Deja Who (13 page)

C
atherine Carey was the first woman elected mayor of Boston, and when the votes were tallied you could hear the sighs of relief all over the city. The incumbent had to go.

Mayor Carey ran as an independent and soundly kicked ass for several reasons. She was beautiful (yes, what diff, except in politics it helps if you're hot, it helps a
lot
), a local (born in Danvers, Massachusetts, home of the former Danvers State Insane Asylum), intelligent (MBA from Harvard Business School, which proved nothing, but an IQ of 146, which did), charismatic (Miss Danvers, 1993; Miss Teen Massachusetts, 1994), and compassionate (she ran her first blood drive at age fourteen; she mailed her lemonade stand money to starving children in Africa).

Also, her Republican opponent, the incumbent, had just been indicted for taking a bribe to push through the Big Dig II Program (“Now Bigger and Diggier!”), and her Democratic
opponent burst into tears during their televised debate (“But I don't
know
how we're going to fix the tax situation! Stop picking on me!”).

(It later came to light that the man had stopped taking his antidepressants several weeks earlier, which earned him a compassionate scolding from Mayor-Elect Carey.)

As expected, Mayor Carey wasted no time rolling up her figurative sleeves (and occasionally her literal sleeves) and jumping in with both feet (also literally as well as figuratively). In her first year of office she decreased government spending by eight percent (hey,
you
try it), coaxed two local zillionaires to fund the renovation for several local athletic fields, and wasn't a racist.

The last one proved to be her political ruin. While going over the city's proposed cuts to the Boston Public Library budget, Mayor Carey objected strongly, probably because “cuts” really meant “demolition.”

“I don't care about Kindles or Nooks or Wikipedia or downloads. We will always need a library. Boston's citizens will always need a place to find a planet's worth of information for free. Rich, poor, other, they'll always need a place that's warm in winter and cool in summer and full of books and computers and maps and magazines and government forms and reading nooks. It is every citizen's birthright and we are not tearing it down because the Internet exists. Bad enough you want to be so niggardly with the budget.”

Of course: uproar. The mayor assumed it was because she was digging in her heels on the budget.

It wasn't.

“But niggardly isn't a racial slur.”

RACIST MAYOR REFUSES TO APOLOGIZE

“But that isn't what niggardly means.”

MAYOR DENIES BEING DISGUSTING BIGOT

“It means ‘stingy' or ‘miserly.' It's from an Old Norse word: ‘
Nigla
.' It means to make a big deal out of a small thing. Kind of like what's happening right now.”

RACIST MAYOR THINKS BIGOTED REMARKS “NO BIG DEAL”

“For God's sake.”

RACIST MAYOR TRIES TO COMBINE CHURCH AND STATE

“Fine. I apologize if my correct use of an adjective that isn't a racial slur offends anyone who can't take five seconds to look it up in Merriam-Webster. Hey, you know where you can do that?
The fucking public library!”

MAYOR MAKES AMENDS FOR RACIST REMARKS; PLEDGES TO KEEP LIBRARY OPEN

“Really? That did the trick? You know, the journalists really got us off track with this one. The
Boston Globe
is basically a black hole from which no scandal, however silly, can escape.”

RACIST MAYOR CITES
BOSTON GLOBE
AS BLACK HOLE; THINKS BIGOTED REMARKS SILLY

“Oh, come on! I didn't mean that I think the
Globe
is solely staffed by African-Americans! A black hole has nothing to do with race!”

RACIST MAYOR DENIES BEING A RACIST AGAIN

“It's a region of space-time that nothing escapes! It's called black because it sucks up everything, even light, and doesn't have one thing to do with race or creed or color. Which you can also find out if you use
the fucking public library
!”

RACIST MAYOR CLAIMS BLACKS SUCK

“That's it. I quit.”

RACIST MAYOR RESIGNS

And that is
how the former mayor of Boston came to live part-time in a small Chicago public park.

“H
mm. Okay. It's probably not gonna be Cat.”

“She's not even poor,” Leah giggled. Somehow they'd ended up prone on the couch, Archer on his back, Leah on his front. This had stemmed in mid-story from her demand to examine his stab wounds, and had progressed to kissing and, of course, the finale of the Tale of Cat.

“No? Really?”

“Boston, right? Most of her family can trace their roots back to Plymouth Rock and she's got a six-figure trust fund. So she didn't just quit being mayor; she quit all of it. Corporations and business suits and shaking hands while kissing babies and politics of
any
kind and now she sort of pokes around the city and sometimes she sleeps in shelters and sometimes she gets a suite at the Marriott but she always ends up in that park. She must really like the ducks.”

