Dead on Delivery (7 page)

I kept walking now, keeping my gaze steady and forward. I let my other senses reach out toward the woman and nearly stumbled.

Whoever she was, she wasn’t an ordinary bystander. There was definite power there. It wasn’t the kind of sensation I got when I was near Paul or Alex though. I didn’t think she was a werewolf or any other kind of supernatural being. She had magic in her, but she was fully human. Whatever she was, she was powerful and she was full of hate.

 

 

I FOLLOWED THE LINE OF CARS TO NEIL BOSSARD’S PARENTS’ house. I knew where it was already. I’d been there once before, after all. It was where I’d delivered the package that I’d found on the hood of the Buick, address neatly printed in block letters. The house looked pretty much as I remembered it. It was a nice house in a nice area, kind of like my parents’ place. Two stories, big well-tended yard, rose bushes along the clapboard siding, a driveway leading to a detached garage. The backyard was fenced. I’d lay odds there was a pool back there. My aunt Kitty would have called it neocolonial. I felt a little suffocated just looking at it and I drove past. I still didn’t need my car being noticed again.

I cut over a few blocks south on Atlas Drive and then another two on Dixon Drive and parked. I kicked back and waited a bit. I didn’t want to be one of the first guests to arrive or one of the last. I needed to arrive as part of that pack that seems to always get to an event at the same time. I’d slide in with a group and no one would even notice me.

I wasn’t sure what I thought I was going to find, but I needed to start somewhere. It’s not like anybody was likely to dish the dirt about a young man who died under such tragic circumstances at his memorial service, but I was betting that enough crumbs would fall to guide me to my next step.

I walked the few blocks to the house. My timing was perfect. Several clumps of people were heading toward the house from various directions. All of them walked along without talking, heads down. A few people held hands. It was easy enough to fall into step with one group. I chose one that looked vaguely like a family: a middle-aged couple and a young man and a young woman who looked like they might be in their late teens or early twenties. I stayed a few steps back so I didn’t crowd them, but I was still close enough to look like I might be part of them. As if I were maybe the petulant daughter who was being dragged along against her wishes. I knew the part inside out. Just ask my mother.

It’s easy enough to attach yourself to a group like that. If anyone in the group notices you, they simply assume you’re going to the same place they are and belong there. Anyone outside the group assumes you’re with the people you’re entering with. The key is to blend. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to blend with varying degrees of success. As long as it’s purely an external thing, I do okay.

Blending at a funeral is apparently second nature to me. My outfit looked identical to pretty much everyone else’s and no one was flashing big white-toothed California smiles. Perhaps I had finally found my people? The dour-faced somber-colored clothes people? I shook my head. Didn’t it just figure? I’d spent a lifetime looking out of place in my black clothes while living in perpetual sunshine, with people always telling me to smile. I should have just hung out at the mortuary. My mother would definitely not have been thrilled.

I slid in with the group and edged my way into the crowded living room. I felt a little like I had at the one junior high dance I’d been coerced into attending. I was in a room full of people and didn’t have a word to say to any one of them. I did pretty much what I did then, too. I leaned against the wall and watched.

The old lady in the wheelchair was holding court in one corner, a cup of tea on the side table next to her and a plate of untouched cookies in her lap.

“Can I get you anything, Mom?” Bossard’s father asked her.

“No, dear. I’m fine.” She patted the hand he’d placed on her shoulder. “Or as fine as I can be, I guess.”

Mr. Bossard nodded, his Adam’s apple jerking up and down in his throat. It didn’t look like he was fine or would be for quite some time. I felt a stab of pity followed by a quick twist of guilt. I’d like nothing more than to find out that the package I’d delivered to Neil Bossard had nothing to do with his death. I so didn’t want to be associated with causing anyone this kind of pain.

I edged along the room, picking up bits and pieces of conversations. “A shame, really. One mistake and he never gets a chance to come back from it,” a woman my mother’s age was saying to another woman. They both wore knee-length skirts and sensible shoes. One’s hair was bobbed and silvery blonde, the other’s was longer, darker and pulled back in a low ponytail.

