“If anyone is psychic around here, it’s you.”
He laughed. “I’m dead. Psychic is all that’s left. But you’re the one who hears ghosts.”
Which was only another indication she was just plain crazy. “Well, you’re the one who acted weird right before you—”
“Died?”
It should have gotten easier to say it aloud, but the word still tied up her insides. “For days before, maybe even weeks, you acted strangely.”
“I can’t remember.” According to Cameron, he couldn’t remember anything. Except that he’d died. That he’d loved her. That he still did.
Her heart contracted with not being able to see or feel him next to her. She’d brought this uncomfortable conversation on herself. “Maybe, subconsciously, you knew something was going to happen to you.”
“Maybe that’s why, when it finally happened, I couldn’t leave you. We’re tethered, Max. I can’t get more than twenty feet from you without feeling like I’ve ceased to exist even in this insubstantial form.”
Max bit her lip, but the small pain didn’t cure the much larger ache of losing him. “I’m going to be late for my interview,” she muttered, hoping to end the subject she should never have brought up in the first place.
As easily as that, Cameron let it go, as if his death was as painful for him as it was for her. “You didn’t want that job anyway,” he snorted, a ghostly resonance absorbed into the vinyl liner above her. “You hate working for a temp agency, and you hate accounting.”
“I love working for Sunny. She’s wonderful, and the temp jobs are great.”
“You’re lying to yourself.”
“Accounting pays the bills.” And had been well on the way to giving her an ulcer before the age of thirty. Now, at thirty-two, Max had learned you did some things for the money and turned the rest off when the clock hit five.
“I can pay the bills if you let me,” Cameron whispered somewhere near her left ear, the sound whooshing away as if it came from outside the car. “Use my life insurance money.”
She bit down on the inside of her cheek. So he wasn’t letting the subject drop, just coming at it from another direction. “Blood money. You didn’t die so I could pay the rent.”
She belatedly realized she’d said the dreaded word, and her teeth clamped together.
“It’s been in precious metals for two years. Use the income.”
She’d somehow escaped the devastation of the economic downturn. “In-bred blood money. I still won’t touch it.”
Because touching it made his death final. Something she’d avoided for two years simply by closing her eyes, listening to his voice, and seeking his ghostly touch, as if he were beside her, flesh and bone.
“So what do you plan to do if we find a body?” She preferred any subject, even murder, to talking about the blood money.
Thankfully, this time Cameron let her steer the conversation away. “I think we ought to figure out who killed her, don’t you?”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve had that little strategy up your sleeve the whole time.”
“Max, Max, Max. I don’t have sleeves. I’m heavenly.”
Life with Cameron had been heavenly. Sunday afternoons spent scouring used book stores for old mysteries. Long motorcycle rides in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Sex in a secluded mountain meadow, once without even removing helmets or leather jackets. There’d been something erotic about it, definitely kinky with an element of risk that had made it all the more exciting.
She’d sold the Ducati a month after Cameron’s funeral.
Max took the turn for the long-term airport parking, the subtle scent of Cameron’s cigarette drifting by, muted by time and fading memory.
“If we keep this under eight minutes, I won’t have to pay,” she said, punching the button and pulling out a ticket.
“You need to call to check that flight 452 from Boise actually existed.” He referred to the number their unknown lady had written on the green note. “If you got yourself a new computer, you could just do it right there on the Internet.”
Her old laptop had blown its motherboard or something, and she’d never replaced it. She didn’t need e-mail or the Internet. She didn’t need to be connected.
“Calling will work just fine.” She’d told Cameron the whole dream sequence, from the woman’s arrival at the airport, her anticipation, the fear her lover evoked because she hadn’t stuck to the plan, then to the parking lot, and finally, to the dying. But some things were missing. Whole chunks. Exactly whose hands had been at her throat? Why had the woman welcomed Death, as if she deserved it? Max’s dream psyche seemed to have done a big fast forward, leaving the answers behind in that missing footage.
The parking lot was packed, empty spots scarce, cars circling the aisles. “Which way?” Cameron prodded.
Without thought, Max turned to the right and headed slowly out to the south end of the lot, bits of last night’s dream sifting through her head. “Something just came to me.”