“Wait?” Calvin asked, glancing up from his breakfast.
I looked at him and Pop before getting to my feet and going to the coffee table. “The guy. In my apartment.” I came back with my phone to see Calvin poised for standing. “I remembered thinking he reminded me of, like, a Civil War soldier or something close to it, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.”
“Okay.” Calvin stared, waiting for me to continue.
I held my phone close to type into the web browser. “He looked like this.” I turned the phone around and held it out.
Calvin took it, staring at the screen.
“That’s the former Confederate President, Jefferson Davis.”
“Jefferson Davis died in your apartment?”
“Someone who could have been his brother did.”
“I’m not following, Sebastian.”
I took the phone back and typed again. “There’s a story that Davis tried to escape Union troops by dressing as a woman. But—shit—” My typos were confusing the hell out of Google. “But it got exaggerated by the newspapers at the time. The real story is that he accidently grabbed his wife’s coat instead of his own.”
I handed Calvin the phone again when I had found pictures of northern newspapers from the time. Davis was comically drawn wearing a woman’s skirt and undergarments, running through the woods.
I pointed at it. “The guy, last night? He was wearing a petticoat. Someone had put him in 1800s women’s clothing.”
“How can you be certain the clothes weren’t his own?” Calvin asked.
Cop mode, activate!
“They weren’t,” I insisted. “I swear, if I still had a home, I’d bet on it that this guy was made to look like Davis from these newspapers. His hair was right, he even had that ugly little beard. So… you can use his picture as a model for who the dead man was.”
“Good grief, Sebastian,” Pop muttered, having stopped eating himself. He was staring at us both. “What have you gotten yourself into this time?”
I LOOKEDcool in aviator sunglasses.
Pop had found an old pair of prescription sunglasses that were mine once upon a time in a drawer. Why had I not kept this style? Maybe onlyIthought I looked cool.
I was sitting in the passenger seat of Calvin’s car as he drove to the precinct. The dreary morning crawled by during rush hour.
Calvin turned the wipers on. “I’d rather have more of that epic snowstorm than this freezing rain,” he murmured.
Agreed. This was the sort of cold, biting rain that made your soul shiver. At least the snow was pretty. It was mostly melted now, piles shoveled on street corners here and there, looking more like dirty blocks of ice than anything.
Calvin’s hand touched mine.
I glanced at him and wove our fingers together.
I take what life gives me without much trouble. I think I’ve always been this way. Relaxed and composed to the point of it being suspicious. Hysterics get you nowhere. I see it as a waste of time and energy when you could instead take a deep breath and apply logic to your problem.
Not that I don’t get upset now and then.
And I definitely had cause for that now, but really—it wouldn’t have helped.
I was homeless, but I had a loving boyfriend and father who would make sure I wasn’t actually without a roof over me. I had no possessions, but besides society possibly frowning over me running around naked, they were just things. Things that made me happy, of course, but my building had blown up and I had walked away with only a cut and a bump on the head.
I was afraid to ask if all my neighbors had been so lucky.
“You should get a dog,” I stated when Calvin put his hand back on the wheel.
“What?”
