The old-fashioned endearment perfectly fit Maya Ryan, who feared time and the passing of time. She was Leah’s second client with chronophobia, and by far the most interesting. Maya believed the best way to prevent time from passing was to break every watch or clock in her home, and steal and hide/bury/destroy every watch or clock outside of her home. The police, of course, eventually got involved.
“My niece couldn’t sit in a classroom, she couldn’t go to a movie theater or the grocery store or a school play without being obsessed with the clocks, with the watches people around her were wearing . . . she was a wreck. So was my sister. But you were pretty nice about the whole thing.”
“I was?” Nice? Really? Was it possible there were two Leah Nazirs living in the Chicago area?
“Yeah, you figured out that she’d died some ten or fifteen times already, always because she’d run out of time.”
Leah remembered. In 1881, Maya had ingested poison as a child in Wyoming and hid rather than confess what she’d done; by the time she’d been coaxed from her hiding place and rushed to the hospital, her time had run out. In 1927, she had ignored all the Danger signs, found a hole in the fencing, and sneaked into the William A. Clark house, which was (as the signs had warned helpfully) set to explode. Tick-tock boom. As a young mother-to-be in Seattle twenty-three years later, she hadn’t realized she’d developed eclampsia; when her labor started, so did her convulsions. By the time the baby had been removed via emergency C-section, Maya had been clinically dead for three minutes.
The cabbie brought Leah back to the present by saying the last thing she expected. “‘You were right to be afraid then, and you’re right to be afraid now. Your fear is a gift; not a thing to suppress or fight.’”
“How did you know what I—”
“She said it at least once a week, often enough that I memorized it. She was so grateful to you. I am, too.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.”
“She’s dead now. There was an accident by the side of the road and she got out to help. Got clipped by a truck crossing the midline.”
Leah groaned. “Of course she did. I’m so sorry.”
“Us, too. But you did help her when nobody else could.” The cabbie adjusted her rearview mirror, the better to gaze straight into Leah’s eyes. “I’ve hopes I’ll see her again in her next life. I’ve hopes she’ll live a lovely long life and die old and loved in her bed. You helped her break the cycle, you know.”
“I did? Hmm. She did, at any rate,” Leah replied, thinking hard. “Or it was broken for her. Something changed and the pattern broke. That’s . . . hmm.”
She didn’t say another word until the cab pulled up to her apartment building, which looked a lot like a long gray Lego upended on its side. The cabbie didn’t, either, but got out of her seat and gave Leah a slow, careful hug, which Leah managed to return in kind without bursting into fresh tears.
THIRTY-NINE
Leah’s studio apartment always made her sad, but never more than today. She much preferred Archer’s place. He might be only renting the tower, and his landlord might be gone all the time, and the place might be on the market, but it nonetheless felt like a real home.
Or maybe that was just the Archer Effect. Either way, her small studio (or was that redundant?) seemed to scream “this is the home of someone who does not care, does not anticipate marriage and children, and is only waiting to die.” Maybe it was the beige wallpaper. If she lived through the end of the month, she promised herself she’d repaint everything in Wild Moss. Or maybe Fennel Seed. Wild Turkey?
Her plan—get to a working phone to warn Cat—worked perfectly until she picked her broken cell phone up off the floor. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten such a vital detail. “Son of a fuck,” she swore, poking ineffectually at the thing. She had no landline as they were almost obsolete in the twenty-first century, and even if she did, Cat’s number was stored in the dead phone. She almost never called it, and couldn’t begin to recall what it was. Cat was one of those people who just appeared when they were needed, and existed quietly offstage when they weren’t. Which was a terrible way to think of her best friend, but if she got mired in her faults, nothing would get done.
Dead phone. Hmm. She had another phone. This one wasn’t dead so much as on near-permanent vacation. A homophobic client had not taken well to the news that he used to be Oscar Wilde. He managed to snatch her phone away, then tossed it into the vase of flowers on the small table beside her desk. Unfortunately they weren’t silk flowers but real ones that required water. (She’d never made that mistake again.)
