He sighed. “Something like that.”
My mother moved around me to fill a glass of water. “Just say what you want to say to her so we can get back to our lives.”
“What are you doing here so late?” I asked again. “And why haven’t you been at work? The deliveryman still hasn’t shown up.”
My uncle shuffled his feet like a lost child, unsure of where to put himself. “I know,” he said, his voice thick with weariness. “Luis died on Friday night.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a sudden pang of guilt. The deliveryman had a name — Luis, yes, I remembered. And now Luis, who was barely forty, was dead. “What happened to him?”
“He drowned.”
“Drowned,” I echoed. “At night. Where?”
“In his bathtub,” said Jack, simply, like there wasn’t anything bizarre about that statement.
“Oh dear,” said my mother, covering her mouth.
I, on the other hand, was gaping. It just seemed so illogical. “Was it suicide?” The last time I signed for a delivery, Luis was chattering on about how great the weather was.
“Luis had too much to live for,” Jack replied matter-of-factly. “He didn’t do it to himself.” What did that mean? A sudden coldness rippled up my arms. My uncle continued, undeterred by the implication, leaving me to ponder it in silence. “Eric Cain and I are going to see Luis’s family tomorrow. I want to see that they’re taken care of while they deal with … all of this. His wife is inconsolable.”
I was starting to feel like a royal ass. I had met Luis maybe twenty times and I barely knew his name; my uncle knew his story, his family, and now he was going to go out of his way to make sure they were OK.
“That’s really good of you,” I said, looking to my mother for her agreement — surely she would give Uncle Jack credit for this — but she wasn’t paying attention to me.
“That poor woman,” she said quietly instead.
“It’s the right thing to do,” said Jack, to me.
“Are you OK?” My uncle wasn’t one for big displays of emotion, but I could see by his face that he was upset.
“Yeah,” he said, brushing off my concern. “I just wanted to come by and talk to you before I left.”
“You could have called me,” I ventured, not unkindly, but there’s just something so unnerving about people visiting you without calling first. “I’m permanently contactable.”
“I lost my phone. I have to get a new one.”
My mother circled the table and sat as far away from Jack as she could. She started drumming her fingernails along the table — a not-so-subtle hint — while still keeping a watchful eye on our conversation. If I thought Luis’s death had softened her obvious disdain for my uncle, I was wrong.
Jack ignored her exasperation, and I felt like I was the only one left experiencing the full awkwardness of the situation.
“So … what’s up?” I asked.
He pulled a chair out and sat down, propping his elbows on his knees. His shoulders sagged. “After I visit Luis’s family tomorrow, I’m going to go stay in the city. I won’t be back in Cedar Hill for a while. But I want to talk to you about something before I go away.”
He looked at me with solemn gray-blue eyes — they were my eyes, my father’s eyes, and with a sudden pang I was reminded of just how similar they were. Before, they could have been mistaken for twins, but not anymore. Prison life had been unkind to my father’s appearance, while my uncle’s face remained mostly unlined, his hair neat and his skin lightly tanned from being out in the sun.
“What do you want to talk about?” I backed up against the counter and gripped it a lot harder than I meant to, sensing something was wrong. This was what they were arguing about. My mother continued to drum her fingernails on the table.
“A new family have moved into the neighborhood, and I need you to be careful of them.”
I felt alarm spread across my face. “What?”
He surveyed me warily. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I nodded slowly, trying to figure out where this was coming from and why it was making me feel panicky all over again. “What’s wrong with the Priestlys?”
I watched my mother’s reaction for more clues.
“Theatrics,” she murmured, with a dismissive flick of the wrist. Still, she stayed where she was, monitoring our exchange.
“Persephone” — I grimaced on instinct. I hated when Jack full-named me. “I’m not going to get into it,” he said. My uncle’s stern voice was so like my father’s, it sent a shudder down my spine. For a second I wanted to close my eyes and pretend he was there, that everything was back to the way it should be — that we hadn’t just discussed somebody drowning in their own tub, and that we weren’t about to slap a big fat warning sign over the hottest boys in the neighborhood. “Just do as I ask.”
I couldn’t help but feel skeptical. Even with his bruised hand, there had been something so soothing about Nic’s presence.
“When will you be back?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Cagey as ever. I wished Millie the High Inquisitor were here. She could get answers from a mute. And she’d enjoy it, too.
“So that’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“That’s all there is.” Jack looked away from me, out the window and into the darkness behind our house. “Do you understand?”
I was about to answer that I didn’t really understand anything about it, but then the most peculiar thing happened. He sprang to his feet like something had bitten him. The chair tumbled backward and he darted across the kitchen.
“What on earth?” My mother’s chair screeched against the floor.
Jack lunged at the kitchen sink and shot out his hand. I thought he was going to punch through the window, but instead he grabbed the jar of honey from the sill. When he looked at me again, his eyes were red and bulging.
“Where did this come from?”