Death at the door, p.16
Death at the Door, page 16
The funny thing was I didn’t have a colander or a big pot. Cordelia’s kitchen had been bare bones. Despite her new crusade to teach me to cook, I didn’t think she did much cooking herself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “When I moved in, the super said that there was no next of kin and rented the apartment to me as is. I kept the furniture, and the books and things, but I got rid of everything I couldn’t use.”
“Got rid of,” he repeated, his voice strained.
“I gave it away to charity. Like her clothes and stuff,” I explained. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but I had no use for clothes that didn’t fit me and a shoebox of documents and old photos a dead woman had in her closet. Now that I knew Cordelia was still around, at least on some level, and her brother was right here in my kitchen, I felt guilty about tossing anything, but there was nothing I could do about that now. “She has a locker in the basement that I haven’t gotten around to cleaning out yet,” I told him. “You’re welcome to anything down there.”
“Thanks,” he said tersely. “I appreciate that.”
He chopped the steaming potatoes before returning them to the pot on the stove. He emptied the rest of the heavy cream into the pot, and then tossed the empty container into the trash. From what little I remembered about my drunken conversation with Cordelia, her brother was essentially a man-child incapable of taking care of himself, but he seemed to know what he was doing in the kitchen.
Maybe Cordelia didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. What if Ian wasn’t a chronic screwup?
There was a knock on the door.
“Get that, will ya?” Ian said.
“Uh, my apartment, remember?” I reminded him. I opened the door. Tosh was standing in the hall, holding a frozen store-bought pie.
“Am I early?” he asked.
“Right on time, buddy!” Ian yelled from the kitchen.
“Hey, Ruby,” Tosh said, handing me the pie. “Thanks for the invite.”
I stepped back and he followed me inside. “Yeah, sure,” I agreed. “Have a seat. Be right with you.” He headed for the loveseat. I headed for the kitchen. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re grocery shopping? Making dinner? Inviting my neighbor over? What’s next, you’re gonna move in?”
“If you insist,” Ian said with a grin. “Fair warning, though, I’m a blanket hog.” He saw the shocked expression on my face and backpedaled. “Just kidding. Great place you got here, but your kitchen is woefully understocked. Makes sense. My dad didn’t cook, so it was always Cordelia’s job growing up. Once she was out on her own, she couldn’t be bothered.”
“Oh really?” I asked. I didn’t know how much I could admit that I already knew without arousing Ian’s suspicions. I’d almost blown it with the comment about his absent mother. I’d guessed that Cordelia didn’t cook much based on the state of her kitchen, but I hadn’t known why until now.
“Anyway, Tosh here was more than happy to lend a bit of cookware for the promise of a hot meal. Isn’t that right?”
“Yup,” Tosh said from the loveseat.
“How did you two meet?” I asked.
Before Tosh could say anything, Ian answered, “I had my arms full with the groceries, and my man Tosh here gave me a hand.”
“Is that so?” I asked, studying Ian. I set the pie down on the counter. “Can I get you something to drink?” I asked Tosh.
“I’m good.”
“Go entertain our guest, Ruby,” Ian said, shooing me out of the kitchen. “Dinner should be ready in a few.”
I didn’t like the idea of Ian making himself at home in my kitchen, or him inviting people over to my apartment. But I did love the smells coming out of my kitchen, and I wanted to spend more time with Tosh. Throwing them both out at this point seemed needless and, frankly, rude. So instead of making a scene with Ian, I settled onto the loveseat next to Tosh.
“Your roomie’s a hoot,” Tosh said.
“Oh, he’s not my roomie.”
“He’s not? Then who is he?”
“He’s my dead roommate’s brother” was what almost came out of my mouth, but I stopped myself just in time. “He’s just Ian,” I said with a shrug instead. “How are you settling in?” I asked to change the subject.
“It’s a lot colder than I’m used to in SoCal,” he replied.
I barked out a laugh, which Ian echoed from the kitchen.
