“You like him?” He must have sounded incredulous because Andi chuckled.
“Come on, George. I do like some people, on occasion. You, Shireen, Evangeline. It’s not that surprising.”
“I just never suspected Bill Waters to be part of our illustrious circle.”
“What can I say? I like variety.” Andi was now grinning broadly.
“I’m not sure if you’re pulling my leg or not.” George shook his head. He liked seeing Andi carefree for once. “You still up for driving to Gartner’s home?”
“Yes. Let’s get it over with.”
GIDEON GARTNER’Shouse was a beautiful Southern Belle with the typical columns on the generous porch and a balcony wrapping around the entire second floor. It was painted a vibrant orange, which looked gorgeous among the tamer beige, light yellow, and white of its neighbors. The location downtown also meant they could simply take a stroll around the neighborhood without drawing any attention when they sat down for a break on one of the benches along the walkway. George had given Andi two ibuprofen and made a mental note to do some additional reading on pain medication. His partner wasn’t taking the heavyweights, but George already knew swallowing them in the quantities Andi did wasn’t good, even if they were prescription free.
The bench was only a few feet from the driveway of Gartner’s house, which meant Andi didn’t have to stretch his senses too far. George slung his arm around Andi’s shoulders like a lover would, leaning close to him, both as a cover for anybody who might be too interested in them as well as to be close enough when Andi started talking so that nobody else would hear. It also gave George the opportunity to keep Andi stable once he dove into that world beneath their own that was so alien to George. Leaning in, he could smell a hint of the chamomile soap Andi used. The odors of the city mixed with the remnants of the tacos they had had on their way to downtown, layered with Andi’s natural scent, which George found more fascinating than he had any business doing.
Andi took a deep breath, put his head on George’s shoulder in a rare gesture of openness, and started talking, translating what he was seeing.
“It’s loud, so much noise here, all the time, thumping and screeching and pounding, so many blobs, dogs, cats, the gardens here are too clean, not many places to feed, to hide, to live, barren, almost, the houses are good, old, many nooks and crannies, rotting wood, decent hiding spots, the house is quiet most of the time, only four blobs there, two always cleaning, taking the food away, one producing food in the kitchen, what a great place, damp spots, a bit moldy where the pipe has been leaking, not many plants, a room full of books, more dust, the wood tastes good, I need a place to lay the eggs, silverfish in the bathroom, many of them, happy, healthy, thriving, the cellar’s dark and damp, perfect, tiles on the floor, new, there’s a skeleton behind one of the walls, too old, nobody knows, no food, just bones, ignore it, the thumping is hollow here, not so bad, I’m so tired, hungry, need to build a new net, the colony is getting too big, we need a new nest, not here, the ground’s too hard, no way to build more tunnels, the space behind the wardrobe is perfect, so many, prey, I kill one of them, they’re so easy to catch with their many legs and I’m poisonous, sated, nothing there, the breeze in the bedroom is too strong, I’m sleeping, found the perfect spot, everything’s liquid, the skin is too tight, I need, I need, I’m gone, where am I, where is, who was I, gone, gone, dripping, changing, turning, away, away, so deep—”
“Andi! Come back! I need you here!” George was squeezing Andi’s side, trying to shake him out of his trance. This time, Andi reacted fairly quickly, his gaze focusing back on George.
“Man, I hate that.”
“Everything all right, Andi?”
His partner shuddered. “There were some caterpillars undergoing transformation to a butterfly. It’s so weird, being all liquid while knowing you’re not.”
George could only stare. “I don’t think I want to even imagine that.”
“Trust me, you don’t want to feel it either.”
“Then let’s ignore it in favor of the skeleton you said was in Gartner’s wall. Did you mean that literally, or was it just a euphemism for finding something we can get him with?” George very firmly focused his thoughts on this information.
“Sorry, as much as it galls me to say it, but that skeleton has been there for a long time. Gartner bought this house ten years ago, correct?”
George furrowed his brows. They had done their homework on the house during the taco break. Well, Shireen had done the homework and sent it to them. “I think it was eleven. How old are the bones?”
“Hard to say. At least twenty years, if not older. I could find no traces of memories of a giant feast, which means it’s been so long the resident arthropods have forgotten all about it. And something big like that tends to leave a huge impression.”
“What if the house has been fumigated at some point? Wouldn’t the memory be gone as well?”
“Not necessarily. It depends on how far in the past the incident was. Let’s say the person was killed by Gartner and he put the corpse behind the wall, then fumigated the house a few months later. Even if all the arthropods died—which is unlikely in a house with a cellar like that—the event itself would still be recent enough for the new arthropods to register as something big. The bigger the timespan between the kill and the fumigation, the greater the chances for the memory of the kill to fade.”
George felt a headache coming his way. Andi had explained how the memory of arthropods worked—which was completely different to human memory, sometimes a lot more accurate, at other times even hazier than the recounting of college students high on weed and drunk from cheap beer. “How can you tell the length of the timespan?”
“It’s not a science. Lots of it is experience, plus guesswork. There’s an ant colony living under the porch. The nest is getting too small for them, and they need to expand. As you know, the memory of social insects is a lot more precise than that of solitary insects. That colony has been in the house for at least fifteen dead spaces, and they can’t remember the kill, which means they weren’t there when it took place. This in turn means the skeleton has been there for at least twenty years if not more, taking into account that the counting of the dead spaces is always tricky and more of a plus/minus two or three thing and the fact that it takes a body a year to decompose if it’s placed in soil. Behind a wall in a cellar, I’d say it takes longer. We’d have to ask Evangeline for detailed information. There are no clothes on the skeleton anymore, and they only start decomposing after about a year when the chemicals the body produces begin eating away at them. So I take the fifteen dead spaces the ants have memorized, add two more to be on the safe side, then three more to take into account that for the ants not thinking the skeleton was a big thing, it had to be nothing but bones when the colony started, which makes twenty years in total. If we were to decide we want to know who the victim could be, I would start looking into the history of the house, going backwards from 2000.”
“Which we are not going to do because we can’t explain how we knew about the bones in the first place.”
“Welcome to my world.” Andi groaned and leaned more heavily on George’s shoulder.
“Did you sense anything else? Anything you didn’t mention?”
“No. Nothing incriminating.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes, fuck. Can we go home now? I’m tired.” Andi made no move to lift his head from George’s shoulder. With some difficulty, he managed to heave his partner up. Because Andi seemed to be in a cuddling mood, another indicator of how stressed he was, George kept his arm around Andi’s shoulders while they strolled back to the Escalade, all the time trying to not think about how right it felt to have Andi there.
