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That was it.
Ben Harper was the key.
Now, all Liliana had to do was convince an intelligent Normal to secretly hand over his beloved boyfriend’s most treasured possession to a stranger.
Liliana sighed and closed all her eyes. It would be a lot easier if she just had to kill someone.
Chapter 10
Man Of Science
Pete and Sergeant Giovanni from the Criminal Investigation Division of Fort Liberty were out investigating the murders of the two soldiers who had been shot execution style and buried in shallow graves in the forest. If not for Liliana’s vision, they probably never would have been found.
Since Pete was out hunting a killer with the Sergeant and the Detective, Ben Harper was home by himself that evening. Liliana thought it would be the best time to pay him a social visit and try to convince the teacher that he should give her Pete’s sword.
Dual feelings of familiarity and strangeness gripped the spider-kin as she walked past the Willoughby’s house. Janice Willoughby had come to her once a week for advice and gossip since before the rabbit-kin had finished her first two years of college. Back then, Janice was a young single girl, wondering what her future might hold.
There was a bicycle on the Willoughby’s front porch that Liliana knew belonged to Janice’s oldest girl, Sally, named after Janice’s grandmother. The spider seer had seen Janice’s oldest boy, Louie, named for his father, mowing the neatly trimmed lush green grass. She had seen Janice’s husband, Lou, tinkering with their SUV in the driveway. Liliana knew this house and everyone who lived in it, almost as well as she knew her own home. Yet, in all the years she had known Janice, she had never physically been at her house with the exception of one very strange night when the Willoughby’s peaceful old oak tree had become a weapon of death.
So much of the things Liliana thought of as her life were really just things she had seen. Janice’s days were filled with her beloved husband, her five active children, her home, her friends, PTA meetings, bake sales, all the little acts that added up to a real life. Liliana had watched over everyone else’s life for so long, she had maybe forgotten to live her own for a while.
Pete and Ben Harper’s house was right next door to the Willoughby’s. She knew the layout of the house, knew that Pete didn’t have a back porch, but in the backyard was a gazebo that Ben liked to sit in and grade his students’ classwork when the weather was nice. Pete was her closest friend, yet the spider-kin had never physically been to his house, either. And she had never met the man who was more important to Pete than his own life.
She felt her feet dragging as she approached Pete’s house. Social interaction was always difficult, complicated, and often awkward. Communication with a Normal, where she could not use any but her human eyes, would be even harder. Liliana had avoided social interaction of any kind as much as possible, to the point where life had become largely something she watched from a distance. If her father had still been alive, he would have admonished her years ago not to let fear control her. Cowardice was not something Simon of Nemea would have tolerated.
“I am sorry, Pater,” Liliana said softly, as her fourth eyes let her look back in time at her tall, handsome father with his shaggy mane of curly, black hair and his face set in a scowl of disapproval. “I did not realize I was letting fear rule my life. But I am doing better now.”
She lifted her chin, walked boldly to Pete’s front door, and knocked firmly.
And waited.
No one came.
Liliana peeked quickly with her fourth eyes to see where Ben Harper was.
Oh.
The late afternoon was lovely and sunny. She should have gone to the gazebo first.
Liliana stepped up on the railing of Pete’s front porch, jumped up, caught the edge of the roof, and pulled herself up.
Pete should have someone look at his roof soon and trim the big elm tree in his backyard. Some of the shingles over the kitchen looked rubbed half off by a large limb. It might cause a leak. She would tell Pete the next time she saw him.
The spider-kin walked onto the tree limb, followed it to the center of the tree, and switched to another limb that shaded the hexagonal gazebo made of cedar wood by the scent of it. She hopped lightly out of the tree and onto the roof of the small structure. Careful not to disturb the wisteria vines that were already starting to bud, she climbed down one of the support poles.
Ben Harper was staring at her with his mouth open as she dropped to the grass and dusted off a few leaves that had gotten caught in her skirt. A tablet computer lay on the picnic table in front of the blond teacher. He held a stylus in his hand, still hovering over the screen.
Liliana thought of her father always urging her to face the world with courage and said, “Hello, Mister Harper,” with a confidence she didn’t feel.
“Um, hello,” the teacher said. “Who are you?”
“I am Liliana. I am Pete’s friend.”
“I don’t think Pete ever mentioned having a friend named Liliana.” He shifted the stylus around in his hand. He wore a slight smile as well as a confused expression, as if wondering if this were a joke of some sort.
“Pete calls me Lilly. All my friends call me Lilly. I have not met you before, but you can call me Lilly. I hope that we will become friends because Pete loves you and I love Pete. He is my closest friend.” Despite the spider-kin’s determination to face this social interaction with courage, she found herself looking down at her sleeves while she talked and pulling the long, trailing brightly colored fabric through her fingers. When she realized what she was doing, she dropped the sleeves quickly and put her hands behind her back.
“Oh, Lilly! Right, Pete said you’ve been coaching him in martial arts, and you helped him with the serial killers in Raleigh. He said he might not have made it out of there without your help. I thought you’d be bigger.” Ben Harper’s smile widened to something far more welcoming.
