“People mourn and react to pain and loss in so many ways. I didn’t know Jeremy the way you did, of course, but over the years, I was able to talk to him many times. He was a very cool dude who didn’t believe any one religion or creed could be the only one, that there were many ways to a greater power. I mean, I think he would like a moment of silence and memory for him, maybe a few words, at a massive convention,” Bridget assured her. “Then again, if you think it’s in bad taste or wrong...”
“I don’t know what I think,” Marnie said. “Except I have a pounding headache. I guess I’m not going to take up drinking—I’m going to go with a giant bottle of aspirin!”
“Marnie—” Jackson caught her attention “—I’m going to head down to the morgue and meet up with the ME and Vining and, eventually, Bryan. Angela is staying here.”
“Not to worry. I have complete confidence in Angela,” Marnie assured him.
“And your patrol cop is still outside,” Jackson said.
“All the better,” Marnie said.
“I made tea,” Angela said. “It will go straight from my hands to yours,” she added.
“Oh, that slimy, slimy bastard. He ruined tea,” Bridget muttered. Angela served tea. Marnie used it to wash down an aspirin. She really did have an absolutely splitting headache.
Shortly, Jackson left, and Madison and Sean accompanied Bridget to her side of the duplex, since she wanted to shower and change.
“I guess I will try lying down,” Marnie told Angela. “I’ll bring George in with me.”
“I’ll be in the living room if you need me,” Angela assured her.
Marnie headed into her room and lay down. George looked at her with big brown eyes.
She patted the bed. “Come on up!”
He wagged his tail, whined and jumped up on the bed.
“This will not be all the time. You’re a guard dog, you know. This is special. Just for today,” Marnie told him.
He harrumphed.
Marnie curled up beside him, setting a hand on his back. She closed her eyes.
She could still feel the pounding in her head. It was fading, though, just a little.
Besides the pounding, she wasn’t sure what she felt. Sorrow, of course. She had really cared for Jeremy; he had been kind of a father figure. They’d been good friends on set.
Maybe it was all too much. She felt cold, too, as if she should have more emotion, but she was really a distant observer, and all of this could not be happening to her.
A sweet foggy darkness seemed to be settling around her, a result of the double dose of aspirin, she thought.
She drifted off.
It was nice.
George, warm and furry, was at her side, and sleep, right now, was the most pleasing balm in the world.
*
David Neal rose.
“This is the most ridiculous thing in the world. I didn’t assault anyone. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You people are about as sick as they get. I’m nonviolent. Nonviolent, don’t you understand?”
“So you didn’t dress up as Blood-bone?” Sophie Manning asked.
They had David Neal in an interrogation room. He looked nervous.
But at the suggestion that he’d been Blood-bone, he looked horrified.
“I didn’t kill anyone. I’m not a killer. I was there—oh, God, I was there! That day. I watched Cara Barton become mincemeat. It was horrible. You’re accusing me of... Oh, God!”
“You drugged Marnie Davante’s tea,” Bryan accused. He was seated next to Sophie.
Neal was right across the table.
“Attempted rape,” Bryan said.
“Oh, you are full of it!” Neal said, but he looked nervous. He turned to Sophie. “If anyone is drugging Marnie to get her into bed, it’s him. Oh, yeah—son of movie stars. Big macho watchdog. What’s he even doing here? All he wants is Marnie, and he’s making things up. Come on, Detective Manning, you are a cop.”
“Yes. The cop who saw to the testing of the remnants of the tea in Marnie’s cup.”
Neal swallowed.
“Is that why you had Cara killed? And then killed her killer?” Sophie asked him. “I believe I understand now. You’re in love with Marnie Davante.”
“Half the world is in love with Marnie Davante,” Neal muttered. He glared at Bryan.
“But you’re obsessed,” the PI said, easing forward. “You had Cara killed because that would have stopped—you hoped—a remake of the show. Then you got nervous that your hired hit man was going to give you away. And you killed him. And then, yesterday, you decided to make your move on Marnie.”
