16. Pushing Up Daisies
sixteen
Pushing Up Daisies
Would you look at that? Undeniable proof that Jean Johnson, also known as Imogen Savona and occasionally known as Peggy in the Middle, was murdered.
Or if not murdered, at the very least a deliberate, albeit sloppy attempt to hide her remains in the scrubland on the outskirts of the hotel’s grounds.
“None of these brambles existed when I was dumped here,” Jeanie says, hands on hips, staring at a spot in the centre of all the thorns and blackberries.
“Actually, this was the pet cemetery, where they buried all the horses and dogs that worked with them during construction. You’ll find my remains under a tiny tombstone marked ‘Bones.’”
“How do you know your body’s hidden there?” I ask.
Jeanie sighs. “Because whoever murdered me didn’t do a very good job. They buried me alive. This is the site of my death, and the place my ghost returns to every time I cross my boundary lines.”
“Oh, wow. Buried alive, amazing.” I change tack when I clock Jeanie’s expression. “I mean, that’s awful.” I click my tongue. “Gruesome.”
I have to pretend I’m not totally giddy with excitement. When has there ever been a time in history that someone’s had the chance to interview a buried?alive murder victim? Literally never.
“What did it feel like being in the soil? Were you in a casket or just . . .” I mime something akin to a dumper truck dropping its load into a hole.
“Don’t recall,” Jeanie says with a shrug. “Went to bed, fell asleep, woke up dead.”
I nod. “Yeah, same.” A thought pops into my head. “How many of us were sleeping when we died? And does anyone actually remember dying?” I can’t believe I didn’t think to ask this question before.
“I was asleep,” Pixie says. “But I might be the only one.”
“Okay, it’s a pain in the arse, but can each of you talk me through your final moments?
What do you remember happening? And most importantly, were there any people present on your last day?
Also, if any details stood out as weird.
” My soul wants to turn straight to Trystan, to listen to the cadence of his voice, but my head needs to begin chronologically.
“Okay, Peter, mind if we start with you?”
Peter rubs his face like a groggy toddler waking from a nap. “Sure.” His eyes flicker shut, then open one at a time. “We were doing a show. It was about four or something in the afternoon. We’d done this act hundreds of times before, all over the country and continental Europe.”
He heaves an enormous sigh, muscle memory I suppose, but I use this opportunity to pluck out my pencil and scrap of paper to make notes. They’ll disappear later today, but hopefully I can figure something out before they vanish.
“I’d set all the tricks up before we went on stage, including the sword-box illusion. As far as I know, nobody tampered with my equipment beforehand. The only people allowed backstage were the hotel managers, the dressers, me, and Hels.”
“So, you never noticed anything out of place?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Everything was as it always was. I only knew I was going to die when the sword entered the box. It went in at a different angle, and it made a different sound than usual. I called out to Hels, but she didn’t stop, and everybody in the audience just thought it was part of the show.
The sword penetrated my chest, pierced my heart, and according to my watch .
. .” He pulls his sleeve up to show me the digital Casio G-Shock beauty on his wrist. “Fucking flowers,” he says, pulling the bouquet out once again and tossing it aside.
“Four minutes had passed between blacking out and dying, then coming around as a ghost.”
“What happened then?” I ask.
“It was quiet for a while. People thought it was all part of the bit. Then when they realised it wasn’t, screaming.
Lots of screaming. Lots of traumatised kids.
” He tells the tale like he’s relishing it, but then I remember he’s an entertainer, and his death story is probably the only “show” he has left.
“Nothing unusual afterwards? Do you recall seeing Franny, or Sergeant Davies, or anyone else . . . Angel?”
“No. Well, Franny was working at The Paragon, but I honestly don’t remember seeing her then or any time before that. I’m not even sure she was on shift. You’d have to check the hotel’s records. They’re in Hels’s office. On her computer. I don’t know how to access them, though.”
“You think Helga murdered you.” It’s not a question. I’m already familiar with Peter’s thoughts on this matter, but something about her motive doesn’t sit right with me.
“I don’t think. I know,” he says.
I lay on the impartiality, try to make it seem like I’m not doubting his account of the events.
“But you still love her? You sleep in her office every night to be closer to her? This hotel’s enormous.
If I knew exactly who my killer was, I wouldn’t elect to spend as much of my time with them as possible. ”
He sighs. “She was—is—my everything. Without her, what is there? I wanted to grow old with her, go into this afterlife together. Till death do us part, remember. It’s difficult. I can’t explain it, but when you love someone that desperately . . . you’d literally die for them.”
