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“That someone would want to kill you?”
He nodded. “I was always one of those guys who wanted people to like me.”
Which they apparently had, as far as I could tell. All right, with the notable exception of Mike Harrison and maybe anyone else whose daughter had gotten sucked into the Danny Ortega dating vortex, but overall, I got the impression that most people had thought Danny was a pretty okay guy.
I wanted to tell him that people often did crazy stuff in the heat of the moment. Problem was, this obviously hadn’t been a “heat of the moment” kind of crime. Someone had brewed up that poison and waited until exactly the right moment to slip it into his drink.
“Well, we’ll figure it out,” I promised him. “For now, though, it’s late and I want to get to bed. Are you going to be all right?”
“Oh sure,” he said cheerfully — a cheer that didn’t fool me for a second. “I think I’ll circle back to the house and hang around there for the evening. I doubt anyone’s going to come back and check on things overnight.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. It did sound as though Henry Lewis had showed up, done what he needed to, and left. There didn’t seem to be any reason why he would come back, especially in the wee hours of the morning.
And I had to think that Danny would do better in familiar surroundings, even if he couldn’t really interact with them.
“Then have a good night,” I said, and he took the hint for what it was. A slight tilt of his head toward me, and he was gone.
I let out a breath, and my gaze moved toward the altar, toward the Aim-n-Flame I’d left lying by one of the candles. It was now almost eleven-thirty. Still time to perform my ritual if I really wanted to.
But I didn’t. My current ennui was no doubt the universe telling me it was time to go to bed.
I decided to listen to it.
9
Day of the Dead
I didn’t sleep as wellas I’d hoped, but I still managed to get a solid six and a half hours in. Just as well that I didn’t oversleep, because I could only imagine Archie’s ire if I was late getting his food in his bowl.
“Were you talking tohimagain?” the cat asked as he strolled into the kitchen.
“‘Him,’ who?”
Archie grimaced at my ungrammatical question. “The ghost. Danny Ortega.”
I removed the carafe from my coffeemaker and poured some Italian roast into the big reactive-glazed mug I’d bought at an arts and crafts fair during Calvin’s and my trip to the Verde Valley. “Yes, Danny dropped by.”
Another grimace, and Archie sat down on his haunches and gave me a beady-eyed stare — or at least as beady as his big gold eyes could be. “Is this going to be a regular occurrence? It’s rather unsettling to hear voices coming out of a room when you thought you were alone.”
Tell me about it,I thought. While I was glad to offer Danny what comfort I could, I also wasn’t exactly thrilled by the prospect of having him materialize in my apartment whenever he felt like it. If he did that again, we’d probably need to have a talk.
“I don’t know,” I said frankly, then picked up my mug and blew on the coffee inside. Right then, I knew I needed to get some of that caffeine into my bloodstream as quickly as possible. “He wanted to tell me something.”
Archie’s tail made an irritated swish. “He couldn’t leave you a note?”
“I doubt it,” I replied. “He can’t interact with corporeal objects, so it’s not like he can just pick up a pen and write something down.”
“Voicemail?” Archie inquired, now sounding almost desperate.
“How’s he supposed to dial a number — or even dictate a message — if he can’t interact with a touch screen?”
That question seemed to flummox the cat. While Archie had some familiarity with modern technology after watching people use it for so many years, it wasn’t as though he’d ever had to operate a cell phone himself.
“You’re the witch,” he snapped. “Think of something.”
I somehow doubted Grandma Ellen would be too thrilled to share space in my crystal ball with Danny Ortega. Although she’d been dead for more than thirty years, she looked much younger than the forty she’d been when she left this plane, and I could only imagine how Danny would react to being in close proximity to such an attractive spirit. For obvious reasons, I didn’t own a Ouija board, but I might have to resort to that means of communicating with Danny if he got too exuberant about showing up in my apartment whenever he felt like it.
“Working on it,” I said, and left the matter there. Or rather, I took my mug of coffee with me and went into the bedroom, then shut the door and headed into the bathroom to get the water running for my shower. Most days, I drank coffee and had my breakfast at the dining room table, and showered afterward, but I could tell this was the only viable way to get Archie off my back. No way in the world would he follow me when there was even the slightest chance he might see me with my clothes off.