“No!” Neal protested.
“We will arrest and try him for murder,” Sophie told Bryan.
“Lawyer!” Neal said.
“Sure,” Sophie told him with a shrug. She rose and started to leave the room.
“Wait, wait!” Neal said. “Wait... This is the honest-to-God truth, I swear. I—I did try to drug Marnie. I am in love with her. And I don’t want the show having a revival—I want Marnie to open her theater. It’s what she wants. But I swear I didn’t kill anyone. I swear! I drugged Marnie’s tea, but I did not kill anyone. I didn’t. I didn’t. I swear on my mother’s life!”
*
Marnie might have drifted into something of a half sleep.
She could hear whispering.
She knew that—unless she was dead herself—Angela Hawkins wouldn’t let anyone in, wouldn’t let anyone near her.
George let out a little whine, as if warning of a danger he wasn’t exactly sure of.
She opened her eyes.
Like a pair of little old chaperones, the ghosts of Cara Barton and Jeremy Highsmith were standing just inside her bedroom door.
“Poor dear. She’s sleeping.”
“She could sleep a lot more if she wasn’t fooling around with Muscles.”
“Jeremy! Shush! They’re a lovely couple.”
“Hmph.”
“We could have been a lovely couple.”
“What? You mean if you weren’t always telling me that I couldn’t act my way out of a paper bag?” Jeremy asked.
“I never!” Cara protested.
“Almost daily,” he assured her. “You were always quite the old battle-ax.”
“Oh!”
“You weren’t particularly kind to me. And you could be hell on wheels on set.”
“I had to be. The rest of you were positively doormats.”
“You could be brutal.”
“But—I loved you, Jeremy. Really, I loved you!”
“Ah, sweet thing. I guess it’s too late for us, eh?”
Cara’s ghost sighed. “Shall I wax poetic? Love is never too late.”
Marnie blinked.
Yes, the two of them were there. Were they waiting for her to awaken?
She cleared her throat.
“Oh!” Cara gasped.
George whined, thumped his tail nervously and looked at Marnie. She stroked the dog. “It’s okay, George. More or less okay. You know, you might have knocked.”
“We should have knocked,” Jeremy told Cara. “I told you we should have knocked.”
“I really didn’t want to wake Marnie if she was deeply sleeping. I mean, we don’t really have much to say, do we? You just wanted her to...make a big deal over you,” Cara said, impatiently waving a spectral arm in the air.
“It’s only fair—you had a massive funeral.”
“You’re still lying in the morgue!”
“Must you remind me?”
“Okay!” Marnie said. “It’s okay.”
“Of course, it’s okay. Bryan’s not here right now. So, you see, it doesn’t matter that we didn’t knock.”
“I could have just walked out of the shower,” Marnie said.
“Oh, you dress in the bathroom,” Cara said with another impatient wave of her arm.
Tears suddenly stung Marnie’s eyes again.
They were both dead.
They’d had egos, they had argued, they had all been a little off now and then, but in the end, they had been really decent human beings, and she had loved them both.
“Marnie...my dear, sweet girl. Cry for us. You might be the only one,” Jeremy said.
“Not true. People loved you both.”
“Well, they loved me,” Cara said. And she jabbed her ghostly companion in the ribs. “Lighten up, my love. Everybody thought you were the coolest. Best TV dad since Father Knows Best!”
“And you’re very good at being a ghost,” Marnie said, swinging her legs over the side of the bed so she could sit and look at them both easily. “You’re visible, and you’re barely...”
“Dead,” Jeremy told her flatly when her voice faded.
“I’m so sorry.”
“I had a hell of a life,” he assured her. He paused and smiled at Cara, took her hand and kissed it. “And suddenly, we are together.”
“Lovely,” Marnie told him. His own death had to be touchy subject. “Jeremy, what happened? You...you looked fine yesterday during the day.”
“You can’t imagine the pain of a massive heart attack,” Jeremy told her earnestly. “It’s like being crushed with a sledgehammer.”