Death at the door, p.12
Death at the Door, page 12
“Hello?” Ruby’s voice dropped so low I could hardly hear it through the static. “Cordelia?” she whispered.
I hit the buzzer twice in rapid succession. One knock for “no,” two knocks for “yes,” right? Or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter. As far as Ruby knew, I was the only ghost on the block. She had to assume it was me, which meant two buzzes for yes.
“I have company right now,” she said, in a normal voice. Was Ian standing over her shoulder? Or was he still on the floor, nursing his beverage and feeling sorry for himself, oblivious to the world?
Two quick buzzes. “Yeah, I know you have company, silly.”
“Would you like to talk to them?” she asked.
One long, loud buzz. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
Two short buzzes. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“I can tell them to—”
I interrupted her with a long buzz.
“I was going to say I could ask them to leave.” Ruby sounded irritated. I didn’t blame her. The buzzer was annoying. Which is why I’d used it to torture her in the first place. Not that I would do that now. I mean, yes, sure, I was using it now, but not to be mean. This was an emergency.
Two buzzes.
“You really want them to leave?” she asked, sounding perplexed.
How to explain a lifetime of sibling dynamics using only “yes” and “no”? If I could talk to her, I would start with, “Ian is about my favorite person on the planet but also, he’s a leech. He’s not dangerous, but he’s not harmless, either. I wish I could say that my brother was a sweet kid who grew up to become a well-adjusted contributing member of society, but he was a shit kid then and he’s a shit adult now. I hope you have eyes on your wallet because I can guarantee that he does.”
But the best I could do was two short buzzes.
“Yeah, okay then.”
I concentrated on the inside of my apartment, blinked, and … nothing happened.
Nothing was fair in life, but less than nothing was fair in the afterlife. A second ago, I was able to transport myself to the front stoop of the building without even trying. I wanted to be outside and poof, I was outside. The reverse should work just as effortlessly, especially considering I’d just recharged. But whatever cosmic joke I was stuck in had other ideas.
“Whatever,” I grumbled to myself. In the back of my head, I knew that if I really wanted to, I could have popped back into the apartment because the only thing keeping me from defying the laws of the universe was, well, me. Which meant that in my heart of hearts, I didn’t want to be back in my apartment.
After a lifetime of trying, and failing, to protect him, I didn’t want to see my brother’s face when Ruby kicked him to the curb. If it felt like I was choosing her over him, it was because I was. I’d never chosen anyone over my brother before, not even myself. And look how that had turned out. It was too late for me to fix everything that was broken, but I had to start somewhere.
I slipped through the closed front door of the apartment building. Next came the long trek up to the fourth floor. These stairs had been the bane of my existence when I was alive. Now, they were merely an annoyance, especially when I’d rather teleport. But despite holding myself back from taking the quick way back into the apartment, I knew I needed to hurry. It wasn’t a good idea to leave Ian alone with Ruby.
He wouldn’t hurt her, not physically at least. Ian didn’t have a mean bone in his entire body. When he got into a fight, which was often, it was because he felt like he had no other choice. It was his go-to defense mechanism. He’d no sooner hit a woman than he’d … well, I wasn’t sure what. But he would never hit a woman, at least not one who hadn’t hit him first.
But he could hurt her in other ways, even if he didn’t intend to. He could memorize her credit card numbers and order up a dozen televisions to turn around and sell on the black market. He could swipe her phone and scam someone into sending him a small fortune in gift cards. He could apply for loans with her social security number with zero intention of ever paying them back. Or worst of all, he could promise her that he’d put his nonsense behind him and he was going to be there for her from now on out, only to get pinched boosting a car a few hours later.
It was never a surprise when Ian let me down. Everyone did, eventually.
