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Because if he was going to start popping into my apartment whenever he felt like it, we needed to have a talk.
He had the good grace to appear slightly abashed. “I know I shouldn’t have just shown up here like this, but….”
“But what?” I asked, even as I did my best to curb my anger. This was definitely not the right mental state to be in if I wanted to conduct a proper Samhain ritual.
“But I was lonely, and you’re the only person I can talk to.”
At once, my anger faded as quickly as it had come. It couldn’t be easy to be stuck on this plane, your entire existence in limbo until you could find the peace your soul so desperately needed.
“It’s all right,” I said. Then, because I couldn’t help asking, I added, “What exactlydoyou do all day?”
He scratched the dark stubble on his chin. “I don’t know exactly,” he replied. “Things just sort of…fade in and out. Time doesn’t seem to pass the same way it did when I was alive.”
“Well, that makes some sense,” I said, doing my best to sound reassuring. “You’re stuck on this plane, but some part of you understands that everything has changed at the same time. I’d just roll with it if I were you.”
“Doing my best.” Danny glanced over at my altar, then added, “I’m sorry I interrupted you. Do you want to keep going? I can wait outside or something.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said hastily. Whatever it was that he wanted to talk about, his presence had effectively destroyed any energy I’d built up to perform the ritual. It happened sometimes, and of course, there would always be more Samhains.
Sorry about this, Cerridwen,I thought.
“What’s on your mind?” I said aloud.
“One thing I do remember is going over to my house,” Danny responded. “It must have been sometime in the afternoon, since the sun was still out. My housekeeper was meeting my parents there. It looked like she was giving them the key.”
“Well, that makes some sense, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Who was the beneficiary in your will?”
“My brother Tony,” Danny said. “But maybe he was busy at the ranch and had them go over to the house instead.” His expression, which had remained cheerful throughout our exchange despite his confession about being lonely, sobered then. “They looked pretty sad.”
“It’s never easy to lose a child,” I told him, and he nodded.
“I guess so.” Still looking somewhat doleful, he went on, “Then Chief Lewis showed up.”
“Chief Lewis?” I asked, startled. “What was he doing there?”
Danny shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. My parents let him in, and then he started poking around in the papers on my desk and in my file cabinet. He even booted up my computer and started looking around on there, too.”
That felt like a horrible invasion of privacy, although I suppose it was probably standard procedure. Then again, I also knew I wouldn’t have felt the same way if I hadn’t known the person those papers and that computer belonged to was still roaming around on this plane of existence.
“How was Chief Lewis able to get into your computer without a password?” I asked, and Danny looked almost sheepish.
“I just had it set as ‘password,’” he told me. “I figured since I lived by myself and no one else was around with access to that computer, it wasn’t a big deal.”
This probably wasn’t the time to be lecturing him on password hygiene, so I decided to let it go. Besides, I wasn’t exactly a model citizen when it came to that sort of thing, either. I had about a dozen passwords of moderate difficulty that I rotated among my most-visited websites for logins, so I guessed I could be hacked pretty easily if anyone had the desire to do so. In the grand scheme of things, though, I knew I was pretty small potatoes.
“I hope you didn’t have anything incriminating on there,” I said with a grin, and Danny sent me a pained glance.
“I’m not that stupid,” he replied. “But what do you think Chief Lewis was looking for?”
I shrugged. “He’s probably doing his version of the same thing I am — trying to see who in your life would have sufficient motive for wanting you out of the way.”
As soon as I spoke those words, though, my anxiety ratcheted up a notch. If Chief Lewis’s investigation was following basically the same path as mine, then he was going to find out sooner rather than later that I’d been poking around where I wasn’t supposed to.
However, I decided it was best to file that worry away for later. It wasn’t as though he could arrest me for asking a few questions.
At least, I didn’t think so.
Danny absorbed my comment and looked unusually pensive. “It’s not something I like to think about,” he said.
