Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
3.
Niki was a little hungover, and Leda was trying to work, ignoring the intermittent moans and the occasional rustle as her friend shifted, rolled over, and tried to get comfortable on the secondhand IKEA love seat that sat along one wall of the tiny office. It wasn’t made for sleeping—it was barely made for sitting—and Niki’s plastic-bound foot kept falling off the arm, landing with a thunk on the floor.
“Oof. Ow.”
“Stop doing that,” Leda grumbled. “You’re going to hurt yourself even worse.”
“Worse than the Jägermeister?”
“Nothing hurts worse than Jäger, but that was your own damn fault.”
“They had dollar shots. In test tubes. It was amazing. Some dude was just… passing them out. What was I supposed to do?” she asked, sitting up with no small degree of effort. “Not drink any?”
“Abstinence might’ve been the right call, considering,” Leda mused.
“It’s not like I’m bothering you. You’re not even working.”
“I am too working.”
“On what?” Niki asked.
“Targeted Facebook ads. I’m trying to research and… um… budget. I’m also thinking about Craigslist and the newspaper, but is that too—I don’t know—tacky? Does it make me sound sketchy? How else do people even find travel agents these days? I’m already in the phone book, and I have a web page and everything. I’m easy to find! Hire me!”
Niki pointed her encased toes at the entrance. “Tacky, sketchy. Whatever gets people through that door.”
On cue, a shadow darkened the frosted glass that made up the top half of the agency’s door. After a brief hesitation, somebody knocked.
Both women sat upright with a start.
“Client!” Leda hissed. “Look professional, or something.”
Without giving Niki time to do anything but put her other foot down on the floor beside the busted one, she called out, “Come in!”
The knob turned, and the door cracked open slowly, revealing an ordinary-looking gent in the regional uniform of casual clothes topped off with a puffy vest. He was in his mid-forties, Leda guessed. Average build. Clean-cut, with dark hair and light eyes. Something about his posture suggested military or law enforcement, unless he just had a full-time stick up his ass.
“Hello!” Leda said brightly. “Welcome to Foley’s Far-Fetched Flights of Fancy. I’m Leda Foley. How can I help you?”
Her guest froze, one hand still on the doorknob. “I… um. Hello.”
“Please, come in and have a seat. What can I do for you today?” She waved at the pair of mid-century office chairs she’d found at the Fremont Fair for ten bucks apiece the year before. They were positioned across from her desk, looking reasonably official.
The man peered around the small office, taking in the framed travel posters, the struggling succulents, the blue curtains that were patterned with little yellow pineapples, the coffee cup that read I’D RATHER BE TRAVELING THE WORLD full of mismatched pens… and the random brunette in a cast who was sitting on a love seat against the wall.
He cleared his throat and said, “Hello, Ms. Foley. We’ve never exactly met—but we’ve spoken on the phone and exchanged a few emails. I’m Grady Merritt, from the other day?” The question mark at the end said either he wasn’t sure how long it’d been since they’d spoken, or he wasn’t sure what he was doing there.
Leda’s stomach sank. It didn’t know what else to do.
Because holy shit, it was the guy from Orlando International.
She tried to stay chipper. “Mr. Merritt! I’m so glad to see you made it home safely.”
“Yeah, well. You had something to do with that, didn’t you?” He closed the door and took a seat in one of the Knoll knockoffs. “I was hoping we could talk about… about what happened on Tuesday.”
Leda and Niki exchanged the briefest, most panicked glance. “Absolutely, we can talk about Tuesday. Oh, I’m sorry—I almost forgot.” She stalled by gesturing at Niki, who clearly would’ve rather been left out of the conversation. “This is my friend and associate, Niki Nelson.”
He bobbed his head at her and said, “Nice to meet you.”
“She helps around the office when she’s not busy at her own job, you know how it goes. Since she broke her foot, she’s been keeping me company here.” Leda was rambling. She knew she was rambling. She still couldn’t stop herself. “I really appreciate it, to be honest. This little business is my first time working alone, and I’m not sure I care for it much. Maybe one day I’ll just hire Niki outright, or get myself an assistant if she gets the cast removed and wants to go back to bartending. There’s probably more money in bartending, come to think of it.”
He glanced at Niki again, like he was sizing her up. “Okay,” he said. “I guess this isn’t a particularly… private conversation. Just a weird one.”
Niki laughed, and Leda forced herself to smile. This was her nightmare scenario, wasn’t it? The man had shown up at her office, probably to accuse her of witchcraft or something. He could call the local news, go viral on Twitter, and get articles written about the nut with the travel agency who kept him off an exploding plane. She’d be laughed out of Puget Sound.
