“We don’t know, ma’am. That’s why I’m here: to see what you know about it. Unfortunately the Department is very backed up, and there were no witnesses in the neighborhood, so it’s taken awhile to get around to you. I was only brought on about two months ago to handle the backed-up cold cases—”
She blinked. “‘Cold cases’?”
“Cases where we ran out of leads, ma’am, and didn’t have the manpower right away to follow through. Your case was put ‘on ice’ until someone could be spared to look into it again.”
The look in her eyes gave Rob a whole new definition of “cold” to work with. “Which has been how long, exactly?”
“You’ve been dead for about three years.”
Her eyes widened. “And you’re only turning up here now?”
“Budget, ma’am,” Rob said, truly ashamed. “We’re a very small department yet. The other kinds of forensics have been established longer, and they get most of the funds. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”
She looked at him more with disbelief than horror, which was a relief. “Bullshit!” she said.
Rob’s mouth dropped open.
“The only reason my murder hasn’t been solved sooner is that I don’t have any sons or daughters making it hot for somebody on the City Council!” Mrs. Eldridge said; and though she was annoyed, it wasn’t at him. “Or somebody else down at Parker Center. When you say ‘budget’, you mean there’s one kind of law for the poor—excuse me, the low-income—and one for the noisy rich. Isn’t that it? There’s no big rush looking into the murder of an elderly widow with no living relatives, living on SSI. And I’ve been here being dead for three years when I could have been—”
She had to stop for a moment. “What could I have been?” Mrs. Eldridge said. “I mean, I’ve always been a churchgoing woman, I thought that—”
“We’re not allowed to get into that, ma’am.”
“Well, why in God’s name not?”
This was not the usual dry resignation Rob was used to from the vast majority of his murder cases. “Lack of personal experience?” Rob said, maybe a little more roughly than he’d intended.
She let out a breath. “Sorry. This does make you uncomfortable, doesn’t it. I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
Rob also wasn’t used to his victims being quite this perceptive—or so perceptive of others’ reactions, anyway. Mostly they immediately got totally absorbed in the personal implications of being dead. “Ma’am, there are various things that can keep someone from moving on to their final destination. Trauma. Confusion—”
She gave him a look that suggested she was not confused. “My ‘final destination?’ Next thing you’re going to tell me to fold up my tray table and put my seat in the upright position. Young man, I’m not so sure how final my destination is, even if I am churchgoing. You’re saying I’m dead, but I haven’t moved on. Fine. So what do I need to do so that I can move on? Since there are probably some people wondering where I am. I’m not the kind to be late.”
And then she stopped, and gave him a wry look. “That was a pun,” she said. “Isn’t there humor after death? You’re not laughing.”
Rob took a long breath: this interview was getting out of hand. “Ma’am,” he said, “sometimes, in my line of work, it’s smarter to wait a while and make sure you’re supposed to laugh.” He did have to smile, then. She was going to be an easier job than he had originally feared.
She looked around her, bemused. “And what about my house?” Mrs. Eldridge said. “If I’ve been dead for three years…”
“Ma’am, this is your image of your house,” Rob said. “After your murder, your real house was put up for auction to pay off funeral expenses and death duties. It was bought by some people who sold it to a consortium of cocaine dealers. Until last week this was a crack house.”
Now it was Mrs. Eldridge’s turn to open her mouth and close it in shock.
“Let me see,” she said.
She stood up.
“Ma’am,” Rob said, “there’s one thing we have to do first.”
He fumbled about his left wrist, feeling for the slight sizzle of power that meant contact with his heartline. He didn’t get the sizzle, possibly because he was so thrown off balance by the way this whole interview had gone; but the heartline he found, and drew it out—a thin silver thread, glowing even in the warm afternoon light of Mrs. Eldridge’s living room.
“While this is connecting us, you can walk in the land of the living,” he said, holding it out between his wrist and the fingers of his other hand. “And I can walk where you take me. Ideally, that would be back to the hours just before you died. You may not have been able to see who murdered you, but I will.”