She’d gone home and plunked her dead phone into a bag of rice, but assumed it wouldn’t work, assumed she’d need another, and acquired a new one. But rather than ditch the old one she behaved the way most people did: tossed it into a drawer and forgot about it. Did the rice work? Or not? Cells being so cheap these days, it didn’t much matter.
She went to the kitchen junk drawer, pawed through the mess of seed packets (she had never planted a seed in her life), Elmer’s glue (she could not remember the last time she used it, literally years and years ago), twine (did people even use that anymore?), expired stamps (or send snail mail?), broken pencils (why in God’s name did she save broken pencils?), and a battered cell phone.
She plugged it in to charge, gripping the thing so hard her knuckles ached, waited a couple of minutes, and then gave it a tentative poke.
“Yes!” Cat’s number, Cat’s number, CatCatCat . . . “There!” She pressed it at once, hoping she was catching her friend on a rich day, not a park day.
“Have you fucked up this thing with Archer yet?”
She was so relieved she could barely summon the energy to bristle. “Excellent, you haven’t been stabbed.” Then, “How did you know who this was?”
“Who else would be calling the crazy homeless lady who lives in the park? Social services? An Air Force recruitment center? AT&T?”
“Listen, my mother—”
“Should I bother to waste your time with condolences?”
“Probably not. Listen, get the hell off the streets, you understand? Check into the Ritz—”
“No way. They don’t have streaming. After a hard day of panhandling and feeding pigeons, I really need classic Daily Show.”
Ugh. “The Peninsula?”
“Pass. No room service after eleven.”
“Listen, I don’t care where, but do not loiter at your usual haunt, which would make it easy for my killer to kill you. Anybody who’s been watching me for more than a few weeks will know about you and where to find you . . . in the park. They won’t have a clue you’re the former mayor of the nation’s twenty-first-largest city.”
“Yeah, well. If this were a TV show—”
“TV is getting everything wrong this month!”
“—I’d say something tough yet caring, like ‘I can take care of myself’ and then promptly get my big ass murdered. So to Hotel Felix I shall go.”
“Is that really a hotel?”
“Yes, you plebian.”
“Sounds like the name of a hotel in a cartoon.”
“Wicked plebian.”
“Stop that. Maybe you should leave town altogether,” she fretted.
“If he knows me, he only knows Cat, not Catherine Carey. It’s a good idea, Leah.”
“So you’re going, right? Right now? You’re on your way? Right now?”
“Cripes, you’re a bigger nag than my handlers and my private school tutors combined. Yeah, I’m going.”
Relief made her knees buckle; she sank into a kitchen chair with more than a little gratitude. If the chair hadn’t been there, she’d be on the floor. “Great, Cat. That’s wonderful. Okay.”
A pause. “You did screw up the thing with Archer, didn’t you?”
“I had to get him away from me. This wretch went for m
y mother.”
“Yeah, he must have thought you loved her.” She could hear Cat’s sigh over the phone. “Friggin’ moron. So you . . . let’s see . . . went into bitch overdrive to drive him away?”
“Bitch four-wheel overdrive.” Was that a thing? Possibly not.
“But once you prevent your murder, you’ll fix it. Right? Leah? Right?”
“I . . .” She shook her head, viciously swallowed the lump in her throat. She had zero time for that nonsense. “I can’t imagine, Cat. And it’s just as well.”
“Friggin’ moron.”
“I suspect you’re not referring to my killer.”
“Come to the hotel with me. Stay as long as you want, we’ll get a suite. My treat. Because you’ve got that ‘I think I’ll do something so fuckin’ stupid I’ll top every stupid thing I ever did’ tone in your voice.”
“No more hiding.”
“That’s also something they say on TV, and it’s usually followed by the hero having to duck a hail of bullets.”
