Time Thief: A Time Thief Novel (12 page)

On my way to the stairs, I paused at the laptop and glanced at the opened spreadsheet that showed the current
occupants of the rooms. Sure enough, there was a Peter Moore listed for the honeymoon suite. But it was another name that had me thinking when I ran as quietly as I could down the metal stairs, and out to Eloise. Was it a coincidence that Dalton McKay the allergy sufferer was staying in town, or was he…my brain stopped when I tried to think of viable reasons he might be there. “It’s not like he fell madly in love with you and is stalking you,” I said aloud as I released the parking brake, removed the parking brick (needed because the parking brake was frequently as temperamental as Eloise’s engine), and hunkered down to flick the ignition wires together. “It’s still kind of an odd coincidence nonetheless.”

I heard a woman’s voice over the roar of Eloise’s engine as she came to life, and obligingly drove down the road toward the main highway. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I smiled at the sight of the motel woman doing a little dance of rage in the street, and waved cheerily when she shook her fist at me. “Not the brightest enchilada at the fiesta,” I said before spending the rest of the trip back to the Faa camp wondering how I was going to track down Peter.

Just because I wanted to make sure he was all right. Not because his chest held an unholy fascination for me.

My egos rolled their eyes at that qualification. My id started a journal called “I Wouldn’t Kick Him Out of Bed for Eating Crackers.” And I pondered what the man was up to that people would so viciously attack him.

“W
hat do you know about anal glands?”

I stared in horror at the tiny woman who sat across the table from me bathed in the bright morning sunshine, and wondered if lack of sleep from my interrupted night had finally, some eight hours later, caught up with me. At least this topic had the benefit of distracting me from wondering where and how I was going to find Peter, a subject that had been uppermost in my mind the last few hours. Right, anal glands. “Um. They’re in the behind?”

“Here.” Reluctantly, I accepted the pair of thin latex gloves that were thrust at me. “It is time for Jacques to have his anal glands expressed. If you do not do it every two months, he attempts to do so himself by dragging his bottom on the carpet. It is most disconcerting, not to mention unclean.”

We both looked at the fat pug who lolled on his back in a patch of sunlight that ran down the interior length of the RV. The morning sun was strong, heralding a warm, pleasant day, but I felt as if dark clouds had suddenly rolled in and started a deluge overhead.

“It’s not that I don’t want to help Jacques,” I protested with careful choice of words, “but I’ve never…er…expressed
anyone before. I don’t know how to do it other than, judging by the gloves, you must go…inside.”

“Ah. Yes.” Mrs. Faa rummaged around in a large cloth bag that sat next to her on the suede couch, and emerged with a small object. “Lubricant.”

“I wouldn’t want to hurt Jacques because I had no practical experience in the matter,” I said somewhat desperately. There are many things I am prepared to do in life, but expressing a pug’s anal glands isn’t one of them. Not unless it was a life-or-death situation. “Besides, I have big hands. See?”

She frowned at my hands. “They
are
large,” she admitted.

“Right. And Jacques’ little orifice is small. Even lubed up, I don’t think he’d enjoy the experience at all.” I sure as shooting knew I wouldn’t.

“Hmm.” She looked at Jacques, then at my hands again, then back to Jacques. “Perhaps it would be wiser to have a veterinary doctor do the expressing. At least until he can teach you how to do it properly, so you won’t cause discomfort.”

I made a mental note that no matter how much money I might be short when the time of Jacques’ next tune-up was upon us, I would quit my job and run far, far away. “Sure thing. Is there a vet in Rose Hill?”

“No.” She named a town to the south about fifteen minutes away. “You will take Jacques to the vet there as soon as you can make an appointment. In fact…” She paused a moment in thought. “Yes, it has been almost a month. You will also set up appointments at the grooming shop in Rose Hill, since you will be passing through it after the expressing. That way you might get both tasks accomplished easily. You have a mobile phone, yes?”

“I do, but it’s always been temperamental, and besides, the battery is about dead, and I don’t have the charging cord with me. If you have one…?”

She shook her head. “Electronics do not work well for me. I do without.”

