Charlie shook her head. “But Odette might have an address to send his last check on file, if you want to send him a haunted object or something. Or there’s a service that ships packages filled with glitter to your enemies. They don’t call it the herpes of crafting for nothing.”

  He gave her a wan smile but was clearly sunk in misery. “He’s probably basking in the sun, happy, eating avocados off the trees in his backyard, having sex with a hot surfer every night. Meanwhile, I will never find love.”

  “I told you,” Katelynn said, “I’ll fix you up with my cousin.”

  “Isn’t he the one who ate a dead moth off the bathroom floor?” José raised his eyebrows.

  “As a child! You can’t hold that against him,” Katelynn protested.

  “I should just get a gloom to cut my feelings right out of me,” José declared dramatically. “Maybe then I’d be happy.”

  “You can’t be happy without feelings,” Katelynn said, pedantic to the end.

  Charlie appeared to have arrived at the exact point in the night when everyone had drunk too much and become either belligerent or morose. She slung back the Old Crow. She’d better catch up.

  “I heard Doreen was looking for you,” Suzie said as Katelynn and José continued to argue over whether a mouth tainted by a moth could ever be enjoyably kissed. Suzie had on a billowy-sleeved dress in a yellow pattern and a large, chunky necklace. Her dark hair was pulled up into a tortoiseshell clip. She wore the kind of thrift store finds that cost more than new clothes.

  Some of the people at the party might have heard that Charlie had “fixed things” for someone in a jam, or had a vaguely criminal side gig, but were light on the details. They saw what they expected to see: Charlie Hall, perennial fuck-up, who had a hard time holding down a job and was willing to make out when she got really drunk.

  Suzie Lambton knew a little more. When she was at Hampshire, a professor had tried to have her tossed out for plagiarizing a paper. Charlie found the way to change his mind.

  She shrugged. “Adam’s in the wind. She wants me to find him for her. Convince him to go home.”

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t get involved in his mess,” Suzie told her. “When people get to a certain age, either they change or they curdle. He’s pushing thirty and wants to live like he’s twenty. Wants to come into work drunk from the night before, gamble, that kind of shit. I’m going on a yoga retreat next weekend. You should come with me instead.”

  “Too late,” Charlie said, lifting her plastic cup in a salute. “To wise advice and bad decisions.”

  Suzie, who probably had plagiarized her paper, raised her glass.

  Vince rolled up a half hour later, with orange juice and ice, having received Charlie’s text that the party was low on both.

  She went over and hugged him, burying her face in the wool of his coat. It carried the scent of leaves and cold night air. A small smile lifted one corner of his mouth, and she felt a swell of strange, bittersweet longing for someone who was already hers.

  Tina, who worked at the Hampshire Gazette and drank like a journalist in a movie, was loudly musing about getting her shadow altered to have a cat tail. “Guys love a tail,” Tina proclaimed, to protests by nearly everyone. Aimee thought Tina shouldn’t consider fetishes along a gender binary. Ian wanted it to be known that he thought it was disgusting, and that men did not want to molest animals. The artist agreed it was kind of hot, but his comic was about saucy mice.

  Charlie told Tina that she had maybe misunderstood what “getting some tail” actually meant.

  “Mermaids, right?” Vince asked, in such a clueless just-joined-the-conversation tone that it was hard to know if he was joking, or if he’d misheard the earlier part.

  It didn’t matter. Everyone laughed. It was funny either way.

  As Charlie poured more bourbon—with ice this time—she decided she was glad she’d come. She was just buzzed enough to feel an expansive warmth for the people in the room. See, she was fine being a normal person and doing normal-person things. She ate some cheese that Tina made from the milk of her own goats and which no one had the heart to tell her tasted weird, and smiled for absolutely no reason.

  Then she heard Ian, speaking loudly enough to drown out the Sonos. “Hey, Vince. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen at that job of yours?” His tone made it into a challenge.

