“Shut up,” Andy whispered, trying to hide behind the very tiny glass. It was becoming a night full of experiences she wasn’t used to. Alcohol. Praise.
Kerri signaled for another two shots in a gesture that seemed too vague and aimless to be of any consequence, but proved effective in under five seconds.
“So, apart from cleaning up the gene pool one asshole at a time, what are you up to?”
Andy shifted in her seat. “Well, not much. I hitchhiked for a while after I saw you at your alma mater. Took some jobs. What about you? I thought you’d be a biologist by now.”
“I am,” Kerri said. “We’re allowed to take off our lab coats on the Sabbath.” She waited for a reaction, then clarified. “Kidding. But I am a biologist; I got my BA two years ago. Not too glossy grades—the place where I did the internship sucked. And I had a falling-out with this guy who was supposed to tutor me during my senior year. You know, we were keeping it professional, but then we met at this crazy afterparty and we slept together, but we agreed it was nothing serious, so I slept with other guys, and he said it was okay, but then it wasn’t, and you know…Old story, right?”
Andy debated between saying “right” or just shrugging, and did neither.
“So you’re not doing any biology work now.”
“Well, no, not at the moment. I applied for some PhD programs, but I wasn’t lucky, and that bastard would not even give me a fake recommendation. And my GRE wasn’t dazzling either because…well, I can’t even remember taking it. So, anyway, I’m taking some time to put my shit together now. You know, ’cause a biologist’s got to eat. But soon I’ll start applying to colleges again, show my résumé around, get back on track.”
She idly inspected the half-full glass in her hand.
“Any time now.”
And she gulped down the rest of the drink.
—
The second place was fuller, dirtier, and louder, but Andy hardly gave any attention to these circumstances, except for the time Kerri tried to pull her onto the dance floor and she refused and stayed on the sofa, pretending to enjoy a rum and Coke while watching Kerri bounce and shake to Zulu electronica, orange hair splashing around like a Hawaiian volcano. And every time a guy approached her and spoke inaudible words at her, Andy would stiff her back up for a second, trying to mentally push the message in his direction: That’s Dr. Kerri to you, and no, she doesn’t want anything.
Then they sat together again and continued talking, and Kerri’s white laughter glowed under the UV lights.
“That was Mr. Magnus!” she went. “He was stealing his own boats for insurance fraud! Who would ever suspect him?”
“No, the boats were spring of ’seventy-seven!” Andy insisted. “Captain Al took us scuba diving in Crab Cove! The time we went kayaking it was about the sheep-smuggling case.”
Kerri contemplated the memory. “Shit, you’re right! The werewolf and his sheep-smuggling network!”
“Can you believe we were scared of that guy?”
“God, the lowlifes we’ve encountered. Who the fuck smuggles sheep?”
“No one now. They know better since we busted them.”
“Seriously, we made the crime rate around Blyton Hills drop like ninety percent. Pity we didn’t spend summer here in New York; the Bronx would look like Sesame Street by now.”
They waited for laughter to remit, and Andy considered it convenient to force another sip of rum into her body, bite her lip, and bring up another file.
“Debo?n Mansion and the Sleepy Lake monster.”
“Our last case,” Kerri said, after a quasi-unnoticeable pause. “God, someone should compile a casebook with all of these. ‘The Archives of the Blyton Summer Detective Club.’ Kids might like it.”
“You never would’ve read it,” Andy scoffed. “And by the way, what happened to you? Little Miss Not Ready to Confront the Sheep-Smuggling Werewolf Yet, Let’s Spend Another Week in the Library? And now you take over a dance floor all by yourself? And what happened to your glasses?”
“Okay, okay,” Kerri placated her, resting a brown suede boot on the seat opposite as she leaned back and articulated her defense. “One, contact lenses. And two…Well, college changed me.”
“But college was supposed to be a bookworm paradise!”
“God, you beautiful naive thing.” She drank, with Andy rendered helpless by that line. Then she added, slapping her knee, “What can I say? I changed.”
“We all did,” Andy agreed.
For a minute, silence somehow nudged itself into the deafening dance beat.
“I should have called you after Peter,” Andy said.
Kerri took a very obvious pause this time. Then she raised the bottle. “Fuck it. World’s for the living.”
And she finished off her drink, while Andy struggled to find meaning in that abstruse carpe diem.
—
The third place they hit felt even more crammed than the club, not much tidier, and surprisingly quiet. It was Kerri’s apartment.
As soon as Kerri unlocked the door, a bluish dash of a dog poured over them like a roomful of Marx Brothers.
“Hey! Look who wants to go to the bathroom!” she greeted. “I was talking about me, actually. Make way!”
She sneaked through a side door while Andy stared at the excited blue-gray hunting dog clambering up her leg.
“This…Is this Roger?”
“You’ve been out of the loop too long,” Kerri said offscreen. “That is Roger’s son Tim.”
Tim, 3 according to the Hollis family’s records, reacts to his name by standing down, as alert as his drooping ears manage to indicate, then seems to order himself “at ease” and lets his mouth open and his tongue unfold, panting proudly.
Even to Andy’s trained eye, Tim was the spitting image of Roger, the son of George and grandson of Sean. Sean, of Blyton Summer Detective Club fame, had died years ago in Portland, but he had been already a grandfather in the time he used to accompany the children in their adventures—the one grown-up on the team, founder of a lineage. All of them the same shade of blue gray, somewhat undersized for their breed standards, and maddeningly energetic.
“They all come through the male line?”
“Nope. George was a female, remember?”
A toilet flushed, and Tim tracked down his leash, ready to offer it to Kerri as she exited the coffin bathroom.
“My mom spoils them too much. I adopted Tim the last time I was home in Portland to teach him some discipline.” She attached the leash to his collar. “Gotta pop downstairs. Make yourself comfortable. There’s a bottle of vodka somewhere.”
“I’m fine.”