My confidence seemed to amuse him. “I was just thinking we might go out for coffee sometime.”
“Damn,” Elizabeth said. “You guys are going out for coffee? Can I watch?”
I frowned at her. “We are not going out for coffee.”
Garrett lowered his head, seeming to force himself to be patient.
“Look,” I said, getting fed up with his ’tude. “I’ve already told you. You can either deal with my ability or not. Preferably not. There’s the door. Have a nice day and kiss my ass.”
He raised his head, his expression serious but not angry like I felt it should have been, considering the “ass” comment. “First of all,” he said, his voice infused with exasperation, “I’m still getting used to all this, Miss Piss and Vinegar. Give me a little time.”
“No.”
“Second,” he continued without missing a beat, “I just want to talk to you about it.”
“No.”
“I mean, how does it work?”
“Well.”
“Do you see dead people all the time?”
“Every other weekend and holidays.”
“Are they, you know, everywhere?”
“Is a frog’s ass watertight?” I asked, leaning back in my chair and lifting my feet to rest them, dusty hiking boots and all, on the desk.
I crossed my ankles and steepled my fingers and glared to emphasize my impatience while I waited, impatiently, for Garrett to make a decision. To believe or not to believe.
I called this part “the dawning”—the part where people begin to wonder if I really can see the departed. Oh, they still have doubts. Most people rack their brains, trying to come up with an explanation, any explanation, of how I do what I do.
And as I lived and breathed, Garrett Swopes was struggling to come up with that very thing. After all, dead people don’t walk around trying to solve their own murders. Ghosts don’t exist. None of what I claimed was possible.
The dawning was like a relish fork in the road, and the proverbial traveler had to take one prong or the other. Unfortunately, the prong that led to Charley-sees-dead-people was much sharper than the safer, more travel-worn Charley-is-psychotic prong. Nobody wants to look like a fool. Nine times out of ten, that reason alone keeps people from allowing themselves to believe.
Garrett stared back at me a few seconds, then refocused on my fingers. I could almost see the wheels spinning in his head. After several moments more, I began to think those wheels needed a good oiling.
“But how did you know where to find Ms. Ellery’s body?” he asked at last.
“I’m not explaining it again, Swopes.”
“Seriously—”
“No.”
After another long pause, he asked, “You’ve been doing this since you were five?”
I snorted. “I’ve been able to see the departed since I was born. It just took my dad five years to really believe me. But when I told him where to find a missing girl’s body, he realized what an asset I’d be.”
“The Johnson girl,” he said.
I tried not to wince. The memory was not one of my favorites. In fact, if someone were to ask, I’d have a hard time choosing a lesser favorite. On the day of the Johnson Girl Fiasco, as I called it, Denise veered right onto the travel-worn prong, choosing not to believe me and vowing never to talk about it again. It was also the day that I recognized the abnormality of what I do. And that some people — people very close to me — would despise me for it. Of course, my stepmother slapping me senseless in front of dozens of onlookers didn’t ingratiate me to the incident either.
“Are you okay?” Sussman asked.
I’d almost forgotten they were there. I nodded discreetly.
“You know,” Elizabeth said, “I think he’s really trying to be open-minded.”
My expression turned into a dubious scowl. It was mean. She was only trying to help.
“Are they here now?” Garrett asked.
I sighed, not particularly craving his antagonism. But he’d asked. “Yes.”
He took out his notebook. “Can you ask Ms. Ellery when her birthday is?”
“No.”
Elizabeth walked forward. “It’s June twentieth.”
I looked at her. “He knows when your birthday is. He just wants to see if I do.”
“No?” he asked. He seemed disappointed, like he wanted me to tell him, wanted to believe. For about five minutes, anyway. It was the fair-weather believers I had to watch out for. They had a nasty habit of sucker- punching me in the gut when I least expected it.
“Just tell him,” Elizabeth said.
“You don’t understand,” I told her. “People like him never believe, not fully. He’ll always have doubts. He’ll always quiz me, drill me for information he already has just to see if I fuck up.” I looked back at Garrett. “So fuck him.”
“Elizabeth,” Sussman said, “maybe we should just—”
“No!” she yelled, and I jumped, catching Garrett’s full attention. “Just tell him.” She rushed toward my desk, leaned over it. “He needs to get over himself and just believe you. He doesn’t know what he’ll be missing. He’ll go through life with this one-dimensional view of the world he lives in. He’ll have no sense of direction, no hope that the people he’s loved and lost will go to a better place. That they’ll be okay.”
I realized Elizabeth was no longer talking about Garrett. She was talking about herself.
I stood and walked around to her. “Elizabeth, what’s wrong?”
She almost cried. I could see tears shimmering in her pale eyes. “There’s so much I want to tell my sister, but she’s just like him … just like me. I would never have believed you either.” Her shoulders deflated, and she leveled a guilty gaze on me. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, I wouldn’t have. Not in a million years. And neither will she.”
A relieved smile spread across my face. Was that all? I’d come across this problem countless times. “Elizabeth,” I said, “of all the problems we have right now, that is the only one with a simple fix.”
Garrett watched our exchange — or rather my exchange — but to his credit, his expression remained passive. I’d often considered how ridiculous I must look to the living, talking to myself, gesturing wildly, hugging air. But I didn’t always have a choice. If Garrett refused to leave, he’d just have to deal with my world. I would not modify my behavior to appease his delicate sense of propriety in my own office.
Elizabeth sniffed. “What do you mean? What fix?”
“You leave a note.”
“A note?”
“Sure. I do it all the time. It saves me so much explaining,” I said with an encompassing wave of my hand. “You dictate a note to me, I type it — and predate it to before your death, naturally — and then it’s miraculously found among your possessions. Kind of like an if-anything-should-happen-to-me note. You tell her everything you want her to know, and we just pretend you’d typed it before you died. I even have a guy who can forge your signature to seal the deal, if you’d like.”
“Who?” Garrett asked.
I glowered at him in warning. What I did with the departed was none of his business.
A pretty look of astonishment came over Elizabeth’s face. “That’s brilliant. I’m a lawyer. I’m more organized than the Dewey decimal system. She’d totally fall for it.”
“Of course she’ll fall for it,” I said, patting her back.
“Can I write one to my wife?” Sussman asked.
“Sure.”
Then we all looked at Barber, expecting him to have someone to write to as well. “I only have my mom. She knows how I feel about her,” he said, and I wondered if I should be happy about that or sad because his mother was all he had.
“I’m glad,” I told him. “I wish more people took the time to make their feelings known.”
