Just Kill Me (31 page)

“Well, well,” I say, in my best spy voice, even though I know she can't hear me. “At last we meet, Nellise Rosenfeld . . . or should I say . . . Lillian Collier?”

I stand there on her grave, letting the rain hit the both of us, for a long minute. I wonder what she looked like when she was an old woman, a few months shy of eighty. I imagine her at that age now, under the ground, laughing as I say her old name and saying, “Lillian Collier. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. A long time.”

I wonder if Abner even knew about her days as a flapper.

Or if she ever saw Virginia Harrison again after that fire.

When I get too soaked to do anything but shiver, I get
back into the hearse, turn on the heat (hearses have better heat than you'd guess), and think about texting Cyn.

I need to talk to her. The fact that Edward was lying about Lillian doesn't necessarily mean Cyn isn't planning to kill me, or that she didn't kill Saltis, but turning me into a ghost in a far suburban cemetery would do her no good whatsoever. I'm about as safe as I can be out here.

So I send Cyn a message.

MEGAN:

You at work?

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

Home. What's up? Your mom has called me twice.

MEGAN:

Arlington Heights. Shalom Memorial Park, Section 12. Come at once. Emergency.

SWITCHBLADE CYNTHIA FARGON:

On my way.

Then I sit in the car for a bit—it's gonna take her a while to make it this far out of the city, especially in the rain. Traffic always slows down in the rain.

I let the sound of the drops on the roof of the hearse sort
of hypnotize me, and try to meditate a bit. As usual, I can't. I calm down with the
OED
.

Some good
OED
words for sex include “meddling” (1398), “Venus exercise” (1507), “hot cockles” (1627), and “Moll Peatley's jig” (1711).

Then the word “barney-mugging” pops in my brain. It isn't in the
OED
, but googling shows that it was a flapper term for sex. For a minute I think maybe Lillian's ghost whispered it in my ear, but I must have just heard it somewhere before. Surely no one comes back from the dead just to teach people fun new words for intercourse.

But, then again, that's exactly how I'd want to spend my afterlife.

When Cyn's truck pulls up, I step into the rain and I motion her over to the grave site. She sloshes through the swampy grass.

“Who's this?” she asks. Then she looks down and reads out “Nellise. Interesting name.”

“It was a pseudonym.”

“What was her real name?”

“In 1922 it was Lillian Collier.”

Cyn looks up at me, and her damp face lights up.

“This is her?”

I nod.

“You're sure?”

“Airtight. I found record after record. She became a mystery writer and a playwright under the name Nellise Child.”

“Seriously?”

“She had a play on Broadway. It only lasted a week and papers still called her a ‘girl playwright,' even though she was thirty-five, but still.”

“Yeah.”

“She even wrote some true crime, so she was technically a murdermonger.”

“Wow.” Cyn stares down at the gravestone, then smiles. “Can we talk in the car? You're gonna catch your death in this rain.”

I nod and we get into the hearse. The heater is still running.

“So, you found her,” says Cyn. “How did you do it?”

I run her through the stories about the mystery novels, the murdermongering, and Irene Castle. She listens intently, then says, “You could be her reincarnation, if you believe in that sort of thing.”

“Or maybe I'm her ghost,” I say.

She laughs. “Nah. You've aged since I was your babysitter. Ghosts don't do that. Not real ones.”

She doesn't say anything or react in any way that makes me think the idea of me being, or becoming, Lillian's ghost is anything she's been plotting.

I show her all the documents I've saved to my phone. Articles where she talks about hopping freight trains from California to New York with her dog, Prince Otto, to get her
play produced. The new 1920s stuff I found. I see when I'm flipping through them that there's an article in the
Tribune
archives with the name “Nellie Lieberman” too, but a missing comma made it less apparent that she was Lillian's mom.

Then, as Cyn reads through an article I found about “Lillian Gerard” from the 1940s, I just blurt out the question.

“Why did you tell my mom about Zoey?”

She looks up from the article. “I thought your mom seemed surprised when I mentioned that. She didn't know about her?”

I shake my head.

“You and your mom tell each other everything. You're like the Gilmore Goths.”

“Well, I don't tell her that about, like, sexting or freaky stuff. God.”

“I thought you'd at least tell her you had someone who was important to you.”

“I was afraid she'd tell me how stupid I was being.”

Cyn looks guilty, then gives me a hug as she apologizes and says we all do stupid things for love. “Look,” she says. “Obviously I didn't tell your mom about the stories or anything. I just asked if you were okay and mentioned that I knew you were having girlfriend trouble. That's all. If I knew it was that big of a secret, I never would have said a thing.”

I nod.  And Cyn looks back at the phone, reading the rest of the article about Lillian from when she was a 1940s
housewife who wrote novels. When she finishes, she smiles and hands me back my phone.

I stare for a second, then ask the
really
big question.

“Did you tell Edward Tweed about Zoey too?”

She gives me a surprised look, then laughs like I just asked her if she could drive me to Italy in her truck.

“Of course not,” she says.

“Seriously. It's okay. Did you?”

“Megan, I would never tell that man anything personal. If I was in front of him in line at KFC, I wouldn't want him to know if I was getting original or extra crispy.”

I lean back in my seat. “Okay.”

I want to believe her. I desperately, desperately want to believe her. And I think I do.

“Seriously, Megan. Why would you even think I would do that?”

“He knows all about her.”

