I started out as a creepy little kid who saw ghosts. By the afternoon after Tripp’s death, Lu and Dave were fielding phone calls from reporters seeking the city’s premier medium, spiritual advisor, and Wiccan priestess.
You couldn’t buy advertising like that, even if you wanted to.
But I was just looking to be left alone, and to eat a super-greasy cheeseburger in peace.
In the middle of the day, this could be done at the Barrel. Since it was before seven o’clock we wouldn’t know any of the waitstaff, and the place was effectively empty except for us. Come nightfall, though, we’d probably have to find somewhere else to haunt if we meant to stay incognito.
While Benny shared the pictures with Jamie, I attended to my lunch, despite not having enough appetite to do it justice. Mostly I picked at the tater tots and nibbled at the pot pie–sized burger until my phone rang.
I didn’t recognize the digits on the display, but on a whim I answered it anyway in hopes that it wasn’t someone from a network wanting a statement.
It wasn’t. It was Dana.
“A woman at your home—your mother, I guess—she gave me this number. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” I said quickly, without correcting her. “No, I don’t mind. How are you? Where are you?”
“I’m at the Chattanoogan,” she said, naming a newer, high-end hotel downtown. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and they won’t release Tripp…his body, I mean. They won’t release it until after an autopsy. It may take a few days.”
“Oh.”
“So I can’t go home. Charlie left this morning. I didn’t have any reason to make him stay, and his wife was worried about him.”
“That makes sense,” I said lamely. The guys had stopped talking and were looking at me. They’d realized it wasn’t Lu or Dave on the line, and were curious. I ineffectively waved them back to their own business, then removed my napkin from my lap and wadded it up, setting it on the table.
“Give me a minute,” I told them as I stepped away from my seat and walked to the edge of the landing.
“I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time,” Dana said, and I heard real hope in her voice—the kind you don’t often get when someone’s only saying it for the sake of politeness.
I leaned lightly against the ironwork railing, and stared down over Market Street and Eleventh. “No, not at all. I’m just finishing up lunch. I’m done now. I can talk. I’d like to talk.”
Dana dove on in. “I wanted you to know, I told the police you were working with me. I don’t know what you were doing out there really; but you probably saved my life, and I thought I owed you that much, at least.”
“We appreciate it,” I said. “I found out about it this morning, from a reporter who came by my house.”
“Nick somebody?”
“Nick somebody, that’s him. Alders,” I confirmed.
“Chipper bastard, isn’t he?”
I laughed, then smothered it because it felt wrong to laugh on the phone to a woman whose husband had just died. “Until the microphone was off, yes.”
“He struck me as the sort of guy who rolls into the news-room with a hangover, then tells the news while sitting behind the desk without wearing any pants.”
Her assessment was pitch-perfect. “That’s about the truth, I bet. And I mean it—thank you. We were out there for about the same reason as you. Hell, you met Benny, our fan-boy in residence. We were just trying to get to the bottom of it too.”
“I thought that must be the case. And I saw later on, after the alarm went off and the ambulance was there—I thought I saw you had a camera around your neck, is that right?”
“Uh-huh.” I shot a glimpse over at my friends, who were fawning over the arguable bits and pieces of the dead that had showed up in the images.
“I wondered if you got any pictures of the guy who did this. I thought, maybe we could get together and talk. Compare notes. Get a drink, I don’t know.”
“Sure. Sure we could.”
I had a strong feeling that whatever motivated our shooter was going to be something well outside the experience of local law enforcement—a possibility that had probably occurred to Dana, too. And who else would we talk to, if not each other? Kitty, out in the Bend?
“I want to understand,” she said.
“I know you do. So do I.”
“Is there a place we could go? Maybe this afternoon? Maybe now?”
I thought about telling her to head east a couple of blocks, but decided against it. It would be easier to go and pick her up than give her instructions. “I’ll come and get you,” I said instead. “I know where you are. That’s the hotel with the bar in it, the Foundry. Meet me in the lobby, in say, ten minutes? I’m only a few streets away from you right now. We can get coffee, or something.”
“I’ll be there.”
She hung up without any closing salutation, and I did likewise.
