“Voulez-vous plus de café?” she asked, stumbling over the pronunciation.
He stared at her in confused alarm, which was understandable since she’d just spouted gibberish. “What?”
Charlie shook her head, feeling ridiculous. “Nothing.”
“We better go look at your car,” he said, taking a deep swallow from his mug.
She bit her lip. “Okay. Yeah.”
* * *
Vince drove a white van, rusty parts covered with house paint. It was easily as old as Charlie’s car and equally likely to give up the ghost at an inconvenient moment, although it hadn’t so far. She swung herself up into the passenger seat. An old Dunkin’ foam coffee cup rested in the center console, next to a phone charger with the prepaid phone he always used plugged in and a yellowed paperback entitled Cry of Evil with a lady on the cover holding a gun in a sexy but unlikely position. A tree-shaped air freshener hung from the mirror, only adding a layer of lemon oil to the aggressively bleach, vinegar, and Lysol smell of the back.
Vince’s gaze was on the road. Charlie studied his profile. His jawline. His hands on the wheel.
“Last night,” she said. “I think I saw a dead body.”
He glanced at her. “Is that what you and your sister were arguing about?”
“We weren’t—” she started, then stopped herself. “Posey just needs someone she can shout at. She’s wired from all the caffeine, irritated from not enough sleep. And there was a video of kids breaking into a hospital that bothered her.”
Vince didn’t look as though he entirely believed her. “Where did you see the body?”
“On my way home.”
He glanced at her, frowned. “Walking?”
“I was fine,” she said as he pulled into the empty parking lot of the bar. “It was just weird. I never saw anyone dead before.”
He must see bodies all the time, at his work. But he didn’t try to one-up her by pointing that out.
He didn’t tell her that she shouldn’t have been out alone or try to make her promise that she wouldn’t do it again either. He never told her how to act, or what to wear—which was, for the record, an extremely boring black v-neck t-shirt, black jeans, and checkerboard Vans—and that was good, of course. But there was a part of her that kept wanting to squabble. Like Posey, maybe she needed someone to yell at. Maybe she wanted to be yelled at.
Charlie tried to swallow the impulse.
She turned to sit with the door open, letting her legs dangle out of the van as Vince opened up the hood of her Corolla. He started poking at the insides, then went around to try to turn the car on. It didn’t so much as shudder.
“Can you tell what’s wrong?”
“Starter, I think,” he said, frowning.
It made her twitchy to sit by and watch, even though she knew next to nothing about cars. “You need me to do anything?”
He shook his head. “Not at the moment.”
She watched him work, the bend of his body. The sureness of his hands. And the way he seemed to defy the sunlight, casting nothing on the ground.
Charlie had known a local girl who’d sold her shadow. She’d been a pole dancer, over at what locals unkindly referred to as the Whately Ballet. She finished her shift around the same time as Charlie, so they ran into each other sometimes at the few eateries open all night.
“He paid me five grand,” Linda had confided in a whisper, her expression hard to read. “And it’s not like I was using it.”
“Who paid?” Charlie had asked, taking a bite of very oily fried eggs.
“I’d never seen the guy before. Bought a lap dance, and that’s when he made the offer. At first I laughed, but he was serious. Said there was someone who wanted a shadow just like mine.”
The diner had been dimly lit and Linda was sitting. From that angle, it hadn’t been obvious anything was missing.
“Do you notice that it’s gone?” Charlie had asked, frowning at the blurred edges of her own shadow.
Linda had taken a slug of her coffee. “You know when there’s a word and you feel like it’s on the tip of your tongue? It’s like that. There was something inside me that isn’t anymore, but I don’t know what. I’m not sure I miss it, but I feel like I should.”
Every time she thought of the conversation, it made her wonder if it was how Vince felt too. But when she’d asked him about it, he’d told her he couldn’t remember what it had been like before. And when she’d asked him if he wanted a new shadow, he said he didn’t need one.
Charlie picked up her burner phone and scrolled through the local news, looking for some mention of a body found in Easthampton. Nothing, even though the local crime beat at the paper was so sleepy that shoplifting and drunk students got reported. Who was the dead guy? And had he really stolen a book from Lionel Salt?
That rich bastard’s name stood at the top of lists of donors to museums and charities and hot chocolate runs. Kids swapped stories of seeing Salt’s car creeping along different roads—a matte black and silver Rolls-Royce Phantom Mansory Conquistador—a car whose name guys in high school had delighted in saying in its entirety so often that it lodged in the head like an earwormed song.
But most people hadn’t been inside Salt’s horror show of a house or watched him poison someone in the hopes of stealing a quickened shadow. If there were a different set of rules for the rich, Lionel Salt operated without rules at all. Just thinking about him made Charlie nervous.
She turned her mind back to the dead guy. He’d ordered bourbon and paid with a card. Which meant there’d be a receipt in Odette’s office with his name on it. If she knew who he was, she’d be able to ask around. Find out more about what he thought he’d been doing.
Her phone buzzed, and it took her a moment to realize it was her burner. Adam. We haven’t talked payment.
This was why Adam needed Balthazar as a go-between, not just for anonymity, but because Balthazar would have nailed down the cash immediately.
Since she wasn’t planning on paying him anyway, she could have promised any amount. But she figured she’d take the opportunity to find out just how much bliss he’d been rolling. Can we work something out? she texted.
The reply came quickly. What kind of connections do you have?
Charlie frowned. She’d expected him to bring up bliss, not whatever this was about. I know people, she wrote.
He took a moment to respond, and when he did it was a long message: I have something that I need to move Somehting big but I don’t want anyone to know it’s me making the deal. Act like its you and ill get your thing for free.
A job like the one she was offering could have gotten him a grand, easy. Twice that, if the client was desperate. What could Adam have that he needed to hide? He was, by all accounts, not a particularly skilled thief. And he had Balthazar to move things for him.
Sure, she wrote. Who are you making the deal with?
He typed his message back fast. All you’ll have to do is talk on the hotel phone. I’ll tell you what to say.
Charlie noticed Vince watching her and shoved her phone guiltily into her pocket. “How did you learn about cars?”
“I told you my grandfather was strict, right?” Vince said, his attention returning to the guts of the Corolla. “He taught me lots of stuff. He believed in the improving power of work, no matter how old you were. He didn’t believe in excuses. And he had a limo that broke down sometimes.”
“So he was a livery driver?” Charlie asked. “He let you ride in the back sometimes?”
He shrugged. “Dropped me off the first day of high school. Everyone stared at me like I was somebody.”
She tried to picture him back then. Had he been a gangly kid who ate two lunches and never filled out? The boy who sat in the back of the class and read comics? The track star? Nothing fit.