Endless (5 page)

Jenny stepped carefully inside, approaching in his peripheral so she wouldn’t freak him out. He didn’t seem to notice her, and as she came level with the piano bench, she saw why. His eyes were closed. He was obviously playing by feel, by instinct, by memory. She could see the emotion in his face. The tension.

She was so mesmerized that she didn’t notice the tape measure sliding off the notebook. Didn’t notice anything but the guy and the music until the metal casing of the tape measure hit the floor with a clatter.

She froze as the music stopped, the boy turning to her with something raw and unnameable in his eyes.

“I’m … I’m sorry,” Jenny stuttered, bending to pick up the tape measure.

When she stood up, he was looking at her, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.

“Who are you? And what are you doing in my room?”

“I’m Jenny.” She stepped toward him, holding out her gloved hand. “Jenny Kramer. My dad’s the architect your mom hired to renovate the house. I mean, I’m assuming that’s your mom downstairs. Clare?”

He ignored her hand and the question. After a few seconds, she let her arm drop, resisting the urge to fill the silence with mindless chatter. Instead, she took advantage of the opportunity to get a good look at him.

His hair was longer on one side than the other. It fell across his forehead and one eye, though she could see the silver ring glinting in his eyebrow. He had one in his lip, too, but it might have been a clip-on. His eyes, cool and steely blue, studied her like she was a puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit with the rest laid out on the table.

“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing in my room,” he finally said, his voice flat and emotionless.

This was not a guy looking for a friend.

“I need to measure,” Jenny said, a hint of defensiveness creeping into her voice. “For my dad. I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Well, you are.” His voice was petulant. Like Thomas, the four-year-old Jenny sometimes babysat, when she told him he had to take a bath.

“I am what?”

“Bothering me.”

Jenny felt her face flush with embarrassment. “Fine. I’ll make it quick, then.”

She measured the room around the mess, wondering if it was her imagination that she could feel his eyes on her. A rush of indignant anger flowed through her veins as she moved from corner to corner, stepping around the dirty clothes. Her inner tirade kept her company as she recorded the numbers in silence.

What a jerk. She hated guys who tried to be all cool and distant, like it made them intriguing instead of making them an asshole.
Newsflash!
She wanted to scream at him.
You’re not cool. You’re not mysteriously emo. You’re just a jerk who doesn’t have the good manners to be polite to someone you don’t even know.

By the time she’d recorded all the measurements and lifted the camera to take the pictures, her hands were shaking so badly she wasn’t even sure the photos would come out right. She just wanted to get out of there. She took the pictures as fast as she could before picking up the notebook and tape measure and heading for the door. She wondered if he’d say something as she left. “Goodbye”? “Thanks for nothing”?

But he didn’t say a thing, and she left the room the way she’d entered it. In silence.

Jenny was still a little rattled when they left the Daulton house an hour later. It was stupid. Ben Daulton was just a guy. Or, if you wanted to get specific, a jerk. She’d just avoid him next time.

Her dad talked about the project all the way home, about its potential and the challenge of the time line and the budget. These were the projects he liked best, the ones that forced him to “think outside the box” and “be innovative.” He talked about Clare, too, and how she didn’t know anyone and needed to find a temporary job to help make ends meet until she could sell the house. Jenny tried to listen, nodding and smiling in all the right places, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of rejection from her meeting with Ben.

They reached home in time for Jenny to wrap her paintings before her shift at Books. She had to have everything to the gallery that was hosting the Central Valley Young Artists Show by seven p.m. Prepping the canvases for transport now meant that later she could just load them up and go.

She wasn’t surprised to find the paint slightly tacky where the figure had been added to each painting. Acrylics took only a few hours to dry, but longer to really set. She wrapped them carefully, hoping the paint wouldn’t smudge en route. She may not have meant for the man to be there, but now that he was, better to make it look like she’d planned it that way.

Once the canvases were wrapped, Jenny headed to Books. She took the Honda her dad had bought secondhand when she’d finally passed her road test last year and forced herself not to speed on the way to the store. Samuel was forgiving when they were late, but Jenny still liked to be on time.

She made her way through the outskirts of town and was almost to Main Street when she looked in the rearview mirror and realized the black car behind her had been following her almost since she’d pulled out of her driveway. She had a flash of paranoia as she pulled into the tiny lot behind the store, but the car passed by without stopping. She felt stupid when she saw the moon symbol on the driver’s-side door and realized it was one of the cars from the retreat center on the mountain.

She found a parking spot and scanned the lot for Tiffany’s car, not surprised when she didn’t find it, even though Jenny knew they were on the schedule to work together. Tiffany was always late.

Jenny didn’t bother locking the car door. There was virtually no crime in Stony Creek. It was a big deal if a teenager stole a nail polish from Rite Aid.

She entered the store through the back, making her way around the towers of books and miscellaneous gift items stacked in boxes in the storeroom. Samuel Thompson, the owner of the store, was unloading paperbacks onto a rolling cart. Jenny waved at him as she headed for the employee break room.

“Hey, Sam. Has it been busy?”

His brown eyes were warm as he smiled. “Not too bad today, Jenny. I missed you this morning, though.”

She laughed, knowing he was referring to all the people on their way to Saturday afternoon birthday parties who took advantage of the store’s free gift-wrapping policy. Sam was terrible at wrapping.

“I’m sure you did fine,” she said, hanging her bag on a hook in the break room.

“Don’t be so sure,” he grinned. His accent, still thoroughly Jamaican after twenty years in the US, was like warm syrup on a Saturday morning.

“Where do you want me today?” she asked.

He started breaking down the box, now empty. “I’m putting you and Tiffany in the cafe.”

