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Cloud Coffee was crowded, so we ordered our sandwiches to go and brought them back to my apartment. As soon as the three of us entered the place, Archie bolted back to his refuge in the office.
“I didn’t know you had a cat,” my mother said.
No, I’d purposely avoided mentioning Archie, mostly because I didn’t want to make the mistake of saying too much about him. “Oh, Archie?” I said, trying to sound innocent. “He was a stray I took in. I found him wandering around the first day I was here, and we just sort of adopted each other.”
That story was close enough to the truth. She definitely didn’t need to know he wasn’t really a cat at all.
“It’s nice when you own your place and don’t have to worry about landlords telling you whether or not you can have pets,” my mother responded. No doubt she was remembering the years after we lost my one and only pet, Star Ruby, and how I’d begged to get another cat after we’d moved and I learned the hard way about apartments and pet policies. The first place we’d lived had been pretty lenient about such things, but the ones that followed were much stricter.
“Definitely,” I agreed.
We talked about cats — although she and Tom currently had a dog, Winston, a fluffy little Maltese who was being watched by a pet sitter while they were out of town — and soon enough, one o’clock rolled around and I needed to get back down to the shop. Or rather, I felt I needed to get back to work. I kind of doubted anyone was beating down the door to get into Once in a Blue Moon.
My mother and Tom said goodbye, and told me that maybe we could get together for dinner again the next night. I offered to cook dinner, and my mother tried to beg off.
“Oh, I don’t want to put you to all that work,” she protested.
“I like to cook,” I said. “And there’s plenty of room for all of us in the dining room here. I’ll see if Calvin can come over.”
“That would be nice,” she replied. “But I don’t want you to think that you and Calvin always have to double-date with Tom and me.”
“I don’t,” I told her, my tone firm so she’d know I was only telling her the truth. “Anyway, the only time Calvin gets home-cooked food is if I make it — or his mother sends him a care package — so I’m sure he’ll be down with it.”
Those words made her smile. “All right.”
She gave me a quick hug, and I walked her and Tom down the stairs. From there, they headed out to the parking lot, and I went into the shop.
It seemed my belief that no one would be waiting for me to return from lunch had been a misplaced one. A woman around my age, maybe a little younger, was peering in one of the display windows, all but pressing her nose to the glass. She had long, honey-blonde hair that fell in fluffy waves nearly to her waist, and a pretty face with a pointed chin and straight little nose, and wore a tie-dyed skirt and turquoise blue tank top.
In short, she looked exactly like the sort of person who’d be jonesing to get into a New Age shop.
“Sorry,” I said as soon as I unlocked the front door and opened it. “I got a little delayed coming back from lunch.”
Up close, her eyes looked reddened, as if she’d been crying fairly recently. “Are you Selena Marx?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied, somewhat uncertainly. True, my name was on the Yelp page for the shop, and probably wasn’t too hard to Google, but this was the first time I’d had someone come in the store and ask for me directly by name.
“I’m Sasha Young,” she said. “Brant Thoreau was my boyfriend.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, even as I thought, So much for my women’s intuition about his sexual orientation. “Please, come in.”
She followed me into the shop and paused by the rack that held a collection of embroidered and sequined skirts from India. Looking diffident, she said, “The police told me he died at your parents’ house. I tried to go by and talk to them, but no one was home.”
“They went out for the afternoon,” I told her. “It was hard for them to be there, so they decided to get out for a bit.”
Sasha nodded, red-rimmed blue eyes sympathetic. “I can understand that. Do you know what happened? The police wouldn’t tell me much, except that he fell.”
“That’s about all any of us know,” I said. “He came to the house to investigate a possible demonic infestation, but he fell down the stairs in the dark.”
“Fell…or was pushed,” she responded, echoing Chief Lewis’s words from that morning. However, her implication was entirely different. “Demons can do that, you know.”
“Push people?” I asked. Hopefully, that question hadn’t sounded too skeptical.
“Yes. But Brant was careful. I don’t see how they could have gotten the better of him like that.”
I didn’t, either. However, the thought of demons causing evil mischief such as physically shoving Brant down the stairs made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, so I pushed it aside as best I could and said, “I really think it was just a terrible accident. What else did the police tell you?”
“Not much.”
