Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
24.
When Leda Foley woke up, her half-eaten burrito was cold in the bag, but there weren’t any rats yet.
She was winning already.
She dragged herself upright and scrambled around on the floor until she’d collected her thoughts. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before. Nothing so strong and hard, nothing so concrete and fast. It’d knocked her right out.
The side of her head was cold from the concrete she’d left it on, and her right arm was asleep. Her mouth was so sticky and gross that she finished drinking the soda she’d brought—even though it was mostly melted ice by that point. It didn’t make her feel any better, but it didn’t make her feel any worse, either.
And she felt pretty damn good.
Wait, was that right? She wadded up the paper cup and stuffed it into her bag of burrito detritus. Was it good, knowing the answer to a murderous riddle? Or did it turn her stomach?
Maybe a little of both. She scrambled to her feet, collected her trash, grabbed the whole box that held the costumes—she saw the curly red Lucy wig, and she knew she’d found them—and then picked up her purse. She wobbled, straightened up, and corrected herself. “A lot of both.”
The door slammed behind her as she fled.
She staggered to her car, and once she was seated with the engine running and the heater warming, she pulled her phone out of her purse. She called up Grady’s contact info and smashed it with her index finger until it dialed him.
“Leda, I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon. Is everything okay?”
He hadn’t gotten the last syllable all the way out when she blurted, “I know who killed the Gilmans!”
He was stunned for a beat. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The murderer is a guy named Scott Keyes, but he changed his name to Abbot about a couple of years ago. Before that, I bet you he had some other family name. He’s changed it a couple of times,” she said with more confidence than she felt. “Something tells me there’s a strong family resemblance in the Keyes clan.”
Grady asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“His alibi. He said he was at his stepbrother’s funeral. You said he turned up in photos. I bet you a dollar it wasn’t him. He’s a lying liar who lies, and a murderer, too. You need to go arrest him, like, right now.”
“You know better than that.”
“Okay, then get ready to arrest him!”
“Come on, Leda. You know good and well that’s not how it works. Wait, hang on,” he said quietly. Leda got the distinct impression that he was in a room full of people, and he was trying not to sound too crazy in front of them. In the background, she heard murmurs, phones ringing, and a general patter of conversation. Then, a few seconds later, he was up to full volume. “I was in a meeting, sorry. Now I’m out. What do you mean it was Keyes? What’s this business about a Scott?”
“Scott Keyes is Abbot Keyes. He changed his name. He’s the one who did it, Grady. He murdered all the people!”
“Do you have any proof, or is this just a psychic flash telling you this?”
“Can’t it be both?” she asked desperately. She threw her car into gear and hit the road.
“No!” he told her, a dash of exasperation shining through his voice. “Psychic feelings don’t count for jack squat in the legal system! Can you prove it? If you’re that certain, then you need to… to… find a way to make everyone else certain. Help me help you, as they say.”
Her thoughts raced through her head, and her car raced through a four-way stop. “Meet me at Castaways. I need my murder board. I don’t know if I can prove it to you, but I can definitely show it to you. Please go pick him up.”
He sighed, and she could practically hear him squeezing that little spot between his eyebrows with frustration. “I can’t go pick him up, because I don’t have any evidence that he’s done anything wrong. But I’ll call in a favor or two and see if I can get eyes on him.”
“What does that mean?” She cut somebody off on the way to the interstate on-ramp. The other driver flipped her off and honked, but she barely noticed and didn’t even flip them off in return.
“It means I’ll see if I can get someone to track him down so that we can bring him in, if it turns out that you can give me probable cause. I’m sorry, but you have to give me more than your personal paranormal confidence.”
“I understand, I do. I get it,” she said. “Just meet me at the bar, that’s where I’m headed right now. I can show you. I can lay it all out, and you’ll see. I’ll make you believe me.”
Before he could reply, she hung up on him and threw her phone back into her purse.
Both hands now on the wheel, she gunned it for Cap Hill.
Thirty minutes later, she finally found a parking spot within two blocks of Castaways, around the corner from a popular indie bookstore and a defunct KFC. It was a tiny private lot between two buildings, in a space that might have better served the city as an alley, but it was almost rush hour and she’d have to take whatever she could get—even at ten bucks an hour.
