Night of the Loving Dead

by Casey Daniels

And to find out once and for all how deeply he was involved with the disappearances at the Gerard Clinic.

  When Dan arrived at my hotel late that afternoon, he found me pacing my room. Quick study that he is, he knew right away that something was wrong.

  Or maybe he picked up on that because I was grumbling.

  And the pages of Ella’s presentation were scattered all over the floor.

  “What?” Leave it to Dan to be Mr. Neatnik. No sooner was he inside the door than he bent to retrieve the pages closest to him. “You had a hurricane in here or something?”

  I barely contained a screech. “I can’t stand the thought of giving that stupid talk.” I wasn’t a clean freak, but even I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night with the room in that state. While I cursed myself for losing my temper and chucking the pages, I scooped up the papers that had landed near the bathroom door. “It’s boring,” I said, plunking the pages down on the coffee table. “It’s dull. Ella’s the one who wrote this stupid speech and nobody’s going to want to hear me give it and I’m—”

  “You’re giving a talk here at the conference?” Dan glanced at the pages briefly before he set them down. He glanced at me, too, and I couldn’t help but notice that something almost like admiration shone in his eyes. “You’re nervous.”

  I could have argued with him, but there didn’t seem to be much point. I dropped into the nearest chair, pulled in a deep breath, and confessed to him what I’d been afraid to admit even to myself. “I’m scared to death.”

  His laugh didn’t make me feel better. “Hey!” He hurried over and patted my shoulder. “It’s not so bad. Believe me, I’ve given plenty of talks in my day.” He flipped through the pages still in his hands. “Resurrectionists, huh? They’ll eat this stuff up.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who’s going to be standing in front of a room full of cemetery geeks.” Because I didn’t want to think about it, I got up, and without being too obvious about it, checked my hair and my makeup in the nearest mirror. I’d dressed carefully in jeans and a dark, bulky sweater. I didn’t know where we were going for dinner, but I wasn’t going to take any chances with the cold. I added a coat of gloss over the lipstick I was wearing.

  By the time I was done, Dan had all the pages picked up and stacked neatly. “Good thing they’re numbered,” he said. “Maybe Ella knew you’d lose it and end up tossing her talk.”

  He was going for funny. I wasn’t laughing.

  “I’ll tell you what.” Dan did his best to appease me. “We’ll take the pages along and you can practice on me. What do you say?”

  “Really?” Not one to pass on an opportunity, I grabbed Ella’s talk and stuffed the pages into my purse. “You’ll let me read it? It’ll put you to sleep.”

  “Pepper.” I don’t know if his eyes twinkled or if it was a reflection off his glasses. I only know that when he looked at me that way, even reading a dull talk about a dull subject suddenly didn’t sound so dull anymore. “I could never get bored when I’m with you,” he said.

  I got so warm, I almost forgot to grab my jacket before we left the room.

  We were in the elevator and headed downstairs when Dan looked at his watch.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I asked to meet you so early,” he said. “There’s still something I have to take care of before we can head off to dinner, and I want to get there before they close. I thought maybe you’d like to come along.”

  Our elevator stopped, and a couple people I recognized as conference goers got in. Fortunately, they weren’t with the Doris crowd. They didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. I was free to continue my conversation with Dan, and I ignored them and turned my attention back to him.

  Dan’s smile was sincere. “When I’m in Chicago I never let a day go by without doing what I thought we could do now. I’ve been busy all day and there hasn’t been a chance and—”

  I hated to see him feel bad. Especially since he’d volunteered to listen to Ella’s talk. “No problem.” The elevator bumped to a stop at the lobby, and since we were in the back, we waited while the people up front got off. He stepped aside so I could get off before him. “Where are we headed, anyway?” I asked.

  Dan’s comment was casual enough. “I thought we’d stop and visit my wife.”

  Did I say casual? My reaction to this bombshell was anything but. As a matter of fact, I stood there so long, the elevator doors were already closing before I realized I was headed back upstairs. I bumped the door with my hip and saw that while I was frozen with shock, Dan had already gotten off the elevator. Maybe he realized he’d blindsided me when he saw that my mouth was hanging open.

  “I’m sorry, Pepper. I should have told you sooner.” His words teetered between being an apology and a simple statement of fact. “I would have, of course, but the subject just never came up. Now that you’re in Doctor Gerard’s study and we’re going to be seeing each other more, it makes sense for us to be honest and open with each other.” The smile Dan offered had warmed me through and through only a short time before. Now it did nothing but ignite my temper. “I guess it’s time we know everything there is about each other, right?”

  “And you’re telling me . . .” Was that my voice? It sounded high and tight. I coughed and tried again, and it took more willpower than I knew I had to control my anger. “You’re going to stand here like it’s nothing at all and tell me that you have a wife? Don’t you think you could have mentioned that before?”

  “I could have. I would have, but . . .” Dan shrugged. “It didn’t seem important at the time.”

  Maybe I’d been getting the wrong signals from Dan all this time, but I thought not. A woman knows these things, and this woman knew that the signals Dan was sending weren’t the signals of a married man. Not when it came to me. OK, a married man who just wants to be friends might have saved my life the way Dan did back at the cemetery the spring before. But that same married man never would have kissed me the way he kissed me after. Not unless he had something more than just friendship in mind.