“It was a pretty big mistake, Diane,” Ponytail pointed out.

Bobbed Blonde shook her head and took a sip of tea. “I never thought that he was one of the ringleaders. He got caught up in something and didn’t know how to get out of it.”

Ponytail sighed. “And now look at poor Georgia. I thought he’d broken her heart before. He’s smashed it now.” They both looked over to where Mrs. Bossard stood near the dining room table, serving tea, then both looked down into their own cups.

They had a point. Mrs. Bossard looked like a zombie. Not a real zombie. They generally had rotting flesh hanging off them and lurched around trying to eat people’s brains. Perhaps “sleepwalker” would be a better description of Neil Bossard’s mother at the moment. Her face had settled into a stunned expression, her movements seemed automatic and a little jerky as she passed people cups and gestured toward the cream, lemon and sugar.

I shifted farther along the wall. A clump of younger people massed in one of the corners. My best guess is that they were only a few years younger than me, probably friends of Neil’s. I thought I recognized one or two of them from his MySpace page.

“It’s creeping me out,” one of the girls said, swinging her dark blonde hair back over her shoulder. “First Kurt and now Neil? I don’t see how that can be a coincidence.”

Fabulous. I wasn’t the only one who had put those two deaths together. I wondered who else had and why.

“Do you think it was a suicide pact?” another girl asked.

One of the boys brushed the question aside. “How could it be a pact? Neither of them could stand to even be in a room with the other one after they got back. How would they have made a pact?”

Tears filled the girl’s eyes. “I don’t know, but there’s got to be a reason they both, you know ...”

“Offed themselves?” The boy finished for her. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared. “They were a couple of whiney little bitches, is what they where. Only cowards kill themselves.”

“Eric!” The blonde put her hand on his chest. “Don’t talk like that.”

“I’m just telling the truth. First, there was all that skulking around and talking about people looking at them. They both did that. Of course people were looking at them. They’d been gone for six years. Even people who didn’t know what happened knew they’d come back from someplace else. Then all that weird shit about someone cursing them. Nobody cursed them. There isn’t any such thing as a curse. They did it to themselves. All of it.”

Eric turned and stomped away from the group. The blonde started to follow him, but one of the other boys stopped her. “I’ll go.”

So both boys had thought someone had been following them. Both boys had thought someone was cursing them. But why? What had they done? What had happened six years before? Where had the boys gone and why had they come back?

The group broke up. Everywhere else I inched I heard conversations about the weather and real estate prices, both hot topics at most cocktail parties. I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to attend many.

I decided it was time to put the riskier portion of my plan into play. It was time to do some actual snooping and not just eavesdropping. I inched my way along to the staircase leading to the second floor.

I was halfway up the stairs when I caught the first faint hum of the vibration. It wasn’t very strong, but it was definitely there. There was something on the second floor. I flattened myself against the wall as two women made their way down the stairs. It gave me a second to evaluate what I might be facing. One of them smiled at me as she went past. “Second door on the left,” she whispered.

I smiled and nodded. It never hurts to know where the bathroom is. Then I refocused my attention on the vibration. It felt like a thing, not a being. Perhaps what I’d delivered to Neil Bossard was still in the house. I made my way to the top of the stairs. I stood for a second, feeling with my senses which way to turn. The room at the end of the hallway felt right. I glanced down the stairs. No one else seemed to be making their way to the bathroom, but with all the tea-drinking going on, I might not have a lot of time. I walked quickly down the hall and slipped into the room.

It only took a few seconds for my eyes to refocus in the dim light. I glanced around the room. There wasn’t much on the walls, and the shelves and desk were bare. The bed had a blue plaid bedspread and a wooden headboard. It seemed so generic. Then again, Bossard hadn’t been home long from wherever he’d been. I guess wherever it was, he hadn’t wanted to bring home any souvenirs.

