Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
8.
“Idon’t know!” Grady Merritt said, waving his hands at the hotel manager and the EMT like he was trying to claw his way out of a spiderweb. “It was like I’d accidentally tased her or something—which I did not. She was fine; we were saying goodbye. I shook her hand; she shrieked and fell over!”
“Did she hit her head?” asked the EMT.
“No, she didn’t hit her head. I caught her, and set her down, and called nine-one-one. Now you know everything I know, I swear. I have no idea what happened.”
On that note, Leda—who was on a gurney—sat up straight and shrieked again. “Oh my God. What is this? What’s happening? What just happened? Grady?” she asked, catching a glimpse of him. “What are these people doing here? Why am I strapped down on a table?”
“Leda! Yes. Right here.” He darted to her side. “It’s not a table, it’s a gurney. And you’re not strapped down, exactly. You’re secured so you don’t roll off and break your neck.”
“I’m not gonna break my neck,” she said, writhing and testing the straps. She yanked at the one around her waist, swung her legs off the side of the gurney and began to hop off.
The medic barked, “What are you doing? Stay where you are.”
“No, no. I don’t need this. I don’t need any of this,” she protested.
Grady put a hand on her shoulder. “Look, you passed out, okay? I called for help. Let the helpers help.”
She pushed the medic away and jumped down to the ground, grabbing the gurney to steady herself. “I didn’t pass out. Or if I did, it wasn’t a normal passing out. It was a…” She squinted at everyone in the vicinity, then aimed her squint hardest at Grady. “Special passing out. Related to what we were talking about inside.”
He shooed the EMT away. “Give us a minute, would you? She’s okay. She says she’s okay. Believe women, would you?”
The guy shrugged and walked away, probably happy to go help some other person who wouldn’t be such a dick about it. The hotel manager went back inside, looking bored to death with this entire event. From where he was standing, the whole scenario could only lead to more bad press.
When they were gone, Grady turned to her.
“Did you see something else? Anything new that might help?”
For a split second, Leda’s face froze. But her glazed expression of horror passed quickly, sliding into something more like shrewdness. He didn’t know what it meant, and he wasn’t sure he liked it.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, keeping her voice down. “It had nothing to do with you. Unless I’m wrong. But I think it doesn’t. Except it might. Look, the flash I saw… it wasn’t about your case, okay? Definitely not about this case, or else it’s a bigger mess than I thought.”
Carefully, he said, “None of that made any sense. Do you want to back up and take another run at it?”
“I do not!” she shouted back. She made a clumsy effort to compose herself, patting down her shirt, her pockets, and then shouting to whoever might be listening, “Where the hell is my purse! I had a purse when I passed out, and I want it back!”
Grady looked around, spotted it, and swiped it off the back of the ambulance before they could close the doors and leave. “Here. It’s right here, Jesus. Calm down.”
She snatched the bag from him and tucked it under her arm. “You calm down! No, no. I’m sorry,” she said abruptly. Her eyeliner had smudged so completely that one formerly sleek black wing now zigzagged toward her temple; her hair was a hopeless brown tangle that had halfway left its original ponytail and hung down toward one shoulder. She looked like she’d fallen down an elevator shaft.
“I have to go,” she concluded. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. It’s not you; it’s me. I seriously have to go.”
“But what happened?” he begged. “What did you see?”
Then, because it occurred to him that he ought to, he asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine! So fine. The finest I’ve ever been, no, seriously.”
She shoved her hand down into her purse, retrieved her phone, and sprinted for her car. The last thing Grady heard before she shut herself inside and peeled away was, “Niki? Oh my God, Niki, you won’t believe this….”
Grady stood in the parking lot, wearing a messenger bag full of evidence that he was absolutely not supposed to have in his possession. The ambulance and EMTs were gone; they’d left as swiftly as they’d arrived. The hotel manager had skedaddled. Leda had fled.
It was just him—confused and alone and very, very afraid that he’d colossally screwed this up.
He took a deep breath, let it out, and made for his own car.
He should’ve never involved a civilian in the case. It had been a boneheaded move from the start, and now he regretted it more thoroughly than he’d ever regretted anything, at least since his high school Juggalo phase. Christ, what was he going to do now? He needed to get the evidence back to the locker without anyone knowing that it’d ever left. There was now a 911 recording of him sounding absolutely bananas, begging for help with a woman down. He hadn’t identified himself, had he? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t think so. It had happened so fast.
