Charlie shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Weren’t you just complaining about how we can’t trust anyone in this hellhole?”
“Sure, but in the end there’s only one person we actually can’t trust. We just need to weed them out, and then this could be our home. Right?”
Charlie just shrugged. “Dude, I’m wetter than a soccer mom at a Magic Mike show out here. Can I go get into something that isn’t actively growing moss?”
“Okay,” said Nora, deflating. “Yeah, of course. Go dry off, and just think about it, okay?”
Charlie gave a salute and disappeared inside.
19
Case # 64889
Gus Richards
Age: 111
Cause of Death: Flu
By the time lunch rolled around on the day Nora sorted Gus’s case, he was the talk of the office. Until that point, the oldest soul collected at Nora’s branch had been a one-hundred-and-three-year-old woman named Doris who had to be reassigned to a new agent after relentlessly flirting with her initial collector. Gus’s case was fascinating, and until his agent returned with firsthand intel, everyone spent the day speculating on how he’d managed to evade Death for so long. Nora, having finished her shift and gone home, had to wait until the next morning to find out this crucial information. She spent the night trying to decide who among her colleagues to approach; unfortunately, her social anxiety got the better of her and she never got to learn Gus’s answer. Not that it mattered, she reasoned. There was nothing he could say that she didn’t already know. There simply weren’t any secrettricks for keeping Death at bay, no matter how much she wished there were.
* * *
Nora was becoming uncomfortably accustomed to not sleeping. Back home she was in bed by ten, asleep in give or take an hour depending on her current level of anxiety, and waking up well rested by six a.m. as a result. But now, with the newfound thoughts and worries and uncovered secrets a constant cacophony of concern in her head—which only grew louder as soon as that head hit the pillow—Nora was lucky to drift off at all before the first hazy hints of sunrise.
That night, the thoughts keeping her awake were different than usual. Since arriving in Virgo Bay, they’d been consumed by Charlie’s situation: trying to decipher his cause of death, trying to determine his would-be killer, trying to keep him alive. But tonight, her grandparents’ revelation drowned anything else out. It was too big, took up too much room between the walls of her skull for any other thoughts to squeeze through.
Nora first learned about Death’s Blind Spots a week into her time at S.C.Y.T.H.E. She had finished her daily file deliveries late, which in turn led to Nora finding the last agent on her roster already at his desk. She handed him his cases for the day and had every intention of hurrying back to the sanctuary of her office when the agent—a man named Michael somewhere firmly between the age of fifty and whenever it was that people stopped bothering to manage their nose hair—did the unthinkable. He roped Nora into small talk. It was a grueling ten minutes filled mostly by polite nods at golf-related anecdotes and the occasional mention of grandchildren, but somewhere towards the endof the exchange, Michael mentioned something about an upcoming trip to Florida, and how it “must be one of Death’s Blind Spots. Why else would old coots hanging on by a thread flock there in droves?”
Nora had given him a confused look, which prompted even more words out of his mouth, but these she found herself rapt by. The prospect of a place that Death couldn’t reach sounded like an impossible fantasy. And her coworkers quickly confirmed that to be the case. Like poltergeists and possession, Blind Spots were widely rumored, but only crackpots in the industry actually believed in them. It seemed that even those who worked in the Death field felt as mystified by the concept as civilians, and so had filled in the blanks their own way. That’s what her supervisor had explained when Nora approached her with questions. And she’d believed it, because when something sounded too good to be true, it very likely was.
But somehow, a century ago, her own family had proven that crackpot theory true, and now Nora was there, in a Blind Spot where Death couldn’t find her unless a human did her harm.
She flipped onto her side, restless with the energy of hope coursing through her. Just that morning Virgo Bay had seemed like an absolute nightmare town, but one conversation with Richard and Ruby later, and it was suddenly a haven she would never admit to dreaming about. Sure, it had its quirks. Remote, no real amenities, at least one murderer. But aside from that, she’d landed in her own personal utopia, and any desire she had to return to her old life seemed to melt away like cotton candy in the rain. Who could ever want to leave a place like this?
Charlie. He’d want to leave. The man could get bored at a rave (and had, on more than one occasion). Virgo Bay wasn’texactly his pace. Nora would just have to find a way to convince him otherwise. He wasn’t always receptive to sense, but she had to try.
She tossed back over to her other side. Jessica greeted her from the edge of her pillow with a tilt of her head. Nora looked up at the bird.
“You’ll help me talk to Charlie about staying here, right?” she whispered. “Once the whole murder thing is done. You must feel it too, what makes this place special. Maybe that’s why you’ve been so quiet. You don’t want to leave either, do you? Who would?”
Then Nora finally allowed herself to answer that question in a way she wasn’t ready to before.
“Dad,” she said. “Dad left.”
The thought made her stomach ball up into something hard and uncomfortable. Martin Bird had been the only one to leave, and he’d paid the ultimate price for it. If he’d just stayed there, like the rest of his family, he’d be alive right now. He’d have raised his family in Virgo Bay, and Nora would have grown up without knowing fear or loss or death. The thoughts kept flooding her. All that wasn’t and could have been. Her anger flared again, the one pointing directly in her dead dad’s direction. It lit a flame behind her eyes, but there was too little kindling, and a rush of tears quickly came to wash it away. She choked on a sob, desperate to avoid waking Charlie and letting him see her like this again. She had to keep her shit together for once.
“Why?” she barely mouthed at Jessica. “Why would he leave? Why couldn’t things have been different?”
Her cheeks were slick and streaked now, her nose helpfully contributing to the general sheen on her face. Jessica hoppedtowards Nora and tucked her little gray head under Nora’s chin, which only served to make the tears stream harder. Nora untucked her arms from the blanket and wrapped them around the parrot, pulling the creature close to her chest.
“Thank you,” she whispered into Jessica’s feathery head.
“Mars bar,” Jessica squawked back, but Nora was too busy stifling sobs to notice.
* * *
Nora was halfway up the stairs the next morning when she heard the sound of hushed voices in the kitchen. She stopped and crouched on the step she’d landed on, careful not to shift the wood and elicit a creak. It didn’t take her long to place two of the voices: Ruby and Richard weren’t quite at a whisper, and their tones—Ruby’s cool but gentle, Richard’s warm and robust—were easy enough to detect. The third voice was kept so soft that Nora had to strain even to hear it, much less determine who it belonged to.
