Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (14 page)

“They met yesterday,” Ari told Jed. “He’s in security, drives a motorcycle. Sets women’s panties on fire with his smoldering-hot looks.”

Jed waggled his eyebrows at me. “Wait until I tell Troy. What did you say his name is?”

“Hudson Keyes,” Ari said before I could stop her.

I whirled to Jed and pointed my finger at him. “Don’t even think about cyber-stalking him,” I said.

“Who? Me?” Jed blinked innocently, and I pretended not to see Ari make the “call me” gesture to Jed behind my back. I didn’t know how they did it, but somehow Ari, Jed, and Jed’s partner, Troy, always found out information I never told them about the men I dated. I suspected Ari used her FBI agent sister-in-law Miriam to do the dirty work, but they insisted most people’s basic information existed on the Internet for anyone to find. Anyone on speaking terms with electricity.

I left Ari plotting with Jed and keyed open my loft. Serenity engulfed me. I dropped my bag on the hutch inside the door and walked straight to the balcony. Large wood-framed glass doors pivoted open along the entire back and side wall, and I opened a few to let the warm April air circulate through the loft. Muted traffic noises and the rustle of palm fronds filtered in with the sweet aroma of freesias blooming on the balcony. I could feel energy returning, bringing hope and optimism with it. Somewhere in my high school memory banks, I’d find vital information about Jenny. By the end of today, Kyoko would be back in her hands and Sofie, Ari, Hudson, and I would be free of Jenny’s entanglement. Then I could explore my attraction to Hudson.

“You grab the yearbooks, I’ll fix us some lemonade,” Ari said, shutting the front door behind her.

I stacked four yearbooks on the coffee table and accepted a glass from Ari. We plopped down side by side on the couch, propped our feet up, and made satisfied sighing sounds at the same time, which caused us to laugh. I grabbed our senior yearbook; Ari took our junior.

“She’s not in here,” I said after scanning the index and then the senior photos. I started thumbing through the activity pages.

“She’s in here. Check this out.” At the bottom of the page, listed under “Winters, Jennifer” was a black-and-white shot of Jenny, ten years younger, glaring at us from the glossy page. Her hair was slicked back, her brows furrowed, and her face half hidden behind heavy glasses that had never been in style. She must have been wearing contacts yesterday or had corrective surgery since high school, because judging by the thickness of the lenses, she would have been blind now without them.

“I wonder if she moved or transferred. Do you remember her now?” I asked.

Ari shook her head. “I don’t think we shared a class. And if we did, we never talked.”

“Is she anywhere else in there?”

Ari consulted the index. “Once, on page fifty-eight.” She flipped to it. An action shot of a cheerleader with a vague resemblance to Jenny slanted across the bottom corner. I doubted Jenny could pull off her giddy grin.

“That was completely useless.” I grabbed our sophomore book and flipped to the index. Jenny was listed only once, in her school photo. She had bangs in this shot and a fledgling glare behind the same glasses. The freshman book was a bust.

“How many different ways can people say ‘stay cool’ and ‘never change’?” Ari asked, reading the comments in the margins of my junior book. “Oh, listen to this winner. ‘Look me up in five years, baby. I’ll be the millionaire on the cover of
Forbes
.’ Who’s Stewart?”

“Sounds like an ass.” I couldn’t put a face with the name.

“Ha! ‘We’ll always have Maria’s Bakery, love Dave.’ Do I remember Dave?”

“Skinny guy, hair redder than mine. Liked to whistle.”

“Oh,
Dave
. That’s right. What was with Maria’s Bakery?”

“I think we kissed there.” I tossed my freshman yearbook back to the coffee table. “Maybe my honor’s teacher would remember Jenny.”

“Who was that?”

“I don’t remember.” I grabbed the senior yearbook again and flipped to the faculty. The teachers were listed by name but not by class. I studied their faces. I recognized one in a dozen.

“Look. Is this Jenny?” Ari asked. She pointed to a tiny photo with large font beneath identifying the group as the science club. I squinted at the half-visible face in the back row. “There’s one more face than there are names in the caption,” she said.