  Vince looked up from the winged armchair where he sat, caught midconversation with Suzie and José. The chair, Charlie noted, looked as though it had been shredded by a cat, and bits of stuffing showed along the arms.

  “None of it’s great,” Vince said, clearly attempting to deflect the conversation.

  “Yeah, but there must be something. An eyeball in the sink. Hair on the ceiling. Come on.” Ian grinned in an entirely unfriendly way. “Entertain us.”

  Charlie had been feeling pretty good until that moment. Her current boyfriend wasn’t sulking in a corner, or saying something obnoxious, or picking a fight, the way that past ones had. Vince was willing to listen and make the sort of encouraging noises that kept people going—catnip to the self-involved. But no matter how much any of her friends were getting along with Vince, the night was about to go bad anyway.

  “Ian,” Charlie said, trying to make her voice as stern as Odette wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails in her back office.

  He smirked at her, and she was suddenly sure that this wasn’t about being unpleasantly curious. It was about some weird feeling Ian had about Charlie. He wanted to prove something to her, or ruin something for her. “I’m just asking a question. Getting to know the guy. I mean, if you’re fuc—”

  Vince interrupted him, pushing himself out of the chair. “Once I saw someone turned entirely inside out.”

  Charlie was used to him hunching a bit, trying not to take up too much space or be too intimidating. Not with his shoulders back, the muscles in his arms tense. His voice sounded as calm as ever, but the hair stood up along her arms. “Bones and organs and fingers and toes. Everything. Like a sock. Inside. Out.”

  “Really?” Ian asked, impressed.

  “No,” Vince said, stone-faced.

  People nearby laughed. Even Charlie laughed, surprised into it.

  “Fine, asshole, I won’t ask you about your stupid job,” Ian said, moving in close. Getting up in his face, daring to get hit. When Vince didn’t react, Ian gave him a shove.

  Vince let himself be pushed back, but there was a barely restrained glee in his eyes she had never seen there before. “It’s just a lot of picking bits of brain off walls. Nothing much to tell.”

  For a moment, the two men stared at one another.

  A moment later, Ian blanched and ducked his head. “I didn’t know you’d be so boring,” he muttered.

  Vince sat back down with a shrug, as though nothing had happened. As though nothing had been about to happen.

  Charlie was heading over to apologize when Suzie Lambton perched herself on the arm of Vince’s chair. She touched Vince’s shoulder as she said something. Tossed her hair. Laughed. Vince smiled in return, one of his real smiles.

  Charlie had a sudden and almost overwhelming urge to knock her to the ground.

  She drank a slug of bourbon instead.

  “You know, you can’t make her catch on fire just by staring like that,” Barb said.

  Busted, Charlie looked away. “I wasn’t—”

  Barb laughed. “Go over and tell him he did good. It’s not easy to let some little guy insult you.”

  “I’m sure Vince is fine,” Charlie said, scowling a little. “He never gets riled.”

  What he did get was hit on. Vince, with hair the color of old gold, was a lot of people’s type. Charlie had a gaudy kind of beauty. Nothing understated in her curves. No subtlety to her cleavage. Maybe Suzie thought she had a shot.

  Suzie was pursuing a master’s degree at Smith. Rumor had it that her wealthy parents still paid her rent. Was able to do that yoga move where you stood on your head. Maybe she did have a shot.

  “Harsh,” Barb said. “Abandoning him to the wolves. Well, just one wolf, but you know what I mean.”

  Charlie shrugged.

  “Don’t blame me if you wind up in a thruple.”

  Charlie rolled her eyes, heading for the wraparound porch outside. She needed to get some air. The intensity of her anger at Suzie bothered her. She didn’t get jealous. Not like that.

  It didn’t make sense to long for someone who was already yours.

  It’s the alcohol, she told herself, as she sat on a porch swing that she hoped wasn’t full of spiders.

  Most of the nearby houses didn’t have lights on, but a scattered few caught her eye. The soft glow of a pink night-light in a child’s room. A television, the screen moving between images. A beacon burning over a garage door, waiting for someone to return. This area had all been farms once. Tobacco, probably. You still passed old drying barns on the back roads.

