Page 9

“We don’t get to choose our beginnings or our ends. All we get to decide on is what we do in between. And baby, I hope you shine.”

—Eloise Dunlavy

The driveway of a small home in Columbus, Ohio

I REAPPEARED ON THE EDGE of the lawn, where the shadow of the house would keep me from being too obvious. Not that I was particularly concerned: there were no ghost hunters in this area, and if the Covenant had been sniffing around again, Shelby would have said something. Most people, when they see someone appear out of thin air, assume there’s something wrong with their eyes before they jump to “ghosts are real.”

Sometimes human stubbornness works in my favor, is what I’m saying here. I looked around. My precautions had been for nothing, because there was no one watching me, only Arthur sitting miserably in the back seat of the car with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed. Even he didn’t seem to have seen me arrive. I trotted in his direction, testing the passenger-side door and finding it mercifully unlocked.

A locked door won’t keep me out, but a locked door frequently means the person on the other side is looking for privacy, and I try not to be that particular flavor of asshole when I have a choice in the matter. I opened the door and slid into the front seat, kneeling with my back to the windshield and my elbows resting on the back of the seat.

“Hey,” I said.

Arthur didn’t lift his head. I winced. This wasn’t great.

“Hey,” I tried again. This time he glanced up, just enough to meet my eyes, before looking back down again.

“Hey,” he agreed, in a monotone.

“You okay, buddy?”

“I’m not your buddy,” he said. “You barely know me. You remember babysitting this body, I guess, since some of the memories I’m made from tell me that you used to be in charge of me, but you don’t know me. Don’t act like you do.”

“I’m sorry, Arthur. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. And I wasn’t trying to act like you’re the same person you used to be. But it’s hard, sometimes, not to act that way. You were built from memories of him, and as you said, I used to take care of the body you live in.”

Arthur turned his face away.

“You just want Artie back,” he said.

I paused. I didn’t want to tell him he was right, and I didn’t want to lie to him, either. But he was right. Artie was the kid I had helped to raise, the boy I knew and understood, the man I had been so proud to watch growing up and growing into himself. He was the one I knew, and loved, and treasured, and even though it would have meant this man disappeared forever, I would have brought Artie home in an instant. Not just for me, either. He and Sarah spent so many years dancing around each other that losing him, and losing him due to Sarah, no less, felt less like a natural ending and more like a cruel cheat inflicted by an uncaring universe.

“Arthur…” I said.

“You can’t even lie about it, can you? You want him back, the same as everyone does, and you hate that I’m here.”

“I don’t,” I said, carefully. “Hate that you’re here, I mean. Everything changes. People come and go. I do worry sometimes that you being here means that Artie doesn’t get to move on—that because you’re using the same body, you’re also functionally using the same soul. If that’s the case, it’s not fair to either of you. I do want him back, but I’d be perfectly happy to have him back and keep you around at the same time, if that were possible. But what I want doesn’t matter. He’s not coming back. He was erased, and you’re here now, and we both need to be okay with that. I like you, Arthur. I like the ways you’re like Artie, and I like the ways you’re not like him, too. I like watching you figure out who you are.”

He turned back to me, expression utterly miserable. “It doesn’t really matter what I figure out. Pieces of me keep breaking off and dropping into the void, and once they’re gone, they’re gone forever. I know that sounds weird, but when something falls, it’s not like I forgot it. It’s just not there anymore. It’s gone. ”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you try to think about your life, you know how you don’t remember every single little detail, but it feels like there’s something in the spaces you don’t remember all the way? Like going for a long walk through a familiar neighborhood, and maybe you won’t see every little detail, but what you do see will be coherent enough to fill in the gaps? I don’t have that anymore. I just have emptiness.” He sighed, visibly frustrated. “No wonder that kid thought I was a monster. The inside of my head must look like a slaughterhouse.”

“That kid is your cousin Isaac,” I said.

“I’ve never met him before, or if I have, it happened in one of the spaces that isn’t there anymore, and it’s gone,” he said. “But I know a cuckoo when I see one. That’s something I never have to question anymore. Whether or not I see a cuckoo.”

