“Moonpie Fairybunny?” I asked.
“A seeker,” Felicity answered, speaking toward the surface of the table as she held her head in her hands.
“She’s been to the last couple of classes,” RJ offered. “Real crystal crunching, cotton-tailed, white-lighter. Enough to make you gag.”
“She probably won’t even ask to dedicate, RJ,” Felicity told him.
“You’re probably right. You should have seen her face when you hit the floor,” he returned. “I think you scared the crap out of her.”
“So what are we going to do?” Felicity asked.
“About Fluffy?” RJ asked rhetorically. “Tell her not…”
“No,” Felicity shot back, cutting him off and turning her face up to mine. “About Brittany Larson. What if she really is dead? Shouldn’t we tell someone?”
For the first time I could recall, I found myself standing on a very different side of the fence. It was a viewpoint with which I had more than just a passing familiarity but only when it was staring back at me. I had never seen the world from this angle, or at least not in the past few years.
“Honey,” I began. “I hate to sound like Ben, but right now we’ve got nothing to go on. On top of that, you don’t even remember saying that she’s dead.”
“But we have to do something,” she appealed.
“I’m not saying we don’t,” I told her. “But at the moment, our best and only link to the investigation is soused and passed out on our sofa.”
“Let’s wake him up, then,” she pressed.
“Waking up isn’t the issue, Felicity. I don’t think you understand. He was trashed. And I mean trashed with the proverbial capital T. He’s going to have to sleep it off before he can even make a coherent sentence.”
“Foicheallan. Drongair,” she spat.
“What was that?” RJ asked.
“You’ve heard her speak Gaelic before,” I told him.
“Yeah, but what did she just say?”
“I don’t know. Those were a couple of new ones to me.”
“He’s a useless drunkard” came her retort.
“Settle down, Felicity,” I told her, realizing that she was as in the dark about Ben’s circumstances as I had been just an hour ago. “He’s got his reasons.”
“They’d best be good,” she remarked with a hard edge to her voice, looking up at me with anger flashing in her eyes.
I certainly understood the turmoil and sense of urgency she was going through. It wasn’t like I had been guilty of it myself. However, I didn’t want to get into Ben’s personal life in front of Cally and RJ.
I looked back at her without a word, hoping that the look on my face would get through to her and that she’d drop the subject for now. She glared back for a moment, and I simply held her stare. I don’t know if it was my expression or just the fact that her brain had to be swimming in an untold number of directions, but she moved on, or back as the case may be.
“Fine. So what are we going to do?” she demanded. “Sit around and wait for him to come to?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” I returned, trying not to snap at her. I knew all too well how she felt.
“What about Constance?” she declared. “Didn’t you say Ben told you she was assigned to the case?”
With the turmoil of the evening, I had completely forgotten about the federal agent.
I nodded assent. “You’re right. He did. I’ll try to get hold of her as soon as Cally’s off the phone. In the meantime, maybe we could try to jog your memory so we have something more to tell her.”
She looked back at me and shuddered involuntarily. “I’m not so sure I’m ready for that.”
I added, “I can understand that. Truth is I’m not so sure that I’m ready for you to do that either.
“You know, something else we could do is put our heads together and try to figure out why this is happening to you instead of me.”
Even as I was finishing the comment her face went blank. At first I thought she was about to have an episode, but instead of tensing up, she simply turned her face away from mine. In that instant, the thick ethereal walls she had constructed around herself palpably strengthened.
My own psychic alarms began ringing in the back of my head as it became obvious that she was steeling herself not against the unknown but against me.
“What’s going on, Felicity?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she returned flatly.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Nothing’s going on,” she stated again.
“I know you better than that. You’re not telling me something.”
Her voice continued to be cold and defiant. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Felicity…”
“Fine,” she spat, wheeling back to face me. “I’ve got your answer. I know EXACTLY why this is happening to me.”
CHAPTER 13:
I had absolutely no idea where my wife was heading with this, but the sharpness of her present attitude told me it was a place I wasn’t going to be happy about. I knew her well enough to tell that her temper was flaring because she had been backed into a corner, or at least that is what she perceived to be happening. The fact that those green eyes were focused so intently on me and no one else was more than just an overt clue that I was the one who had chased her there- they were a proverbial smoking gun.
I ran down a mental list of hastily formed theories but still came up empty. I simply couldn’t imagine what she could feel so strongly about keeping secret, given the circumstances. Unless, of course, she was about to issue the blame for her plight directly upon me, and by pushing I was inadvertently forcing her to voice that fact in front of friends. I hoped, however, that such was nothing more than my own insecurities about the pressure everyone had been under and that they were simply bubbling to the top at a less than opportune moment.
I heard Cally re-enter the room behind me and drop the handset back into the cradle as she announced, “The twins are bringing Felicity’s Jeep over right now. They can ride back to Nancy’s with us.”
“They didn’t have to do that,” I told her evenly without turning away from my wife’s molten stare.
“They were already… on… their… way,” she replied, voice fading into a stutter near the end of the sentence. “I’m sorry. Did I interrupt something?”
“I guess that depends,” I replied as the tension continued to swell. “Were you planning to expand on that last comment, Felicity?”
Faced with the query, my wife backpedaled. “The phone is free. Shouldn’t you call Constance,” she said. The last part of the statement came not as a question but as an instruction.
“In a minute,” I replied. I didn’t know if I was only serving to bring myself more grief, but something was telling me not to let this go without an answer. Her attempt to slam the door she had just opened a moment before only steeled my resolve to get it. “What did you mean you ‘know EXACTLY why this is happening’ to you?”
She made another verbal attempt at escape. “Just forget it.”
“I don’t think so.”
We searched each other’s faces for a long moment, and while looking at her, I realized there was something more to this than I had first thought. Something was hiding in the shadows. What I had initially taken for anger alone now held what could have been a hint of embarrassment peeking around from behind the bolder of the two emotional masks.
At the same time, I knew that what she had to be seeing in my face was stark determination. This was very simply one argument my petite, Taurus wife was not going to be able to stampede her way through.
“Okay, fine then,” she replied, turning her face away and breaking the stare. “Look in the pantry. Bottom