  Out past the highway was the Connecticut River, a black snake curling around Mount Tom until it shed its skin and became the Chicopee River, then the Swift River, and finally the Quabbin Reservoir. Charlie remembered walking around there when she was a kid on a field trip at school. They went to see a fish hatchery and then climbed the observation tower. Charlie had stood at the top and looked down into the water, wondering if she could see the drowned buildings beneath the waves.

  The Quabbin was a human-made reservoir, created by flooding four towns. And while the residents had relocated, their homes, shops, and halls remained. They were still down there, with whatever had been left inside. Secret, unless you knew where to look, and how.

  She thought of shadows moving in the dark, as impossible to spot as drowned towns.

  “You ready?” Vince asked, the door closing heavily behind him. She jumped, surprised.

  His eyes looked eerie in the porch light. Silver.

  “No thruple?” she asked after a moment.

  He frowned at her in the same confused way he had when she’d read the French phrase off her phone. She wished she could make him tell her what he was thinking. Of course, it was possible he was just thinking that he was tired, annoyed with her friends, and wanted to go home.

  Or it was possible that he was thinking there was something seriously wrong with her.

  “Never mind.” She got up from the swing and dusted off her pants.

  Charlie needed to stop looking for trouble where there was none. She needed to stop looking for trouble, period.

  * * *

  At home, she got ready for bed, washing her face and putting on a t-shirt. She moved to climb over Vince to her side of the mattress when he put his hand on her hip. She paused, straddling his chest.

  Outside their window, the moon was a bright silver coin in the black sky, lighting the room well enough to see the intensity of his gaze. He reached up to thread his fingers through her hair.

  “Your friends are nice.” His mouth curved up on one side. “Mostly.”

  She wondered if he was going to ask her about Ian. “You were a hit.”

  “Because I brought ice,” he said, clearly not believing her. “Everyone loves the guy who brings ice.”

  She could have explained how bad the previous guys she’d brought around were, and how great Vince seemed by comparison, but that didn’t reflect well on either one of them. “I certainly do,” she said, before realizing what that meant. She’d intended to be funny, to imply I love ice, not I love you.

  But he didn’t seem alarmed, and after a moment the sharp spike of panic faded. She was just drunk. Drunk people said stupid things.

  “Come a little closer,” he told her.

  As she bent toward him, his thumb went to her cheekbone, brushing lightly over her skin. Her hair fell around them in a canopy.

  He levered up to kiss her, mouth careful, as though she was something fragile and precious. Spun sugar. The wing of a butterfly. Someone who wasn’t a human callus. Or a rock ready to be thrown through a window. Someone who wasn’t Charlie Hall.

  Maybe that was how he thought he was supposed to kiss girls, the way he’d kissed the girl whose picture was in his wallet. Maybe he wanted to be respectful. But every time he did it, Charlie couldn’t help thinking of it as a challenge.

  She reached down, hand on his chest, fingers sliding beneath the waistband of his sleep pants. She loved how his breath caught, went uneven. Loved the way that when he kissed her again, his mouth was looser, his tongue dirtier.

  Pulling away, she squirmed out of her panties, kicking them to one side of the bed, not bothering to take off her shirt. Then she crawled back, on her hands and knees. He bent over her, covering her body with his. His mouth went to her throat, to her shoulder, his fingers tracing over the part of her breast just above her heart.

  When pleasure hit at the base of her spine, she let it carry her past all regrets.

  6

  MARSHMALLOW TEST

  Charlie groaned and rolled over. Coffee was brewing in the other room, the scent of it making her feel incrementally more awake. Outside, someone was using a leaf blower, the sound a steady, grating thrum. Above her, the familiar dried brown rings of a water stain from their leaky ceiling formed Rorschach-like patterns. A gun. A goat. An hourglass. In tea leaves, those would all be warnings. She rubbed her face with the heel of her hand and got up.

