Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (147 page)

He nodded and sat down, dropping the cigarette and grabbing his head with both hands.

Seafood crepes were on the menu and I found myself wishing that I was the one cooking them instead of being stuck in a fridge with a ghost. I went out to the tank in the corner of the kitchen and started fishing out the lobsters.

“You going to serve lobster at your place?” he said across from me, his voice calm now. “You are going to have your own place one day, right?”

“Maybe,” I whispered.

“I bet it’ll be nice.”

“I’d like it to be a hole in the wall type of place with really good food and beer. A restaurant that people like to go to on a regular basis.”

“Yeah, those are the best,” he said. “Neighborhood joints. Sarah and I had a little place we’d go to on Second Avenue. Two Little Red Hens. It felt like home.”

I thought about the power of food. How sometimes it was so much more than sustenance, how the smells and tastes and feelings of it made memories. The burgers at Pilot Butte would always remind me of Jesse and chocolate chip cookies coming out of the oven would forever remind me of my mom. Food, especially food combined with love, was a force as strong as any on earth, binding us to places and people.

“I never went back to that place again. I never did so many things again.” Modine looked down at the floor. “The year after she died, I barely functioned. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I’d just roam the streets all day and night looking for him. It was almost like I was already a ghost.”

I wondered if he was going to tell me about his suicide.

He let out a sigh and shook his head.

“I was a shell. The heart attack just sealed the deal.”

I dropped the scallops into the crate and stared at him for a moment, not sure what to say.

“For most people, it’s a cliché, that line about someone being everything,” he continued. “But for me it was true. She
was
my whole world. And when she died, my world ended right there and then. I lingered for a while longer, but it was just a formality. The writing was on the wall. I was as dead as she was. I couldn’t live without her.”

“So, it was a heart attack, huh?” I said, trying to work it in casually and remove any trace of disbelief from my voice.

“Yeah, that was the official cause of death. Like I already told you, bad hearts run in my family. But her murder sped up my fate. I was just 37.”

“Well, I want you to know that I believe you. About the killer, I mean.”

I was about to tell him about the tattoo when the door opened.

“Hey, Abby,” Chad Barker said. “We need you out here now.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

“And we’re running low on butter.”

“We’re going to have to continue this later,” I said after the chef had left.

Modine nodded his head slightly, scratching under his collar.

CHAPTER 28

“I wasn’t sure you’d show,” I said, throwing up a brick. “Thought you might be too scared.”

“Your shooting is pretty scary, Craigers. I’ll give you that.”

I ran up and gave him a long hug anyway.

Twenty minutes later Jesse hadn’t broken a sweat and the only thing I had come close to breaking was the backboard.

“Let’s try that again, shall we?” he said, tossing back the ball after I had put up yet another air ball. “You’re clearly off your game. Not that on your best day your game is anything to write home about. So I’m going to reach out to you here. Let’s forget the score. All you gotta do for the win is hit this last shot. Right here, right now. One basket and you take it all.”

Normally I would have told him to take his deal and shove it, that I wasn’t a charity case. But while my fitness level was on the rebound, my shooting had been atrocious all night. Like in other areas of my life, I seemed to be gripping.

It was getting late and the janitor would be by any minute to kick me out and lock up.

“One basket and you’ll forget about those 28 points you have on me?”

“Yep. Just say the word.”

“Word,” I said, blowing past him and going up for a shot.

At that moment he usually would have reached back and floated up to swat away the ball with one of those long, skinny arms of his, but he let me take it. It hit nothing but net.

“Good game, Craigers.”

I walked over to the bleachers and grabbed a towel out of my bag.

“Hey, sorry I haven’t been around more,” he said.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ve been struggling a little though.”

“You mean in school?”

“That, and other stuff.”

“Well, I heard you wow them with your knowledge of Franz Ferdinand the other day. It didn’t seem like you were struggling then.”

