First Grave on the Right cd-1

by Darynda Jones

  I strolled inside and spotted his tall, slim form sitting at a table with my wicked stepmother and older, non-stepsister. While Dad was the rain, they were the scorpions, and I’d learned long ago to steer clear of them. My real mom died when I was born — hemorrhaged to death while giving birth to me, which has never been one of my favorite memories — and Dad married Denise before I’d turned a year. Without even asking my opinion on the matter. Denise and I never really clicked.

  “Hey, hon,” Dad said as I put my sunglasses back on and tried to ease past without being noticed, not really sure why I thought the sunglasses would help.

  I was almost annoyed at being spotted before realizing I’d never have gotten away with it anyway. The danged elevator was louder than a Chevy big block and crept up like an injured snail. I was certain Denise would have noticed when a dark-haired girl in sunglasses started elevating beside her.

  I strolled toward their table.

  “Come have some breakfast,” Dad said. “I’ll share.”

  Denise and Gemma had brought Dad sustenance to break the fast. Apparently, I was not invited — big surprise — despite the fact that I live about two inches south of the back door.

  Gemma didn’t bother glancing up from her breakfast burrito. The movement might have displaced a hair. Denise only sighed at Dad’s offer and started cutting into his burrito to give me some.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I already ate.”

  She glanced up at me then, overtly annoyed. I tended to do that to her. “What did you have?” she asked, a razor’s edge to her voice.

  I hesitated. This was a trick; I could feel it. She was feigning concern over the nutritional content of my breakfast to make me think she cared. I stood with my lips sealed shut, refusing to be taken in by such an obvious setup.

  But she turned her powerful, laserlike glare on me, and I caved. “A blueberry bagel.”

  Her eyes rolled in irritation before refocusing on her burrito.

  Phew. That was close. Who knew the mention of a blueberry bagel could irritate my stepmother so? Maybe I should have thrown in the strawberry cream cheese for backup. It was hard being such an utter disappointment to the woman who’d raised me, but gosh darn it, I gave it my all. I could have invented the wheel and she would have been disappointed. Or Post-it notes. Or bone marrow.

  My dad unfolded from his chair for a kiss and gasped softly when he noticed my jaw. I was fairly certain Denise had noticed, too — I saw her lids widen a fraction of an inch before she caught herself — but since she chose to ignore it, I chose to ignore it as well.

  I lowered my glasses quickly and shook my head at Dad. He paused, drew his brows together in displeasure that I didn’t want to explain anything in front of my wicked stepmother, then kissed my forehead.

  “I’ll be upstairs in a bit.” He was letting me know he expected an explanation nonetheless.

  “That’s where I’ll be,” I said, opening the cage to the elevator, “if you’re lucky.”

  He chuckled.

  Denise sighed.

  My stepmother was never big on the whole nurturing thing. I think she used up all the good stuff on my older sister, and by the time she got to me, she was fresh out of nurture. She did, however, give me one pertinent bit of 411. She was the one who informed me that I had the attention span of a gnat; only, she said I had the attention span of a gnat with selective listening. At least I think that’s what she said. I wasn’t listening. Oh, and she told me that men want only one thing.

  And on that note, I must give praise and thanks to the powers that be. I don’t want much else from them either.

  But truly, in my stepmom’s defense, who could blame her? I mean, she had Gemma. Gemma Vi Davidson. The Gemma Vi Davidson.

  It was hard to compete. Especially since Gemma and I were total opposites. Gemma had blond hair and blue eyes. I did not.

  Gemma was always an A student. I was more of a B-all-you-can-be kind of gal.

  When Gemma was into science, I was into skipping.

  When Gemma was into foreign languages, I was into the hot Italian guy down the street.

  And when Gemma went to college and graduated magna cum laude in three and a half years with a bachelor’s in psychology, I went to college and graduated in three and a half years with a bachelor’s in sociology, only I did it summa cum laude.