The key fob beeped, and Grady opened the door wide enough to throw his bag onto the passenger seat. He climbed inside behind it and sat behind the wheel. “This was a bad idea,” he said to his own reflection in the rearview mirror. “The worst idea. Literally the worst. In the world.”
It hadn’t even seemed like a good idea at the time, when he’d first gotten a bug up his ass to look up the travel agent. It had always been a terrible idea, which was why he hadn’t told a single soul about it, except for his daughter.
He shoved the key into the ignition.
According to the clock on the dashboard, he still had a couple of hours before Molly got home from work, but Cairo would be happy to see him—and that was the number one perk of having a dog, wasn’t it? No matter how bad your day, how terrible your choices, how ridiculous your risks, a dog would never tell you how stupid you were.
“Only because they don’t speak English,” Grady grumbled to himself.
Indeed, Cairo understood refreshingly little English, and he was predictably face-licking happy to see Grady home at the unusual hour. The pooch had a doggy door so he could come or go from the house to the backyard when no one was home. If the nanny cam Grady had installed a year ago could be believed, the dog kept close to home, listened for his people’s car to pull into the driveway, and mostly snoozed in obscene crotch-upward positions all day.
Grady dropped his bag on the coffee table, paid a bit more attention to the dog, and turned on the TV with a flick of the remote’s power button. Then he sank as far into the couch as he was physically able.
It wasn’t far enough. It didn’t swallow him whole.
Cairo hopped up onto the cushion beside him, having long ignored the “no dogs on the furniture” rule that no one tried to enforce anymore. He flopped his head on top of Grady’s thigh and gave him an expression so pathetically optimistic that Grady couldn’t help but scratch his ears and tell him that yes, of course everything was all right.
“It’s all right for you, at least. You didn’t risk your job and your sanity to sneak a psychic into a crime scene.”
The dog didn’t argue. He rolled over on his back and flashed his no-longer-existent balls at the ceiling.
Grady reached over Cairo’s fuzzy, warm head and retrieved the bag with all its illicit contents—dragging it onto the couch, beside the leg that wasn’t occupied by a dog’s sprawl. The Gilman case had been driving him batty ever since it’d been more or less abandoned by the PD almost a year before. Nothing about it had ever made sense.
“Eh, that’s not quite true,” he argued with himself.
Cairo raised an eyebrow. Grady patted his noggin and continued.
“Here’s the thing, see? Chris Gilman was a garbage human, and he was probably killed by another garbage human, over some garbage deal gone garbagely wrong. But Kevin… he wasn’t so bad,” he explained to the dog in a voice that teetered perilously close to baby talk. “He’d been making changes to Dad’s company while Dad wasn’t looking. Offering parental leave, better health insurance, all the stuff that helps you keep quality employees. He even dabbled in philanthropy. He was in the process of establishing a scholarship fund at UW in memory of his mother. All of which begs the question…”
Molly poked her head into the living room. “Begs what question?”
Grady yelped, and Cairo jumped, and the contents of the messenger bag went scattering across the table and floor. “The hell? You’re supposed to be at work!”
“I got a nosebleed, and they sent me home.”
“What? Are you okay?”
“I slipped and fell, and hit the espresso machine with my face.” She did a quarter turn left, then right, as if to show off some tragic injury, curiously absent. Her shift at Starbucks was supposed to start at two. It was presently three thirty, and she shouldn’t be home until after five. If she’d gone to work, then she had not spent very much time there.
Grady didn’t see any signs of black eyes or a broken schnoz. “Well, you can’t tell at all, so congratulations. You’ve successfully weaseled out of your gainful employment yet again.”
“Nobody’s weaseling, Dad. It was gruesome. Blood and snot everywhere. Stray boogers flying around like tiny droids. Customers don’t want to see that, or so I was told.”
“Now I know you’re full of it, but I’m glad you’re okay,” he added, in case that part wasn’t clear. “Wish I’d known you were home, though.”
“I was taking a nap, and you disturbed me. You probably owe me a pizza or something.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.” Instead, he scooped up his sealed plastic bags covered in brightly colored warnings and began to stuff them back into the bag.
Molly came to sit beside him, reaching across his lap to pet Cairo, whose butt was shaking like a paint mixer. As if she were giving the dog her full attention and had only the most casual, innocent interest in knowing the answer, Molly asked, “How’d it go with the psychic? Should I gather from your mood that this little adventure went… poorly?”
