A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 (10 page)

26. G.

Morning is definitely a better time for jogging than afternoon.
Still hot—don’t get me wrong—but tolerable. Kind of like a June afternoon in
Ohio, except without the humidity. I was enjoying my run, too, which is
something I never thought I would say.

I rounded the corner and saw a lone figure walking down the
sidewalk. During this time of morning, most folks were at work, and those who
ran before
work were
already home taking a shower. It
wasn’t a complete surprise to see someone out walking in the morning, though it
was a surprise to see that this someone was Melody. I came up next to her and
slowed to match her pace.

“Hey,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

“Hey!” She seemed genuinely glad to see me. “I didn’t know
you ran.”

“I just started up again a couple of weeks ago,” I said. “I
need to get in shape before ROTC starts in the fall, and I have all this energy
that I don’t know what to do with, so I decided to stop putting off the
inevitable. Weird thing though, I actually like it now. Like, I can’t get
enough.”

“Is that what they call the runner’s high?” she asked.

“I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s weird. I’m a book
worm, the quintessence of laziness, if you catch my drift. I
hate
PT – physical training—but since I
moved here, I have more energy than I know what to do with.”

“Growth spurt?”

“I hope not! I’m already 6’4”. I don’t want to become the
jolly green giant.”

The image made us both laugh. “So what’s going on with you?”
I asked, suddenly aware that I hardly knew her at all.

She was quiet for a moment. “A lot, you know, because of the
business with my brother’s ghost.
And maybe some interesting
side effects.
Other than that, not much.
Oh,
except Shelby won’t talk to me. But she’ll get over it.”

“Yeah, girls are like that, right?”

“I suppose,” she said. “I don’t really have any good female
friends except for Tara. I mean, I like Shelby and Brittney, but they aren’t
BFF’s or anything.”

“I don’t have any BFF’s either,” I said, shrugging my
shoulders and shaking my head. We both laughed.

“Hey, you want to come in and get a coffee with me? Usually
Sam walks with me in the mornings since he goes this way to work, but he didn’t
show.”

I shrugged. “Sure. I don’t drink coffee though, it’s nasty.”

She arched a brow. “That’s because you’ve never had French
Pressed coffee.”

We stood in line at Smitty’s for several minutes, and I
tried really hard to ignore the looks I was getting. Yeah, I was new in town,
yeah, I towered over everyone else in the shop, but that wasn’t what was going
through my mind – instead it was
I hope I
don’t stink like sweat
. I resisted the urge to try and catch a whiff of my
pits. If I stunk, then oh well. I was headed home to take a shower before work
anyways.

“Man, you must have a hole bored through the back of your
head by now,” Melody said, looking up at me and grinning.

“What do you mean?” I whipped my head around, paranoia about
my sweaty
self taking
over. I didn’t see anyone
behind me staring, except a random, not-half-bad looking chick sitting at a
table in the back.

“That girl back there is Tanya Griffin. She’s in our grade.
She’s been looking at you like dessert since we walked in here.”

I turned to look at Tanya over my shoulder. She gave me a
smile. I nodded and turned back to look at Melody who was laughing silently.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell Tara.”

“Tell Tara what?”

“That all your exercise has turned you into a person of
interest.”

I was dumbfounded. I looked down at my right arm and flexed.
Holy shit, I had muscles. And you could actually see them. Hell
Naw
, when did that happen?

“I guess it’s all the push-ups,” I said.

“I guess so.”

Melody grabbed her coffee, and one for me too, and we sat
down at a table outside on the patio. The breeze felt good, and the coffee,
surprisingly, was not bitter. “You’re right,” I said. “This isn’t terrible.”

“See? It’s the paper filters that make coffee bitter. French
Pressed coffee uses a fine wire mesh instead of paper, and the coffee grounds
are only steeped for around four minutes or so, not long enough for the acids
to take over the flavor. It’s really the only civilized way to drink coffee.”

I took another sip.
“If you say so.”

“I do.”

My eyes wandered to a shop across the street. “
Muy
Thai,” I said. “That’s what they use in cage fighting.”

Melody followed my gaze, her expression unreadable.
“Yeah.
My brother used to take lessons there. He got really
buff doing it. I asked him why he chose such a violent martial art, and he said
he’d rather be the best weapon he could be than a victim. I thought that was
weird.”

