“I hope you don’t think—” This time, the color that shot into Ella’s cheeks was the exact shade of the red roses in the vase. “I hope you don’t think I’m asking you to…” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “To prostitute yourself. I mean, figuratively speaking. If there’s something about Mr. Blackburne that’s making you uncomfortable, Pepper—”
“No, there isn’t. Not really.” It was the truth, and I told myself not to forget it. Maybe then I wouldn’t be so queasy. “I just don’t need a guy hanging around right now.”
“Oh?”
How can anybody utter that one little syllable and make it pack the punch of so many suspicions?
Ella’s grin ratcheted up a notch. “It is Quinn, isn’t it? You two…are you back together?”
“Maybe,” I told her, because really, I wasn’t in the mood for a million questions I wasn’t going to answer, especially when I wasn’t sure of the answers, anyway. “We’ve been seeing each other.”
“I knew it!” Ella clapped her hands together. “I told you years ago, Pepper, you two are meant for each other. I knew he’d come around eventually. Oh, I just love a happily ever after.”
“And Milo Blackburne?”
She clicked her tongue and headed back across the office. “All you have to do is be pleasant. And get me that donation. Nobody’s telling you to marry him.” She stopped just as she got to the door. “Oh, I almost forgot what I came in here for. I was looking over that list you left on my desk yesterday. The one about the speakers’ bureau.”
I braced myself for more questions, and this time, they wouldn’t be ones I didn’t want to answer, they’d be ones it was impossible for me to answer. Apparently while I was out investigating, Jean had been hard at work.
“The list.” I said this with as much enthusiasm as I could muster and scrambled for a half-truth that would satisfy Ella. “Let me explain.”
“No need.” Ella opened the door and scurried into the hallway. “I just wanted you to know that it’s absolutely perfect. You’ve paired some of our most knowledgeable volunteers with the subjects they’re best qualified to talk about. It’s brilliant, Pepper, and you put the whole thing together so quickly and so professionally. I’m impressed, and you can be sure I’m going to mention your good work to the trustees this afternoon.”
She left smiling.
And after that, I was supposed to call Milo Blackburne and tell him to stick his flowers?
Okay, yeah, I was tempted. But before I could, my phone rang.
“Hey.”
Mr. Small Talk.
“Thought you should know I did some digging around,” Quinn said. “You know, about Jack and Dingo.”
“And…?”
“And nothing.” Quinn did not sound happy to report this. “Nobody knows anything about it. Not unofficially. Not officially.”
“But then how—”
“Yeah. Exactly what I’ve been asking myself. But I’ve done all the digging it’s possible to do and I’m coming up empty. We know what Dick told us, but there’s no record of Jack Haggarty ever having arrested Danny Ackerman for that comic book store robbery.”
By the time I was done talking to Quinn, I was grumbling again.
Jack arrested Dingo but he didn’t arrest Dingo?
It made no sense at all, and besides, I knew that if my newest ghostly acquaintance showed (which he didn’t, but then, ghosts have the annoying habit of never being around when I need them), it wouldn’t help much. Playing guessing games while Jack tried to signal what he wanted me to know was not high on my list of things to do at the moment.
And even if it was, I wouldn’t have had the luxury. The latest issue of the Garden View newsletter was due on Ella’s desk in just a couple days, and in an effort to get it done—but without the effort part—I’d set Chet Houston up with one of those voice-activated tape recorders in a mausoleum that I knew hadn’t had a visitor in years. I was supposed to pick up his dictated newsletter articles that morning so that I’d have time to enter them in my computer, and still thinking about Jack and Dingo and what the arrest record that wasn’t meant, I climbed into my car and drove to the other side of the cemetery.
