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Her alarm buzzedin her ear way too soon. Bunny groaned and rolled over, not wanting to know what state her hair was in. She’d gone to bed with it wet, which was like asking for it to look like something she should have left behind in the 80s. She hit the snooze button and pretended for a full five minutes that she didn’t need to get up and get ready for another night at Arcadian Waters.
Honestly. That five minutes between ‘snooze’ and ‘drag your ass out of bed now’ were the best five minutes of sleep she got every single day.
She showered again, her unruly mop tucked into a shower cap until she was squeaky clean, dry, and moisturized. Bunny was always stunned by people telling her that she didn’t look old enough to be in her fifties—the crow’s feet and the elevens between her brows begged to differ. But she wore her attitude like a badass cloak, and it covered all of her other imperfections and, dare she think it, her insecurities as well. Scooping her hair into a short ponytail, she finished getting ready for work and was out the door within fifteen minutes.
But that’s where she was stopped—or rather, blocked. EMTs and police were spread across the hall, which was full to the brim with people who were rubbernecking.
“What’s going on here?” she asked, looking across the hall at Fiona.
And there it was. Her neighbor was glowing again; that same bright white glow she’d seen the other day. Bunny frowned, trying to make sense of it. She thought she’d moved past that. Why the hell would she be glowing now? What was different today? Almost, as soon as the thought entered her mind, her mom’s necklace began to prickle against her chest. She looked down for a second and then back up.
She had been wearing the pendant when she’d seen the glow the first time, but on the day she had been talking to Ben on the phone in the hall and Fiona wasn’t glowing, it’d been left on her bathroom counter. On a whim, Bunny lifted the pendant over her head, holding it by the chain. Fiona stopped glowing immediately. Bunny narrowed her eyes, squinting, as though that might somehow make the glow appear. It didn’t.
“It’s Cam,” Fiona was saying. “Apparently his mom came over this afternoon to take him to some kind of appointment, and she found him.”
Bunny felt a chill plummet down her spine. She looked down the hall, where for the first time she noticed an elderly woman sobbing in the arms of a well-meaning police officer who looked really uncomfortable. “Found him?”
Fiona’s chin wobbled. “He’s dead.”
Holy fuckeroni.
“How?” Bunny asked a little too eagerly. Thankfully, Fiona didn’t seem to noticed.
“I don’t think they know,” she said, struggling to keep her emotions under control. “They didn’t give any details. It’s just…” She took a deep breath, a tear spilling over. “Poor Cam, you know? I always thought he was so lonely, that’s why he played that music all the time. I imagine it was so he didn’t have to think too much. And now we have to think about him all alone during his final moments…” Fiona was crying in earnest now, and Bunny crossed the hall to comfort her. She was a good neighbor and a sweet lady, who was undoubtedly sensitive to this sort of thing.
“Are you okay?” Bunny asked gently, placing a hand on Fiona’s shoulder.
“Actually,” Fiona said, looking pale, “I don’t feel very well. I might go have a lie down.”
“Good idea. Have some water, too.” Bunny reached into her purse, taking out an old receipt and a pen. She wrote down her number. “Here’s my cell. Call me if you need anything, okay? I’ll be at work tonight, but I can check in on you in the morning.”
Fiona offered Bunny a wan smile. “That’s so kind of you. Thanks.”
“Anytime,” Bunny said, jutting her chin in the direction of her neighbor’s apartment. “Now go rest. Okay?”
“Okay.”
It was a blessing Fiona had left when she did, because no sooner was the door to apartment 5C closed, the one to 5A opened and an ambulance gurney was wheeled out. It carried a black body bag that was zipped up, presumably containing the man formerly known as Cam.
As the EMTs wheeled it down the hall, Bunny followed like an eager injury compensation lawyer.
“Bernadette Major, triage nurse,” she lied smoothly to the EMT closest to her, a young man who looked like he was scared half to death himself. “What happened?”
His partner, an older woman who was helping to guide the gurney down the hall, pressed her lips together as if she wasn’t going to say anything. “Honestly?” she said under her breath, presumably so the other onlookers wouldn’t overhear. “By the look on the poor guy’s face, he died of fright.”
The elevator doors opened with a ding, and the EMTs wheeled in the dead body, leaving Bunny staring after them in shock.
* * *
She was doingher fifth round of patient observations for the evening when she noticed a flash of black pass the door of the room she was in.
Bunny hastily scrawled the rest of her notes on the med chart in handwriting that would make any doctor jealous, threw the chart on the end of the bed and took off at a jog. She reached the doorway of the patient’s room in time to see a flash of black coat disappear around the corner of the hallway, and she followed in hot pursuit.
When she rounded the corner, she fully expected to come face to face with a hallway full of nothing but air. But she was surprised to see the man in black, hands cupped around his face, peering through the window in the closed door of another patient room.
“Hey!”
He jumped, like she had actually managed to startle him. Him, the guy who could vanish into nothingness in the wink of an eye. She began to march toward him, sick of being brushed off.
