Chapter Twenty-Three
“Booby trap - an explosive device designed to be triggered when an unsuspecting victim touches or disturbs a seemingly harmless object.”
Charming
The tricky thing about searching someone’s personal space was making it appear it hadn’t been searched at all. Just the slightest disturbance of something that seemed like it would go unnoticed is the one thing that could cause everything to blow up in my face.
“Look over there,” I said in hushed tones, pointing to the bookcases across the room from the desk.
We searched in silence, not wanting to alert any of the staff that might be in the house. It was amazing to me that the Grim Reaper was able to employ so many people and never get caught. If I were him, I would want all the privacy I could get. Hell, I wasn’t him and I still wanted that.
I started with his desk. I looked through the neat stack of papers that lay in the center, but it was all just stupid paperwork.
Utility bills, invitations to events, and some spreadsheets and invoices for the legitimate business that he owned, which was luxury car sales.
He had dealerships in Anchorage, Los Angeles, and New York.
I restacked the papers and moved on, looking over the surface of the desk.
There wasn’t anything else to search. My eyes settled briefly on the bowl of stones that sat on the corner and then moved away.
I wasn’t going to touch those things. His stones were his calling card, the only thing he left in place of a life he took.
My luck, I would pick up one and alarms everywhere would start wailing.
I went through the contents of his desk drawers, looked through his calendar, his pens, and the roster of names that I knew were Death Escorts.
The business was growing. He had more Escorts than I realized.
Maybe that was one of the reasons he thought I was expendable.
He thought he could replace me. I smirked. I wasn’t replaceable.
“There’s nothing here,” Storm complained about ten minutes into the search.
I glanced up. “Did you look in those books?”
“All one hundred of them?” He moaned. “Yeah. Nothing but a bunch of words.”
“Keep looking.”
“I’m telling you, you aren’t going to find anything.”
I reached under the desk and pressed a button. All the closet doors containing his collection of bodies opened soundlessly. They all hung there in perfect, neat rows. Not a hair was out of place on any of them.
G.R. was definitely a neat freak, which made searching a pain for many reasons. One, I had to be sure everything was back exactly the way I found it. And two, everything was so decluttered that I was starting to think Storm was right, that there wasn’t anything to find.
“We’re going to have to search his bedroom after this.”
“You wanna do what?” Storm said, disbelief crowding his tone.
I began looking through the bodies, sliding them back and forth on the rods. “I’m not leaving here until I have something I can use against him.”
Storm came over beside me, stopping and I would assume staring at me, but I ignored him. I got down and searched under the bodies’ feet, looking for anything that might be of use. But all the bottoms of the closets were completely empty. There wasn’t even a speck of dust.
I stood up and looked up, above the racks, thinking there might be shelves with boxes for storage. Nope. The only thing in these closets were bodies. Lots of them, all hanging single file.
“Which one of these is yours?” I asked Storm, looking through one of the bodies pant pockets.
Storm was quiet a moment, moving all the way down to the last closet on the wall, and hovered near the center. “This one.”
I reached out, pulled the hanger off the rack, and held up the body.
He looked to be in his early twenties. He had skin the color of coffee mixed with cream, a smooth complexion, and all its hair was buzzed off.
Storm had been a fairly tall guy, probably reaching at least six feet because when I held the body up, his feet about reached mine.
“I don’t understand why he dresses all the bodies like we’re students at prep school. Does anyone even wear khakis anymore? Where the hell are the jeans?”
I grinned. “I guess death doesn’t come with fashion sense.”
“Which one’s yours?” Storm asked.
“It’s not here.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it since I died.”
“You mean he’s never let you use it?”
“I don’t even think he has it.” The only thing I could think of was that it was too damaged to save.
“That man has everyone’s body. It isn’t right that yours isn’t here.”
I shrugged, like it didn’t bother me. It really never had before. But now… now I kind of wondered where it was. I kind of wondered what it would be like to see it again. Would it feel familiar to me? Would it feel like home?
I pushed away those thoughts. They were stupid. “Want to take yours for a spin?” I asked, holding his body out to him. Even to me it seemed weird that I was offering someone a chance to use their own body.
“Hell no. If he noticed that body missing, the first place he would look was for me.”
