Page 16 of Broken Bird (The Last Picks #4)

I’d planned ahead, of course, and managed to record the whole thing. All in all, the sheriff seemed pleased. And Bobby seemed…not angry, which I considered a win. The deputies who had come to process the scene all told me what a good job I’d done. Salk, who was like a Golden Retriever in a twentysomething guy’s body, even rubbed my shoulders like I was a champion boxer between rounds. Bobby looked as confused as I felt, so maybe it was a straight guy thing.

Eventually, Bobby drove us home. I was too wired to eat, so I walked around the house, trying to burn off some of the energy that made me feel like I was plugged into a hundred and twenty volts. Bobby walked with me. He didn’t say much. Neither of us did. And when the crash finally came, he helped me upstairs and put me to bed.

I woke to an unusual sound, and I lay there with my eyes closed, trying to decipher it. Shuffle. Tap. Rustle. Rattle. I must have forgotten to close the curtains the night before because, even with my eyes closed, I could feel daylight on my face. It was probably way too early for any human to be awake. It was probably some ungodly hour like nine o’clock. Some grizzled old farmer somewhere was probably just getting out of bed to milk Bessie. Shuffle. Tap. Rustle. Rattle. I decided it had to be a bird. One of the crows, maybe, roosting on the roof of Hemlock House. Sleep seemed a long way off now, so I opened my eyes and grabbed my glasses.

On the other side of the window, the day looked cold and dull and misty, like it couldn’t decide whether to be rain or fog. The ocean moved in huge slabs of gray. Some days, I felt like I could see forever—until the horizon anyway. But today, there was no horizon. There was only this slate-colored light that showed me maybe a quarter mile, and then the world dissolved into nothing.

That was when Bobby’s head appeared, upside down, in front of my window.

I screamed.

Bobby jolted, and a skittering sound came from the roof. Then he caught himself, and the look on his face rolled back and forth between vexation and reluctant amusement.

My only rational thought was, My hair .

He gave a tiny wave.

“What is wrong with you?” I screamed as I scrambled out of bed—it wasn’t clear to me yet if I was going to shut the curtains or run into the bathroom (to fix my hair, obviously).

Bobby’s eyes widened, and it took me a moment to realize it had nothing to do with my outrage and everything to do with, well, my underwear.

They’re cute boxers, if I do say so myself. They’re Minecraft themed. And if you’ve never played Minecraft, you might not know that Minecraft has a deliberately pixelated look. And Minecraft is all about tools. And in this case, on this particular pair of boxers, one particular tool was printed, uh, in one particular spot. Not to put too fine a point on it.

“Oh my God!” I screamed (again) and jumped back in bed.

But even with the covers pulled over my head, I could hear him laughing.

He was putting up the lights, in case you were wondering. On Christmas morning. On a cold, misty, miserable day. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody, as far as I knew, had even mentioned it to him. The rest of us had decided that the exterior lights were too much of a pain. But I guess Bobby had different ideas, although as I’d learned—with excruciating clarity—I wasn’t all that good at knowing what was going on inside Bobby’s head.

Although I had an idea of what had been going on inside his head when he saw those boxers.

Maybe I had a hope .

Oh my God.

What was wrong with me?

Since Bobby didn’t conveniently fall to his death, and since my bed didn’t turn out to be one of those you sometimes read about in classic Golden Age mysteries—you know, the kind that has the canopy that slowly lowers and crushes you to death, and then the innkeeper steals all your possessions, and presumably the bed is easy to clean or the inn has an excellent housekeeping staff because the next victim is never suspicious about stains or anything—I eventually had to face the world. I showered. I picked a nice, family friendly pair of boxers (pixelated reindeer). I found my old Legend of Zelda Christmas sweater, which Hugo had forbidden me from wearing, and I paired it with my favorite joggers. I checked my hair and then—better safe than sorry—I checked it again.

And then, because I’m a sucker, I went outside and helped Bobby with the lights. Helping is a nice, broad term, because in this case, I mostly talked to him while he clipped the lights to the gutters, and I occasionally plugged something in and then unplugged it and one time I pretended to get electrocuted, which Bobby didn’t think was funny at all, but Millie and Keme had a great laugh about. (Come to think of it, they might have been laughing at me.) I also did that thing with the ladder where I pretended to jostle it. Bobby didn’t think that was funny either, but he thought it was freaking hilarious when he faked almost slipping. Keme and Millie thought it was funny too.

