halfway to the trailer door. She sat down abruptly. Looked back the way she’d come. Trying to pinpoint the noise from outside, presumably, which Talia hadn’t even heard. Pickles and Sandy seemed to be doing the same, and none of the other cats had settled down yet either.

Kind of odd, but cats got ideas into their heads once in a while and just as quickly forgot them. Whatever. It was getting late and she had at least another blank line break in her before it was time for—

Someone knocked on the door.

Talia froze, hands still poised. There was no doubt that’s what it had been. There were trees near the trailer, but none of them came close enough for a branch to have made the sound. It had come from the door, too, not the roof—a straightforward
rap rap rap
. Not loud. Like you’d do if you were half expected. But people didn’t come visiting Talia, not down this road, and certainly not this late.

“Who’s there?”

Her voice was strong. Talia Willocks had never taken any shit, and if some happy asshole had gotten themselves lost then they needed to know right away who they’d be dealing with when and if she opened her trailer door.

The cats were all looking in the same direction. Talia hit the key combination to save her work, strode over to the door, and opened it.

“Who is it?”

There was nobody outside. She looked both ways and plodded down the little metal stairs. From here you could see from her lot (somewhat overgrown; she didn’t care much about the outside) down the twenty-foot path to the road. There was no one there either.

A hundred yards up the way was the graveyard. Its proximity had never bothered her. It was where you put dead people, right? Dead people wouldn’t do you any harm. Ed lay up there, along with the other people who shared his death day, and hundreds of others who’d passed over the years. The thought had never yielded any comfort but on the other hand, neither did she mind.

She looked in the other direction. The road came to an end forty yards down the way, replaced by the foot-worn path of those who wanted to head down to the high-sided and rocky creek that had given the town its name, generally to make out. Talia’s best bet was that some young couple, likely a few brews down, had rapped on her door as a joke—before tearing off down the path.