“Remy?” She thought about waving a hand in his face or snapping her fingers. “Mr. Hackett?”
He took a deep, gulping breath, then continued with their conversation as if nothing had happened. “As I was saying before we were interrupted, because you see, I hadn’t actually finished my sentence, and what I meant to say was that I don’t believe in ghosts per se, but I’m sure in some metaphysical sense there’s always the possibility that they coexist with us on some alternate plane—” He stopped abruptly and stared at Max.
She stared back at him with eyes that felt as round as saucers. “What are you talking about?”
Remy laughed. A self-conscious, artificial sound that raised goose bumps on her arms. “Oh, nothing. Silly.”
Whatever. He was a strange one. “I’ll clean up, then bring you a cup of coffee,” she offered.
“Yes. Good idea.”
He turned on his heel and left the room.
She could only stare after him.
“Catching flies?” Cameron blew in her ear.
She snapped her mouth shut, then she shook her head back and forth. “That was undoubtedly the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. And I’ve seen a helluva lot.”
“He told a lie,” Cameron whispered.
She blew a rude noise through her lips. “About not believing in ghosts? Yeah, right.”
“He definitely believes.”
“Well, I suppose seeing a ghost, especially one as scary as you, is enough to make anyone a little wonky.”
“You don’t get it. He couldn’t see me. I didn’t make him wonky. It was the lie.”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“It’s his Achilles Heel, Maxi. Milk it for all it’s worth.” With that, he left, in a swirl of peppermint, coffee, and sudden silence.
Max tipped her head, considering. Cameron was right. They’d caught Remy in a lie. Even if it was a strange, incomprehensible lie, one not even worth telling in the first place.
But just how did Cameron expect her to milk it for all it was worth?
“Yeah right, make a mess and leave me to clean it up.” She forgot to yell at him for calling her Maxi.
Chapter Eleven
Lilah Bloom, nail technician extraordinaire, sat on a raised, red brick dais in the window of the Hair Hunters Salon on Main Street, three blocks down from Billy Joe’s Western Round Up. In her early thirties, Lilah was a throwback to an earlier time. Her red hair beehived to the amazing height of at least six inches, purple and black tortoise shell glasses framed her eyes with sixties-era cat’s-eye rims, and her hot pink plastic earrings curlicued to her shoulders. She looked like fallout from a nuclear bomb scare. Sitting across from her, Max was afraid she’d either get radiation poisoning or die from overexposure to polish remover.
Lilah buffed Max’s thumbnail with stubby, plump fingers painted a sparkly fluorescent pink as if Minnie Mouse had gone mad with a psychedelic nail job. “So you were a friend of Wendy’s?”
“Yes,” Max answered. It was six o’clock on Monday evening, and the seven stylist chairs in the salon were filled. The small shop resonated with the sound of blow dryers, laughter, and ringing phones. Perm solution polluted the air. A harried, young woman sat on a chair in the waiting area, hissing “no” at the small child beside her.
Seated next to the window and huddled over the manicurist’s table, with the cacophony around them acting almost as a cocoon, Max probed. “It’s just terrible what happened to her.”
Other than a slight raising of one plucked eyebrow, Lilah ignored the statement and tugged on Max’s fingers. “Relax. Just let your hand go limp. That’s better. You’ve never had your nails done before, have you?”
“No. But Wendy had beautiful nails. I know that doesn’t sound like a good reason for calling you, but—”
Lilah cut Max off. “Wendy could never relax her hands. She’d start talking, and before you knew it, her fingers were all tensed up. I had to shake her.”
Max quit trying to explain why she was there. Lilah didn’t care. “What did she talk about that got her so upset?”
“Work, home, you name it. She hated her marriage. She hated her job. I’m a real good listener. I think I was like her mother-confessor or something.” Lilah filed and shaped Max’s blunt nails, squaring them off. “I felt sorry for her, you know. She didn’t have any friends, like that husband kept a leash on her or something, always approving and disapproving whatever she did.”
So that’s how Hal had “taken care” of her. Max felt Wendy’s tears in the back of her throat. Wendy’s best friend was a manicurist she saw for an hour every other week. It was damn sad. “Sounds like you didn’t like her husband.”