As soon as I parked the Mustang, I was reminded that this was still an active part of the cemetery. In graveyard lingo, that means people were still being buried there. There was a freshly dug grave between the road and the mausoleum where I was headed, and a backhoe waiting to finish the job once the casket was finally in place. I wound my way through the folding wooden chairs set up for the mourners around the gaping hole and made up my mind: Chet and I would have to make this meeting short and sweet. I might not be a cemetery geek, but I wasn’t a total loser when it came to understanding grief and the respect due mourners. I didn’t belong, and I’d need to be long gone by the time the funeral procession arrived.
With that in mind, I ducked into the mausoleum and wrapped up my business with Chet in no time at all. For the record, his new headstone had been put into place, and he was thrilled. No angels. No flowers. I had a friend and a ghostwriter—literally—for life.
That taken care of, I’d just stepped outside and locked the mausoleum door behind me when a prickle like icy fingers touched the back of my neck.
You can’t be a private investigator for the dead for as long as I have and not know what this means—someone was watching me, and since Chet had disappeared into the nothingness where ghosts go when they’re not bugging me, it wasn’t him.
It wasn’t the funeral goers, either. One quick look around, and I didn’t see any cars but my own and no one walking through the vast expanse of headstones or visiting at one of the nearby graves. At least no one I could see.
But still, those icy fingers danced across my skin, chilling me to the bone.
“Hello!” Anyone else would have headed right to the car, but hey, see above and the whole PI to the gone but not departed bunch. The someone I knew was hanging around could be someone who wasn’t really a someone anymore. Catch my drift? If that was the case, it was best to get things over with.
“Are you looking for me?” I called out into the still air. “Because if you are, make it quick. I’ve got stuff to do back at the office.”
No answer.
No sounds.
No nothing.
Nothing but that sensation that trickled down the back of my neck and seeped into my spine. Somewhere along the way it soaked into my bloodstream, too. My legs locked, and my stomach clenched. The quiet settled against me like unseen hands.
Adrenaline is a funny thing. At the same time it exploded through my body and rooted me to the spot, it tickled my brain and sent out a warning.
Run.
Great advice if I could make my feet move.
Run.
I gulped in a breath that hurt going down around the ball of panic wedged in my throat.
Run.
I did. Or at least I tried.
For one thing, it was hard to take those first few steps on account of how my legs were heavy and I couldn’t breathe. For another, I hadn’t planned on doing anything more strenuous that day than going out to the nearest Chinese takeaway for lunch so I’d worn a new pair of platform-soled, peep-toe pumps. Black patent leather upper, python heel (okay, fake python heel, but it looked like the real thing). They were as cute as can be, and they might have been serviceable when it came to covering a short, flat span in a reasonable amount of time, but the ground in cemeteries is lumpy and there were dozens of headstones—and that newly dug grave—between me and my car. I dodged around an angel with a sad face, did a two-step scurry (it was more like a shuffle) past an urn atop a monument that was a full twelve feet tall, stepped over a flat stone half hidden by grass.
And tripped.
Desperate to keep from smacking into the nearest headstone, I threw out a hand and, hallelujah, connected with one of those chairs set up for the funeral. For a second, it held. That is, until the chair folded and went down and I went down
with it.
My knees thwacked against a flat headstone and I cursed my luck and my dry cleaning bill since I was wearing linen pants in a sage color that was sure to show the dirt. The good news was that after a few seconds, the pain in my knees subsided and I knew I wasn’t seriously hurt.
The bad news?
It turned out to be a few seconds too long.
Before I could pull myself to my feet and long before I realized someone had come up behind me, two hands went around my throat. I wedged my fingers under my attacker’s, fighting to loosen the grip, but even I knew it was a losing cause. His fingers digging into my windpipe, the man (who else would be that strong?) lifted me clear off the ground.
I kicked. And thrashed. I would have screamed if I could get so much as a peep out of a windpipe that was slowly being crushed.
My attacker hauled me to the lip of that open grave.
I’d like to say that the last thing I heard before he threw me into the hole were the sounds of my own feeble screams.
