Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
29.
Two days after Abbot Keyes nearly drowned in a gutter on Capitol Hill while being arrested on multiple counts of murder, Leda unlocked the door to her office in Columbia City. She opened the door and froze. Niki was already in there, asleep on the love seat. Her hair was a mess, her mouth was open, and a thin stream of dried drool was crusted on her chin.
“Nik?”
Niki shot awake and jerked upright, flailing until she rolled right off the short couch and onto the floor.
“What… are you doing here?” Leda asked.
From the floor, Niki replied, “I was very, very drunk, and I accidentally told the Uber guy to take me here. I couldn’t remember the address, but I remembered it was next door to the sushi place. I… there was… I had…”
“You have a key.”
“Right. I have a key, so. I let myself in to… to…”
Leda sighed. “To sleep it off?”
“I don’t think I had a plan, to be honest. I just needed to lie down.” Niki pulled herself back up, whapping her (now much smaller) boot cast against the edge of Leda’s desk. “Ow. Anyway, you look… alert.”
“I didn’t have that much to drink last night.”
“You didn’t?” Niki gave her a stink-eye glare that said she didn’t believe her. “It was your party.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was my makeup concert, since I bailed the other night.” She dropped her purse on the desk. “I was home in bed by midnight. Besides, it’s…” She sat down behind her desk and fished her phone out of her purse. “After nine o’clock. It’s not exactly the crack of dawn over here.”
“Yeah, but you still deserved to sleep in.”
“I couldn’t.” Leda had awakened shortly after the sun came up, and she’d never made it back to sleep. She was tired but restless, so she figured she might as well get some work done.
“Are you having, like, PTSD? Is it something like that? Do you need some weed and a good cry?”
Leda opened her laptop and pressed a button to turn it on. “Probably at some point, but not right now. Thanks for the offer, though. It’s been a hell of a week, right? I mean, not just the thing where I almost got murdered, but everything else, too. It’s been three days of cops and journalists, and I just need a quiet, nothing-gonna-happen day where I can pretend that my life is normal.”
“Your life has never been normal.”
“But wouldn’t it be nice if it was?”
Niki shrugged. “I don’t know. Sounds boring to me.”
“I could use a little boring right now.”
Her friend relented. She settled upright in the love seat, leaning back and crossing her legs. “Fair enough. How did The Stranger interview about all the murdering go?”
“It went fine. It was weird, and I sounded like a maniac, I’m sure. But the interviewer was nice, and I got in a plug for the travel agency, so maybe we’ll see a little bump in business. Murder is great advertising. Maybe? We kind of got off in the weeds for a bit. I told them how I met Grady and everything.”
“Oh boy. When will the piece go live?”
“It went live online last night; those Stranger guys work fast. Now the Seattle Times wants to do a piece on me, too, but I don’t know, man. I’ve had enough publicity this week for the rest of my life.”
Solemnly, Niki said, “Publicity leads to work, and work leads to money.”
“It also leads to bizarro emails from dudes who want to know if I’m single. As it turns out.” With a cringe, Leda opened her email and waited for the internet to deliver whatever fresh hell was new on deck.
“Has that actually happened yet?”
“I’ve gotten three of them so far, and one was really freaking creepy. The guy’s obviously been to my shows at Castaways. His email started out with three paragraphs about what I was wearing, where I was sitting when I wasn’t on the stage, and what drinks Tiffany had made for me in my downtime… but then wrapped up by saying that he didn’t want to come say hello because, and I quote, ‘That would be weird.’ ”
Niki laughed. “Seattle dudes are the worst.”
“Maybe some dudes are terrible everywhere, just like some ladies are. Oh my God,” she said suddenly, shifting gears. “I have a lot of emails.”
“Clients? Skeevy dudes? Long-lost relatives who’ve passed away and left you their fortunes?”
“No emails from dead relatives, no, but… hang on.” Leda opened one and skimmed it, then skimmed the next one. “But hey, if all twenty-four of these emails are from people wanting travel arrangements—and I think they might be, except for the spam—then holy moly, I might be able to make rent and feed myself for a few weeks!”
“Hot damn!”
Leda skimmed more emails as fast as she could. “It’s almost, like, if you keep a cop from getting on a plane that’s going to blow up, people want to trust you with their travel plans! Oh God, oh no…”
“Oh no?” Niki asked.
“Oh no!” Leda repeated. “What if I book these people for their vacations, and one of them dies? On a plane, or in a rental car, or in a hotel fire… oh man, there are a billion ways a traveler can die on a trip. What if I send someone to Florida, and they get eaten by alligators? What if I send someone to Aspen, and they die in an avalanche?”
“You can turn literally any good thing into a Greek tragedy, I swear to God.”
