The hag had died in lingerie. Either that or been buried in it, and that seemed unlikely. Those were the two moments in time that ghosts pulled their wardrobe from.
“Something,” Jonah said. “But not last year.”
When they’d talked, Slater had said she’d felt like something had its eye on her for a while before she finally went back to meetings. It had been what drove her back. That took time.
“Find out the last time Deborah Slater spoke at a conference,” he said. “Sometime between when she moved to Jerusalem and last year.”
“She said that was Columbus,” Luke said. He glanced up from the phone screen. “I’m sure. She tells that story a lot.”
“Yeah,” Jonah said. He pulled the gas nozzle out of the tank before it overflowed and slotted it back onto the pump. “But sometimes people lie.”
“At AA?” Luke said. “Why bother? What’s the point if you aren’t going to be honest?”
“You’d be surprised,” Jonah said. He glanced at his sketched-out reflection in the scored plastic on the pump’s display and wondered if he looked guilty. “Just because people aren’t ready to talk about something doesn’t mean they don’t need help with it. Find the conference. Whatever happened, it was during that.”
He left Luke to search, put his shirt on, and went inside to pay.
There were two people ahead of him in the line. An old man with a handful of scratchers he worked his way through as they waited, piles of gray shavings on the counter, and a teenager who jiggled her sneaker-clad heel impatiently as she balanced a stack of plastic food boxes under her nose. The smell of reduced chicken wings, hard-fried batter soaked in hot sauce, made Jonah’s stomach grumble.
He grabbed a coffee instead, a cardboard cup filled with drip coffee from a jug that was stained black with use. No bubbles at all. He took a drink. It tasted like burnt muck, but that was better than the booze and river mulch taste caught between his teeth.
The scratcher man finished his roll and traded the winning cards for tobacco and a bottle of tequila.
“Your daughter said not to sell you liquor,” the clerk said as he got it off the shelf.
Behind him, the shelves of bottles rippled as if something dark had swum through them, threads of rum dragged along to stain the vodka amber. The hair on the back of Jonah’s neck itched, and he glanced out at the truck.
It was still where he left it, parked at the brightest-lit bay.
The old man spat on the ground—in front of Jonah, the girl went “ewwww” quietly to herself—and slapped his hand against the winning cards. His hands were scarred and thick-knuckled from years of hard labor.
“You get paid to do what she tells you?” the old man asked harshly. “Or paid to sell shit to people who want it?”
The clerk sighed and handed over the bottle.
“Damn right,” the old man said. He turned and shouldered past the girl. She stumbled and dropped her food onto the floor. Chicken grease and hot sauce smeared over the tiles, and two hot dogs rolled away under the chiller cabinet. She cursed and jumped back. The old man gave her a humorless smile, his teeth tombstone straight. “Ewww.”
He stomped out, the bottle hung from his hand by the glass neck.
The girl spun around to give his back the finger and then swiped pointlessly at the stains on her hoodie.
“Fuck,” she breathed out.
“Just get more,” the clerk said. “You don’t gotta pay for what you dropped.”
The girl looked up at him. “You mean, that he knocked out of my hands?”
The clerk took a deep breath and puffed acne-scarred cheeks out as he sighed. “That’s the argument I don’t want to have,” he said. He waved his hand at the rack of hot glass boxes in the back of the store. “Just get more food, Darlene.”
Darlene kicked a breaded chicken drumstick out of her way—it bounced off the magazine rack and landed between two shelves—and went to reload. The money for the gas was already in Jonah’s hands as he stepped up to the till.
“How much for the coffee?” he asked.
The clerk glanced at the by-now empty cup in Jonah’s hand and shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “I drink it free all night.”
He took the money from Jonah and started to ring up the purchase. Jonah glanced down at the counter and idly swept his hand along it to brush the curls of gray powder to the floor. It was still warm from the old man’s hands and clung like cigarette ash. Jonah grimaced and brushed his hands together to get rid of it.
“Anything else?” the clerk asked.
