As I was coming down the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away. Was that Edward Lear? Ogden Nash, maybe? Or perhaps it was the ever-prolific Anonymous. Regardless, the damn verse was running laps through my head again when I woke up at seven-thirty. Worse, I felt like I was hung over, which was really unfair; the wine had been nearly seven hours ago. My sleep had been dreamless, not unusual, but I didn’t feel the slightest bit rested. I felt more like I’d worked open-to-close two days before Christmas without stopping to pee.
The hell with this, I decided. I was spending way too much time worrying about what was repeatedly turning out to be nothing. I found my cell phone and dialed Michael’s number.
“This is Michael,” he answered on the first ring. He never checked caller ID.
His voice caressed my ears. “Where are you, handsome?” I asked without introduction.
“Not too far from you, looking for a place to park. Will I be too late for dinner?”
“Not at all,” I said, smiling. “I just woke up from a nap and I have tomorrow off.”
“Are you okay, Zo? Are you getting sick again?”
“Not you too. Please, not you too. I am not sick.” A sneeze snuck up on me before I could suppress it. It was loud. “Okay, maybe the stress of seeing someone that wasn’t there when I wasn’t sick is making me sick again, but I remain in heavy denial. Anyway, I have pesto in the freezer that can be tossed with linguine. Come on over.”
“Sounds great. I missed you last night. Want me to pick up a bottle of wine?”
“No wine for me tonight, hon.” I said with regret. Some more of that Australian white would have been nice with the garlic and basil and cheese. “I am remaining in control of my dubious senses.” I changed the subject before he could reply. “I missed you too. See you soon.”
That felt good. Making plans, moving on to relevant things, re-establishing some sort of routine. Betteredge would be proud. Maybe a vacation would be a good idea, I considered. I’d ask Michael about it at dinner. Maybe we could go skiing for a week. Or go to New York, he’d never been there. I could show him the Strand bookstore with its miles of books. Or there was always someplace seriously warm like the Virgin Islands. I couldn’t remember last time I’d been to a real beach. I’d grown up with the occasional treat to Lake Michigan, but I much preferred salt water.
The pesto was in a plastic bag. I removed it from the freezer, and placed it in the sink under cold running water. A few minutes of that would thaw it enough to heat it to room temperature. Another case of me not using the microwave. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it, though. Or replace it. I’d had it for years and it did get some use. Kind of like some of my late brother’s clothes still taking up space in my closet. Maybe there was a lesson here. Perhaps I shouldn’t be holding on to things so long. Perhaps I was thinking too much again.
I’d left the laptop on and in doing so drained the battery. I took this as a further sign to stop worrying. The universe seemed to be telling me to drop out, tune out, and turn on. Or something.
Today seemed full of necessary evils. Data entry. Housework. Admitting to myself I could have been wrong. On some character-building level, it was probably good for me. That’s what mom used to say if I had to slog through something I didn’t like, usually homework. It wasn’t always about homework. Sometimes it was something even more unpleasant like being nice to Melanie Fowler when I was six, even though Melanie had always been an absolute brat. She was also mean to animals. I didn’t see the reason for it then, but now I appreciated that it’s occasionally useful to be nice to the unpleasant. And well, if I didn’t have sufficient character, I certainly knew enough of them. That would have to do.
I didn’t see dust on the shelves, so I just ran round the apartment with the vacuum cleaner for a few minutes. After that, I found a caramel-colored angora sweater suitable for petting. It looked great with black jeans. I put water on to boil, then took a moment to touch up my makeup and wash the sleep out of my eyes. Taming my hair into a ponytail took another minute or two. Michael let himself in the door on the St. Philip side a few minutes later. He greeted me with a long kiss. The water boiled over. I treated it as a coincidence.
“Hi,” I said after we broke the lip lock.
“Hi yourself,” he said. “I brought dessert.”
“You did?” I led him into the kitchen where I tossed linguine in the water.
“Tonight’s special from Copeland’s Cheesecake factory. Praline caramel.”
“You picked that up before I called, didn’t you?” I kissed him again and made some other low affectionate noises. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He always smiled when he said it. “Yes, I did. I didn’t figure I’d be on time for dinner. Why do you have tomorrow off?”
