The Tell-Tale Con Read online

  I hated when I sounded stupid. I wanted to launch into an explanation of why I was calling and that I wasn’t trying to pick up on Harrison, but anything I said would only make it worse. So I just clamped my jaw and waited.

  “Why you want him?” Her accent was heavily Asian, maybe Japanese though I wasn’t entirely sure, and her usage of the English language suggested she hadn’t been here long. “Who are you?”

  “We’re lab partners at school. My name is Talia. Jones.”

  “You stay. I get him.”

  Like I was going to hang up now. I already felt curiously like I’d been grilled by the woman when she hadn’t spoken but two lines to me. It was her tone of voice, like I was some slutty girl after her son.

  “Hello?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you told me yesterday.”

  “Talia?”

  Okay, he hadn’t been told who I was, despite the fact the woman had asked. “Yeah. I think…I think I can help you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rules of the Scam #34

  Don’t forget your story. Ever, ever, ever…

  I met Harrison at a restaurant up the street. It was one of those kitschy retro things, built inside an Airstream. The only edible thing they sold was dessert. I played it safe and ordered a malt. Chocolate. Harrison clearly didn’t know the score here and ordered a burger. It was his stomach lining.

  When the waitress was gone, Harrison turned to me. “You don’t have to help me, you know. I’m…I feel bad about coming over. If I’d have known that Private Ike was gone, I never would have.”

  “Really, it doesn’t matter. I embarrassed myself on the phone with your mom too, it’s all good.”

  Confusion flashed before he smiled. “That wasn’t my mom. It was…well, I guess it was my step-grandmother. I think. She’s my step-mom, Kanako’s, mother. She’s visiting from Japan. I never met her before yesterday, and I can’t say her name at all, no matter how many times she tells me. It sounds like ‘My Sharona’ to me so that’s what I call her in my head.”

  I smiled, too, surprised I was allowing myself to become so engaged in the conversation. I had no idea what hold Harrison had over me in this situation, but I wasn’t certain I liked it at all. Yesterday I would have said that Harrison Poe was my lab partner and wouldn’t have been able to give much more than that. Now I was irritatingly compelled to solve his problems, merely because I knew I could. Well, and for the two thousand dollars he would have paid anyway. Money that would keep Mom out of jail or keep us from running again.

  I pulled the plastic card Private Ike had left behind in our offices and slapped it down on the table. It was yellow and lumpy and peeling at the edges.

  He glanced down at it. “What is this?”

  I took a deep breath. “It’s Private Ike’s rates. He left it behind when he left. Look, I wasn’t kidding yesterday when I said your demon hunt is a scam. And it sounds like a good one. If there’s one thing I know, it’s liars. I’m not a licensed detective, but frankly I’m guessing Private Ike probably wasn’t either, considering. And at least you know that I won’t call the tabloids.”

  He looked back at the card and then to me. “Are you offering your services under the same conditions as Private Ike’s?” He said it like he had no opinion of that, and I was relieved to hear at least that much. If he’d acted like it was the dumbest plan he’d ever heard I’d have packed up and left without hesitation.

  “A hundred bucks an hour, twenty hour minimum. I’ll figure this out, just as well as anyone else could.” I felt a little twinge asking for the money, but I needed it, and I reminded myself the cash was the only reason I was doing this thing.

  He cocked his head to the side and regarded me for a long time. So long that I started to get uncomfortable and considered looking away. However, that would have indicated weakness, something I would never do. Finally, he sat back in his seat. “Fine. I’ll pay the whole twenty hours up front. If you incur expenses we’ll deal with that part later.” He pulled out his iPhone. “What’s your bank routing and account number? I’ll do an automatic transfer.”

  I didn’t use the bank account. I would just pull the money out later today. Not just because I needed to pay Mr. Pete before both my parents ended up in prison. I didn’t trust banks. But I could see the logic in what he wanted to do, and the thought of all that money was enough to overwhelm my natural trepidation. I waited until he was in his account and then took the phone and entered my information myself. He didn’t seem to care one way or another.