  Gemma’s never forgiven me for showing her up. But it did push her to continue her education as part of our never-ending struggle of one-upmanship, which is kind of like the struggle for survival, only not so noble. And she didn’t stop at her master’s either. She went all the way with a Ph.D. A married professor named Dr. Roland. Then she got her own Ph.D. and did it by the time she was thirty.

  Clearly she needed to hit it with the professor more.

  Denise has never forgiven me either. When Gemma graduated, Denise’s eyes shimmered with tears of joy. When I graduated, Denise’s eyes rolled more often than a heroin addict with a trust fund. I think she was annoyed that she had to miss her Saturday garden club to attend the ceremony. Or it could have been the T-shirt I was wearing underneath my shiny graduation gown that said JENIUS.

  Dad was proud of me, though. For a long time, I pretended that was enough. I kept thinking that someday Denise would realize she had the superhuman ability to be proud of more than one person at the same time.

  That day never came. So, in an act of utter defiance, I did exactly what Denise would expect me to do: I disappointed her. Again. Because Denise felt like a woman’s place was in front of a classroom, I trotted down to a recruiting event on the university’s campus and joined the Peace Corps. Disappointing her was so much easier than working my ass off trying not to. And those little sideways glances and sighs of dismay didn’t hurt so much when they were clearly deserved. Not to mention the fact that I got to work with the military on several projects, and surprisingly, the military is chock-full of men in uniform. Truly, its cup runneth over. Hoo-yah!

  The elevator finally reached the second floor, and I waved down to Dad before stepping into the hall that led to the back entrance of my office. The front outside entrance, the one I usually took, led directly to my reception area, with my office past that.

  Then there was a third entrance that was a little trickier to maneuver and involved the fire escape out back. So when I saw Garrett in the hall, leaning against my office door, waiting for me, I realized he must have jumped to the fire escape and climbed in through the window.

  Show-off.

  “Do you remember the part about my dad being an ex-cop? What are you doing here?” I asked, annoyance hardening my voice. He was wearing a white T-shirt, dark jacket, and a nice-fitting pair of jeans.

  He straightened and raised a questioning brow. “Any reason you took an elevator that travels at the speed of molasses in January instead of the stairs?”

  Garrett was a looker, damn him, with his dark skin and smoldering gray eyes, but that was as far as it went for me. Any minute amount of attraction I may previously have harbored was now buried beneath a thick layer of resentment and animosity. And as far as I was concerned, that was exactly where it would stay.

  I let my irritated facial expression answer for me, unlocked the heavy wooden door to my office, then looked past Garrett to the three departed visitors who’d also been waiting for me.

  “Glad you could join us,” I said to Barber. “You’re much taller vertically.”

  Sussman elbowed him in a teasing gesture while Garrett strode into my office, apparently refusing to watch me talk to wallpaper.

  “Sorry about my earlier behavior,” Barber said. “I guess I kind of lost it.”

  His apology left me feeling guilty for not being more … I don’t know, supportive. Maybe I needed sensitivity training. I once signed up for an anger management class, but the instructor pissed me off.

  “I have no room to judge you,” I said, patting Barber on the shoulder. “I’ve never died. Not officially.”

  �
��Officially?” Sussman asked.

  “Long story.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Elizabeth said. “Can we get inside? I figure I don’t have much time left, and I want to get in all the ogling at tall, dark, and skeptic that I can. Why couldn’t I have met him yesterday? I could’ve died happy.”

  I knew how she felt. I had similar feelings about Reyes.

  We stepped inside my office, which doubled as an art gallery for a friend of mine named Pari. Dark abstract paintings of life on Central lined my walls. One was a disturbing rendition of a Goth girl doing laundry, washing blood off her sleeves. The girl looked like me, a little joke, since I loathed laundry day. Thankfully, my image was difficult to make out in the frenzy of grays swirling around the scene.

  Pari was also a tattoo artist and had a shop nearby. She designed the tattoo I had on my left shoulder blade. The one of a little grim reaper enshrouded in a flowing cloak with large, innocent eyes peeping out of it. Pari was chock-full of inside jokes.

