Pickwick stayed. But a sound came from his throat, low and awful, unlike any sound I’d heard from a dog—mournful and angry and confused. A howl, but the dog swallowed it, tamped it down to please his master. His ears were back, flattened to his silky head. Dog and man locked gazes, and their look was so despairing, so intimate, that I moaned softly myself. Don’t go, I thought. Wait, please, please—
A hand grabbed my arm, turned me roughly. It was Mrs. Campbell, my neighbor of two doors down, her hair askew and her face flushed with anger.
“What is the matter with you?” she cried, furious.
I stared at her in shock. The itching drained away, the throbbing in my head, and for the first time I noticed a knot of people gathered in the street behind her. “What?”
“Are you blind, or just stupid?” she nearly shouted. “Can’t you see what’s happened? Don’t you even care?”
Inside the knot of people, a man was bent over something on the road. A van turned the corner and stopped, two men in uniforms jumping out. The man bent over moved aside and I glimpsed the familiar brown suit, the legs of Mr. Bagwell prone on the road, unmoving.
I turned and looked back at the corner, my mind clear. The spot where Mr. Bagwell had stood was empty.
“I didn’t know,” I said to Mrs. Campbell as Pickwick put his nose to the ground. He did not look at the body of his master. “I didn’t—”
“Some neighbor you are,” she spat at me. “Turn your back on a man while he dies on the road.”
I didn’t turn my back on him, I opened my mouth to say, but she had already moved away and was helping the ambulance men with the body. “His heart stopped,” came the murmurs from the crowd. “Just like that, sudden-like. No one saw it coming.”
More people drifted from their homes and up the street to watch the spectacle. A policeman in uniform approached me as they put the body in the back of the van and asked if this was Mr. Bagwell’s dog.
“Yes,” I said, my grip on the leash tightening instinctively. “This is Pickwick. I’ll take him home with me.”
He took down my information, told me someone would contact me with instructions for the dog once the relatives had been informed. Mr. Bagwell was a widower, and his grown children had long since moved away; even I knew that. I moved closer to Pickwick, leaning my shins against his trembling rib cage. When I had finished with the policeman, I tugged gently on the lead and the dog followed me back into the house. He had stopped shaking, and he did not look at me. He curled up obediently at my feet as I sat at the table in the kitchen. I watched him lay his nose on the linoleum and sigh.
“I’m sorry,” I said aloud to him, my voice ringing in the quiet kitchen. “That was awful. I’m so sorry for you, sweetheart.”
Pickwick made no move.
My chest felt tight. I kicked off my shoes and slid from the chair, going to my knees in my stockings on the kitchen floor. I bent over Pickwick, running my hands over the short fur of his forehead, the luxurious ruff of his neck. He didn’t respond, but I sat there anyway, stroking him for a long time. He seemed to need no words; the action consoled me as much as it consoled him, I was sure. I lifted his chin and looked into his eyes, so sweet and soulful, eyes that had seen what I had seen. Eyes that understood.
Deathbed visions, James had called them, though it seemed cruel to call it that when a man had died so far from his bed before he’d even grown old. Yet I also thought that hadn’t been exactly what it was. That had been Mr. Bagwell, not just an echo or a shadow of him. It had really been the man, telling his beloved dog to stay as he went where his companion couldn’t follow. It had been just like all of the visions I’d called for my mother, only this time, like the previous night, I hadn’t called it at all. My grip on my powers was loosening, and the dead could come whether I willed it or not.
I dug my hands into the dog’s warm fur and waited for the terror to subside.
* * *
“Davies,” I said into the telephone that sat in my front hall. “It’s Ellie.”
“What now?” she said. “I thought I was free of you, Mary Pickford.”
I sighed. Mary Pickford, the name of the ringleted, golden-haired movie star, was Davies’s epithet for me, her attempt at the kind of wit Gloria had wielded so easily. “I came to see you earlier.”
“I was out.”
Doing what? “Yes, I know. I need to talk to you.”
She snorted. “Did you have fun with Octavia Murtry, that little fortune-petter, the other day?”
“Not really, no.”
“Useless, isn’t she? The only reason Gloria put up with her was because of Harry, though God knows what Harry saw in her. I was glad to see you have to put up with her for once. My guess is you’ll have a hard time getting rid of her.”
I was starting to feel steady, the nightmarish event with Mr. Bagwell fading from my mind. Pickwick was asleep on the kitchen floor. “She wants to contact Gloria’s brothers,” I said.
“She never had half a chance,” Davies replied. “Gloria would never do it. She always said she could bear to look at other people’s dead, but she had no desire to contact her own. Those boys dying ripped her to pieces.”
She seemed talkative, so I pushed her further. “Did you know Gloria’s brothers?”
“No, but Gloria had photographs. I only saw them once, because she never showed them around.”
“She carried them with her. All three of them. Along with their notification telegrams.”
There was a pause, and I realized I’d thrown Davies for a loop. “How the hell did you know that?”
She hadn’t known, then. I rubbed my hand on my forehead. She’d be resentful now that I knew something about Gloria that she didn’t; it would be an insult in her book. “I took her flask bag,” I said, trying to sound apologetic. “When I was at her flat. It was all in there.”
“You took her flask bag from under my nose? When I let you in and everything?”
“I didn’t plan it.” I tried to sound remorseful. “An impulse, that’s all. I’m sorry, Davies.”
“Some people have no manners,” she said.
“Look, the letters and photographs weren’t the only things tucked in there. She’d written out her schedule as well.”