Which is exactly why I didn’t realize Damon had popped up beside me.
For once I didn’t jump. I was knocked for a loop by all I’d just heard. And maybe busy feeling a little envious, too.
“You and that?” Okay, it wasn’t a polite question. But who could blame me? Naturally, I figured Damon had pretty good taste. He liked me, didn’t he? So that nobody could see me talking to myself, I ducked behind the table where the sugar packets and the cup covers were stacked. “She’s just talking crazy, right? I mean, she’s an obsessed fan, sure, but she can’t be serious. You and Belinda?”
“Me and…” When I poked my head around the corner, Damon looked where I was looking. Belinda had put her coffee cup down on top of a trash can so she could scratch her stomach. “Who is she?” he asked.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “She says she’s the love of your life. But I gotta tell you, I didn’t believe her from the start. I mean, really, look at her.”
Damon did. His thoughtful expression melted into recognition. “Did she say we met in Los Angeles?”
My stomach swooped. “You’re not telling me it’s true?”
He acted like it was no big deal. “Come on, Pepper, I told you. Chicks were my thing, and I guarantee you, that chick, she was just as crazy, but she was way better-looking back then.”
“Then it is true? You and Belinda, you were—” I couldn’t bring myself to say it, all that stuff about soul mates and until-death-do-us part. “You told me you loved women. You never said there was one special person in your life.”
He’d been watching Belinda, and Damon turned my way. “Special? I wouldn’t say that. She was good for a few laughs, sure, and a couple nights of really good sex, but after that…well, I guess I lost interest. She must have hooked up with one of the other guys. She was always around. But I swear, we never spent another night together.”
“So why does she think that once she dies, you’re going to be waiting to welcome her with open arms?” Did I sound like a crazy, jealous lover? I consoled myself with the fact that I couldn’t have. I might be crazy, but I’d never be Damon’s lover. Not like Belinda had been. The thought ripped through me, and damn it, tears filled my eyes. “She says you two were soul mates,” I told Damon. “That’s why she stays here in Cleveland. To take care of your grave. She says you’re going to love her for all eternity.”
“Well, then I’m sorry.” Damon looked into my eyes when he spoke. “I’m sorry for you, Pepper, because I can see that it hurts you to think I kept a secret from you. Believe me, that’s the last thing I want to do. I’m sorry for her, too.” He glanced back toward the trash can, but Belinda had moved on. “I never promised her a thing. Once she walked out the door, I didn’t even remember her name. And she’s devoted forty years of her life to me.” He rippled like a reflection on a pond. “She’s wasted all the time she’s been given here on earth. Because of me.” His voice was muffled, but there was no mistaking the regret in it. “It’s sad. And pathetic.” Little by little, the color drained out of Damon until he looked like an old black-and-white photograph. He faded. “I never meant for it to happen. To me, it was a one-night stand. To her—”
“It’s been her whole life.” I finished the sentence for him, and it’s a good thing. When I looked to where he’d been standing, Damon was gone.
And it was just as well.
Because epiphany moments, as important as they are, aren’t necessarily meant to be shared.
And this was one I wanted to keep to myself.
I thought about Joel and Grandma Panhorst’s ring. I thought about how all these months, I’d been struggling to pretend life could be like it had been before my dad ended up in prison and my world fell apart. I thought about Damon and the fact that as crazy as it sounded—as crazy as it was—I’d fallen in love with him.
And I realized that me and Belinda, we had a whole lot in common.
We were both hanging on to the past.
And if I wasn’t careful, it was going to destroy my future. Just like it had hers.
Chapter 16
What all this led to, of course, was a weekend of examining my life. This is a good thing, or so I’m told, and can lead to all sorts of wonderful revelations. Unfortunately in my case, all it left me with was the unshakable and depressing realization that my life was in desperate need of resuscitation.
Oh yeah, and me feeling sorry for myself.
I wallowed in my misery and proved it by finishing off an entire pint of chocolate ice cream (Harmony’s latest check had yet to arrive, and I couldn’t afford Ben & Jerry’s and had to settle for the cheap stuff), a bag of Oreos, and every single cannoli I bought from Corbo’s, the really good Italian bakery down the street from my apartment. And no, I won’t say how many that was.
By the time Monday rolled around, the carbs had worked their magic, and I knew what I had to do—in addition to eating nothing but salad for an entire week.
I had to stop it with the self-pity.
I had to quit being jealous of a woman who was old and crazy and of the forty-year-old affair she’d had with a man who was as off-limits as any guy I’d ever met, and for the best of reasons, too, since he was dead.
I had to reclaim my life. Get over it. Get on with it. Get real.
