“I’m going to make sure no one else goes missing,” I told her.
“If they’re missing.” It was her turn to sigh. “It’s not the same world you live in,” she said, and if we’d known each other long enough, I might have pointed out that nobody lived in the same world I lived in.
She took a black wool scarf out of her pocket and wound it on. “The homeless here in Chicago are like the homeless everywhere. They come and they go. Some of them get lucky and find their way to warmer places. Some of them die out on the streets. A precious few turn their lives around, find jobs, get places to live. Just because we don’t see them again doesn’t mean anything sinister has happened to them.”
“Except you think that maybe it has. Otherwise you never would have gone to the cops.”
Thinking, she tipped her head, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what she was going to say next. When she blurted out, “Zmeskis, Oscar’s last name is Zmeskis,” I was so surprised that I fumbled to flip open the portfolio, asked her to spell the name, and wrote it down carefully.
“Becka isn’t a Rebecca, just a Becka. Becka Chance.” She looked over my shoulder to where I was writing. “You might as well add Alan Grankowski, Leon Harris, Lony Billberger, and Athalea Misborough.” She waited while I wrote down these names, too. “I haven’t seen them in a while, and I’ve been told they were seen at the clinic, that they talked about that study.”
My thank-you came out along with a smile of gratitude.
Except I don’t think Sister Maggie wanted any thanks. She didn’t expect any, that’s for sure. She pushed open the door and held it so I could step out into the church parking lot ahead of her. “Just promise me you’ll be careful, OK?”
I was going to say something witty, like “Careful is my middle name” or “Nothing’s going to happen if I’m too careful,” only when I looked back, her expression was so thoughtful, I didn’t have the heart.
“I promise,” I told her. “No more talking to clinic patients where anybody can see us.”
“And you won’t take any foolish chances with your own safety, either, right?”
This, I didn’t want to get into. Not with a nun, anyway. To date, my life had been filled with foolish chances. Some of them had panned out. Others, not so much. It wasn’t fair to burden her with the story of Joel, and I didn’t think telling her about Quinn was exactly appropriate, so I gave her a cocky smile instead. “I’ve dodged a few bullets in my day.”
“I hope that’s just a figure of speech.”
It wasn’t. Behind my back, I crossed the fingers of one hand and told her it was. I guess that made her happy. She closed the door to the church, locked it, and walked away. Last I saw her, she was handing a dollar to a guy hanging around at the corner.
I went in the opposite direction, feeling pretty proud of myself.
Sure it had cost me the price of dry cleaning for a sweater and a pair of jeans (not to mention the burn that would need some aloe lotion, stat), but I knew more than I had when I left the hotel that morning. I had last names to go with first names, and more first names and last names on the list. Armed with that information, I could do some digging. I could also provide Dan with some concrete evidence that he could use to check against the clinic files. Once he did, maybe then he’d believe that I (and my claim to fame as the Dr. Phil of the undead) was on the up-and-up.
I basked in the glow of my success all the way back to the L station. True to my word to Sister Maggie, in addition to being pretty darned satisfied with the way the day had panned out, I was also careful. I took a quick look around every chance I got, and I knew nobody was following me. Or even watching me. As far as I could remember, nobody had since I’d been in Chicago.
Except maybe for the homeless guy with the weird spiky hair who I’d seen at Piece and at the clinic.
And that spooky black shadow.
The thought sent a skitter of cold up my spine, and as I stood waiting to cross the street, then turn a corner to head to the L station, I shivered.
Or maybe that’s because when I did turn that corner, I saw two police cars parked in front of the station. Their flashing lights clashed with the swirling red light on top of the ambulance parked nearby. As I got to the back of the crowd gathered around to watch, the paramedics were just carrying a stretcher down the steps. Whoever was on it, the prognosis wasn’t good; the body was completely covered by a sheet.
“What happened?” I asked a woman standing and watching at my side.
“Can’t say for sure. Just got here myself.”
A man over on our right put in his two cents. “I heard the woman ended up under a train. That’s her there.” He looked over to where the paramedics wheeled the gurney toward the ambulance. “I’ll bet there’s not a whole lot left once that train’s done with you.”
Just thinking about it made my stomach jump. I gulped. “Accident?” I asked. “Or suicide?”
The woman at my side shrugged. “You never know around here.”
There was a young guy standing in front of us, his hands pushed into the pockets of his winter jacket. He turned. “The way I heard it,” he said, “somebody pushed her. Only I ain’t telling nobody that. I was up there and I didn’t see nothing myself and besides, I don’t want to be the next one that gets pushed.”
It was too awful to consider, and I’d just decided not to do it when a curious thing happened. The gurney that carried the body hit a bump, and that bump jarred the victim on the stretcher. Her arm slipped out from under the sheet and swung limply over the side of the stretcher.
Creepy enough.
Creepier still when I realized that the dead woman was wearing a pink parka.
And when something fell out of her hand and hit the pavement.
