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Undead and Unforgiven(76)

By:MaryJanice Davidson


“I object to ‘real meanie,’” I objected.

“It’s like good cop/bad cop, when everyone else in the house is the bad cop. So, like, there’s a platoon of bad cops behind me, but I’m friendly and helpful.”

“You sure seemed friendly and helpful out on the lawn. And why are you limping?”

“I’m getting to it, just give me a—”

“What were you talking to that guy about? Besides the fact that you definitely live with vampires?”

“John Cusack.”

?????????

“Betsy? Did you hear me?”

“I heard you. It just took me a couple of seconds.”

“His name’s Will Mason and he runs the G-Spot.”

“So much more than I needed to know.”

“Grow up. It’s the name of his website. He started out as a ghost chaser but now he covers all kinds of paranormal weirdness in the Twin Cities.”

“That should keep him busy.” People didn’t normally associate Minneapolis–St. Paul with lots o’ paranormal weirdness. But even if you didn’t know vamps and weres were a thing, there were lots of people who claimed they’d seen ghosts. When I was alive I blew it off; after death, I rearranged my perceptions. A famous local French restaurant, Forepaugh’s, was known as much for its killer desserts (deconstructed banana cream pie, drooool) as for the ghost who haunted it: the spirit of a maid who’d fallen for the boss, slept with him, discovered she was pregnant, and jumped out the third-story window after he broke off the affair. Management was weirdly proud that that poor sad ghost hung around the place drooping in despair, but again: deconstructed banana cream pie.

Heck, a house on this very street, Summit Avenue, was famous for being haunted: the Griggs Mansion boasted the ghosts of a maid, a gardener, a Civil War general, and a random teenager, among others (weird how a place always seems to be mostly haunted by the servants, never the rich people). The maid, like the poor girl from Forepaugh’s, threw herself out a fourth-story window after a bad breakup. Warning: if you’re a servant prior to 1950 and you throw yourself out the boss’s window, you’re apparently doomed to live in that house forevermore.

All that to say, the blogger in question—Will?—had plenty to keep him busy even if vampires weren’t real.

“This led to John Cusack how?”

“Well, we got to talking about the movie Better Off Dead, which as you’ll recall is the greatest movie of that decade, which got us talking about One Crazy Summer, which inevitably led to Say Anything, and then—”

“Well, thanks for playing good cop.”

“I did more than play. One of the news vans almost clipped him when they drove off, but I—”

“Good, that’s great, thanks.” A window of opportunity! No reporters, Sinclair was probably ready for a break, it was relatively quiet around here for a change. I couldn’t let this chance go. I had an inkling of what to do about my Father Markus problem, but I needed more info first. “Sorry, Marc, I gotta do something. Tell me more about it when I get back.”

“You realize whenever you say something like that, it ends up being really important la—”

“Sinclair?” Want to take the puppies for a walk?

Sinclair, who’d been holed up with Tina for the last hour, answered at once. Oh yes! You must wish to get out of here as much as I.

Who knows when we’ll have another chance? Time to carpe the diem, pal.

You know I go weak in the knees when you butcher Latin.

Please. You go weak in the knees when I change my socks.

In next to no time we were being led by the leashed furballs. It was unseasonably warm for late winter—thirties—and the full moon shone down on us so brightly we almost didn’t need streetlights. Well, with our vamp-o-vision we didn’t need streetlights, but you know what I mean.

“So tell me about your friend Lawrence. We had that dumb fight before I got a chance to ask. How’d you two even meet?”

Sinclair brightened and I felt his pleased surprise

(????????)

as he began to talk. I paid attention to what he said, and what he didn’t say. I was getting used to having an agenda below my agenda and was a little worried that it didn’t bother me the way it would have five years ago. Even two years ago.

That didn’t stop me from pumping Sinclair for every scrap of info about his friend, though. The price of power, I guess. If things went the way I hoped, there could be a happy ending of sorts. If I was wrong, or my plan backfired, I likely wouldn’t be around to worry about the fallout.

That shouldn’t have been a comforting thought.