“What? What’s so funny?” Tosh asked.
“I don’t know how to break this to you, but this is warm. Just wait until winter,” I cautioned him.
“Oh, I’m looking forward to it!” He leaned toward me. “I’ve never seen snow in real life. Can you imagine? Do you think it might snow this winter?”
“Count on it,” Ian said.
Tosh looked pleased. “I know it sounds silly, but I can’t wait for my first snowball fight.”
“I can’t remember the last time I got into a snowball fight,” I admitted. “It’s been ages.”
“My sister and I used to have wicked snowball fights,” Ian said.
I had a hard time imagining Cordelia getting into a snowball fight, but then again, I hadn’t known her when she was alive, much less when she was a kid. There was something about the word “ghost” that made me think of old Victorian ladies in high-necked dresses, not tank tops and sweatpants. Before I met Cordelia, I imagined ghosts with enormous bouffant hairdos, not messy buns. And for some odd reason, whenever I pictured a ghost in my head, they were always in black and white.
“What’s so funny?” Ian asked.
I realized that while I was grinning at the thought of how many ways Cordelia did not fit the ghost stereotype, he’d come over with two plates heaped with food. “Nothing. That smells delicious.”
“Hopefully it tastes as good as it smells then,” Ian said, handing one plate to me and the other to Tosh. He went back to the kitchen to serve himself.
When I settled my plate on my lap, I shifted in my seat and the USB drive in my pocket dug into my thigh. I’d very nearly forgotten all about it in my excitement over finding Marty’s pill bottle. “Question for you,” I said, turning to face Tosh.
“I’m an open book,” he assured me.
“You work with computers. If you found a USB drive, but when you opened it up, it was gibberish, is there a way to recover it?” I asked.
“Well, first off, if I found a USB drive, the absolute last thing I’d do is put it in my computer.”
“Really?” I asked. The lump in my pocket felt like a secret begging to be cracked, but now I was starting to worry because I’d done exactly that. I’d stuck it in my work computer without a second thought. “Why not?”
“Those things can be riddled with viruses. You might as well write your password down on a Post-it note.”
I blushed. I’d done that before. I knew my generation had a reputation for being tech savvy, but in my house, we didn’t have a lot of money for high-end electronics, so sometimes I was behind the curve. “What if you opened it anyway, and all the files were random letters?” I asked.
“Two possibilities. The data’s corrupt, or the drive’s encrypted.”
“Corrupt” sounded about right, given Cordelia’s track record with electronics.
“My money’s on encrypted,” Ian said, returning with his own plate.
“If it’s not damaged, how would you unencrypt it?” I asked, scootching over to make room for Tosh next to me. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Cordelia hadn’t scrambled its innards like an egg, but if the drive was encrypted, at least I stood a chance at recovering the data.
“You can’t. That’s the whole point of encryption,” Tosh said with a shrug. “Why do you ask?”
“A ghost gave me a dead drug dealer’s memory stick, which might be a clue to their murder, but I can’t open it,” I said aloud, without thinking.
CHAPTER TWENTY
RUBY
“Excuse me?” Tosh asked.
Why had I said that? I knew better than to mention Cordelia in front of her brother. And to claim to get a clue to solve a murder involving drugs from a ghost? What was I thinking?
“Ha ha.” I forced myself to laugh. “Just kidding. Obviously.”
My life had become so ridiculous that I didn’t even realize what I was saying sounded unhinged until it was already out of my mouth. Plus, dinner was delicious and I was sandwiched between two cute guys I barely knew. I wasn’t thinking straight. Call it the macaroni and cheese defense.
“Someone’s been reading too many mysteries,” Ian said, gesturing at the bookshelf with his fork, even though the shelves were mostly lined with romances, not mysteries.
“Or sci-fi,” Tosh added.
