“He did,” Eddison confirms, and Bliss mutters soft curses. “The box is for if you need to break shit. I had a friend drop it off.”
“If we need to . . . Eddison.” But he can hear the almost-laugh in Inara’s voice, and he knows she’s opened it.
And he knows, because it’s his cousin’s specialty, that the box is full of the most god-awful ugly mugs in existence, cheap things so badly painted you wonder that anyone would pay even a quarter for them. She buys them up by the gross, using them in therapy at the women’s shelter she runs, because there’s just something about smashing the damn things that feels so good.
“If you need more, let me know. I can hook you up.”
Vic flinches at the sound of shattering ceramic.
“That one was Bliss,” Inara informs them wryly. “How did he do it?”
And that’s the thing about conversations with Inara; they circle. Even when she doesn’t mean to, even when she’s not doing it to purposefully confuse people, she has a way of sidling around a thing until she comes back at a more comfortable angle. You just have to wait for it.
“He tried to hang himself,” Vic replies. “He ended up strangling himself.”
“Fucker couldn’t even do that right,” snarls Bliss.
“Inara . . .”
“It’s okay, Vic,” Inara says softly. Weirdly enough, Eddison believes her. “The Gardener can try and brazen through a trial, trusting the faults in the system and his own sense of superiority. That kind of confidence was never going to be Desmond’s.”
One of Vic’s hands leaves the wheel, touches the pocket with Desmond’s last note. Eddison shakes his head.
“The Gardener? Was he told?”
“We just came from the infirmary.”
“You told him in person?”
“Vic’s a father.”
That earns him a sharp look from his partner, but a soft sound of understanding from the speakers. “The prosecutor’s office called about the contents of the letters,” she says. “They said he seemed to get more unstable after Amiko died.”
“You said he bonded with her over music.”
“Finding out I turned the letters over without reading them, the no-contact order . . . well, it’s not really a surprise, is it?”
“That doesn’t mean it makes less of an impact,” Vic tells her.
“True. But this . . . this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”
“Finding out he’s dead?”
“I thought you were calling to tell me another of the girls was dead.”
Shit. Eddison definitely hadn’t thought of that.
From the slightly sick look on Vic’s face, neither had he.
Well, it’s been a hell of a morning.
They can hear another mug shatter.
“Yeah, so we’ll need that hookup to get more of these.”
“Inara? It’s okay to grieve for him, if you want.”
“I don’t know what I want to do, Vic,” she replies, then laughs bitterly. “I guess I don’t want him to be worth any more of my time and attention. But that’s hardly fair, is it?”
“What is?” Eddison asks before he can think better of it.
She gives a soft huff of amusement, an unconscious echo of a hospital hallway and a pacing father and a terrified, traumatized little girl. “We’ll get some of the others to take our shifts tonight. Maybe go back out to that beach.”
“Did it help?”
“We can run forever and there’s no glass wall to stop us.”
So yes, it helped.
“Try not to tell anyone else just yet. They want to control how it hits the news.”
“Thank you for telling us. And for the fucktastic mugs.”
They can hear another one shatter.
Eddison gives up and laughs into his hand. “I’ll give you my contact’s name; she can tell you where she gets them.”
“No, Bliss, not off the roof!” The call ends abruptly.
But Vic is smiling a little, that terrible grimness fading. “They’ll be okay, won’t they?”
“I think Inara will have some bad days, but for the most part, yes. I think this takes some of the burden away from her.”
A cell phone goes off, making them both flinch. Eddison can feel the vibrations against his belt. He pulls it up, his stomach sinking as he sees Priya’s name on the display. “Priya? Are you okay?”
“There are petunias on the doorstep,” she says, her voice sharp and fragile. “Mum forgot something and came back before she even got out of town, and they were there. The camera didn’t see a goddamn thing.”
Friday’s camera footage shows a half hour of static instead of a delivery of petunias. It isn’t frozen in place like before—the time stamp is continuous—but it’s just snow. Just half an hour, though; it comes back on after that. Between that and all the clocks in the front half of the house being reset, Archer’s theory is a short-range EMP. They’re not that hard to find, he says; it’s even easy to make them at home.
Oh, the joys of technology.
Archer does . . . something . . . to the cameras, as Sterling argues urgently into her phone, trying to get permission from the section chief to take Landon’s picture and go out canvassing in the neighborhoods Eddison thought were most likely. The conversation does not go well, and is immediately followed by a call to Finney. He can’t countermand his boss’s restrictions, though, and his garbled voice sounds as frustrated as Sterling does.
Archer does not look optimistic about the camera. “Hopefully the shielding will protect it through another pulse,” he says, screwing in the cover.
“Hopefully?” Mum asks dangerously, still in her work clothes.
“It’s a basic home-security camera; it’s not really meant to be indestructible.”
Mum glowers at the camera, swearing under her breath in Hindi.
On Sunday we drive up to Denver, ostensibly for shopping. Really it’s just to get me out of Huntington for a while. She points out the building where she works in LoDo; she doesn’t suggest going in. Even if I were in any mood to meet colleagues putting in extra time, Mum hasn’t personalized her offices since Boston.
The first two years of moving around, her company was sending her to clean up HR departments in struggling branches. She was there to get things back to where they should be. Right after we got to San Diego, they offered her Director of Human Resources in their Paris branch; the current director was looking to retire within the next few years, but the woman he’d been grooming for his position had just been poached by a German industrial firm. They wanted Mum to keep putting out fires in different offices here in the States, but also start learning all the international aspects of the business, the French and EU laws that required different compliance.
I think that may have been what let me bond with Aimée, actually, when I’d spent the other moves avoiding friendships. She was so damn excited when she found out I’d eventually be living in Paris; that was her dream. So, while everyone else in the class learned enough to meet graduation and scholarship requirements, Aimée and I drove the teacher crazy needing more.
We eat someplace a bit nicer than usual because why not, and the whole time we’re there, I can feel the anger curling and crawling and clawing up my gut, hungry for far more than what’s on my plate, because I can’t get the petunias out of my head.
Everyone who knew Kiersten Knowles talked about her laugh. She was always laughing, and had one of those laughs that could fill a room, make you join in before you’d even finished turning around to see what was funny. Kiersten Knowles was a creature of joy. That is, until her aunt—her best friend in the world—was killed by a drunk driver.
Kiersten stopped laughing.