“Did he curse me?” Roach uttered.
“No!” Karla exclaimed in a deep tone, which then softened. “He loved you in his own way. He knows he wasn’t an easy man to be around, but as terrible as his death was, the flames cleansed his soul. He knows you would have saved him if you could. Your brother is with him, and they will meet you again one day.”
Yeah, in hell.
When the room became dark for a lot longer than before, Roach swallowed a sob, now happy that Zane had fled.
Chapter 12 – Zane
This was some next level bullshit.
Zane had come up with the wife idea to test Karla, because he would not pay someone who was a good actor but incapable of delivering what they promised to clients. He’d really had hopes for this visit, though. Deep down he believed that this woman might have some magical insight into what happened to him and Roach. But so far she not only claimed Zane’s non-existent wife was waiting in some kind of paranormal line because Roach’s bastard father strong-armed his way in front of her, but also focused her attention on a local man who’d driven Zane here.
What the hell was this? A deleted scene from Beetlejuice?
The way Karla had made Roach reveal his dad’s name had been the icing on the cake. Roach couldn’t be naive enough to believe this performance, could he?
Zane had intended to let out his frustration in the quiet of the bathroom, but on the way there, his gaze was drawn to a door where a pale glow, very much like that produced by a computer or television screen, shone in the narrow slit above the floor
The door had no handle, yet the room was in use, almost as if… Karla didn’t want a customer to ‘accidentally’ find themselves in there. And if she took off the handle herself, then it would be somewhere close, somewhere like the wooden closet in the corner.
Maybe Roach really was getting into all that woo-woo shit, reconnecting with his dad or whatever, but Zane would not let some old bag bait him when his life was at stake. And he’d paid for this visit with a kiss, so he’d be getting its worth. To give credit where it was due, Roach was a good kisser, but he didn’t need to find out about it anytime soon.
Zane opened the closet, glancing over his shoulder when bright dots flashed over the wood. He couldn’t believe the lightshow going on in the dining room and reflecting toward him off a small mirror. Karla probably had a button for it under the table. But while she was busy giving Roach daddy time, Zane found the handle on a pile of laundry.
Bingo.
Despite the noise coming from next door, he tried to keep quiet as he tiptoed back to the door and squatted next to it before aligning the bolt attached to the handle with the hole and pushing it in the gentlest way possible. He rose, waited, and when Karla raised her voice—opened the door.
The tiny office with shelves full of books and folders covering all walls was alight with the creepy glow of an open laptop. Roach’s photo, in the same suit he was wearing tonight took up a large section of the screen, and the enlarged script around it betrayed the image as a newspaper scan.
A file was open on the desk next to the computer, and as Zane leaned over it, breathless at Karla’s audacity, he realized there was a page from a local magazine at the top. The article he was looking at had been published the day after his visit at the clubhouse two years ago, and as he stared at the picture of firefighters combating the flames, the only thing he cared about was scanning the text for a possible mention of him.
But as he flipped through a bunch of other pieces on the event, his anxiety eased. Roach—Reed—had been cleared of taking part in the arson based on an alibi. He’d been arrested for drunk driving in a nearby county. The journalist quipped that this had to be the first time drunk driving ever saved someone’s life, but Zane didn’t find that particularly funny.
His skin burned as if it had been rubbed raw with bristles. He left the desk and approached one of the shelving units, noticing surnames and dates on the folders. He’d entered this room suspicious—no, half-convinced—Karla was a scam artist, but now that he looked at proof, fury was a rat trying to bite its way out of his chest.
That fucking bitch. Preying on people’s hopes and grief like that!
Reason was no longer a factor in his choices, so when he noticed a metal box that contained stacked dollar bills, he grabbed them all and stuffed the cash into his pockets. He’d been fucked over too many times to allow this to happen again. He’d come here with an actual problem, with hope that this woman understood things that escaped logic, but she’d fed on people like him for years, and he was so desperate for answers he might have fallen for her act if she hadn’t made the mistake of focusing on Roach.