“Bullets, ha. If only. Go. Now.”
“Fer Christ’s sake think it o—”
Leah hung up. Archer was safe. Cat was safe. She, of course, was not. But she never was, not in any life. She had never, ever felt safe and for a moment she couldn’t help thinking of Maya the Clock Snatcher, who always felt terrified at how time slipped by no matter how much she tried to slow it down. Who died an untimely death, but not the one she’d been doomed to relive dozens of times.
Leah had no plans to be hit by a car while helping someone else who had been hit by a car, but she did know the variable in this life: Archer. He was the thing that never happened before. He was the key to tricking fate into cutting the shit already.
But the cost was too high. His life for hers? Never.
Oh, never.
She stepped to the kitchen window and looked down at the streets. Archer was out there somewhere, which was fine. Her killer was, too. Which was not.
“Come on, come on,” she breathed, fogging the glass. “You know you want me. Come and get me.”
FORTY
“You’re horrible and I could almost regret meeting you and I’m probably not the only guy out there who wants to strangle you—I’m literally not the only guy out there who wants to strangle you—but I’m not gonna just slink off into the sunset and let you get fatally stabbed a lot.”
“Huh.”
“That’s it.” Archer nodded so hard he almost gave himself a headache. “That’s what I’ll say to her when I see her again.”
“Might work,” Cat conceded. She and Archer were walking toward the downtown area. Archer had called Cat with updates, she gave him an earful, then orders, and he’d met her to walk her to the hotel. The day was too gorgeous, and they were both too keyed up, for a taxi. “Or you could just kiss her a whole bunch.”
“Plan B. Also Plan C through ZZZ.”
“Good to know. So you figured out her incredibly transparent ploy, eh?”
“Please, God, let it be a ploy.” He shoved his hands in his jeans and hunched while they trudged, Cat because she was loaded down with Target bags of just-purchased travel toiletries, he because he was dead like a dodo inside. Thanks to Leah, his heart was extinct. I need to remember to never say that out loud because, even to me, it sounds lame. “Pretty please? God probably owes me a favor, right? I do all sorts of stuff for Him.” Part-time job number five: bookstore clerk at St. Peter’s.
“Trust me, she was as awful as she could be, but not to be awful. Not to just be awful,” Cat amended. “You always, always have to remember what you’re dealing with.”
“Who.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you correcting my grammar, boy?”
“Yeah, it helps me feel closer to the Leah who corrected my grammar and forget the Leah who talked to me like she hates me.”
“First off, it’s ‘whom,’ you doorknob, so you gotta turn in your Grammar Police badge.”
“It is not! It’s ‘who,’ and I don’t have a Gra—”
“Second, she doesn’t hate you. Opposite, in fact. This is a woman who operates almost entirely out of fear while refusing to acknowledge she’s scared shitless pretty much all the time.” Anticipating his question, Cat elaborated. “Scared of putting herself out there, scared of opening up to you, scared of making a friend who doesn’t put ‘feed pigeons chunks of Big Macs’ on her weekly to-do list, scared the world’s gonna drown in aluminum cans because not enough assholes recycle.” She paused. “No. That last one’s something I’m scared of. Leah doesn’t worry much about the planet, just the people who live on it. Scratch the last.”
He shrugged, feeling bitchy. “I dunno. She had a couple of good points.”
“Shut up, don’t buy into that shit,” the mayor ordered. “Depending on my schedule that day I’ll either cut you or smack you upside the head with my platinum Amex.”
She must have been terrifying in office. “So, what? She drove me off like a dog at a picnic for what? Leah’s just gonna just put herself out there? Make herself bait? Write ‘please come stab me, big boy’ on her forehead?”
“Dog at a picnic, heh.” Catching his scowl, Cat shrugged. “Sorry, hilarious mental image. But listen, I think that might be pretty close to the plan. It might even work. Her whole deal is that she’s always passive, always on the sidelines, right? She’s never tried getting in the killer’s face before.”