He’d pulled all those scams, and more, on me. Ruby was naïve, but when it came to my brother, I was always the biggest sucker in the room. At that thought, I scrambled up the rest of the stairs and hurried down the hall. I’d never been able to protect myself from Ian’s sticky fingers, but I could still keep an eye on him as long as he was in our apartment.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RUBY
After Ian left, I locked all the locks, even the chain at the top. If Ian did come back, he wasn’t getting inside without making an awful lot of noise.
Then, I turned to Cordelia. Or, rather, I turned toward where I assumed she was. Sometimes I could feel it when she was in the room with me—although that might have been wishful thinking—but I could never pinpoint her precise location. I picked something to focus on, usually the refrigerator because that’s where the poetry magnets were, and hoped for the best.
“Why were you so eager for me to get rid of him?” I waited a beat for an answer that never came. “He’s your brother, Cordelia. I’d think you’d be happy to see him. If one of my sisters dropped by unannounced, I’d be ecstatic.”
Well, not unannounced. As much as I loved my sisters, and missed them, it was nice to have my own place for the first time in my life, even if everyone in my family was four hundred miles away. Even if I shared it with a ghost. In any event, I would hope that they would at least text me before heading out—giving me eight hours to straighten up first.
There was a drop in temperature in the apartment. During the winter, that usually meant that the heater was on the fritz. Again. But now that the weather was warm, sudden cold spots usually meant that Cordelia was mad. Or sad. Or cranky. It was the ghostly equivalent of a very aggressive eyeroll and was completely open to interpretation.
“Got nothing to say now?” That was a rhetorical question. Cordelia never had anything to say. Or if she did, I couldn’t hear her. “That buzzer trick was…”
My voice trailed off. I knew she hadn’t meant anything by it, but when I first moved in, Cordelia was so desperate to communicate that she’d rung the door buzzer more or less constantly, day and night, trying to get my attention. If I ever heard that high-pitched buzz again, it would be too soon.
Of course I couldn’t tell her that. I wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings, especially when she’d been nothing but kind to me.
“… cute.” I finished my thought, but the word fell flat. “Although, I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t use the buzzer at all, if that’s okay with you.”
I really hoped that Cordelia couldn’t read my thoughts. She’d be terribly upset if she knew how much the sound of that door buzzer drove me up the wall. Seriously, I’d almost moved out because of that constant noise, twenty-four seven. It had been that bad. Then, Cordelia and I found another, better way to communicate, and the buzzing finally stopped.
“Ian was devastated when I told him,” I said. I perched on the arm of the loveseat so I could continue to face the refrigerator. “I’m not sure how much you heard. How is it that he didn’t know you were dead?”
There was no answer, not that I was expecting one.
“He freaked out. Can’t say I blame him. If one of my sisters, well, you know…” My voice trailed off. There were some things I didn’t want to ever think about, much less say out loud. Anything bad happening to my sisters was at the top of that list. “If he knew you were a ghost, he might feel better.”
no
nothing
KNOT ever
NONE
“Yeah, I got that,” I told her, although I didn’t understand. Why was she so adamant? I knew better than to go around blabbing that I had a ghost. They’d lock me up faster than I could say, “Just kidding!”
I hadn’t told my mom or my sisters, and I wasn’t in the habit of keeping secrets from them. Not big ones, at least. Likewise, I’d kept my mouth shut around my friends back home and everyone at work. But this was different. This was her brother.
“Come on, Cordelia, if you’d let me talk to him, explain everything, he could find some solace.”
I stared at the refrigerator, willing the magnets to move. Nothing happened. “You are the most stubborn ghost I’ve ever met,” I told her. Sure, she was the only ghost I’d ever met, but she knew what I meant.
Even though I could still feel a heaviness in the atmosphere that I’d come to associate with Cordelia being nearby, there was no response, not even so much as another fluctuation in the temperature.
“Fine. Have it your way.” I got up and moved toward the refrigerator. The apartment was small enough that the kitchen was only separated from the living room by a few steps, but I didn’t mind. It was plenty big enough for just me. Well, me and Cordelia, but she didn’t take up much space.