  Once that was done he returned the phone to his pocket and fixed me with another expressionless stare. “So, what now?”

  “First we talk. Tell me about this ‘demon’. It’s easy to forget details when your story is too big. So if you could walk me through what’s happened since the beginning, maybe someone has slipped up.”

  The waitress returned, sliding my malt across the black and white checked table and plunking a plate of practically raw cow carcass on a dry bun in front of Harrison. Shrinking back slightly, I leaned against the red plastic of my chair. After a surly round of being asked if we needed something else, she was finally gone and Harrison spoke.

  “I was at my Cousin Nate’s place in Vail, Colorado.” Harrison eyed the burger for a moment before poking it slightly with the tip of his finger. Not surprisingly, it did nothing.

  “Nate’s parents have a place up here in the East Mountains, near Cedar Crest. But they vacation in Colorado during the summer.”

  He took the top off the burger, sniffed it speculatively, and then put it back down, reaching for a fry instead. I couldn’t imagine a life where people vacationed in a glitzy mountain town just because the weather was annoying them. Sometimes my parents pulled off good cons, and we had money. Sometimes they didn’t. But we were strictly small time. No ski vacations for us.

  “Anyway.” He paused to dump about half a container of ketchup over his burger, probably in an attempt to make it edible. It was a fruitless attempt. But those were the kinds of things people had to learn for themselves. “Nate is a couple of years older than I. He just turned twenty. At the time though, I was about fifteen, and he was about seventeen.”

  “So this was three years ago?” I sniffed my malt just to be sure it was safe. Really, you could never tell with this place. It passed the perfunctory smell test so I took a hard swallow.

  “Yeah. Summer. Anyway, Nate was dating this chick, and she came over and brought all of her friends. They were very into the occult, and they’d brought a Ouija board with them. I thought it was stupid, but Nate made me do it because otherwise his girlfriend would have gotten pissed, and then Nate wouldn’t have gotten laid, and somehow that would have been my fault.”

  “Of course.”

  “Right? So this girl comes over, kills the lights and pulls out this board. She and her two friends would not stop giggling. Seriously, you can not imagine how annoying it was.”

  Actually I could. I had a serious aversion to giggling and people who giggled as a general rule, even if they didn’t do it in front of me. “So when did the name come along?”

  He cut off a chunk of his ketchup soaked burger and speared it with a fork, smelling it one more time before shoving it into his mouth. If he couldn’t tell when something was that bad using the sniff test, I couldn’t imagine why he bothered. His expression told me that the full enormity of what he’d just done to his taste buds had sunk in.

  When he was finished chewing he took a deep swallow from his water glass and coughed slightly. I just shook my head and waited for him to pick up where he’d left off.

  “Anyway, eventually it was my turn. Nate made me ask a question. I seriously was so disgusted by that point, I refused. So the girl asked the board what was in my future. It spelled out, ‘hunted.’ I still thought it was stupid, but she asked, ‘hunted by who?’ Which isn’t even proper grammar, but whatever.”

  I hid my smile behind my malt. I found it slightly delightful
that after all these years he was still irritated by his cousin’s girlfriend’s grammar. “Go on.”

  “Anyway, the board spelled out Aeshma. Which meant nothing to me. Or anyone else I guess. She asked what that meant and got the answer, ‘demon’.”

  “And is that when the whole thing really started?”

  “Nah. Nothing happened then. I was just glad they were done and would go away.”

  “I’m having a little trouble understanding how we got from there to here.”

  “Nate called me. He said his girlfriend was so freaked out she couldn’t sleep. Whatever. It wasn’t her answer. But Nate had looked up the name and found it really did belong to a demon. He didn’t want me to tell her. Like I would ever have the opportunity to tell her, if I had my way.”

  He ate more fries, seemed to consider his burger again, and in the end pushed the plate away. “Anyway, I didn’t think about it again until I was at the fair in Fenway.”