  Garrett turned toward me. I refused to acknowledge him with eye contact. Instead, I hung up my bag and started a pot of coffee just as Cookie came in the front door.

  “You in here, sweetheart?”

  “Back here,” I called to her. “I’ve started the coffee.” I kept the coffeepot in my office on the pretense of monitoring Cookie’s caffeine intake. Actually, it was my answer to potpourri.

  “Coffee. Thank the gods,” Cookie said as she opened the door between her office and mine. “Oh.” She saw Garrett. “Mr. Swopes, I didn’t realize—”

  “He was just leaving,” I told her.

  Garrett smiled at me, then placed the full power of his lopsided grin on Cookie.

  The bastard.

  “My, my, my,” Elizabeth said a tad too breathlessly. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  Suppressing a helpless sigh, I watched as Cookie started to speak, stuttered something about paperwork, then waved and closed the door to give us our privacy.

  “I know exactly how she feels,” Elizabeth purred.

  I plopped into the chair behind my desk as Garrett folded himself into the seat across from me.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Well?” he mimicked.

  “You’re not here for a social call, Swopes. What do you want? I have three murders to solve.”

  My confidence seemed to amuse him. “I was just thinking we might go out for coffee sometime.”

  “Damn,” Elizabeth said. “You guys are going out for coffee? Can I watch?”

  I frowned at her. “We are not going out for coffee.”

  Garrett lowered his head, seeming to force himself to be patient.

  “Look,” I said, getting fed up with his ’tude. “I’ve already told you. You can either deal with my ability or not. Preferably not. There’s the door. Have a nice day and kiss my ass.”

  He raised his head, his expression serious but not angry like I felt it should have been, considering the “ass” comment. “First of all,” he said, his voice infused with exasperation, “I’m still getting used to all this, Miss Piss and Vinegar. Give me a little time.”

  “No.”

  “Second,” he continued without missing a beat, “I just want to talk to you about it.”

  “No.”

  “I mean, how does it work?”

  “Well.”

  “Do you see dead people all the time?”

  “Every other weekend and holidays.”

  “Are they, you know, everywhere?”

  “Is a frog’s ass watertight?” I asked, leaning back in my chair and lifting my feet to rest them, dusty hiking boots and all, on the desk.

  I crossed my ankles and steepled my fingers and glared to emphasize my impatience while I waited, impatiently, for Garrett to make a decision. To believe or not to believe.

  I called this part “the dawning”—the part where people begin to wonder if I really can see the departed. Oh, they still have doubts. Most people rack their brains, trying to come up with an explanation, any explanation, of how I do what I do.

  And as I lived and breathed, Garrett Swopes was struggling to come up with that very thing. After all, dead people don’t walk around trying to solve their own murders. Ghosts don’t exist. None of what I claimed was possible.

  The dawning was like a relish fork in the road, and the proverbial traveler had to take one prong or the other. Unfortunately, the prong that led to Charley-sees-dead-people was much sharper than the safer, more travel-worn Charley-is-psychotic prong. Nobody wants to look like a fool. Nine times out of ten, that reason alone keeps people from allowing themselves to believe.

  Garrett stared back at me a few seconds, then refocused on my fingers. I could almost see the wheels spinning in his head. After several moments more, I began to think those wheels needed a good oiling.

  “But how did you know where to find Ms. Ellery’s body?” he asked at last.

  “I’m not explaining it again, Swopes.”

  “Seriously—”

  “No.”

  After another long pause, he asked, “You’ve been doing this since you were five?”

  I snorted. “I’ve been able to see the departed since I was born. It just took my dad five years to really believe me. But when I told him where to find a missing girl’s body, he realized what an asset I’d be.”

  “The Johnson girl,” he said.