Too bad that wasn’t true.
See, the last thing I heard was that backhoe chugging to life.
Right before it rolled over to the hole and dropped a load of dirt on top of me.
I would have tried screaming again if I wasn’t afraid of getting a mouth full of dirt.
The way it was, I propped my hands over my head and fell to my knees under the weight of the first load of dirt.
“No, no, no.” My voice was small and muffled in the confines of the grave. “Not going to die like this.”
Finished with the load, the backhoe pulled away, but I didn’t dare breathe a sigh of relief. I knew what it meant—my attacker was going for more dirt.
“It’s really not such a bad thing, you know.”
In a morning filled with surprises, hearing the sound of another voice down there in some stranger’s grave was par for the course. I brushed soil off my face and opened my eyes to find Albert, my personal accountant, standing in the corner opposite from me, as calm as can be.
He could afford to be calm. He was already dead.
“Are you crazy?” Hard to believe my voice could be so shrill, what with nearly having my trachea crushed and all. “Dead is very bad. It’s…it’s dead.”
Albert was a full head shorter than me, anorexic-looking, and I suspected, as pale in life as he was now when he floated over the first load of dirt toward me. He had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses pinched to the bridge of his nose, and they winked at me in what little light made its way to the bottom of the hole. “You’ll be fine in a minute,” he said.
“I’ll be dead in a minute.”
The beeping of the backhoe proved my point. “He’s coming back,” I wailed. “Albert, I got those bushes planted for you. You’ve got to do something!”
“Me? Oh dear.” Behind his glasses, Albert blinked. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t know how. I’m just an accountant, after all.”
“Then get somebody else. Somebody who can help.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t anyone else. I can’t fetch help because you’re the only one who can see and hear me.”
“Then what about…” The whirring of the backhoe’s engine got closer, louder. “Get Chet. Maybe Chet will know what to do.”
He did, all right. When Chet popped up next to me, he was holding a pad of paper and the stub of a pencil.
“I’ll get the details,” he said. “You know, of your last moments.”
This was supposed to make me feel better?
Rather than argue, I screamed, and when I was done, I screamed some more. At the same time I was doing that, I dug my cell out of my pocket and tried Ella’s number.
Just for the record, it’s impossible to get a cell signal in a grave.
Time for a Plan B, and I needed to come up with it fast.
“I do hate to bother you at a time like this, Miss Martin.” This time, it was Jean who showed up. Three ghosts and a hole that was no bigger than a couple feet across and six feet deep. It was getting crowded in there, not to mention chilly.
Jean clutched her hands at her waist. “I was just planning. You understand. For any…contingencies.”
“Contingencies.” I had to yell to be heard over the sounds of the backhoe. The motor birred and I knew my assailant was raising the bucket, getting ready to drop the next load. “You mean contingencies like me being dead?”
“Well, I should go over your schedule with you. Just in case. I’d hate for cemetery business to suffer. You know.” Jean gave me a level look. “Just in case.”
Her words were brought home when the second load of dirt rained down on me.
Pebbles bonked me in the head. Dirt splattered into my eyes. Instinctively, I folded myself into the corner of the grave and luckily, my attacker couldn’t see me from his seat in the backhoe; he dumped the dirt in the center of the hole.
Spiders on my shoulders.
Worms stroking my arms.
Muck that oozed up from the bottom of the grave and squished between my toes.
I ignored it all, keeping my place and holding my breath while the dirt spilled into the grave and flew around me in a gritty cloud. When it settled enough for me to see again, what I saw was that my three ghostly assistant were gone and Jack Haggarty was down in the hole with me. He was standing in the center of the grave, right atop that dirt pile, and he was jumping up and down.
“Yeah. Right. Thanks.” I made the mistake of running my tongue over my lips, then ended up spitting out a mouthful of soil. “I’m kind of not in the mood for games, Jack. A little busy here getting buried alive.”
