Dead Demon Walking

by Linda Welch

  “I’ve always wondered about that place.”

  Royal’s shoulder rubbed mine as we walked. “Wondered?”

  “Who lived here, next to a cemetery? There’s nothing else for miles. There’s no church, so not a preacher’s house.”

  We could barely walk side by side, our linked hands pressed between our bodies. Dark copper and gold, Royal’s wet hair plastered his scalp, a metallic helmet. My sodden braid weighed heavy down my back. My jacket felt damp and clammy.

  “Help me help me help me!”

  I nearly jumped out my skin.

  “Peacocks.”

  “I know!” I said indignantly.

  “Then why are your nails digging in my hand?”

  “Surprised me, is all. And don’t you dare laugh at me.”

  Peacocks are gorgeous birds, but I hate their cry, like a high, tragic, disembodied voice calling for help. Through the rain, I spotted two beneath a tree near the house, tails spread, necks stiff and erect. I forgot some made this place their stomping ground. I shuddered and looked ahead.

  We broke from the trees to hurry across the parking area to Royal’s truck. He let go my hand so he could thoughtfully put on a mini burst of demon speed to reach the truck first and open the passenger door. I scooted in.

  He got the engine rumbling as I fastened my seatbelt. Water from my braid got under my collar and dribbled down my neck

  “Are you going to help Dale Jericho?”

  “I can’t. I can’t tell him what happened to Jack.” I pushed a few loose, dripping strands off my forehead. “I don’t believe he was involved in Jack’s murder and that was all I cared about. I think something happened in New York, maybe personal. In that case, it’s not my business. I’ll have to let this one go.”

  ***

  Royal left me outside my house and drove away. I stood on the little piece of grass I call the front yard and examined the mountainside. Leaves were rapidly changing color and I’d seen fewer hummingbirds in the past week. They would be the young ones, hanging back to fill up on nectar while the older birds flew to a warmer climate. My few fading perennials in the border below the kitchen windows were pathetic. With September a week away, all the signs of approaching fall were suddenly upon Clarion. Winter would come early this year.

  I remembered the first time I saw the house as I drove through the old neighborhood eying For Sale signs. The small redbrick affair with a disproportionally large backyard caught my eye, so I parked outside and peeked in the front windows. I liked the solid look of the place, and it had an air-conditioning unit. Most homes back then had swamp coolers. I don’t like swamp coolers, I do like air-conditioning.

  I haggled down the asking price. I worked three jobs to make payments on the mortgage. It can’t be called charming by a long stretch, but the house and every stick of secondhand furniture in there are mine. After all the foster homes and furnished apartments, that means a lot to me.

  I walked beside the house, unlatched the gate and went in the backyard. The last strong gale brought a mess of crabapples down from the single tree and the damn thing had sent shoots up all over the lawn again. I hate those little sprigs, but the tree looks pretty when it blooms and shades the square concrete patio. As if sprouting baby crabapples weren’t nuisance enough, acorns from all the scrub oak lay everywhere. I should rake them up soon. Mac likes to eat acorns and crabapples, though he prefers the crabapples when they start to rot.

  I went in the back door, in the kitchen, to be greeted by near-silence, my old refrigerator humming to itself and the tick of the clock on the wall above it the only sound. Mel sat on the windowsill, her back to the west windows, feet on the counter beneath.

  Mac ambled in from the hall and went directly to the pantry. He lowered his rear end and concentrated on the door. I put hands to hips. “I know you’re hungry, but how am I supposed to open it with you in the way?”

  He didn’t as much as look at me

  I inched the door open, making him jump up and back away, but not without giving me a reproachful look from brown eyes half hidden by wiry black-brindle hair. “You idiot,” I told him as I dipped his bowl in the open bag of kibble.

  “Did you get anything out of him?” Mel asked.

  “Old man Frost? Not a thing. Won’t get a paycheck for that.”

  “Shame. I looked forward to the new chair you picked out.”