“You two don’t have any sense of humor.” People wouldn’t believe me that I was living with a mystery-solving ghost even if I told them, but it was downright reckless of me to let anything slip. “But seriously, my mom, she, uh, found a USB drive in my sister’s room. It was, um, hidden. Mom got curious and tried to see what was on it, but she can’t read the files. Now she’s more determined than ever to find out what’s on it, and since I work at a tech company, I told her I’d ask one of my smart friends.”
I glanced over at Tosh first, then at Ian. They both looked skeptical.
“Your mom needs to be having this conversation with your sister instead of you,” Tosh suggested.
“Or she could put it back and pretend she never found it,” Ian offered.
“But if she really wanted to see what’s on the drive?” I asked.
Tosh sighed. “She can try opening it on your sister’s laptop. But even if the software to decrypt the files is installed there, she’ll need a PIN.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll let her know.” I dug into my macaroni and cheese with gusto, making a show of how good it was, hoping Ian and Tosh would forget about my odd outburst and focus on dinner instead. “This is delicious.”
“It is,” Tosh agreed. “I don’t think I’ve ever had macaroni and cheese this good before. Where’d you learn to cook like this?”
“Prison,” Ian said.
I blinked at him. On one hand, I was grateful that he’d brought up the subject, because Tosh would forget about my USB drive questions entirely, but on the other hand, I was surprised Ian was so casual about revealing his checkered past at dinner.
Tosh almost choked on his bite of macaroni. “Is that, um, what you do, then?” he asked. “You’re a chef at a prison?”
“Oh no, nothing like that,” Ian said, scooping up a forkful of the roasted carrots—which were amazing by the way. The dish was mostly dairy and sugar, but there were carrots, too, so technically it counted as a vegetable dish. “While I was incarcerated, I bribed a guard to get me on kitchen duty. It beat sweating my ass off in the laundry and, obviously, they wouldn’t let me anywhere near the motor pool.”
“Obviously,” Tosh said, his eyes growing to the size of quarters. Even though I was sitting between them, he wiggled closer to the armrest, putting more distance between Ian and himself.
“It makes no sense, right? I mean, I know more about cars than half the so-called mechanics, but they wouldn’t let me work in the garage. And yet, when they lose the keys to the transport bus, who do they call to hot-wire it?” He pointed at himself with one thumb. “This guy.”
“Well, I for one am glad you spent your time learning to cook instead of changing oil,” I said, trying to sound like Ian’s criminal history was no big deal. “Because this is really good. I would have never thought to use heavy cream in the mashed potatoes instead of milk.”
“The secret to good mashed potatoes is first, you buy a box of the instant potato flakes. Then you throw that in the trash and use actual potatoes instead.”
Ian laughed at his own joke. I laughed along. Tosh looked like he was thinking of a way to escape. I didn’t blame him. I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that Ian had a criminal record, too.
“So Tosh, what do you do for work?” Ian asked, changing the subject.
Tosh chewed and forced himself to swallow. “I’m a data analyst.”
“You work at CloudIndus, right?” I asked. I hadn’t asked him what he actually did for a living the last time he’d come over. I was too busy being awkward.
“Yup. And you work at TrendCelerate. You’re our biggest competition,” Tosh said.
“So why were our two companies meeting this week?”
I’d stuck my foot in my mouth about the USB drive, Ian had narrowly avoided a land mine with his prison revelation, and now it was Tosh’s turn in the hot seat. “You should ask your boss at TrendCelerate,” he stammered.
“Come on, dude, don’t be like that,” Ian said. “Just answer the lady.”
“I can’t. I signed an NDA,” Tosh said, as his ears turned bright red.
“That’s okay,” I jumped in to take the pressure off of Tosh. “I’m sure I can find out at work tomorrow. What’s with the name CloudIndus anyway? Sounds like a Pokémon. Your boss must be a huge Pokémon fan.”
Tosh looked confused. “Not that I know of.”
“I loved the cards when I was a kid,” Ian said.
“My sisters and I used to play in our old neighborhood in Baltimore,” I told them.
“Do you still have your cards?” Ian asked.