I cleared the magnets, letting them mix in with the other words that could be used to form endless combinations. Then I opened the door and looked inside. I needed to go grocery shopping again soon. After hurling the mustard at Ian when I thought he was an intruder, instead of putting it back on the shelf, I’d thrown it in the trash. I wasn’t in the habit of tossing out perfectly good food—my mother had raised me better than that—but I had no idea how old it was, since like all of the furniture, it had come with the apartment. I rarely ever used mustard. I wouldn’t miss it. I was, however, upset that the last of the cheesecake was gone.
If he was telling the truth and Cordelia had given her brother a key, why hadn’t she warned me? Who else had a key to my apartment? I needed to get the locks changed, ASAP. Cordelia’s brother or not, I didn’t like the idea of strange men having keys to come and go as they pleased.
I thought of the TrendCelerate bathroom key that Marty had borrowed and not brought back. Having a locked door hadn’t helped him any. He still ended up dead on the tile floor. The more I thought about it, the more his death and Cordelia’s had in common.
When I moved into the apartment, it was exactly like Cordelia had left it, from the clothes in the closet to the rancid trash in the garbage cans that hadn’t been emptied in weeks. There were liquor bottles, both empty and full, but there were no pills laying around. From my previous snooping—I mean considerate review of Cordelia’s medical files to helpfully alert her doctor and dentist to remove any upcoming appointments—I knew that she didn’t have any medications prescribed to her.
Cordelia had been a drunk, and there was evidence of that everywhere I looked. But I hadn’t found a single pill stronger than Advil. If she’d had an empty pill container of whatever she’d taken next to her when she died, the paramedics might have taken it as evidence when they wheeled her body out. But there should be pill bottles around the apartment, not just Jack Daniel’s bottles. There’d been no evidence that she took drugs regularly, but maybe I’d overlooked the obvious since, by her own admission, she’d bought from Marty in the past.
Marty’s sister swore he didn’t use hard drugs. According to her, he didn’t sell anything you couldn’t otherwise get with a prescription. He wasn’t a drug dealer, in her mind, just a delivery guy. Which tracked, because Marty really was a delivery guy. He just happened to deliver unprescribed drugs along with spuckies.
“Marty’s sister, Hazel, has to know more than she told us,” I said aloud. If Cordelia was confused by the sudden change in topic, she didn’t give me any sign. “She swore Marty was a good guy trying to support her and the kids. The pay at Beantown Deli wasn’t bad, not if he got to keep the tips plus some kind of hourly wage, or a cut of the delivery fee. But he had an awful lot of mouths to feed. So who had anything to gain from his death?”
MOON Y
Cordelia had learned to be creative with the magnetic poetry. When the word she needed wasn’t available, she’d make one. I’d gotten better at figuring out what she meant, but this one was easy because she’d used it before.
“Money, exactly. Follow the money,” I agreed. “Hazel seemed sincerely distraught over her brother’s death. Even if he left a little insurance, considering how hard he worked, he’s worth more to her alive. Hazel would have to be completely heartless to kill her own brother and orphan his child for a payout—no matter how large.”
Growing up, I’d threatened to kill my sisters a time or two, and they’d said the same about me. We never really meant it, though. It was always some silly little squabble easily forgotten. There wasn’t enough money in the world to tempt me to actually hurt either of them. But then again, I might have been broke, but I wasn’t desperate and I didn’t have anyone relying on me.
“I doubt Marty had insurance, at least not a lot of it.” I thought back to my first day at TrendCelerate. The benefits package had a life insurance option. I selected the default because it was no cost to me. But Marty had a kid, and a sister and nephew he supported. He would have selected a higher amount. But all of that was assuming that Beantown offered benefits to their delivery guy and that he could afford the premiums.