  “I looked forward to food in the pantry.”

  “Come on, it’s not that bad.”

  Right. I exaggerated. I had a healthy bank balance, but griping about financial woes became a habit after pinching pennies for years. I could pay the bills. I would not die of hypothermia or starvation.

  I bent to put the bowl on the floor off to one side. “Where’s Jack?”

  She shrugged. “He won’t speak to me.”

  I went in the hall for my keys. “Did you two fight?” Stupid question. When did they not fight?

  She stood in the kitchen doorway with her head down “No. I think it’s to do with that man, Dale something-or-other. He’s in his room. He doesn’t even tell me to leave when I go in there, just ignores me, as if he doesn’t hear me.”

  Hm. Jack, silent? I jingled the keys. “I’ll be back in a few.”

  She studied me. “Where are you going?”

  “Dobey’s. I won’t be long.”

  “Okay,” she said, sounding dejected.

  I drove to Dobey’s, got my supper at the drive-thru and drove home, thinking about Jack and Dale Jericho the entire time.

  ***

  I sat in my kitchen eating the biggest, juiciest, tastiest bacon-cheeseburger in existence, with deep-fried beer-battered onion rings, washed down by a thick chocolate malt shake.

  Mel sat across the table, eyes riveted on me, chin dipping up and down as she watch my hands go from plate to mouth. I must admit, not having Jack there doing exactly the same felt odd. The phone rang. I licked ketchup off my thumb as I got up.

  I couldn’t resist saying, “I don’t want to come back and find you got at my burger.”

  She made a snarling noise.

  I rested my hip on the counter edge and picked up the phone. “This is Tiff.”

  The voice came faintly, as if from far away. “Help me.”

  It wasn’t a peacock

  Chapter Three

  After a restless night, I went to Royal’s apartment at eight. I knew he’d be up and about, keeping an eye on the renovation which would provide space for our business office.

  Most of our cases are what I call regular detective work - finding people for various reasons, or a client out to get the dirt on someone else, that kind of thing - and far from exciting. I don’t care; I’ve had enough excitement to last me a lifetime. Then there are the clients who require my special skills, although we turn down most. I can’t help a person who wants to find something they misplaced, and refuse to work for a woman who wants to know who her man slept with before he died.

  Staying afloat was touch and go for a time, but business had improved, we kept busy. We needed an office in which to meet clients. Royal pointed out the wisdom of conducting business someplace where Jack and Mel can’t distract me. I am good at ignoring the terrible twosome, but there are times, especially if they are in a playful mood, when talking shop is difficult.

  I would have objected to Royal’s proposal we convert part of his apartment to an office when we opened the agency, unless I could pay half the renovation costs, which I could not. But since then I’d discovered some clients are uncomfortable meeting in a public place where they can be overheard, and some don’t want you in their home. Royal had space to spare for an office; he would not miss what we needed. The work involved slapping a wall across the apartment and putting in a separate entrance, giving us a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot office, a half-bathroom and a cubbyhole for a small fridge and coffeemaker.

  His apartment occupies two floors above an art gallery called Bailey and Cognac. Savvy detective that I am, until I me
t Royal I thought the shop sold fortified wine. The establishments on Royal’s block share connecting, bricked in stairwells, but many knocked down sections of wall to incorporate the stairs into their primary space in the mid-1900s, so customers don’t need to step outside to reach the next floor up. Whoever owned what is now Bailey’s never bothered. Therefore, to get from Royal’s main living area on the first floor, to his bedroom on the top floor, you go outside and up the stairs.

  I went up the steps to the first floor and through the cast-iron gate. The gate is normally locked, but Royal left if open for the workmen who trudged in and out all day. They put in another door next to his front door, but two steps lower with a new step leading up to it. The new door would give access to the office.

