Ch.118Two Face’s Guests – Michael Husband (3)

When this woman lowered her voice and hung a few teardrops at the corners of her eyes, it seemed like any man would willingly flee with her from Maine at the northeastern edge to California at the southwestern corner.

He would certainly have his work cut out for him. She exuded a cool, unpredictable aura that felt closer to vampire than human, though at least vampires were aware of the atmosphere they created.

In contrast, this woman was both sly and innocent. Though generally reserved with strangers, she would easily approach anyone who seemed interested in her and whisper in a bubbly voice.

My situation wasn’t any better. If she asked me right now, I felt I could run away with her—perhaps not all the way to California, but at least to Utah. Once again, I organized my thoughts, dismissing these idle musings.

Fortunately, I felt rewarded for having dressed properly. Until now, I couldn’t understand why such a woman was sitting alone without a boyfriend.

After bobbing her head back and forth as if trying to focus, she leaned toward me and began examining my face thoroughly, as if inspecting every corner. She seemed to be searching for something.

Eventually, looking puzzled as if she hadn’t found what she was looking for, she giggled. She appeared to be around twenty, but her behavior was childlike. Yet her voice was laced with coquettishness like frost.

“I can’t tell. Usually, I can tell what kind of person someone is just by looking, and when I see your fists, I’m reminded of a boxer I used to date. But unlike him, your ears and nose aren’t smashed in. I want to know what kind of person you are. You must have been invited for dinner, but there’s still plenty of time until then. And I don’t smell any meat cooking in the oven.”

She placed her hands on the table and moved closer. She looked like a cat about to climb across the table, as if she might leap over to the guest sofa where I was sitting.

“And you look so blurry. Like you might disappear from where you’re sitting. Are you going to disappear? Will you stay in this house until dinner time?”

She had good intuition. She lacked tact but had good eyes that could see much. However, she didn’t appear to be a warlock, so she couldn’t see through magic. That was enough.

Just as she was about to climb onto the table and reach for me, the editor’s son grabbed her wrist and pulled her back to the sofa. I had assumed she would stop on her own, but apparently not.

“Carmen, enough. It’s fine to be polite to our guest, but don’t go beyond that.”

Even with her wrist caught and being pulled back to the sofa, the smile never left her face. As if examining my face had been quite entertaining, she rolled her eyes around a couple of times before speaking in a complaining voice.

Until just now, she had whispered with a flirtatious voice, but now she whined like a child. Though they only had two children, the youngest daughter was clearly the baby of the family.

“I heard he saved our entire family, but he hasn’t saved me yet. So he’ll save me someday too, and it’s only natural that I’m curious about the person who will save me, Gerard.”

Every word she spoke relied more on spontaneity and intuition than logic and reason, but for what it was, she exuded confidence. She could pass for a prophet.

To be more accurate, I had to use all my strength to hold back from asking if their daughter was under the influence of something. Still, she was entertaining to watch, so I felt no desire to be rude.

At least now I understood why she was sitting here without a boyfriend. While she might be enjoyable to sit across from, she wouldn’t be pleasant to sit beside. That much was certain.

The editor’s son sighed as he listened to her nonsensical words, stroking her hair. He was still treating her like a younger sister.

“I apologize. My sister is a bit…”

Peculiar, I supposed. Since that would have been impolite, I blurted it out while he was still searching for the right word. When not working, I could try to be gentle and kind.

“She’s cheerful. Lively, I mean. It’s nice to see, so there’s no need to stop her.”

At my words, the editor and his wife exchanged smiles, looking somewhat relieved. I hoped they weren’t thinking that a potential suitor had appeared for their daughter.

The editor went to check on the food, leaving only the young people in the living room. Carmen got up with a grin, crossed the table, and approached me.

Naturally, she sat on my lap, brought her face close to mine, and smiled. The childlike behavior from earlier had vanished without a trace as she whispered in a low voice.

“You’re skilled at choosing words. You must be good with language. But these don’t seem like words you normally use. They smell dusty, like books that haven’t been opened for a long time. Oh, Detective. You smell like flames. Like a roaring fire.”