With that in mind, I went through the motions of my job, and at five o’clock, I put away the research I was using to write an article for the next Garden View newsletter on Christmas traditions at the cemetery. Then I did a couple of things. Number one, I pulled out both the business card where Quinn had written his home phone number and the cocktail napkin on which Dan had scrawled his cell number. Number two, I spent a long time thinking about calling them. Both of them. If I was in search of a life, there didn’t seem a better way to prove it than by establishing a relationship with a guy who was actually breathing.
Number three…
Well, number three was that I took a good, hard look at those phone numbers, I thought about Quinn and Dan a little more, and I decided to do nothing.
Yes, I know, such wishy-washy behavior is the true sign of a wimp. But look at things from my vantage point: I couldn’t talk to either Dan or Quinn. Not without sounding as desperate as I felt. And I wasn’t about to let either one of them know that.
All was not lost, however. With the messy personal stuff taken care of (sort of), I could concentrate on my professional life.
And I wasn’t talking about that article on Christmas traditions.
I pulled out a legal pad and made a list. It was an obsessive/compulsive sort of thing to do, and I am anything but. Still, as I had learned from working my other cases, lists help me order my thoughts. Right about then, that was exactly what I needed. More order, less oh-poor-me.
I divided the page into three columns and wrote “Damon” to the left and “Vinnie” in the middle. On the far right I scrawled “Mind at Large.” After that, things got dicey. I took a deep breath, told my brain it was time to get in gear, and in the appropriate places, I filled in the few facts I knew for certain.
“His death was an accident but maybe not an accident,” I wrote beneath Damon’s name and spoke out loud while I did. “He could have been murdered, which might explain why he’s tied to this plane and can’t leave. Photograph missing. Maybe it’s important? Or maybe it’s not missing?”
I considered the possibility and dismissed it instantly. Belinda was a lot of things, but as the shrine to Damon in her apartment proved, careless wasn’t one of them. No way had she misplaced the photo. She valued it too much.
And so did someone else.
“Someone knows something,” I said, and since I wasn’t sure where this factoid belonged, I wrote it across all three columns. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have broken into Belinda’s apartment.”
And what about the burglary at my place?
It wasn’t the first time I wondered if the two incidents were related, but this time, like all the other times, I shook my head. What did Beli
nda and I have in common? In a word, absolutely nothing (and yes, I know that technically that’s two words).
Or did we?
There was Damon, of course, but heck, I hadn’t told anybody that I talked to him on a regular basis. And certainly, though everybody knew Belinda was still in love with him, nobody could possibly suspect how I felt. If they did, I’d get carted away by guys in white lab coats.
Other than that, Belinda and I both hung out at Garden View a lot (for totally different reasons), we both lived nearby, we’d both been at the Rock Hall at the same time on two occasions and at the recording studio together on another day.
What any of this meant or why it was important, I didn’t know. And none of it changed the fact that both Damon and Vinnie were dead and I didn’t have a clue as to why. Or that, if Vinnie’s information was to be trusted, another Mind at Large band member was sure to follow in their ghostly footsteps. This last bit I took personally. After all, I’d been with the band when someone shot at them. I could have ended up dead, too, and I was so not ready for that.
For another fifteen minutes or so, I went on thinking and writing and muttering. Don’t get me wrong, though I say I was ordering my thoughts and making notes about my case the way any real private investigator would, I am not completely delusional (except of course on humid days when I try to convince myself that for once, my hair was not going to frizz). Even I didn’t miss the number of coulds and maybes and question marks in my list.
Sad but true, when push came to shove, the only fact I knew for sure was this: I didn’t know squat.
Groaning, I tossed my pen down on the legal pad and plunked back in my chair. Maybe (yes, another maybe) I just needed a break. Maybe some downtime would restart my brain. At this point in my investigation, my thoughts should have been flowing. Instead they plonked through my head in heavy boots and made a noise like—
Like the sound of the footsteps I heard outside my office door.
My head came up, and I leaned toward the door and listened closely, trying out my deductive skills and congratulating myself when I came up with three very good reasons why I shouldn’t be afraid:
I was the only one in the office. I knew that for sure because both Jim, our administrator, and Ella, who was always the last one out the door, had already stuck their heads in to say good night.
Ghosts didn’t make noise when they walked around, so it couldn’t have been a visitor from the Other Side.
It was too early for a burglary.
I know this doesn’t exactly sound logical, but think about it and it actually makes sense. What burglar in his right mind would risk coming into an office when all the lights are on and there are still cars—okay, one car—in the parking lot?
The upshot was clear. I was imagining things. Since imagining was what I was trying not to do, and sticking to the cold, hard facts was, I got back to work.
“Damon, Vinnie, Mind at Large.” One by one, I tapped my pen against the words written on the pad. “If someone still cares enough to steal the photo of Damon, then that someone might be the same someone who had something to do with his death. Maybe.”
My brain hurt. I tossed down the pen so I could run my hands through my hair.
Which is when I heard a sound in the hallway again.
