Dead Sleeping Shaman by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

her.”
    “Good luck,” I grumbled, bristling over being separated from the others and interrogated by the little blob of a man. “All I need is a story for the paper. That’s it. Everything else is your department.”
    Dolly looked me in the face. “What if that damn book of yours sells? You think of that? You’ll need more. You’ll need me. And maybe I won’t want to be bothered with you hanging around by then. Two can play that game, Emily.”
    I could have grabbed her by the scraggly hair and tossed her down the steps, but Crystalline had stopped, turned, and watched us with consternation written in her blinking eyes.
    “I appreciate it, Emily,” Crystalline said, taking a deep breath and pulling her shoulders back. “I’ll tell you everything I know. And on that you’ll have to trust me. Knowledge comes through different channels. Maybe even Marjory will come back to help us. Whatever it takes—of this world or of a world beyond —we’ll find the person who did this to her.”
    She talked all the way back to my house.
    Though it was dark by the time I got home to Willow Lake, Jackson’s white Jaguar, parked in my driveway, was unmistakable.
    All Dolly said when she saw it was “Un-uh. There stands trouble.”
    Jackson, long and lanky in his dress-to-impress outfit, leaned against the back of his car with arms crossed, a white restaurant bag dangling from his left wrist. He straightened with a slow, languorous unfolding—sure to wow any woman within one hundred feet. You had to give him a certain grace; an older male model perfection in his black turtleneck under a white cashmere cardigan and his knife-creased slacks. Ah Jackson, I thought, ever the pipe and elbow-patch writer. Crystalline gave an “Umm” of admiration. I muttered something about him being my ex.
    He waved at Dolly, and bent forward to see who the redhead, beside her in the car, was, then waved and smiled at her, too. What a charmer. With meanness bubbling straight up from my soul as I crawled out of the car, I thought the charm was wearing a little thin. With bigger meanness, I added, in my head, that the wearing down could be from all those chipper coeds he’d gotten into his bed. “Past sins will out,” I mumbled to nobody in particular.
    “I called you,” I yelled toward him, slowly making my way toward the house as Dolly left. “I told you I wouldn’t be here.”
    Jackson shrugged and opened his arms wide as if I’d go flying to him. The bag from Gio’s restaurant swung back and forth from his wrist. “Figured you had to come home sometime. Where on earth is your spare key?” he demanded, walking toward me. “I searched everywhere. There’s not a person on this earth who doesn’t hide a key under the welcome mat.”
    I got around him, through the bare rose arbor, to the house, ignoring the arms held out. I felt in my pocket for a key. There was one under the flowerpot near the arbor, but I didn’t want him to see where I’d hidden it. “Obviates the hiding, doesn’t it?” I said over my shoulder. “To put a key where people expect to find it?”
    I pushed my way through the door then turned and smiled up at him. He bent to kiss my cheek and hug me, moving the bag so it slapped hard against my back.
    “I needed to see you,” he said.
    That should have been nice to hear: I needed to see you …
    “I’m sure my pasta has shriveled by this time,” he complained.
    “Come on in, Jackson. And bring your shriveled pasta with you.” I grinned back at him. I felt an old urge to reach up and touch his face where the five o’clock shadow outlined his rugged chin. “I’ll make a shriveled salad to go with it.”
    I didn’t add, and never once think it a metaphor for our shriveled marriage. I didn’t say it, not out loud, but I sure thought it, and then thought what a clever girl I was.

It was so ordinary, sitting at the table, sharing dinner as Jackson talked on and on about Chaucer and how he hadn’t finished