by E. C. Bell
“So, tell me about this meeting we are supposed to have,” he said, as I swallowed my last bite.
“Yes,” I said. “The meeting.”
“Yes,” he replied, and smiled at me encouragingly. He sounded nothing like the angry man I’d spoken to an hour before. “Tell me all about it.”
“Did you take a painkiller?” I asked.
“Yep.” He grinned even more broadly. “Those are good pills.”
Ah. Drugged. Explained just about everything.
“Okay, the meeting. Honoria Lowe is the cousin of one of your Dead Uncle Jimmy’s old clients.”
“Don’t call him that,” James said.
“Sorry.” I shrugged, and continued, “She wants us to help her cousin Honoria prove she had nothing to do with the death of Eddie. I thought I’d gather some intel while you were asleep—”
“Intel?” He snickered.
“Yeah,” I said, bristling. “I can gather intel as well as anyone else. Can’t I?”
“Yes,” he said, and luckily for him, the snickering subsided. “You’re actually quite good at it. Were you successful?”
I thought about not finding Eddie and shook my head. “Not really. I figured out the dead guy’s name. Eddie Hansen—”
“I knew that, too. It was announced on TV just before you got back.”
Of course it was. Which meant Eddie’s next of kin had been informed. “All right, fine,” I sighed. “I met one of his friends, but she didn’t give me much more than his name. Not yet.”
“In other words, we have nothing.”
“Not right now.”
“So we should probably tell this Honoria person we can’t take the case,” he said.
“It’s a job, James.” The words rushed out of me before I could stop them. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some extra cash, even if it is only for a couple of days’ work. At the very least, let’s talk to her. If she can give us some clues, maybe we can figure out who killed Eddie and get her off the hook.”
“Clues. Intel.” He grinned again and walked slowly over to the door. “You’re starting to sound like a detective, or something.”
I tried to grin back. “I’m just the secretary,” I said.
“Like fun you are,” he replied. Then he leaned heavily against the door jamb and thought.
“All right,” he finally said. “We’ll talk to her. Maybe there’s a way we can help her prove to the police she wasn’t involved.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
“But if she doesn’t give us any good ‘clues’”—and he grinned again—“then we’ll send her on her way. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
I wondered why the cops saw her as a potential suspect. Then I shuddered, remembering all the blood around that tree. What if she actually was the one who killed Eddie Hansen? And what if we figured it out?
“Would she still pay us?” I muttered.
“What did you say?” James asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t say anything.”
HONORIA LOWE CAME to the office at two o’clock on the dot.
I was sitting behind my desk in the reception area, trying to look busy. James was back in his dead uncle’s office, doing whatever.
Honoria walked into the room so quietly I did a double take. She could have been one of the dead. Even her footsteps were silent. She stood, staring at the top of my desk.
“My name is Honoria,” she finally said. “Honoria Lowe.”
Then she smiled and literally lit up the room. I could have worked up a big case of “I hate you” right there, if she hadn’t also looked like she’d been psychically beaten to a bloody pulp. I’ve never seen anyone who looked so haunted in my whole life.
And I see ghosts, for heaven’s sake.
“You mentioned on the phone that you’re having trouble with the police. What’s going on?” I asked.
Honoria frowned. “I thought I was supposed to have a meeting with the owner. James Lavall.”
She was making it much easier for me to hate her.
“Yes, you’re absolutely right. My apologies.”
She didn’t acknowledge my existence after that. Nice. She didn’t want to talk to the hired help, obviously. I pushed myself out of my chair and walked to the closed door of the inner office. James could deal with her.
I knocked twice, then stuck my head into the office. “She’s here.”
James looked up from the book he was reading and closed it softly. I didn’t understand his fascination with books. They just made my head hurt. “I’m ready,” he said. “Send her in.”
Honoria smoothly walked past me and up to James’s desk. “Honoria Lowe,” she said, and held her hand out to him. “My cousin says good things about this agency.”
Her cousin knew James’s Uncle Jimmy. James’s very recently dead Uncle Jimmy. The actual private investigator. I hoped Honoria didn’t know about that. No need to worry her with our lack of expertise.
She sat in the chair opposite James’s, then stared at the top of his desk as though she’d been struck mute.
James glanced over at me, his eyes wide. I shrugged, letting him know I had no clue what our potential client’s damage was. He shrugged back and looked at Honoria. “Tell me what happened.”
She seemed to thaw. “All right,” she said softly, and smiled. “If you want.”
“I do,” James replied, and almost batted his eyes at her. He was basking in the glow of her fantastic smile, for heaven’s sake! I felt an ugly prick of jealousy, knowing for a fact that I’d never smiled that beautifully in my whole life.
“Just don’t judge me, until I’m done,” she said. “Please.”
Now, that was just a little bit strange. I looked at James, but he ignored me.
“Consider it a judge-free zone,” he said, then glanced in my direction. “Take notes?”
I nodded, grabbed some paper and a pen, and settled in a chair next to James’s desk.