I’ve watched enough bad movies to know the last thing I should have done was get up and go to the door. But I was working without a script and was so eager to find answers, I was willing to take a chance.
“Hello!” I opened my door and stuck my head into the hallway. There was no one around. No one I could see, anyway. “Is that you, Jim? Ella?”
No one answered, and suddenly getting in my car, locking the doors, and heading for home sounded like a really good plan. With that in mind, I ducked back into my office long enough to get my purse and take out my keys. I fisted my keychain in one hand and poked the keys out from between my fingers. With my other hand, I grabbed a paperweight off my desk. It was a promotional item Ella had insisted on gifting me with after a recent cemetery conference, a Lucite half circle, flat on the bottom and rounded on top with the picture of a simpering angel statue inside it. Lucky for me, though the paperweight wasn’t big, it was plenty heavy. Weighing it in one hand, I headed for the door. I edged down the hallway, rounded the corner into the lobby area—
And ran right into Crazy Belinda.
“Holy shit! Don’t do that to me.” I clutched the paperweight to my heart and fought to catch my breath. It wasn’t until after I finally managed not to keel over that I realized Belinda didn’t look any calmer than I felt. There were bright spots of color in her cheeks, and her eyes were aflame. She was breathing hard. She craned her neck to look over my shoulder.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“Couldn’t find you. Didn’t know which office. Have to hide.” Belinda ran her tongue over her lips. “It isn’t the angel. I would wait for the angel. You know I would. I would be so happy. But angels come on shiny clouds. They don’t follow in the dark.”
“Somebody’s following you?” I looked over my shoulder, too. There was no sign of anyone in the office, and from what I could see through a nearby window, nobody out in the parking lot. “You’re sure? This is for real?”
Even though I knew I was justified, I felt guilty for even asking. Then again, that might have been because one look at Belinda, and I was reminded of everything I’d heard about her. Once upon a long time ago, she was beautiful. These days, she was nothing but a shell of her old self. Yeah, that was pretty much enough to make me feel guilty. But wait (as they say on those commercials), there was more.
For one thing, I’d spent the entire weekend being jealous of the old Belinda, a woman who no longer existed, one Damon didn’t even remember. For another…well, that was really the deal breaker. Because no matter what I thought of Belinda, who she was now, who she used to be, or what she’d ever meant to Damon, nothing could change the fact that there was stark terror in her eyes.
No one has ever accused me of being warm and fuzzy (well, except for Joel, and only once, but that was when I was in the first throes of wedding-induced madness and looking at cake tops—could I be blamed for thinking hearts and flowers?). Be that as it may, I am not that insensitive.
I set down the paperweight. “Come on,” I said, checking the window one more time. The coast was clear. “I’ll drive you home. Then you won’t have to worry about anyone following you.”
Belinda’s knees locked. “But he’ll find me and he’ll get you, too.”
This was not the calming reassurance I needed.
A drumbeat of fear started up inside my chest. “Nobody’s going to get me. Or you,” I told her. I figured talking tough might make both of us feel better. “My car is right outside. We don’t have far to go. So if he’s following you—”
My own words brought me up short.
“He who?” I asked because asking meant I was back in logical mode, and that was better than giving in to the panic that shivered through Belinda’s voice and threatened to infect me. “Did you see the man? Do you know who he is? What he wants?”
“He’s the wolfman. He eats the hearts of innocents.”
This piece of information would have sent any normal person screaming into the night. But truth be told, I guess I’m not all that normal. Hearing this actually made me feel better. Belinda talking about werewolves was like Belinda talking about the angel of death, and I was much better dealing with an overactive imagination and a fried brain than I was with real threats.
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Let’s get going.”
She held back, but I was persistent, younger, stronger, and a whole lot taller. When I got tired of sweet-talking and grabbed her arm, she came along with me. A few short minutes later, we were in my car. It was dark and the security light over the office door threw odd shadows, but there was no mistaking the relief that swept across Belinda’s expression when I finally locked the doors.
Her
eyes glistening, she sank back into the passenger seat and didn’t say a word. At least not until we were halfway to the side gate the employees used to leave by when they worked late and the main gates were already closed. There was a fork in the road directly ahead of us. Beyond that and across a swathe of grass was one of the older sections of the cemetery. When my headlights raked the tombstones, Belinda sat bolt upright and pointed toward the windshield with one trembling finger. “He’s there! He’s waiting! Hurry, Pepper, hurry! He’s following me.”
My heart jumped, and I don’t think I can be blamed for stepping on the accelerator. I took the fork in the road on two wheels.
Fortunately, since it was already dark and there are no streetlights in Garden View to illuminate the roads that twist and turn, common sense conquered my knee-jerk fear. Whoever Belinda thought she saw among the tombstones, no way he could keep up. I let up on the gas.
Tombs of Endearment Page 23
