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“Well the semester’s winding down,” I said. “She’s probably in transition.”
“No, this is more. She’s distracted all the time.”
“I’m sure she’s made friends out there. She’s a sophomore, she must have."
“Look, I’m telling you, something is wrong. All my mommy-alarms are vibrating. I feel this, Rachel, I feel it clearly. You work with Mason on cases all the time,” she said. “You know how to?—”
“Snoop?” I asked. I made my eyes really wide. “Are you seriously asking me to spy on your grown-ass daughter, Sandra?”
She smacked her palm on the wide, flat arm of her chair and said, “Yes! That’s exactly what I’m asking, and I know I sound crazy, but you are my sister, and you have to do this for me, because I’m going to go insane if I don’t know for sure she’s okay.”
That logic isn’t logical.
No, but it was effective. “Of course I will, I’ll… I’ll drive out for a visit for starters, huh? See if she’ll open up to her Auntie Badass before we resort to pawing through her dorm-room trash, okay?”
Sandra’s brows went soft. “Really? Will you? God, I’d feel so much better, Rache.”
“I will. Hell, maybe a weekend in Saratoga Springs is just the ticket. Mason’s been acting a little mopey lately.”
“Do you blame him?”
I had taken a sip of my now-cold coffee and choked on a chunk of soggy donut. “What’s that supposed to mean?” And then I remembered and went on. “And what was that little exchange between you two when you passed on the sidewalk this morning?”
“What exchange?”
I looked down at my cold, donut-polluted coffee so I could feel her, not that I thought she’d lie to me, but still. And then I got stuck looking because of the patterns in the dark, crumby liquid.
How weird, it almost looked like something was swimming around in?—
A fishtail rose so hard it splashed coffee into my face. “Holy shit!” I jumped up fast and pressed my hands to my cheeks but there was no coffee wetting my skin. Not a drop stained my light denim jacket, either. And the mug on the arm of my chair was still, not even a ripple in its shiny black surface.
“What the hell, Rachel?”
“I don’t fucking know!” My voice came out too loud, too sharp. I took a breath. “Reflection in the mug,” I said. “My eyes were playing tricks on me.”
Sandra got to her feet and her expression shifted instantly to sheer worry. “Is your eyesight okay? Have you been having issues? Have you talked to your doctor?”
“It’s nothing like that.”
She searched my face, put one palm on my cheek like a mom checking her kid for a fever. “You’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?”
“I would. I swear. And honestly, Sandra, my biggest problem right now is…” I looked around my home, but I didn’t see any problems to list for her. Honestly, life was about as good as I could imagine it. Jeremy was a six-month rookie deputy at the Broome County Sheriff’s Department. Josh had graduated and decided to spend some time traveling across the country with his best buddies and had taken his dog, Hugo, along with him. Mason and I were having a summer of bliss. No kids. No catastrophes. No dead people talking inside my head or sending me on ride-alongs with killers. Nada. It was bliss.
Up to now, Inner Bitch said, the fucking know-it-all.
I glanced down at my dog. She was standing rigid, staring straight down at a shiny green frog, who was also completely motionless.
I tilted my head. “Myrtle?”
She did not move.
“What’s she doing?” Sandra asked.
“I don’t know. She’s a strange little dog.”
“Looks like she’s staring at the frog.”
“Except she’s blind,” I said. “But she knows it’s there. Jeseze, move, Froggy.” I found a pebble near my foot and pitched it at the frog. It splashed near enough to startle it, so it leaped away.