I shook my head. “We only ever played on our phones.”
“You can play Pokémon on your phone?” Ian asked.
How long, exactly, had he been in prison? Cordelia had made it sound like it had been a short stint, but then again, I’d been drinking at the time and our conversation was a little fuzzy. I couldn’t have been much more than thirteen or fourteen when the Pokémon game came out. That made me realize two things very clearly. Ian had been in and out of jail since I was in eighth grade, and he was older than I’d originally thought.
Ian let out a barking laugh, breaking the awkward silence. “Of course I know what the Pokémon phone game is. I’m just pulling your leg.” He stood, and suddenly it felt like there was too much room on the loveseat. “Anyone else want seconds?”
I looked down at my plate. I’d devoured my meal, even the carrot dish. My mother would be so proud. She had to force me to eat my veggies. I guess she should have tried drowning them in butter and brown sugar. “I’m good. I couldn’t eat another bite.”
“Me too,” Tosh said. “In fact, I should get going.”
“Nonsense,” Ian said, collecting our empty plates. “The pie should be almost ready. You can’t leave without having a slice of the pie you brought.” He took our plates back to the kitchen.
As soon as Ian turned on the sink to rinse them, Tosh leaned his head toward mine and lowered his voice. “He was kidding, right? About prison? Like you were joking about the USB drive belonging to a dead guy?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” It was getting hard to remember who had told me what, or what I’d told them. It would be easier to keep my stories straight if I didn’t have to lie all the time, but also, I couldn’t go around telling everyone I had a ghost, either, not even if they thought it was some sort of a weird joke.
“There’s always room for pie,” Ian said as he returned with three small plates, each with an enormous slice of pie with a scoop of rapidly melting ice cream on top.
“What’d you do, cut the pie into fourths?” I asked him. Not that I was complaining. I was full, but the pie smelled delicious. I was hoping that he’d left enough that I could have the rest for breakfast in the morning.
“Eat up,” Ian said, instead of answering me. I noticed that about him. He was very good at avoiding answering questions.
“Seriously, thanks for dinner, but I’m full.” Tosh put his plate on the coffee table and stood up. “Walk me to the door?” he asked me.
“Of course.” I put my pie down, too. “Don’t you dare touch mine,” I warned Ian playfully. Like Tosh, I was full, but not so full that I wanted Ian to eat my share.
“Thanks for coming over tonight, and for loaning us your dishware,” I told Tosh as we walked toward the door. “I’ll wash it all and return them tomorrow.”
“Perfect.” He stepped out into the hall and held out his hand.
I took it awkwardly, and he pulled me into the hall, closing the door behind me.
“Are you okay being alone with him?” he asked.
“Who, Ian? Yeah, he’s fine.” Cordelia had called him harmless, and I trusted her. She hadn’t led me astray yet.
Although, I wasn’t certain Cordelia was around. I hadn’t felt her presence all through dinner. Normally, there was something. A tingle in the air like a thunderstorm was approaching. Lights flickering. Shadows moving. I knew it was irrational and a symptom of growing up in a big household and now living on my own for the first time in my life, but I missed her when she wasn’t around.
“If you need anything, anything at all, I’m right across the hall,” he told me.
I smiled. I’d been in Boston for almost four months without making a single friend, but now, Melissa invited me to her birthday party and Tosh had come over for his second dinner in my apartment this week. My social life was looking up.
“I appreciate that. And we’ll do this again sometime?”
“Definitely.” He squeezed my hand. “Just you and me next time?”
“Sounds like a date,” I told him.
I turned to let myself back in my apartment, but when Tosh pulled the door closed, he’d inadvertently activated the automatic lock. My key was inside. I was locked out of my own apartment.
If Cordelia had been with me, getting locked out of my apartment would have been no big deal. She could easily pass through doors and open them from the inside for me, but she was off who-knows-where doing who-knows-what. Instead of relying on Cordelia, I had to knock. On my own door.
