“Hey, Mundy,” Skyla said when I came through the front door of Thorin Adventure Outfitters. She stood on a ladder, hanging sale signs on a rack of kayaks. “Val left about an hour ago.”
I blushed. “I’m not here for him.”
“Oh yeah?” She posted her last sign in place and then shimmied down the ladder. “You shopping?”
“No. I came to finish the stockroom.” I actually didn’t give a flip about finishing the stockroom except that the chore gave me an excuse to spend time with Skyla. After reading Mani’s thoughts and feelings about her in his journal, I wondered how I was going to find an opportunity to break the ice with her, get to know her. I sent out a silent prayer of thanks for the good fortune that had landed the stockroom excuse in my lap.
Skyla’s eyes went wide and round. “That was you? I thought one of the guys had manifested a sudden case of OCD.”
“Looked like nobody else was going to do it.”
Skyla shivered like she had tasted something bitter. “Ugh, I don’t do organization. I subscribe to the toss-it-in-the-corner-and-look-for-it-later school of thought.”
I smiled and said, “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Skyla wore her hair in a mop of wild, dark curls. Her sleeveless T-shirt revealed extensive tattoos, a tiny stud glinted in her left nostril, and her earlobes stretched around thick, black gauges. The anti-establishment would have nominated her as their favorite poster girl.
Skyla turned to her stack of sale stickers. “I’ve got to mark down all of our summer clearance,” she said and rolled her eyes. “How lame.”
I pointed to the swinging door at the rear of the store. “I’m going to head back. Holler if you need me.”
In the stockroom, I crouched over the pile of thermal underwear I had started sorting yesterday before Thorin and Val interrupted. Everything lay as I’d left it; my stint as an organizational muse had apparently failed to inspire. I sighed, tightened my ponytail, and went to work.
The chore should have taken no time to finish, but by late afternoon I still had a whole rack left to tackle. “Arrrgh!” I growled when a heap of Smartwool socks rained onto my head as I tried to pull its box from an overhead shelf.
A snicker gave her away.
“Skyla,” I said and blew a loose hair from my eyes. “How do you manage to find anything back here?”
Skyla stood in the doorway, wearing a sardonic grin. “We use a Ouija board and a divining rod.”
I knelt and grabbed up armfuls of socks. Skyla took pity on me and came over to join me. “I’ll help you with this, even though it goes against my religion.”
“Thanks. I was afraid I was going to have to come back another day. Thorin really will have to put me on his payroll.”
Skyla’s eyes widened. “You’re not doing this for free, are you?”
“Well… yeah… I guess so.”
“You’re monkey nuts, chick. Thorin owes you, and I’m going to make sure he knows it.”
I shook my head as I followed her toward the last shelf on the stockroom’s back wall. “No, it’s no big deal.”
Skyla spun and put her hand on her hip. “That man does not need any favors. You make him pay you, Mundy.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. Skyla passed me a box of beef jerky mixed in among bootlaces and keychain flashlights. I couldn’t tell her what it was like—that I was here solely as a way to meet her. To do the very thing I was doing now—talk to her, sound her out.
“You don’t have enough to do?” she asked. “Are you done with Mani’s apartment yet?”
“Almost. I made a big dent in it today.”
“What about your meeting with the cops? How did that go?”
I paused, a bundle of bootlaces knotted around my fingers. “You know about that?”
Skyla rolled her eyes. “Jeez, Mundy, where do you think you are? Small towns aren’t good at secrets.”
“It’s doing a good job of keeping them about my brother.”
Skyla sighed. “I think people know things, but in his case, they aren’t talking.”
“What people?”
Skyla crouched and rifled through a pile of Life is Good T-shirts. “These things are cheesy as hell.”
“Skyla,” I whined.
“People people,” she said. “Not the police. They don’t know jack.”
“Who then?”
Skyla exhaled and let her chin drop to her chest. She said nothing, and I gave her a second to deliberate. Finally she rose to her full height and looked me in the eye. “I’m telling you this only because you’re his sister and maybe that means I can trust you. The police, they got nothing because they’re walking in all their regular circles, looking for regular answers. What happened to Mani—it wasn’t regular.”
“How do you know?”
Skyla’s nostrils flared. “Didn’t you see the crime scene photos?”
I swallowed in an effort to moisten the desert settling in my throat. “No, not yet. I haven’t worked up the nerve.”
