Two-Tone

It was the wrong color paint. It was close, but this wasn’t horseshoes or hand grenades. I knew it wasn’t quite right last night, but I told myself it just wasn’t dry yet, that it would look different in daylight. It would match.

I lied to myself.

I brush my fingers along the now two-tone wall. Bone dry. Cross off that excuse. The entire length of wall is covered in bright sunlight, but this section stands out, a quarter of a shade less blue than the rest. I can’t blame the light. I’m out of excuses and rationalizations.

I step back and tip my head to the side. Maybe I’m just being overcritical. Maybe no one other than me would see the minor difference. I close my eyes and stand in internal darkness for a moment, cleansing my visual palette. I breath, then open my eyes. The two colors stare back at me. Still just obvious enough that no one could overlook this.

The good news is I have time to fix this. Jerome won’t be home until tomorrow. A little over twenty-four hours. I pull out my phone and snap a picture of the wall from far away, then move closer to the line between right and wrong to grab a close-up.

I don’t go back to our local hardware store. Me buying paint twice in two days would be too memorable, Bob or James might tell Jerome. Besides, they failed to get me the right color the first time.

Instead, I point my car toward the huge box store on the edge of town. Here, I can be anonymous. But, there are eight million paint options. I’m overwhelmed, peering at the images on my phone, holding slips of paper next to it, searching for a match, when I am rescued.

“Are you trying to match a specific color?”

The voice questions the obvious, but I embrace it anyway. I need the perfect color.

“I have this,” I point to my screen and hold the phone out to the dark-haired man standing next to me. His orange apron is a bright clash to the calm green of his eyes. Neither of those colors matches what I’m looking for.

“I need this.” I shift my finger, directing his green eyes to the right, to the original wall color.

“Yeah,” he says. “Matching to paint is really tough.” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other and looks around, maybe hoping for a solution to fall from the sky. “If you bring in an item, we can get you a matching wall color, but matching paint is never perfect.”

I sigh.

“That’s why I always recommend buying more paint than you’ll need. Too much is always better than too little.”

I sigh again and add an eye roll since he’s looking around again instead of at me. I have extra paint. It’s just not the right color.

“You should probably start over. Repaint the whole room.”

His words break my heart. But he’s right. That’s the only way to get the room back to one color.

I choose a bold orange. Not quite as bright as his apron, a bit more red, but so different from the grey-green-blue-bland walls that me suddenly painting the room might make sense. I can play it off as a surprise for Jerome, as me watching too much reno-TV while he was away.

By the time I unload the paint and rollers and drop cloths and brushes into the living room, I’m exhausted. I want a shot of whiskey and a nap, but pour a cup of coffee and get to work instead.

The job takes the remainder of the day, and part of the night. The walls are a hideous sunset when I am done. I hate it, but at least the walls are all the same color again. I drop onto the couch, satisfied that I’ll wake up to a job well done.

The walls look better the next morning. Sunlight splashes through the windows, enhancing the warmth of the walls, making them glow. I did good. This actually looks okay. I check my phone for the time.

Not the morning. I slept far later than I had planned. I thought I’d have time to shower and style my hair, put the room back together for Jerome. It’s now 1:30, and he could be here within half an hour. The walls are finished, but I need to clean up the room, get rid of the painting mess and supplies. I’ll have to forget about the shower. Maybe I’ll just get him to take one with me later.

I scramble, tossing brushes and rollers into the dumpster outside in the alley, tapping lids back onto buckets and stowing the extra paint downstairs. The paint guy was right, it’s hard to know when I might need to do another touch up.

I am picking up the last of the drop cloths when I hear Jerome’s car in the driveway. I just made it. He’s going to get to see the room in its finished state, just with one extra bag of trash. And a filthy me.

I look down, bunching up the cloth to shove it into the last waiting trash bag. There’s a stain on the wood floor. I thought I had protected them, contained all the mess. That was the point of all the drop cloths. I guess I was more careful when I was painting than I was when I killed that man two days ago. This stain is blood, much too red to be the paint on the walls.

It’s too late. Jerome is here. He’ll see the blood, the one remnant from the tiny mistake I made. I covered the blood on the walls, but I can’t cover this, or replace the floor.

I’ll just have to add Jerome’s blood to it.

I drop the cloth and go to find my knife.

Magic For Liars and Other May Reads

I finished nine books in May:

The Farm by Joanne Ramos (ARC)
The Make or Break Year by Emily Krone Phillips
The Serpent’s Shadow by Rick Riordan
Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (audiobook)
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King
The Unbound by Victoria Schwab
Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey (ARC)
Donna Has Left the Building by Susan Jane Gilman (ARC)
Why Didn’t I Learn This in College? by Paula Rutherford

Of the three ARCs I read this month, Magic For Liars was my favorite. My full review is below. Reviews for the other ARCs can be found here (The Farm) and here (Donna Has Left the Building).

I received an Advance Reader’s Copy of Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey from the publisher (Tor) in exchange for an honest review. Magic For Liars is scheduled for release on June 4, 2019.

Magic For Liars is a private detective novel. It is also a novel of magic. Ivy is a private detective hired to investigate a death at a private high school. This high school is unlike most that we are familiar with. This school teaches magic.

Ivy was born unlucky. She has no magic, but has spent her entire life imagining how things would be different if she did. Ivy’s twin sister, Tabitha, was born lucky. She has magic, and is currently working at the school where the murder took place.

Ivy takes the job, seeing it as not only a big paycheck, but a chance to experience the life she was denied, and perhaps a chance to reconnect with the sister she deliberately grew away from. The job turns out to be more complicated than Ivy imagined, with the truth she seeks hidden by the secrets of students, teachers, and Ivy herself.

This story is told from Ivy’s point of view, and we get to know her quite well. I found her very believable as a non-mage interacting with a world of magic. She alternates between being jealous of magic and despising both the magic and the people who wield it. Frequently throughout the story, Ivy is disgusted by the way magic is wasted on trivial things when it could be used for important things like saving lives.

Other characters are more distant to us as readers. We only get to see them through Ivy’s lens and her interactions with them. Since they are presented to us through Ivy, we are limited in how well we get to know them, but they are still present as individuals. For the most part, these characters are clear, but there are a couple of sets of people (a group of high school girls, for example) that blurred together a bit for me.

I enjoyed the setting of this novel a ton. This is not Hogwarts. It is a modern day, American, boarding school that happens to teach magic in a world where Harry Potter exists. There are references to Hogwarts throughout, primarily with Ivy comparing what she is seeing in front of her to imaginary school. There are lots of details here that make the school come to life and make it a real place instead of a fictional castle.

Overall, the plot is well written. There are twists and turns through the story, as you would expect in a private detective novel. There was a good balance of shifts that I saw coming and surprises that I did not. There were, however, quite a few glitches in the story. These were minor inconsistencies in the timeline, and inconsistencies in characters and what they knew when. These were minor, but they were enough to catch my attention and pull me out of the story. Hopefully, these issues are resolved in the final published version of the novel.

Magic For Liars is an enjoyably fresh take on the private detective genre. If you like mysteries, fantasies, and stories that aren’t afraid to look at their tropes and poke gentle fun at them, you will most likely enjoy this novel.