by Kate Aeon
Her gut said more about Alan, but she didn’t intend to listen to that. She’d given up on men. Living the life of a nun suited her — no one hitting her, no one hurting her, no one threatening to kill her.
Not until yesterday, anyway.
Phoebe spent an hour at the shooting range, plugging targets in tight clusters with the Browning, something she did twice a week every week, because she was never going to be unarmed and helpless again.
Then she drove down University to the Moonstruck New Age Shoppe, parked, and eased herself out of the car, careful of the knee but pleased at how it was holding up. Ben Margolies saw her crossing the parking lot and had the door open for her by the time she reached it.
Ben was, Phoebe guessed, in his late thirties or early forties. But from a few feet away he could have passed for ten years younger. He worked at his looks; his pale hair fell over his forehead in a boyish, clearly expensive style that she suspected included coloring. His eyes were the startling blue that Phoebe attributed to tinted contact lenses. He dressed in Banana Republic and Gap, and kept his body lean and supple with yoga classes he took in the gym next door. Classes he’d invited her to take with him more than once and which she had, more than once, declined.
The irritating young witch wannabes who hung out in the shop gushed about how cute he was. Phoebe thought Ben was trying too hard — but he was nice-looking.
“Hi, beautiful,” he said. “You couldn’t have picked a better day to come in. How’s the knee?”
“Hurts... But see? No cane.” She held out her hands and demonstrated cane-free locomotion for him. “I had something I wanted to ask you, but first tell me what’s great about today.”
“Ummm... I’m going to ask you out and you’re going to tell me yes?”
“Clearly you fail the psychic test,” Phoebe said. She smiled when she said it, but her stomach gave that queasy little flip she got every time he joked about asking her out. If he hadn’t recommended her for the job with the psychic hotline, she probably would have found another place from which to restock her tarot supplies, just because he was endlessly persistent, even if he kept his persistence low-key and friendly.
He had helped her get the tarot job, though, and she felt like she owed him. And even though she didn’t know him very well, he was a familiar face, and was someone who actually knew her name. She didn’t have many people like that left in her life.
Ben laughed. “Actually, I knew you were going to say that. No, today is your lucky day because I got in a new batch of incenses and some fascinating new decks. You’re going to love them.”
Phoebe smiled at him and sighed. “I’ll take a look, but you know what I like.”
“Plain white candles and Nag Champa are fine, but you could have a little zazz in your life. You deserve a little zazz.” He held out his arms and gave her a showman’s smile.
She made a face. “Last couple of days, I’ve had more goddamned zazz than the Boston Pops.”
Ben looked at her sidelong, and an odd smile crawled across his face. “Have you been cheating on me behind my back, beautiful?”
Ben laughed then, but in the instant before he did, her mind reframed everything. Ice slid down her spine and into her bloodstream, and she thought, He knows my real phone number, he could probably get my work number under some pretense, and the fact that he’s always been nice enough doesn’t mean that there isn’t something seriously wrong with him.
If he could do voices — if he’d ever heard Michael speak—
He patted her shoulder in a fashion probably meant to be friendly but that made her heart leap into her throat, and strolled across the store to pick up a big box of her favorite Nag Champa incense for her, and a dozen white pedestal candles.
“How’s business?” she asked. Her mouth was dry.
He had his back to her, putting the candles she got every time she came in into a box. “Steady. Lot of new clients — enough that I may be able to afford a full-time reader to work with me. The offer is still open.”
Chills skittered down Phoebe’s spine. “Too public for me,” she said. “Working in the shop would involve a lot of standing, and you have way too much glass in the front window.”
“You’re still doing the phone readings?” He turned, the box with the candles and the incense in his arms.
She nodded.
“That’s shit money. You could make so much more reading in here, Phoebe, and you’d develop a regular clientele in no time.”
“Reading is a stopgap for me,” Phoebe said.
“You’ve been saying that for a year.”
“I know.”
He shook his head, put the box on the counter, and added the purchases up on a receipt pad. “Thirty-four fifty-nine. That’s my cost — I’ll let you buy wholesale today.”
Phoebe reached into her backpack and brought out her wallet. She counted out bills and change with hands that were shaking and quickly put the money on the counter.
“Thanks,” she said.
Ben reached for the box, but Phoebe picked it up first and hobbled out of the store as fast as she could.
She didn’t think Ben had ever met Michael. What were the odds? She couldn’t imagine how Ben might be able to imitate Michael’s voice, either, or how he might have said the things Michael would say.
But he knew who she was. And where she was. And how to reach her. And as far as she knew, he was the only one who did.
Chapter Eight
“What the hell are you doing in here on your day off?” Morrison Beacham-Smith, one of the rotating ER physicians and Alan’s friend, looked like he’d been strapped to the undercarriage of a train and dragged for five hundred miles.
“I heard you were having fun?”
“Can’t have heard that. It’s been hell on wheels today.”
Alan feigned casual amusement. “Saturdays. Whatcha gonna do?”
“So... you here to help out?”