It was a tube of Trish McEvoy lip gloss.
11
A body snatcher could earn between three and six
months’ wages for a fresh corpse.
Less than twenty-four hours after I’d seen Stella’s body being carted away, thinking about fresh corpses wasn’t exactly what I needed to take my mind off my problems. Sure, I’m in the business of death. Sometimes more than I like. But give me some credit; that doesn’t mean the whole notion doesn’t gross me out.
Kind of like the memory of Stella’s arm slipping out from under that sheet.
I shivered. Skimming over Ella’s paper for the presentation I was scheduled to give on the final day of the conference was supposed to distract me. Too bad it wasn’t working. Always a trooper, I tried again.
Unlawful exhumations and the sale of the bodies that were dug up were done by men known as Resurrection men or Resurrectionists. Sometimes, they were called sack-’em-ups, because they used sacks to carry the corpses to the doctors and medical students who would then dissect them.
“Yetch!” I tossed the presentation down on the coffee table in my hotel room and hugged my arms around myself. It was bad enough I was nervous about speaking in front of who knew how many cemetery geeks. Worse when the topic was so weird that even I (who had, after all, seen, talked to, and investigated for the weirdest of the weirdest) got the willies.
No. I take that back. The worst part was that even the stack of papers Ella had sent to Chicago with me wasn’t enough to take my mind off what had happened to Stella.
And make me wonder if it was my fault.
This time when I grumbled, it had nothing to do with Resurrectionists, cemetery conferences, or Ella’s misplaced faith that I could speak in front of a crowd without making a fool of myself. Oh no. The mixture of disgust and guilt was all about me. All about whether I’d made a mistake going to the clinic. And about poor dead Stella, of course.
Was that guy in the crowd—the one who said Stella had been pushed—right?
I hoped not, because believe me, I wasn’t happy thinking what it might mean. Maybe Stella knew more than she let on. Maybe someone at the clinic had seen me and Stella together and was afraid she’d say too much. Maybe that same someone killed her t
o shut her up. Or maybe Stella was as clueless as she appeared to be. Maybe her untimely end was meant as a message—one that told me MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS in neon letters, six feet high.
Any way I looked at it, it took what had simply been the business of the maybe-missing patients and turned it way ugly.
Of course, I could have chosen to find comfort in the morning Tribune. The article about Stella’s death had been relegated to a small column in an inside section. It used the word accident liberally. If that was true, I actually might be able to sleep better at night.
If it wasn’t . . .
I grabbed my coat and went to the door. Now that I had a dead woman on my hands (so to speak) and the names of the missing patients, I also had a ton of questions. I’d been waiting all morning for Madeline to show so I could ask them, and I was getting sick and tired of it. Heading out seemed the perfect solution, both to finding her and to keeping myself so busy that maybe I could forget the picture that kept popping into my head—the one of that arm in the ripped pink parka when it slipped out from under the sheet and flapped back and forth.
Like Stella was waving to me.
I am not completely delusional. I didn’t really think Madeline would accommodate me and show up at her gravesite to chat, but hey, whoever said that hope springs eternal knows the perils of investigating for the dead.
It was the only way I could think to contact her, so I waited in the cold, grateful that if nothing else, at least it wasn’t snowing. In fact, the skies had been clear all that day, and the sun nearly blinded me as it sank toward the horizon and ricocheted off the couple inches of fresh snow that had fallen the night before. Unfortunately, the sun was no more than a tease. It was no warmer than it had been since I stepped foot in Chicago, and after thirty minutes of waiting and shivering, I convinced myself that enough was enough. Madeline wanted me to help Dan, but I couldn’t do it until I talked to her. If she was MIA, for now, there was nothing I could do to convince Dan that I was the real deal.
And if Madeline never resurfaced?
See, that’s the problem with the dead. No e-mail, no cell phones, and they only pop in when they want to. Or when they want something. If for whatever reason Madeline wasn’t going to show hide nor ghostly hair and help me, then I’d simply have to find the answers to all my questions on my own.
It was the least I could do for Stella.
My determination renewed (even if it was a little frosty around the edges), I turned from Madeline’s grave. That’s the first time I realized I wasn’t alone.
Maybe the cold was freezing more than just my feet, my fingers, and the tip of my nose. Maybe my self-preservation instincts were frostbitten, too.
Maybe that’s why I hadn’t realized that big, terrifying shadow was back.
For the space of a dozen heartbeats, too scared to move or to think, I stared at the black mass drifting a couple feet above the ground between me and the Palmer memorial. As I watched, it billowed like an angry thundercloud, then collapsed in on itself, growing denser and heavier and darker. It grew taller, too. Its middle slimmed out, and a bit of shadow on each side of it split off. Like arms.
It wasn’t a person. Not exactly. It looked more like an animal, a monster, and when it took a couple steps in my direction, I swear, the ground shook.
Or maybe that was just my knees.
