Ten Club? What was that?
“Hey, is there a good café around here?” I asked the Uber driver who’d rescued me from the rain. I’d programmed in the library’s address for my ride, but I needed to eat. Some caffeine would be awesome, too.
The driver recommended a place by the marina.
“Thanks.” I updated my destination and started searching the words Ten Club on my phone. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the Monochrome Café—all black walls with poems and quotes from famous people painted in white—and I was still searching without any hits.
Thirty minutes after that, I’d downed a cup of black coffee and a carrot muffin, still nowhere near finding any information. Also, my cell battery was getting low.
Okay, so the house had to be owned by someone, and ownership required a paper trail.
I quickly looked up the county recorder’s site. There was a searchable database. I typed in the address of the creepy house and finished off my second cup of coffee while my phone loaded the info.
No records found? I set down my cup and typed in the address again. Maybe I’d entered it incorrectly.
Nothing. Weird. I went to the parcel map and found the street, but the lot where the home sat was all grayed out. When I pressed my finger on the square, to pull up the parcel number like I could on the lots beside it, nothing happened.
Okay. This is suspicious. The land was not imaginary. The house was not imaginary. How were there no records?
My next stop would have to be the library. Perhaps I could find something in their archives.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By the time the library closed, I had gone through almost a century’s worth of old newspapers from the pre-internet era.
The only thing that came up on the house was a very old photo of what it used to look like in the early 1900s. From the black-and-white picture, I couldn’t tell what color it had been, but it was definitely the same house, owned by a merchant named Draco Minos, who bought the property from a wealthy politician. Of course, I found nothing about Draco Minos.
“Great.” So the house was a ghost. The owners were ghosts. Ten Club didn’t exist either.
I packed up my stuff and decided my only option was to head back to Jack’s hotel. It was about ten blocks away, so I would walk to save money.
I grabbed my still damp duffel bag and went outside. The rain had finally stopped, but a thick fog hung in the air like a bad omen, blocking out the final rays of daylight.
As I walked down the steep hill lined with house after house, business after business, all tightly packed in together like dominos, I thought about what I’d say to Jack.
I didn’t know how to articulate my thoughts because there wasn’t any clarity inside my mind. I just knew I felt something for him. Or for his presence in my life? It wasn’t a need exactly. It definitely wasn’t love. It was more like…a pull. Because while he terrified me, I couldn’t get him out of my mind. His darkness, his beauty, his deep seductive voice. I could blame my obsession on his body, with endless ropes of powerful muscles set on a tall masculine frame, but what I felt wasn’t physical. Yet, it sorta was. Whatever or whoever Jack was, he affected me right down to my bones.
That kiss, for example. I’d kissed boys before. I’d kissed men, too, when I got older. College was pretty typical, in that I’d had a few superficial flings, but mostly, I kept to myself. Still, despite my limited experience, I’d never had such an intimate kiss like I’d had with Jack, which only made things more confusing. And, sadly, I wasn’t getting closer to the answers. The best I could settle for was telling him how I felt and hoping he wouldn’t abandon me in the midst of my existential crisis. After I came clean, I would give him the cuff, let the pieces fall.
I turned the corner onto the street of Jack’s hotel and spotted him walking in the opposite direction.
“Jack!” I yelled right as a bus passed. He didn’t hear me.
I followed him for several blocks, getting cut off by a red light and traffic. From a distance, I watched him turn down a small side street.
As soon as the crosswalk signal turned green, I jogged after him, but once I got to the alley, all I found was a dead end. Iron security gates protected most of the doors, which I presumed were back entrances or emergency exits.
Where’d he go? I walked down the alley, but there was no sign of Jack. The only place he could have gone was that last door, which was boarded up. The nails were sticking out. Someone had pried open one side.