Alan laughed, and this time the amusement was real. “On my day off? No — but my suspicion that you’ve been into the narcotics cabinet just got a lot stronger.” Alan looked around. The ER actually looked pretty sedate at the moment. The nurses were walking, not running — always a good sign — he couldn’t hear anything beeping, and he didn’t smell blood. “Morrie — can you come for a walk with me? Ten, fifteen minutes tops?”
Morrie said, “Your timing is good. This is the first sane stretch we’ve had all day. And I so need some munchies.” He caught the attention of a blue-scrub-suited nurse propped against the nurses’ station, working on a chart. “Sheila, I’ll be in the cafeteria. Page me if things go boom.”
The nurse nodded and gave him a wave.
As they headed down the hall, Morrie was still on ER wires. “Back-to-back crashes, one blunt amputation, a guy with an ice pick in his skull all the way to, but not through, the fornix, who fucking walked in. Then we get three cardiacs, one of which coded before arrival and one after. The third we shipped upstairs with standard orders, but he’s been tearing downhill ever since. We’ve filled ICU and taken about half of the overflow up on Med-Surg. And at the moment, over in X-ray, we have this guy with a G.I. Joe doll stuck in—”
“Morrie,” Alan interrupted.
Morrie stopped.
“I’ll have to get the war stories later. I need to ask you something.”
They’d reached the cafeteria. Morrie went straight to the row of vending machines and bought a couple of candy bars, a can of soda, and three packs of peanut butter crackers. Then he led the way to a table in the corner.
“Okay, shoot.”
“I won’t have to. You keep eating like that you’re going to keel over on your own.”
Morrie just grinned.
Alan shook his head and smiled. But the smile vanished as he said, “I had a visitor last night.”
Morrie nodded, popped the top on the soda, and took a drink.
“I was inclined to think she was a charlatan, or some sort of gold-dig
ger out for money, but I spent a lot of time thinking about this after I, ah, chased her out of my living room. A couple of things don’t add up.”
Morrie grinned. “You discovered that her hair really is that shade of blonde, that her tits are real, and that she and her little brother are orphans.”
“Not that sort of gold-digger,” Alan said. He didn’t allow himself to express his impatience; Morrie was always trying, but underneath the pain-in-the-ass exterior he was an intelligent, curious man. Excellent diagnostician. Explorer of things a bit beyond the pale.
“Too bad,” Morrie said.
“I’ll cut this short. She came to me last night to tell me that she’d talked with my daughter. That my daughter told her to come see me.”
Morrie put the candy bar on the table and sat up straight. “Your kid died in... Kentucky, was it?”
“Right.”
“This woman came from Kentucky to talk to you?”
“No. She lives next door to me, and has for most of the time I’ve lived in the place.”
Morrie nodded and rested his chin in his hands. “She hasn’t asked you for anything before now?”
“Never so much as said hello. I bumped into her getting home from work yesterday. First time we had any contact at all.”
“And what makes you think she might be legit?”
“Two things,” Alan said, wishing he had some way of not mentioning the second. “First, she exactly described what Chick was wearing the day she died.”
“Any place she could have found that information elsewhere?”
“No.”
“Okay. That’s pretty compelling, then. What’s the second thing?”
Alan took a deep breath. “I saw Chick yesterday, too.”
Morrie looked at him like he’d grown a second head and said, “Fuck me. You’re kidding.”
“I’m not kidding. I don’t intend to tell anyone else, but I’m absolutely serious.”
Alan described Chick’s visitation and the events surrounding it, from the brush of the curtain on the back of his neck while he was working clear through to the spring-scented rainwater on the carpet that was the last thing to vanish.
When he finished, Morrie sat there for a minute, then gave a low whistle. “Duuuude. Dude, dude — you must bring in a couple of guys with meters and cameras to see if they can validate this for you. No? What is this ‘no’ you say? This is potentially huge.” Morrie, in moments of excitement, fell back into the persona of Surfer Dude, which had kept the expectations surrounding him low through high school, college, and the first couple of years of medical school, while permitting him to pursue a slew of outside interests. Beaches. Babes. And, somewhat off the beaten track, ghosts.
Alan said, “This isn’t about science, Morrie. This is about my kid.”
“Well, of course, but... man, if you could do the science, too...”
“No. I knew you were into this sort of thing, though, and I wanted to know if you were aware of any instances where... ghosts... appeared to people away from the place where they were killed.”
“Oh, shit yes,” Morrie said. He evidently felt himself on solid ground again, for he ripped open one of the packs of crackers and started munching. “Happens a lot. People get a visit from a son stationed across the ocean fighting for his country and find out later that he appeared to them the moment that he died, just to let them know he loved them. Or a parent in the hospital with something terminal shows up in the house of the one kid no one has been able to reach to let the kid know he needs to call home. Or ghosts will show up to tell the people they loved when they were alive not to go someplace or do something, and that bit of advice turns out to save the people who get it.”
“So Chick coming to me now...”
“She didn’t appear to you when she died. That would have been a bit more common. The message for that is usually just ‘I love you, I’m going to be okay.’ She’s come a long way, both from the time of her death and from the place of it. So odds are she’s trying to tell you something. Something fairly fucking important. Assuming you don’t have a tumor. We should schedule you for a CAT scan immediately to rule that out.”
