The Dead and the Dark(39)

She turned in the recliner and beamed. “Are you feeling better?”

“Totally.” Logan patted sweat from her forehead. “I … thanks for letting me crash here. I really like the decorations.”

Gracia held up her deep green doily in progress. “You want one? This is for your dad.”

“I—”

“I think yours will be red.”

Logan smiled. “You don’t have to do that. But I’d love one.”

“Give me a week.” Gracia laughed. “I didn’t know you and Elexis were friends. You must be a miracle worker. I can never get him out of his room.”

“Happy to help,” Logan said. A familiar voice rang from the TV screen. Logan spotted her fathers’ faces, inverted by an infrared camera. She laughed under her breath. “You’re a fan?”

“I watch every week. Even the repeats. When your dad left, he promised he’d call, but he never did. Never told me what was going on with you guys. This is the only way I saw him.” Gracia motioned to a plate of cooked bacon on the counter. “Help yourself to some breakfast. You and me need to catch up.”

“I should get back to—”

“You only want to see Elexis, not me?” Gracia asked.

Logan shook her head. Gracia’s old-lady sympathy tactics were underhanded, but she had to respect them. She plucked a strip of bacon from the plate and sat at Gracia’s window-side table. She vaguely recognized this episode of ParaSpectors, though the details escaped her. Maybe it was the one where their camera operator was possessed by Satan. After a while, they began to blur.

The show went to commercial and Gracia turned.

“You were so sick when you got here,” she said. “Do you need anything? Juice? Water?”

“Sick,” Logan repeated. A piece of her hoped Gracia thought it was a stomach bug and not too much beer. “I must’ve had a fever or something.”

Gracia smiled.

She knew.

“Wait until her dads find out,” Elexis called from his room.

Logan chewed on her bacon. “They don’t care.”

“They would have no room to judge.” Gracia chuckled. “After the messes I saw back in the day, I could tell stories that would have them blushing.”

Suddenly, Logan was paying attention. She leaned forward—she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought to try Gracia for information sooner. She’d had an encyclopedia of Snakebite history living next door this whole time.

“Your dad never told you about when he was your age?”

Logan shook her head.

“Oh, he was always ending up in my room after crazy nights out. His parents—my sister and her husband—they were a lot stricter than your dads. If he came home sick they would’ve put him on the street. Which … well, never mind. I must’ve cleaned him up a thousand times before sending him back to his room.”

“Wow,” Logan breathed, immediately abandoning her attempt to figure out what kind of relative that made Gracia to her. “Brandon, too?”

Gracia pursed her lips in thought. A gnat buzzed around the rim of her coffee mug and, from Elexis’s room, virtual gunfire echoed off the walls. “No,” she said finally. “Not Brandon so much. Alejo was a party kid. I don’t think they knew each other back then.”

“So Dad was the wild one?”

“He was always a good boy,” Gracia clarified. “It was that Tammy Barton who tried to make him bad. She was always dragging him everywhere, making him go to bars and parties with all that drinking. She wanted him to be a bad kid like her. Probably made her feel better about herself.”

“Wait,” Logan cut in. “Dad was friends with Ashley’s mom?”

Gracia blinked. “Friends? They were dating. Always telling everyone they were so in love. But your dad was always causing trouble with his dating. First the Bartons were mad at him and Tammy, then everyone was mad at him and Brandon.”

Logan choked.

“No one ever told you? You’re making me into a chismosa,” Gracia said. “Ask your dads to tell you more about Snakebite back then.”

“What was Brandon like?” Logan pushed. “Tell me about him.”

Gracia looked at her for a long moment. “I shouldn’t say anything about it. It’s not my business.”

Logan tried to swallow her desperation for information. She wanted to know what Brandon had been like. In a way, she barely knew what he was like now. Before she could ask, Gracia shook her head.

“Honesty for honesty,” she said. “I always tried to teach your daddy that when he was little. How about you tell me something?”

“Oh,” Logan said. “Uh, sure.”

Gracia popped a honey-lemon cough drop into her mouth and mulled over it quietly. Her salt-and-pepper hair fell in loose curls over her shoulder. “What case are those boys here for?”

“I don’t really know,” Logan admitted. “They said it’s little stuff. Changes in the weather. Some weird sightings.”

Gracia shook her head. “The weather didn’t change until your dad came here.”

“What?”

“It started in January,” Gracia said. “It snowed. It doesn’t snow here. In spring, it was floods. And now this heat. It wasn’t like this before your dad arrived.”