Читать книгу The Girl in the Water - A. J. Grayson - Страница 23

My thoughts have been wandering too long. The bookshop is moving around me now, quietly but with gentle activity. I think I’ve tended to a few customers who’ve ventured to my corner and didn’t already know what they were after, but I can’t say I’m entirely sure. My memories, permitted freely between activities, have nevertheless seemed to invade the whole.

But it’s impossible to be oblivious to Chloe as she re-emerges from behind a bookshelf covered in paperback detective fiction and thrillers. A favourite genre of hers. As she appears, I impulsively fold down my laptop’s screen, which I’d been once again perusing from behind the stacks of magazines on my desk. I’m not sure I want her to know what I’m looking at.

I recognize that the motion might appear rude, so I glance up at Chloe with a try for a smile. Immediately I realize my error, and try desperately to halt the change in my expression. I’m still not in the mood to talk, and smiling generally encourages Chloe to speak. Even here, in my quiet corner where I’m so often left in peace.

‘Noticed I didn’t hear none of your usual flirting with Mitch today,’ she says, proving my point. There is egging in her voice, together with that stupid drawl. She fancies herself a detective, with all the time she spends nose-deep in the books, but with Chloe it’s mostly guesses and innuendos. She wags her head towards our boss’s office door in an appropriation of subtle suggestion. Little stints of investigative splendour like this would be flaunted in my direction more often if Chloe’s normal post wasn’t on the till near the front door, too far away to pass sly comments with any degree of subterfuge.

‘Haven’t seen him since I got in,’ I answer. ‘I assume he’s down in the warehouse.’ Curt. Short. ‘And I never flirt.’

‘Come on now, we all flirt! You don’t have to hide nothin’ from—’

I can’t stand it. I just can’t stand another syllable of it. I’m upset with David, with myself. I’m confused about the odd emotions I seem to harbour about the story of the woman in the river, frustrated that I can’t find more details on it, and I’m not prepared for such an exchange. Not today, and not with this throbbing in my ears.

‘Noth-ing,’ I answer, cutting her off and staring straight up at her. ‘I don’t have to hide noth-ing.’ I catch myself. Shit. ‘Any-thing. Christ sakes, quit pretending you’re Agatha Christie meets queen of the bayou. You work in a bookshop!’

That’s a good snap, for me. I usually don’t react like this.

Chloe is silent for longer than I’ve ever known her to manage the feat. The miracle spans a solid ten seconds.

‘Bitch,’ she finally says, flatly. Her accent is now wholly Californian. ‘Just trying to be friendly. And I can talk however I want. It’s my life.’ Then a pause, and then for what I assume to be the good measure of ensuring it sunk in: ‘Bitch’.

I feel bad. Chloe may not yet be thirty, but she’s already a single, twice-divorced mother of a seven-year-old boy whose stated goal in life is to grow up to be ‘a more bad-ass fucker than dem shits from Oakie’ and whose usual terms of endearment for his own mother alternate between ‘wench’ and ‘yo, lady’ She deserves a break, and certainly more than my attitude.

‘I’m sorry,’ I offer. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘No, to hell with you,’ she cuts me off. ‘I don’t want to hear about your long morning or your tired body or your worn-out temper, or your great throbbing bastard of a headache.’ Chloe is almost prescient in her huff. ‘You just sit there and tend to your pile of newspapers and dross, I’ll mind my till, and we’ll both pretend you’re not the pompous self-centred cow we both know you are.’

She’s disappeared among the rows of shelves again. Despite the impressive array of insults having just been flung my way, I’m not willing to become too apocalyptic about the exchange. I re-open my computer. Chloe and I have tragic, earth-ending disintegrations of our friendship on more or less a weekly cycle, so I know this will pass.

Though not, perhaps, quite as quickly as it actually does.

‘You’d think you’d be grateful for a little help with your snooping, since the art of the search clearly isn’t your forte.’ I hear her voice, soft and back-in-black, from somewhere behind a row of rarely visited classics. A strange comment. My ears are suddenly a degree more alert. My face comes up from my monitor and Sadie’s fuzzy underbelly is facing me from the photo on the wall.

I’m entirely uncertain what sort of ‘help’ Chloe could be in a position to offer me – there’s a solid 50/50 shot it’s advice on hairstyles or improving my sex life, or just an all-out ploy to get me to do some menial activity she doesn’t want to do herself – but her reference to snooping jostles my attention. She hasn’t said it with the tones that normally go with jokes, and the word itself sounds foreign in my ears.

‘My snooping?’ I finally ask. I don’t get up.

And I can’t explain it, but there’s that tingling in my spine again.

‘Yeah, help, woman,’ Chloe answers. Power is coming back into her voice, and after a strong intake of breath, she launches into a long collection of words she’s clearly been storing up since she first said hello.

But I only hear the first three.

‘It’s about Emma.’

And she keeps talking, but I suddenly can’t breathe.