Rabbits(39)

“Do you have the number?” I asked.

“No. I never went looking for Hazel, but I can point you in the direction of somebody who might know how to get in touch.”

“Who?”

“No offense, K, but if I give you this, do you promise I’ll never see you again?”

“I promise,” I said.

He nodded at Chloe. “You too.”

“But we just met.”

He stared at her, unimpressed.

“Fine,” Chloe said.

Russell looked at me, then Chloe, and finally back to me. After shaking his head one last time, he grabbed my phone and entered the name “Amanda Obscura” along with a number.

“Text her and tell her you’re playing,” he said, then he got up and left.

Chloe took a sip of her coffee. “Fun guy.”

Per Russell’s instructions, I sent a text message to Amanda Obscura.

I received an answer a few minutes later. It was an address and a time. The address was about twenty minutes away, and we had fifteen minutes to get there.



* * *



—

Amanda Obscura’s place was a thrift store called Bloom Vintage. I’d actually been there a few times before. They had great prices on used vinyl.

The front of the store was filled with vintage clothing, including a huge selection of genuine rock T-shirts from the seventies and eighties. The back section was a combination used-record store and junk shop. There was a sixtysomething-year-old man with thick silver hair that had been roughly pulled back into a long ponytail sitting behind the front counter reading a novel called Elf when we arrived. We told him we were there to speak with Amanda. Without looking up from his book, he pointed toward the back of the store.

We found her sitting behind a desk, working on a crossword puzzle.

“What’s an eight-letter word for ‘know-it-all’?” she asked without looking up.

Amanda Obscura appeared to be in her midthirties. She wore round pink-tinted sunglasses and a tight blue jean pantsuit from the seventies. Her untamed bleached-blond hair was wrapped up in a pink-and-blue paisley scarf.

She held a pen between her teeth as she spoke.

“?‘Polymath’?” I suggested.

“Shit,” she said. “I messed it up.”

“I could be wrong.” I looked over at Chloe. She shrugged.

“No, yours makes more sense. I should be using a pencil.” She tossed the crossword into a nearby trash can and smiled. “What do you need?”

“We’re looking for a phone number,” I said.

Amanda smiled. “I mean, what do you need from the store?” She motioned around the room. There were dozens of bins filled with vinyl records, and the back wall was covered in floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, CDs, cassette tapes, and all kinds of old electronics.

“Oh,” Chloe said. “We don’t really need anything. We’re just looking for Hazel’s number.”

Amanda nodded and smiled, but didn’t say anything.

I could tell by her face that we were missing something.

“Well, I could certainly use some new records,” I said.

Amanda smiled yet again. “That’s great. We have a terrific selection. Just let me know if you need help finding anything.”

I ended up picking out three albums: Neil Young’s On the Beach, Let It Be by the Beatles, and Arthur by the Kinks. I took those back to Amanda, but she wasn’t quite ready to help. When Chloe added a jade necklace and a Posies concert T-shirt to the pile, Amanda walked over to the back wall and dug something out of a box on a high shelf.

“Here you go,” she said.

She handed Chloe a small green cardboard box that contained a handheld game by Coleco from 1978 called Electronic Quarterback.

Chloe and I looked over the box. It was well-worn, with crooked strips of yellowed masking tape running up two of the four sides. It claimed to contain “all the action of a real football game.”

“What is this?” I asked, but Amanda had stepped away to help another customer.

Chloe pulled the game out of the box. It looked like any other handheld sports game from the seventies. It was green-and-cream colored. The top half was a little football field, and the bottom contained the switches and buttons that would have controlled the tiny red lights that represented the players, had the thing been equipped with batteries.

I was looking for the battery compartment when Amanda came back over. “What are you doing?”

“I assume we’re supposed to play this game to find the phone number somehow?”

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, kid,” Amanda said. She grabbed the game and pointed to something carved into the plastic on the back. It was a name and a phone number.

    Property of Shirley Booth

1-425-224-6685



Amanda wouldn’t let us take a picture of the game itself, but she did let Chloe write down the phone number once we promised we wouldn’t post it anywhere online.

“Shirley Booth?” I asked.

“Google it,” Amanda said, then she boxed up the game and slipped it up onto a nearby shelf.



* * *



—

Chloe and I left Bloom Vintage and made our way back to my place to call the number.