"Silence!" Lily put her hand up, "I'd rather not show my employee spirit by committing every detail of your heinous crime to my photographic memory to be recalled in court later. I'll just say that I saw you but you seemed normal for someone without a clue. "
"You don't have a photographic memory. "
"I do, too, and it's a curse. I can never forget the futility of - "
"You forgot to take out the trash at least eight times last month. "
"I didn't forget. "
Charlie took a deep breath, the familiarity of arguing with Lily was actually calming him down. "Okay then, without looking, what color shirt are you wearing?" He raised an eyebrow like he had her there.
Lily smiled and for a second he could see that she was just a kid, kind of cute and goofy under the fierce makeup and attitude. "Black. "
"Lucky guess. "
"You know I only own black. " She grinned. "Glad you didn't ask hair color, I just changed this morning. "
"That's not good for you, you know. That dye has toxins. "
Lily lifted the lavender wig to reveal her close-cut maroon locks underneath, then dropped it again. "I'm all natural. " She stood and patted the bar stool. "Sit, Asher. Confess. Bore me. "
Lily leaned back against the counter, and tilted her head to look attentive, but with her dark eye makeup and lavender hair it came off more like a marionette with a broken string. Charlie came around the counter and sat on the stool. "I was just in line behind this William Creek guy, and I saw his umbrella glowing. . . "
And Charlie went through the whole story to her, the umbrella, the bus, the hand from the storm sewer, the bolt for home with the giant dark shadow above the rooftops, and when he was finished, Lily asked, "So how do you know his name?"
"Huh?" Charlie said. Of all of the horrible, fantastic things she might have asked about, why that?
"How do you know the guy's name?" Lily repeated. "You barely spoke to the guy before he bit it. You see it on his receipt or something?"
"No, I. . . " He didn't have any idea how he knew the man's name, but suddenly there was a picture in his head of it written out in big, block letters. He leapt off the stool. "I gotta go, Lily. "
He ran through the door into the stockroom and up the steps.
"I still need a note for school," Lily shouted from below, but Charlie was dashing through the kitchen, past a large Russian woman who was bouncing his baby daughter in her arms, and into the bedroom, where he snatched up the notepad he kept on his nightstand by the phone.
There, in his own blocky handwriting, was written the name William Creek and, under it, the number 12. He sat down hard on the bed, holding the notepad like it was a vial of explosives.
Behind him came the heavy steps of Mrs. Korjev as she followed him into the bedroom. "Mr. Asher, what is wrong? You run by like burning bear. "
And Charlie, because he was a Beta Male, and there had evolved over millions of years a standard Beta response to things inexplicable, said, "Someone is fucking with me. "
Lily was touching up her nail polish with a black Magic Marker when Stephan, the mailman, came through the shop door.
"'Sup, Darque?" Stephan said, sorting a stack of mail out of his bag. He was forty, short, muscular, and black. He wore wraparound sunglasses, which were almost always pushed back on his head over hair braided in tight cornrows. Lily had mixed feelings about him. She liked him because he called her Darque, short for Darquewillow Elventhing, the name under which she received mail at the shop, but because he was cheerful and seemed to like people, she deeply mistrusted him.
"Need you to sign," Stephan said, offering her an electronic pad, on which she scribbled Charles Baudelaire with great flourish and without even looking.
Stephan plopped the mail on the counter. "Working alone again? So where is everyone?"
"Ray's in the Philippines, Charlie's traumatized. " She sighed. "Weight of the world falls on me - "
"Poor Charlie," Stephan said. "They say that's the worst thing you can go through, losing a spouse. "
"Yeah, there's that, too. Today he's traumatized because he saw a guy get hit by a bus up on Columbus. "
"Heard about that. He gonna be okay?"
"Well, fuck no, Stephan, he got hit by a bus. " Lily looked up from her nails for the first time.