Should we start with the kitchen or the closet?
“The kitchen, I think,” I say. While I would not say I am happy, my smile doesn’t feel forced. “I’ve always hated those dishes you bought.”
“You’re in good spirits,” Pandora says as she peers into her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“Am I?” I am on my knees, scrubbing the bathtub. This was Tad’s job, one of many I’ve taken over since he’s passed. Perhaps I am not resentful because I can hear him snickering about Panda’s outfit in my ear.
“Yeah. I would have thought cleaning out Tad’s stuff would have made you sad. What did you keep?”
“Nothing,” I say, tackling a stubborn patch of soap scum.
“Nothing?” she says, not believing it. “Not one single thing?”
“Give me some credit. I kept a few things, but most of it’s gone.” Why do I need his things when I can talk to him anytime I want to? “I don’t need constant reminders of what I lost to remember what I had.” My earlobes tingle, and I know that Tad agrees.
Pandora squints at me. “Have you seen a therapist without telling me?”
“No.” Unless you count talking with spirits as therapy. “Why do you ask?”
“You just seem so healthy. It’s disturbing. Next you’ll tell me you’ve gone vegetarian.”
“That’s going a bit far.”
“And you’ve finally been converted. Wearing that bracelet to clean the tub is so right it’s almost wrong.”
“Good thing I’m done,” I say as I splash rinse water around the porcelain. “Wanna go grab a drink? My treat.”
“That’s my girl,” Pandora says.
I do not realize until I change my clothes that Grandmother’s earrings are on my bureau and not my ears.
“You’re finished with them? Are you sure?” Grandmother says, her eyes trying to read my face.
“I’ve never been surer of anything. I don’t need jewelry to feel Tad beside me.” I place the box on the table between us and dig into my fruit salad.
“You’ll be surprised how long they stick around,” she says, casually. “Between Fred and George and Ray, I’m never alone. Sometimes I wonder if they take shifts or if they’re all there at once, bumping into each other and cursing.”
I laugh at the picture her words make in my mind. “You could wear the earrings and ask them.”
“I could,” she agrees, “but that would be intruding.”
“Is that so different from what the dead do to us?”
“I’d like to think it is,” she says, smiling. As she slips the earrings into her purse, I think I see one of her dead husbands beside her. I blink, and the moment and the image are gone.
A CLEAN GETAWAY by Keith R. A. DeCandido
“Watch where you step!’ Lieutenant Danthres Tresyllione was already in a bad mood when she arrived at the house in Unicorn Precinct, and finding herself being yelled at by one of the guards did not improve it. Looking down, she saw that the floor of the house was covered in some kind of dark muck.
Her superiors were generally amenable to paying for a Cleaning Spell to get blood stains out of her boots and earth-colored cloak. This whatever-it-was, on the other hand, would be a harder sell, and Danthres was in no mood to fight that particular battle with whatever functionary in the Lord and Lady’s court oversaw the appropriations for such things.
“I’ll stay out here, then,” she said, stopping in the threshold.
“Not a problem,” said a familiar voice from inside. It was her partner, Lieutenant Torin ban Wyvald. “I’ve already been soiled, so I’ll provide the gory details.”
Danthres peered inside to see a large sitting room that would have been considered fancy and high-class but for the fact that it was covered in a truly impressive amount of dirt and grime and muck. Tramping around in it were the guard who had cautioned her to step lightly-whom she recognized as Manfred, one of the few grunts in the Cliff’s End Castle Guard who had anything approaching a brain-and Torin. Hovering about a hand’s-length above the floor was the M.E., Boneen. Typically, the magical examiner refused to degrade himself, so he used his wizardly abilities to levitate; just as typically, the cranky old bastard didn’t offer the same courtesy to the others.
“I’m surprised to see you here already, Boneen,” Danthres said. “It usually requires a team of dragons to get you to a crime scene with any dispatch.”
Glaring witheringly at Danthres from his position over the floor, Boneen said, “Does it disturb you, Tresyllione, to make so many attempts at wit and yet fall short of the mark?”
“Not in the least.” Danthres turned to Torin. “So what happened?”
Torin cleared his throat before speaking. “This house is owned by the Jaros family. The actual owner is the family patriarch, Millar Jaros, and his son, daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren all live here as well. This morning the daughter-in-law, Abbi, came downstairs to prepare breakfast, and discovered this.”
While Torin was talking, Danthres had been looking at the muck and noticing something. “All right, this is odd-there’s a pattern to the gunk. Like it all exploded outward.” She’d seen similar patterns in blood when someone was struck with a heavy object, especially in the head, but it wasn’t something she ever expected to see with dirt.
“Yes, it did.” Torin was now pointing at a closet door. “It seems to have come out from there.”
Crankily, Boneen said, “No ‘seems’ about it. I did the peel-back, and it showed this garbage literally explode outward from the closet.” On loan from the Brotherhood of Wizards, the magical examiner’s primary purpose was to cast an Inanimate Residue Spell, commonly called a “peel-back,” which allowed him to see what recently happened in a particular place. “And once I did that, I had this young man call you two in.”
That, at least, explained why Boneen’s arrival preceded theirs. She looked at Manfred. “You summoned the M.E., Manfred?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The guard sounded pleased that she remembered his name. “And he had me bring you in, like he said, ma’am.”
Danthres’s mood grew darker by the second. “Pardon me, Boneen, but I was under the impression that the function of lieutenants in the Castle Guard like myself and Torin was to investigate crimes that occur within the Lord and Lady’s demesne.”
“What are you driving at, Tresyllione?”
Angrily, Danthres said, “What I’m driving at is that what I see here is an accident, not a crime-unless there’s a dead body I’m missing under all this?”
Torin’s long red hair and thick red beard obscured all of his face save for his humorous eyes and aquiline nose-except when he smiled broadly, as he did now. “No, but there is a bit of a wrinkle.”
She sighed. “Of course there is.”
Manfred said, “I talked to Abbi Jaros and then her husband, father-in-law, and children, and they all say the same thing: until this morning, there was no closet there, just a blank wall.”
“So there’s magic afoot.” She fixed her irritated gaze upon Boneen. “Isn’t magic the Brotherhood’s concern?”
“Licensed magic is, yes. This is unlicensed magic.” Sniffing, he added, “The Brotherhood does not consort in magicks that cast dirt about.”
“What, your desire to keep from getting your hands dirty extends to the rest of the world, too?”
“Something like that, yes. In any case, I’ve already communicated with Lord Ythran, the local Brotherhood representative, and he and I agreed that this is an unlicensed commercial spell, and therefore not within the Brotherhood’s purview. So have at it.”
With that, Boneen gestured, muttered something, and disappeared in a flash of light.
After blinking the spots from her eyes-Danthres was half-elf, which made her more sensitive to the bright lights that accompanied Boneen’s Teleport Spell-she said, “This doesn’t answer my question.”