Funny thing about getting scared, though. Once I hit rock bottom, the only way to go was up. When I bounced back from that initial thud of panic, it should come as no surprise that I did it with a healthy dose of how-dare-you. Before I even knew what I was doing, my anger was in charge. It wasn’t until I made a move to kick through the snow and move toward the thing that I realized something weird was going on. I mean, something weirder than the weird something that was already going on.
Because everywhere within ten feet of the shadow, there was no snow. It had all melted.
I refused to consider the implications. Physical, cosmic, or otherwise.
“OK, you want to tell me what’s up?” I demanded of the thing. “Because I’m a little tired of this stupid game. I’m supposed to be scared?” I made sure I laughed when I said this, because if I allowed it, the scared part of me would swallow up the angry part and then I’d be back to quivering and sniveling. So not attractive, and counterproductive to boot. “Please! I’m the one with the Gift, remember? You non-dead types are old news. You’re not scaring me at all. In fact, all you’re doing is pissing me off. So why don’t you quit it with the drama and the big, spooky shadow act and just tell me what you want. It will make your life simpler. Oh!” I slapped one gloved hand to the side of my face. “You don’t have a life, do you? But I do, buddy, and I’m sick of having it interrupted.”
The shadow’s eyes were as red as blood. They glowed and flared, and when the thing made a move, I thought for sure it was going to come at me. I tensed, all set to run, but before I could, it spoke.
“Don’t want you.” Its voice was like sandpaper on stone. “Go away, don’t want you.”
I thought about Dan and how he’d assumed I was desperate and dateless. “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around. But if you don’t want me, why do you keep bugging me?”
“Don’t want you.”
I sighed my frustration. “I know that. But you keep showing up. Every time I’m here.” I chanced a step closer.
“No!” It held up one hand. Or paw. Or whatever it was. When it did, something hit me like a punch. I staggered back and fought to catch my breath. “No closer.”
“Not to worry.” I held up a hand to signal that I was more than ready for a time-out, and bent at the waist, struggling to fight off the heaviness in my chest. “Apparently . . .” I hauled in a lungful of frigid air and stood straight again. “Apparently, that’s not something I want to do.”
I was talking to myself. The shadow was gone. The only indication that it had ever been there was the melted snow.
With no other choice, I figured it was time to get the hell out of there. I spun around, but the grass was wet, and my boots were muddy. When I felt myself slip, I put on the brakes, but by that time, there was no way I could keep on my feet.
There was a gravestone not two feet to my left. One look, and I knew it was déjà-vu all over again. Believe me, I wasn’t taking chances.
I pivoted, skidded, and slid. Helpless, I felt my legs go out from under me at the same time I watched an especially muddy patch of grass get closer and closer to my nose. I would have landed with a splat if not for the fact that someone grabbed me from behind and yanked me to my feet.
My hat was down over my eyes, and I grabbed it and pulled it off at the same time I struggled to regain my composure. I turned toward my rescuer. “Thank—you?”
OK, so it wasn’t exactly polite, and I’m not exactly Miss Manners. I had a perfect excuse, since I found myself looking at the homeless guy with the spiky hair.
He sloughed off my surprise as inconsequential. “You OK?”
“Are you kidding?” Since my coat was all twisted and tangled, I straightened it and stepped back and away from him. One of my gloves had fallen off and I bent to pick it up. Homeless Guy was faster. He grabbed the glove before I could and held it out to me.
I snatched it from him and tugged it on. “You want to explain what’s going on?”
“That’s funny, that’s exactly what I was going to ask you.” He acted like it was the most logical response in the world. “I heard you talking, though . . .” He glanced around at the expanse of very empty cemetery that surrounded us. “Who were you talking to?”
“Nobody.” The perfect truth, since (at least in my book) a shadow does not qualify as a who.
“Then who were you here waiting for?”
The same logic applied. I wasn’t about to start into an explanation. “What are you doing here?” I asked him instead.
“A better question might be what’s a cemetery tour guide from Cleveland doing here?”
I backed u
p another step. “You know who I am. How?”
“Word gets around.”
“Word from who?”
“Whom. The proper way to say it is word from whom.”
“I’m so not in the mood for this.” To prove it, I turned to walk away. Homeless Guy fell in step beside me.
I made sure the sidelong glance I gave him was short on friendliness and heavy on suspicion. “I know you’re not—” I was going to say dead, but seeing as how I was alone in a strange town and in a deserted cemetery with a guy I didn’t know who was already acting plenty fishy, I didn’t want to freak him out. Still, I was encouraged thinking that at least this time, I didn’t have to contend with the whole undead scenario. I knew this because the man had grabbed me to keep me from falling down, and when he did, I didn’t feel a bone-freezing chill (at least not one that was any colder than the air around us). Just to satisfy myself that I truly was dealing with flesh and bone, I pretended to brush his sleeve accidentally. He was real, all right, and satisfied, I drew back again.
Night of the Loving Dead Page 14