  I tried not to wince. The memory was not one of my favorites. In fact, if someone were to ask, I’d have a hard time choosing a lesser favorite. On the day of the Johnson Girl Fiasco, as I called it, Denise veered right onto the travel-worn prong, choosing not to believe me and vowing never to talk about it again. It was also the day that I recognized the abnormality of what I do. And that some people — people very close to me — would despise me for it. Of course, my stepmother slapping me senseless in front of dozens of onlookers didn’t ingratiate me to the incident either.

  “Are you okay?” Sussman asked.

  I’d almost forgotten they were there. I nodded discreetly.

  “You know,” Elizabeth said, “I think he’s really trying to be open-minded.”

  My expression turned into a dubious scowl. It was mean. She was only trying to help.

  “Are they here now?” Garrett asked.

  I sighed, not particularly craving his antagonism. But he’d asked. “Yes.”

  He took out his notebook. “Can you ask Ms. Ellery when her birthday is?”

  “No.”

  Elizabeth walked forward. “It’s June twentieth.”

  I looked at her. “He knows when your birthday is. He just wants to see if I do.”

  “No?” he asked. He seemed disappointed, like he wanted me to tell him, wanted to believe. For about five minutes, anyway. It was the fair-weather believers I had to watch out for. They had a nasty habit of sucker-punching me in the gut when I least expected it.

  “Just tell him,” Elizabeth said.

  “You don’t understand,” I told her. “People like him never believe, not fully. He’ll always have doubts. He’ll always quiz me, drill me for information he already has just to see if I fuck up.” I looked back at Garrett. “So fuck him.”

  “Elizabeth,” Sussman said, “maybe we should just—”

  “No!” she yelled, and I jumped, catching Garrett’s full attention. “Just tell him.” She rushed toward my desk, leaned over it. “He needs to get over himself and just believe you. He doesn’t know what he’ll be missing. He’ll go through life with this one-dimensional view of the world he lives in. He’ll have no sense of direction, no hope that the people he’s loved and lost will go to a better place. That they’ll be okay.”

  I realized Elizabeth was no longer talking about Garrett. She was talking about herself.

  I stood and walked around to her. “Elizabeth, what’s wrong?”

  She almost cried. I could see tears shimmering in her pale eyes. “There’s so much I want to tell my sister, but she’s just like him … just like
me. I would never have believed you either.” Her shoulders deflated, and she leveled a guilty gaze on me. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, I wouldn’t have. Not in a million years. And neither will she.”

  A relieved smile spread across my face. Was that all? I’d come across this problem countless times. “Elizabeth,” I said, “of all the problems we have right now, that is the only one with a simple fix.”

  Garrett watched our exchange — or rather my exchange — but to his credit, his expression remained passive. I’d often considered how ridiculous I must look to the living, talking to myself, gesturing wildly, hugging air. But I didn’t always have a choice. If Garrett refused to leave, he’d just have to deal with my world. I would not modify my behavior to appease his delicate sense of propriety in my own office.

  Elizabeth sniffed. “What do you mean? What fix?”

  “You leave a note.”

  “A note?”

  “Sure. I do it all the time. It saves me so much explaining,” I said with an encompassing wave of my hand. “You dictate a note to me, I type it — and predate it to before your death, naturally — and then it’s miraculously found among your possessions. Kind of like an if-anything-should-happen-to-me note. You tell her everything you want her to know, and we just pretend you’d typed it before you died. I even have a guy who can forge your signature to seal the deal, if you’d like.”

  “Who?” Garrett asked.

  I glowered at him in warning. What I did with the departed was none of his business.

  A pretty look of astonishment came over Elizabeth’s face. “That’s brilliant. I’m a lawyer. I’m more organized than the Dewey decimal system. She’d totally fall for it.”

  “Of course she’ll fall for it,” I said, patting her back.

  “Can I write one to my wife?” Sussman asked.

  “Sure.”

  Then we all looked at Barber, expecting him to have someone to write to as well. “I only have my mom. She knows how I feel about her,” he said, and I wondered if I should be happy about that or sad because his mother was all he had.

  “I’m glad,” I told him. “I wish more people took the time to make their feelings known.”