Seeing the Light (A Marie Jenner Mystery Book 1) (17 page)

He settled back, close to me, and I felt the cold of his arm against mine.

“You’re leaving a cold spot,” I said.

“Sorry,” he replied, and pulled away.

“All right, so let’s go over what we know for sure,” I said. “You were killed, brutally. Somebody in this building rigged it, we hope, because if we have to start searching outside this building, I may shit and go blind, excuse my French. It might have something to do with the fact that Carruthers hasn’t been making much money in this place.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because you said he hasn’t spent money on maintenance in years,” I replied. “Besides, more than half the offices are empty. Aren’t they?”

“Yep,” Farley said. “They are.”

“Another thing I figured out,” I said. “Did you know this building is being designated as a historical site?”

“No,” Farley said, and frowned. “Why would that matter?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, and rubbed my eyes. “But that’s what I’ve figured out, so far.”

“It’s not much, is it?”

“Nope,” I said. “Not yet, anyhow. But I will get more. I promise.” I tried to wink at him, but it didn’t go well, and all I ended up doing was blinking like an owl. “Like, for example, did I tell you that my new best drinking buddy Andrea thinks that her boss, Mr. Henderson, is involved in your death?”

Farley sat up straight. “She told you that?”

“Yes, she did. We became best friends and she told me everything I wanted to hear. More, even.” I yawned. “Why do I drink? I am so bad at it!” I rubbed my face, hoping that somehow that would help. “What do you think of her?”

“Who, Andrea?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.” Farley was quiet for a moment. “Henderson has her in a shitty situation as far as I can tell—but really, I don’t know her.” He glanced at me. “Why? What do you think of her?”

“I think she was handing me a line of crap.” I grinned at him. “I think she’s really pissed at Henderson for using her as the office blow-up doll. I think she’s trying to cause him trouble. When I started talking about you and how you died—she jumped all over it. Said she wouldn’t put it past him, doing something like that. She tried to talk me into calling the police and telling them that he was involved.”

I yawned again, hugely. I knew that if I didn’t get up soon, I was going to curl up on the floor and go to sleep.

“The police?” he prompted.

“Yes,” I replied. “The police. I asked her why she wouldn’t make the phone call, but all she said was it could screw something she had in the works.” I snorted laughter. “Who the heck says, ‘in the works’ anymore?”

“I don’t know,” Farley said, faintly. I glanced at him, and could see he was thinking, hard.

“Anyhow, she didn’t even mention anything about you before I did. All she did was complain about him. So I think she’s lying.”

“Maybe she’s not,” Farley said. “She’s got it bad with that asshole—maybe she’s afraid to go to the police on her own.”

I laughed. Couldn’t help myself.

“Farley, you act like such a knight in shining armour, I can’t believe it.” I chortled. “Always trying to save the damsel in distress, aren’t you?”

“A what?” Farley leaped to his feet and glared at me as though I’d spit on his shoes or something. I’d pushed a great big button. “What the hell do you mean by calling me that?”

“I mean that you look at the world like a knight,” I said. “I bet you wouldn’t have to dig back too far to figure out why. It colours your perceptions about people, especially women people, a lot. Heck, you did it with me, remember? When Mr. Latterson laughed?”

“I remember,” he said gruffly. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“I know, Farley. It’s kind of endearing, but we don’t all have to be saved, you know. We’re not all victims.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a—what the hell did you call me? A knight?” He sounded stiff. Angry. Defensive. “They were good guys, except for the wars, and some of that other shit they pulled. They treated women with respect—”

“You don’t have to defend yourself to me,” I said, cutting him off. “You know that, don’t you?”

“My daughter didn’t like it, when I acted like that around her.” Farley’s voice sounded like the words were being pulled from his mouth like rotten teeth.

“Your daughter,” I said. “Rose?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I used to drive her crazy.”

“Maybe she didn’t feel like a damsel in distress,” I said.

“But that’s what I do!” The whine was back in his voice, full force. “I’m the go-to guy, the guy you can turn to when you have a problem, the guy that will save you . . . “ His voice faded, and he hung his head. “Son of a bitch,” he continued. “Even if you don’t need to be saved.”

“I think you’re getting it.” I stood, shaking out my skirt and picking up my mug. I poured myself one more coffee, even though I knew it wouldn’t help. Not really.

“So what you’re telling me is, I was right.” He sounded stronger, and when I turned around, he had regained some of his colour. The tips of the hair on his head were beginning to glow.

Oh my God. He was starting to glow.

“Right about what?” I asked, barely able to believe what I was seeing.

“All this time, people have been telling me I could change. My wife, before my marriage crashed and burned, and my daughter after that. All these years, trying to defend my position, protect my territory. And now you’re saying I was right? That it’s just the way I am?”

I think if I hadn’t had quite so many margaritas, I would have explained to him that the reason he couldn’t change now was because he was dead. He might have been able to before, if he’d found out why this “knighthood” thing had become his essence.

That’s what my mom calls it. The essence of the soul. The one defining characteristic of a person. It’s a good beginning, but isn’t everything. He had to figure out how he came to be that way. He wasn’t born acting like a knight in shining armour. Something or someone brought him to that state.

But I was so relieved to see him getting brighter, all I said was, “Yes.” It was enough that he knew. We could get to the why of it, after he remembered how he died and I wasn’t so drunk.

He smiled, and then began to glow more brightly than I’d ever seen him before. “Look at yourself, Farley,” I said. He glanced down, and even his smile brightened.