  I swallowed down the lump of outrage in my throat. “You’re telling me you’re married and that’s not important?”

  His smile was instantly apologetic. “Not married. Was married. I’m not explaining this well, am I?” Dan ran a hand through his a-little-more-than-shaggy hair before he reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and flipped it open. “Here,” he said, holding a picture out for me to see. “Here’s a picture of my wife. My late wife. You see, she’s dead.”

  Oh, I saw, all right. I saw plenty.

  Because right then and there, I found myself face-to-face with a photograph of Madeline Tremayne.

  7

  For the second time in as many days, I found myself standing in the freezing cold at Graceland Cemetery. Side by side with Dan, I stared at the grave of Madeline Tremayne.

  “Sorry it’s so awful out here.” Dan pulled his scarf closer around his neck. “When it comes to Maddy, I never think about the weather. Rain or shine, I don’t much care. Every day I’m in Chicago—”

  “You come here. Of course.”

  Sure, my voice was a little snippy. Like anyone could blame me? I’d just been blindsided by the living and the dead, it was as cold as hell, my feet were numb, and my teeth were chattering. Add to all that the fact that I was still trying to work through what had me flummoxed in the cab on the way over, and my current funky mood was not only excusable but understandable. There I was, shivering, and I was no closer to figuring out what, exactly, was going on, why I hadn’t caught on sooner, and how I was supposed to proceed now that I knew that the ghost who had engaged my services was connected (in more ways than I wanted to consider) to a guy I thought was going to be a guy in my life, only maybe now he wasn’t, and maybe I didn’t want him to be, anyway, seeing as how he’d never bothered to mention this incredibly important oh-by-the-way-I-used-to-be-married detail.

  It was enough to make my head pound and my blood whoosh
through my veins with all the clatter of an L train, and before it could upend me, I sucked in a breath of frigid air and told myself to get a grip. If nothing else, I now understood why Madeline was so worried about Dan. She was his wife, after all. Or at least she used to be. Of course she cared about him. She loved him.

  From the way he looked at her grave, his expression grim and his eyes brimming with grief that was practically palpable, I knew that even after three years, Dan still loved her, too.

  It was actually pretty sweet.

  My feet were as numb as ever, but my heart warmed.

  “She didn’t use your name.” There was a light dusting of snow on the pink granite headstone. I bent to sweep it away then brushed my gloves against my coat to get rid of the snow that stuck to them. “It says Madeline Tremayne, not Madeline Callahan.”

  Dan never took his eyes off the grave. “Maddy earned her degrees before I ever met her,” he said. “She taught under that name. She lectured under that name. She was published under that name. I felt it was only right that she be remembered for what she accomplished, not for just being my wife.”

  My heart warmed a little more, even when an icy wind kicked up. I glanced around. That day, like every day, the cemetery closed at four thirty, and though we still had a half hour or so, it was an overcast afternoon in the dead of winter; the light was already beginning to fade. The Palmer memorial, not all that far away, was wrapped in gray. I shivered and stepped closer to Dan. Don’t get the wrong idea; I am not insensitive or callous. I knew this wasn’t the time—and it certainly wasn’t the place—to try and put the moves on him. I was hoping for nothing more than to share a smidgen of body heat.

  “She died young.” It was a way to keep the conversation going; I didn’t need to mention it. Something told me that not a day went by when Dan didn’t think about Madeline. In a strange way, it explained a lot.

  He barely nodded. “Too young. She was Doctor Gerard’s assistant at the clinic. Well, really, she was more than his assistant. Maddy was indispensable. She practically ran the place. She worked there when I met her. I was a graduate student and I needed some hours of field-work. I guess there are some people who might say our relationship was inappropriate, seeing that she was my supervisor, but it wasn’t like that at all! She was just a couple years older than me, and we struck up an instant friendship. Exactly one month and three days after we met, I proposed. I didn’t think I could ever be lucky enough to have her feel about me the way I felt about her, so I wasn’t just thrilled when she said yes, I was on top of the world. I was willing to wait if I had to, but she wanted to get married fast. Good thing Maddy wasn’t a woman who believed in all that razzle-dazzle wedding nonsense.”

  It wasn’t my imagination. Dan really did pause right there. It was as if he actually knew that the wedding I had once planned was complete with a videographer, a sound tech, and a computer geek whose job it was to make sure every guest left with a DVD of the day’s events. Of course, there were also the two swans that were set to be released from their pen to float by on the country-club lake just as Joel and I cut our wedding cake. And the bevy of pink-gowned little girls (children of cousins and friends) whose sole function at the festivities was to blow soap bubbles as we emerged from the stretch limo that just happened to be the same shade of ivory as my brides-maids’ gowns.

  Of course Dan’s pointed silence reminded me of all this, but I didn’t take offense. Not too much, anyway. He was so lost in thought, his expression so dreamy, I forgave him.