“Laugh it up!” I told them. “Don’t mind me; I’m just having a heart attack.”

After we finished the lights—which turned out to be a much bigger project than I realized—it was time for Christmas dinner (which was being held at the very reasonable, in my opinion, hour of two o’clock in the afternoon). Indira had outdone herself. A turkey roasted to perfection. A honey-glazed ham. Dressing and Brussels sprouts and cheesy potatoes. And mashed potatoes. And sweet potatoes. (You really can’t go wrong with a potato.) There were rolls. There were buttermilk biscuits. By the grace of God, there was macaroni and cheese.

And the desserts.

Cranberry cake. Peppermint bark. Pavlova (which, let’s be honest, would have been disgusting if it had been made by anybody else, but somehow Indira made it delicious). There was a pecan pie. There was tiramisu. There was a cookies-and-cream trifle. And, of course, b?che de No?l.

We used the formal dining room, as we’d begun to do on holidays. And, I had to admit, after we all cleaned up, we weren’t a bad-looking bunch. I changed into my 8-bit Mario Christmas sweater (which made Keme roll his eyes), and I even struggled into a pair of chinos. Bobby had on a Fair Isle sweater that might have been painted on him, and it wasn’t fair to us mortals. Millie had come in a plaid button-up with a sequined skirt that gave Christmas in Wonderland vibes in the best possible way. Keme looked handsome in a button-up and jeans I knew had come out of Bobby’s closet, and when he wasn’t staring at Millie (his eyes were liable to fall out of his head), he was checking his hair, which someone (again, presumably Bobby) had helped him put up in a man bun. Honestly, he was kind of rocking it. Fox had gone with a red-and-black combo that suggested 19th-century brothel madam meets Annie Oakley. They even had candy cane revolvers strapped to their hips. Millie pronounced it “the true spirit of Christmas,” and who was I to argue?

But as we ate, my gaze kept coming back to Indira. I honestly don’t know how she’d made all of this—let alone, how she’d done it without any help. She didn’t even look tired; she wore a cream sweater dress and a few delicate pieces of gold jewelry, and as I watched her from the other end of the table, she laughed at something Fox said. She ought to have been crabby and sweaty and deep in the eggnog. Maybe she really was a witch. Or maybe, as with so many things, love made the impossible—well, slightly less impossible. I found myself thinking of Bobby up on the roof, in the misting cold, to hang lights the rest of us had given up on.

The gong of the doorbell made us all look at each other.

“It’s your house,” Fox finally said—which I did not appreciate.

When I answered the door, Ophelia stood there. She was still in her widow’s black—although minus the affectation of the lacey veil—and she huddled inside a wool coat, her blond hair artfully disheveled. She handed me a paper bag; inside was my canvas jacket, the one she’d been wearing when she’d run off the other day.

“Do you know what I don’t understand?” she said, as though we were in the middle of a conversation. “Why’d he do it?”

I ignored the question. “Did you take the divorce papers with you after Marshall signed them?”

“Of course. And I destroyed them as soon as I heard he was dead.” She continued as though we’d never changed the subject. “I mean, he was still selling books. He would have gone on selling books for a good while before Chase Thunder petered out. He could have written something else, and it would have sold. It might not have been as good, but it would have sold. He didn’t need to steal her book, that’s what I’m trying to say.”

She was right. At a certain point, sales simply became a matter of momentum—when you were as big as Marshall, your book got big press, big print runs, big distribution, and so the sales followed. It was less about talent or skill and more about sheer volume.

It was a question I’d thought about too. I thought about the way the salt air had rushed into Elodie’s room. The way her belt had bit into my hand as gravity tried to rip her away from me. Her struggles to get free.

“Maybe it’s like you said,” I told Ophelia. “Maybe love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Maybe he thought if he didn’t have a way to hold on to her, she might leave.”

I left it unsaid, but Ophelia spoke the words for me: “Like me.”

With a shrug, I said, “I think both of them were…conflicted. Letting go of someone is hard. And it’s harder when your feelings are tangled. We all want to hold on to the things that are familiar because, even when we’re unhappy, it makes us feel safe.”