“How do you know the man who was murdered?” James asked. “I believe you said his name was Brown Eddie?”
“I’ve never actually met him in person,” Honoria replied. “He comes to me in my dreams.”
“What?” James asked.
“What?” My pen stutter-stepped across the page. Had she actually said, out loud, that a dead guy came to her in her dreams?
Honoria looked down at the floor. “I’m not crazy,” she finally said. “No matter what my family thinks. I-I see Brown Eddie in my dreams.” She put her hands to her face, briefly. “I watch him die. And I keep watching him die.”
She opened her eyes, and looked at James, fiercely. “You have to help me,” she said. “I can’t get the dreams to stop, this time. He won’t get out of my head!”
James didn’t say anything, but I did.
“Oh my God,” I muttered.
She dreams of the dead. She’s a frigging clairvoyant.
THAT’S WHAT MY mother called them. She’d told me about them, before I moved away from home. I always thought they were urban legends or something. Even Mom had never actually met one. Just heard about them.
“The poor dears can’t even communicate with the dead,” she said. “They are condemned to a life of trying to piece together clues about the dead from their dreams. No way to help, no way to stop it, so I’ve heard.”
“We can’t stop seeing the dead, either,” I’d whispered.
She’d reached out and patted my hand gently. She did things like that when I got worked up about our “gift,” which meant she patted my hand a lot.
“Dear, we are nothing like those poor creatures! With just a little training, we can do wondrous things for the spirits of the dead. Help them move on. Help them understand what’s tying them to this earth, what lessons they need to learn from their time among the living, what they would like to do next—we can help them with all of that.”
“And those other people? The clairvoyants?”
“They ca
n only watch.” My mother shuddered. “What a terrible life it would be.”
Looking at Honoria, I thought that my mother was on to something.
Honoria stared between her feet as she droned out her life story. She’d been able to see visions most of her life. She wasn’t sure what made it start, but when it did, it was like a flood. Every night she was bombarded with visions of death and dying. Her mother had had her hospitalized and drugged to the eyeballs. The drugs she was given helped for a while.
“Then they lost their effectiveness,” Honoria said. “I was almost glad, because they made me feel—disconnected. Disjointed. Horrible. But they let me pull it together enough to go home again. There, I was able to come up with some strategies that seemed to work. Until now.”
James stared at Honoria. He seemed hypnotized by her story. “So, what happened this time?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Brown Eddie—I think he’s a drug addict who hangs around Needle Park, across the street from my apartment—popped into my dreams a couple of days ago. Horrible, what happened to him.”
She shuddered, and I didn’t blame her. The tree Eddie had been hung on was going to feature in my nightmares for a while, and I hadn’t even seen the actual murder.
James didn’t move, so, after an awkward moment, I spoke. “What did you do?”
“I went to the police.” She shook her head. “Bit of an error, there.”
No kidding, I thought as I scribbled feverishly on the pad of paper. First lesson my mother taught me was to never go to the police. They do not handle people like us very well at all.
“Why was it an error?” James asked.
“Because now they think I was involved in the murder,” she said. “They held me for eighteen hours. I just got out. Didn’t even have time to get home and clean up, or anything.” She looked down at herself, then up, apologetically, at James.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I must look a wreck.”
“You look fine,” James said.
“Thank you.” And then, she practically batted her eyes at him as she smiled that fantastic smile again.
Good grief.
“You must have known the police would think you were involved if you went and talked to them,” I said, a little nastily. “So why did you do it?”
“I told you. Eddie won’t stop coming to me.” Honoria said. She sobbed, a strangled sound, and I passed her a tissue. “And he dies—so badly.”
“You said he hung around Needle Park,” James said. “How did you know that if you never met him?”
“I think he tried to panhandle from me once or twice, but . . . There’s so many of them around the park, I can’t be sure.”
“And now you’re dreaming about him?”
Honoria nodded.
“Who did you speak to? At the police station?”
I heard strangeness in James’s voice and glanced up from my scribbled notes. He still looked attentive enough, and nodded encouragingly, but I was certain I’d heard something off in his tone. Reminded me of people back home and the way they’d sometimes spoken to my mother.
“A Detective Rumsfeld,” Honoria said. “And later, someone named Stewart.”
Her voice sounded stiff, and I would have been willing to bet large amounts of money that she’d picked up the same tone in James’s voice as I had. After all, if a person had to live with this kind of disability, a person could get pretty tuned in when it came to disbelief.
James was going to blow this, if I didn’t do something. So, I did what I usually do. I barged right in.
“What information did you give to them?”
She turned to me, relief on her face. “I told them what I’d remembered from my dreams, and I showed them my sketches.”
“Sketches?”
“What I draw, to stop the visions. Sometimes words don’t do it.” She blew out a shaky breath. “Often words won’t do it.”
I thought about the way the crucifixion tree looked, even without the dead guy attached to it, and suppressed a shudder. Those would have been some horrible drawings. No wonder the cops were interested in her.
“Did you leave them with the police?” I asked.
