“How do you know that Reginald was the one who stole your fabric?” I asked Emerson.
She gritted her teeth and spat through them. “He came over last night. Both of them did. We had a glass of wine, and Reginald was touching the fabric, admiring it.”
“He was just trying to be nice,” Felipe clarified, shifting his shopping bags.
“I got sleepy. They must have drugged me. I fell asleep—probably didn’t even lock the door after they left. And when I woke up—gone! The whole bolt. And now the damn coward won’t even open up the door and confront me.”
“Pshhh!” Felipe let out a dismissing puff of air. “Reggie is just a hard sleeper.” He handed me a bag and plugged his key into the lock. “Reggie,” he sang as we trailed behind.
I heard the bag clatter to the hardwood floor first, a jar of marinated mushrooms shattering, the oil oozing toward my shoes. Then I heard Felipe, heard the air squeeze out of his lungs. I didn’t have to see his face to know that it was twisted in horror, and as pearl white as mine.
“Oh! Oh!” He clutched his chest and I set my bag down, then gently pushed him aside. And if I hadn’t seen it before, I would have screamed, too.
A body. Reginald.
A loop of fabric was wrapped around his neck, pinching tight as he hung from the rafter. His head lolled forward as if he had just fallen asleep. But his eyes were open, bulging. They were already clouded and dull. His skin was mottled purple and he swayed an inch this way, an inch that way, his shoes scraping across the glossy finish of the cherry-wood table underneath him. Each time his body moved, the rafter he was tied to groaned. The scrape of his feet and the groan of the rafter seemed like the only sounds in the entire world and I remembered, far before I was turned, my father sitting with me as a child while I held my grandmother’s hand. She lay in bed, wilted, her body ravaged by sickness.
“She’s gone now,” my father said as his hand glided over her eyes.
I squeezed my grandmother’s hand, unwilling to believe, even as sadness locked in my throat. “But how do you know?”
There had been no change in my grandmother from this moment to the last. Not a final word, a sigh—not even a flicker of her soul as it passed through her body.
“The silence,” my father said simply, standing. “It’s dead silence.”
That was what surrounded us now in Reginald’s apartment—dead silence, punctuated only by the scrape and groan.
And then the living came through.
“Oh, Reggie!” Felipe slapped his hands to his cheeks and started to scream—a high-pitched, painful wail, tears welling and rolling over his manicured fingers.
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
“That’s my fabric!” Emerson’s voice was a shrill knife cutting through Felipe’s anguish and my own astonishment as I tried to tear my eyes from Reginald. Emerson shoved me aside, pointing to the ragged-edge loops around Reginald’s neck. “That’s why he stole my bolt?”
It actually was god-awful fabric, even for a suicide.
Felipe heaved and began clawing at the table, his clawed hands going for Reginald’s pant legs as I tried to hold him back.
“Emerson,” I snapped, “forget about the fabric and call nine-one-one.”
I held on to Felipe and he crushed against me, finally giving up, crying silently. I could feel his warmth, the thud of his heart—and I couldn’t look at Reginald anymore. He wasn’t just a dead breather. He had been loved.
Emerson was on her cell phone; I could hear her voice, calm and rigid as she talked to the nine-one-one operator.
“Suicide . . . hanging . . . already dead.” She was shielding the phone with her hand, her back toward the body. She looked over her shoulder once or twice and mumbled into the phone.
“We have to get him down!” Felipe sobbed, tearing away from me. “We can’t just leave him there, hanging like that.”
“No,” I said, grabbing a handful of his shirt, yanking him backward. “We have to leave him, Felipe. The police will handle this.” Back in San Francisco, I had tried to pull my roommate away from enough CSI marathons to be pretty familiar with police procedurals.
“We’re going to call the police? But why?”
“They’re already on their way,” Emerson said, waggling her cell phone as if that explained it all.
“Holy f**k.”
It could have been the slow motion of the whole situation but the two-word sentence sounded like a full monologue. My head snapped to where the deep voice was coming from. It was my direct intent to rip his throat out for interrupting this horrific moment, but when I saw him, the death scene in front of me faded into oblivion and my entire body went rigid, colder than normal, and on complete and utter I-want-to-eat-him-in-a-nonvampiric-way high alert.
He was handsome in that traffic-stopping kind of way, with brown-black hair that was just slightly shaggy and unkempt. The wave of his bangs licked over his eyebrows and framed chocolate-brown eyes that I would happily drown in. His skin was the most delicious shade of non-New York, non-vampire toasty brown, and, I happily noticed, he had the kind of body that made one think of Greek gods or jungle men in loincloths. He had a tribal tattoo running down the length of his well-muscled arm and though I had never been interested in them before, I was suddenly, wholeheartedly pro-ink.
Even from this distance, I could smell the salty, toasted coconut scent that wafted from his skin.
I was actually salivating.
Though it almost physically hurt to tear my eyes from him I did—just for a millisecond—to glance at Emerson. She had gone from open-mouthed stare to stone still, feet akimbo, hands on hips. Her eyes were hard, narrow slits spitting dagger glares toward the man I intended to spend the rest of my afterlife with.
“What the hell are you doing here, Pike?” she spat.
Pike, Pike! She knew his name! Images of harp-strumming cherubs and Vera Wang floated in my mind while his name pinged around my head like the heavenly music it was. Pi-i-i-i-i-i-k-e . . .
And then it stopped.
How did Emerson Hawk, of utter stink and stolen designs know my new beau, Pike? Which is actually kind of a stupid name (unless you’re a fish, natch) but still, it should never have been able to come out of Emerson’s halitosis-filled mouth.
Pike held up an expensive looking camera. “Photo essay for the contest. But . . .”
Emerson pointed. “Reginald Fairfield.”
“I was supposed to shoot the three finalists.”