I wasn’t sure if it was right to say she lacked perception. I decided to pretend not to understand, extending a reassuring hand to the editor’s son, who was looking at me with an expression that seemed to ask what on earth this girl was saying.

“I’m not the kind of detective who sits in a corner with a pipe making deductions. That kind of detective wouldn’t have been able to protect your family from the armed men who came looking for them.”

She seemed to swing like a pendulum between innocence and cunning, danger and safety. The high-pitched laugh she let out while sitting on my lap was again innocent.

“I couldn’t tell what kind of person you were just by looking at your face, so I tried to check inside, but I still don’t know. Carmen finds you interesting. All my family members are good people and completely transparent. My brother is kind and dependable. My father is gentle, and my mother is strong. The men I’ve dated were all rather awful, but they were transparent too. So, someone as opaque as you is exciting.”

If she had claimed to have little or no experience with men, I would have been suspicious. Not that it mattered. My own history with women wasn’t exactly pristine either.

My curiosity piqued, I leaned in closer and asked. When our eyes met, she turned her head away as if shy, but it was an act. As soon as she heard my voice, she turned back to look at me.

“I don’t see why you’d want to meet men who so transparently display their awful inner selves.”

She grinned, showing her snow-white teeth. After deliberating whether to lie or tell the truth, she opened her mouth cheerfully in her distinctive high-pitched voice.

“I wanted to show off. Oh, I’m dating a boxer these days. He’s really handsome. Left, right. He throws punches so fast I can’t even see them. It was nice to brag about him until he started throwing those punches at me too. I didn’t care about the black eye, so I bit his neck and broke up with him. Other men were mostly similar.”

“Do you have a gun in your pocket?”

Since she had been honest, I returned the favor. Dropping the polite pretense and speaking in my normal manner, she giggled again.

“You must have one in yours too, right?”

“If I had to choose between a suit and a gun when going out, I’d choose the gun.”

Before she could start patting me down to look for the gun, I pulled out my safety-locked pistol from my pocket and handed it to her. Her eyes sparkled at the sight of me drawing it from the holster.

I wouldn’t have refused even if she had actually tried to search me, but I hadn’t forgotten that I was currently a guest invited by people who considered me their savior, not sitting in a bar.

She placed the gun on her palm and examined it from various angles. She seemed to have fired a gun before, as she kept the barrel pointed at empty space and didn’t even put the tip of her fingernail near the trigger.

There was a certain level of trust between us now. A trust that we both found each other quite enjoyable, and an almost laughable assumption that she wouldn’t release the safety and pull the trigger.

As expected, the gun soon returned to my hand. Carmen tapped the tip of her own nose with her finger.

“They say it’s fun to meet someone who carries the same thing in their heart. That’s not what you meant by this situation, is it? Though maybe it is. Oh, the gun smelled of lubricant.”

Mentioning that the gun had been maintained was a sign that she knew it had been fired recently. She looked up at me with an expression suggesting she didn’t think I had a shooting range in my backyard.

Her senses were as keen as an animal’s. She only told half the story. The other half she kept to herself, as if spinning a thread for me to follow. Suddenly, she stood up from my lap.

“We don’t allow smoking inside our house. I’m going to have a cigarette outside. Would you like to join me? The kitchen window faces the backyard, so if we go to the front yard, no one will say anything.”

I first glanced at the editor’s son. Seeing him nod reluctantly, Carmen took my hand and led me outside the house.

As soon as we left the house, she stretched refreshingly, put a cigarette in her mouth, and pretended to search her pockets. She showed me her palms, which emitted a faint smell of ozone.

“Could I borrow a light? I don’t have a lighter. Carmen doesn’t seem like a meticulous person, does she?”

Carmen deliberately let the smell of ozone emanate from her hands as she spoke. She could use magic but transparently revealed that she wanted me to light it for her.

“You seem to be as meticulous as you want to be when you want to be.”

I took out a green cigarette pack with a red circle, put one in my mouth, gathered mana at my fingertips to create a flame half the size of my fingernail, and lit only my cigarette. I didn’t offer her a light.

Looking up at me happily as if she had wanted me to read her intentions, she properly gathered mana at her fingertips and created a flame similar in size to mine to light her cigarette.