“She really likes
you
, dork!” Archer gave her a gentle smack
on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “Why does that never
ever
occur to you?”

“Um.” She tipped her head to the side and thought. “Past precedent?”

“Ooooh, I love when you're a clueless dumbass and then use big words.”

She shifted her weight enough so that an elbow went into his ribs and he groaned. Smiling, she sat up and straightened her skirt. And then her hair. And readjusted her blouse. “Don't pout.”

“Awwww.”

“That is the exact opposite of ‘don't pout.' Besides, I know I was hurting you.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“I was lying on your chest,” she said, exasperated. “So, directly on your stab wounds. You should have prevented that—”

“Fat goddamn chance.”

“—or at least told me I was hurting you.”

“I get off on it.”

“No, you don't.”

“No, I don't. But I don't mind.”

He sat up, shaking his hair out of his eyes. Leah was having a hard time deciding which she liked best: the blue or the green. “Did not mind. Did not care. Still don't care. You can make me your mattress anytime.”

“Thank you. Do you want to call it a day?” They'd been discussing past lives and possible future murders for hours; the clinic had long since closed. “You understand that because of confidentiality issues I couldn't exactly hand you a pile of charts and a copy machine and let you have at it.”

“And
you
understand that you should wear green all the time.
It makes you look like a sexy leprechaun.” At Leah's snort, he continued. “Besides, we've already been over this. I thought maybe we could figure out the type of person this guy or gal could be, and you could watch for them.”

Adorable.
“It's not always someone in my life,” she reminded him. She had a brief flash of someone

(my name is Mary Jane Kelly)

and a sensation of dread and drowning

(the knife like silver fish)

but the memory was gone before she could chase it down.

“Well, it's something,” Archer was saying. “Better than your Plan A, which was ‘hang around not engaging in a single thing while waiting to be murdered.'”

I haven't entirely abandoned that one. I'm just hoping to get laid first.

“And then there's the people you know.”

“There
are
the people I know.”

“Oh, God, all your hotness plus you're a sworn officer of the Grammar Police.” He pretended to swoon, which was a good trick since he was sitting down. “You are the complete package.”

She shook her head.
He approves of everything about me. Ergo, this cannot will not shall not last. As I foresaw. Too bad. It might have been spectacular.

“So, people you know? I mean really know, not just the charts in your office. Because don't studies show we're most likely to be murdered by someone we know?”

“That's true.”
Depressing beyond belief. And completely true.

“I know you don't have a lot of—uh—the nature of your work
demands you keep a certain—um—distance—which isn't to say you're not—uh—you're—”

Adorable!
“I'm a chilly bitch,” she said, smiling, “and my only friend is the former mayor of Boston, who isn't a racist. Oh, and you, perhaps.” She speared him with a look. “Are you a friend?”

“Nope.” He shook his head so hard his hair flew. “You can't put me in that zone; don't waste time trying. I'm your future snuggle sweetie and never forget it.”

“I will absolutely forget it if required to ever use the term ‘snuggle sweetie.'”

“Got it.” Now that she'd rearranged her clothing, Archer again patted the space beside him on the sofa and she sat. She hadn't bothered to put her shoes back on, so she curled up and tucked her legs beneath her. Archer, meanwhile, had moved over the small empty space on the sofa so fast and hard that he nearly knocked her through the arm rest. “That's better.” He patted her knee. “Argh, even your knees are sexy.”

“Archer . . .” She rolled her eyes.

“So, people in your life. We can eliminate me—”

“I certainly hope so.”

“Don't start that again,” he almost pleaded. “I'm begging, here. What about your boss?”

“I'm the boss. I mean, it's not my clinic,” she clarified, “but I'm the head Insighter. My supervisor no longer sees patients. She's in administration and likes it that way, and likes that I'm good at my job. She's the last person who would kill me, if for no other reason than it would make her life difficult short term as well as long term.”

“Okaaaay.”

She smiled at him. “That's
good
news, Archer.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He would not look at her, just kept making notes. “What about colleagues? Were you ever killed by someone you worked with?”

“Not that I recall. It's not like I've got a mental file cabinet of all my lives and can effortlessly call up even the smallest detail at any time.” But oh, wouldn't that be efficient! And convenient! “And they might not love me, but I don't think they loathe me enough to kill me. One of them could knife me out of envy? Malice? Resentment because I refused to chip in for the birthday cake fund?” She would never,
ever
understand the forced socializing expected at work. She had zero interest in their birthdays, or her own, and they in hers, so why pretend? Also, cake? At 10:00 a.m.?