“Yes,” Honoria said. “They wanted them, and I thought they would help.” She snorted derisively. “I think those drawings are the reason the police believe I’m involved.”
“Is that what they told you? That they think you’re involved?” James finally spoke. I noticed the tone was gone.
Honoria looked at him. “Before they let me go, they called me a ‘person of interest.’ Said they’d have some more questions for me later. Told me not to leave town.” She sniffed and looked like she was going to burst into tears again.
“And you are absolutely sure you don’t know this man—” James started to speak, and I could tell it was a stupid question, a question that meant nothing, so I rode right over it with my own.
“Do you have copies of your drawings? Or maybe some others, that you didn’t take to the police? Anything like that at all?”
I didn’t even look at James when I heard him slump back in his chair with a huff. He’d get over it. I—we—needed to see those drawings.
“Yes.”
“Any chance we can see them? Soon?”
“How about now?” She reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of wrinkled sheets of paper. “Here are some that I drew on my way here. You can have them if you want.”
“Hey, wait—” James started, but I glared him into quiet, and took the proffered pages from Honoria’s hand. I put them on the desk top. Then I stared, hard.
“What am I looking at?” I finally asked. This wasn’t the crucifixion tree, or anything like it.
“I don’t know,” Honoria said.
James stood and looked at the topmost sheet. “Looks like the front of a house.”
“I get that,” I said. “But why?” I glanced at Honoria. “I thought you said all you saw was his murder. That was at the church, wasn’t it?”
Honoria shrugged. “It comes to me and I draw it,” she said. “I have no control.” She pointed at a small figure hastily penciled into one of the windows of the house. “That’s him,” she said. “In that house. For some reason.”
I looked at the sketch again and blinked. The address of the house was etched above the hastily sketched door. If Eddie had somehow figured out a way to go to this house, maybe he was still there. Maybe I could catch him . . .
“I have an idea,” I said.
“I don’t know how much help we’ll be,” James said over my words, glaring at me when I turned and stared at him. “We don’t have much to go on.”
Actually, we did. If I hurried and got to the address on the sketch, I was certain I could catch Eddie there and then talk to him. We’d have the case sewn up in no time. This was going to be a cake walk.
“I think we should take the case, James.” I smiled, hoping I sounded businesslike and not like I was begging. “I have a few ideas—”
“No doubt you do,” Honoria said, and then she gave me an appraising look that brought my smile down a few lumens, I have to tell you. “I think you will be able to clear up this misunderstanding that I have with the police in no time at all.” She glanced at James again, a strange half-smile on her face. “Make sure you listen to her,” she said. “She has—skills in this area, I think.”
“See?” I looked at James so I didn’t have to look at Honoria anymore, suddenly afraid she knew more about me than I was willing to admit to anyone else in the room. Namely James. “We can do this.”
He stared at me for a long moment, until I silently mouthed, “Please” at him. He shrugged and then turned back to Honoria. “I’ll give you a call and let you know what we decide. Tonight.”
“Why don’t you come to my place,” she said. “I’ve got more sketches there. You can look at them, too, before you make your decision.” She grabbed a pen and scribbled on the edge of one of her sketches. “Here’s m
y address,” she said. “Come by about nine.”
“Nine?” James said.
“Nine,” Honoria repeated. “I have to work.”
She reached her hand over the desk. James stared, and then slowly took it, and shook it, once. And then, she was gone.
“Can you explain to me why we should take that case?” James asked, almost before the door closed on our newest almost client.
“Shhh. She might hear you.”
We sat in silence for what felt like enough time to let Honoria trundle down the stairs and out the front door to the street. Then I turned to him and tried to explain, in my overwhelmingly unhelpful way.
“We need the money, James. And I don’t think she did it.”
Short, sweet, and to the point. Though I wasn’t really too sure about the last bit. She could have done it, for all I knew. But I wanted to hear who had done it, from the ghost’s mouth, and it looked like Honoria was going to be able to help me find him.
“Do you really think she’s innocent?” James asked, looking about as unsure as I felt. “The cops—they have instincts about things like this. There has to be a reason she’s a person of interest.”
“For heaven’s sake, she can’t weigh more than 100 pounds! How could she have hung that guy in the tree?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. All that talk about visions and things. That all sounds crazy. Right?”
“Yeah, right,” I snapped, sudden anger flooding through me. I’d heard those words all my life. Those words were the reason I’d moved away from home and to Edmonton, and they were the last words in the world I wanted to hear coming out of his mouth. “Anyone you don’t understand must be crazy.”
“Well, what do you think’s going on with her?” he asked, and I could hear anger in his voice. If I didn’t get off this track, we were going to fight again, and I didn’t want to fight.
“I think there’s more out there in the world than we know,” I replied, doing my level best to drive the emotion from my voice. “And maybe we need to just believe her, for the moment.”
“Seriously?” He laughed, and it bumped up against the anger still rolling through my veins until I thought I’d blow a gasket. “She’s been in and out of mental institutions all her life. That doesn’t make you think she’s crazy?”