“Arthur—”

“I still love her, you know that?” His frustration faded, just a bit, replaced by miserable longing. “I love her with every part of me, because all the memories she used to make me came from people who knew her and knew Artie and knew how much they loved each other. I’ve talked to Annie and James, and I think I know more about growing up with Sarah than they do, because she deleted their memories of her when we crossed dimensions. She took Artie’s, too, but she didn’t build me from his memories. He was already gone when she made me. So I’m built from all the people who knew how much she loved me, and how much I loved her, and I can’t outrun the love, no matter how hard I try. But she can’t even stand to be around me. And when I say I love her, she says it’s not real, it’s just what cuckoos do to their victims, making them think they’re in love when it’s all just another lie.” He paused then, looking at me gravely. “If the love’s a lie, then everything about me is a lie, and all of me should be deleted. If I’m real, so’s the way I love her, because I’m made of the same memories.”

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” I said softly. “This has to have been so hard on you. On all of you.”

“She didn’t know what she was doing when she made me,” he said. “She just wanted to save someone she cared about, and she didn’t know that it was too late to save him. I just wish she’d stop running away from me.”

“Have you tried writing her a letter and telling her what’s going on with you? She might want to know, even if she can’t be in a room with you right now.”

Arthur blinked at me. “Writing her a letter?”

“I’m older than your grandmother, remember? We didn’t have email when I was your age—hell, I was dead when I was your age—and you couldn’t always trust the phones. So people wrote each other letters. It’s words on paper. There’s nothing in them but what you put there, and no one reads anyone else’s mind without meaning to. It might be a way for you to communicate with her without all that other stuff getting in the middle.”

“Where would I even send it?”

“Anywhere,” I said. “Here, Michigan, even to Verity in New York. As long as it’s a family address, she’ll get it eventually. Just don’t focus too hard on needing an answer immediately and it’ll work.”

“I may try that,” he said thoughtfully.

Outside the car, a door slammed. I twisted around to look out the windshield, and saw Elsie storming across the lawn toward us, hair wet and spiky, clearly furious. She jerked the car door open and swung in behind the wheel, slamming the door again before fastening her seatbelt. I blinked.

“Elsie?”

“Call my brother a monster,” she muttered. “Say my brother doesn’t belong. What the fuck ever happened to ‘family before all else’?”

I flipped myself around and settled, pulling my own seatbelt on. “It’s not Isaac’s fault,” I said. “He’s just a kid.”

“We were all kids once,” said Elsie. “I didn’t go around accusing people of being monsters.”

“I know,” I said soothingly.

“You okay, Art?” asked Elsie.

“I’m fine,” said Arthur.

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m not fine,” he admitted. “But can we get moving?”

“Sure. I’ve had a shower, so I’m good for another eight hours. We stopping in New York or not?”

We’d been trying to decide that almost since leaving Portland. Stopping in New York would mean dealing with a pregnant, hormonal Verity who might decide she needed to come with us. Potentially, it could also mean dealing with Sarah, and we needed to give Arthur time before we tried to force that again.

“I think straight to Boston,” I said. “The anima mundi didn’t say anything about the people in New York knowing anything about the ghost hunts, and I feel like we need to get this done.” Not least because we needed to get Arthur home before he fell apart further, and I didn’t like leaving Ted alone like this.

“Got it,” said Elsie, and pulled out of the driveway with a squeal of tires that would have woken the children if they’d been in bed, and would definitely guarantee that Shelby understood how unhappy she was.

And once again, we were off.

Driving with Elsie was an experience I would probably have enjoyed a lot less if I’d been alive. She drove like she wanted to get into an argument with the very concept of traffic laws, shifting lanes any time she felt like there was a sliver of speed to be stolen from the world, hitting the gas like slowing down was a personal affront. Arthur didn’t seem to realize how incredibly dangerous all this could become; he rode quietly and contentedly, humming to himself as she assaulted the American highway system like she resented it for not allowing her to become a routewitch.

Routewitches aren’t made, they’re born. It’s boring deterministic bullshit, but that’s the way the world works. No amount of wanting to be a routewitch will make you one if you’re not, and no amount of wanting not to be a routewitch will save you from the Ocean Lady if she thinks you’re one of hers.

Elsie always wanted to be chosen for something. Not just a member of her family, but something big and important that she wouldn’t have to work to become, that she could just be . But you don’t get to choose whether or not you’re chosen, and as time went on, she’d been forced to admit she was going to need to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. Predestination wasn’t going to give her all the answers.

