Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls by Elliott James

Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls
    “I can’t believe this has happened.” Ronald Stewart was a large man, muscled and fat, but despair had cracked open his shell and ripped out his center. The nutless husk that was talking to us barely knew we were there. “Courtney was…I mean is…”
    He began to cry, ragged, high-pitched sobs that shuddered through his whole body.
    His wife was just the opposite.If Ron was a shell, tragedy had turned Debby Stewart to stone. Her body should have looked soft—she was plump and pillowy—but her face was hard and cold and devoid of weakness. “How much does an expert tracker charge, Mr. Morris?”
    I looked around their home. It was a simple one-story affair, and most of the furniture in it looked decades old, possessions acquired from dead relatives anddepartment stores. He was a retired truck driver and she worked for the city of Bonaparte in some sort of secretarial capacity. More than half of the photos in the living room had their missing nineteen-year-old daughter in them. She was a beautiful girl.
    I did them the courtesy of not smiling. “I came here as a favor to Sarah. I don’t want to charge you anything. I’m not a monster.”
    Whichwas either ironic or an outright lie because that’s exactly what I was.
    Sarah was sitting next to me on the sofa, and she reached out and patted my forearm like the old friend she was pretending to be. She was an attractive woman with long black hair, closing in on forty and wearing it well, the sort of person you think of when you think “yoga instructor” although I had no idea if she didyoga or not. I had met her two hours ago.
    *  *  *
    “This place looks funky,” Isaac Roberts had commented that morning. “But it feels like Christmas.”
    I would have described it as Norman-Rockwell-meets-the-pagans myself, but I knew what he meant. The bakery we were sitting in was a combination of delicious smells and New Age art and old-fashioned corner store. The counter of the glass caseand the Formica tables had been overrun by pewter figurines of forest life and tiny trees made of copper wire with green beaded leaves. All around us lots of earth-toned pottery held pretty plants that you just knew had pretty names, long Latin titles that would roll off the tongue mellifluously if you only knew how to pronounce them.
    The beadwork and tapestries and paintings hanging allover the place were filled with spiraling designs, and I wondered idly what kinds of runes and sigils they hid. It couldn’t have been anything too bad or I would have sensed it in the reactions of the people around us. The customers ran the full gamut of ages and races and economic classes, and even the people waiting to pick up takeout orders at the counter seemed relaxed around one anotherand comfortable in their own skins. The effect was probably temporary, but I could see why people would keep coming back. The bakery was a blessed place.
    I was almost relaxed myself, sitting there rereading a used paperback copy of Ride With Me by Thomas Costain. I hadn’t come there for the cheesecake or the coffee, but both were delicious. When I bit into a pastry puff called a “BonaparteBite” that came free with my order, it had a slip of paper in it. I pulled the fortune out and read: “Old wines and old friends are best.”
    Since I don’t drink and my oldest living friends are trying to track me down and kill me, I didn’t think much of it at the time.
    Isaac wasn’t eating anything. He couldn’t eat anything. The only reason he was even able to sit down was because Ihad pulled out the chair, pretended to reconsider where I wanted to sit, then sat at the opposite side of the table. Isaac was a ghost, or close enough to one that it made no difference.
    “I don’t see how people can just read,” Isaac complained. A tall blond with an athletic build and fine features, he had probably been popular in high school not too many years ago. He was an extrovert, atany rate,