HEART OF ICE

CHAPTER 23

The first thing I noticed was the smell of detergent and fabric softener. The stuffy air between brown-paneled walls was filled with it. I thought I could smell the kind Aunt Meredith liked to use a lot. My skin tingled ever so slightly as I breathed deeply and passed all the way over the enchanted threshold. The door under the street had opened into a short hallway at the back of an old laundromat. My eyes darted all around, trying to take in every detail and watch out for any ambush.

A fluorescent bulb blinked and buzzed above the green and white-tiled floor. The brown walls of the hallway opened up to a warm, wide lobby full of whirring washing machines and humming dryers. Brilliant bands of golden-white sunlight stretched through the big picture windows at the front of the place. I could barely see the street outside. The only names I could easily make out were the ones that belonged to the people inside the laundromat. A few of the old ladies and one man-who looked stuck somewhere between his twenties and thirties-glanced up when I stepped into view. They watched me strangely. It didn't seem like they were exactly surprised that I, or the others walking out of the hallway behind me, were suddenly appearing. There was something else in their expressions.

"Oh, my God," exclaimed Baron at a near whisper. It distracted me for a moment from the people across the room. "I can't...I mean," Baron was saying, trying to understand what had just happened. "That was just a-"

"Drawing? Yes," said Alejandra over her shoulder.

"How many of ya' are back there," Iris Kithman asked. She was standing on the other side of two long rows of green, plastic chairs with one hand braced on the open washing machine she had been pulling clothes from.

"You saw others," I asked.

She, and the other people near her all nodded their heads.

"How many?"

Iris glanced at the people near her. Jorge Sanchez, the man who wasn't old but didn't look young, either, shrugged his shoulders. "Like, five or six, maybe. One of them was a lady. I think she was a lady."

Regina Phillip-Smith rolled her eyes. "There wasn't no lady with them," she said sharply from the row of seats behind Jorge.

"I thought it was a lady," Jorge argued.

"It looked like just a shadow to me," Milton Taylor said quietly. He looked like a college student and slightly out of place in the laundromat and amongst the rest of the group around him. He wore a soft-looking vest with a slightly-faded, argyle pattern on top of a thin, dark sweater. His cherry-brown hair was short and neatly styled. He had been looking down as he spoke but lifted his eyes at the sound of a gasp. That had come from Alejandra.

I looked back at my own group, namely Moe, Alejandra, and Orion.

"DeLovely," Orion said under the noise of the strangers arguing across the room. His brow was furrowed, like he had been struggling to remember her name. "It has to be the one called DeLovely."

"What do you know about her," asked Alejandra.

Orion shook his head. "Not much, I'm afraid. She's one of the least known-about of that whole, deplorable assortment."

"She can't be any worse than the one we already got to know," Moe said, walking slowly past me along the long bank of clothes dryers. "And we were able to take him out."

I grinned at my best friend then looked back across the room at the group finally quieting down. "Which way did they go?"

Iris Kithman looked at me like I was a fool. "Outside. Only place to go except back into the bathroom where ya'll just came from. And I don't even want to know what ya'll were doin' back there. Just too much of all kinds of weirdness happenin' in here today!"

"No kidding," Baron said.

"Thanks, Ms. Kithman," I said quickly, starting to turn toward the front door of the laundromat.

I didn't pay attention to the old woman's shocked expression and confused stuttering. The woman I'd never met before a few minutes earlier was saying something, but I couldn't make out any of her words. They were lost under the volume of a TV set I walked under just at that moment. It was one of four, fairly old fashioned sets bolted into the walls around the warm lobby. I glanced up at the hazy, glowing screen. A weatherman was standing in front of a digital map of an area in a state to the south. He pointed to some red and blue arrows that were pointing at each other before the graphics changed and the arrows began to converge. The last thing I heard over the whir of the laundry machines was something about the chance of tornadoes forming in that area. With my hand on the door at the front of the lobby, I silently hoped everyone in that distant place stayed safe.

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