After we’d been driving for about five hours, Arthur cleared his throat and said, “I want to eat food. Can we stop and eat food, please?”

Elsie glanced at the rearview mirror. “Do you know what food you want to eat?” she asked. The question had the vague air of a test.

Arthur apparently thought so too, because his gaze skittered from her over to me, anxious and afraid of giving the wrong answer. “Er…” he said.

“How about something fast and easy?” I suggested. “I think there’s a truck stop up ahead. We can probably find something there.”

I usually try to avoid truck stops. They’re road ghost territory, the protectorate of phantoms like Rose and other spirits of the highway. And the ghosts who hold and haunt them don’t always look kindly on intruders. Still, as Arthur looked at my reflection with grateful relief, I couldn’t regret anything about agreeing to stop there.

“Sure,” said Elsie, with a shrug. She hit the gas harder, and the car rewarded us with a sudden surge forward, pressing us all back into our seats. “Hold on to your butts,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Arthur, and I laughed, and everything was going to be all right, no matter how far we had to drive to get there.

I was right about the truck stop: we started passing signs for it in under a mile, and reached the exit in roughly three, pulling off via an offramp barely large enough to be worthy of the name, and from there onto a gravel frontage road that ran straight into the embrace of one of those ridiculously overbuilt and overblown fortresses of travel that only really seem to crop up on the American East Coast, where the threat of blizzard is even more pronounced than the need for greasy burgers and cheap coffee. Multiple gas stations and convenience stores warred for territory in the body of a single interconnected stop, along with an indoor food court packed with fast food franchises, a literal diner, and a small motel that promised hourly rentals and showers.

Add on the sheer amount of neon and chrome on display, and the place looked like an advertisement for the power of capitalism, or at least the power of the road itself. I leaned a little closer to Elsie as we drove, watching the stop grow closer, trying to decide whether I’d made the wrong call.

“What do you think, Arthur?” asked Elsie. “McDonald’s or the diner?”

“Diner,” said Arthur.

I mustered a sickly smile. This was on my head, no matter what came next. Whether I pissed off the Ocean Lady or got off scot-free, this was on my head.

Elsie pulled up outside the diner, and we all got out, heading inside as a group. The sign at the hostess stand said to seat ourselves, but when we moved to do precisely that, a waitress stopped, tray in hand, snapped her gum, and said loudly, “Wrong way, honey. Your table’s already waiting for you.”

I didn’t like that at all. From her expression, neither did Elsie. Arthur turned eagerly in the direction the waitress had indicated, bouncing onto his toes and waving. I turned more slowly, trying to put off the moment when I’d need to face whatever had decided to complicate our journey.

There, sitting in a corner booth, was a Japanese American teenager in an outdated white peasant blouse with apple blossoms stitched around the cuffs and apples embroidered at the neckline. She was sipping on a milkshake, and there were already three burgers waiting on the table, perfect and glistening with grease and melted cheese. They looked like the sort of burgers you’d see in a catalog advertising the ideal all-American diner, and they weren’t made more realistic by the piles of golden potatoes nearby.

The three of us walked toward her, Elsie warily, Arthur na?vely, and me with clear resignation. She gestured for us to sit, and we sat. Arthur wound up to her right, and as soon as she indicated his burger, he picked it up and tore into it, eating like he hadn’t seen a solid meal in years and was afraid he might never see one ever again. Elsie scooted in to her left, and I sat next to Elsie, at the outside of the booth, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Who are you?” asked Elsie, still wary.

“I’m a lot of people,” said the girl. “I’m royalty. I’m a runaway. I’m one of the eternal children of the American road—I stopped getting older a long damn time ago, and I’m not going to start again until I decide it’s time for me to go, or someone better for my people comes along. My parents called me Tanaka Asuna, although that’s not how people know me now. Your friend knows who I am.” She shifted her focus to me, then blinked and frowned. “Mary? What happened to your eyes?”

“I died,” I said, with a small shrug. “Again, I mean. I got blown to ghost dust and the anima mundi pulled me back together. I’m assuming they’re the reason you’re here.”

“What, I can’t want to see an old friend?” she asked.

“You can, you just don’t,” I said. “I’m guessing this truck stop isn’t really here, either.”

