“Got it,” I turned, then whipped back around with my finger in the air, “And one more thing. If you had a car stranded off Archer Avenue and it disappeared, where could it have gone?”
Jonah’s face wrinkled from behind his desk, making him look twenty years older. “Well, the first place I’d check is the body shop next to Town Hall.” There was hesitation in his voice. “It’s on the opposite side of town, near Voodoos Bar.”
“Thanks.”
“Get some rest, Fallon,” he added authoritatively.
“Yes, sir.”
Town Hall was north of the gazebo, the two locations that split the town in half. Facing the large white building, I peered left down Seaside Street off Main and spotted the auto body shop right next to Voodoos, just as Jonah had said. I drove the scooter up the empty street until it jumped the curb of the hole-in-the-wall brick building. Inside the garage, my Mini Cooper was lifted in the air as someone worked underneath.
I kicked the stand and hopped off. “Excuse me,” I announced myself, walking closer. The man under my car had his back to me, wearing a backward hat. He paused at the sound of my voice, the muscles in his arms flexing. “That’s my car.”
He dropped his head and dusted his hands before lifting himself out of the hole. “I know,” his indifferent voice said, walking around the car in the shadows to the front. From over my car’s hood, I watched as he turned his cap around before he came into view.
Liquid gray eyes pierced through me, and I stumbled backward as he took another step forward.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said with my hand out between us.
Julian tilted his head, wearing a stretchy black cloth over his mouth and nose. “You shouldn’t be walking the woods at night.” He continued his trek toward me, wiping his grease-stained hands over the front of his shirt. “You could end up hurt,” his brow arched, “or worse.”
“Are you threatening me?” I asked, but it came out all wrong and fragile and breakable. I narrowed my eyes, mustering the Grimaldi strength. “Because you don’t scare me.”
The cloth stretching across his mouth puffed out as he released a breath. “Yet, you ran from me.”
I wanted to say it wasn’t from him. I ran because I had been caged in by them as a whole. But I didn’t. The close proximity of him pulled an unwanted desire straight from my heart down to my core, making my tongue feel swollen. It was only the night before he’d slit a goat’s throat, and now, standing only inches away from him, unable to muster a steady breath, I’d felt as if he were holding me and slowly slitting mine.
He took another step closer, and gravel crunched beneath his heavy boots. “Why did you come back?”
“W-w-what?” The only thing keeping me upright was our locked eyes. It made this real.
“You left twenty-four years ago, and just decided to come back. Why?” The bill from the hat cast a shadow over his eyes, the sun no longer hitting them like before. Still, behind the stone-cold and chilling color, there was a gentleness hidden behind the reserved and potent shield.
My brows pulled together. Had he read the article? Did he think I was hiding something? “Benny needs me.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
Julian’s eyes dropped to my hand where I was twisting my mood ring around my ring finger, then ripped his gaze away, taking off for the garage. “Your car should be ready in a few days.” He grabbed a tool from a shelf and threw a rag over his shoulder. “I’ll see that it gets returned.”
The connection snapped, but I wasn’t ready to let it go. I wasn’t done yet. I had so many questions. “Wait, what was that last night? What were you guys doing in those woods?” I followed after him up the hill, into the garage. “Why did you kill that goat?” And how did you get all those scars?
He readjusted his cap, ducked under the car, and hopped into the hole, going back to work. I stood there for a few moments to see if he would turn around and acknowledge me again, but he continued working, hands moving swiftly, oil staining the fingers where blood once dripped from.
“Julian?”
But nothing.
Chapter 5
Fallon
Tom Gordon had died of heart failure.
Heart failure. The organ I would follow anywhere, without question, without reasoning. When lost or confused, it was our hearts we were told to trust completely. The speaker of desires, deliverer of feelings, and giver of hope. Yet it still had the audacity to fail us, like I had almost failed Gramps, if the town would have let me.
Yesterday, Monday embalmed Mr. Gordon, and today his skin was firmer under every stroke of my thumb, his frozen flesh refusing to soak up the color of life, a golden beige with a smudge of pink. Working on a corpse wasn’t much different from working on the living, but with different techniques used. Some preferred to airbrush, but I preferred the pads of my fingers, sliding my eyes back and forth to the picture of him when he was alive, the picture I’d requested Monday to collect from his grieving wife.
“What’s your sign?” Monday asked from the opposite side of the room, but I was distracted, and her words slipped through the faulty cracks of my mind. She had easily forgiven me for leaving her behind in the woods, but made me work harder for attempting to leave Weeping Hollow. “Fallon?” she continued when I didn’t answer, bouncing a stress ball off the wall.
“Cancer.” I ran my hand over Mr. Gordon’s hair to naturally sweep it to the side like in the picture when he was dressed up in a suit and tie and twenty years younger, his dashing bride standing beside him, a bouquet clutched in her hands, their bare feet in the sand.
The girl who loved Tom Gordon.
He had given his heart to her that day, a heart that was no longer his to fail.
“You seem to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea today, moonchild. You have intense feelings that have you uptight and fearful, but you are keeping quiet about it all. It may involve a relationship that hasn’t quite manifested yet, or someone in your line of sight you haven’t seen. You do not want them to see you in anything but a position of strength and control. The day’s planetary constellations beg the question as to who you are kidding. Being vulnerable is a part of trusting another,” she read off, continuing to blindly bounce the yellow stress ball off the concrete wall. Catching it in her fist, she turned in her chair. “Well, that’s a load of shit.”
“Horoscopes are vague on purpose.” But as soon as she’d said it, I couldn’t help but think about Julian. I stood from Mr. Gordon’s side and walked over to the sink to wash the foundation off my hands, an attempt to wash away images of him from my mind, too. “Tom’s ready. I’m going to head home for the night.” Gramps’ breathing had only gotten worse, and he hadn’t made it to the kitchen this morning.
“But it’s Friday night.”
“So?”
“So, come out with us. A few of us are heading over to Voodoos.”
“The bar?” I’d once drank alone. It was my twenty-first birthday. I’d driven to Gabriel’s Liquor store for a bottle of something. Inexperienced and naïve, I’d grabbed the first bottle my determined eyes came across, a pre-mixed Carlo Rossi Sangria because the bottle was pretty. Dry red wine and tart fruit, the taste of red apples kept me going back for more, searing my tongue and staining my lips until I’d passed out in the early hours of the morning. And when I’d opened my eyes and my gaze followed around the uniquely shaped, half-empty bottle with a thud inside my head, I’d never felt so pathetic and alone.