For all I knew, they treated Marty like an independent contractor so they didn’t have to put him on the payroll. If so, they deserved to have their name dragged through the mud if anyone found out that Marty used his delivery job as a cover for dealing drugs. Or they already knew and killed him to get rid of him.
“That’s silly. If they wanted him gone so badly, they would have fired him,” I said to myself.
?
The single question mark appearing on the refrigerator reminded me that Cordelia was just as invested as I was in finding Marty’s killer, but we weren’t always on the same wavelength.
“Sorry. Never mind. Not important,” I said, beginning to pace as the wheels in my head turned. “Do we know where Marty got the drugs he was selling? I’ve got a friend who sold drugs for a hot minute back before a month in juvie scared him straight. The guys he ran with were downright ruthless. If Marty’s supplier had something to do with his death, I’m not sure we should get involved.”
YOU THINK?
I had to laugh. “That might be the most coherent sentence you’ve ever made,” I told Cordelia.
As charming as the magnetic poetry trick was, there were some times it wasn’t sufficient. I headed for the bookshelf. I had to stand on my tippy-toes to reach the book I wanted, which was on the top shelf. I managed to wiggle my fingers under it, and several books moved at once. A stack of four hardcover books slid off the shelf and I caught them. They were classics. Dickens. Austen. Christie. Shelley. They were nothing like the other books in Cordelia’s collection, which were mostly contemporary paperbacks.
Another thing set them apart from the other books. The four books had been cleverly glued together and then hollowed out, making the perfect hiding space, camouflaged among the rest of Cordelia’s extensive home library.
I’d found it purely by accident one day. When I tried to open one, I discovered their secret. Nestled inside the hollowed-out books were four tiny airplane-size bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I assumed that this was her emergency stash. And considering that this was an emergency, I felt no shame in dipping into her supply, especially since I wasn’t old enough to walk down to the liquor store and legally buy my own bottles.
I took three of the bottles and lined them up on a lower shelf before shimmying the hollowed-out books back into place. “Bottoms up,” I said to myself. I unscrewed one of the lids and tried to down the bottle. Instead, I sputtered as it burned my throat. I forced myself to swallow as much as I could. “This had better be worth it.” I pinched my nose and finished the tiny bottle.
“One down.” I removed the lid of the next bottle and braced myself. I closed my eyes and chugged. When I opened my eyes, where a second ago there had only been an empty apartment, there was now a woman standing in front of me.
I knew from reading her obituary that Cordelia was in her forties, but those must have been a hard forty years because this woman looked older. She had no makeup on and obviously hadn’t moisturized enough when she was alive.
She was tall, taller than me, but most people were. She had red hair worn in a messy bun. She was pale, but not so much so that she would stick out in Boston where everyone was pale after the long winter.
“Cordelia Graves,” I said. I felt a drop of liquid on the corner of my mouth and caught it with my thumb. I sucked at the drop of Jack. It didn’t taste so bad this time. My taste buds were numb from the alcohol. “Nice to see you.”
She grinned at me, and her face lit up. “Hiya, Ruby Young. Nice to be seen.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CORDELIA
“I thought you swore off the booze,” I teased Ruby. “‘Never again.’ Those were your exact words.”
When I first discovered that I could hold actual, bidirectional conversations with the living as long as they were drunk enough, I’d tricked Ruby into shotgunning a bottle of vodka. We had the best time. It was like the perfect girls’ night out, minus the hair braiding. She could see me and hear me, but she couldn’t touch me. Which was a real shame, because I seriously needed to brush my hair.
Then she woke up the next morning with the hangover from hell and zero recollection of our time together. Understandable. I’d had a few mornings like that, myself. And like Ruby, I’d sworn off alcohol more times than I could count. It never lasted. Ruby, on the other hand, had been serious.
“You’re a bad influence on me, Cordelia Graves,” she said, trying—and failing—to keep a straight face before dissolving into giggles. That’s my Ruby. She’s a lightweight.
