influence was meager. I could inspire a breeze, ripple the surface of a pond, maybe even create a spark or two, but none of that could stop a man. If he wanted to hurt my morning’s muse, there would be nothing I could do except witness her suffering—and I was not at all sure this was something I could endure. Having wallowed in human misery while I was alive, I was not anxious to have it follow me in death.
They were approaching the undeveloped edge of the park, hidden from the playground and picnic area by acres of untamed overgrowth. Early in my career, I used to bust men in the shadows of the ramble ahead, hauling them in for lewd conduct and indecent exposure. This was code for some poor bastard groping another poor bastard in the dark, both seeking something raw and real to counteract the charade of their lives. Back then, I’d enjoyed arresting those men with the same enthusiasm my father had reserved for hunting deer. But I was ashamed of my actions now—and I’d have given anything to encounter another human tramping among the shadows. Anyone at all. I feared for my new friend, Noni. Could she not see what this man was up to? He was a loner who had lived with his mother his entire life. Did she need a Hitchcock movie playing right in front of her to realize the truth? You’d think someone named “Mrs. Bates” would know better.
“Look,” Noni said suddenly. “Did you see that? Follow me.” And she’s leading him even deeper into the brush. It is hard to be a guardian angel given what humans bring upon themselves. She placed a finger over her lips, and the chubby man dutifully followed, tiptoeing closer as she bent forward and parted the branches of a bramble bush. “See?”
There, nestled under a protective layer of thorny branches and thick leaves, a mother rabbit had just returned to her nest of grass. Eight newborn kits crowded around her, seeking her warmth.
“They’re very good mothers,” the old lady whispered to her new friend.
Something profound rose in the man named Robert Michael Martin at her comment: sorrow, panic, need—emotions flared like a fire doused with gasoline before he pushed it all back into the past and concealed it with a rush of self-assurance.
Where did that come from?
I would have no time to wonder. The stillness of the spring morning was split by the sound of sirens, arriving from all directions. Their wails filled the air, terrifying the rabbits and flushing birds from the brush. Even I, so used to sirens when I was alive, felt a dark cloud pass through me.
“Oh, dear,” the old lady said.
“We’re too late,” Robert Michael Martin said in despair. “He’s taken someone.”
“You don’t know that,” Noni said firmly. “It could be a fire.”
It was not a fire. I reached the scene well before the pair hurrying across the park behind me. But it was a not a kidnapped child, either. Squad cars were converging on a cottage across the road that bordered the playground in the park. Already, there were three first responders at the curb and more arrived within the minute. Whatever had happened was bad—and the possibilities were made worse by the fact that the cottage did not look like a crime scene at all. It seemed more like a perfect home for happy endings. It was a white-clapboard, copper-roofed house only one story high, a modern fairy cottage among the larger homes surrounding it. The yard was well tended and in full spring bloom, though its glory would not survive the day. Already, heavy-booted patrolmen were trampling the grounds as they stretched crime scene tape from corner to corner, barricading the cottage inside a perimeter of officially sanctioned space that none could cross but the anointed.
And me, of course. No crime scene tape could stop me.
Unseen, I entered the house and found a tidy home with pink-painted walls and plump furniture heaped high with pillows. There were family photos displayed on shelves and fresh flowers in a vase set on a delicately carved table in the foyer.
Death waited a few feet beyond.
I felt it before I saw it: a flat, cold void, as if in taking life away, death had taken all the oxygen and light with it.
Death is always startling, even when you live in it. Sprawled across a pastel carpet lay the body of a small woman. In her stillness, she seemed as frail