“I’m sure I can use a phone in town,” I said, making a note on a little notebook that Mrs. Faa had given me to keep track of all the doggy things to be done. “What do they have done at the grooming place? Just a bath, or something else?”

“Bath, brushing, nail trim, ear cleaning, and of course a blueberry facial.”

I laughed until I realized that she was serious. “They make blueberry facials for dogs?”

“Of course. It is excellent for removing the stains around their eyes. You will make those appointments for tomorrow afternoon, following Jacques’ visit to the veterinary doctor. Since my darlings have had their morning constitutional, they will remain with me for the next three hours. I wish for you to go into town to the post office, where a case of the dogs’ special food is awaiting pickup. We will not need that until their suppertime, so you may have until—” She glanced at the clock on the wall behind me. “You may have until two p.m. to do as you like. By then they will want to visit the lake and have a brief swim before supper. My grandsons’ wives and their children will likely also be there if the weather is suitably hot; please keep the dogs away from them. The children are much too rowdy for my darlings’ safety. That is it, I believe. You may wash your coffee cup at the sink.”

I looked down at my list of chores and, seeing nothing there that required further explanation, did as I was ordered. “This really is a gorgeous RV,” I commented as I
rinsed out the cup Mrs. Faa had given me with her morning audience. “I can’t believe you have water and power out here in the middle of the woods.”

“We use a generator for power, and my grandsons bring in water regularly,” she said grandly. “We stay here because of the privacy it affords us from the townsfolk. They do not like us being here, and have attempted to drive us away.”

“I bet that attitude gets old real fast.” I dried off the cup and set it and the saucer back in the cupboard. “I can’t believe in this day and age people have that sort of prejudice against Gypsies.”

“Gypsies?” Mrs. Faa snorted, and with an effort, dislodged her blanket of pugs and got to her feet before tottering over to a reclining leather chair. Two pugs followed her and leaped onto her lap as soon as she reclined in the chair. The other three reassumed expressions of bliss as they spread out in the pools of sunshine. “We are not Gypsies!”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry! That’s politically incorrect, isn’t it? You prefer…oh, what’s the word…Romany, isn’t it?”

She glared at me, her gnarled hand shooting out to grab my arm, and pulled down my cotton shrug, poking one finger into the lightning flower on my bicep. “We are
not
Romany. We are Travellers, girl, just as you are.”

“You are?” I asked, thoroughly confused now.

“Yes.” She let go of me, allowing me to straighten up. Absently, I rubbed my arm where her finger had jabbed me somewhat painfully.

“OK. I don’t get to travel around much, but I am here and I live somewhere else, so I guess that qualifies me as a traveler. I won’t be getting any frequent-flier miles with
Eloise, but I’d rather have her than be zipping all around the country.”

The old lady looked at me like I was a crumpet short of a high tea. “What are you talking about?”

“Traveling.”

She opened her mouth to say something, closed it again, then narrowed her eyes at me. “Where is your family?”

“My parents died when I was a little girl. It was an accident, caused by a freak lightning storm that came out of nowhere. Some trees were zapped, and went up in flames, and since it was the middle of a droughty summer, the whole camp went up in a matter of minutes. I don’t remember any of it, to be honest. I have a really great foster mom and two foster brothers, but they’re all out on the coast.”

She glanced at my arm again, then sighed a long, slow sigh. “You do not know, do you?”

“About a lot of things, no, but I have a really big curiosity about stuff, and I like to learn. What is a Traveller if it’s not someone who travels around?”

“We are an ancient people, long persecuted for our ways. We seldom settle in one place for long,” she answered, her face serene, but she didn’t meet my eye.

“That sounds like Gypsies to me. Sorry, Romanies.”

“Society often confuses the two, but I assure you we are as different from the Rom as we are from normal mortal beings.”

Now, how on earth do you answer a statement like that? I simply smiled, and wondered if she wasn’t feeling her age this morning. Just a bit, since she seemed lucid in other respects. “Who exactly is persecuting you?”

“Everyone. Anyone. The Watch, in particular,” she answered quickly.