  Her underpants were somewhere beneath the comforter. She found them and tossed them into the laundry pile, along with the shirt she’d slept in.

  Naked, she flopped face-first on the mattress and took out her burner phone. She needed a better plan than the one that was just (1) go to the MGM and disappoint Adam by not being Amber, then (2) get him to go home and disappoint Doreen by being himself.

  But … if Adam truly had the Liber Noctem, Charlie wanted it.

  I think I can get to your place by 1:15am, she texted. Leave a key at the desk and I’ll just come up.

  Almost all hotel elevators needed keys to operate, which would mean that if she didn’t have one, he’d have to come down to get her. Maybe he’d be willing to make things a little more convenient for both of them.

  OK, he texted back.

  See you tonight, she wrote.

  As soon as she arrived at the hotel, she’d get that key. Then she’d text to say that she’d changed her mind and felt weird about going straight to some guy’s room. The casino floor served drinks until four in the morning; she’d suggest they meet there. He might be tired, might get frustrated by her, but she didn’t think he’d give up on a job because she asked him to come downstairs first.

  Since she’d have his room key, she could just waltz in while he was waiting for her at the casino bar. So long as he didn’t keep the book in the wall safe, she could find it, grab it, and go. And even if he did keep it in the safe, she had enough information from knowing Doreen—kid’s birthday, his birthday, wedding anniversary—to guess the obvious passcodes.

  Disguise wouldn’t be a big deal. Charlie just wanted to look different enough that she wouldn’t be noticed on security cameras, in case he got somebody at the hotel to show him the footage. She had a collection of wigs shoved in the bottom of a dresser drawer, packed in ziplocks, for just this purpose.

  She tossed an auburn one into her backpack, along with a tube of distractingly red lipstick, a sparkly yet stretchy dress, and a pair of flats she could run in. Then she changed for work—a black t-shirt, skirt over bike shorts, and her trusty, ugly Crocs.

  So long as her Corolla could get her to Springfield and back, she might be able to have something she never thought she would—the satisfaction of taking something away from Lionel Salt. Maybe she’d destroy it and send him the twisted melted metal remains.

  After she got the book, she’d dob in Adam to Doreen and let her figure out how to get him home.

  * * *

  Charlie’s body was on autopilot as she stirred bitters into old-fashioneds, pulled drafts, and doctored abominable Smirnoff Ices with half shots of Chambord. Up on the stage, a drag trio in sinister yet glittery Elvira-esque attire belted out songs from the nineties. Mixing drinks, she found herself glad of something to do with her hands, some distraction from the churn of her thoughts.

  In the hours before a job, adrenaline kicked in. She was alert, focused. As though she only truly came awake when there was a puzzle to solve, a potential triumph outside the grinding pattern of days. Something other than getting up, eating, going to work, eating again, and then having a few hours before bed with which you could work out or do your laundry or have sex or clean the kitchen or watch a movie or get drunk.

  That grinding pattern was life, though. You weren’t supposed to yearn for something else.

  She’d done a couple of credits at the local community college before screwing that up too. Criminals, her ancient and slightly doddering professor declared, have no self-control. There was a test, where a marshmallow was placed in front of a child. The child was told that if they can wait for the researcher to return, they will be given two marshmallows. The one-marshmallow kids were the ones who were most likely to turn into criminals, who were reckless, who sought pleasure and excitement over all else, stole when they thought they could get away with it, lied when it benefited them. Who chose the temporary thrill over the permanent gain.

  Charlie poured three shots of Chartreuse that glowed the bright green of poison. Shook up a dirty martini, dropped extra olives into the cloudy brine of the drink.

  Her mind went over all the things that could go wrong, and she thought of the receipts in Odette’s office, one of them revealing the name of the dead guy who wanted to fence those pages from the Liber Noctem. If he was the one holding the rest of the book, with Adam in charge of moving it, she was screwed. It wouldn’t be at the hotel. But if she knew the dead guy’s name, she could hit his place next.

  Maybe she hadn’t changed much after all.