Maybe she could get Ben to pay for it, if she did a few songs.
But first.
First, she had a murderer to unmask.
She clicked the door-lock button and kicked the door shut. Where was she again? She checked the nearest street sign and oriented herself, made a mental note of where she was leaving Jason the Accord, and darted toward Castaways—just as it started to rain in earnest.
Behold, the first real downpour of fall, signaling the absolute end of summer. No more final gasps of warm air, no more pretty, dry days. In another couple of weeks, the time would change and it’d start getting dark around three or four o’clock, and Seattle would return to its uniform normal: gray, chilly, and damp… for the next six months at least.
Leda welcomed it.
But for half a second, she did wish she had an umbrella. Locals didn’t typically carry them, because a good, hard rain didn’t happen that often—mostly it was just a dull drizzle, and a hoodie would suffice to protect her hair. But she wasn’t wearing a hoodie, her travel umbrella was unhelpfully stashed in her car’s glove box, and she was already halfway between the lot and the bar when this fact occurred to her.
It didn’t matter. She could be soaking wet and still spell out a case for arresting Abbot Keyes.
Leda ran the rest of the way, her hair slapping her face and her feet getting wet. Puddles and rain soaked up her boots past her jeans to her knees, but she ignored it. She shoved the door open and brushed past Steve, who was still collating the two-dollar drink discount tickets that Ben had printed off at the nearest Kinko’s.
“Hey, Steve!” she said over her shoulder.
“Leda, how you doing?”
“Fantastic!” she shouted without looking back.
Tiffany laughed from somewhere behind the bar, but Leda didn’t pause. She skidded to a halt outside Matt’s office, where Matt was actually located—just this once.
He looked up, startled. “Oh… hello? Is everything okay?”
Leda pointed at him, and then the corkboard behind him. “I need that!” she announced.
“Now?”
“Now!” She vaulted over his desk. “We have to catch a killer!”
He pivoted in his squeaky rolling chair. “Right now?”
She grabbed her index cards from his top-right drawer and a marker from his mug full of writing implements. “Right now!”
“Well, hell. Let me get out of the way.” He pushed his chair back as far as he could so she could turn the board around without braining him.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t know you’d be here…” She started scribbling on cards and laying them out on his desk, where seconds before he’d been entering employee hours into his laptop.
Matt closed the laptop and tucked it under his arm. “What happened? Do you know who did it?”
“I do!” she declared, equally triumphant and frantic. She had to get it all down while it was fresh in her head. She finally had the solution, she knew what had happened, and it all made sense. Tod’s killer was practically within her grasp. All she had to do was stick the landing.
She reached back into the drawer to retrieve a ziplock baggie full of magnets and pulled out a few of the boring dots. She picked them apart from one another and started slapping cards onto the board—adjusting their location and annotating them as she went. “I was in the storage unit with all of Tod’s old stuff, and I was eating this burrito… and… and I got a migraine, but it all came together.”
“All hail migraines. And burritos, I guess.”
She accidentally knocked off the marker’s cap, then picked it up and stuffed it into her mouth to hold it while she kept writing. “Yes. Burritos. Food of the gods, right there,” she murmured. “Tod used to love burritos, did you know that?”
“I um… I did not. Hey, did you call Grady?”
She nodded, the cap bobbing on her lip. “He’s on his way over. He’ll be here any minute.” She’d be ready for him. She’d be ready for justice.
Ben stuck his face around the corner. “What’s going on?”
Matt said, “Murder!”
The general manager bounced with glee. “Oh, goodie! Have we solved the case?” He sidled into the tiny office that barely fit one man and one desk and one magnetic board. With the addition of the velvet-clad elder-Goth boss, it felt like an elevator car at the downtown convention center.
Matt retreated until he was sitting on a three-drawer file cabinet against the wall, awkwardly crossing and uncrossing his legs—trying to figure out where to put them. He settled on the corner of the desk, while Ben rested on the farthest corner of the same. Leda hugged the board and tried not to mess up her progress. She smeared two brightly colored cards onto the floor with an inadvertent swipe of her arm, collected them, and stuck them back where they belonged.
Niki came skidding into the room. She drew up short when she realized how little space was left, so she accepted the tiny square foot she found immediately in front of the desk. “What’s going on? What are we doing? Why is everyone in here?”