“You would have figured it out even without a hint, wouldn’t you? You really are an interesting person. I was both happy and curious when I heard someone had saved my family from danger. That’s why I wanted to know what kind of person you were, Mr. Michael. Mike? Mickey?”

“Mr. Michael. My surname is unusual, so you can call me Husband if you like.”

Only one bartender called me by a nickname.

“Someone calls you Mickey, don’t they? It must be someone who’s known you since childhood. It would take that long to call someone like you Mickey.”

I’d have to take back what I said about her lacking perception. Rather, she was inconsistent. When she wanted to notice something, she acted like a cat that had caught the scent of fish, but when she wasn’t interested, she became oblivious.

We were silent until we finished our cigarettes. Only after we had finished, when we faintly heard Gerard’s voice from inside asking “Where are Michael and Carmen?” and answering “In the front yard,” did she speak again.

“So, why did you bring me out here?”

“To smoke. There are words that go well with the smell of cigarettes. I want to repay you too. Would you like to go for a drink this evening? My parents and brother are all quite uptight. You don’t seem to be.”

Her words didn’t seem connected at all, yet she created a conversation.

“That doesn’t sound bad. Where are we going?”

Carmen pretended to think before speaking as if she had just remembered. It didn’t take long. She was acting as if she knew I would recognize it was an act.

“Probably… Arachne. Do you have an invitation? If not, we could use mine to get in.”

I showed her the spider web-patterned invitation to Arachne from my wallet. She also took out an invitation from her pocket and smiled.

“Arachne’s spirits are enjoyable to drink, aren’t they? They’re strong spirits in both senses of the word—alcoholic and poisonous—which makes them taste better because it’s amusing. Don’t you think?”

“Isn’t it also amusing to feel safe despite being caught in spider webs with spiders everywhere?”

Carmen giggled again. Soon she burst into laughter like a child and nodded.

“It is funny. Being caught in webs spun by human-sized spiders would normally be terrifying. But Arachne’s spiders are extremely friendly. Carmen enjoys that ambiguous feeling.”

If she was a woman who lived for pleasure and desire, it seemed worth knowing. This was more inductive knowledge than my own desire. People who lived such lives generally knocked on the detective agency’s door.

If this woman knocked, it would be a good thing; if the editor and his wife knocked, it would be bad. The probability of it being bad was higher. This woman resembled a vampire, and vampires were generally familiar with tragedy.

After chatting briefly, we each smoked another cigarette before going back inside. We didn’t smell strongly of smoke. After that, I needed to become more acquainted with comfort than pleasure, and Carmen behaved somewhat more properly.

The meal was excellent. I rarely had glossy meat dishes when eating at home, but there was something homely about the food they had prepared.

After dinner, at a time when an old whiskey bottle hidden in the house would normally appear, we continued talking over tea. Most of the conversation was about the journalist.

These were trivial matters. The editor mentioned that for a journalist, he seemed somewhat dull, and while he seemed to have good intuition in some ways and bad in others, the editor had wanted to nurture him into a good journalist… The editor stopped there.

It seemed he thought it better to give trust rather than instruction to someone who would expose the Followers of the Forest’s Firstborn and proudly present himself stopping them as a scoop.

That woman has changed too, he thought. Recalling when they first met, she had been a woman with only flowers in her head, but now… Thinking about it, she was still the same. She just didn’t only look at flower gardens anymore; the person hadn’t changed.

Once we finished talking about people we knew in common, the conversation topics were exhausted. Gerard seemed to want to hear more about the Argonne Invincibles, but he remembered well that I was his family’s savior, not his personal friend. Only then did we exchange warm goodbyes before heading straight to Arachne.

I showed the spider web-patterned invitation to Arachne’s doorkeeper before entering. When asked if I had company, I answered yes.

Arachnes—creatures with female upper bodies attached to spider bodies—moved ceaselessly along the thick, soft spider webs they had spun inside the hollowed-out building, carrying bootleg liquor. I ordered two drinks.

Not long after, Carmen entered. She looked around, found me, smiled, and naturally came to the table and sat across from me. Without even asking if it was hers, she left a lip mark on one of the glasses.