  “The baseball park?”

  His eyebrows shot up, and his mouth twisted in a cross of amusement and disgust, as though I was the one who’d said something weird. “No. The town. It’s a little place in the mountains above Denver.”

  “Colorado again?”

  He cocked his head. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “And Ned again?”

  The corners of his mouth quirked. “Nate.”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “Actually, yeah.” The perplexed furrowing between his eyebrows suggested he’d never bothered to try to connect the circumstances between these situations.

  It wasn’t enough information for me to figure out the entire picture. Nate and Colorado had figured into both stories, but that could just be coincidence. I needed to hear the rest. “So you were at some fair. What happened next?”

  “We went to this fortune teller tent because some other stupid girl, not the same as before, wanted to get her palm read or something.”

  “Okay, so what happened next?” I drank half the malt waiting for him to answer.

  “When we went into the tent, she just looked up and pointed at me. Then she said, ‘Aeshma.’ Aeshma is some obscure religion's wrath demon, by the way. I have to admit that it was freaking creepy.”

  It was. Though I was one hundred percent a practical soul, a little shiver tore through me, and I doubted it was the fault of the malt. “That is weird.”

  “Yeah.” His voice turned down, dark and low.

  “So did she say anything else to you?”

  He shrugged. “No, because I left. Who knows what else she would have said.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  I couldn’t figure out yet the correlation between these things, or what someone would stand to gain.

  “A few months ago. Over the summer.”

  “You remembered such a weird name for three years?”

  “No.” He poked a fry into ketchup, but then didn’t eat it. “I’d forgotten it. It wasn’t until she said it that I remembered.”

  “That must have been unpleasant.”

  “Yeah. You could say that.” His tone of voice suggested he could have said a lot of other less vague things.

  “So okay, that’s weird. But how did you go from being told the name to thinking a demon was coming to get you?”

  He glared at me over his water, and I got the impression he wasn’t thrilled with me being a part of this. I had to wonder why he was paying me to sit here and talk to him. Either he was desperate, or for some reason he trusted me way more than he should.

  “I told you, I don’t believe it. I mean, I know when I’m trying to sleep, I hear voices. I know that someone is doing this to me.”

  And we were back to the voices. As evenly as possible, in case he was nuts and willing to lash out at anyone who knew it, I said, “Okay, Harrison. Tell me about the voices.”

  His mouth pinched, one side cocking up, but not in amusement. He tilted his head to the side and pinned me with a hard glare. It was weird to be given such a dirty look by someone who had eyes the color of butterscotch candy. It was somehow threatening and benign, and delicious, mmm butterscotch, at the same time.

  “It isn’t my imagination, Talia. There are voices, and they aren’t in my head. They’re in my bedroom. Like someone is there with me. Talking to me.”

  Slashes of red darkened his cheeks.

  “Okay. Assuming they’re real, where do you think they come from?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. I wish I did. If I understood where it came from, I could stop it.”

  He sounded pretty sure about that. Clearly, he was used to be in control. I knew where almost all of my problems came from, but that didn’t help me get rid of them. “What do they say, then?”

  “Mostly just random words. Rage, wrath, fury. Sometimes a sentence here or there telling me to give into the rage.”

  “Have you ever done it?” I asked curiously. He didn’t strike me as a ‘give into the rage’ kind of guy.

  He seemed surprised by the question. “Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” I repeated dryly. “Look, here’s what we need to do. I need to listen to your room at night.”

  That really did seem to amuse him. The eye crinkles were back. “I don’t think My Sharona would go for that. She’s fierce.”

  I smiled, too, because it was an amusing picture, though My Sharona frightened me, even on the phone. “Do you have something like walkie-talkies or something?”

  “No. Not since Boy Scouts.” His nose crinkled, like his eyes did. Maybe it was a thinking trait. “Wait. Dad’s company cell phones, he’s got like twelve, they have a push to talk feature so he can talk to people on the set. Do you think they’d work across the street?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  He pulled a twenty and tossed it on the table, waving me off when I started digging into my purse. I guess I inherited a few things from my parents, anyway, because there was no way I was turning down free food. I let him pay.