“Well, then, take your pick,” I said, hanging Storm’s body back in the closet and making sure it was equally spaced between the others.
“You want me to take a body?”
“Why the hell not? He’s got so many he won’t even notice. I’ve been listening to you whine about wanting one since we met.”
He was quiet a long time. I knew he was tempted. I know I would have been.
Finally, he said, “No, I’ll just stick with borrowing.”
“Why borrow someone else’s body and deal with their spirit when you could have your own.”
“Because if I took one of these bodies, I would barely get to use it. I would have a black cloud around me that would point to me like a beacon. If one Escort saw me, they would know I shouldn’t have it.”
“So tell them you’re on vacation.”
“It’s too risky. A borrowed body covers up my spirit.”
“How?”
“Best I can figure is that their spirit cancels mine out.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“Like everything else. Practice.”
“And you’re the only Ghost Escort that can do that?”
“As far as I know.”
I finished searching through the length of closets, patting down pockets and peering under feet, looking for anything I could use.
But I found absolutely nothing.
After rechecking that all the bodies were hung exactly as they had been, I pressed the button and closed the doors. I sat down in G.R.’s leather desk chair and let out a sigh.
“There’s nothing here. Let’s go to his room.”
“You’re crazy.”
I wasn’t crazy, but I was starting to feel a little desperate. Both my hands gripped the seat of the chair, my fingers curling underneath it and squeezing the leather. I was so sure that I would find something. So sure he would be hiding some sort of secret.
I went to push myself up, but when I dragged my hand along the bottom of the chair, I felt something. Some sort of small round knob on the bottom of the seat. I ran my finger over it several times. It felt like a button. I pressed it.
There was a soft sound across the room. Both Storm and I whipped around, thinking we were somehow caught. But we weren’t. The sound came from a secret door. A secret sliding door in the bookcase. It opened, the doorway wide enough for a man to fit through.
Excitement pounded through me. Got you, I thought.
I glanced at Storm. “I thought you searched over there.”
“Shit, you expected me to find some kind of secret door? It’s probably a booby trap that’s going to suck us into the depths of hell.”
“I’ll say hello to the devil for you,” I said, returning G.R’s chair to the exact place it had been in and going over to the entrance and peering inside.
“Well?” Storm asked from close behind.
“No trips to hell today. It’s just more closets.” Three doors all in a row.
“What could he possibly keep in there?”
I wasn’t about to wait to find out. When I stepped into the narrow hallway, I half expected an alarm to go off, but nothing happened so I took another small step and then another.
My heart was pounding in my ears, drowning out the quiet and making me more nervous. I told myself to calm down, that it was stupid to get this nervous. I mean, I didn’t even act like this when I killed people. Guess my body was more afraid of the Reaper than my brain realized.
But fear of the Reaper was why I had to keep going. Being scared of him was unacceptable. I stopped in front of the first door I came to, staring at its cherry finish.
I was surprised when I opened the door.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Something sinister and twisted.
I was a little let down when all I saw was more bodies. “It’s just bodies,” I said, irritation lining my tone.
Storm finally got over his fear this was a portal to hell and came inside. “What’s so special about these bodies?”
What, indeed?
I looked closer, having to squint a little because the lighting in here was so dim. My eyes first went to a contrast in the dark. A body with blond hair. Overly long, messy blond hair.
I grabbed the body, gripping its shoulder and yanking it out so I could see it.
Like a freight train, recognition slammed into me.
It was me.
Memories of looking in the mirror when I was alive crashed over me. Wave after wave of broken clips of memories… of me brushing my teeth, combing my hair, studying a black eye or a busted lip.
This was the body I was born in. The body that carried me through my life. The body that used to laugh and eat cookies. The body that used to hug… them.
“Uh, Charming?”
I shook myself but still kept hold of my body. Of my past. “It’s me,” I said, then cleared my throat. “This is my body.”
He let out a low whistle. “Why’s it in here?”
I shook my head and carefully put it back where it was.
Then I looked at the one beside it. It was a man I’d never seen before.
He had dark hair parted on the side and combed over.
It was an old hairstyle from a very long time ago.
There wasn’t anything remarkable or special about him so I moved on to the next body.
It was a woman.