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“Well, I sure left enough of them,” Bunny griped. Had he really not gotten any of the messages? Had she been out of range? No, she thought immediately. The call had connected and she had left the messages.
“Your phone must be broken,” she reasoned, yanking on her pajamas and strapping on her watch. “I was attacked when I was leaving the funeral. Kind of.”
“What?”
Bunny told Ben about leaving the funeral and the strange man in black who had chased her to her car, and how she had tried to make a quick getaway.
“And then the crow flew right into the damn car window,” she explained, still creeped out. “Like some kind of crazy satanic omen or some shit!”
“What the hell, Bunny!” Ben growled. He sounded wide-awake now, and ready to kick his sister’s ass. “Why didn’t you come back to where there were people? Why would you think it was a good idea to keep walking away from a populated area and get into your car? What if he had tailed you?”
The thought had definitely crossed her mind a couple hundred times, but she didn’t want to admit that her baby brother was right. She left the bathroom and made her way to the fish tank in the living room.
“I’m pretty sure I wasn’t tailed—”
“Pretty sure?!”
“—but who was he? It was the same guy I asked you about during Mom’s service. Tall—maybe six-two? Black hair? Black coat, black shades. Like Neo from The Matrix, if he decided to wear Armani and show up to a funeral.”
She sprinkled fish food on top of the water in the tank. RuPaul, her bright white and orange fantail goldfish, wiggled his way up to have his breakfast. He looked nothing like his namesake, but his charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent were second to none.
Ben sounded confused. “I have no idea who you’re talking about. I don’t remember seeing anyone like that.”
“You’d remember if you did,” Bunny told him, giving her hands a quick wash in the kitchen sink. “There was something about him that wasn’t… quite right.”
“You mean aside from him sounding like the most fashionable person in Mosswood?” Ben joked. “Prissy’d pitch a fit to be outdone like that.”
Bunny blinked, flicking on the kettle. “Now you mention her, Prissy said something to me as I was leaving.”
“I’m sure you gave better’n you got.” He sounded amused, which tempted Bunny into her trademark wry smile.
“I did,” she admitted blithely. “But that’s not the point. She mentioned that Mom had just been to see Dr. Goode and been given a clean bill of health.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that. But healthy-seeming people still have heart attacks, Bun. There’s only so much Dr. Goode would know without running further tests. Right?”
“I guess,” Bunny conceded. She collected the trash bag from the garbage bin, filling it with the junk mail on the hall table before stepping out into the hall. “It just… hasn’t sat right with me since then. Actually, it hasn’t sat right with me since before then, either.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed, making her way to the garbage chute. “I just have this weird gut feeling that something’s off about the way Mom died. It was too sudden, too unlikely. She was so fit, so active. And evidently I’m not the only one to think it’s odd, if the Mosswood gossips are on the case.”
“So now there’s a case?”
“I’m just sayin’, is all,” Bunny said with a shrug her brother couldn’t see.
Cam, the guy in 5A, was still blaring his music as she passed. She opened the chute, shoved her bag inside and closed it. As she turned around, Fiona came off the elevator and rushed down the hall, obviously having forgotten something.
“I think,” her brother announced in a tone that said he was about to assert himself, “that you’ve had a lot on your plate the last few weeks. We all have. You need to take some time out, recharge.”
Bunny watched Fiona coming, feeling like someone had just zapped her with a joke buzzer. Fiona wasn’t glowing anymore. She stepped to the side to let her neighbor scurry past, earning her a warm smile and a quick “Thanks!” before Fiona disappeared into her apartment.
“Bun?”
“Sorry,” Bunny said, Ben dragging her mind back to the moment. “No can do. I have a new job.” She walked back to her apartment.
“What?”
She sighed. Luckily, the kettle was boiled. She made herself a chamomile tea—her favorite thing to drink before bed when coming off night shift.