She looked at the line of silver light. “’Or ever the silver cord be loosed,’” she said, “’or the golden bowl be broken…’”
Rob nodded.
Mrs. Eldridge held out her wrist. Rob draped the free end of the heartline over it. This time he got the shock, stronger than he expected; but that was in line with the kind of psychic energy bound up in someone who was so newly in touch with her status as a murder victim, and so thoroughly annoyed.
Mrs. Eldridge looked out the window at her tidy, close-mowed lawn, went to the door with Rob very much in tow, opened the door, and went out onto the porch.
There she stood for some moments, staring out at what her front yard had become. From somewhere next door, to the left, came the sound of loud heavy metal music.
Mrs. Eldridge shook her head.
“Well, since you’ve taken this long getting onto my case,” she said, “we’d better get going, because I’m certainly not staying in this dump a moment longer than I have to.”
And she looked at him.
“Ma’am?” Rob said.
“I’m waiting for you to offer me your arm,” she said.
Rob did, helping her down the step. “There’s this to be said for being dead,” Mrs. Eldridge said, looking with distaste at the “lawn”: “I don’t feel my rheumatism so much. What do we do now?”
“We retrace your steps,” Rob said. “Where were you coming from, that last day, when you had the groceries?”
“I’d been around the corner, at the Ralph’s,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “I couldn’t get the delivery people to come up here any more: my orders weren’t big enough. I had to walk.” She sighed. “And it wasn’t a pleasant walk, as it was when I first had the house. The neighborhood’s just not what it was.”
Rob nodded and mmm-hmmed, and let her talk. This was just what he would have had to encourage her to do, anyway; immerse herself in her memories of her last day. While in circuit with a lanthanometer, her experience would briefly reshape Rob’s perception of the world. This is going pretty well. At last we should get some kind of result in this case, Rob thought. It was a relief to him, for the case seemed to have been going on for so long now. They all did, though—all the cold cases with which he was routinely saddled. Not that it mattered, really, so long as they got solved: so long as Justice in Her majesty was eventually served. It just seems to take so long sometimes. And this one more than most…
“I don’t see what the point is in talking to you when you’re off in a world of your own,” Mrs. Eldridge said, squeezing his arm.
“Uh, sorry, ma’am,” Rob said. They were halfway along the long block, making their way down past more lanai apartment buildings, up toward Sherman Way. Slowly, slowly, the landscape around them was beginning to shimmer and change—uncertainty descending over things in a silvery fog as, on a local basis anyway, the past shouldered the present aside. Cars shifted position without warning, the sky started to get patchy about its weather, cloudy in one spot, clear and sunny in another.
“I said, Sergeant, do you have family?”
“Uh, no.” That sounded a little bald: the change around them was taking quite nicely, and Rob didn’t have to concentrate quite that hard on it. “It didn’t seem fair,” he said after a moment. “What I do
can be dangerous.”
“Other men have families.”
Rob nodded. “It wasn’t right for me, though,” he said. “Maybe later, when I have some more seniority. Is this the way you came, ma’am? Through this parking lot?”
“That’s right.”
“All right,” Rob said. He stopped at the edge of the parking lot at the end of the block, and paused there, waiting for the change to settle fully, for the present to lie down under the weight of the past. That glassy clarity set in again all around the two of them. “Is this the time of day it was?” Rob said.
Mrs. Eldridge looked around in calm wonder at the way broad, blazing afternoon had reshaped itself into late afternoon, shading into dusk. “That’s right,” she said. “It was just before six. I realized I didn’t have anything left in the fridge for dinner. I can’t keep a lot of stuff in there any more; it’s on its last legs, poor thing… it has trouble keeping more than a quart of milk cold.”
She laughed, then, as they started across the parking lot together. “I guess I don’t have to worry about my fridge any more,” she said. “So now what do we do? I just show you what I did?”
