Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

9.

Leda drove Jason the Accord like she’d stolen him, all the way back to the south side of town and her tiny, adorable bungalow she rented from a retired couple who were presently traveling the country in an RV. She flung herself inside, slammed the door, and immediately apologized to Brutus—even though he surely hadn’t heard the commotion. But she’d gotten into the habit of apologizing to him, and asking his permission, and telling him how handsome he was—even though Brutus was about the size of a stick of gum, and with the same allotment of brain cells.

Not all of Leda’s interactions with her piscine roommate made a great deal of sense, and she’d be the first one to admit it.

But Niki hadn’t answered her second frantic phone call, dialed on the interstate, against Seattle local laws (and risking a hefty ticket, like that was going to stop her this time). Niki also hadn’t responded to the subsequent frantic voice mail, but in Niki’s defense, it’d been only about twenty-five minutes since Leda had abandoned a cold crime scene and the perfectly nice cop who’d persuaded her to meet him there.

She’d never made such good time crossing town before, but she was entirely too rattled to be excited about it. Instead, she paced and fretted, shaking her phone as if doing so would persuade Niki to magically dial in and hear all about it.

Leda was almost desperate enough to call her mom in Spokane when Niki somehow heard the psychic Bat-Signal (or else she’d finally listened to the voice mail) and reached out to learn what the big emergency was.

Before Niki could even say hello, Leda was in full “marbles mode”—a state they’d coined together that one time when they were on the run from a security guard in a golf cart while fleeing the allegedly haunted yacht club boathouse of high school infamy.

People can scatter like marbles. Sometimes their thoughts do, too.

“The cop Grady Merritt had something to do with Tod’s death,” she blurted. “I don’t know what and I don’t know how, but when I shook his hand I got a flash—a crazy flash, like, the strongest flash I’ve ever had—and I saw a moment of… of…” She was hyperventilating now. “Of Tod’s body in the car. I saw Tod, shot and drowned in the back seat; that’s what I saw when I shook Grady’s hand!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Niki replied. “Hang on, now. He’s not the cop who investigated the case; I know he’s not. It was an old dude and his partner, a younger woman. She died a year or two ago in a shoot-out at a liquor store, right?”

“Whiteside, yeah, that was the old guy’s name. It was practically his last case before he retired, and he half-assed it. He never took me seriously, and he avoided me, and he didn’t want to answer my questions, and he was a big fat jerk, and—”

Niki interrupted. “He was a perfectly nice old man who didn’t have any answers. It’s not his fault that Tod got murdered.”

“Tod got murdered,” she echoed back, phlegm in her throat and tears in her eyes. “Tod got murdered, and I didn’t see it coming. It’s the only thing I actually know how to do, Nik. I can see things coming, and then one time, I didn’t. Not when it counted.”

“It’s not your fault.” Niki kept her voice level and calm.

With despair and a snot bubble, Leda cried, “It’s somebody’s fault!”

“That’s a fact, babe. But it’s not your fault; it’s not this cop’s fault. It’s not the old cop’s fault, either, and it probably wasn’t even Tod’s fault. Maybe, though… maybe your woo-woo vibes are trying to tell you to work with this new guy. What if they’re trying to point you in the right direction and chase you toward some actual answers?”

Leda slumped into an overstuffed recliner that looked like it belonged in the office of an elderly rich man who smoked cigars and sipped brandy in his downtime. She tucked her knees against her chest and clutched her phone tight to her ear. She brought her voice down a few decibels and at least one octave when she said, “Maybe it’s Tod’s ghost.”

“You don’t believe in ghosts.”

“I’ve never seen one or talked to one, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’ve never talked to a billionaire, either. Or… or a treasure hunter. Or a lion tamer. For that matter, I don’t know what ghosts sound like when they try to communicate. What if they sound like flashes of light and terrible visions? What if they sound like migraines? Anything could be a clue, Nik. Anything.”

“You had vibes and visions for years before Tod died. His ghost is not the source, and now you’re grasping at straws.”

“Then what is the source?” Leda asked the universe at large.

“Sweetheart, if we knew that…” Niki didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to.

“If we knew that,” Leda grimly agreed. It wasn’t even a question anymore, because the answer probably didn’t matter.

“Listen, I’m on my way home from the grocery store. It’s hard to hold this phone and”—she shifted something around—“three bags of heavy crap while I’m working with a boot cast and a limp, but I’ll be done in another ten minutes. We only just got back from Snoqualmie. You want me to head over?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. Give me half an hour.”

“Twenty minutes,” Leda bargained.

“I’ve got ice cream here. Other things I need to put away, too. But I’ll be there as soon as I can, I promise.”

They hung up, and Leda clung to her best friend’s vow. She had to survive on her own, with no one but Brutus to cry to, for only half an hour. Likely a little longer than that, knowing Niki. Niki always ran fifteen to twenty minutes late, unless Leda was flogging her with the Guilt Whip of Punctuality.

Forty-five minutes, then. She could hang on that long.

