Page 26 of Throwing Shade
7
Sunday morning,wearing my favorite poppy-print sundress and a scarf to hide the bruises since I wasn’t flush in mock turtlenecks, I made a new plan over heavily buttered toast, a latte made on my stovetop Moka pot, and my jigsaw puzzle.
After painstakingly sorting through the remaining pieces to find the final gold one for the A Chorus Line poster, I conceded defeat. Hopefully, I’d have better luck elsewhere.
Emmett hadn’t known where Jude was, but he knew what she was up to. I should have pressed harder for an answer yesterday, but I’d been thrown by his pronouncement and then he’d passed out. So, he’d be my first stop.
Before I went golem hunting, I checked in with Eli’s cop friend, Terence, a nice man who didn’t have much to give me. There’d been no movement on either Jude’s bank accounts or credit cards. Her car had been found at an impound lot, having been towed near her studio yesterday morning. The officer gently asked me if Jude was suicidal, and when I replied emphatically not, he said that Eli had given them her home and studio addresses, and both had been checked out. There was no evidence of foul play.
“Nothing was… stolen or disturbed in either place?” I dumped the dregs of my cold coffee down the drain.
“The lock on her studio door was busted, but nothing was out of place. We asked the artist next door”—there was the sound of rustling paper—“Harley, to take a look. He said that Judith kept the studio fairly orderly, and he couldn’t see anything missing. The building’s had some problems with theft so the broken lock wasn’t indicative of anything other than someone poking around for something to sell.”
I frowned, squirting dish soap on the sponge. Terence was wrong. Someone had broken in to clean the studio up, but who, and why? Covering their tracks?
“If nothing comes to light to indicate foul play,” Terence said, “you should brace yourself for the possibility that she walked away from her life to start over, a not-uncommon occurrence. In which case, you’d need to respect her wishes.”
Jude could be impulsive. I snorted softly, rinsing suds off my breakfast dishes. She’d once gone out to buy runners and bought a townhouse instead, because she’d liked the sunlight on the patio when she’d driven by. She constantly trolled the web for last-minute, sell-off travel deals, and she had told me to blow up my life and move to Spain. Was that advice actually a clue as to her own intentions?
I could have almost bought it except even if Jude was making a massive personal shift, she’d tell me, and if not me, Sadie. Jude never wanted kids, but she took her role as aunt very seriously, and was as important to my daughter as her dad and me. Jude’s father had started over with a new family, and having gone through that, she would never abandon her niece.
“Jude would never pull a Sap move like that,” I said, to suss out whether or not Terence was an Ohrist.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.” I sighed and turned off the tap.
The cop assured me that they’d keep searching because the critical first seventy-two hours weren’t up yet, but I didn’t hold out hope. There’d be no assistance from this quarter, no matter how well-intentioned. Whoever had caused Jude’s disappearance was tied to the break-in at her studio, the golem, and those risks Emmett had mentioned, and I was on my own to get answers.
Grabbing my purse, I texted Sadie on the way to my car to let her know I was going out and to call me before she came home from her cousin’s place. The kids wouldn’t be up for at least another couple hours, leaving me free to interrogate the golem.
Damn it. The laundry. I ran back inside and grabbed the hamper with the colors from our bathroom, hurriedly shoving everything into the washer in the hall closet. There was too much for one load, so I did what any self-respecting woman who despised housekeeping would do: I crammed it all in as hard as I could and flipped the setting to extra-large. What was the point of that option if not to use the washing machine as my own personal TARDIS?
The bubble of hope lodged in my chest burst when I swept through Jude’s condo to find that nothing had been disturbed since my last visit and the golem was gone. My search this time focused on finding anything that would lead me into the magic community. There was no handy directory for that, but I did find a few matchbooks on the kitchen windowsill with “Stay in Your Lane” written on the front, with no address or further information listed. Jude didn’t smoke and wasn’t big on candles so there wasn’t a practical reason for her to have multiples of these.
I turned the matchbook over in my fingers. This might be a perfectly normal matchbook with a humorous tagline, but the same instincts that had led me down many a research trail said otherwise. I struck a match, waving it under the matchbook cover, but no hidden name or address appeared, nor did anything happen when I held it up to a light bulb.
If this was a magic artifact, there was another way to activate it, though that could horribly backfire. Before I could second-guess myself, I nicked my index finger with a steak knife and rubbed the edge of the matchbook against the red droplet.
Nothing.
Feeling slightly foolish, I headed for the sink to wash off the knife and return the matches to the drawer where I’d found them.
The matchbook tugged against my palm to go in the opposite direction, towards Jude’s front door. I stepped closer to the sink to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, and received another tug.
I tossed the knife in the sink and ran out the door.
Matchbook GPS was stupidly inefficient and almost caused me to crash three times when it gave me last-minute directions to turn, but at last I hit Yaletown, an old warehouse district downtown that was now home to condo towers, upscale restaurants, cocktail lounges, and local designer and homeware boutiques. The matchbook fell dormant, its cover mangled from being gripped in my hand for the past fifteen minutes.
I stood at one end of the block and relaxed my vision, as if I was staring at one of those stupid hidden 3D stereograms, half of which I was never able to see. If I was successful, the secret magic place would emerge in the same way as the hidden 3D picture. I willed the concealed physical reality to reveal itself, but mostly, I looked like an idiot and more than one person asked if I was unwell. Blinking rapidly to clear my vision, I took a deep breath and tried again. Given enough practice, this reveal would become instantaneous, even possible while driving.
After another minute with my face screwed up, a beat-up brown door with “Stay in Your Lane” written in silver metallic letters across the front popped out partway down the block.
I hurried toward it, my head pounding with the strain of keeping it in my sight, but inevitably, when I got close enough to grab the handle, the image fell apart.
There was a sucking noise and the door began to fall back into obscurity.
I tucked in my elbows and threw myself through, landing in one piece with all my limbs intact. This time.