  “We were married at city hall that week,” he said, and thinking about it, a smile touched his lips. “That was just a few months before . . .” He cleared his throat. “Maddy was leaving the clinic one night when she ran into one of her clients. He was off his meds. He asked for money; she didn’t have any to give him, she needed it for cab fare. He claimed he didn’t remember exactly what happened after that, but—”

  “He killed her.”

  When Dan’s eyes snapped to mine, I knew I had to explain.

  I shrugged, but I doubted he noticed, since the light was fading fast and I was cocooned in my wool coat. “What else could it have been? I mean, a woman that young, and you said she was mugged. It only makes sense that she was—”

  “Yeah.” Dan’s voice was no louder than the whisper of frosty wind that raised the hair on the back of my neck. “What a waste of such a promising life! And it’s even sadder when you think she only had a couple bucks with her. I know that for a fact, because she called earlier in the day and asked me to bring some extra cash when I came down to the clinic. She needed to stop on the way home and pick up some things from the grocery store, and she hated to write a check for food. Said it wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe if I’d been there like I was supposed to be . . .”

  There was nothing I could say, so I didn’t even try, and good thing. Dan was so caught up in the past and the guilt that was eating him from the inside out, he never would have heard me.

  “She was brilliant,” he said. “She was clever. Maddy was beautiful.”

  “Huh?” I slapped one gloved hand over my mouth, but by then, it was already too late. I couldn’t take back my skeptical question, and I sure couldn’t tell Dan that the Madeline I knew wasn’t just irritating and self-important, she was as plain as a mud fence and had the fashion sense of a cloistered nun. With no other choice, I scrambled for an excuse. “That picture you showed me, it wasn’t the best. It didn’t do her justice. I bet she was plenty pretty.”

  Dan smiled in a way I always imagined some guy—somewhere, someday—would smile when he talked about me. “Pretty? That’s putting it mildly! Maddy was blond and blue-eyed and she had the cutest little dimple that showed up on her right cheek when she smiled.”

  I’d never noticed the dimple, but then, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen Madeline smile. No matter, hearing the affection that colored Dan’s voice made me think of that old saying about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. No doubt, in Dan’s eyes, Madeline was the belle of the ball.

  I hate getting all sloppy and sentimental, but facts are facts; my heart softened even more.

  “I’m sorry I never told you about her.” To try and gauge my reaction, Dan gave me a sidelong glance. “It just never seemed to be the right time. But then this afternoon, when I saw you coming out of the clinic and realized you were going to be part of Doctor Gerard’s study . . .” He pulled in a breath and let it out in a puff. When he turned to me, his expression wasn’t nearly as solemn anymore. Something very much like hope shone in Dan’s blue eyes. “This is great, Pepper. Really. I’m convinced that you’re our best bet. If we ever have any hope of contacting those on the Other Side—”

  I didn’t have to say a word to stop Dan cold. That’s because I latched onto his arm so hard and so fast, he was too startled to go on.

  Confused, he blinked at me in wonder, and I stammered over questions I could barely put into words. “You mean, the ghost thing? Your interest in the paranormal? All that talk about . . . about warnings of danger and . . . and things that go bump in the night and . . . and how you took that picture of me once and you must have used some kind of crazy camera because it showed me and two blobs of mist and... and you never really came right out and said it, of course, because that would have been too easy and... and you just sort of skirted around the issue and . . . and you talked about my aberrant behavior instead and . . . and my brain scans and all and . . .and how weird they were since I hit my head on that mausoleum back at Garden View and... and now this study with Doctor Gerard and... and are you telling me this is all because of—”

  “Because of Maddy. Of course.”

  Dan was so calm, his voice so matter-of-fact, it made my ramblings sound crazier than ever. And they already sounded pretty crazy.

  I steadied myself with a calming breath, and though it wasn’t easy, I refused to say another word until I was sure I wouldn’t come across sounding like a lunatic. When I finally spoke, my words were as ca
lm and as measured as the look I gave Dan.

  “You’re interested in the paranormal because you want to contact Madeline.”

  Buying some time to organize his thoughts, he took a couple steps away. “I’ve always been interested in the paranormal,” he said. “You know, the way a lot of people are. As a kid, I loved ghost stories and scary movies, and sometimes even these days, I watch those ghost-hunting shows on TV. But I never really believed any of it. Back when I was in school, I mean. I was a scientist, after all, and I took my research work very seriously. Then I met Maddy.”

  Dan was still looking my way, but I could tell he wasn’t seeing me. His eyes were misted. He was clearly thinking about the past.

  “She was the love of my life. My soul mate. When she died . . .” His shoulders slumped as if a weight had been dropped from the leaden clouds above us. “I have to find her again, Pepper. I’ll never rest until I do. After Maddy died, that’s when I got seriously involved in paranormal research. I was making progress, too. But not enough. Not fast enough. That’s when I took the chance and mentioned my interest to Doctor Gerard. He didn’t laugh. Not like I expected him to. In fact, he understood perfectly. He knew Maddy as well as anyone. He missed her, too. He agreed to fund my research on one condition: I had to share my findings with him. Since then, I’ve made great strides. It’s amazing what can happen when you’ve got financing behind you. I’ve got the best equipment in the world and—”