“Feliz insisted.” I summed up the sighting of man who wasn’t there and how I was now a free woman until Thursday, whether I liked it or not.
“Well, I’m not going to argue with Feliz if it gives us some more time together.”
“It’s smarter not to argue with Feliz at all,” I pointed out.
“I won’t argue with that either.” He squeezed my shoulders. “I took the liberty of calling Jerry and telling him I’m coming in late tomorrow.”
“Good timing,” I replied. “Jerry’s been telling me I should take a vacation. Actually, he told me you should take me on a vacation. We can tell him we’re talking about it.” The thawed pesto went into a small pot over very low heat. I’d serve it at just barely room temperature.
That surprised him. “This is Jerry Ashe, one of your best friends and my boss, right? The one that promoted me from contractor to running his IT department last spring and has kept me working sixty hours a week ever since?”
“The same one,” I countered. “It surprised me, too.” I put the strainer in the sink for the pasta. Jerry could be a little complicated sometimes. Yes, he’d arranged for Michael and I to meet. On the other hand, and I knew he would never admit it, I sometimes thought he missed being the de facto most important male in my life. I hadn’t picked up on this, but Marie had and she told me. Marie understands men. Michael and I agreed to not confront Jerry about the jealousy, but rather let it die a natural death, which it finally seemed to be doing.
“So where do you want to go?” Michael’s question pulled me back from distraction.
“Anywhere with you.” A year ago, I wouldn’t have been comfortable saying something like that. Fortunately, Michael was a patient man. Back in Chicago, I’d lost my parents and my brother very close to each other when I was just out of college. A year later, my only really serious romantic relationship had ended with a bang. I caught him banging another woman. Not long after that, my journalism career ended with a whimper. It takes a while to recover from something that devastating. It takes a while to recover from any one of those things, really. On the brighter side, I hadn’t married Bobby McCabe. That would have been a huge mistake.
“I thought about skiing,” I said. “but I think I had enough of winter when I lived in Chicago. How do you feel about someplace with a beach and drinks with little paper umbrellas?”
“You can get those at Burt’s Tiki Lounge downtown.”
“What were you doing in that part of town?” It was an area most people preferred to go about armed. Preferably armed and dangerous.
“I was helping Jerry on one of his cases. Which meant sitting in the bar while he convinced a pimp that trying to find a certain underage girl was a really bad idea.”
Michael drained the pasta with great trepidation, while I threw a salad together. He wasn’t completely at home in a kitchen, but with a little encouragement, he was slowly learning some basics. Of course, living in New Orleans, one really didn’t have to know how to cook. If you knew where to look, you could find just about anything edible twenty-four seven. Admittedly, some of the places were downright frightening—I’d only heard stories about Burt’s--and the patronage didn’t all speak English, but I’d had some damn fine food in some holes in the wall after midnight that I knew I’d never find again.
My dining area was a small bistro set I’d found at an estate sale in the Garden District. While adorable and quite in character with the environment of the Quarter, it wasn’t on a balcony surrounded by lush palms, crepe myrtle, and night-blooming jasmine. It also wasn’t big enough for two full-sized plates, beverages, and a bowl of salad. We ate in the living room on my burgundy leather couch, with a candle on the coffee table.
“I like the idea of going someplace warm.” He said around a mouthful of pasta. Michael had grown up in San Francisco, not the warmest spot in the country, even at the height of summer.
“I like that idea too,” I replied. “One of those places with pink sand.” I ate another bite of linguini. “Is that Bermuda or the Bahamas?”
He gave me a kiss. “I’m not sure. I think there should also be a lot of room service. Any word on John Doe?”
“I thought I saw him in the bar last night.”
“You’re kidding. Up and around and everything?”
I nodded, and told him what happened, including hearing that his name was something like McCoy. Michael shook his head in amazement, but didn’t suggest I was hallucinating.
“So what’s next?” he asked. “Will you ask Jerry to check on him?”
“I’ve got someone else checking on missing persons, but I’m not expecting it to pan out. If I did see him, he was walking around and appeared to be okay.”
“Have you thought about taking out a personal ad?”
“For what? I’ve got you.”