“Too obvious? Or not obvious enough?” She craned her head to look out the window. “I considered putting a carnival in the west parking lot—thought it might make your traveling companions more comfortable—but then I couldn’t decide whether that would be overkill or just the right amount of kill. What do you think?”

“I think introductions are in order,” I said, mildly. “Elsie, this is Apple, current Queen of the North American Routewitches. Apple, this is Elsinore Harrington-Price, one of the kids I babysit for, and her brother, Arthur Harrington-Price. They’re both under my protection.”

“Did you think I managed this many decades as queen by mess ing with a caretaker’s charges?” Apple picked up her milkshake and took a pointed sip, never taking her eyes off of me. “Routewitches walk the border between the living and the dead, Mary. You know this. I’ve always known what you were, and I’ve never challenged your authority over the ones within your care. I would no more threaten one of your kids than I would set aside my crown.”

“Your predecessor did.”

“Threaten, or abdicate?”

“Abdicate.”

“Too bad for him, because I like the job more than he ever did, and I’m not following in his footsteps while I have any choice in the matter.” Apple shrugged, setting her milkshake off to the side and focusing on Elsie. “Is she always this suspicious?”

“When it’s about our safety, yeah,” said Elsie. She looked at the cheeseburger in front of her, and then to her brother, who was already halfway through his, barely pausing to breathe or chew. “Mary, I’m guessing from what you said about the truck stop that wherever we are isn’t really real. Is this like eating food in a fairy tale? Am I going to wind up sworn to the service of a weird teenager for seven years if I eat this burger?”

“Not if she knows what’s good for her,” I said, casting a sharp-eyed glance at Apple.

She laughed. Actually laughed, like the situation was genuinely hilarious. Leaning back in her seat, she said, “I am not the Queen of Faerie, and I wouldn’t mess with Mary’s kids if I were. You can eat. I’ll be more annoyed if the food goes to waste than I will be if you eat it.”

That was all the permission Elsie needed. She picked up her cheeseburger and took a quick bite, eyes going wide as she chewed and swallowed. Then she ripped in to the rest of the burger like someone was going to take it away from her, eating with the same enthusiasm as Arthur.

I gave Apple a hard look. She laughed, holding up her hands.

“It’s just diner food, I swear. Platonically perfect diner food, but diner food all the same. It can’t hurt them, although it may be a while before they can eat another cheeseburger. Once you’ve tasted perfection, it’s hard to accept anything less.”

“And I suppose that’s why you keep the crown,” I said.

Apple looked surprised. “No. I keep the crown because the Ocean Lady still loves me, and as long as she loves me, I belong with her. One day she’ll find someone she likes better, and I’ll fade into obscurity like the kings and queens before me. But for now, I’m comfortable in my reign, and I’m not in any hurry to get myself unseated.”

I frowned but said nothing.

“I guess you’re wondering why I came to meet you.”

“No, I figured you’d show up eventually, after I asked the anima mundi to find me a routewitch,” I said. “You do take a personal interest where I’m concerned.”

“You were there when my predecessor lost his position,” she said. “Makes this personal.”

“That’s not exactly how it happened—”

“But yes, the anima mundi approached my lady and told her you might need one or more of my subjects to help you get where you were going. I declined to help.”

“What? Why?”

“You were getting there just fine the ordinary way, and look at it from my perspective—you people are starting to use my people as a glorified taxi service, and that’s not what we are. We’re a culture and a community in our own right, and we don’t exist solely to make it easier on you assholes.” Apple took a sip from her milkshake. “Anima mundi did make one good point, though. Those Covenant fucks are killing innocent ghosts, and more than that, they’re capturing them.”

“Capturing them?”

She nodded. “Sealing them in spirit jars full of mercury, salt, and iron nails, then shaking them until the ghosts inside can’t stay out of contact with those components. That’s a quick and easy way to drive a bunch of spirits insane.”

“It’s a quick and easy way to do much worse than that,” I said, staring at her. Locking a ghost in a jar is bad. Locking them in a jar filled with things that hurt them and rip bits of their substance away is torture. Mercury shatters the substance of ghosts. Salt seals it away. And iron shreds their thoughts and memories, melting them, for lack of a better term, turning them into something viscous and thick that doesn’t want to go back to being a person.