She took a deep breath through her nostrils, past the rigid smile. “All right, hit me! What exactly would you like to talk about?”
He took a deep breath, too.
Then he got right to the point. “The plane crash, Tuesday morning.”
“Oh, yes, that terrible accident. Some kind of mechanical failure, I heard? It’s a wonder more people weren’t killed, instead of just a handful. Not that a handful of people dying isn’t a tragedy!” she added quickly. “Only that it could’ve been so much worse, and I’m so glad that it wasn’t. Also, I’m glad you weren’t on board. What a lucky coincidence that was, am I right?”
“Yeah, five people didn’t make it out, but everybody else was safe. Even the only dog on the flight got out okay.”
“Dogs are awesome! Do you have any?” she asked, on the off chance it might derail the whole thing and they could sit around sharing pictures of their pets. Brutus was a very attractive fish. She had a number of piscine portraits in her phone, just waiting to be shown to random semi-strangers.
“One.”
“What kind?”
“Yellow mutt,” he said with a crisp note of finality that said he was finished with this particular line of conversation.
“Not me. My apartment’s barely big enough for me and a fish. I do have a fish…” she tried one last time.
“Fish are great. Not dying in a plane crash is even better, and that’s why I’m here.”
Leda swallowed. “Right.”
“Here’s the thing,” he said, gesturing. His fingers were long and slender, and they moved like he was accustomed to holding things when he talked. A pen, or a notebook, maybe. “I’ve played that day over and over in my head. One thing stands out above everything else that happened.”
“What’s that?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You. I don’t know how, but you knew about the crash. You knew it all along, and that’s why you changed my flight.”
“Mr. Merritt!” Leda exclaimed. “I certainly did not know about—”
He stopped her right there. “Yeah, you did. Maybe you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but when you went on about having a bad feeling and not having any concrete reason for changing the flight for me… you knew something bad was on the horizon.”
Leda had a bit of experience protesting this sort of accusation. It was familiar turf, and it almost made her more comfortable with the conversation, now that it’d arrived. Leda slid into “nuh-uh mode.”
“Sir, I assure you I had no idea. More likely, as I was clicking around on the internet I saw something, somewhere, out of the corner of my eye about the big truck that jackknifed on the interstate in Orlando and my subconscious filled in the blanks. People do that kind of thing all the time, and they call it intuition. I’ve been booking travel for many years,” she exaggerated wildly, considering it’d been only a month or two, “and after a while you… you get a feel for it.”
He shook his head and locked his hands together, letting them sit atop his thighs. “Nope. That’s not what happened. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was. You weren’t working on intuition—you were too confident for that. You changed a customer’s approved reservations against his will, and you’re not an idiot. It could’ve cost you business in the future, and you’re too meticulous for that.”
“Meticulous?” Niki was incredulous. “She’s a one-woman crapshoot.”
“Not when I talked to her on the phone, after the lab put me in touch with her.” Then, to Leda, he added, “When I first called to set up the trip, you asked all the right questions.” He kept Leda’s eyes fixed with his own. “You steered me away from layovers that were too short, and made sure that I had a seat near the front of the plane to shave a few seconds off my connection. You were the picture of professionalism. You were not the kind of woman to throw caution to the wind and drop a grenade into a guy’s travel plans.”
Niki laughed out loud. “That’s where you’re wrong, my dude. I mean, um, sir.”
He turned around, leaning one elbow on the back of the chair so he could see her better. “How’s that?”
“All I’m saying is, you think Professional Leda is the real Leda, when in fact, Crapshoot Leda is usually the one running point.”
Leda narrowed her eyes. “Thanks, Nik.”
“I’m here for you, babe. I mean, um. Ma’am.”
Grady rotated back to Leda and gave her the ol’ stink-eye. “I don’t buy it. You took action deliberately and thoughtfully, even though you knew it might upset me. You acted on information that you didn’t want to share, and I want to know what it was.”
“Mr. Merritt… or… or… Detective Merritt… I…”
“Call me Grady.”
Leda opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again, sucked in a deep breath. “Mr…. Grady. Did you make it home that night, like I promised you would?”
“Barely, but yes. You were right about that, too. The Uber pulled up to my house at eleven fifty-seven p.m. My daughter was on the front porch in her bathrobe and bunny slippers, waiting for me.”
