Vanished

He’s much too tall from my position down on the floor: a giant blue denim tree crowned with silvery hair. My dream vision zooms up and in, and something tightens in my chest until I can feel it strain to the breaking point.

Will Novak, my ex-boyfriend, looks down at me with a cool glance. “Oh. It’s you,” he says.

The too-tight thing in my chest pings and breaks. Pain lashes through me like the unwinding mainspring of a broken clock.

I woke up with a scream in my mouth that twisted into shuddering tears. I huddled into my bed and cried, feeling that something had been wrecked or wrenched apart in a way I didn’t understand. I wished I was cuddled up with Quinton in his safe little hole under the streets and not alone with the lingering desolation of my nightmare.

I’m not much for emotional outbursts. They’re counterproductive and ugly and they tend to put someone at a disadvantage. Even alone in my condo I felt a little ashamed of weeping like a brat, and I was glad the ferret wasn’t going to tell anyone. But I still felt bad about it.

The dream was a bad start to a bad day filled with unpaid bills, lying clients, dead-end investigations, and ghosts behaving badly. So with the past and my death on my mind, I guess it wasn’t such a surprise that I got a phone call from a dead boyfriend. The dead seem to have a thing about phones.

I didn’t recognize the number, but that never stops me. I answered the phone, “Harper Blaine,” like usual.

“Hiya, Slim.”

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“Ahhh. no. I had to whistle pretty hard, but I think I got it right.”

Whistle? What the—?

“Hey,” the voice continued, “you know how to whistle, don’t ya?”

I couldn’t stop myself from finishing the quote. “You just put your lips together. and blow.” That was Slim Browning’s line from To Have and Have Not. Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart. My favorite film. It was someone else’s favorite film, too.

He laughed. “I knew you wouldn’t forget.”

A chill ran over me. “Who is this?”

“You’re disappointing me, Slim. It’s Cary.”

“Cary.?” I echoed, feeling queasy.

“Malloy. From LA.”

Cary Malloy had mentored me through my first two years as a professional investigator. We’d broken the rules about interoffice romances. Then he’d died in a car accident on Mulholland Drive. Two fast cars racing on the twisty road with a distracting view across the nighttime basin of lights; a bad curve; Cary’s car parked on the shoulder as he observed a subject’s house, pretending to admire the view; one car swinging a little too wide, sliding out the side of the curve. I hadn’t been there, but I always felt as if I had, as if I’d heard the sound of the cars colliding, scraping across the road in showers of sparks and the screech of metal. The two cars had tumbled over the cliff, milling down the canyon side as the third rushed away into the darkness.

The subject had called it in. After all, it had happened right across the street, and the small fire started in the dry chaparral by hot metal and spilling gas was a menace. The entangled state of the burning cars made it plain both drivers were long dead by the time LA County Fire arrived. The residents of the canyon had simply stood at the edge of the road and watched. There was nothing else they could do.

My silence gave my thoughts away, I suppose. Cary’s voice said, “Yeah. dying really bit.”

My own voice shook a little when I replied, “That’s what I hear. Umm. why did you call?”

“It’s complicated.” I could almost hear him shrug. “But, look, I have to tell you—” He choked and coughed, his voice straining now. “Have to say, it’s not what you think.”

I could hear a noise, a crackling sound.

“You don’t know what you really are, Slim. You need to come here and look into the past,” he muttered, his voice fading as if he was moving away from the phone. “There’re things. waiting for you. ”

“Cary? What things? Cary!” I shouted at the phone, feeling tears building and trembling over my eyelids.

But he’d already faded away, and the flat, dull hum of the dial tone was the only sound from the phone. I put the receiver down and pressed my hand over my mouth, squeezing my eyes shut against the burning of saltwater tears. Coming on the heels of the nightmare, this was too much. But I wasn’t going to cry. Not over Cary Malloy. Not again and after so much time. I wasn’t twelve anymore, and blubbering wasn’t going to help anything.

I wasn’t crying when Quinton came tapping at my office door a few minutes later, but I must have looked pretty horrible. He glanced at me and slid in, locking the door behind himself as he dropped his backpack on the floor. He crouched down beside my chair and tried to catch my eye.

“Is the ferret OK?”

I frowned in confusion. “What? Why are you asking that?”

“Because you look like your best friend just died. What’s wrong?”

“I just got a phone call from a guy who’s been dead for eight years.”

“That’s never bothered you before.”

“I used to date him. He died in a car wreck.”

Quinton straightened and leaned on the edge of my desk. “That is a little weirder than normal. What did he want?”

“I’m not sure. He wasn’t very clear. He wanted me to come. someplace and look into the past. He said things aren’t what I think—he said I’m not what I think. And then he faded out.”

“Was he always a cryptic pain in the ass, or is that new since his death?”

I had to snort a laugh—it was kind of fu

“But he called you. After eight years. Maybe I have some competition here. ”

I made a face. “I don’t think so. But that’s not the only weird thing. I dreamed about my death last night.”

Quinton looked uncomfortable and sat down on the edge of my desk so he could avoid looking me straight in the eye. “You mean. in the future?” Some things still freak out even Quinton, I guess.

“No, I mean when this all started two years ago; when I died in that elevator,” I explained. “I don’t see the future.”

He gnawed on his lower lip and thought a bit, holding my hands in both of his. His grip was warm and comforting, loosening a tension in my shoulders I hadn’t noticed until it slid away. “It’s an interesting coincidence. Do you think it’s more than that?”

I made a face and shook my head, slightly disgusted with the direction my thoughts were turning. “I have decreasing confidence in coincidence. Freaky Grey events almost never ‘just happen’ together. It’s like a pond where the ripples of one event can set off a whole series of others.”

Quinton raised his eyebrows expectantly but said nothing.

I sighed. “All right. I have the feeling that something’s building up. There’s a lot happening around here lately with the ghosts and vampires and magical things. I have three open cases right now involving ghosts, and Edward’s been sending more invitations—of various kinds—for me to come to work for him. You know how much he wants to control me.”

“Yeah. The vampires have been kind of restless lately here in Pioneer Square,” Quinton added. “Do you think that’s something Edward’s doing to get to you?”

Edward Kammerling was the leader of Seattle’s vampire pack; he was also the founder of TPM, one of Seattle’s biggest development groups in a city historically run by developers of various stripes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t see how he’d benefit from drawing attention, do you?”

“No,” Quinton confirmed, shaking his head with a grim set to his mouth. “But even with the stu