Leda paused and pointed the marker at her. “I’ve figured out who the murderer is, and now I’m mapping it out on the board so I can show Grady, and he can go arrest the bastard who killed Tod. Matt was in here already, Ben came in to see what the commotion was about, and now you’re here… so I think you’re all caught up.”
Tiffany poked her head around the doorjamb. “Catches who up, with what? Oh, hey, party in Matt’s office…” She slipped inside to squeeze herself beside Niki. “What are we talking about?”
“Murder!” Niki and Matt shouted.
Ben laughed. “I was going to say ‘psychic mumbo jumbo,’ but I didn’t want to offend my star attraction.”
“Psychic mumbo jumbo, yeah,” Leda said, taking no offense. “That’s kind of what happened, actually. I think I’ve figured out how it works!”
“How what works?” Grady asked. He shuffled inside a few inches—next to Tiffany, who nudged Niki so far to the right that she opted just to sit in Matt’s lap atop the file cabinet. It creaked and teetered beneath their weight but held steady.
Leda grinned like a maniac. “There you are! So glad you could join us.”
“I got here as fast as I could. Um, is there someplace we could do this… somewhere with more floor space?”
Ben suggested, “We could move the murder board to the stage, if you like.”
Silence fell. Leda looked at the board. Matt and Niki exchanged a shrug. Tiffany said, “I’ll make drinks for the big reveal! There’s nobody in here yet, so I’ll just tell Steve to keep people out for a few minutes.”
Ben clapped his hands. “Let’s do it! I’ll grab my laser pointer.”
Leda felt a weird twist in her stomach, like this wasn’t how she’d expected it to go. A big reveal? A man was dead. Two men. No, three. Fine, a lot of people were dead. But Tod was the one who mattered the most to her. She almost protested; it felt a little public and flashy. But then again, it was a hell of an occasion. It wasn’t her friends’ fault that they hadn’t known and loved her fiancé the same way she had.
She forced herself to brighten her face into a performer’s smile. “You have a laser pointer?”
“Yes,” Ben said. “And you may use it, upon this momentous occasion!”
With that, he squished himself past Grady and around Tiffany, and vanished down the hall in the direction of his own office. The bartender followed, heading back to the bar. Matt used his feet to push his rolly chair into the small space the shift opened up, and Niki hopped off his lap.
“I’ll help with the board,” she offered. “You guys go take a seat. We’ve got this.”
Grady said, “Take a seat?” like he was none too sure about this.
Matt gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, man. Front-row seats. Come on, I’ll get us set up.”
“This is nuts,” Grady said as he followed him out. “This is not how we conduct police business.”
But relocating the murder board only took a couple of minutes, and they only lost a few index cards and a handful of magnets in the hallway as Niki and Leda maneuvered it toward the bar and stage area. Once there, they found that either Ben or Matt had added a pair of chairs to stand in for an easel.
The women set down the board, and Leda went back to the corridor to collect all the bits she’d lost along the way. While she arranged, adjusted, and added a few notes to the cards, everyone else took up seats at two of the small tables down front. Tiffany brought out a flight of multicolored drinks that looked vaguely like fancy party favors. She passed them out, keeping one for herself.
“Everybody ready?” Leda asked, since she was as ready as she was ever going to be. Then she frowned past the lights on the floor and said, “Wait, where’s Ben?”
“Right here!” he called from the front door, where he was locking up. “I put a sign up saying we’ll be open in twenty minutes. Oh, this is so exciting!”
“How about that laser pointer?” Leda reminded him.
He pulled it out of his pocket and tossed it to her, underhand. “Catch!”
Leda ducked, and the pointer hit the board, then bounced off the stage and into Matt’s drink. He fished it out and handed it up to the psychic psongstress, who wiped it dry on her pants. With a press of the button, she had a handy red dot. She waved it at the ceiling, and then got the hang of swiping it around. With a great flourish, as if she were directing an orchestra, she made the dot dance across the shiny whiteboard, the brightly colored index cards, the novelty magnets, and the chairs that held them all.
“Ooh,” Ben purred. “This is going to be fun.”
If not fun, Leda thought, then decidedly satisfying. She took a deep breath. Straightened her back. Tossed her hair; exhaled by blowing a big raspberry.
And started talking.