Five of us, all lined up. Looking thoughtful, disheveled, and disaffected. Yeah, even a little John Hughes. “Which one are you, honey?” I asked.
“The brain, clearly.”
“And that would make me the basket case.”
He reached out, and I snuggled under his arm as he pulled me close and kissed the top of my head.
Sadie said, “Would you guys do me a favor and keep in touch this time? Like even a Christmas card or something. Or a text message every six months. And don’t kill each other?”
“Monthly coffee date?” I suggested.
“You’re on.”
“I do miss coffee,” Jesse sighed. “The trick is finding someone who’s just had a double venti latte, then drink their blood—”
I looked at him. “I didn’t need to know that.”
Trevor laughed.
I could almost hear music coming from the ballroom, over the chatter of the crowd. With so few people left inside, the sound echoed and carried. “That poor DJ isn’t still trying to keep things going, is he?” I said.
“‘My Heart Will Go On’ was on when I ducked in,” Sadie said.
And wasn’t that just terrible? “What’s playing now?”
We all got quiet, trying to make out the hint of a chorus. Jesse, who probably had the best hearing of any of us, leaned forward, head tilted. Then, he laughed.
“Oh, it isn’t,” I said. Then we all heard it.
Don’t you forget about me . . .
It’s Still the Same Old Story
RICK AWOKE AT SUNSET and found a phone message from an old friend waiting for him. Helen sounded unhappy, but she didn’t give details. She wouldn’t even say that she was afraid and needed help, but the hushed tone of her voice made her sound like she was looking over her shoulder. He grabbed his coat, went upstairs to the back of the shop where he parked his silver BMW, and drove to see her.
The summer night was still, ordinary. Downtown Denver blazed. To his eyes, the skyscrapers seemed like glowing mushrooms; they’d sprung up so quickly, overwhelming everything that had come before. Only in the last forty years or so had Denver begun to shed its cow town image to become another typical metropolis. He sometimes missed the cow town, though he could still catch glimpses of it. Union Station still stood, the State Capitol of course, and the Victorian mansions in the surrounding neighborhoods. If he squinted, he could remember them in their glory days. Some of the fire from the mining boom era remained. That was why Rick stayed.
Helen lived a few miles south along the grid of streets around the University of Denver, in a house not quite as old or large as those Victorian mansions, but still an antique in the context of the rest of the city. She’d lived there since the 1950s, when Rick bought her the place. Even then, Denver had been booming. The city was an ever-shifting collage, its landmarks rising and falling, the points around which he navigated subtly changing over the decades.
Points like Helen.
He parked on the street in front of her house, a single-story square cottage, pale blue with white trim, shutters framing the windows, with a front porch and hanging planters filled with multicolored petunias. The lights were off.
For a moment, he stood on the concrete walkway in front and let his more-than-human senses press outward: sight, sound, and taste. The street, the lawn, the house itself were undisturbed. The neighbors were watching television. A block away, an older man walked a large dog. It was all very normal, except that the house in front of him was silent. No one living was inside—he’d have smelled the blood, heard the heartbeat.
When he and Helen became friends, he’d known this day would come. This day always came. But the circumstances here were unnatural. He walked up the stairs to the front door, which was unlocked. Carefully, he pushed inside, stepping around the places on the hardwood floor that creaked, reaching the area rug in the living room. Nothing—furniture, photographs, bookcase, small upright piano in the corner—was out of place. The modernist coffee table, a cone-shaped lamp by a blocky armchair, silk lilies in a cut-crystal vase. They were the decorations of an old woman—out of place, out of time, seemingly preserved. But to Rick it was just Helen, the way she’d always been.
His steps muffled on the rug, he progressed to the kitchen in back. He found her there, lying on the linoleum floor. Long dead—he could tell by her cold skin and the smell of dried blood on the floor.
Standing in the doorway, he could work out what had happened. She’d been sitting at the Formica table, sipping a cup of tea. The cup and saucer were there, undisturbed, along with a bowl of sugar cubes. She must have set the cup down before she fell. When she did fall, it had been violently, knocking the chair over. She had crawled a few feet—not far. She might have broken a hip or leg in the fall—expected, at her age. Flecks of blood streaked the back of her blue silk dress, fanning out from a dark, dime-sized hole. When he took a deep breath, he could smell the fire of gunpowder. She’d been shot in the back, and she had died.
After such a life, to die like this.
So that was that. A more-than-sixty-year acquaintance ended. Time to say goodbye, mourn, and move on. He’d done it before—often, even. He could be philosophical about it. The natural course of events, and all that. But this was different, and he wouldn’t abandon her, even now when it didn’t matter. He’d do the right thing—the human thing.
He drew his cell phone from his coat pocket and dialed 911.
“Hello. I need to report a murder.”