She looked. And looked. Five seconds in, his nerves started to jangle. Does she think I’m going to kill and bury her? Which is why we’re in a cemetery? That would be disastrous.
“This is—” She stopped, then started again. “It almost looks like you brought a lot of cleaning supplies and brushes and paint remover and garbage bags and the like. To my dad’s grave. Which was defiled. And which no one’s had a chance to clean up.”
He looked at her. Well. Tried. She was still staring into his trunk. “You said, ‘We’re gonna have to clean this up.’”
Her pale cheeks were flushed. “I didn’t mean you and I should clean it up. I meant the Drakes.”
You overstepped. Again. “Oh.”
She must have seen something in his expression because she reached out at once and seized his hand, then stared up into his face. This was startling and wonderful. She had never touched him outside of a handshake; she had never looked at him so intently. “You set up another visit with my uncle where he’s likely to insult you, and then you arranged to meet me here so we’d have time to clean up my father’s grave so my little brothers and cousins wouldn’t see it.”
“Yes. But I see now that—”
Her small hand clamped down on his, and he swallowed a yelp. Yeow! Stronger than she looks. “This is, no shit, one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me.”
Oh, thank God. “It is? Really?” He could hear the delight in his tone and resigned himself to constantly making an ass of himself whenever he was in Angela Drake’s presence. “I mean, that’s nice. That you like my idea. And don’t feel I exceeded boundaries.”
“You’re not exceeding anything, I promise.” She paused. “Uh, I’ll rephrase.”
“And after, if you like, I was thinking we could have a picnic. If you want.” If you don’t think I’m a presumptuous freak with lustful designs on your body. Only one of those things is true.
Her grin was sunshine bright, and almost as warm. “Jason, I would love that. Which is weird. But I don’t give a shit. Also, I swear more when I’m nervous.”
“I make you nervous?” That came out pretty neutral. At least he didn’t say “I make youuuuu nervous????” with an accompanying flabbergasted expression.
“You, cemeteries in general, pending trips to prison . . . y’know, the usual.” She released his hand and he massaged the feeling back into his fingers when she wasn’t looking. She rummaged around in the trunk and brought out brushes, a pair of bright yellow dishwashing gloves, and one of the buckets. “Well, then. Let’s get to it. Also I might use one of those big Hefty bags as a smock.”
She did.
It was adorable.
THIRTY-FOUR
Ninety minutes later and the stone, if not good as new, looked a lot better. The gouges couldn’t be fixed, but you could read Donald’s name. It no longer looked like a nutjob had gone to town on it, just that time was doing some aggressive damage. That was more than Angela thought two people could get done in under two hours. Especially when one of the two was trying not to stare at the other one’s butt in jeans.
That. Ass. It’s not fair, it’s really not.
They cleaned up and packed everything back in Jason’s trunk. He went around to the back seat and pulled out a light green backpack with tan accents; there was a wine bottle strapped to one side and a rolled-up tan blanket on the other. He slung it over one shoulder, smiled at her, and said, “Shall we?”
Damned right. She was famished. Jack had slept late, but when he didn’t make a big family breakfast, she tended not to bother, and if that occasionally led to her wolfing down a bowl of dry cereal at her desk (or wet cereal over the sink), that was her business. Even if she’d shown up with a full stomach, scrubbing a tombstone for ninety minutes would kindle anyone’s appetite. Probably. Maybe a normal person would lose their appetite after scrubbing the graffiti off their dad’s gravestone. She honestly had no idea; “normal” was beyond any of them.
But now what? Was this a date? Or just a relaxing post–tombstone cleaning ritual between colleagues who weren’t actually colleagues? Maybe he had planned to have an alfresco lunch all along and invited her to be polite. They weren’t holding hands. But it wasn’t uncomfortable, either; they were walking—strolling?—together. Her controlling nature was baffled: It couldn’t qualify what was going on, so she kept getting more and more confused. And the longer they were quiet, the harder it got to say something.
Luckily a small child had been struck by lightning a hundred years ago; it was the perfect icebreaker. She pointed out the statue of poor Inez Clarke, murdered by Mother Nature at age six. Her heartbroken parents had commissioned a statue of her exact likeness and sealed it in a glass box on the grounds. The thing was more than a century old and looked like it had been up less than a year.
“Your standard sad story,” Angela said. “Except.”
Jason smiled. “Always an ‘except.’”
“Except when there isn’t an except. Luckily that’s not the case this time. Except they say that when it’s a stormy night, she leaves.”
“‘Leaves’?” Jason was now standing in front of the glass box encasing the statue, one hand holding the picnic backpack, the other fiddling absently with a belt loop. “What, she takes her show on the road? Runs away? Teleports? Goes on strike?”
“Dunno. At least one guard quit over it. He was doing his walk-around in a rainstorm at midnight—”
“Have you ever noticed these stories never take place in bright sunshine at 10:00 a.m.?
“Quiet, you. Anyway, when he got to her box, it was empty. He quit on the spot. Left the cemetery, never even went back to the security office. Just walked out and never went back.”
“He went home without his car?”
“Jeez, Jason, I didn’t take down the incident report. Anyway, the next day the statue was back like it never left.”
“Possibly because it hadn’t,” Jason said dryly.
“And the legend grew,” Angela finished. “I’ll take a vanishing statue over the friggin’ creepy Eternal Silence ghoul in green. Who wants to see their own upcoming death? Bad enough most of us see the ones we already endured. ‘Oh, great, look at that. I’ve drowned twice, but apparently I’m due to be trampled by elephants this time around.’ Blech!”
He seemed to falter a bit, but perhaps that was because they’d gotten to the footbridge over Lake Willowmere to Burnham Island. Even the most sedate walkers sounded like horses galloping across the small wooden bridge.
He cleared his throat. Angela tried to think of a single instance when someone cleared their throat and it wasn’t to broach a difficult subject. Maybe the last time Jordan had a head cold . . . “Speaking of past lives, and endurance, you should know I’ve been diagnosed with dysthymia. It’s—”
“I know what it is.” She’d looked it up after Leah told her how to spell it. To her credit, Leah hadn’t asked questions. Just said, “D-Y-S-T-H-Y-M-I-A,” from her side of the bathroom door. (Reason #262 to never ever gestate: You had to pee every sixteen seconds.)
“Oh. Well.” He paused and she had the sense he was mentally squaring his shoulders. “You should know I take medication for it, I’m currently on—”
“Sorry to interrupt. Again, I mean. But it’s fine. And—don’t get mad—but I already—don’t be upset, please, but the thing is, I already knew about your depression. Dysthymia.”
He stared at her. “How could y— Leah Nazir.” He frowned as he worked it out. Hopefully it was a frown of concentration as opposed to a “I never want to see you again” scowl. “She shakes my hand every time she sees me. She probably knows my life history.”
“All seven of them. That was a guess, by the way. She didn’t say seven. I don’t know how many lives you’ve had. It’s none of my business.”
“But you’ve got the same ability.”
“No. I have a sense of your past, but not the details. And I didn’t want to pry. I wasn’t prying,” she rushed to assure him. “She just came out with it.”
“When?”
“The day after she met you.”