Page 47 of Book of Night
She needed to get him out of the house—and soon, before temptation overwhelmed her common sense and she went through his stuff while he was likely to walk in on her.
An hour later, Vince came inside, his hands sooty. By then, she had her story ready.
“Katelynn wants me to meet her for coffee tonight,” Charlie said, trying to sound offhanded.
He washed his hands in the sink, soap all the way to his elbows. “The tattooist. With the moth-eating cousin.”
“Right,” she said, unnerved. She hadn’t noticed them talking at the party. “I’m thinking about getting something new.”
“Oh yeah?” he asked, wiping his wet hands on his black jeans.
The expression on his face—slight smile, seemingly honest interest, no judgment for the trouble of the previous night—unnerved her as well. He really seemed to care for her. He’d killed someone to save her.
She wanted to trust him.
“Vince?” She took his hand and looked up into his pale gray eyes. “How did you lose your shadow? For real this time.”
His gaze slid away from her. “I didn’t. I—” He stopped, then started again. “I didn’t understand the danger we were in.”
He wasn’t necessarily lying. The truth was often complicated and hard to explain. “What danger?”
He shook his head and picked up their compost bucket—bought by Posey, online, in an effort for them to be better environmentalists, now filled with slimy cucumber remains and other fridge remnants, plus a lot of coffee grounds.
“That’s not an answer,” she called after him.
But whatever she’d been looking for, she didn’t get it. He only went outside to dump the compost into a weird worm bin that none of them was sure was working. With all the coffee grounds they added, the only thing Charlie was certain of was that those worms werewired. If a bird ate one, it was going to fly directly into the sun.
By the time he came back in, he had his phone to his ear. He’d been called in for a job. A residential double homicide.
“I can stay if you want,” he said to her, turning the phone away from his mouth. Faintly, she could hear his boss yelling at someone. Before that moment, she hadn’t been sure if Vince had faked the call, just to avoid talking.
She shook her head. “I’m going out anyhow. Katelynn, remember?”
He got his coat. Kissed her on the mouth and then at the edge of her jaw. A kiss that obviously meantsomething,but whether it was apology or promise, she wasn’t sure.
After he left, she stared at her bedroom door. If he hadn’t gotten called in to work, he might have given her answers. And she knew that any newspaper advice columnist would tell her that she should wait, respect his privacy, and ask him more when he returned.
She made it fifteen minutes before she got up and made a show of stretching. “Well, I’m going to take a quick nap before I go out.”
“Hold on,” Posey said. “I was waiting for him to leave. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
Charlie did not want to hear more about DMT and how it was absolutely necessary to steal some for Posey’s let’s-experiment-on-ourselves-in-the-woods retreat. “I won’t be long.”
In the bedroom, with the door firmly closed, Charlie looked around. Tangled sheets. Clothes and shoes scattered on the floor. A dresser cluttered with yellowed paperback books and pots of makeup and a vase stuffed with receipts.
When she looked down at her hands, she was surprised to find them shaking.
Charlie ripped the bedding all the way off, then pushed the mattress up against the wall. It was heavy and wobbled, but she got it up. Things got hidden under beds in movies. Which meant that people who watched movies hid things under beds.
But beneath the mattress, all she found was a pair of underwear she’d lost, a crumpled tissue, plus something gross and fuzzy and flat that might have once been one of Lucipurrr’s hairballs.
She thought of her mother, looking for evidence of another woman, in drawers, in pockets. Impossibly trying to prove a negative. Hoping for nothing, and knowing that nothing only meant you weren’t looking hard enough. Charlie swore that she would never wind up like that.
Yet here she was.
Charlie moved on to Vince’s half of the dresser, shoving her hands all the way to the back, then taking everything out and turning over the drawers. Vince was tidy—never left his clothes on the floor, never left his hair in the sink—so it was a surprise to find shirts and jeans thrown together haphazardly. She hoped there was no system to the chaos, because she’d never be able to re-create it. If he left five balls of socks in a particular order to detect snooping, she was screwed.
But she found nothing of interest. Nothing incriminating.