The mist was settling in her eyelashes now, prismatic in the light from the house. She turned her head as though looking off into the distance, fixed her hair, touched the collar of her coat. A hint of red colored her cheeks. I could see now, under the lipstick, where she’d chewed her lip raw. When she looked at me, her eyes were so dark they were almost purple. “It makes us feel safe,” she said, “until one day, it makes us want to die.”

Footsteps padded behind me; Bobby was coming across the vestibule, frowning.

When I checked the porch, Ophelia had repeated her disappearing trick: she was already moving down the drive at a steady clip, a small black shape fading into the dusk.

“Everything okay?” Bobby asked.

I nodded as I shut the door.

Maybe that wasn’t as convincing as I thought, though, because when I turned around, he braced me by the arms and looked into my face.

“Everything’s fine,” I said and gave a tired laugh.

That didn’t seem to convince him either. He’d shaved, I realized. And he smelled like that clean, masculinely sporty scent that was now part of my daily life. His hands were warm, and he moved them slowly now, like he was chafing me after I’d been out in the cold.

“I feel sorry for them,” I said. “For all of them. Even for Elodie, I think. That makes me a pretty terrible detective, I guess.”

In his silence, I could hear the whisper of his hands as he continued to move them up and down my arms, the sound of their slow passage over my sweater. It was like something building, like electricity. Static, I thought. If I touched a light switch, I’d probably explode.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Bobby said in a voice almost too quiet to be heard. “The world could use more compassion.” And then a smile ghosted across his face. “Especially in its crime-fighting superheroes.”

I rolled my eyes.

“And Will Gower was kind to that man he caught in your Emerald Express story. Very understanding. The first thing I thought, when I read that, was that of course you would write a detective with a kind heart.”

“He doesn’t have a kind heart,” I said. “He’s tough as nails.”

“Hmm.”

“He’s hard-boiled.”

“Okay.”

“He’s dour and grim and marginally misogynistic, and the only way he can fend off the terrors at night is with the bottle of whiskey—oh my fudge!” (I did not say fudge.) “You read that story?”

“Of course.”

“But—” The best I could come up with was “You can’t!”

“But I did.” Bobby wrinkled his brow. “And anyway, why not?”

“Because it’s private!”

“They printed it in a magazine.”

“But people who know me aren’t supposed to read it. People who—” The rest of that sentence was headed into dangerous territory, so I veered off into “You aren’t supposed to read it!”

“I think you need more eggnog.”

“I do need more eggnog. I need lots and lots of eggnog.”

I expected—something. One of Bobby’s endearingly earnest questions, like How much eggnog ? Or maybe, if I were lucky, that big, goofy grin. But instead, the moment seemed to slow, unfurling like a flower until it opened to hold us. Just us. The two of us.

“Are you okay?” he asked. The question meant a million different things, and I heard all of them. Elodie, of course, and Marshall. The craziness of the last half year. Hugo. My parents. Christmas on my own for the first time, although not really on my own. Even my writing (which I didn’t have to do today because holidays were an exception, thank you oh-so much). And Bobby was asking about all of them. Not because he was ready to fix something. Not because he was trying to make a point. Because he actually wanted to know. And that was such a Bobby thing that I smiled.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m great, actually. Don’t tell Keme, though. He’ll think I’m getting too big for my britches.” I wanted to stop there, but all I could think about was that this must be hard for him too—not only was he living in a Class V haunted mansion, not only did he have to put up with me every day, but it was his first Christmas since the breakup. I didn’t know how to put all of that into words, but the silence had a kind of scratchiness that made me say, “How are you?”

He didn’t say anything. But something changed. The tiniest slant to his eyebrows. A fresh tension around his mouth. Like he found something funny. His hands slowed, stopped, rested on my arms, but I felt that spark again, like if I moved too fast, I’d get shocked. The vestibule seemed very dark. And then—because it was Christmas, and Christmas was a time for magic—lights bloomed outside. Bobby’s lights.

His eyes went up, and I followed them.

There, hanging over us, was a sprig of mistletoe.

“Huh.” He smiled that big, beautifully goofy smile. “Look at that.”