“She’s never lost her goddamned mind before, either,” he muttered. “I’m pretty sure.”
“I don’t think the killer’s gonna hang around long after doing her mom. He’s gonna have to make his move real soon.”
“Guessing.” He slashed his hand through the air, dismissing the argument. “It’s all just guessing.”
“Yep. But I think Leah’s an accurate judge of his methods. She might not always know who he is, but she remembers enough things to be careful.”
“Except she’s not being careful. Is she?”
“No.”
It’s unreal that we’re even discussing this. Only three weirdos: a shark-eyed Insighter, the rich homeless former mayor of Boston, and . . . well . . . me . . . could have problems like this. Does that make us lucky, or fucked?
They walked in silence for a few moments. “You know what I can’t figure out? Besides almost everything? How someone who thinks she’s a terrible person would go out of her way to protect you and me.”
“She’s her own worst critic,” Cat agreed, “and she’s still terrible. Just not as terrible as she thinks.”
“This whole thing is making me ill. I don’t know dick about serial killers—any kind of killer, since my dad didn’t really kill my uncle—”
“What the frig, Archer! Minor detail I’m only just hearing about!”
“It’s not relevant to this month,” he argued, “so I want to stay on topic. And the topic, horribly, is the guy who wants to kill my shark-eyed sweetie.”
“It’s maybe not relevant, but it adds to the Mystery of Archer. You’re older than her but look younger—”
“I have a really good moisturizer.”
“—you’re a private eye with only one client, now deceased—”
“I needed a vacation anyway.”
“—who lives in a tower with a landlord who’s never there—”
“The economy’s tough and she’s job hunting in California.”
Cat snorted and swung her Target bags. Archer jerked back, saving his nose from getting clipped. “What the hell do you do all day, Archer?”
“Asked the bag lady.”
“Please,” Cat huffed, annoyed, “we prefer the term ‘home-impaired.’”
“I do lots of things,” he replied cheerfully. “After my dad went to prison I helped out my mom by taking on some part-time jobs, blew off college, and decided I liked being
a permanent self-appointed temp worker. So I do some Pee Eye stuff and sometimes I dog-sit and sometimes I pick up a few shifts at the diner around the corner from the tower—”
“Waiter?”
“Cook. I dunno how to explain it; those little tiny jobs are all nice but they don’t move me.”
“Be thankful it’s not a career that doesn’t move you. You know how many lawyers I know who hate their jobs? College and law school and they just about cry every morning when their alarm goes off.”
Was there a lawyer anywhere who doesn’t hate being a lawyer? Someone should do a study. “Yeah, and the little jobs are fun until they’re not and then I quit and do something else. I think I’m sort of testing everything out. I’m like a compass with the needle spinning all the time.”
“So you’re a professional bum. Bum as in goof-off, not a politically incorrect term for the home-impaired.”
“Pretty much. Good thing Leah can’t see all the jobs from my past lives, since I’ve had a million just in this life. Her brain would implode.”
Cat was giving him the oddest look, which was unsettling to say the least. (Okay, technically saying nothing was saying the least, but he was a slave to cliché.) “Have you thought maybe you’re not life-blind at all?”
“Huh?” He nearly tripped over a parking meter, and a bike messenger nearly clipped him, and they resumed walking. “Where’d that come from?”
“Something Leah said a few months ago. A theory about the life-blind. I thought she was bullshitting out of boredom, but now I wonder.”
“It’s a myth, Cat. It’s the fairy tale nobody actually buys. Believe me, I used to play that card when people were feeding me overdoses of patented ‘you poor blind idiot, you’ll never get it’ crap. It’s like the things orphans tell themselves: my real parents are rich but I was stolen from them. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Whereas the tabula rasa have never been here at all.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m not that. I was disabused of it pretty early on. And for the zillionth time, being life-blind is no handicap.”