“Hmm.” Fraser was noncommittal on that point. “Did you ever go out with guys your own age?”
“Of course.”
“But…?”
“Nothing. It was fine. I never fell in love until Noah. Noah was…”
“Handsome, rich, cultured, and your boss.”
I stared at him. “It wasn’t like that,” I said shortly.
“Why wouldn’t it be? That’s not criticism. I can see why you fell for him. He sounds perfect. Too perfect, if you want my opinion. I can see you don’t. So, what went wrong with this idyllic life you worked so hard to build?”
The waiter brought my drink, and I had a couple of sips thinking over that telling comment.
“You
“I tend to come on too strong when I’m…” He lost track of that thought in his apparent interest in capturing the last crumb of onion loaf.
“Too what?”
“Hmm?”
“You come on too strong when you’re too what?”
Fraser looked blank.
I realized belatedly that maybe I didn’t want to know. We finished our meal more quietly than we’d begun it, although we did relax again over the hot fudge brownie desserts.
When the bill arrived we argued briefly.
“
Next time?
The sidewalk sparkled with frost. A Volkswagen Beetle sped past, demons and goblins yelling out the window.
“What now?” Fraser’s breath was warm in the cold night air.
Our gazes tangled. I knew what I
Fraser stared right back as though he could read my mind. “Well,” he said casually, “we could always see a movie.”
Chapter Six
Believe it or not, when I finished laughing, we went to the movies.
We arrived in time to catch the second feature, which was the 1932 version of
“Did you know this was filmed in Mojave?” Fraser whispered.
I shook my head.
He snickered over Ardeth Bey’s “Excuse me… I dislike being touched,” and downright guffawed over “Maybe he got too gay with the vestal virgins in the temple.”
I watched him out of the corner of my eye and smiled. I liked that he shared my same loony sense of humor. I liked his lack of self-consciousness. And I really liked how much he was enjoying himself. I tried to remember the last time I’d had such an uncomplicated good time.
I didn’t let myself think about my article. I didn’t let myself think about Noah. I watched Ardeth Bey try to reclaim his reincarnated true love and concentrated on nothing but the warmth of Fraser’s shoulder pressing against mine, the occasional brush of our hands in the popcorn barrel.
It could have been any first date. But that was also something I didn’t let myself think about.
When the movie was over we walked back to the hotel along quiet and by then mostly deserted streets. The scent of wood smoke drifted in the sparkling night air. Every so often someone in costume appeared in the distant peripheral of our vision, as though at the far end of a telescope. Kids. Teenagers. Milking the last few minutes of the spookiest night of the year.
“What time is it?” I asked as we walked past a house where a jack-o’-lantern sat on the porch steps, eyes glowing eerily, yellow mouth laughing silently.
Fraser checked his wristwatch. “A quarter to midnight.”
“The witching hour.”
“Yep.”
After that we seemed to be out of things to talk about. I was coming down from the booze, and I felt tired and depressed when I remembered the fight with Noah. Which was every couple of minutes.
Fraser seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts.
It took a while for the dull, shuffling noise behind us to register. In fact, I don’t know that I would have registered it if Fraser hadn’t stopped walking.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?” I stopped too.
“That.”
I listened. I could hear the power lines buzzing softly overhead, leaves scratching along the sidewalk…
“I don’t hear anything.”
“It’s stopped.”
I expelled a long breath. “Not funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. I heard something.”
“Like what?”
“Like…something scraping, no…dragging along the sidewalk.”
I shook my head and started walking again.
Fraser caught me up in a few steps. “I’m serious!”
“No, you’re not.”
“Wait.” He hooked a hand around my arm, halting me. “Listen.”
Once again I listened. Once again there was nothing to hear but the whine of the power lines and the wind shaking the trees lining the street.
I made a sound of impatience. “
I swore and raced after them. The back door to the house slammed open. A voice bellowed, “You kids get the hell out of here before I call the cops!”
Imagine trying to explain this to the cops?
He was still yelling as I cleared the next fence.
I found myself in an alley. Weeds grew through what remained of the cracked pavement. Opposite me was a junkyard fenced by chain link. A particularly unfriendly dog was throwing itself at the fence and offering its unsolicited opinion of my behavior.
“Who asked you?” I told it.
It responded by trying to chew its way through the fence.
The alleyway ended in a tall brick wall without windows or doors. It opened onto a street. Fraser stood in the middle of the street swearing.
I went to join him.
“He got away,” he said by way of greeting.
“Where would he go?”
He shook his head. It was a good question though. The street was made up of storefronts. Mostly closed for the night, though a couple had Out of Business signs in the darkened windows.
In fact, the only thing open was a dive-looking bar called the Blue Moon. A neon cocktail glass containing a blue crescent moon blinked on and off above the battered door.
“There,” Fraser said. He elbowed me and started across the street.
“What? No way.”
“He sure as hell didn’t go in there.” He nodded at the junkyard where the Hound of the Baskervilles was still trying to saw through the fence. “So where is he?”
I looked up and down the empty street. Other than a few parked cars outside the bar—and us—there was no sign of life. No mummy fleeing down the sidewalk in either direction.
“He’s hiding.”
“He’s in
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I would love to believe that something,
Okay, maybe everyone didn’t stop talking. Maybe it just felt that way after Fraser burst out, “Did anyone see a mummy come in?”
There was a pause—even the jukebox seemed to pause in the middle of a Patsy Cline song—and then all those hard, weather-beaten faces began to roar with laughter.
“Aw, he lost his mummy,” a guy in a straw cowboy hat called. “Maybe his daddy’s here.”
“Hey, it’s Abbott and Costello,” some other wit called.
“See the pyramids along the Nile…” sang Patty.
“Ha ha,” Fraser retorted.
Personally, I thought he could have tried a little harder in the retort department, but he was busy scanning the room for the, er, mummy. Because he was absolutely, utterly serious about finding that freak. You had to respect that. Even if he was turning us both into laughingstocks. And, after all, it’s not like we had to go on living in this town. So what if they laughed.
And kept laughing.
And wiped the tears from their eyes and took their cowboy hats off and blew their noses and stamped their boots and nearly fell off their barstools with pounding each other on the back as they kept building on the joke.
Fraser ignored them. He studied every inch of that little bar, from the winking, blinking jukebox to the elk horns half-blocking the exit sign.
“He went thataway, boys,” said one old hand gravely, seeing the way Fraser moved purposefully toward the exit.
“
Undeterred, Fraser reached for the panic bar, and I grabbed his arm. “We’d have heard the alarm go off.”
“Not necessarily.”
I shook my head. “He’s long gone, Fraser. Even if he did come through here. We’re not going to catch him now. What would we do with him if we did catch him?”
“We’d ask him what the hell he thinks he’s up to.”
“It’s Halloween. What do you think he’s up to?”
“You don’t think this is a weird coincidence?”
“That we see someone dressed up like a mummy on Halloween? No, I don’t think it’s a weird coincidence. Mummies are popular these days. So are zombies.”
“That wasn’t a zombie.”
“I know.”
“It was definitely a mummy.”
“Agreed.”
The jukebox began to play Steve Martin’s “King Tut”. I said, “Now, I think that’s a weird coincidence.”
“What?”
“That song.”
He started laughing. The bartender leaned across and called over the music, “What can I get you two?”