“I can’t understand it. Not yet.”
“You will. One day.”
And then she was gone, a wheezing laugh oozing from her throat like Corcoran’s final hurrah.
* * *
I was buoyed along on a tide of love, I suppose, that ushered me into my deadline week. My boss, Feedworthy’s Andy Brewer himself, an appellation I had gotten extremely tired of using weeks before, stopped me at the doorway to my office.
“You mind if I come in?” he asked. “I’m not going to lie, this is less of a check-in than it is me asking if you have headache medicine. I had a rager last night and I feel like I’m dying.”
“Please do,” I said.
He high-fived my assistant, Gabe, and then sat back in a chair and closed his eyes. I scrounged in my purse—only came up with some Midol. Andy shrugged and slugged it back.
“How’s things?” he asked. “You seem to be loosening up.”
“I’m finding my groove again,” I said. “I’ve been seeing someone.”
“And who is this?”
“She’s seeing two men,” Gabe said, with a gasp, as if he was shocked with himself.
I jerked my head around.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, biting his nails. “I found out when I snooped through your personal emails last week. I haven’t told anyone and it was literally giving me an ulcer keeping it in. Please don’t be mad at me.”
“Yeah, well, cat’s out of the bag on that one,” I said.
“Huh. I wouldn’t have expected that from you of all people,” he said. “Just take it easy, okay? Personally, I don’t have time for a relationship. I just use Tinder like a normal human being to get my sinful urges out of my system and I’m good to go again for another week or two.”
“You are a mess,” Gabe said. “I don’t know about you two, but there’s like fifteen dating apps for men seeking men in this city and I’m still as dry as the Sahara lately.”
“With a personality like yours?” Andy asked.
Gabe blushed.
“I’m a venomous viper,” he said bashfully. “Men do strange things to my brain. I just can’t trust myself around them. I start to plot backup plans, like murder. In the case of an eventual, inevitable betrayal. I’m pretty much the worst parts of a Scorpio.”
“I used to be that way around women,” Andy said. “Hey, so, fraternization asides. How’d the article on the old Tremblay Manor go?”
“It went well,” I said. “There wasn’t anything there. Just a bunch of old memories. But I did get a lead on a long-lost historical figure. Are you familiar with William Corcoran?”
“He sounds familiar,” Gabe said.
“Apparently, he was a Magician of some renown. He travelled the globe and learned the tricks of the trade everywhere he went. He was involved in a lot of magical societies—you know, Golden Dawn, the Thelemic Lodge, studied under Blavatsky. Basically, your average industrial age roustabout spiritualist. Apparently he checked in the night of Tremblay’s murder, and nobody ever saw him again. I think I’m going to approach it with an overview of his notoriety and then segue into a possible cold case mystery being solved. I mean. The story just writes itself. Mysterious conjurer disappears from history the exact same night a famous wealthy member of the American elite gets murdered. Yet another American mystery.”
“Sounds fantastic,” Andy said. “You really have a knack for this stuff. Just wanted to give a head’s up. Next week, we have guys from Digby Digital Media coming in. Head honcho types. Technically DDM owns Feedworthy, and while they give us free rein to do our own thing…”
“Oh God,” Gabe said. “The last time they came through it was like the Night of Long Knives. People kept disappearing. It was murder. I haven’t left my cubicle since.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Andy said. “Basically, enjoy being sober for the next two weeks. They respect what we do here, but they are pretty stringent about how we party.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“Hey. Just wanted to say also. I’m going to need you to give a presentation. Your department is doing really well. So well, in fact, some of the DDMers are saying we need to focus in on giving you more specialty pieces. You’ve worked your way up into the good graces of the higher-ups. The numbers we’re reporting are really off-the-charts.”