Jack jumped up and down some more.
He looked down at the dirt. Jump. Jump. Jump.
He looked up at me. Jump. Jump. Jump.
And for a woman who earlier in the day swore she didn’t want to engage in another round of charades, I decided suddenly and completely, that pantomime was my favorite thing in the world.
Because, see, I knew what Jack wanted me to do.
It wasn’t easy and, thank goodness, there never were and never would be pictures. But I climbed right on top of that dirt pile and did exactly what Jack was doing. I jumped up and down for all I was worth.
Slowly—too slowly—the dirt beneath my feet packed down. It wasn’t hard to figure out why I couldn’t move faster. I said good-bye to the peep-toe pumps and kept hopping for all I was worth.
Little by little, that dirt pile at the bottom of the grave got harder and taller, and I wasn’t so deep underground anymore. One more load…
I glanced at Jack, who looked relieved that I’d gotten the message. “If it doesn’t cover me completely and smother me to death,” I told him, “one more load and I should have enough dirt to pack down to climb out of here.”
If.
In what seemed way too short a time, the backhoe’s yellow basket filled with soil hung directly above me again.
Dirt rained down, and I scrambled down the hill I’d created and mashed myself into the corner. By now, even this far from the center of the grave, the dirt was nearly up to my waist, and I had to fight my way through it to get to the higher spot I’d stomped into existence. I fell down twice when the ground beneath my feet slipped out from under me, and when I couldn’t get up fast enough, I pounded the dirt with my fists. Before the backhoe could return, I had built up the little hill just enough to see out of the grave.
That was when I realized that my plan—brilliant as it was—was just a tad lacking. Had I built up the hill closer to the rim of the grave, I might have been able to pull myself to safety. The way it was, I was in the center of a pile molded like one of those cone-shaped bullet bras Madonna is famous for wearing. Too bad the pointy part of the cone was smack-dab in the center of the grave.
I didn’t have time to try to reconfigure my escape route. From here, I could see the backhoe chomp into what was left of the waiting dirt pile. It backed up, turned, and headed my way. This time, I knew the load would be its last. There were no
corners left for me to hide in.
At least I would be buried with my peep-toe pumps.
I was just thinking that it wasn’t much of a consolation when a couple things happened.
Number one, I got a look at the man operating the backhoe. Tall, skinny, young. He had a wild mop of dark curly hair, and I knew I’d seen him before. Somewhere. If I wasn’t so freaking scared, I might have taken the time to figure it out. But I was. Scared, that is.
At least until a sleek black hearse rolled around the corner and stopped nearby.
The funeral had arrived.
My attacker saw the procession just as I did. The motor still running, he jumped off the backhoe. The last I saw of him was his back as he ducked into a dense planting of rhododendrons.
And me?
My knees were knocking so loud, I’m surprised the funeral director didn’t hear them when he got out of the hearse and came over to the grave to give it one last look-see before he had the pallbearers bring the casket over.
“If you wouldn’t mind.” I stuck my hand out, and honestly, I couldn’t say what the poor man was thinking when his mouth fell open. Maybe he was wondering what he was going to do with the deceased now that the hole was nearly filled. Or maybe he’d just never seen a redhead in very dirty clothes rising from the ground before. I was hardly in the mood to quibble. Speechless, he offered me a hand and more gratefully than I can say, I accepted it and climbed out of the grave.
* * *
What’s a girl supposed to do in a situation like that?
I don’t know about anybody else, but this girl is no fool. There were a couple of those carry-along reusable shopping bags (that I never use) in the trunk of my car, and I got them out so I could sit on them and keep my car seat reasonably clean, then I drove like a bat out of hell, all the way home.
Once there, I did a couple things, not necessarily in this order:
I locked the door behind me and checked the lock three times to make sure it was secure.
I looked inside every closet and under my bed just in case someone was lurking.
PM09 - Supernatural Born Killers Page 12
