Sunshine on my face and a slight feeling of déjà vu woke me up. I was not where I thought I was supposed to be. At least this time I was in familiar surroundings, even if I wasn’t in my own bed. The sheets and comforter were flannel, the latter in a black watch tartan on one side. The other side, as well as the sheets tangled around my legs, was an off-white. Or maybe it was cream or ecru. How did we get so many words for one color? Marie could tell the difference. She also knew the difference between coral and salmon, which had always eluded me. I decided not to think about taupe. I had never been able to understand exactly what color taupe was. A sapphire blue blanket added an extra layer of warmth. I’d been grateful for it when I went to sleep; now I was hot.
No, I was cold. And a little bit hungry. Make that nauseous. Damn it. I really wanted to be home where I could make chicken soup. I also knew I wouldn’t get a lot of rest if I went home; so staying here wasn’t a bad idea. For now. The clock said one-thirty, but it was probably closer to one—Michael kept his clocks fast. I padded to the kitchen on bare feet and inspected the larder. Tea. He had green tea, tea with vitamin C, and something called Gypsy Cold Care. Cold, flu. Close enough. It sounded like it might help. It smelled like eucalyptus. I filled the teakettle that lived on his stove and while the water heated up, I found a clean mug. There was sugar in cabinet, but I didn’t see any honey. Pity. That would have been good for my throat. Dad had always liked honey in his tea.
No soup in the other cupboards. Heck, not very much food in the cupboards full stop. Ingredients out of which to make food were significant in their absence. I checked the freezer and had better luck. Well, better luck if I wanted microwaveable frozen food. Hot Pockets--the ultimate bachelor food, Stouffer’s frozen entrees. Fettuccine Alfredo with chicken and broccoli, orange chicken, and Yankee pot roast, which I pretty sure could not be legally sold south of the Mason-Dixon line. What I really wanted was soup and crackers. And ginger ale. I checked the fridge. He did have a nearly full two-liter bottle of ginger ale. That and the tea would do for now.
Leaving the tea to steep, I sat on the black leather couch and sipped a glass of ginger ale over ice. The bubbles tickled my nose, but I was still finding it hard to breathe. That made it time to try the tea. It was, as I suspected, heavy on the eucalyptus, which penetrated my sinuses, thank God. I’d gone from sneezy to stuffy in the last half an hour. What to do with myself now?
Go back to bed? It was certainly an option. There was nothing that demanded my attention. I felt like hell, but I wasn’t really tired at the moment. Groggy, sure, but Nyquil will do that to a woman, even after a hearty breakfast of a formerly frozen waffle. I sipped some more tea and did a full-body assessment. My sinuses hurt, but I was in a lot better shape than the day before. As long as I didn’t move, I felt almost human. Almost.
I found the phone and called Michael, who was away from his phone. “Hi honey, I just woke up. Feeling a lot better, except for the flu coming back part. I’m going to go back to bed, I think. Thanks for taking care of me. Love you.” I tried Marie next, and she was actually in her office. She picked up on the first ring.
“Girl, what have I told you about going off with strangers?”
“Make sure you’re with me so you don’t miss out on the fun,” I recited as if in grade school. “You were busy yesterday, remember?”
“That was at lunchtime. If you’d told me you were going to crash the guy’s funeral in the afternoon, I would have made time for it. Now tell me everything that happened. Every detail.” I couldn’t tell if she was more concerned for my health or piqued at missing the fun. I suspected a combination of both.
“I did not,” I said calmly, “crash the guy’s funeral. He has a name, by the way, Ian MacKay. I just showed up.”
“That’s what crashing means. I know; I’ve done enough of it.”
“It’s not like it was by invitation only,” I retorted. “It was in the paper. The interment was private, but anyone could have going to the funeral. I was right, Marie. It was the guy I saw at the bar on Monday. His funeral. The obituary said he was killed on Sunday night, but he’s alive, and there’s something really weird going on around here.” I sneezed.
“God bless you. The only thing weird is you seeing people that aren’t there. The guy wasn’t in the bar. I even went back there yesterday and asked the bartender. Balding guy, around forty, named Maurice?” I heard the scratch of a lighter and a deep inhale. “He got snippy with me. With me! He told me he’d never seen the guy and wanted to know what was so all-fired interesting about him anyway. I told him he was your ex-husband and you wanted his ass for back child support.”
I laughed. “Leave it to you think of an ex-husband before anything else. Did he buy it?”
“I couldn’t tell. He really didn’t want to talk about it. Seriously Zo, your guy wasn’t there. I don’t know what you think you saw, but it could not have been a dead man. You’re talking like one of the psychics at the Voodoo Museum. You do not see dead people. They are not talking to you. Whatever you’re taking for the cold, let it wash out of your system before you have any more booze, okay?”
I decided not to mention the Nyquil. She used to do shots of it in college. In boarding school it was Listerine. “Marie, I’m at Michael’s, I’m going to stay here because he’s worried about me too. I promise I will be fine as soon as I get rid of the bloody flu.” And find out if Ian MacKay is really dead. “I have no intention of winding up in any more back alleys.”
“Well, if you do, make sure you had a good time first. I’ll see you Friday for the doctor’s appointment. No way are you getting out of that. Get some rest, okay?”
“I said I would,” I promised. I even meant it. “Love you.”
I hung up and didn’t call Jerry, hoping Michael had at least filled him in on my safe return. Before I talked to Jerry, I wanted corroborating evidence that I wasn’t, didn’t and hadn’t been seeing things. I had a feeling the blouse I’d asked him to get analyzed was going to get “lost” in the shuffle and never get to the lab technicians. Or if it did, it would be down so low on the priority list, it might has well have been misplaced. I needed something, anything that would get him to at least consider the idea that MacKay was not dead.
More tea, I decided. This time the stuff with the vitamin C. I eschewed more Nyquil, but found a couple more aspirin tablets. Aspirin didn’t cause hallucinations. Once those were painfully swallowed down my sore throat, I sat down at Michael’s computer. After a few minutes scrounging my memory for my password, I got to my webmail, which I almost never used. Nothing new from Dodson. I dug up MacKay’s obituary and sent a link to it to friend Nate with a note saying, “ask your cousin who did the autopsy.” If Ian was dead under unusual circumstances (and I still didn’t think he was), it would require an autopsy. I hoped knowing who could have faked an autopsy would get our friendly neighborhood reporter nosing around. Now for craigslist. There had been nothing from them in my email, but that didn’t mean someone couldn’t have taken out an ad of their own.
I surfed through a couple days’ worth of interesting and occasionally surprising ads and commentary in Missed Connections, including something about penguins I wished I hadn’t read. I finally came to an ad in the previous day’s postings that could be aimed at me, but I wasn’t sure:
“Gate crasher: all is not what it seems. Thanks for the assist, please stay out of it. The Real.” I definitely hadn’t been invited to the funeral, but I had been invited to the house, so technically I wasn’t a crasher. Or so I kept telling myself. Marie’s use of the same word made me wonder if my actions could be interpreted as such. Hmm. I scrolled down a little further. “Re: Are you the real McCoy? The king is dead. Long live the king.”
I was more confused than I had been when the dead man disappeared.