The Long and Winding Road (The Seafare Chronicles 4)

The doorbell rang.

I opened my eyes, unsure of what the hell had just happened.

It rang again a moment later.

“I don’t want any!” I shouted at the door. “I’m dying, so I wouldn’t even be able to taste your Girl Scout cookies or hear you talk about your lord and savior Jesus Christ!”

The doorbell rang again.

Fucking persistent Girl Scouts and/or lovers of Christ.

Or maybe it was a robber. With a knife.

Had I remembered to lock the door?

I didn’t know.

I was going to get stabbed by a robber.

They’d find my body, snot on my upper lip, used tissues on the ground, and say, “Well, he looks gross.”

Otter and the Kid would be sad for a little bit, sure. Maybe they’d cry at the funeral, but they’d both move on. Otter would get married to the Martha Stewart reject and they’d have kids with perfectly coiffed hair, and Tyson would get hired on by PETA and eventually stage a military coup and force vegetarianism on everyone else.

“I can’t let that happen,” I muttered. “I can’t get stabbed and die.” I tried to get up, but that turned out to be a bad idea, so I sat back down with a groan. “Okay. Fine. Come in. You can kill me. Just make it quick. And tell Otter that when he gets remarried to Phinneus Van der Woods the fourth, he’s not allowed to have his engagement announcement in the New York Times say anything about how the happy couple likes to go yachting in their spare time, because that’s just fucking stupid. Seriously. Yachting? They might as well also play croquet using mallets made out of wood repurposed from the old Summer House that had been built by Jebediah Van der Woods in the late 1800s.”

“Wow,” a voice I didn’t recognize said. “That was… specific.”

I opened my eyes. Standing awkwardly near the door was a kid I’d never seen before. He was thin and wearing tight jeans (skinny jeans, I thought the youths called them—fucking millennials). His skin was dark and lovely, and he was watching me with a curious expression.

He didn’t seem threatening, but then I was sure murder victims sometimes thought the same thing. “Are you here to kill me?”

“Should I be? Are we role-playing? Like, you’re the spy and I’m the FBI agent bent on revenge who has finally caught up with you. You’ve been shot and are coughing up blood, and I have to decide if my morals are firmly planted in the gray or if I have some hope for redemption. I’d have to go buy new dress shoes before we do this. I feel I’d wear expensive ones. Did you know that a pair of Testoni dress shoes cost almost forty grand? They have gold and jewels inlaid in them.”

Dammit. I liked my potential murderer. “Well, make it quick. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to last.”

“Yeah, it looks like—oh my god, there is a used Kleenex stuck to my non-Testoni shoe. What is wrong with you? How could you do this to me?”

The stranger in my house was hopping on one foot, scraping his shoe against the wall, a look of disgust on his face. His thick black hair was tied back, held in place by a leather strap.

“As fun as this is,” I said, voice hoarse, “if you’re not here to kill me or bring me cookies, who the hell are you and what do you want?”

He grimaced as the Kleenex stuck to the wall. “My name is Corey. Corey Ellis. I’m a student at Dartmouth.”

“Oh-kay? And what do you want?”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “This is probably going to seem weird, but—hell. You know Tyson, right? Tyson Thompson?”

That caught my attention. I sat up quickly. “He’s my brother. What happened? Is he okay? Did he get hurt—”

Corey’s eyes went wide. “No. No, no, no, he’s fine. I swear. It’s not—man, you are so not going to believe me on this.”

“Are you a friend of his?” I asked, confused.

He shook his head. “We’ve never met.”

That… didn’t sound right. “Uh-huh,” I said slowly. “And you know who he is because….”

“Everyone knows who he is,” Corey said, pulling his bag up higher on his shoulder. “Smart kid, right? Got a lot of attention when he came here.”