The hum was stronger here. I closed my eyes and let my senses guide me. I headed toward the bed. There was nothing on the bedside table. I opened the drawer and found nothing there. I got down on my hands and knees and lifted the bed skirt to look beneath the bed.

Bingo.

It was still in the box I’d delivered it in. It was small. No bigger than an index card and not much thicker than a deck of cards. Neil had never even opened it. I wondered how it had gotten under the bed and then shook my head. I didn’t even know what was in the box, but I knew how objects of power worked. Seemingly inanimate, seemingly with no will or volition of their own, they often ended up exactly where they needed to be. Someone dropped a box on the floor. Someone else accidentally kicked it. Suddenly it was under the bed of whoever it was intended for, working whatever magic, good or ill, that its maker intended.

I reached for it. Damn. It was just out of reach. If only my arms were another inch or two longer, I could get it. I craned my head under the bed. I could almost slip it under the frame. My fingers brushed the box. I scraped my fingernails along the edge and caught a fold in the brown paper that covered it and pulled it toward me. I slumped with the relief of my success.

“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” a voice demanded from behind me.

I then executed a complicated series of maneuvers that I don’t think I could possibly reproduce or even explain. Suffice it to say that I managed to both bash my head against the underside of the bed and scrape my face along the carpet. I also, however, managed to palm the box up into the sleeve of my sweater.

I stood. The voice belonged to a young man and I use the term
man
loosely. He was maybe seventeen at the most, but he was tall and solid looking.

“Hi,” I said, giving my most disarming smile. “How’s it going?”

“What were you doing under there?” He crossed his arms over his chest and scowled.

Apparently my most disarming smile was about as effective as my feminine wiles. “I was, uh, looking for the bathroom.”

“Under the bed?” The scowl turned to a look of incredulity. I couldn’t decide if that was progress or not.

“Well, of course not. Don’t be silly. I, uh, came in here by mistake and then I, uh, dropped an earring.” He was standing smack dab in the center of the doorway. The only way out was straight through him. I could definitely take him. First of all, he wouldn’t be expecting it, and surprise was always a wonderful weapon. Second, despite him looking solid, he was only solid for a seventeen-year-old. That’s not all that solid. Still, it wasn’t a course I really wanted to take. I’d planned on being discreet. I like to stick to the plan whenever possible. Barreling over a seventeen-year-old on the second floor and then hightailing it out of the house didn’t really sound discreet to me.

He squinted. “You’ve still got both your earrings in your ears.”

I reached up to check my lobes. “Yep! Found it! Isn’t that great?” I started walking toward him, hoping he would shift out of my way.

“Who are you anyway?” He didn’t shift. Bummer.

“I’m Melina. I’m, uh, I was a friend of Neil’s.” I tried to put just the right hesitation on it so that I sounded still surprised and regretful that he was dead.

“A friend from where? I don’t recognize you from around here.”

I guess I didn’t get the spin right. “No,” I said. “Not from around here.”

“You’re from there, then?” It didn’t sound like it would be a good thing to be from “there,” wherever and whatever it was. It sounded a little like it might be a leper colony.

“Not exactly,” I said, figuring it was best to be as noncommittal as possible.

His eyes still narrowed, he finally stepped out of the door. “I think you’d better go,” he said.

“Well, okay then,” I said.

I slipped past him into the hallway, which was when the commotion started downstairs.

One voice said, “Don’t you see? They’re coming for me next. Somebody’s got to help me. Why won’t you help me?”

I couldn’t make out what the answer was, but it was a deep male rumble that didn’t sound welcoming.

Bouncer Boy brushed past me and took the stairs two at a time. I followed more slowly, but not by much. I wanted to see what was going on just as much as he did, but I didn’t want to rip my skirt.

A young man stood at the doorway to the house. A ring of men prevented him from entering any farther. The entryway was virtually invisible from the living room because of the retaining wall on that side. No one could really see what was going on and the buzz inside the house from dozens of conversations masked any noise.