She bounced out of the chair and went to the tiny dining nook beside the kitchen, where Brutus’s tank was sitting on a vintage buffet near the window. She was careful to keep him from getting too much direct sunlight, and careful to keep him from getting too cold, and careful to keep him from eating too much. And while Leda could survive on Rice Krispies treats and beef jerky, left to her own devices, her single small pet ate the most expensive fish food she could find, on the grounds that it was surely the highest quality.

She’d tasted it once—putting one tiny pellet on her tongue—and then wished she hadn’t for the next six hours. It’d been like a wee breath mint in “concentrated tide pool” flavor, and the aftertaste had lingered.

“Bruty-boy, what do I do?” she asked, staring through the glass and spotting him chillaxing—tucked under his favorite leaf.

He flicked his tail to acknowledge her presence but didn’t offer any useful advice.

“Tod is gone. Somebody killed him, and I still don’t know who. I don’t know why. Everybody loved Tod,” she assured the fish. “Not just me. Even Niki liked him, and she never likes anybody I date. It’s been that way since tenth grade.”

Tod Sandoval had died three months after proposing to Leda Foley at the top of the Ferris wheel on the pier. It was a cornball proposal, with a little box and a pretty ring, and a short speech about how great they were together. Tod had been six feet even, with curly black hair and green eyes. Tod had a bright laugh that could light up a room, and a quick hand if anybody needed help. Tod was almost perfect, and in his absence even the faintest rough edges had been sanded away smooth. Now Tod was an angel.

But Leda didn’t believe in angels any more than she believed in ghosts, and the more time passed with no breaks in the case, the less she believed in justice, either.

But, wonder of wonders, Niki was prompt for once.

She arrived in twenty-eight minutes flat and let herself inside. She found Leda crying to the fish in the dining room. “I’ll open some wine,” she declared.

Shortly thereafter, both women sat on either side of the little bistro set that served as a dining room table: Leda, red-eyed and still shaking, and Niki, topping off the glass of pink wine every time it seemed necessary.

“I know it feels like a lot right now, but when you calm down a little… I think you should call the cop and explain yourself.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Leda snuffled.

“No, but he’s probably worried about you. You fainted and ran away screaming. If I were him, I’d be concerned.”

“I know, I know. He’s concerned. He already sent a text.”

“A text?” Niki nodded approvingly. “Good call. You can respond whenever you want. If you don’t, he might swing by the office, or look you up here, at home. Jesus, Leda… I only heard about your afternoon secondhand, and I’m worried enough as it is. That guy must be freaking out.”

“His text didn’t sound too freaked out.” Leda pulled out her phone and showed Niki the message that had landed about ten minutes before Niki’d arrived. “It sounded politely interested in my well-being.”

“I’m sure he’s holding back for the sake of propriety.”

“He’s a homicide detective who brought a fragile psychic to a gruesome crime scene. He has no sense of propriety.”

Niki rolled her eyes with vigor. “Girl, he didn’t drag you out there at gunpoint. He barely even twisted your arm. Don’t be a dick about this. Tell him you’re okay and let him off the hook.”

Leda glared down at the screen. “Fine. I will.” She retrieved her phone and pounded out a text like she was mad at it. Thanks for the adventure, and I’m sorry I passed out. I’m okay now, don’t worry. She tossed the phone aside, but Niki caught it before it flipped onto the floor.

Since it was still unlocked, she added a second text—so quickly that Leda almost didn’t notice. We should probably talk later.

“What are you doing? Nik, what did you do?”

Leda flailed for the phone, and after hitting Send, Niki passed it back to her.

“I’m helping.”

“That’s not helping!”

“Yes,” she insisted. “It is. You’re planning to avoid this man for the rest of your natural life—and don’t you act like I’m wrong about that. We both know you’re already wondering if the rent is any cheaper on the dark side of the moon because you’re embarrassed and you never want to see him again. But if there’s any chance at all that this guy can help you get answers about Tod’s death, you have to follow up with him.”

“You don’t understand. I saw Tod. Dead.”

“I do understand. I’ve been watching you process this for three years, and I know that one reason you’ve been beefing up your skills at Castaways is that you’ve been hoping to see Tod in a psychic flash ever since you got the phone call that he’d been found. You admitted it once, last year. When you were, okay, super drunk.”

Leda folded her arms on the small round table and laid her head down on top of them. “I feel stupid about it now.”

Niki patted her nearest elbow. “There’s nothing to feel stupid about. You saw something terrible, and it scared you. You ran away from it. That’s normal.”

“Grady Merritt didn’t think it was normal.”

“Only because he didn’t know the context. You should tell him. Talk to him, explain the whole thing about Tod, and you might have a new ally in the hunt for his killer.”

Leda’s response was a mumble, spoken into the crook of her arm.

“C’mon, take the rest of the day off. It’s the weekend, right? Do you want to go to Castaways?” Niki offered, since Leda usually treated the bar like it was base in a cosmic game of tag. She was safe there, if nowhere else in the world.

But Leda surprised her. “Not tonight. I don’t want to do anything tonight except finish the second bottle of pink wine and cry.”

“Netflix and swill?”

She considered it. “I’d rather PlayStation and complain. While swilling, yes.”

“Are both controllers charged up?” Niki asked. When Leda nodded, she said, “Good. Ready player one, bitch. Let’s get this cheer-up show on the road.”