“That’s right, ma’am. As far as possible, you ignore me and just do whatever you did that evening. I’ll take care of the rest.”
She nodded and headed for the doors of the supermarket. The doors slid aside for them; as Mrs. Eldridge picked up a hand basket, Rob looked over his shoulder at the parking lot. People there were loading groceries, driving in, driving out; none of them showed any sign of having particularly noticed the small, thin woman walking in.
Rob let the heartline stretch between them, looking around at the supermarket staff, the other people wheeling carts up and down the aisles. “You go ahead, ma’am,” he said. “The people here can see you, just as they saw you that day. It’s all happening again; just let the flow of it carry you along. No one can see me. I’m just your invisible friend.”
“Well, I would talk to myself half the time when I was shopping,” she said, wandering down the bakery aisle, “so no one’s going to think twice if I do it now. Did I get bread? Yes, I think so. That sunflower rye.”
Rob dropped back as he would have on any surveillance involving the living, watching to see who noticed Mrs. Eldridge, how the people she interacted with behaved. She picked up the loaf of rye bread she wanted, chatted briefly with the young paper-hatted girl behind the bakery counter, and then headed back toward the dairy case. “I can never decide what kind of milk to get,” she said softly. “All the different kinds they have now, it just gets confusing. What kind do you get?”
“I’m not much of a milk drinker, ma’am,” he said. “Mineral water mostly, or beer.”
“But what do you take in your coffee?”
“I drink it black.”
Mrs. Eldridge rolled her eyes at him as she picked up a quart of skim. “Not sure you’re human,” she said, with a mischievous look. “But maybe a dead lady shouldn’t be casting aspersions.”
Rob had to smile at that as she made her way into the next aisle. For a while he followed her up and down, while Mrs. Eldridge chose a head of lettuce here, a couple of potatoes there, hesitated for some minutes over the comparative virtues of two different brands of beans. “These are cheaper,” she said, “but the others taste better…” She sighed and put the cheaper can back. “If I’m going to be murdered before I get in the door with these,” she said, “I’ll at least be found with the better-tasting brand. And you’ll see the murder, you think?”
“The murderer too, I’d expect.”
“That must be hard for you,” Mrs. Eldridge said, heading into the paper products aisle. “Never able to stop a crime. Always having to watch it happen, and not be able to prevent it…”
“It has to be done. But just finding out what happens,” Rob said, looking around as Mrs. Eldridge turned into another aisle, “makes a big difference.”
“And not just to you, I take it.” She went through her basket, saw that everything she needed was there, and headed for the express checkout.
“Routinely, ma’am,” Rob said, “when the murderer’s found and brought to Justice, the soul of the murdered is released from whatever trauma it may have suffered, and it then goes…” He trailed off.
“Still can’t get into detail about that, Sergeant?” Mrs. Eldridge said under her breath, while waiting her turn. She smiled: she was teasing him now.
“The destinations would appear to vary, ma’am,” Rob said, “and any answer I gave you could prejudice the course of action you take. Once Justice has taken Her course, you’ll be free to go…wherever.”
She got to the checkout, paid for her groceries, and picked up the bag. “It’s just a shame I can’t make you carry these for me,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “This was always the bad part. But I guess I should think of it as the last time….”
They went out through the sliding doors, Mrs. Eldridge first, Rob following a short distance behind. And as they walked out into the parking lot, Rob saw someone standing out by a car, watching the door, and something sang down Rob’s nerves—recognition, certainty. The guy was in the sloppy baggy pants a lot of kids were favoring at the moment, a huge T-shirt, the inevitable baseball cap on backwards: a tall kid, maybe seventeen, eighteen years old, hatchet-faced, with a thin little excuse for a mustache just growing, his hair blond, longish, shoved back under the hat. He watched Mrs. Eldridge the way a cat watches a mouse: the way a murderer watches a prospective victim.
