Page 14 of A Shade Too Far
Tatiana scrunched up her face, squinting at the yellow line. “No wonder. I’m not wearing my night driving glasses.” She took one hand off the wheel and all her focus off the road to root around in her purse.
“Ahhhh!” I grabbed the wheel, trying to keep us on course. Tatiana took this to mean that I’d steer while she searched for her glasses. “You’re crazier than Santiago and his Funhouse of Horrors, you know that?”
She calmly switched out her oversize glasses for round granny frames.
“Smaller lenses? Is that really the way to go?” I said.
“Sha.” Scolding me to be quiet in Yiddish, she pried my fingers off the wheel. “Ah. That’s better.”
The rest of the drive was uneventful in terms of my having a heart attack but hearing an eighty-year-old sing along to Taylor Swift’s 1989 album, complete with sassy shimmying and finger wagging, induced its own kind of trauma.
Jews wandering in the desert for forty years wouldn’t have been as relieved to find a lush oasis as I was to pull up to my duplex in East Vancouver. A neatly pruned rosebush in full bloom complemented the green siding and white trim of the townhouse. I’d put colorful cushions on the two chairs gracing my half of the front porch and hung baskets overflowing with tiny flowers on both my side and that of my ex-husband, Eli. It was my trade for him mowing my lawn.
Tatiana bumped over the curb, parking the behemoth on the diagonal, and almost taking out the sideview mirror on my sedan.
“Safe and sound. Really, Miriam—” She accidentally elbowed the horn as she twisted to face me, and I jumped. “You worry too much.”
I tensed, swiveling to check my neighbors’ homes for lights switching on. All I needed was to wake one of them and explain my new friends.
“I’ll try to adopt your laid-back attitude,” I said, scrambling out as fast as I could, once I was assured that we hadn’t disturbed anyone.
“Do that.” She threw me a finger wave. “Sweet dreams, bubeleh.”
I shut the car door with a sigh of relief. I’d been wound up over this mission and couldn’t wait to get a good night’s sleep.
And sleep I did. The price of that deep slumber, though, was waking up Sunday morning to find that I’d gotten my period. Add musical accompaniment to my spurting and gushing and I could have rivalled the fountain at the Bellagio in Vegas.
Perimenopause was a cruel joke. If I had to suffer through hot flashes that left me wetter than my gym towel the one time I’d tried a spin class, then my periods could end already. Though speaking of that spin class, it wasn’t my fault I collapsed into the fetal position when it was over, in so much pain between my legs that I swore I had my own burning bush. That class had been the seventh level of Hell and was taught by a cyborg. Not even the hot cyborg, Sean, that my bestie, Jude, had sworn would be there.
I sighed. I missed the days when Saturdays meant a weekly brunch with her, but since I’d learned about the Danger Zone, drinking was a no go. We’d moved it to Sundays, but one or the other of us had scheduling issues, like she did today. For now, we’d abandoned our standing date, and it sucked not seeing her on a regular basis.
Between missing my best friend and currently wearing more padding in my underwear than a loose-bowelled baby, I was in a foul mood that could not be dispelled by my latte, the two (okay, four) blueberry Eggo waffles that I’d hidden at the back of my freezer, or cracking into my fun jigsaw of the New York Times front page showing the news from the day I was born.
My puzzle mat was unrolled on the kitchen table, and my empty coffee mug and plate with waffle crumbs were pushed to one side as I completed a section in the bottom left. It was a photo of a meteor shower that had happened on that day. I didn’t know much about them, and curious, I looked it up.
Meteor showers were streaks of light across the night sky that were caused by bits of rock and debris called meteoroids. Cool. I scanned the next paragraph. The popular name for them was shooting or fallen stars. In shock, I dropped my phone.
The sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out / At one stride comes the dark
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was my favorite poem and truly beautiful, but the line that had popped into my head wasn’t relevant to this. Dozens of these showers happened every year. This wasn’t some prophecy about me and stars. Nor was the dark some allusion to my shadow magic. The meteor shower on the day I was born was a coincidence and no reason to break out the tinfoil hat.
That said, I abandoned that part of the puzzle to tackle the opposite side, scrawling a rough to-do list while I worked on it. The easiest way to narrow down that enthralled woman’s identity was to get hold of Santiago’s guest list. I underlined “find incentive for Tatiana.”
After a brief hesitation, I added another item: find out why Zev wanted the gloves. The vampire didn’t need a demon artifact, no matter how cruel, to torture a person. If he planned to flay someone alive, he had minions aplenty up to the task, if he wasn’t in the mood himself. Besides, his reaction to the gloves continued to bother me.
A quick search on Ohrist forums didn’t yield anything about the Torquemada Gloves beyond Naveen’s story of madness and people trying to rip off their own skin. I tapped a puzzle piece against my lip.
Naveen assumed Zev coveted the gloves for obvious reasons, but he was prone to incorrect assumptions, I thought spitefully, fitting the puzzle piece into the headline. Tatiana could probably connect me with a paranormal expert who could shed more light on them, but she also might forbid me from prying into Zev’s private business.
My gut instinct said that the answer was more complex than the gloves being demonic. Fellow librarians to the rescue. I typed a quick email on my phone to a colleague at the main library at the University of British Columbia, seeking direction to learn more about a potential religious or historical artifact. They had to be known as the Torquemada Gloves for a reason, but I didn’t have time to scour the various academic databases for a lead, especially when a vital clue could easily be a footnote in some obscure scholarly journal.
Someone rapped out a “Shave and a Haircut” knock on my front door as I hit send.
Cursing anyone that perky for existing, I peered through the peephole, then lightly banged my head against the wall, debating the odds my visitors would go away.
“I know you’re home, Mir,” Eli called out. “Open up.”
“I brought ginger molasses cookies,” Ryann Esposito trilled.
I cracked the door, the chain pulled taut. “Homemade?”
“You bet. Super chewy.” She held up one of those Danish cookie tins. Excellent. I needed a new sewing kit holder.
I removed the chain and opened the door wide. “Twenty minutes and if your harassment supersedes my enjoyment of the cookies, this ambush is over.”