“Both of us?” Usually only one of them worked the cafe at a time.

He nodded. “That local author is coming in for a signing. The one who wrote the book about the hauntings?”

“Oh, right … ” Jenny tried to remember the book and couldn’t.

“Mavis will be out for a while,” Samuel continued, “so Joe will work the register, you and Tiffany work the cafe, and I’ll work the author.” He winked. “If it gets too busy up front, I’ll move one of you from the cafe.”

“Is Mavis okay?” Jenny asked. Mavis Lupinski was nearly seventy years old and had been working at Books since before Samuel bought it in 2001.

Samuel shook his head. “Death in the family.”

“Oh, no,” Jenny said. “When will she be back?”

“I don’t know, but I may need someone to help out in the meantime.”

Jenny remembered Clare, trying not to think of her unpleasant son. “I think I might know someone. I think she wants something temporary, too, so it could be perfect.”

Sam ran a box cutter through the tape on a new box before looking up. “Have her call me, will you?”

She smiled. “Yep. I’ll go make sure the cafe’s ready.”

She pushed through the door leading to the store. The incident with Ben faded a little as she breathed in the scent of ink on paper and the vanilla candles Samuel burned whenever the store was open. She was truly comfortable, truly herself, in exactly three places: at Books and More, in front of her easel, and at the graveyard.

All of which probably made her crazier than any of the other crazy stuff about her.

Still, Books was like a second home. A first home, really, because here she could talk about her art or be moody and quiet and no one bothered her about it. No one looked at her with worried eyes.

She made her way around the shelves of books and reading tables, lifting a hand to Joe, already at the front counter. No one was working the cafe when she got there, which wasn’t surprising. It wasn’t unusual for Samuel to work the cafe, become bored when there were no customers for five minutes, and wander to the storeroom to unpack or to the office to run numbers, leaving the cafe totally unattended. No one really cared. Books was a small town store. If someone wanted coffee and no one was there, they’d give a shout and someone would show up. Eventually.

Jenny plucked a clean apron off one of the hooks on the cafe wall. She was wiping down the counters and refilling the sugar and cream containers when Tiffany rushed in.

“Oh, my God!” she said, grabbing an apron. “My mom is killing me. I told her I needed the car today, like I always do when I’m on the schedule, but she swore I didn’t. I had to wait for her to get back from Acton and then practically risk my life getting here on time.”

“You should have called me,” Jenny said, putting the bag of sugar back on the shelf. “I could have picked you up on my way in.”

“She said she’d be back at one. You know how she is.” Tiffany rolled her eyes. “By the time I knew she was going to be late, I figured you’d already left.” She put her hands on her hips. “So what are we doing?”

“I’m refilling. Samuel says there’s going to be a crowd later for some signing. You want to wipe down the tables and stuff?”

“Sure.”

Tiffany picked up a rag and took it to the sink, rinsing it out before moving to the counter. She wiped it down while Jenny refilled the cream, their silence changing into one of the weird ones where Jenny knew Tiffany was trying to decide whether or not to say something. It didn’t happen very often. Tiffany was pretty much the only person Jenny considered a friend. But there were still things Tiffany didn’t know. Still things Jenny kept close and secret.

It was an improvement. Until she’d gotten to know Tiffany at Books, Jenny’s best friend had been her art. She’d been surprised to find out that she and Tiffany had that in common, though Tiffany was more into digital media than fine art. A lot of stuff had surprised her about Tiffany. The more Jenny got to know her, the more she couldn’t understand why Tiffany hung out with people like Amber and Gary. But when she finally got the guts to mention it, Tiffany just laughed nervously and said she’d known them forever.

She didn’t seem to like them much, though, and by the time spring turned into summer, Tiffany spent more time with Jenny than she did with Amber. Mostly they hung out at the mall, went to lunch in town, or watched movies at Tiffany’s house. But it was nice, having someone to call a friend.

“So … ” Tiffany finally said, wiping at the same place she’d been wiping for the last five minutes.

“Uh-huh?” Jenny prompted, keeping her eyes on the coffee pot like it wouldn’t make coffee if she didn’t watch it.

“Last night was weird, right?”

Jenny shrugged. “It was just a game.”

“Did you read the piece of paper?”

Jenny nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well?” Tiffany had stopped moving.

“Well what?”

Tiffany sighed. “Come on, Jen. You know what. It was freaky.”

Jenny turned to her. “It was just a game.”

Tiffany’s eyes met hers. “I saw it happen. I know those guys can be jerks, but I don’t think they were fooling around. They seemed scared when the pointer started moving. Scared and shocked.”

Jenny crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the counter. “Look, I don’t know what you want me to say about it. Is it weird that some kind of spirit contacted you guys through the Ouija board? Yes. Do I know what it was or why it said what it did? No.”

Tiffany set the rag down. “Okay, but what happened when you … you know, when you blacked out or whatever?”

“I didn’t black out,” Jenny insisted.

“Then what was it?”

Jenny took a deep breath, pulling her eyes from Tiffany’s, looking at the wall instead as she tried to remember, to take herself back to the dark space in which she’d felt someone reaching for her, sending her a message.

“I don’t know. It’s like I was there with you guys, and then I was sort of … floating, I guess.”

“Floating?”

Jenny shook her head. “That’s not the right word. It’s like I was in another place. A dark place.”

“Could you hear us talking? Did you know a message was coming through the board?” Tiffany prompted.

“I heard Amber ask the first couple of questions. After that, it was almost like being in a dream, except I felt like someone was there, trying to tell me something.”

“Like what?”

Jenny shrugged. “I don’t know. I couldn’t quite grab onto it.”