Dead Endings: Chapter 4

Safely ensconced within a corner of the tea-scented Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam and 11th, Gabriella relayed Jacob Warner’s words and their impressions of the blue smudge from the night before.

“Well, that’s something,” Everett said. “Dunno what yet, but it’s something. What about the cemetery? Are you sure you didn’t get anything there?”

“Nada,” said Cailen as she crushed apricot jam into the doughy innards of a croissant. “The only thing we saw there was you, barfing behind every other tombstone.”

He took a dainty sip of his Rooibos tea. “Funny. The only thing I saw was you, jumping at every turn like someone goosed you from behind. You have some real nerves of steel on you, Delaney.”

“One of them passed right through me! Of course I jumped!”

Gabriella rubbed her temples and kept her jaw clamped shut. Cailen knew that took effort.

“Well, you’re both wrong,” Everett eventually said with a sniff. “I smelled it. The ‘cinnamon.’ On Christopher Markle’s grave.”

The women shot him identical, incredulous looks.

“No way. There was nothing there, spirit or otherwise!” Cailen looked to Gabriella for backup, and her roommate nodded.

“Not a blip. You sure you actually smelled it? I mean, it looked to me like you smelled a bit of everything.”

He folded his arms over his chest and shook his head. “Oh, I also picked up a strong whiff of licorice-scented, rotten-garbage-fish death, but it was there, all right. Not much, but enough to pick out. ‘Cinnamon’ was definitely there.”

“Is there anywhere this thing can’t go?” Cailen wondered aloud. Both she and Everett looked at Gabriella for an answer.

Gabriella took a long pull on her coffee as she considered it.

“I’m in new territory here, guys. Sorry. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this. I wish my grandfather was around so I could ask him, but I’ve got nothing.”

Everett looked down at his hands.

“Then we’re all out of leads.”

“What about the police?” Cailen asked.

“Nothing useful’s come through the desk.”

Gabriella tapped her fingers on her cup. “I don’t think they know anything, either. I have a friend in the force I could talk to, but I’d like to be able to give him some kind of lead.”

Everett looked up. “What about checking out the funeral reception? It’s a long shot, but maybe his spirit is hanging around there? They follow family members sometimes, right?”

“There’s a chance, but it’s a rare one.”

“Not like we have anything else,” Cailen said with a shrug.

Gabriella pulled the card with the address from her wallet and studied the precise handwriting.

“She did say it would be going on all day…” Her brown eyes glinted mischievously. “Got a clean dress, Delaney?”

***

Crashing a funeral reception was as fun as Cailen imagined it would be. Smartly dressed people milled about in black clothing. Cufflinks gleamed at every suited wrist, whether the wearer was sixty-eight or thirteen. A professional catering staff passed around tiny, elegant food, glasses of wine, tumblers of hard liquor, and fancier drinks, mixed fresh for the asking.

Death lingered in the air, an abstract concept given shape by the weeping mother and the silent, stricken father by the stairs. It hovered on everyone’s lips, and leeched any fun or pleasure from the affair. Laughter from a baby seemed to mock the guests’ pain; adults flinched from the happy sound.

Christopher Markle, age twenty-nine and beloved son of Dennis and Andrea Markle, was dead.

Cailen took a sip of her brandy and flicked a small piece of fluff from her shoulder. It had been a long time since she’d worn a dress, but it was appropriate armor for this somber mission. Gabriella, similarly clad in a slate-gray one-piece, mingled with the other guests, gleaning information and offering sincere condolences. A lot of people had left the reception, but it would have been the height of tactlessness to intrude on the grieving family until an appropriate opening presented itself. And so they mingled and kept their eyes open for Christopher Markle, feeling guilty all the while.

Lacking appropriate, clean formal wear, Everett had elected to wait for them at a coffee shop around the corner. His bright scarf, yellow polo shirt, and ripped jeans would not have blended in well at this party. Cailen wished for a bit of his fire now that she was here, though. Anything to lighten the oppressive mood.

To her left, just an arms-length away, a young man leaned heavily against the bookcase. He was of medium height with sandy blond hair and a dusting of freckles across his nose. Cailen guessed him to be in his early twenties. He held a glass of brandy in his hand, but he stared into it as if unsure of how to drink it.

While Cailen glanced at him surreptitiously from the corner of her eye, the young man finally downed the glass in one gulp. He shuddered as the liquor went down, but his light blue eyes immediately searched for a waiter to acquire another. Taking pity on him, Cailen snagged one from a passing tray and held it out.

He gratefully accepted the proffered glass, and perhaps because he knew that someone was watching him now, he sipped at it slowly.

“Who are you?” he asked after a long pause.

Cailen held out her hand. “Cailen. I was a friend of Christopher’s.”

“I don’t think I know you.”

“It was…a long time ago,” Cailen said, praying that the man wouldn’t probe much deeper. “And you are…?”

“Oh, I’m Alex. Christopher was my cousin…”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Alex smiled strangely and sipped his brandy. “People keep saying that,” he muttered.

Cailen was not unschooled in the finer points of conversation, but navigating the fragile moods of the bereaved was not her specialty. She took a sip of her own brandy and tried, anyway.

“It must seem weird. To hear that, I mean.”

“You have no idea…”

“Because it was so recent?”

“If only…” The young man continued to drink anxiously.

“Are…you all right?” she asked.

“I…” Alex ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I think I need another drink.”

Cailen dutifully plucked another brandy off a moving tray and wished Alex was a Spanish bartender instead. Gabriella had all the luck.

“It’s just…wrong. All wrong,” Alex whispered into the glass.

“Murder usually is,” Cailen agreed.

His eyes flicked between her and the glass. The shaking in his hands intensified so much that Cailen took his glass from him as a precaution.

“I can get someone for you,” she offered, unsure of what else to say. From the expression on his face, Cailen couldn’t tell if he would burst into tears or faint right there.

“No… No one would believe me, anyway.” He half-laughed.

“Believe you about what?”

“You’ll think I’m insane.”

“You’ve still got your pants on, so I think you’re in okay territory.”

She got a weak smile for her joke.

“What if I told you that I’d seen a ghost? What about then?”

Cailen went very still. She was aware of the ebb and flow of the people moving around them, and in her peripheral vision she tracked Gabriella’s position. When she set down her brandy, the glass clinked against a brass lamp on the table, and the note sounded clear as a bell in her head.

“What did you see?”

Proceed to Chapter 4, page 3–>