“Have you heard from him?” I repeat.
“No,” she snaps. A brick wall of a response, deterring any follow- up questions.
“Do you have a way of getting a hold of him?” I persist. Those childhood visits had to have been organized somehow, right?
“Why are you asking me this?” she hisses into the phone. “Nothing good can come from—”
“You don’t have to talk to him, I will. I need answers—”
She gives a strangled laugh. “And you think he’ll just give them to you? For free?”
For not the first time, I wonder exactly how Mors told my mother the truth about who he was. Who I would be. Did he show up when she was a sleep-deprived new mother and still grieving her husband to tell her I was his, Death’s, daughter? How did he prove it?
I’m not sure I want to know.
“Just give me the number,” I say. I’ll deal with whatever happens after that. Though the thought of my father on campus is enough to make me want to crawl into a hole somewhere and never come out.
“He doesn’t have a cell phone, Jocasta.” She pauses. “Or if he does, he’s never given me the number.”
I frown. “But he used to come to our house—”
“He would just show up whenever he felt like it. Takeyouwhenever he felt like it. Once a week sometimes, and then nothing for months. It was impossible to predict.” She sounds weary, reflecting on that era in her life. And I don’t blame her. How could you sleep at night, always half expecting a knock at the door and for that knock to belong to Death. “I don’t think… I don’t think he experiencestime the same way.” She lowers her voice, as if discussing something shameful. Like believing in the Loch Ness Monster or the colony of mole people in the tunnels beneath the Denver airport.
Both of which might be real for all I know.
I scrub my free hand over my face. “Great.”
“Jocasta, whatever is going on, you need to leave it alone,” she says firmly, in her best “the due date is the due date” professor voice. But there’s a faint quaver in it that softens something in me. She’s afraid for me. Of me. Both.
I sigh. “I can’t.” I fill her in briefly on Devon’s arrival and the whole announcement thing, Lennie’s death, and the police interest in me.
I brace myself for a wave of silent disapproval.
But instead she speaks right away, sounding thoughtful. “The only announcement I’m aware of was when you were born. Of course, I did my best to distance myself after that.”
“There was an announcement when I was…” I shake my head in disbelief. This is the first I’m hearing of it. “How did you find out?”
“Strangers were showing up night and day to pay tribute. Or that’s what they said, anyway, beforehemade them stop. It was like something out of one of the original fairy tales.”
It is not lost on me that my mother’s chosen area of expertise must be a source of bitter irony for her. She teaches mythology and religion, Greek and Roman primarily. She was, in a way, an expert on the Old Ones before she even knew they existed.
“That’s why I sold the condo in the city. I had to,” she continues matter-of-factly, as if this is something I should have known. “And then he moved us to the house.”
The house.It takes a second for my brain to process. “Wait.Ourhouse? That’s… our house ishis?” It feels like the world is tippingsideways, and I grip the edge of the bathroom counter to steady myself.
“Jocasta,” she says with exasperation. “Do you think I could have afforded that on my own back then? I was an adjunct and a single mother.”
I never thought about it. Which was a failing on my part. Ishouldhave thought about it. What she’s saying is logical.
“I don’t know how he did it, and I never asked. He said it was a safe place for you,” she says stiffly.
Which, of course, also meant that he would know exactly where I was, at all times. A price for everything. That’s what she was getting at earlier.
A soft tapping comes on the door behind me. Carter. Needing his phone.Shit. Carter. Lennie. Devon.My Beecher world snaps back into place.
“I have to go. I need to…” Do what? Reevaluate my whole life? “Go,” I repeat finally. I start to pull the phone away from my ear.
“Jo.” My mother sounds so much smaller, more fragile at a distance.