  I stepped inside what would be the living room’s south-east corner, when it had a wall, not a huge sheet of thick, semitransparent plastic across. The kitchen lamps were on, but the plastic diffused the light from what were once Royal’s living room windows, leaving most of the room dim. The office wall would completely steal the daylight, so the contractors were going to put two windows in the west wall. I didn’t know how Royal finagled that. The building is not on the Historic Register, but it is old and getting a city permit to alter it couldn’t have been easy. Still, as I well know, Royal has his ways.

  The smell of plastic and sawdust tickled my nose. I pinched my nostrils to suppress a sneeze, but it blasted out when I took my hand away.

  Royal’s living and dining furniture, the giant Buddha, his lacquered bar, the Christmas trees and dining set huddled up to the kitchen counters with just a small gap to let him through. The room is just short of cavernous and he didn’t need to cram the furniture together, but did so in a vain attempt to keep it away from the dust raised by the contractors. I, being female with a brain in my head, would cover the furniture in dust sheets. Royal, being a guy, doesn’t think like that.

  I would like the new living/dining/kitchen space better than the old. The room is just too damn long, with gaps - a big gap between living and dining and another between dining and kitchen. The new setup would be a little cozier, less sterile.

  Royal stood in the kitchen. He opened the oven door, releasing the wonderful aroma of fresh-baked-cookies which overpowered the sawdust smell and made saliva form in my mouth. He would offer the two workmen coffee, or soda, or donuts, and damn me, now he baked cookies. I took a second or two to drink my fill of him, the roll of shoulder and hitch of buttocks as he bent to pull another cookie sheet out the oven.

  “Got any to spare?”

  He observed me over his shoulder and grinned. “For you, always.”

  I covered my ears against the almighty banging from beyond the plastic separator. “What are they doing now?”

  “Putting up four-by-fours.”

  I snatched a pumpkin-chocolate-chip cookie off the cooling rack and nearly dropped it when I burned my fingers. I carefully juggled it between my hands. “Can we go somewhere quieter, where we can talk?”

  “Sure.”

  He yelled at the plastic curtain: “Help yourselves to cookies. We’ll be upstairs.”

  The banging magically stopped.

  ***

  Royal silk sheets whispered over my naked skin as his lips delicately scooped the crumbs from around my mouth. I might have swooned at the sensations that sent clear through me, were I the swooning type. He followed up with a kiss.

  Every kiss was like the first, two days after we first met, when he came to my bedroom in the early morning hours, asking why I saw his true appearance, not the human male whose picture hung on the wall of Clarion PDs Homicide Department with his fellow detectives. After I answered him - I have no more idea why I see demons as they are than why I see the dead - he teased me, putting on a hot and heavy show, and then he kissed me.

  He took my breath away. He still did.

  In the aftermath of our passion, we lounged on his bed, a paper plate covered in cookie crumbs between us. Muffled thuds from below punctuated traffic noise on Twenty-Second and Grant. Morning sunlight peeked through white slatted blinds to send hazy bars over the dark board floor, Royal’s heavy Art Deco desk and cerulean-blue walls. Not a speck of dust on the big oak armoire, the desk, the three tall bookshelves and bedside cabinets or what perched on them. Royal is a neat freak.

  His scent enveloped the bed, sandalwood and amber intensified by our body heat. With a body temperature higher than a human male’s, he is a furnace on legs when we make love.

  “A bad connection, perhaps?”

  I chewed on my lower lip. “You’re probably right, but I can’t get her voice out my head. She sounded desperate, and the line went dead. I tried Star 69, but the number’s blocked.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You cannot do anything about it.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  He reached over and stroked my breast with one finger. “You have a crumb there.”

  I swatted his hand away. “Really? How clever of it to land dead center on my nipple.”

  “If you insist on flaunting your body at me. . . .”

  I glamorously snuffed through my nose. “I wouldn’t know how to flaunt if it upped and kicked me in the butt.”

  Wrong thing to say, because his hand slipped over my hip to investigate that part of my anatomy.

  The plate disappeared and he leaned over me with hands either side my waist. “You have crumbs all over you, Tiff.” His head dipped, his long demon tongue swirled my nipple.