I went back to the table and my half-eaten food, and pulled a ten-dollar bill out of my pocket. “This ought to more than cover everything of mine,” I said, and my friends nodded.
“Yours and a tip, too. You heading out?” Jamie asked.
“So soon?”
“Yes, Benny. So soon. That was Dana on the phone. We’re going to compare notes. And I think maybe we’ll talk about regular stuff, too. Give me the pictures, would you, darling? She’ll want to see those too. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t sulk. I’ll bring them back. She’s alone here, you know. She could use a friendly ear, and we’re the closest things to friends she has in town.”
“Poor woman,” Jamie said, but whether he meant to be funny or not, I couldn’t tell.
“You want us to hang around? Do we count as friends, too?” Benny asked. He wanted me to say yes, but I wasn’t comfortable enough with the situation to give him that.
“Why don’t you give us an hour or two, then meet us over at Greyfriar’s? We’re just going there for coffee, unless she wants something stronger—and I wouldn’t blame her if she did.”
The compromise satisfied him, and Jamie too. I left them there and tiptoed down the curly ironwork stairs, back down to my car. I could’ve walked; the Chattanoogan was only half a mile away as the crow flies—if that. But I drove it to be prompt, and when I got there, Dana was sitting on the street curb instead of in the lobby inside.
I almost didn’t recognize her.
She hadn’t slept, or if she had, it hadn’t done her any good.
“That was fast,” she observed, rising to her feet and dusting her rear end off with her hands.
I popped the locks on the Death Nugget and leaned over to open the door for her. “I told you I wasn’t far away. Climb in. Coffee’s on me.”
Dana Marshall settled herself into the seat and dragged the seat belt across her chest. “Thanks. I could use some, I think.” She pulled down the visor mirror, but flipped it quickly back into place after catching her reflection. “I look like hell.”
I thought about arguing with her for form’s sake, but didn’t. “So what? You’ve been through hell.”
“So what, indeed. I don’t give a damn if you don’t.”
I didn’t.
The downtown area proper isn’t very big, and my caffeine-hole of choice was only another three or four blocks towards the river. We reached it in as many minutes, delayed by construction and stoplights.
I parked down the street, across from a barbecue restaurant and a bus stop. “You hungry?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t think I could keep anything down right now.”
“All right. The ’Friar’s is right here.”
“What do you recommend?” she asked, stepping past a hippie with a guitar and reaching for the door.
“It’s all good. Get whatever you like. I’ll cover it.”
Inside the door, a gently frumpy man with a French accent discussed a game of chess with one of Karl’s friends. I didn’t know either of their names, but I nodded at them because I knew them on sight, and it would have been rude to ignore them. Dana meandered to the end of the counter with the ORDER HERE sign and kept her eyes on the menu board mounted on the wall behind the counter.
“Can I help you? Oh, hey, Eden.”
“Hey,” I returned. “Hook her up with whatever she wants. It’s on me, okay? I’ll be right back.”
I poked my head around the corner, checking out the back hall. The bathrooms, office, and roaster’s room were a series of closed doors on either side; and the narrow, two-person bistro tables were unoccupied except for a dark-haired guy working on a laptop. He didn’t glance up when I stepped into his field of view, and the muffin-sized headphones he wore implied that he wouldn’t bother us even if he noticed us.
I dropped my purse onto the table farthest to the back, and I shrugged out of my light button-up sweater, hanging it on the back of the chair.
When I rejoined Dana, she’d decided against anything fancy and requested the largest cup of black coffee available. The girl on duty had given her a latte mug and told her to help herself to the air pots on the counter.
“Just give me a to-go cup,” I said, thinking that their paper cups were larger than the mugs. I extracted enough dollar bills from my jeans pocket to cover everything. After paying, I dropped my change into a carafe labeled TIP JAR and pointed the back table out to Dana.
She topped off her mug of Yemen with a drop of half-and-half and followed my summoning finger, sinking into the little chair and putting her head down over the brew, facial-sauna style. I sat down across from her and began tearing yellow packets of sweetener.
For a while, we didn’t talk. I stirred my coffee with the skinny brown straw, and she sucked down an entire mug’s worth of beverage before I had time to get started on mine. She went back for another, and when she returned with this second cup, she felt awake enough for conversation.