head. I realized my description and taxonomy of the Big Bad may have led Cookie to believe that he was, well, big and bad. And he was. Kind of.
But I still couldn’t tell her
“He … got the guy off me.”
“Oh, my goodness, Charley. I guess I didn’t realize.… I mean, you made it sound so minuscule. And your life had been in danger?”
With a shrug, I said, “Maybe a little. There was a switchblade involved. I didn’t even know they still made those things. Aren’t they illegal?”
“He shows up when your life is in danger,” she repeated, deep in thought, “and he saved you when you were four? So, what happened when you were four again?”
I shifted in my chair, so sore I could barely manage it. “Well, I was kind of kidnapped, though not really kidnapped so much as led away.”
A hand shot to her mouth to squelch a gasp.
“God, all this sounds so awful when I say it out loud,” I complained. “I whine more than a Goth with a blogging fetish. It’s really not that bad. I actually grew up rather happy. I had lots of friends. They were mostly dead, but still.”
“Charley Jean Davidson,” she said in warning. “You cannot use the word
“Fine, if you really want to know. But you’re not going to like it.”
“I really want to know.”
After a long, breathy sigh, I said, “It happened here.”
“Here? In Albuquerque?”
“Here in this building. When I was four.”
“You’ve lived in this building before?”
I suddenly felt like I was in therapy and all the things that had happened to me in the past, both good and bad, were gushing from a festering wound. But what happened in this building was the worst of the worst. The knife in my flesh, buried so deep inside me, I doubted it could ever be extracted fully. At least not without some serious anesthesia.
“No,” I said, drawing another sip, testing the rich, warm chocolate on my tongue before swallowing. “I’ve never lived here. But even before my dad bought the bar, it’d been a cop hangout. And he’d taken me to it on several occasions, quite innocently, mostly for birthday parties and such. And a few times he had to chat with his partner, as those were the eighties BC.” When Cookie’s brows slanted in question, I added, “Before cells.”
“Ah, of course.”
“But on one particular occasion, I’d upset my stepmother when I told her, in a rather matter-of-fact way, that her father had died and had crossed through me because he wanted me to give her a message. She hadn’t known yet that he’d passed away and she was furious, refused to listen. She never even let me give her the message. I didn’t understand it anyway. Something about blue towels.”
“She wouldn’t listen even after she found out he’d actually passed away?”
“Absolutely not. By that time, Denise was anti-anything-death-related.”
Cookie took a deep breath as if to calm her nerves. “The woman never ceases to amaze me.”
“You should try her meat loaf. It’ll put some pretty coarse hair on your chest.”
She chuckled. “I have enough hair to deal with, thank you very much. I’ll pass on family night at the Davidsons’.”
I shrugged. “Your loss.”
“So, you were four.”
Geez, she was so pushy. “Right. Four. So, my feelings were hurt as usual, and when we drove to the bar where my dad was having a beer, Denise left me on the bench by the kitchen to go tell on me to Dad. I loved it in the kitchen, but I was all mad and hurt, so I decided to run away. When Mr. Dunlop, the cook, wasn’t looking, I snuck out the back.”
“A four-year-old, alone at night, on Central? A parent’s worst nightmare.”
“Yeah, well. I figured I’d show her,” I said. “I wasn’t the brightest four-year-old on Central. Of course, the minute I stepped outside, I changed my mind. Not that I was scared. I don’t get scared like most people. I was just … aware. But before I could dash back inside, a super nice man in a trench coat offered to help me find my stepmother. Oddly, instead of going into the bar where I knew she was, we came into this building.”
“Oh, honey,” she whispered, despair in her voice.
“But nothing much happened,” I said with a lift of my shoulders. “Like I said, Bad saved me.” Trying to make light of a dark situation, I added, “Looking back, I don’t think that man ever planned to help me find my stepmother.”
Cookie reached toward me and wrapped me into a huge, long hug. It made me think of warm fires on winter nights. And, for some reason, roasting marshmallows.
After, like, an hour and twenty-seven minutes, I mumbled, “Can’t … breathe.…”
She leaned back with her brows creased in thought. “Is it just me, or does the fact that you live in the same building you were abducted into seem a bit morbid?”
“Pffft. It’s just you,” I said, discounting the entire bizarre, ghoulish thing.
I was so happy she didn’t push for more details. The devil was in the details, and I wasn’t feeling particularly satanic at that moment. “Oh,” I said remembering another incident. “This guy in high school tried to run me over with his dad’s SUV. Bad shoved the vehicle through a store window.” The memory brought a smile to my face.
“Someone tried to run you over in high school?” she asked, appalled.
“Only that one time,” I answered.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, then asked, “So, those are the only times you’ve seen Bad?”
I counted off silently with my fingers. “Yep, that just about covers it.”
“And our job is to figure out how Reyes plays into all of this?”
“Yep again. We should roast marshmallows.”
“Then I feel it my duty,” she continued, unfazed, “as friend and confidante, to analyze in panoramic detail the shower scene.”
I held back a giggle. “I’m not really sure the shower scene plays into this on a salient level. It seems more, I don’t know, nonsalient.”
“Charley,” she said in warning, “spill or die a slow and painful death. Who was in the shower with you? Reyes? The Big Bad? Work with me here.”
“Okay,” I said, acquiescing, “you know that Reyes called me Dutch that night when I was fifteen, right?”
“Right,” she said, clearly impatient to jump to the shower scene.
“And you know about the beautiful man showing up in my dreams every night for the past month, right?”
“Right,” she said, a sigh softening her voice.
“Well, today, Dream Guy wrote
“Now we’re talking.” She scooted to the edge of her seat, then stopped abruptly in realization. “So, Dream Guy is Reyes?”
“That’s what I mean. I realized tonight Bad called me Dutch the day I was born.”
She frowned in confusion. “So, who was in the shower?”
I grinned and gazed at her, suddenly in awe of the woman sitting beside me. “You know, I just told you that this big, scary creature follows me around and saves my life every so often and that I remember the day I was born and that I know every language ever spoken, and you have yet to run out of the room screaming. How can you just accept what I say?”
After a long, thoughtful pause, she asked, “Are you purposely trying to change the subject?”
A deep chuckle almost doubled me over. I grabbed my aching ribs and cried out, “Stop! Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”
“Sorry.”