He nodded, then shook his head, then shrugged. “She does this trick where she holds things and she can tell you something about them. Sometimes. That part was pretty cool.”
“Did she give you any good clues?”
“About eighty percent of what she had to say… it fit the facts; I can say that much for certain.”
“And the other twenty percent?” she pressed, leaning forward.
“The other twenty percent was either nonsense, or useful—and I don’t know which one yet.”
“But you’re going to find out?”
This time he nodded firmly. “I’m definitely going to find out. She said this one thing that really stuck with me, about a silver fox…”
“A fox? An actual fox, like the adorable mammal? Or like a sexy old guy?”
“More like… an attractive older man. Please don’t use that phrase, for the love of God.”
She laughed and threw a pillow at his head. “You’re ridiculous.”
He caught the pillow, startling the dog—who leaped down off the couch and wandered away. “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Or that Leda was wrong. See, there was a guy on the periphery of the case, named Richard Beckmeyer. We interviewed him as a person of interest but never really considered him a suspect.”
“Are you rethinking it, now that a psychic brought him up?”
“Slow your roll, kid—you’re jumping to conclusions.” He held up his hands and counted off a few of the variables. “I believe that Leda is legit, but I don’t know it for a fact. Even if I assume she knows what she’s talking about, I don’t know if the silver fox she described is Beckmeyer, I don’t know if she’s right about his involvement, and I don’t know why she wigged out on me before she left.”
“She wigged out? Did she attack you or something?”
“Not exactly. We were finished with our little meetup, and we shook hands… and she lost it. She shrieked and fainted. I called nine-one-one, and there were medics, and the hotel manager yelled at me because he was doing me a favor by letting us inside the room again, and the whole thing was just…”
“A shitshow?”
“Yes, dear. It was a shitshow.”
“Was the psychic okay?”
He hugged the pillow and wished the dog would come back. No wonder therapy animals were so popular. “She came around, screamed at me again, ran away from the ambulance, and drove off in her own car. If you want to call that ‘okay.’ ”
“Oh, wow.”
“Wow, for sure.” He let his head fall back on the couch, so he was staring up at the ceiling when he said, “I wish to God I knew what happened.”
Molly considered this, pouting her lower lip and tilting her chin back and forth like she was thinking. “You said she gets her info from touching objects, right? Do you count as an object?”
“Me?”
“Uh-huh. What if she got a vision or something when she shook your hand?”
“God, I hope that’s not it.” Once again, he wished that the couch would eat him—thereby sparing him from further embarrassment. He wondered what she saw. Whatever it was, it must’ve scared her to death.”
“Maybe you just creeped her out,” his daughter suggested oh-so-helpfully.
“Thanks. That’s even worse.”
“I’m full of great ideas.”
“Always, yes.”
“I’ve got another great idea, right here on deck,” she hinted.
“All right, fine. Hit me.”
Molly pulled her feet up underneath herself, in order to sit cross-legged on the cushion beside him. “Why don’t you suck it up and ask her what happened?”
“I did ask, when she was standing in front of me having a meltdown.”
“Ask later. Ask tomorrow. Text her, and ask her to call you back.”
He turned to face her. “You don’t get it. She fled, Molly. She didn’t want to look at me for another second, much less answer any more of my questions.”
“Thus my suggestion that you send her a text. Listen to us kids, old man. We know things about how to communicate when the world is super awkward. Text messages are your friends. She can answer whenever she feels like it, or not at all. You have her number, don’t you?”
“I do. It’s not a terrible idea, and I appreciate you for being the voice of reason during this difficult time.”
“Don’t give me any avoidant-cop speeches. Just text her, find out what freaked her out, and quit worrying about it. Maybe she’ll talk to you again and you’ll learn the details, maybe she won’t and you’ll never hear from her again. That’s life.”
“That’s pleasantly wise of you.”
“I’m a pleasantly wise person.”
“That you are, kid.” Grady pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up Leda’s number. Then he spent half an hour composing a handful of words, hoping he wasn’t coming off like a jerk or a creep.
Thanks for meeting me today, and I’m sorry about whatever happened at the end. Please call or shoot me a text to let me know that you’re all right, and I swear I’ll leave you alone. If that’s what you want.
He pressed Send. Then he finished packing up his pilfered evidence and went online to do a little surreptitious info-hunting. He had questions about Rick Beckmeyer, and although some of those questions would have to be answered in person, more than a few answers might be found on the internet.