“It looks like her. Maybe.” I scanned another page of teachers before a familiar smirk sparked a memory. “Mr. Hornbunkel! How could I have forgotten that name?”

Ari leaned closer to get a better look at him. “He looks like he’d quote Shakespeare to grocery store clerks when they ask him ‘paper or plastic.’”

“Do you think he’d remember something useful about Jenny, because I’m at a loss. Nothing in these books has jogged a memory, and if you don’t remember her, I’ve reached a dead end.”

“Only because you don’t have the Internet. And we did learn a few things. She likely was in the science club. I can hunt down the other people in the photo with her and see what they remember.”

“How?”

“Facebook. LinkedIn. The alumni website. I may not be friends with any of these people, but I bet you I know someone who is. I can also look into Mr. Hornbunkel, send him an e-mail if he’s still at school or find out where he is now.”

“Are you sure you’re not just saying what you think I want to hear?” I asked. “You can actually find all these people on the Internet?”

“Yep. Probably by the end of the day. I’ll also see what the sites turn up on Jenny.” A starry cloud appeared behind Ari’s head, like the Milky Way condensed. Greens and reds swirled through dense solar systems, and many tiny clusters glowed too bright to look at directly. The three-dimensional galaxy could have been pulled straight out of the Hubble telescope photographs. When I’d first described the apparition to Ari, she’d explained it was how she thought of the Internet: a final frontier of unlimited possibilities. It seemed like an adequate description to me.

Of all the twentieth-century inventions I missed out on because of my curse, airplane travel and the Internet were the two I most wished I could experience.

Ari glanced at her mechanical watch, then at me.

“You’re going to your consultation like that?”

“My consul— Crap!” I shot off the couch and rushed to my office. I scanned the large three-by-three-foot calendar tacked to the wall, then checked the wall clock. “I completely forgot about Max Overton! Ari, can you drive me? I’ve got only thirty minutes, and there’s no way I’m making it to Glendon Avenue by bus in less than an hour.”

“You actually forgot?” Ari asked.

“It’s been a long twenty-four hours.”

“Or it’s the hormones addling your brain.”

I stuck my tongue out at her.

* * *

Ari borrowed her brother Antonio’s car, and she dropped me off in front of a three-bedroom split-level house at three-thirty on the dot. Since I wouldn’t have time to change after the consultation before Hudson arrived, I’d selected an outfit that worked for business and pleasure: a summery yellow top, a black pencil skirt, and black heels. I had my satchel and I’d organized my paperwork for Mr. Overton’s house on the drive, using the familiar actions to keep me calm so Antonio’s car wouldn’t strand Ari on the way home.

Mr. Overton opened the door after one knock. He was big—big muscles, big hands when we shook, big smile when he asked me to call him Max. His height flirted with giant status, though I was pretty sure all those stacked muscles generated an optical illusion. The only divination I got off him was a Trix cereal box dumping colorful chunks onto his feet.

He ushered me into a front room with two matching recliners, a huge television, and several framed movie posters. I counted eleven guns and three swords between four posters.

“I’m not a touchy-feely guy,” Max said. “I don’t want anything Chinese looking. I don’t want candles or smelly dead flowers or tiny, pointless pillows. And I don’t believe in chi-voodoo crap.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“What
do
you want?” I asked.

“I want a woman. Not a ho, not a gold digger, and not a one-night stand. I can get all those on my own. I want a woman I can marry. My sister, Selena Bosch, said she hired you to fix her career, and two months later she met her husband. He’s a good guy. Doesn’t cheat at cards.”

I remembered Selena. She had a two-story bungalow near the San Fernando Valley. Her house had been a simple transformation—just a matter of Selena letting go of some outdated ideas and fears that had crept into her surroundings and bringing in some new energy. Max’s house wouldn’t be as easy to fix. It was a masculine cliché the polar opposite of his goal.