“This is a good thing, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You’re absolutely right,” I replied. “Congratulations. I think you made it to Stage Two.”

Stage Two
Gaining Awareness

Farley:
Let the Fading Begin

Want to hear something weird? My tattoos are starting to fade. Marie assured me that it was all perfectly normal. We all go through a fading period toward “uniform luminosity.” I asked her if she was going to write a book, and she laughed. Didn’t think there would be much of a market, since the only people who would really give a shit enough to read the book would be dead.

I don’t know about that, though. There are enough pop psychology life after death spiritual transformation books out there to bury a city the size of Edmonton, so why the hell shouldn’t she try her hand at it? Write a book, make a million, then she wouldn’t have to pull these kind of bullshit jobs she does now, to make ends meet. She wasn’t interested, though. Maybe later, she said. Maybe when she knows more. Me, I thought she knew plenty all ready.

She explained a bit more about the Three Stages of Acceptance. I thought there were supposed to be more than that, but she said it’s all she’d ever seen with the dead, anyhow. Maybe we don’t have the time to go through all the rest of the stages, or maybe we got them all balled up into three main ones. I don’t know. I knew that for some reason, this shit was beginning to make sense to me. And since I hit the second stage, I didn’t feel as afraid, and I didn’t feel thin or stretched as often, either. And I hadn’t gone to hell again. So Stage Two, the Awareness Stage, suited me fine. I wasn’t sure what else I was supposed to “gain an awareness of,” though. Except figuring out who the hell killed me and why. I wouldn’t have minded gaining some awareness around that.

Even thinking about that made me feel a little thin.

Shit.

Marie:
Score One for the Good Guys

Even with the hangover, I felt great. I’d helped Farley make it to Stage Two—I knew I had. He’d popped up a couple of luminosity degrees when I mentioned the knight thing. He thanked me, told me he had a plan for getting more information about whether Andrea was lying about her boss, and then left me alone for the rest of the day.

Mr. Latterson had a pile of paperwork a mile high for me to type, and I finished it, though I made a lot more mistakes than usual with the margaritas still floating around in my system. At the end of the day, I went home and fell across my bed, and slept. In spite of the hangover, I felt great.

I woke up two hours later, still a bit hung over, and starving. I searched through my fridge, though I knew there was nothing whatever to eat. The single orange, collapsing in on itself in its mould-covered skin scowled at me from the middle shelf, so I turned to the phone instead.

The first person I thought about calling was James. Almost of their own doing, my fingers danced through the ancient phone book that had been in the apartment when I moved in. Soon I was staring at the name “James Lavall,” with a number beside it.

“Probably not him,” I muttered. I closed the book, keeping my finger at the page holding his name. Then I flipped it open again, and stared at it for a moment more, before mentally giving myself a good shake, and slamming the book shut.

“I do not need to get involved with another man. Not now.” So, I phoned Jasmine instead.

“Jazz,” I said, when she picked up the phone. “It’s me. I need some company. You still up for some TV watching?”

She was free, her kids were in bed, and she was happy to hear from me. Ecstatic, in fact. She thought I was going to dump her as a friend after getting pink-slipped.

“Not a chance, Jasmine,” I replied, laughing a little more heartily than I felt. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

After we said our good-byes, I grabbed my coat, and headed out of my quiet, dark apartment. I even sang a little as I waited for the bus.

Jasmine grabbed me in a hug before I made it into the door of her overstuffed bungalow. She smelled of baby powder and incense, and I leaned into her, because it felt like being hugged by a mom—even if it wasn’t my own.

“So how you been keeping?” she asked me when she finally let me go. She peered at me hard, then a smile brightened her face. “My God,” she said, shaking her head. “You started dating that James guy. Didn’t you?”

“No.” I said, throwing my jacket on the pile of coats by the overstuffed closet. “He and I are friends. Nothing more.”

“I don’t think so. Not by the look on your face.” She pulled me into her kitchen, which was filled with a table overflowing with book bags and homework, and surrounded by mismatched chairs. She pointed to one, and turned to the stove, putting the heat on under the kettle. “Tea?”

“Sure.” I plopped myself down, and thumbed through her daughter Ella’s math homework, closing the book when I couldn’t figure out what Ella had been working on. She was in Grade Six, and I felt like an idiot. “How are things?”

“They’re good. Good.” Jasmine kept her back to me as she fiddled with the teapot and tea, so I knew she was lying. She always looked at me when she talked, unless she was telling a lie.

“So, what happened?”

“Oh, it’s that damned Gerald!” she cried, then glanced over at the hallway, as if to see if her swearword had careened down it and into the innocent ears of her children sleeping in the bedrooms hidden from view. “He’s making life difficult, since you left.”

“I didn’t leave,” I replied, shaking my head. “I was fired. By voicemail.”

“That man,” she sighed, shaking her head.

“So what’s he doing?”

“Oh, the usual. Can’t find good help, so he’s given me three more hours a day to cover until he does. So now I need a babysitter for those hours.” She slammed the top on the teapot, hard, then quickly checked for cracks. “I can’t find one close to here. There’s my next door neighbour—but he’s old. My little sweeties would tear him apart. And my dear daughter Ella—” She sighed melodramatically as she set the teapot and two cups on the table in front of me. “Ella doesn’t seem to have the ovaries for babysitting. I don’t know what to do.”

I made some sympathetic noises and poured myself a cup of tea. There was nothing I could do to help her, because there was no way I was offering to babysit her crew. I’d done it once, and still had the scars to prove it. Apparently I didn’t have the ovaries for babysitting, either.