“What? Oh, you mean Ferdinand Point. Wait, you were there in my class?”

“I’m like a river, Craigers,” he said. “I like to stay current. Besides, it smells so good sometimes that I just can’t stay away.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not my cooking that smells so good.”

“You’re just going through a bad patch. It happens. To normal people anyway. I don’t think your friend is normal. How does he chop at that speed and still have all his fingers? By the way, you know he has a crush on you, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “He also knows I have a boyfriend, but it doesn’t seem to matter.”

“He’ll get over you,” Jesse said, spinning the ball on his index finger. “I did.”

“Hey,” I said, knocking the ball out of his hand. “That’s not very nice.”

“I was just seeing if you were paying attention,” he said and smiled.

“I just don’t know why he lied,” I said after a while.

“Who?” Jesse went back to spinning. “Miguel?”

I wondered what would happen if someone walked in at that moment and saw the ball spinning there in midair.

“No, Modine,” I said. “Why he lied to me about his death. Telling me it was a heart attack, when the truth seems to be that he hanged himself.”

“He probably feels ashamed or is worried that you’d pass judgment on him.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Jesse was quiet for a moment, forgetting about the ball.

“You know, shame is a powerful thing,” he said. “Some stuff is hard to get past.”

I waited for more, but there wasn’t any.

“I see what you’re saying,” I said. “But I still wish he hadn’t lied. I’m trying to help the guy after all. And if anyone can relate to what he went through, I think it’s me. I remember that kind of pain. The darkness after you died was beyond anything. Beyond black. There’s no color, there’s nothing. Only pain.”

He stared at me and then smiled.

“Did I say something funny?”

“No, not really, but you said something good. You said you
remember
that kind of pain. For a while there it wasn’t a remembering kind of thing. You were living it.”

He dribbled toward me and suddenly stopped like he was going to shoot, but he let the ball roll off his fingers behind him and then hugged me hard.

“Last call,” came from the steel doors, the voice hollow and bouncing off the walls.

I slid into my sweatshirt and pulled up the hood as I walked quietly toward the door.

“Takes a lot of dedication to be out here by yourself like this on a cold winter’s night,” the janitor said. “You got a big game coming up or something?”

“No, just needed to unwind.”

“Video games work for me,” he said, twitching his thumbs at me. “Hey, watch the ice out there. It’s pretty nasty.”

“Stay warm,” I said.

A bitter gust blew into my face as I stepped out and looked up at the dark sky. Bright stars were above, twinkling in the cold night. I unlocked the Jeep and turned the key. Nothing happened. It finally started on the third try.

As I unrolled my window to say goodbye to Jesse, I saw out of the corner of my eye that he was in the seat next to me, playing with the radio.

“So you coming home with me tonight?” I said.

A goofy grin spread across his face.

“No, Craigers. You’re taken, remember?” He placed his hand on my knee. “I want to make sure you get home safe, is all. Let’s hit the road.”

We drove in silence as I navigated slowly out of the lot, bringing it down to a crawl when I entered the roundabout. The art sculpture in the middle was frozen solid, a glittery white sheen sticking to the metal.

 “God, this new stuff sucks,” he said, fiddling with the radio and flipping past a Lorde song that I really liked. “Where’s the classic rock station I used to listen to?”

“Gone. Now it’s Top 40.”

“This town, man. Like, it’s in the Stone Age. And I’m not talking
Queens
of the Stone Age.”

I laughed.

“Don’t go all
St. Anger
on me. I’ll do better next time. I’ll make you a special playlist, heavy on Lars. Maybe a little Megadeth.”

I pulled into the driveway.

“You know, Jesse, just because I have to remember the pain, it doesn’t mean I don’t feel the same way I always have. You’re in my heart. Forever.”

When I turned toward him, he wasn’t there anymore, but I hoped that he had heard me.

