Billy shook his head. “Been dead too long. I never get anything from people who’ve been dead more than forty-eight hours. They lose their connection with the world.”
I nodded, then frowned. “I thought you said your sister visited you three years after she died.”
“I guess blood’s thicker than ether.”
The wind picked up as he spoke, a hair-raising keen that had no business anywhere outside of a holler. I instinctively lifted my shoulders against it, then felt a scowl crinkling my forehead so hard it ached. There was no new chill in the air, no cutting cold through my coat, despite the shriek of sound. A shadow came down over the world, making me look up at the sky, as if the sun wasn’t already hidden beneath doomfully gray clouds.
There were no clouds. A window framed the section of sky I could see, scattered stars valiantly struggling against the light of a brilliantly full moon. Irish lace curtains caught at the moon’s edges, making it whimsical and delicate in the clear black sky. Seattle’s snowbound chill was driven from my skin, and the breath I took was full of warm air and the scent of tea.
Recognition jolted through me like needles under my fingernails. I knew the window; I knew the curtains, and I knew that if I looked to my left I would see a near stranger, lying beneath a handmade quilt and dying of nothing more than her own determination to do so.
I turned my head, for all that I didn’t want to look at the woman on the bed. She had black hair, worn much longer than mine. It lay in soft-looking waves against her white pillow, stark contrast in the moonlight. Even in the blue-white light, her eyes were very green, and her skin was nearly as pale as the pillowcase. I heard myself say, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” which I certainly hadn’t said in real life. I wouldn’t have let myself, even if I’d dared.
I was a wildly imperfect reflection of the woman on the bed. Where her skin was uniformly smooth and pale, mine was marked with a handful of freckles scattered across my nose; where her features were fine, mine seemed too sharp or too blunt. She was tall, although not as tall as I was, and had a degree of elegance to her that my long limbs and mechanic’s hands could never emulate.
Her skin changed color, a horrid sallowness creeping in. I looked back at the moon to see blood draining over it. Fear scampered through me, the pure childish terror of the unknown. My voice broke as I said, “Sheila?” but when I turned to her, the woman was gone.
“Joanie?” Billy’s hand on my elbow, big and warm, brought me back to the field with a start. I looked at his hand, then up at his worried frown. “You all right?”
“Yeah. I just…kind of spaced out. Sorry. I don’t know what that was. Did you say something?” The wet chill of Seattle winter settled back into my bones, leaving me scowling at nothing. The moon had been full the night my mother died, but we hadn’t spoken. We hadn’t had much to say to one another, not from the time she’d called me out of the blue to say she was dying and she’d like to meet the daughter she abandoned twenty-six years earlier. I’d gone out of a mixed sense of duty and curiosity, and spent four uncomfortable months that culminated in her death on the winter solstice, almost three months ago to the day.
“I said, do you think there’s anything else you can pick up? You’ve got more mojo than I do.” His grin suggested he was biting his tongue to not ride me harder than that.
“I’ll, um…shit.” The last word wasn’t meant to be heard, but Billy laughed anyway. I curled a lip and waved it off, perversely glad that he was teasing me a little. “I’ll try.” I wanted to try about as much as I wanted to stick red-hot pokers against my feet, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to say that to the one person who didn’t think I was at all crazy.
Granted, he was nuts himself by any normal standards, but I wasn’t in a position to be throwing stones. “Is the morning soon enough?”
Billy turned a sad smile on the woman’s body, then made a gesture to encompass the rest of the field. “There’s a lot to do here, and I don’t think another night is going to make this any harder on anybody. You work tomorrow?”
“Yeah. I’ll give you anything I’ve got before I go out on patrol.” I admired the weary confidence in my voice, as if I actually expected to come up with anything.
The problem was that I was afraid I might.
“All right. Thanks, Joanie.” Billy hesitated a moment before adding, “I know you don’t like this.”
“So I’m a great sport for going along with it. I know. Tomorrow, Billy.”
It was more than not liking it. It was like fingernails on chalkboards combined with dentist drills on unnumbed teeth. My world was a sensible, straightforward place. Checking out ritual murders on a psychic level simply did not belong. I kicked clumps of snow as I slogged back to Morrison to bum a ride home. He was driving his personal vehicle, a gold Toyota Avalon XLS—which I thought of as the American version of “boxy, but safe!”—so he hadn’t been on duty when he’d called me. I didn’t envy him his job.
Neither of us spoke during the whole drive, both wrapped up in our individual discomfort of what I was doing there. I didn’t even say thanks when I got out, just thumped the top of his car and watched him drive off. Only after he disappeared down the Ave did I go into my building, taking the steps up to my fifth-floor apartment two at a time.
Gary, to whom I was practically certain I had not given a key, was hanging out in my apartment playing Tetris on my computer. “Thought you never touched the things,” I said as I unlaced my boots.
“You didn’t leave any entertainment rags. What was I supposed to do?”
“Cook dinner?” I put the boots on the carpet where all the melting snow would be absorbed and slid into the kitchen in my stocking feet.
“Nothin’ to cook. I looked.”
“Details, details. Besides, there is, too. I’ve got at least three different frozen dinners in here.” I heard the telltale musical bloop that said he’d died horribly in the game, and a moment later he appeared in the door frame, making it look ridiculously small with his bulk. Even in his eighth decade he retained the build of the linebacker he’d once been, a fact that he took no small amount of pride in.
“So. Was there a body?”
I pulled two microwave dinners out of the freezer. “Do you remember calling me a bloodhound when we first met?”
“Nope.” Gary gave me a disarming smile. “So there was a body.”
“There were three. And…” I really didn’t want to say anything else. I busied myself stabbing holes in the plastic tops of the dinners, then mumbled, as fast as I could, “And I said I’d maybe do a little checking out of what was going on in the astral realm sort of thing I don’t suppose you’d hang around and bang a drum after dinner.”
“Eh?” Gary cupped a hand behind his ear, leaning forward a little and wearing a cocky grin that would do James Garner’s Maverick proud. “What’d you say? I’m an old man, lady. Can’t hear when you don’t speak up.”
“I hate you, Gary.”
He beamed at me. “Now, that’s no way to talk to an old man, Joanne Walkingstick.”
“Augh! Gary! No! Stop that!” I’d dropped my last name along with the rest of my Cherokee heritage when I graduated from high school, and a compulsive slip of the tongue—was there such a thing? It had felt like it at the time—had caused me to mention the long-since-abandoned name to Gary the day we’d met. “It’s Walker. Don’t do that, Gary.” The humor I’d started with fell away into discomfort and I shrugged my shoulders unhappily as I put the first meal into the microwave. “Please.”
“Hey.” He came into the kitchen to put a hand on my shoulder and turn me around. “No harm meant, Jo. You arright?”
“I just…” I summarized the experience at the park, staring alternately at his feet and my own, not wanting to meet his eyes. “I just hate this shit. And the thing with remembering my mother all of a sudden just freaked me out.” The microwave beeped and I turned back to it, my stomach grumbling. Gary put a hand on the door, keeping me from opening it.