I didn’t think that was weird at all. It made perfect sense
to me. “Did he say how much it cost?”

“No idea.”

“I think I’m going to check it out. The running and
calisthenics are fine, but I feel like I need something… deeper. Whatever, I
know I don’t make sense.”

“You’re a guy. All you really
gotta
say is
Me
man, me strong, ugh!”

I pounded my chest.
“Me
Muy
Thai!”
I said, and we both laughed. Seriously
though, I was going to check it out. After dealing with douche-bag at my last
school, I knew what being a victim was like. I didn’t care to repeat the
experience.
Ever.

27. TARA

Working in Esme’s shop definitely had its perks. Besides the
employee discount on pretty, shiny things, there was the large book selection
which I could use for research all day long when customers weren’t at the
register – and never have to buy a single book.

There were several books about my favorite psychic, Edgar
Cayce, but nothing about sigils or anything like that. At least I had my laptop
with me and Esme had a steady, if wired, Internet connection. So the last few
days I spent time looking up sigils and warding spells on the Internet, and I
found out a bunch of really interesting stuff – but none of that had anything
to do with what was happening with Melody and her brother’s ghost.

Something was niggling at the back of my brain, but I
couldn’t quite make it work. I gave up on it for a while and decided to tackle
everything from another direction… Who was Orla and why did we have to stop
her?

According to a popular baby naming website, Orla was a
girl’s name of Celtic origin, and it meant ‘golden queen’.” I looked through
the local phone book until my eyes were blurry, and then through any online
phone book website I could find for someone named Orla – either first or last
name – and came up empty. That is, until sweet little Myrtle York walked up to
the register with a basket full of candles and incense and decided to tell me
her life story. And when she started telling me about the vacation her husband
was going to take her on for their anniversary in a couple of weeks, my eyes
were beginning to glaze over and I almost missed it.

“And the riverboat is supposed to be huge! The
Golden Queen
, it has everything on
board, like a mini cruise ship, right down to a ballroom and a casino. It’s
going to be just lovely.”

I snapped out of my reverie just in time. As Myrtle was
grabbing her sack of treasures and about to walk out the door, I was able to
squeeze in one last question.

“That sounds really awesome, Myrtle! I hope you two have a
wonderful time. Where did you say the boat was again? I think that’s something
that my parents would really enjoy.”

The old lady smiled at me and gushed. “Oh, they would! And
it’s not far either – just up on the Red River on the Oklahoma and Texas
border. Just go to the Hawthorne Marina at Lake
Texoma
and you can’t miss it. If you tell your mother to hurry, she could get the sale
price!”

“I’ll tell her, thanks Myrtle. I’ll see you next time!” I
couldn’t resist grinning.
The
Golden Queen
on the Red River.
Hello, Othello, I think we
might finally have a clue we could use.

28. MELODY

“Sam’s avoiding me or something; he hasn’t texted me back
for
days
.”

“Did you make him mad?” Tara asked, busy poring over a road
map of the Texas and Oklahoma border.

“I don’t think so. I mean, I haven’t talked to him enough to
say anything that would make him mad. It’s weird.”

“I thought that’s what you wanted?
For him
to stop mooning over you?”

“I suppose. I mean, no more than he wanted you to stop
mooning over
him
. But that didn’t
mean I wanted him to just disappear altogether. He’s still my friend.”

“Uh-huh,” said Tara, clearly not paying attention to me at
all.

“And then I kissed him passionately and told him I wanted to
bear all of his children.
At one time.
Like a huge
litter of little Melody-Sam’s.”

“Uh-huh,” she said again, her finger tracing a line on the
map.

“Tara! You’re not even listening.”

“I am, I mean, I was. I’m just distracted. I’m trying to
figure out the best route for us to drive up to the
Golden Queen
to investigate.”

“Sure, we can drive there, but then what will we do when we
get there? The only one of us who is eighteen is Sam, and he’s not returning my
calls. And it’s a casino. Don’t we have to be at least eighteen to get in?”

“It’s also a hotel and resort. You take overnight river
cruises on it. I figure we could sneak on, or maybe we could
fake
a reservation. Or maybe your Gram would reserve a room
for us? No?”