CHAPTER 29

For the next several days, I parked down the street from St. Matthew’s, watching the sun come up and waiting for the man with the tattoo to appear. I sat there wrapped in one of Kate’s old down jackets, studying for tests, reading chapters, and memorizing recipes as I kept an eye on the large wooden doors at the top of the stairs.

Every morning at precisely seven o’clock, Father Grady would shuffle out, stop, and look up toward the sky. He saw me on the second day and waved his bony arm until I waved back. From then on we maintained the ritual, me in the car and him by the doors, casting our separate nets.

But my efforts were in vain. The killer never showed. I was tired of frozen toes and tired of trying to study behind a steering wheel and tired of wasting time I could put to better use. I was plain tired. I wasn’t getting enough sleep and had nothing to show for it.

I needed a new plan. Sitting there, I briefly considered talking to Father Grady to see if he knew anything, but then thought better of it. I had a feeling that
Hey, Father, seen any killers hanging around lately?
wasn’t going to work.

Sometimes late at night I would go online and review the news stories and look at the video of the accident. But no matter how many times I went over the facts and the footage, nothing new jumped out at me.

With each passing day Charlie Modine’s mood grew darker, more depressed. I couldn’t blame him. I had warned him in the beginning that I wasn’t an investigator and now he had the proof. How was I going to dig up any evidence against the man with the tattoo if I couldn’t even find him?

“He’s gone,” he said, standing in a snowbank in back of the school restaurant when I was taking out some trash late one afternoon. “We’re both wasting our time here.”

Something told me he was wrong. I could feel the killer, his presence hovering in the air, in the chilly breeze that brushed through the trees. He was still out there, waiting. But waiting for what, I didn’t know.

“He’s still here,” I said. “I can feel it. I can feel him. Don’t you?”

He didn’t answer right away and I lifted up the large bin door and tossed in the bags. When I turned back around, he looked at me with mournful, faraway eyes.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said softly.

“We’ll find him.”

As Charlie Modine disappeared, I stood there a moment longer watching the light in the sky fade, taking in the earthy smells of the nearby woods. I closed my eyes and inhaled the coming of night, holding it tight in my lungs before releasing it out in a thin, foggy wisp.

“You can’t lose hope, Charlie.”

I said his name but I think I was talking to myself.

CHAPTER 30

I dropped by 10 Barrel on my way home to say hello to Ty. We shared a pizza and talked, mostly about Modine and how the killer had given me the slip.

“Maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you at culinary school and me here. Maybe instead of opening a pub, we should go into the private eye business. I could deal with the living. Of course, you would handle the dead. Sometimes, we could both work a case, you know, when it overlaps.”

“Hmmm,” I said, not knowing if he was just tired or serious or joking.

I kissed him goodbye and slipped on my coat, noticing that it had gotten really busy. Nearly all the tables were full, including the long community one that stretched down the center of the restaurant.

Walking through the lot, I was hit by the silence. And the cold. Now that it had finally stopped snowing, the temperature was plummeting. There were no groups of people wandering around, no cars speeding by, no tourists doing the Ale Trail. There was a sci-fi quality to it all, like the entire world had been reduced to the population of the pub behind me. Everything else was deep space, cold and empty.

The sky above was clearing, the stars sparkling, a nearly full moon on the rise.

The air burned the back of my throat and lungs going in. It had to be well below zero. Again. A thin sheen covered the ground where the snow had been shoveled. I managed to skate over to the Jeep without falling and revved up the engine and sat there for a few minutes while the heater fought a losing battle.

It was then that I realized I had been wrong.

I wasn’t alone in the frozen night.

CHAPTER 31

A tall figure stood across the street in the shadows, watching.

I immediately knew who it was. I couldn’t see his face, but somehow I was sure of it. The same height. The same body shape. And something else. Something outside of logic, something that told me it was the man from the church. The man with the tattoo.

I locked the door without taking my eyes off him. He just stood there in the darkness not moving.