Diana Peterfreund - Under the Rose

“Amy.” She squeezed my hands. “Please. Help. Me.”

Jenny may not pay attention to her oaths, but I still did. Okay, so I sucked at secrecy. So I didn’t always completely trust or love my brethren. I was still there to help them out when they needed me.

And this chick needed me.

“Jenny, what am I supposed to say? That you’ll talk, but only to me? That’s a little NYPD Blue, don’t you think?”

“No, you can’t tell him I’m here at all. Please? I don’t trust him.”

This, coming from the traitor with the secret apartment and the false name. “I don’t have a particularly high opinion of the people you do trust.”

Jenny maneuvered herself behind the Cheetos display. “Right now, there’s only one person who fits that description and she’s standing in front of me.”

“Then strike what I just said.” I looked out at the street. Poe was probably already searching for me.

“Get rid of him, okay?” She thrust a restaurant postcard at me. “Then meet me here.”

“Absolutely not!” I said. “You’ve been missing for two days and you think I’m letting you out of my sight? Forget it.”

“Amy, I swear—”

“Bullshit. I don’t believe anything you swear. Not after what you did.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I swear. I swear on the Bible.” She reached behind her neck and unclasped her crucifix and chain. “Here. This was my grandmother’s. Take it as assurance that I’ll meet you. But don’t tell Poe about me. Please. There’s a lot going on you don’t know.”

I was getting a little sick of hearing that, and also, I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t just palmed some cheap trinket. But I’d seen Jenny wear this crucifix before. “Fine,” I said, regretting it already.

Jenny walked up to the counter, whispered a word to the still-stunned clerk, then ran out the back door.

“So, girly,” he said, pocketing a fifty, “you still want your coffees?”

Outside, I scanned the dismal streets for Poe while balancing two paper cups and an umbrella handle and brainstorming ways to, as Jenny said, “get rid of him.” We’d been working together so well, too. I was still trying to figure it out when Poe rounded the corner, saw me, and came splashing up.

“Where have you been!” he said with a scowl. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“Everywhere but in the store you left me in front of?”

He put his hands on my shoulders. “You have no idea what I thought.”

“I have a pretty good idea, actually,” I replied, shaking him off. I handed him his cup. “I’m the big conspiracy theorist in the group, remember?”

“Can you just lay off the backtalk for two minutes? I wanted to show you something. I think we can get in through—”

But I’d stopped listening. “Backtalk?” I repeated, imbuing the word with as much venom as possible. “ Backtalk? Who do you think you are, my great-aunt Amelia, wielding her wooden spoon?”

He rolled his eyes. “Sorry. It was just an expression. I was joking.”

“Joking.” I searched the memory banks. “Since when do you have a sense of humor? I seem to recall a certain individual who tried to drown me the last time I made a joke.” Poe had been cruel to me during my initiation. Focus on that.

“Okay, now I know you’re mocking me. I said I’m sorry. Can we get on with it?”

He wasn’t going to make this easy, was he? “Not if you plan to keep patronizing me like this. I don’t even get why you’re still here, James. What’s your plan? Trying to get in good with Gehry?”

“No, not anymore. I thought we went over this. It’s Jamie, and I’m a gardener now, remember?”

“And unless you want to stay a gardener, don’t you think you’d better get out of here? Keep it up, and you won’t have any friends in politics left.”

He placed his cup on a window ledge and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Wherefore the sudden concern?”

“It’s not concern,” I replied smoothly. “It’s that pesky paranoia of mine. So here’s my theory: You say you want to help. You feed me nice little bits of information, and then you make sure you tag along every step of the way. You’re not here to help me. You’re helping them. What better way to get back in their good graces?”

“Are you insane?”

Yes. “You knew I would track her down eventually, and you made sure you’d be right beside me.”

“You are insane. Amy, you couldn’t track a train by yourself.” That’s right, Poe. Make it easy. My eyes began to burn. “And in case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t exactly found her, either.” Ah, Poe, how little you understand. “Is this how you get when you haven’t had your nap?”

“Right. My nap. Always good to have the condescension as well as the misogyny in your arsenal, isn’t it?”

Oops, maybe a tad too far. Poe reeled back as if struck. He stood there for a moment, in the rain, blinking at me. Then he raised his hands in surrender. “I fucking don’t get you women.”

Enter Misogyny. Or, at the very least, chauvinism.

He looked at Jenny’s building, then shook his head. “This was a dead end anyway. I’m out of here. See you around, Amy.” He turned and walked off.

I stood there until my coffee got cold.

Jenny was seated in a tall-backed booth when I arrived at the near-empty restaurant. I stashed my dripping umbrella, wondered briefly what had happened to Poe’s, and slid into the seat across from her.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“I pissed him off and he ditched me.” I dropped her necklace on the table and waved to the waitress. “Double cappuccino?”

Jenny slid the menu at me. “Are you hungry?”

“Mostly for information. Now, tell me what happened before I’m tempted to commit assault with the pepper shaker.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “Where do I start?”

“Anywhere. Your involvement with the website. Your disappearance. Your alias. Your fake apartment. How about explaining why the hell thirteen inches of your hair are sitting in the Grand Library right now?”

“I screwed up.”

“I know that part. Tell me how. And start with whether or not anyone has been hurting you.”

She worried her bottom lip, and her eyes grew glassy. “Not as much as I’ve been hurting myself. The Diggers are all bark and no bite, you know.”

“Tell that to the man who broke into my room yesterday,” I snapped.

“Someone broke into your room?” she asked.

“Yes. And yours.” I was losing my patience. Where was that cappuccino? “Now, what happened? Begin with the part where you betrayed us, and then I’ll see if I’m interested in sticking around for the rest.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. When I joined, I didn’t know what to expect. I mean, I was told Rose & Grave worshipped the devil.”

“Then why did you join?”

“I was a sleeper agent,” she said matter-of-factly as the waitress arrived. The woman gave Jenny a skeptical glance, set down a cup of cappuccino, a milkshake, and an omelette with French fries and departed. “It was Micah’s idea. When the Diggers started grooming me, we thought it was the perfect chance.” She waved in the air with her fork. “To…get them.”

“What went wrong?”

She dug into her food. “To start with, you did. And the other girls. You were really nice to me and I was kind of into the whole battle—you know, down with the entrenched patriarchy and all that stuff Demetria says. It made the society seem really human to me. Before I was in there, I pretty much thought it was all blood rituals.”