“So . . . you’ve forgiven her? For murdering you.
Accidentally or not.” It still isn’t sitting right.
Peter’s reasoning, his “devotion,” his borderline stalker behaviour.
Would Helga kill him and then stick around?
She’s not local to the area, so would she have left her family behind and chosen to live with the guilt? Who does that?
Peter screws up his face and turns his head to the side. Suddenly he’s no longer looking so sleepy. “Maybe.”
Beside me, Jeanie chews on her thumbnail. When I make eye contact with her, she removes her hand, straightens her spine, and offers me a pleasant but forced smile.
I decide it’s time to move on. “We have a potential motive for Peter, but what about you, Pixie?”
Pixie startles as though she wasn’t expecting me to call on her next. “What about me?”
“What can you tell me about your last few moments?”
“Well,” she says with a dramatic pause. “Nothing, really.” The ghosts laugh.
“We did a gig. It finished about eleven thirty. Then we moved to the bar for the afterparty. Came upstairs to the suite, partied a bit more. Finally, everyone left to go back to their own rooms, and I crashed around four, and like Jeanie said, woke up dead.”
“Who were you partying with?”
“The rest of the band. Tommy, Johnny, Lenny, and Rocky. The roadies, a few groupies, some of the hotel staff.”
“The hotel staff?” My pencil poises itself over the paper. “Was Franny there?”
Pixie thinks for a second. “No. I don’t remember seeing her. But Helga was around for a bit.”
“Helga?” I ask, my heart racing.
Only Peter seems interested in what follows next. I imagine it’s a much?discussed topic the others have heard many times before.
“She drank tequila with me in the restrooms,” Pixie says, shrugging off the statement.
“Do you think she could’ve poisoned you? Switched up the booze or added something?”
“It’s unlikely. She drank the exact stuff I did, then we had a heart?to?heart in the stalls while she threw up and I held back her hair—it was long then. I never saw her after that, at least not while alive.”
Pixie’s response doesn’t entirely disprove my theory, and she must read this on my face because she adds, “I don’t think I was poisoned. There was no vomit and no . . . bowel or bladder evacuation. But . . . my eyes were bloodshot, and as I paced around the room, I noticed something else . . .”
“What?”
“A pillowcase with two black smudges.”
“You were suffocated?” I say it like a question.
I’m not sure why. “Could it have been one of your bandmates? Maybe an over-infatuated groupie?” I’ll admit that the only motive we have so far for Pixie is Angel’s xenophobia.
But it would be weird for him to target only Pixie, and not the dozens of other Americans who were undoubtedly here at the same time.
“I mean, yeah, it’s a possibility,” she says.
“We were the same as every other band. There was always in-fighting, but it was mostly between the boys. I never got involved in their arguments. I know some magazines claimed I was having an affair with Johnny, and then with Rocky, and then with whoever else, and that a jealous lover was to blame, but the truth is Johnny and Rocky were fucking each other, and I like women.”
I go to respond, realise I have nothing to say, and snap my mouth shut.
“I was alone in the room when I died. No sign of a break-in or a struggle. Whoever killed me either had a key, was let in by someone with a key, or . . . could walk through walls . . .”
I don’t miss the glance Pixie shares with Jeanie.
“Did you have any enemies? Can you think of anyone who’d want to kill you?” I ask.
“Gary,” Pixie sounds as exhausted as Peter.
“I was the lead vocalist of an international band whose songs were largely about dismantling the patriarchy. I was a woman. Those things are reason enough for some people. Off the top of my head, I had at least seven stalkers that were known to me and the FBI. It honestly could have been anyone.”
My shoulders slump. I really hate it when the pool of suspects grows rather than shrinks.
“Okay, Trystan.” I want to move on. I already know a few details from his death, but I’m not about to pass up the opportunity to hear his voice at length.
“Yeeeww?”
“You weren’t asleep, were you? But you definitely were drowned. Can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt you?”
“Only Gabriel, who was basically my arch?rival. We practically grew up together, learned the waves together, then when I got Amped sponsorship, Gabe pretended I no longer existed.”
I scribble the name down on my paper. “Could Gabriel have killed you?”
“No chance.”
“How come?”
“He was at Big Sur when I died.”
I raise a questioning brow.