The living have sometimes believed that subjecting a ghost to iron will drive them insane. We know better now. Insanity is a normal, natural thing. It can be harmful to the people it wraps around, but it isn’t infectious, and it isn’t so easily spread. A ghost who’s been shredded by iron hasn’t been maddened: they’ve been reduced to their component parts. What’s left after a few days of being shaken in a spirit jar full of iron isn’t even a beast—it’s a rabid beast, incapable of rational thought, made of nothing but hatred and hurting.

Apple nodded slowly. “True enough. The ghosts they capture are ticking time bombs, and there’s no telling who the Covenant might set them against, or where they might release them.”

Routewitches—Apple’s people—are the only living souls who can move semi-freely through the twilight. They use it as passage and pathway, and it’s part of how they can pull off such incredible feats of distance. A mile in the twilight might be twenty miles in the lands of the living.

But using the twilight as a shortcut means putting yourself in the path of ghosts, both friendly and less so. If the Covenant was jarring and weaponizing ghosts, they were in a position to start attacking the routewitches in a way they never had before, where there wouldn’t be a lot of defenses. It was a terrifying notion.

From the grim expression on Apple’s face, I wasn’t coming up with anything new but joining her in a moment of terror already in progress. She’d been given the time to come to these conclusions already, and she didn’t like them any more than I did.

“So you’re here to help us reach the Covenant, then,” I guessed.

“Nope,” said Apple.

“But you just said…”

“The Covenant capturing ghosts is incredibly dangerous for me and my routewitches, especially since they’re here on the East Coast. If they were on the West Coast, they could get to the Rainbow Road, but she’s not a goddess yet: she’s a demigoddess at best, an avatar. The Ocean Lady is a goddess, and she’s a nonhuman intelligence, which means the Covenant wants to see her destroyed. I have to assume their jarred ghosts are going to be unleashed on her to do damage. And I can’t let that happen.”

“What do you mean, you can’t let it?”

“I mean that I am the Queen of the North American Routewitches, and that isn’t just a pretty title. It’s not just power and position. It’s a responsibility, to my people and to my lady. The Ocean Lady wants her routewitches to be safe. We want her to be safe. She protects us in little ways every single day. Once in a while, we have to protect her in return. When a ruler of the roads fails in our duty to protect the Ocean Lady, she forsakes us, and we have to move along. I don’t want to move along. I can’t let the Ocean Lady be harmed by my insufficiency.”

“And you’re not going to help us reach the Covenant.”

“Nope.”

“So you’re going to do—what?”

“I’m going to show you where to find the Covenant, which could take you weeks or more without me, and I’m going to make sure you know where to start your search once you get there.”

Apple produced a folded roadmap, the sort of thing I recognized from the decades I’d moved through before the cellphone came along, back when it had been possible to spend a week trav eling without anyone knowing where you were or how to find you. Elsie gave it a curious, confused look but didn’t reach for it as Apple slid it across the table to me.

I picked it up. It had been folded over and over again until it was the size of a deck of cards. I picked at one corner, folding it upward to reveal a small slice of roads and boundary lines. Apple leaned across the table, putting her hand over mine.

“Don’t,” she said. “As long as you don’t open it, you’re still looking at the potential of the trip, and nothing’s set in stone. When you unfold it, it will be accurate to where the Covenant can be found. They can move after that, and you won’t know.”

I blinked. “So it’s an unfinished map?”

“No, it’s finished. It’s just changing until someone looks at it and fixes it as it is.”

That was the sort of illogical logic the routewitches specialized in. I tucked the map into my pocket. “Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet. I have an additional task for you.”

Why was I not surprised to hear that? I frowned, leaning back in my seat, and gestured for her to continue. Apple took a deep breath.

“According to the Ocean Lady, the anima mundi asked you to find and stop the Covenant operatives who are behind all the current trouble.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, I want that too. None of us wants a Covenant team wandering around the area, making trouble, and even if you could make them stop without hurting them, they’d still be a problem. I want them gone, you want them gone, we’re going to get rid of them. Bing, bam, boom. But once that’s done—once they aren’t a threat anymore—I need you to deal with the ghosts they’ve captured.”

“The ones they’ve turned into weapons.”