“You shouldn’t turn, ma’am,” Rob said, as they walked toward the edge of the parking lot, where it met the sidewalk of Mrs. Eldridge’s street. “Not obviously, anyway; it’ll disturb the flow. Seen this guy before? A tall kid, blond hair, baggies, kind of a hooked nose?”
Deliberately Mrs. Eldridge stopped and put down the plastic bag, as if the handle was cutting into her hand; then picked it up once more and started walking. “He lives in the apartment house to the right of me,” Mrs. Eldridge said, having turned her head just enough to catch a glimpse of the casual shape following her. “He has a motorbike. Always revving it up and down the alley in the back: the noise of it would deafen you. Another one with the late parties and the loud music.”
“You ever complain about him?”
She shrugged. “Lots of times, but not recently. Not that that would matter, I guess. But is that what we’re coming to, Sergeant? That someone complains about noise, and you kill them?”
“Not what we’re coming to,” Rob said softly. “Where we’ve been, for a long time now. People…” He shook his head.
They walked quietly down the street, in the gathering dusk, under the palm trees. Rob walked backwards behind Mrs. Eldridge, watching the tall skinny shape following them, all casual innocence. Rob saw that one side of the baggy pants was hanging unnaturally low, and the kid had his hand in that pocket, and was watching Mrs. Eldridge with care.
She merely kept walking.
“Do I have to go through it again?” she said then.
For any other similar case Rob had worked with lately, that would have been the first question. For this woman, it was the last. Rob wished he had had a chance to know her. “Of course not,” he said.
Mrs. Eldridge turned into her front walk, went up onto the porch, put the shopping bag down and fumbled in her little purse for her keys. She got them out, started going through the keys for the right one in the darkness of the porch, under the light fixture with the dead bulb. After a moment she found the key, opened the door—
Rob stepped in the door behind her, and snapped the heartline between them. The air went glassy again. Somewhere out in the land of probability, a few feet away but nonetheless nearly invisible to Rob and Mrs. Eldridge, a teenager drugged half out of his mind and desperate for money for more came up behind the nasty old lady who could afford to live in a whole house by herself, smashed her skull in from behind with a lug wrench, kicked her the rest of the way in through the door, closed it, and set about ran
sacking the place.
The gossamer form of the murderer headed for the back bedroom; a form even dimmer and harder to see lay on the hall rug, twitched a couple of times, and went still. “So that was it,” Mrs. Eldridge said softly.
“That was it,” Rob said.
“And now what?” Mrs. Eldridge said.
“Now…”
Rob stopped himself. He knew better than to try to give the woman directions: souls knew their own way. All the same, he was suddenly going to be sorry to see her go. He couldn’t get rid of the sense that there was something incomplete about this interview, though everything had gone as well as could have been expected.
“Now one of us goes on,” Rob said.
Mrs. Eldridge looked at him kindly, almost with pity. “Not just one,” she said.
Rob stared at her.
“But this is always the bad part, isn’t it,” Mrs. Eldridge said. “Where truth meets denial.”
Her voice didn’t sound the way it had before; and suddenly she didn’t look much like a little old lady, either.
“You were always the brave one,” said the tall and radiant figure standing there. “Always charging in. Always sure you were in the right. Well, you charged in one time too many, six months ago. It wasn’t that I knew for sure it was going to happen: but I’d had my suspicions for a long time. Why do you think I’ve been waiting here for you all this while?”
She waved around her, at the house with the seedy lawn and the down-at-heel guttering and the peeling stucco. “You had solving her murder her on your mind, that whole time. You came up that walk so sure you knew where all the guns were. But you never saw the one across the street, the one that surprised everybody. The paramedics were on another call: they got here exactly three minutes too late. But you were so intent on doing your job, and keeping the guys behind you from getting hurt, that you barely noticed your own murder one. You’ve been coming up this walk for a long time, again and again and again; remaking your image of the day, though for a long time your soul was too shattered by the trauma to be able to finish the walk. This is the first time you made it to the door.” She smiled. “But I knew you’d manage it eventually. Giving up was never your style.”