Greywalker - Kat Richardson [45]
She looked at me a moment, gnawing her lower lip, then said, “I was making coffee. You want some?” She went to the sink, pulled the plug, and water gurgled away down the drain. The garbage disposal growled, cutting off my reply. She glanced over her shoulder at me, drying her hands on a cotton dish towel.
“Sure. Thanks,” I replied.
She reached across the sink and pushed a button on the small stereo on the counter; Vivaldi’s Gloria swelled. In a minute, she came back with a small, painted tin tray and dipped like a cocktail waitress to unload it. A garish picture of the Space Needle from 1962 was painted on the inside. Sarah returned the tray to the counter before she sat down across from me. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She took a book off her half of the table and placed it on the floor; then she pushed a mug of coffee in front of me and arranged a neat little barrier of milk jug and sugar bowl between us. She dawdled over mixing her coffee, keeping her head down.
I sipped my coffee black. It tasted like brackish water run through oil-soaked sawdust.
Sarah swished her spoon around in her cup. “So, you wanted to talk to me . . . ?”
“Your mother hired me to find Cameron. I’ve got some ideas about where he might be, but not why. I was hoping you could help me out with that.”
She raised her head and glared at me. “Oh, so ‘Mummy’ thinks that if something bad has happened it must be Sarah’s fault, huh?”
I stared back in silence until she blushed and lowered her eyes. “No. Cam’s roommate mentioned that you called a few times and that you two seemed to be close.” I let that hang.
She poked at her mug.
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
She heaved her skinny shoulders, defensive and sullen. “I don’t know. Sometime in March, I guess. Haven’t seen him or talked to him since, so I don’t know where he is.”
“In March, did you see him in person, or talk on the phone?”
“In person.”
“Where did you see him?”
“In a bar.”
“Where?”
“Pioneer.”
“Pioneer Square?” I clarified.
“Yeah.”
“Which bar?”
“Don’t remember.”
I sighed and sat back in my chair. I drank my bad coffee, then put it down on the table. “This would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to play Twenty Questions with you.”
Again the glare.
My purse shuddered and Chaos exploded from it, scratching and scrambling to look over the table edge. Sarah started and stared at the furry apparition hoisting itself onto the table.
The ferret poked her nose into my coffee mug and I scooped her up. “Chaos! No.”
She sneezed and shook her head in annoyance just as Sarah lit up and reached for her, too.
“Sweet!” Sarah cried. She offered a finger for sniffing. Chaos licked the fingertip after a careful snuffle. “Does it bite?”
“No.”
Sarah stroked the ferret’s head as I put her down again. Then Chaos skipped off to investigate Sarah’s coffee mug.
“Don’t let her into the sugar,” I warned.
“Can it—she—have some milk? Is that OK?”
“Only a little,” I allowed.
Sarah dipped her pinky into the milk jug and offered it to Chaos, who licked up the milk with a rapid tongue.
The girl beamed at me. “May I pick her up?”
“Uh, sure.”
Sarah lifted the ferret with care and brought her up to her shoulder, cuddling the animal against her neck. “What a sweetie!” Chaos nuzzled her jaw.
Sarah exclaimed over the wonderfulness of my pet for five minutes while Chaos endeared herself, trotting along Sarah’s shoulders and offering whiskery, tickling kisses—the attention hound.
Brimming over with the joy of mustelid nuzzling, Sarah began pouring out a story. “I don’t know if this is related to Cam going missing, but I suppose it could be. He helped me out of a bad situation back . . . in February, I guess it was. I was really stupid to get into it in the first place, but I was mad, you know?”
I prompted her. “What happened?”
“Well, first you gotta know the family thing. Cam’s not the oldest. I am. But because he’s a boy—a male—everything is for him.” Bitterness crept into her tone. “The