Alan studied him sidelong and saw the grin. “Thanks, Morrie. You’re always reassuring.”
“That’s what friends are for.” Morrie offered Alan one of his plastic crackers, and Alan waved it off. Morrie shrugged, crunched his cracker, and said, “But you couldn’t hear anything when you saw her, right?”
“Right.”
“And it was after she appeared to you that she appeared to the next-door neighbor.”
“I’m not sure of the time sequence. Could have been before, could have been after. My neighbor and I didn’t actually, um, discuss this. But yes, I think so.”
“And the next-door neighbor could hear what she said.”
“She said she could.”
Morrie shrugged broadly. “Then, my man, this is easy. You go over, you make nice to the neighbor, and you try to find out why the hell your kid has come a very long way to talk to you.”
“You don’t think a... séance... or something like that would be better?”
“No,” Morrie said. “If your little girl can talk through the neighbor and is willing to do that don’t screw around trying some other method that probably won’t work. Use the method you know will work.” He was watching Alan’s face, and suddenly he grinned. “Oh, I get it. The neighbor looks like Magilla Gorilla, and you’re afraid if you go over and make nice, she’s going to want you.”
“Not exactly,” Alan said, “but I’d rather not deal with her again if I can figure out an alternative.”
Morrie sat there for a moment studying Alan, an expression of frank suspicion on his face. Then his eyes lit up. “Oh, sweet jumping Jesus, she’s a babe, isn’t she? She’s ripe, and suddenly my man’s little soldier has remembered he can do something besides piss.”
“She’s cute, in a short, starved, waiflike sort of way. But she’s not my type. And I don’t need that sort of complication in my life anyway.”
“Duuuude, you so need that sort of complication. I have never in my life known a man more in need of getting fucked through the floor than you. You are so rigidly uptight the nurses finally gave up on you and moved your name to the Not Running section of the Pussy Pool. You’re down there with Milton Stanback.” Milton Stanback was seventy-eight, the oldest physician on staff. “The best odds on you right now are under what circumstances your testicles will explode from lack of use.”
This diverted Alan for a moment. “The nurses have a... Pussy Pool?”
“Not that you heard about from me,” Morrie said. “They run little side bets about when various doctors get some, with payoffs based on mood when called at three in the morning, gender, age, and sex appeal of the voice answering the phone, and traitors like me who feed them details for a piece of the action.” Morrie waggled his eyebrows. “They should just call it the Get-Laid Pool, since about a third of the doctors on the list are women and only a couple of those are actively chasing other women. But a couple of the nurses liked the alliteration too much to give up the name.” He grinned and took a swig of his soda. “I’ll have to tell them to put you back in as a dark-horse candidate.”
Alan shook his head. “Do not do that to me.”
“Hey, it’s better than your only get-laid odds now, which are for ‘Sympathy fuck on the X-ray table’ and which are running an outrageous two hundred to one against. Shit, I have ten bucks on that one just because it’s almost impossible to get the nurses to handicap that high.” His eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t feel like... um... waiting a day or two and then hitting up, say, Denise in Respiratory Therapy for...”
“No,” Alan said. “I wouldn’t.”
Morrie considered that for a moment, then, apropos of nothing, said, “Odds on your nuts exploding during a code are three to one.”
“Thanks, Morrie,” Alan said, standing. “That’s always nice to know.”
Morrie shoved extra crackers and candy bars into the pockets of his lab coat, tugged the drawstring a little tighter on his scrub pants, and said, “Denise. X-ray table. Three minutes, dude, and you’d make me a happy man.”
“The nurses are a whole lot scarier than I thought they were,” Alan said, walking back toward the ER.
“Believe it,” Morrie said, grimacing. “You have no idea. They tell me things...” His voice trailed off, and he shuddered. Then his mood changed, and he rested a hand on Alan’s shoulder. “Let me know how this thing with Chick and the neighbor turns out. Let me know that you get through it okay, at least.”
“Thanks,” Alan said. “I will.”
Morrie gave him an evil little grin and said, “And if by chance you and your luscious next-door neighbor get nekkid, pleeeease let me know. Fortunes will be made and lost and empires rise or tumble, on such information.”
“No,” Alan said as they stepped through the double doors from the crowded hallway in front of the ER into the department itself. He was, however, grinning just a little as he headed for the door that led to the staff parking lot. And he could only shake his head as, behind him, he heard Morrie saying in a low, urgent voice, “I have a great tip on a returning player. Break out the Hot Sheet.”
Phoebe saw Alan sitting on the front step of her townhouse as soon as she came around the corner from the parking lot and started up the walk. For just a second her heart started to race.
Then she remembered that Alan had decided she was some sort of fraud with an angle, and she pulled her shoulders straighter and lifted her chin, staring through him.
She started to step carefully around him, but he stood up as she reached him and put a hand on her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You... I wasn’t ready for what you had to tell me last night.”
Phoebe stopped and looked up at him. He looked sincere enough. Anxiety drew deep lines on his forehead and at the comers of his mouth, but then, last night she’d told him his dead daughter had dropped in to visit her. That would give almost anyone reason to be anxious.