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Something in Heather’s expression annealed. Her hand tightened around the door, and she started to swing it shut.
“We know,” Jem said. “About the Cottonmouth Club. About all of it. So, you can either tell us, or you can tell the police.”
She stopped, the door halfway to the frame.
“We just want to talk,” Tean said.
He was the kind of person who could say something like that and mean it. More than that, he was the kind of person who could say something like that, and anyone who heard him would believe it.
Heather eased the door open. “You can come in, I guess. I’ve got to keep working.”
As she wrangled the Corgis—Jem thought there were five or six of them, but he kept losing count—Tean slipped inside. He took the first wave of the assault on his shins, Corgis leaping enthusiastically against him, yipping and jumping and crashing into each other. A bunch of adorable dumbasses who had immediately fallen in love with Tean, like most animals. Jem stepped in behind him, and then the Corgi brigade rushed him too. It was easier with little dogs, to stand and let them paw at his legs and sniff and bark. Easier, too, when Tean reached back discreetly to squeeze Jem’s hand.
They followed Heather into the house. It had knotty-pine paneling and honey-colored floorboards that needed staining. Forget-me-not curtains hung in the windows, white ruffles gray with dust, and the smell of dog and charred food and fish oil made Jem’s stomach turn. In the front room, a large crystal—the kind Jem had heard witchy types call a wand—rested on a special stand. A smudge stick smoked where it had been abandoned on a ceramic dish. A wall ornament of raw crystals had a design that clearly meant something to somebody, and on the wall opposite, seven miniature swords hung in a crisscross pattern—the seven swords of Saint Michael, Jem thought. She even had a crystal ball—Jem had to twitch aside the piece of silk covering it, and when Tean hissed at him, he dropped the cloth back into place and hurried after them.
In the kitchen, cardboard boxes that had clearly been rescued from a supermarket—Pampers, Land O’Lakes, Best Value—were stacked everywhere, making a maze out of the remaining space. What looked like photo albums had been stacked in a Green Giant French-style green beans box. Puppy pads and boxes of Frosted Flakes competed for space in a Gold Medal flour box. A woman who was running, Jem thought, and didn’t have any idea what to take. Not exactly a hardened criminal. Maybe not even all that bright.
The Corgis had lost interest in them by then, and Heather put them out on the screened porch. To lie in wait, Jem assumed, until the opportunity for a bloodbath presented itself. Heather opened a cabinet and began drawing out cookbooks and sliding them, one by one, into a milk crate.
“Are you leaving?” Tean asked.
“I’m moving in with my mother,” Heather said. “She’s sick. She needs the help.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Heather went back for another armload of cookbooks. She was already breathing hard, and when she bent, she had to steady herself with one hand on the countertop.
“Can we help you?” Tean asked.
“No. I’ve got it all organized; I don’t need anybody messing things up.”
Jem watched her. She took a magnet from the fridge that said WIGGLY BUTTS CROSSING and put it in with the cookbooks. She took it out again and stared at it, like maybe it ought to go in a better box. The wattle of crepey skin trembled as she tried to get enough air, and she looked gray.
“Yesenia—“ Tean began, but he cut off when Jem shook his head.
Jem weighed his options. What he could see of her now. What he’d seen in the living room. He said, “You’re a bad liar.”
Straightening up from a box, Heather glared at him. “Excuse me.”
“You’re a liar.” He shrugged. “You’re not leaving because your mom is sick.”
“How dare you—”
“Because I’ve got the gift, just like you, and I’m sick of you wasting my time.”
She stared at him. Her lips were slightly parted, the tip of her tongue visible, and her breathing sounded labored. Then she made a disgusted sound.
“You don’t believe me?”
Heather waved a hand at him and started to turn back to the boxes.
“It’s cancer, isn’t it?” Jem said. “It’s a cloud around your aura.”
Tean shot him a look, and Jem waited for the disapproval, the frustration, the helplessness. Among so many other things, the doc didn’t like lying. But lying was what Jem was best at, and right then, they needed something—anything. Because his bluff about the cops might have gotten them inside the house, but it wouldn’t get them what they needed. Heather would have a story—a lie of her own, something to explain everything. A sick mom, for example. So, now Jem had to riff, and riffing meant the fact that she was an animal psychic. It meant the crystal wand, the smudge stick, the desperation she couldn’t quite hide. Heather didn’t seem to have noticed anything; she was staring at the box of cookbooks, and when she finally spoke, her voice was gravelly. “A year.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad enough.” She put a hand to her side and pressed, and her face went glassy with pain. “I thought you wanted to talk about Yesenia.”
