Along Came Trouble (Camelot 2)

“I’ll walk with you. I can carry the pizza.”

He waited.

“I have to talk to you,” she muttered.

“Okay.” He opened the door. “After you, Katelet.”

He kept the conversation light on the short walk over to the Cove, a dank hole-in-the-wall that had long been a Camelot institution. The Cove sold greasy take-out pizza and offered customers their choice of two ancient video games to pass the time until their orders came up. Caleb got a couple of bucks’ worth of quarters and waited until they’d settled into their customary Ms. Pac-Man duel before he asked, “So what’s up?”

Katie ran Ms. Pac-Man straight into the blue ghost, which was when he knew for sure this would be bad. His sister was crazy-talented at Ms. Pac-Man. Usually, she kicked his ass.

She turned around to lean on the machine and stare at her Keds.

One afternoon when she was thirteen, he’d brought her here to play Ms. Pac-Man and told her he was joining the army. She’d started to cry—ugly, snuffling sobs—and there had been nothing he could do. He hadn’t seen her cry since she was a baby. It had shocked him. He’d patted her on the back and bought her a Cherry Coke, feeling thoroughly out of his league.

It was tough to figure out how to help Katie. He couldn’t predict her moods or guess what was bothering her. He still didn’t know what had gone down in Alaska.

He didn’t know what to say to her right now.

She took a deep breath.

“You know you’re the only person in the family who’s never asked me what happened with Levi?”

Caleb shrugged and moved the joystick, eyes on the screen. “I figured if you wanted me to know, you’d say something.”

“I haven’t told anybody.”

“Yeah,” he said, pausing between screens to take a drink from the Styrofoam cup he’d perched on top of the game. “I got that impression.”

Katie looked at her shoes again and went back to twisting her ring. “I’m married,” she said.

At first, he didn’t respond because his brain couldn’t figure out what to do with the information. She wasn’t seeing anyone—and he would know, because she lived at his house and worked in his office. His fingers went slack on the joystick as he tried to puzzle it out, and Ms. Pac-Man bit the dust with a sound like a shot from a digital laser.

And then it clicked. This wasn’t recent news. This was the past she’d been hiding. “To Levi?”

She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “It wasn’t a real marriage. He proposed one night when we were both half drunk. We only did it to get residency, because we couldn’t afford the tuition otherwise. And even married, we could only afford for one of us to go at a time. Which is why—”

She glanced at him and faltered. He tried to make his face do something less rigid and foreboding, but every muscle in his body seemed to have frozen.

Katie was married to Levi. Presently. Right this second.

“Where is he?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I ran into his mom at the post office, and it would seem he’s in California. I thought he was in Tibet. He told me he was going to Tibet. When he left. I mean, he didn’t actually tell me, but he left me this note, and the note said he was going to Tibet, and he wished me luck, only he took all the money, so it wasn’t as if luck was going to be much help—”

“Jesus Christ.” Caleb smacked the flat of his palm into the side of the video game hard enough to knock his drink off the top, spilling crushed ice and water all over the cheap red carpet. Katie went down on her knees and started pushing the mess back into the cup with her hand, as if there were some way she could prevent the water from soaking in.

“Leave it.”

She didn’t, and he couldn’t stand to see her there, looking like she was doing some kind of penance. He found her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Leave it.”

“Clark?”

A teenager with a shaved head and several ounces of metal in his face slid their pizzas onto the counter. Caleb looked at him without really seeing him, and the kid shuddered.

“Caleb,” Katie whispered, giving his hand a squeeze with her cold, wet fingers. “Get the pizzas.”

Moving stiffly, he pulled his wallet out