“The Watch?” Peter had used that word. It was an old-fashioned expression for the police, or so I remembered from a history course. “Isn’t it a bit odd for the police to be persecuting you? I mean, they have accountability and stuff, don’t they?”

“Not the L’au-dela Watch,” she said with grim finality. “Our people have borne such persecutions for centuries. We are used to it.”

“Doesn’t make it right, though,” I said, hesitating to ask what I wanted. “You haven’t been persecuted lately, have you? I mean, not right here? Say, last night?”

The look she shot me should have skewered me up against the back wall. “Last night?”

“Gregory said that there was a man harassing you last night.”

She made a
tch
ing sound in the back of her throat, and picked fretfully at the material of the chair’s arm. “The Watch was here last night, and they are always troublesome. Never do they leave us be. They must always poke and prod and dig for some incident with which they can damn us in the eyes of the world. I grow tired of such tactics. We came here to be left in peace, and now the old trouble is starting up again. It is most distressing.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” I offered, worried by how agitated she had become. It couldn’t be good for her health, and since she was employing me, it behooved me to keep her as chipper as I could. I just wished I knew how to calm her down. “I’d be happy to do what I can. Maybe talk to someone about leaving you alone?”

“Someone?” That razor-edged gaze was on me again.

I lifted my hands helplessly. “Yeah, like…I don’t
know, maybe a state ombudsman, or something? They’re supposed to fight for the average Joe. I mean, someone has to care if the police are harassing you for no good reason.”

But there is
a very good reason,
my ego suddenly pointed out to me.
Peter was stabbed here. Perhaps to keep him from finding out something about your employer?

I shook my head at the question. Until I could talk to Peter, speculation wasn’t going to get me far. Going into town to run errands, however, would suit me just fine—that would give me the opportunity to track down the mysterious Peter and find out just what he was up to. Assuming he hadn’t been attacked again…

Mrs. Faa sighed again, and waved me away. “It seems easier to let the explanation of what has happened go until another time, Kiya Mortenson. I am tired. You may leave now.”

As I was momentarily gripped with a horrible mental vision of Peter lying dead somewhere in the wilds of the Umpqua Forest, it took me a minute to process what she was saying. I wanted badly to ask what exactly had happened last night, but since she was evidently calming down enough to entertain her midmorning nap, I said nothing, and tiptoed out of the RV, relishing the fact that I’d have a few hours to myself once my chores were done.

Gregory’s car was gone, I noticed as I left the RV. That didn’t surprise me, since it hadn’t been present earlier that morning, when I returned to camp after losing both Peter and Gregory. “I’d like to have a word or two with him about leaving me with that deranged motel woman,” I grumbled, then made an attempt to organize
my thoughts so I’d have the maximum amount of free time. “Run into town, pick up dog food, make appointments for vet and doggy spa day, and then a couple of free hours to find out what happened to Mr. Gorgeous Eyes,” I murmured to myself when I hurried across the open space toward my tent. As I passed them, I waved at three of the kids who were sitting in a small plastic wading pool that had been filled with sand. The kids stared at me with the same faintly appalled expression that their mothers wore.

I hurriedly changed into a pair of walking shorts and a light gauze shirt, grabbed my wallet and phone, and was about to leave the tent when a low male voice spoke right outside the tent.

“You have seen him? Alive?”

“
Hsst.
That’s the woman’s tent.”

“She is with Mother and those little monsters. Answer my question—you have seen him with your own eyes?”

“Yes, he survived.”

“Then we must see to it that he does not remain that way.”

A chill ran down my back as I clutched my wallet. I knew, I just knew, they were talking about Peter.

“I said I would take care of it,” the second man snapped. His voice was lower, and harder to pinpoint, but I was pretty sure it was Andrew. Although it did kind of sound like Gregory….

“And yet you failed miserably last night after swearing the same thing.” That had to be the ever-sneering William. “If I cannot trust you to do a simple job—”

“I’ll do it all right,” Man Two snarled, and I jumped when his shadow flickered briefly against the wall of my tent. It had to be Andrew. It was shaped like him. Wasn’t
it? “He’s gone to ground, but I’ll find him and take care of it.”

“Now. Take care of it now. I don’t want him snooping around here again.”