“Okay.” She held out her hands and then pressed them flat upon her desk, hard enough to hold it down in case of an earthquake. “Since you want the truth, and I have the truth, and it all worked out in the end… I changed your flight because I did know something was wrong—but I swear to you, I didn’t know what it was. I might’ve been vibing off the traffic you were stuck in, or I might’ve been vibing off the cosmic certainty of the plane crashing. Either way, I knew that you couldn’t get on that plane because if you tried, you wouldn’t make it home that day.”
“Wait. Vibing? Like… psychic vibes.”
It was almost a relief when he said it first. She exhaled all the deep breaths she’d taken for a week, all over her desk. “Yes. Exactly like psychic vibes. It’s not something I tell the whole world about, and it’s not very precise or reliable, but I’ve learned the hard way over the years that I can’t just ignore it when I feel it. When I ignore my feelings, bad things happen.”
“Like customers dying in plane crashes?”
She hesitated. “Well, that’s never happened before.”
“Then what?” he pressed.
“Then people get hurt in other ways,” she snapped. “Man, you really are a cop, aren’t you? I said, ‘bad things.’ Isn’t that clear enough?”
“I’ve been a detective with the Seattle PD for more than a decade.”
Leda felt her neck go warm and her ears go hot. “I haven’t broken any laws.”
“I never said you did. This is a social call, more or less.”
“You’re not here to arrest me?”
“For what? Keeping me out of a burning plane?”
She chuckled weakly. “When you put it that way…”
“I’m just here to have a lighthearted conversation with my friendly neighborhood psychic travel agent.”
Niki snorted. “Just a lighthearted conversation about people dying inside airplanes, got it. Or are you just looking for reassurance that your next flight won’t go down in flames?”
“Not now, Nik.”
Grady smiled. “Oh, I’m not flying again anytime soon. But next time I do… yeah, I’ll probably check with you first. I think you might be my travel agent for life.”
Frustrated, worried, and ready to get this over with—whatever it was—Leda finally put her foot down. “But that’s not why you’re here, so what do you want? Why did you really come today?”
He sat back in the chair and seemed thoughtful, like he was considering how much to tell her, or how much to ask her. Then he crossed his arms and started talking.
“When my daughter was born, my wife and I thought it was an honest-to-God miracle. Candice was in a bad accident back in college, and some doctor told her she’d never have kids. Molly was born anyway, and we never took it for granted. Every now and again I’d wake up at night and my wife would be gone from the bed. I’d get up and go looking for her and find her in the nursery, either holding Molly or feeding her, or just looking down at her with… this light in her eyes, you know?”
Leda glanced down at his left hand and didn’t see a ring.
He saw the glance. “I took the ring off a year after she died, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. Wow, you notice everything.”
“Yeah, so do you. Anyway, you want a detective who notices everything,” he said offhandedly. “So one night I got up to use the restroom, and when I was done, I noticed a light in the baby’s room. I figured Candy must’ve gotten up to check on her, but when I got back to bed… she was right there, dead asleep.
“Something about the light in the nursery bugged me, so I went back to see Molly. Just to check. Just to see.” He stopped, staring into space.
“What did you find?” Leda asked, very nearly in a whisper.
“I saw a woman standing over the crib. She was small and thin, and the light… it was… not coming from her, exactly. But it was around her, it was part of her. I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” he said quickly, trying to move on. “But she was looking at the baby and making little cooing noises, so soft you could hardly hear her.”
Niki asked, “Well, who was it?”
“My mother,” he said. “She died when I was in the police academy twenty-odd years ago, but there she was. Standing in my house. Cooing at her granddaughter. After a few seconds, she looked up and saw me. She winked, and she was gone.”
Leda said, “Just like that?”
“Just like that. I suppose she wanted to see the baby, and she came all the way back from the other side to do it.”
He was quiet for a minute, but Leda had always had trouble with silence. “Detective Merritt… Grady… I’m not that kind of psychic. I can’t talk to the dead, if that’s why you’re here.”
If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. The look on his face said he’d either expected that much or he was fine with it. “I’m not looking for a séance, Ms. Foley. I’m just telling you that I know there’s more to the world than what we can always see right in front of us. And I believe you when you tell me that you had a premonition, or a bad feeling, or a bad certainty—if that’s more like it. I believe you saved my life. Saved me a hell of a story and some smoke inhalation, that’s for damn sure. And now I want to hire you. Not to book any travel, and not to talk to my dead mother. I’ve got a case I’ve been beating my head against for a couple of years, and I’m all out of leads. I’m ready to try anything, which means I’m willing to try a psychic. Ms. Foley, I want you to help me solve a murder.”