“But I’m not wrong! Look,” Leda insisted, turning the laptop around so Niki could see the screen. “Most of these people are afraid to fly. This guy, right here…” She tapped the touch screen to load the email. “This guy is terrified of boats, but his wife wants to take a cruise. He thinks that if I book it, I’ll keep him from any ship that’s going to sink! I don’t know if I can take this kind of pressure!”
“Leda, babe. Your job is to make sure that their flight details are correct, their layovers are doable, and their rental cars are waiting for them at their destinations. You aren’t God. You can’t guarantee that anybody will go anywhere and come back in one piece.”
“But these people don’t know that!” She whipped the laptop back around and scowled at her screen.
“Who cares? The only thing that needs to be true is that you’ll make their arrangements correctly and support them if they run into difficulties. It’s not like your website offers them a money-back guarantee if they die en route.”
“I don’t have the money for a website.”
“Sounds like you will after this.”
Leda mumbled, “Yeah, maybe. Speaking of, Grady finally paid me. I told him he didn’t have to, but he insisted on honoring our original agreement, and he paid me out of his own pocket for helping him with the Gilman case.” She sighed and closed the laptop with a soft click. “Nik, I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”
“For greatness?”
“For the worst tragedy of my life and the second-worst day of my life to become the seeds of that greatness. I’ll never get away from Tod dying, or from the feel of Abbot Keyes’s gun at my side.”
Niki rolled her eyes. “Nobody ever really puts the past behind them, no matter what anyone says. Yes, bad things happened to you—really bad things. But you survived them! Now that chapter’s closed, and you can… well, you don’t have to forget any of it. You don’t have to pretend it never happened. But you’ve got the whole rest of your life to live, so how are you gonna live it? As a psychic psongstress? A travel agent? I vote for some combination of the two.”
“You think you get a vote?”
“I damn well better.”
Leda laughed. “Yeah, okay. You get a vote. And since I don’t have any better ideas…” She might have said more, but a knock at the door stopped her. She and Niki looked back and forth at each other. Niki mouthed, “Grady?” but Leda shrugged. “Come in,” she said, with what she hoped was an appropriate measure of confidence and professionalism.
The door opened.
A silver-haired, heavyset, black-clad white woman let herself into the office. She left one hand on the doorknob while she gazed around the little space, taking in the posters, the desk, the love seat, and the two younger women. “Hello,” she said. Her hand slipped from the knob, and she drew the door shut behind her. “My name is Avalon Harris, and I’m looking for you, I believe. Leda Foley?”
Leda rose to her feet. Something about this woman called for decorum, and she wasn’t sure what it was, exactly. Avalon Harris wasn’t very tall, and she looked tastefully like a grandmotherly version of the kids who hung around the Goth bar on Capitol Hill. Black head to toe; silver jewelry; sleek, short hair that looked like spun starlight. Leda held her hand across the desk to beckon her inside.
“Yes, that’s me—hello, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. Please, come in and have a seat.”
Ms. Harris took her hand and shook it, then took one of the two office chairs that faced the desk. There was precious little room, but she sidled into it neatly, and then crossed her feet at the ankles. “Thank you so much.”
“This is my associate, Niki Nelson,” Leda added, hoping it made Niki sound less like “random hungover person who accidentally slept in my office” and more like “coworker or perhaps employee.”
Niki waved. “Hello!”
Leda said, “What can I do for you? Are you interested in one of our travel packages?”
Avalon Harris folded her hands in her lap. “Well, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, so, no—that’s not it. I’ve actually come to see you about your other specialty.”
Niki said, “You must have read the article in The Stranger.”
“What? No. I learned of your existence through the flyers on Cap Hill, about the shows you’ve been performing at the Castaways bar. I’d been meaning to attend one, but last night I was called away at the last minute—and I’m afraid that I missed your show.”
Leda closed her laptop and pushed it aside. “Oh, I’ll do another one soon.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said with a small smile. “By all reports, you’re terribly talented. My ex-husband went to one of your shows and reported that you were absolutely the real deal.”
“You have an ex-husband? Who calls you and gives you hot entertainment tips?” Niki asked.
Leda flashed her a look that said she was being rude, but that’d never stopped Niki before and wouldn’t stop her now.
If Avalon Harris minded, she didn’t show it. “Oh, yes. Edgar is a dear. We remain close friends. He reached out to me after your show because we have something in common, you and I.”
“We do?”
“Indeed. Not so much the psychic-touch angle, though I do have a bit of that. Mine’s not terribly strong, I’ll confess. I’m a much better medium, though that’s somewhat unreliable, too.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss the whole business as a gamble. “That said, I have a great deal of experience and a significant amount of education on the subject.”
“Are you… do you…?” Leda wasn’t sure how to formulate her question. “Do you want to work together? Is that why you’re here?”
“No, not particularly. I stopped consulting for the cops on a formal basis decades ago, but I understand you’ve recently been approved as a consultant for the Seattle Police Department.”
“How… how did you know that? Wow, you really are psychic!”