  Back on the street between our homes, I waited while Harrison went and got two of his dad’s yellow cell phones with rubbery-looking casings and gave me one. Neither of us actually went upstairs to our places—I stood in Mr. Wong’s and Harrison in his lobby—but, even over the roar of washing machines and dryers, we could still hear each other perfectly.

  With a plan in place, we parted ways, and I spent the rest of the day fielding Mom’s clients, not one of whom left crying, thank goodness, and waiting impatiently for bedtime.

  It was the first time I could ever recall having a twitchy desire for sleepy time. Even as a kid my parents had failed to give me a bedtime, and I’d stay up until midnight, if not later, in the first or second grade. Sleep wasn’t the biggest priority for me.

  But of course I wasn’t waiting for actual rest. I was waiting to put this demon business down so I could go back to acting like Harrison was some dude in science class who liked his Goonies T-shirt and had a famous dad.

  I took a walk down to the bank and then to Mr. Pete’s, paying him the money my mother owed. He was absurdly happy not to have the cops involved, and I was absurdly happy not to have one more problem hanging over my head. I went home, made dinner, and watched TV for half an hour before going to my room to work on the big project I had due soon in history class. I had to recreate the entire Battle of Hastings, which I decided to do using castoff Star Wars characters I’d found at the thrift store. William, the Duke of Normandy, was played by Obi Wan, and Lando Calrissian was cast in the part of King Harold. But I couldn’t concentrate. No big surprise. Now that I’d decided to help Harrison, and now that he’d already paid me, I was fixated on getting answers.

  Once I was back in my room, it was actually Harrison who made it easier to wait. Though the problem was his, and though he, frankly, seemed to have little to no sense of humor during class, he kept me entertained through the walkie-talkie.

  “I’m watching reality TV,” he told me, around eight.

&n
bsp; “I don’t have a TV in my room.” I wasn’t sure why I told him that. He neither needed to know, nor likely would care.

  “You’re really missing something. These people are fighting over a horse.”

  “Is that some kind of code?”

  He laughed, and I heard knocking on his side. Momentarily he came back and said, quieter, “My Sharona told me to shut up. It isn’t a code. It’s a competition. These women are all trying to win a horse.”

  “Why would they want a horse?” I was sincerely perplexed.

  “Well, at this point I can’t actually tell whether or not they’re trying to run a horse farm or, like, Who Wants to Marry a Thoroughbred. It’s pretty unclear.”

  It was my turn to belly laugh. The rumbling sensation was foreign and confusing for a moment. I couldn’t honestly remember the last time I’d genuinely laughed. “You’ll have to keep me updated about who wins.”

  “Are you kidding? I love this show. I’ll tell you. This is my new favorite show. Three women are beating each other with miniature bales of hay inside a wind tunnel. I don’t know why they’re doing this. I have the sound off. But, seriously, you should be sad you’re not seeing this with me.”

  Actually, I kind of was.

  After Who Wants to Marry a Thoroughbred was over, he started watching a Mexican soap opera on Telemundo. “Here’s one where it doesn’t matter if the sound is off. It’s in Spanish. I don’t speak a word.”

  I wasn’t certain how a person could fail to learn even a small amount of Spanish living in New Mexico. Spanglish was pretty much the official language. “What are they doing?”

  “I’m not sure. The horse show was clearer. There are two women staring at a magazine. Both of them are wearing yellow tube tops.”

  “Well, sure. Why not.”

  “Oh, wait. Now they’re fighting.”

  “That’s because they’re both wore the same tube top to a party. Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

  It was the first time in my life I’d ever watched TV without actually watching it. And I enjoyed myself. Harrison walking me through two hours of television was considerably more entertaining than literally watching two hours of television. And before I knew it, it was after ten.