Knots tightened my neck muscles. I needed to be focusing all my energy on finding Jenny. A consultation was the last thing I should have been doing. For the first time in my career, I was anxious to get the job over with as fast as possible.

“Let’s get started.”

“I’ve got a good job. I work out. I’m not a troll. I’m don’t understand why I’m having such a hard time finding a good woman.” A duck with a cat’s head waddled at his feet. I didn’t attempt an interpretation.

Max ambled through the house in front of me, taking his time when I wanted to run through and rattle off a list of changes he need to make, starting with the painting of a camouflaged man sighting down a gun that was hanging at the end of the hallway, the barrel aimed straight at our chests.

“How long have you been on the hunt?” I asked, eyeing the painted face of the sniper.

“Eight miserable months. This is LA. A million women live right outside my doorstep, all of them psychos. And not the good kind.”

The master bedroom was spacious, even with the enormous bed centered on one wall. Max lingered, staring at the bed and sighing. Two more bedrooms filled out the top house, both much smaller than the master. One served as a catchall storage room of clutter in his creativity and children section.

“Not much to see in there,” Max said, dismissing the room that needed the most work.

The other bedroom, which comprised almost the entire relationship section of the house, was converted into a workout room. Mirrors covered one wall; antique weapons lined the others.

Max’s house exhibited a dozen big-picture problems combating his goal for a wife. I was mentally organizing how to fix each when I realized that for the first time since Jenny latched on to my arm the day before, I felt normal. Confident. In control. The tight spring of fear and frustration that had coiled in my gut since Jenny handcuffed me had unwound. As always, feng shui stabilized me.

“Let me see if I get this right,” I said, stepping into the workout room. I discarded my “chi-voodoo” lessons about energy movement and intentions behind decor placement and delivered my advice with blunt brutality. “All the women you date, they start out or become combative. Either they’re fighting with you or they’re throwing up walls. Everything starts out hot and intense, but you both get tired of the relationship too quick. When you bring up children, it becomes a clusterfuck.”

He pointed at me. “That’s exactly right. The nice ones dump me without explanations. The sassy ones want to fight all the time. I don’t get it.”

I pulled out my bagua flyer and handed it to him. “Every house has nine baguas, according to feng shui. You align the bagua like this.” I turned us so the skills and knowledge, career, and helpful people and travel sections were aligned with the front of the house. “If you divide your house into nine equal squares, you can see roughly the nine sections of your life. We’re standing in the relationship and love section.”

We both examined the stacked weights and Bowflex machine, then the guns and swords.

“Does this room remind you of your experiences with women?”

“It’s uncanny,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m always doing all the heavy lifting.”

“If you want to change that, we need to change a few things here.”

“But I can’t stop working out.” He flexed an arm and winked at me. He was right: He was far from a troll. A little rough around the edges, but that was part of his charm.

“I doubt your future wife wants you to stop working out, either. But there are ways to make this room, and other parts of the house, more woman friendly.”

I left Max an hour later with a list of changes, big and small. Move his weapons collection to his skills section and replace it with art representing the life he wanted. Organize the storage bedroom into a home office and bring in elements that made him either feel like a kid or think of children. Add a second nightstand in the master bedroom with a matching lamp. Rearrange his closet to make room for another person. Consider adding a couch or love seat to make a place where two people could snuggle together in the front room. Move the sniper artwork from the hall—his fame section. Women didn’t like to feel hunted, and they definitely didn’t like to feel stalked, which was the painting’s vibe. That instruction took the most convincing, being the most “chi-voodoo” sounding.

I didn’t bother with the small details, like each bagua’s element, shape, or color. Max was a bold-strokes kind of guy. I left him energized to get to work. Everything I’d told Max fell in the “common-sense feng shui” category. Everyone was more comfortable in a clean, organized house where they had adequate space to relax. Ari would do a follow-up call with him in a few weeks, and we’d see if he wanted a second consultation. Sometimes when people saw their lives start to change in response to their initial alterations, they were willing to embrace feng shui on a deeper level.