The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [38]
And sadly, Max scarcely reminded her.
Rarely, anymore.
These days.
Melony Polito was stunned with a self-admiration such as this and so suddenly, and here, in such a public place. Perhaps a big piece of the nervousness pie which plagued and grappled with her will to stifle it found its blame within her own timid self-consciousness in the very way she presented herself tonight.
Or perhaps it was something more, something she was growing all the more recently dissatisfied with, a yearning, a void to be filled, a piece of her soul that once was but now lay flooded with marital and occupational duty, and the desire to find something more.
Something out there.
Something perhaps as close as somewhere in this crowd.
Moving right along and released from the stall of smoochers, Melony made her way onto the Crow Job’s main floor. People with drinks pushed past her, table chairs dodged her path as their occupants rose up or sat down or arched forwards or tipped backwards on rear chair legs. She rounded a lengthy stool-studded bar and overcame the darting trays of barhop traffic, her attentions struggling between the human obstacle course about her, the urgency of her mission to locate the faces of those she’d come for, and to find her own table and sit down.
Press is to the right of the stage....
The stage was opposite the bar. She followed the capillary flow of one-at-a-time commuters until she was in the area to the stage’s confined right, where the round wooden club tables narrowed into two rows back to back. In the center of the back row, she found her empty table. A grey card propped against the bubbly red glass of a candleholder displayed her name above DIVERSE ARCANUM NEWSLETTER, MALIBU, CA. The table was small, surrounded by two lonely chairs of padded wood. She at last sat down and slid her purse onto the tabletop, then relocated her purse to her lap upon seeing how the table space doubled without it.
Every table around her was chocked-full with assumed press agents, or perhaps music industry moguls, each one in every aspect looking no more or less important or enthusiastic or even reckless than anyone else she observed. A short distance away, two barhops separated, one in Melony’s direction. As much as she needed a drink by then, she couldn’t forsake the need to focus on faces. To search for secret souls.
Maxwell had been on a personal assignment in a village on the southwestern border of Brazil two mornings ago when his wife/secretary had contacted him with the news. He was busily researching a case where half the village’s population of children vanished overnight with barely a trace, to emerge twelve days later from the forest unharmed but for surgical punctures on their ankles and behind their left ears.
Children.
Vanishing....
Much like the six-year-old black child whose body was found freshly mutilated last weekend in the alley between The Crow Job and the neighboring apartment complex, the news of which reached Melony through close law enforcement peers who kept in touch with issues of the insolvably unspoken. It was news enough to contact Max, for Max to wash his hands quickly of third-world close encounters struts and to hurry his way back to Southern Cal, for Mel herself to jot down orders and to prepare and plan pinpoint spur-of-the moment itineraries and urgent strategies.
No ordinary homicide could cause such a secretive stir as to involve the likes of Max and Mel, and although Melony herself had made ordinary investigations including homicide her occupational fortè, Maxwell’s unwilling involvement in this particular matter had become the backbone in his search for the unknown years ago, when it all started.
For the body of young Nigel had been declared missing and assumed dead since his own encounter with the unknown within the bowels of a condemned