  My hands automatically curled to his shoulder blades. I held my breath as the muscles in his back rolled beneath my fingers and silken copper-gold skeins rippled over my breasts.

  He lifted his head and the heat in his eyes all but scalded me. His voice came low and husky. “Are we done with business? Can we get back to pleasure?”

  I melted into a puddle all over Royal’s blue silk sheets.

  ***

  I lay on my side with my hand on Royal’s sleek, hairless chest, reveling in the feel of his satin-smooth skin. His fingers traced over the back of my hand and twined with mine. I curled my fingers to trap his. He smiled, although he didn’t open his eyes, because he knew I scrutinized him.

  He could have any woman in the world. Why me? I’m stubborn, and can be short-tempered and cantankerous when the mood hits me. Not only do I see dead people, I live with two. Life with me was not an easy ride. But I won’t ask him why he stays with me. Hell no. Let’s not put ideas in his head.

  Life with Royal was not a breeze, either. He comes from another world inexplicably joined to ours and I saw his people do things which turned my stomach. I didn’t as a rule allow my emotions to overpower knowledge and commonsense, and the latter two liked to remind me Royal took me to witness what amounted to an execution. I didn’t blame him for Maud’s death, but couldn’t easily forget he knew what would happen when he whisked me off to Russia. He told me we went to attend the death of a mortally injured Gelpha woman, to see if I could talk to her shade. He did not tell me the Gelpha would help her on her way when I got there. That was a problem.

  But all couples have their problems, don’t they? Ours just happened to be on a different scale. Give and take. Right? A relationship is all about give and take. We wanted to be together, we had a hell of a lot of fun, we . . . we fit. Royal tolerated the idiosyncrasies of a woman who spoke to thin air and I told myself I should not always expect to understand or condone the motivations and strictures which ruled him. He was still the best thing ever happened to me. I’d keep him around for a while, for as long as it lasted.

  When a tiny seed of doubt pushed to the surface, I shoved it back down.

  “Tiff, I have been thinking?”

  “You should watch that.”

  His chest flexed as he chuckled. “We have been busy these past six months. We should take a break. What do you say to a vacation?”

  I folded one hand atop the other on his chest and rested my chin on them, eyes turned up to see his
face. I had not been on vacation in years. “A vacation? Where? For how long?”

  His eyes sparkled. “Ever been to Boston?”

  “Never. Why Boston?”

  “It’s a lovely old town, and my friend has a fine hotel there. I thought a few days there, then work our way down the coast.”

  “So a week, two weeks?”

  “Oh, a week and a half I should think.”

  Going over the pros and cons in my mind, my gaze dropped to the column of his neck.

  Royal joined his hands behind his head, making his pecs swell beneath my cheek. “You don’t want to go?”

  “I do.” I thought I did. “But I’d have to leave Mac with someone. I’d have to put up with Jack and Mel being totally obnoxious till we left and totally obnoxious when we get back.”

  “You can leave Mac with Janie - the scars must be healed by now.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “And according to you, Jack and Mel are always obnoxious.

  He had me there. I shifted to spoon against him so I could doodle on his chest with one finger. “Will we drive or fly? I can’t take my gun on a flight.”

  “You won’t need a gun, and we don’t have to fly.” He brought one hand up to make a zoom motion through the air.

  I knew what he meant. Teeth clamped on my lower lip, I visualized us as we blurred along at demon speed, me clinging to Royal, with luggage and miscellaneous travel necessities strapped all over me.

  “If we go, we fly,” I said firmly, and lest he try to misinterpret, added, “in an airplane.”

  Chapter Four

  “You’ll be gone ages,” Mel said. “We’ll go stir crazy.”

  Leaving them for what could be a couple of weeks did give me more than a twinge of remorse, but - for God’s sake, I was not their mother! Why should I feel guilty? “You’ll cope. You got along okay before I moved here.”