She laughed. “Darling, I can read. Your publicist has amended the recent flyers to include the distinction. I suppose it lends you an air of authority.”
“Oh God. Ben…” Leda mumbled. “Okay, yes, but right now it’s just a verbal agreement—there’s no paperwork. That’ll take a while, or that’s what they tell me. And they’ll only call me in if they’re totally stuck and they think they can use me. The consultant offer isn’t a promise of anything. It just makes me more official and less…”
“Less sneaky?” Avalon asked with a gleam in her eye. “You and Detective Merritt did so much work behind the scenes, off-the-books, semiofficially… it must be nice to know that they’ll give you a pass, going forward. From what I’ve heard, they’d be fools to let you get away.”
“Aw, shucks.”
“No, I’m serious. You have a great deal of raw talent, and I’m here on the off chance that you’d like to learn to wield it a little… better? More precisely, let’s say. I can’t turn you into an all-knowing, crime-solving machine, but I think that you could probably use some armor.”
“Armor?” Leda asked.
She nodded. “Shields, perhaps. If you like that analogy better. Here’s the thing,” she said, leaning forward and tangling her fingers loosely together. “I’ve seen people like you before. I’ve known and loved them, and I’ve lost a few of them.”
Leda swallowed. “Lost them? Like, you misplaced them??”
“One died by misadventure, and one died… through more personal means,” she said carefully, and Leda wondered if she meant suicide or drugs, but she did not ask. “Another went absolutely mad and never came back. It doesn’t happen to everyone with a gift like ours, but it happens too often, I’d say. So I am here, today, sitting in your office, offering myself up as a friendly ear. Or, if you’re interested, as a teacher.”
“Oh. Um…” Leda looked to Niki, who shrugged. “That sounds lovely, if I’m honest. I’ve never really met anyone else who could do anything like this, much less had any friends or teachers who knew what it was like. But I don’t have any money or anything, if that’s—”
Avalon cut her off there. “No, don’t be ridiculous. I have plenty of my own.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend…”
“It’s all right.” She took a deep breath, as if she felt the need to compose herself. “You’re well within your rights to be suspicious, and now that you’ve got a modicum of fame, you can expect all sorts of weirdos and charlatans to creep out of the woodwork, but I’m not one of them. And I didn’t make my money from telling fortunes or consulting with grieving families, either.”
There it was. Leda got it now. Avalon Harris had been accused of this in the past, and it was a touchy subject. She didn’t need clairvoyant abilities to read the woman’s face. “I apologize, I was just thinking you were offering classes or something.”
It wasn’t the perfect thing to say, but it was close enough. The woman softened. “No, nothing like that. I’m only here to offer you my company. And my card.” She reached into a small, shiny leather purse with a silver chain and retrieved a business card. “Here, I want you to have this.”
Leda took the card. It read quite simply Avalon Harris, Psychic Medium and Adviser. Then an email and phone number.
“If you’d like to get coffee sometime, or if you simply want to bend an ear that understands precisely what you’re up against, when a case is bloody and hard… I’m here.”
“In Columbia City?” Niki asked.
“On Bainbridge Island, actually—but it’s a short ferry ride, and I’m semiretired. My days are flexible, and I’m interested in paying it forward, you could say. I lost my own mentor a few years ago; my God, the woman was nearly a hundred when she passed, but she was such a giant of the field. And also…” She hesitated, but then said, “I lost my son last year. He wasn’t murdered, and there’s no question about what happened. I’m not seeking any answers. I’m just hoping to help someone else who might find their life filled with… unusual difficulties like ours.”
With this, she rose to her feet and gave both Leda and Niki a short bow.
“Thank you for your time,” said Avalon Harris, who then collected her purse and left the way she’d come in.
When the door had closed, and the women were alone again, Niki exhaled like she’d been holding a whole balloon’s worth of air in her chest. “Wow. That was weird.”
“Only weird, though. Kind of exciting, for sure! There are other people out there who… who do what I do and are probably better at it than me! I might actually learn how to do this professionally and earn some money. I mean, and help people. Obviously. And that’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s definitely not bad,” her friend agreed somewhat more cautiously. “Weird isn’t always bad.”
“And weird is par for the course around here, right?”
“Damn right it is,” Niki agreed—offering a silent, long-distance high five that Leda returned from behind the desk. She reclined back into her original position, foot up and arms sprawled out.
Casually, she asked, “So… are you ever gonna call her?”
Leda grinned and sat back down. “Maybe one of these days. Okay, probably one of these days.” She opened her laptop again and saw three new emails since their unusual guest had appeared. “Wow,” she breathed. Then she cracked her knuckles, reached for her mouse, and dived into all the messages from all the hopeful travelers, each and every one of them wanting the reassurance of Puget Sound’s most famous psychic, proprietor of Foley’s Far-Fetched Flights of Fancy, which might actually get off the ground after all.
Would wonders never cease?