“Yes.” Apple looked at me solemnly, not blinking, and something about the way she held herself was so much older than she looked that it made me want to disappear and run. I guess it takes one eternal teenager to be terrified of another. She looked like she was just about my age. She was still older and more terrifying than I was, and I wanted to grab my kids and get the hell away from her as quickly as I possibly could. “The ones they’ve turned into weapons.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“I don’t think anybody does.” She shrugged. “You’ll figure it out. Or you won’t. You’re not one of mine, so it doesn’t entirely matter to me one way or the other how this goes down, as long as those ghosts aren’t a threat by the end of it.”

I paused for a moment and just stared at her, then shifted my attention over to Arthur and Elsie. To my surprise and satisfaction, they were also staring at her, Arthur with a French fry lifted halfway to his mouth, Elsie with her hands resting against the edge of the table. Both of them looked utterly stunned. Elsie turned to me.

“Do we have to sit here and listen to this?”

“Nope,” I said, and slid out of the booth, the hard outline of the folded map pressing against my hip. I turned back to Apple. “Thank you for your help, even if it’s coming only because you don’t see any other choice. I have never been a friend to the Ocean Lady, and I know that means I’ve never been a friend to you, but I still appreciate it. And because I appreciate it, I’m going to give you a warning.”

“Give me a warning?” she asked, sounding politely amused.

“Yes. If any harm comes to my kids because of what you’ve asked me to do, what you’re sending us off to do without any backup, without any support, if they suffer so much as a broken fingernail, it’s going to be you versus me. The anima mundi versus the Ocean Lady, avatar against avatar, and you’ve been a queen for a long time, Apple. You’ve been comfortable and cosseted and cared for, while I was doing the bidding of the nastiest eldritch force this world has ever known. The twilight taught you to be merciful. The crossroads taught me to cheat, to lie, and to never surrender an advantage. So that’s the warning. If they suffer because you don’t want to put yourself out, I will come for you, Apple Tanaka of the Ocean Lady, and I will end you.”

For just a moment, I saw fear flash in her eyes. Then her expression clamped down, turning cold and regal. The face of a queen. “So noted,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

She didn’t disappear so much as she had abruptly never been there in the first place. Neither had the diner. I was standing in the middle of one of those cracked-concrete-and-weeds empty lots that crop up alongside major highways, flowering when fortunes are low and being replaced by new construction and money-makers when fortunes are high. The car wasn’t very far away, and beyond it I could see the highway itself, black and raw and gleaming with broken glass and glints of light off passing cars.

Elsie, who had been halfway to her feet when the diner disappeared, straightened. Arthur had still been seated, and he yelped as his butt hit the glass-speckled concrete. I glanced over at him.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Yeah,” he said, pushing himself carefully to his feet. He rubbed his rump with one hand, checking it carefully when he was done, and looked relieved when his fingers came away bloodless. “Are all your friends like that?”

“Okay, first, Apple’s not really my friend. She’s more like a business acquaintance. Second, yeah, pretty much. The crossroads really weren’t into letting me go out and meet people. I never made more than a handful of friends.”

Elsie blinked at me. “What about Grandpa Thomas? You say he’s your friend.”

“He was never one of my charges,” I said. “I met him when he moved to Buckley. That was when I was still taking care of your grandmother—not that I’ve really ever stopped all the way. Anyway, she liked him, and so she introduced us.”

“Am I allowed to introduce you to my friends?” asked Arthur.

“If they’re ex-Covenant and you’re planning to keep them, you are,” I said. “Tommy was—is—probably my best friend, because he was my friend. Not my work colleague, not one of my kids, my friend. And I betrayed him, because the crossroads didn’t give me a choice.”

They both blinked at me.

“Just hold on to that, all right? Apple is working for something just as big and just as alien as the crossroads, and she has to do what her master tells her to do, even if she’d rather not.”

“She didn’t look coerced to me,” said Elsie, sullenly.

“No, and maybe she wasn’t, but I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt until all this is finished,” I said. “You ready to go?”

“I’m not hungry anymore,” said Arthur.

“The cheeseburger was there before I pissed her off, and she knows better than to open by messing with a caretaker’s charges,” I said. “I’m sure the lunch she had set out for you was fine.”

“I feel better hearing that,” said Elsie.

“Good, I’m glad,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”