“Don't joke, babe.”

“Ugh. Babe?”

She put her tongue out at him, but he refused to be distracted. “People knife each other for a lot less.”

“Oh yes! But in this case, none of them care about me enough to want to kill me. They only want to force pastry on me at all hours of the workday. We're all quite jaded, and nobody wants to take on my case load. So again: good news.”

He looked at his notes for a few seconds, then back up at her. “Your idea of good news is different from mine. And you're so calm about it. ‘Nobody cares about me enough to kill me' is
not
good news, Leah, okay? It's pretty sad news, in fact. More on that later because I can tell you're already tuning me out, but we're definitely not done discussing this, get it?”

She shrugged.
Tack “tenacious” onto “adorable.” Tenorable? Adoracious?

“Okay, what about that nervous-looking bald guy at Nellie's house? Your mom's agent and I guess yours, too, once. He seems pretty furtive.”

“Tom Winn of Winner's Talent
TM
(ugh). Don't be fooled, though. He's a Hollywood agent, he can't help it,” she explained. “Tom's furtive because it's his nature, not because he's murdered me a dozen times.”

“And you know this how?”

“That wet-eyed bastard has been in my life for years; he's had several opportunities to kill me. Anytime she decided I needed new head shots, for example. The cattle call for the Tampax commercial, for example. The callback for
Sweets to the Suite
, for example. My entire childhood and a chunk of my adolescence, for example.” She took a closer look at Archer and saw he was still puzzled. “It doesn't work like that, anyway. It's not going to be some random stranger who knifes me on the subway. It'll be someone I know, even if just briefly. A patient, or someone who referred a patient. A former teacher.”

“Then why stab me? I was a stranger!”

“Instinct?” she suggested. But it was a fair question. “It's one thing to intellectually understand my killer is going to strike again and when he does, he'll be known to me. It's another not to fight against someone who's been following me for weeks and then corners me in an alley.”

“Point,” he muttered.

“Plus as I said, Tom has had over a decade to kill me. And he's entirely my mother's creature, and was even when I was outearning her five to one.”

A look of understanding crossed Archer's face. “Oh, she must have
loved
that.”

Leah managed a sour smirk. “You can guess how much. It was petty revenge, but it was
mine.
The irony, of course, is that if I'd had no success, she wouldn't have been so driven to keep me working long after I loathed everything about it. And, in fairness to her, I could be quite smug about it. I would read the trades praising whatever nonsense I'd been up to that week, then ‘accidentally' leave them for her to read and eat her heart out over.”

“Oh, boo-hoo, your mom deserved it.”

“Well, yes. But regardless, you can scratch Tom. He's harmless, which is what I always disliked about him.”

“That's what they all say. But it's always the quiet ones.”

She couldn't restrain the fond smile. “It's sometimes the quiet ones,” she corrected. “History proves it.”

“Okay, so he's off the list. Also, our list sucks, because we don't actually have any names on it now. I feel like we should put at least one name down—”

“For the false illusion of progress?” she asked sweetly.

“Yep.” Archer remained admirably unmoved by her sarcasm. “So here comes the toughie: your mom.”

Leah barked a laugh. “Toughie?”

Undaunted (adorable!), he plowed ahead. “I can't imagine how hard even talking about this must be—”

She laughed again; she couldn't help it. He was just so
earnest
, as though he feared hurting her. Nothing had hurt her in forever. Crying in her mother's driveway those few days ago was the first time she'd cried in years. “As in it will be emotionally difficult for me to discuss the possibility that she will indulge in filicide? Ah . . . no.”

“This is the part where I pretend I know what filicide means.”

“Killing your son or daughter, also known as prolicide.
There's also nepoticide, when you kill your nephew; maricitide, which is killing your husband; parricide, killing a close relative; fratricide, killing your brother; sororocide, killing your sister; uxoricide, when you kill your wife; avunculicide, killing your uncle; and of course my personal favorite, matricide.”

“It's awful that you know all that.”

“It
is
awful that I know all that.”

“Getting away from fucked-up uncles killing nephews, the thing about your mom is, she's kinda killed you in the past.”

“You're so cute when you're striving for tactful.”

“Thanks,” he said modestly. “But you know I'm right.”

“Oh, yes. She has most definitely kinda killed me in the past. And because you're not confused enough, I feel compelled to point out she kinda hasn't, too.”