“What?”

“And at least the basics about my stories. And he says you told him.”

She breathes heavily for a second, then says, “Did Zoey know about Edward?”

“I guess. I told her a little about the competition and stuff.”

“She probably e-mailed him herself, then. Maybe she got so pissed off when you kissed Morticia that she sent everything over to your business rival.”

I swear on the grave of Lillian, the second Cyn says that, the windshield wipers in the hearse turn themselves on. If we'd been on a ghost hunt, we'd say it was a ghost sighting. The wipers clear up the windshield just as everything becomes clear in my brain.

Of
course
Zoey must have e-mailed Edward.

It was probably some sort of revenge on me. She probably offered to give him dirt on us or something. Our tour route. Pictures of the Couch tomb interior. Stuff about my Lillian obsession. Maybe even my stories.

It all makes sense.

Edward had my phone number to text me the other day, after Aaron died. Even if Cyn was telling Edward about Zoey, surely she wouldn't have given him my phone number, right? What would be the point? But if Zoey was sending him shit about me as revenge, my phone number might have been part of it.

I think the wipers are beating at the same rhythm as my heart.

“That's gotta be it,” I say. “It has to be. She told him. And he's been lying to me.”

“Of course he has,” says Cyn. “It's what he does. The way I see it, either he got the info from Zoey herself, or he's rigged something up to bug the bus and spy on us. Maybe both.”

“I thought about that. I checked for, like, walkie-talkies or whatever you'd use. Nanny cams. I didn't see any.”

“I'll check some more. But I'll bet the whole dog and pony show that Zoey told him herself.”

Then I look over at Cyn. Each thunk of the windshield wipers feels like another piece of the puzzle falling into place.

Thunk thunk.

“He knows about the brain-punch thing, you know,” I say. “I don't know how.”

“He's been in the business a while. If Marjorie found out about it, he probably could have too.”

Thunk, thunk.

“He could have been killing people at his tour stops this whole time. For years,” I say. “That might explain why everyone thinks his stops are haunted, even when the back story doesn't check out.”

“Totally. Proper murder victims would make better imprints than what we get.”

Thunk thunk.

“Maybe
he
killed Aaron Saltis,” I say.

“Yeah. Maybe after he found out Saltis was talking to Ghostly Journeys.”

Thunk thunk.

“Probably did it on the tour route so I'd think it was you.”

Thunk thunk.

“He's trying to throw you off,” says Cyn. “So you won't suspect that he's planning to kill you himself.”

“You think? I think he'd rather have me alive and do the TV show with him. He's trying to recruit me.”

Thunk thunk.

“He might let you live a while if you join him,” she says. “Might. But it'll just be a matter of time.”

“So . . . what do we do?”

We stay in the cemetery, talking through every point of evidence, until they're about to close the gates. Then we say good-bye to Lillian and head over to a little deli nearby to warm back up. We sit there for the next hour, comparing notes.

We can't call the cops. We've done too much we don't want them looking into.

And we can't really tell Ricardo, partly because he doesn't know what we've been doing either, and partly because we both decide we don't want to deal with all of the jokes he's sure to make about Edward trying to turn me to the DarkSide.

But we make plans.

And before I go home, I call Tweed and arrange a meeting.

“Let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it . . . To practice death is to practice freedom.”

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

T
he moon hangs between the antennas of the Hancock Center as I pull the hearse into the damp, gloomy bus lot. A Halloween-sized rat scurries along by the 1930s fire truck that someone keeps parked out here. The coyote is probably out there somewhere on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Edward Tweed is waiting by his car and waves at me when I roll my window down.

“Sweet ride,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“I think in a couple of cities they actually have ghost tours that drive people around in hearses, but I don't know how they make any money. Only so many seats to sell.”

“You want to take it out to Lincoln Park?” I ask.

“We can just take my car,” he says. “They all know me at the museum, so they won't run us off if I park in their lot.”

My knees are shaking like hell, but I somehow manage to
walk from my car to his. It's a fancy sports car. Mr. Tweed is doing pretty well for himself.

He drives out of the lot, and I notice Cyn sitting in a car with Punk Rock James at the intersection on the other side of Halsted Street. In the rearview mirror I see them hold back a second after we pass by, then they pull onto Halsted Street to follow us at a safe distance.

My sense of lingering dread is mostly gone now, but it's been replaced by a nervousness way beyond any I've ever felt before. The only thing I can compare it to is the second before Morticia kissed me. Only that was just a second. This is a continual buzz of nervousness.

Emprise (first recorded 1500). Twitchety (1859). Spooky (1926).

I'll get through this.

It's really sort of awesome, in fact. Espionage and intrigue already, at the age of eighteen. Fuck yeah.

I keep trying to tell myself things like that. But I'm also busy trying to gauge how scared I should be. Cyn and I agree that even if he did kill Saltis, he's probably not going to kill me today. Maybe not even this year. He might really want me to do this TV show with him.

But “probably” isn't good enough. I'm in danger. But I can't let him know that I know it.

Also, there's a very good chance that this old man has
read some of the stories I wrote. That Zoey sent him the most embarrassing ones. The idea that he knows that part of me makes me nauseous.

“I found some new articles about Lillian the flapper,” I say casually, as we cruise along. “Apparently Virginia Harrison, her partner, was the chief suspect when her tearoom got torched.”

“Lovers' quarrel,” he says. “They were a couple, you know.”