He put his plate down and gathered me into his arms. “I would hope you’re not looking to replace me. But I know craigslist has a section for “Missed Connections.”
“Who’s Craig?” I finished my salad, narrowly missing dripping white wine vinegar on my angora.
“A guy in San Francisco who set up a website for people to connect. It’s free and lots of people use it. I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it before. It’s expanded all over the country.”
I hadn’t. While I wasn’t computer illiterate, Michael was light years ahead of me. I generally used the Internet for rare book auctions and email. Someone else updated the website for Bloody Murder. Research such as I’d done earlier about medication wasn’t typical. If I was looking for part-time help, I put a sign in the window.
“It can’t hurt, I suppose.” I put the dinner dishes in the kitchen while he went to the bedroom to fetch my laptop.
“It’s still charging, did you let the battery run all the way down?” He turned it on and booted it up.
“Yeah, I left it on when I took a nap,” I said sheepishly.
“It happens to everyone, and these batteries don’t have a long life to them. You might want to look into upgrading. Or maybe buying a new battery--I think your laptop is out of warranty. Sorry,” he said at my glazed look. “I’ll stop.”
“Thank you. I’m much more interested in your personal hardware, but we’ll get to that later. Show me this list.” His fingers flew across the keyboard.
I was impressed once I got used to the blue-on-white of craigslist.com. No ads, no pop-ups, no contests, just text and links in a relatively easy-to-read format once I got used to it. “How’s it supported with no ads?”
“The only thing he charges for are job listings—for the employers not the employees. I found a contracting job or two through it before I started working for Jerry. Here we are,” he clicked on Louisiana, followed by New Orleans and finally on a link under Personals that said, “Missed Connections,” and we read a few sample ads.
“Redhead with spiky hair at the Dungeon, We made out in the ladies’ room and you said you’d find me later. You’re so hot. It’s later. Find me. “
“Me: tall with shaven head, light blue mesh shirt and black leather pants. You: showing off your new back tattoo on Bourbon Street. It read something in Japanese, but not what you think it means. Call me for translation.”
“Hot guy wearing the St. Brigid’s cross. You still want to get kinky with sashimi?”
I took a moment to take that all in. “Well,” I said finally, “I suppose looking for a hallucination isn’t any weirder than some of these.”
“Exactly,” Michael said. “I know it’s a long shot, but if your guy doesn’t read this, someone he knows might. It certainly can’t hurt. Now, let’s get you set up.” The joys of loving a geek, especially when they’ve traded in the pocket protectors for other kinds of protection. He took care of the administrivia while I mentally composed. When I finished, the ad read:
Are you the real McCoy? Nice tattoo. If you were really at the Inn on Monday and waved at me, let me know you’re okay. Last time I checked, you didn’t have a pulse.
“Not a work of art,” I said, “but it will do. Thanks, honey.” He hit send.
“They’ll send an email to confirm.” The computer beeped. I verified the ad, and then I shut down the laptop.
“You’re welcome,” He said. “Now,” he kissed me intently causing my hormone levels to fluctuate, “you said something about my hardware, and I don’t think you mean my Smart Phone.”
I sent one of my hands traveling up his thigh. “Oh is that what’s in your pocket? Or are you just glad to see me?”
“I’m always glad to see you.”
I met his lips with mine eagerly. Whoever said familiarity breeds contempt had issues. I was still as crazy about and hot for Michael as I had been the first time he laid a hand on me. That had been on our first date when he lifted me into a horse-drawn carriage. I’d been on crutches at the time; it was expedient. Uh-huh. And damn romantic.
So was his gently rubbing my back with one hand and teasing my front with the other. The angora was definitely a good idea. If I could, I’d be purring. Instead I concentrated on kissing him and unbuttoning his slate blue shirt at the same time. Multitasking, an important skill in this fast-paced world we live in.
“You smell nice,” he whispered in my ear, then licked my neck down to the vee of the sweater. “Very nice.” He nibbled at the top of my scant cleavage while I murmured approval. My hands were busy at his belt.
“You know what I want?” I asked and plunged a hand into his shorts. I was pleased to hear him gasp as I stroked him.
“What?”
“Take me into the bedroom and I’ll show you.”
He picked me up and carried me down the short hallway.