“She’s pretty laid back as far as grandmother’s go, but
there’s no way she’s going to reserve a room for us on board a riverboat
casino
.”

“So just make the reservation in her name.”

“No way.
I’m not going to steal her
credit card!”

“You don’t have to steal it, silly. My mom does it all the
time – she makes the reservation to hold the room with a card, but when she
gets there, she pays cash so the charge never shows up. It’s easy. I can do it
if you want.”

It sounded easy. Clearly that meant there was a catch,
somewhere. “Okay, I guess. What do we have to do?”

“We need to call and make a reservation, and we have to um,
liberate the card from her wallet for a minute to do it. We’ll need that
verification code on the back to prove it’s not stolen.”

To prove it’s not
stolen
. I tried not to groan. But I figured that Gram would never notice,
because it’s not like she and Gramps ever went anywhere anymore, now that he
was in a wheelchair most of the time. And I really, really, wanted to know what
Orla, I mean the
Golden Queen
, was
all about. Matthew’s ghost had been insistent. And I just couldn’t let
something like that go. Stop Orla, he’d said. How the heck were we going to
stop a river boat?

“We can do it tomorrow,” I said, hating myself as I said it.
“She’ll be working in her garden most of the afternoon, and she’ll never
notice. When do we tell the boys?”

“As soon as G. gets here, I guess. This is so exciting!
First the garage, and now this – I feel like a character on
Pretty Little Liars
.”

G. showed up an hour later, and Tara and I had most of the
details planned out by then. I would drive, since I had the most dependable
car, and we each would say we were sleeping at the other person’s house. G. and
Sam would do the same thing, and then we would just drive up to Lake
Texoma
, the four of us together, check into the riverboat
hotel / casino, and case the joint. Tara thought we should bring along the
Spirit Board to see if Matthew had further instructions for us, and I thought
that sounded like a good idea. I mean, we really had no idea what we were looking
for, except that Orla was a ‘golden queen’, and we were supposed to stop her.

“That’s risky,” G. said after he heard our plan. “You have
to have the credit card with you to check into the room, which means you really
would have to steal it from your grandmother’s purse. And then even if we did
manage to get in, what are we looking for?”

“That’s what the Spirit Board is for,” said Tara brightly,
putting her hand on G.’s arm. “We’ll have another séance or whatever, right
there in the hotel room, so that Matthew can tell us what to do.”

“So now we take directions from a ghost?” G. looked
bothered.

“Matthew’s message on the recordings was pretty clear… and
there’s more.” Tara looked at me, silently asking permission to share the
contents of the cloth-bound package we found in the garage.

I shrugged. What did I have to lose at this point? We
weren’t getting anywhere on our own. Maybe having G.’s
eyes,
and Sam’s too—if he ever showed up—would help us figure it out.

G. looked from Tara to me and back to Tara again. “What do
you mean there’s more?”

“More what?” asked Sam as he strutted into the room,
backpack slung over his shoulder and a big soft drink cup in his hand.

“More to this whole ghost story… Melody and I found
something the other night.”

#

G. was looking at me and Tara as if we were naughty
children.

“I can’t go,” said Sam abruptly. “Although it sounds like it
might be an interesting time.”

My face stung, as if I had been slapped. “What do you mean
you can’t go?” I asked, voice rising just a little bit on the last syllable. I
could feel anger surge through me. First he dissed me through text and voice
mail, and now when I actually needed his help with something important he just
“can’t go”?

“Sorry, I’ve got a gig.
A big one.
It pays a thousand bucks, and with that I can finally buy my own car. I can’t
go with you, but you kids have fun.”

Tara and I were both staring at him, mouths agape, but G.
just bumped fists with him and grinned.

“The chick?” he asked Sam, eyebrows
raised
.

“Hell, yeah,” said Sam, grinning.

When did those two become such good friends?
“Fine.
You can’t go. G., you can come, right?”

G. looked from me to Tara, and then nodded slowly. “I don’t
want to go to jail though, so if we get busted, I’m hanging you two out to
dry.”

That made us all laugh, and the tension in the room eased a
bit. Although Sam’s betrayal stung, how could I expect him to turn down such a
juicy opportunity? What was wrong with me anyways? Wasn’t this what I wanted?
Sam to finally have an interest in someone else with breasts
besides me?