“I don’t remember,” David said.
He lay in a bed at the U of C Hospital. The ER doctors hadn’t found anything seriously wrong with him, but they were keeping him overnight for observation.
I was there with his father. And Rachel. She’d decided to come down when I told her as much of the story as I could before the paramedics showed up. I felt as if my fairy godmother had landed, if a fairy godmother’s standard greeting was to punch me in the ribs and demand, “What the hell are you up to, jerk?”
Things were quiet now in the room. David looked tired and weak, trying to answer our questions. “You don’t remember anything?” Beckerman demanded.
“Do you remember Madame Olivya’s?” I asked, more quietly, as Rachel held his hand.
David nodded. “Y-yeah. She let me borrow the book. Then I—I remember the front of the cemetery, and this guy giving me a map, and then . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Who is this Madame Olivya?” Beckerman asked. “Is this part of that ‘special research’ you’re doing?”
“I go there—” He looked at his father, nervous. “It’s just for fun. I like her readings.”
“Tarot cards?” Beckerman rolled his eyes. “I suppose there are worse things, but really?” He started to pace, hands behind his back as if he needed to keep them from doing something awkward.
“Did Quentin Styles tell you about the book?” I asked.
“No.” David looked puzzled. “I told him. I found it, but they wouldn’t let me take it out of the library, but then I remembered seeing it at Madame Olivya’s. I told him after class. He said I should check it out. That’s why I went to Madame Olivya’s. I guess I went right to the cemetery, but I just—” He closed his eyes and rubbed his head. “I remember walking through the cemetery. I had a map. I think I fell, and it seemed like a long time, and after that—” He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
I looked at Rachel, still holding his hand. She nodded. “He really doesn’t remember. I can feel something blocking him, but I can’t do a Vulcan mind meld or anything like that. Maybe it’ll come back.”
Beckerman stopped pacing and stared at her. Rachel smiled. “I’m psychic. Sort of. A little.” She shrugged.
He sat down with a sigh. “I don’t know what to think. I’m just glad—” He looked up. “Okay. Thank you for finding my son. You can go home now.”
“I’m glad he’s okay.” I took Rachel’s hand. “Let’s go.”
She let me hold her hand until we were out in the hallway, and then she yanked it away from me. “You’re just holding hands because I held his hand.” She smirked. “Jealous much?”
“Did you have to hold his hand for five minutes? I think he was starting to enjoy it.” I looked down the hall at the elevator. “What’s for dinner?”
“Cheese and crackers. I never got around to actually making anything.”
I pressed the elevator button. “I got a Tarot reading today.”
Rachel lifted an eyebrow. “What’d you find out?”
“I’ve seen death, people don’t trust me, I’m a stubborn asshole. Oh, and there’s a darkness around me.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, that all tracks.” The elevator door opened.
“Even the darkness? What does that mean?” I pressed the first floor button, and the doors closed.
Rachel smiled. “I like the darkness.”
This was a little disconcerting. “What kind of darkness?”
She reached for my hand, as if confirming what she already sensed. “I don’t know. But it’s what I noticed about you when we met the first time. It’s what I liked about you first.”
“Not my debonair good looks?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. That.”
The door opened. “Did you Uber here?” I asked.
“I drove in case you had to head out somewhere else.”
We headed for the front door. “So I guess I’ll see you at home.”
She grinned. “If you’re lucky.”
The next morning my client called me at 8:15 as I was still eating my cereal. “He’s still in the hospital. They’re doing more tests. He still doesn’t remember anything. And Styles came to see him this morning.”
“What did he want?”
“I wasn’t there. I got there at 7:30, and David told me he’d been there. He came in and asked all sorts of questions—"
“About what?”
“David—he couldn’t say. He’s still pretty out of it, and it was early in the morning and I guess he didn’t sleep well. Nightmares.” He sighed. “The thing is, I called him last night. Styles. Told him to stay away from David. I probably shouldn’t have done that.”
Interesting. What was Styles looking for? “I could talk to him again if you want me to.”
“Yeah. I want to know if he’s a danger to my son.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I promised. We hung up and I finished my cereal.
Rachel was working at her office today, seeing clients in person, so I couldn’t bounce any ideas or jokes off her. That usually makes her mad anyway. Instead I checked Styles’s schedule—it was posted online—then drank coffee and did some other work until it was time to catch him during office hours.
But he wasn’t there. When I drove down to Hyde Park, parked my Prius, and went up to his office, I found a note taped to the door: OFFICE HOURS CANCELED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE—PERSONAL EMERGENCY. Underneath someone had drawn a heart.
Now what? I sat on the bench and took out my phone. I had an address for Styles, a house a few blocks south of the main campus, just close enough to qualify as walking distance. I headed out.
I found the house 15 minutes later—two stories, a tree in the front yard, vines covering the fence around it—but Styles didn’t answer when I rang the bell from his porch. I walked over and peered through the front window, its curtains half closed, but saw nothing.
I could have broken in, but I’m not on TV and I don’t want to go to jail. So I started back to my car. At least I was getting some exercise. Rachel had been talking about getting me a foot counter lately.
My phone buzzed. Beckerman. “Have you talked to Styles yet?”
“No,” I told him. “He skipped office hours and he’s not answering the door at his home.” I turned and looked back down the street toward Styles’s house. “Are you at the hospital now?”
“No, I’ve got meetings I can’t get out of. He’s there with some girl named, uh, Hallie.”
“Is he going home today?”
“They don’t want to discharge him yet. He’s still dehydrated, and some other numbers are low. I’m coming out there this afternoon as soon as I finish up with some clients.”
“I’m in Hyde Park right now,” I told him. “I’ll go over to the hospital.”
Thirty minutes later I was in David’s room. He was sleeping, and Hallie was sitting, reading on a laptop as I entered. She looked up, startled, and closed her computer. “Oh. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for Professor Styles. His father said he was here this morning.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t—I had class, but I came right after.” She seemed embarrassed. “David’s taking a nap right now—”
“I’m awake.” David coughed and rubbed his eyes. “Tired.” He reached for a cup of ice water.
“Sorry to disturb you.” Hallie had the only other chair in the room, so I stood at the foot of the bed. Monitors beeped above and behind him. “Your father says Professor Styles was here this morning.”
David sighed. “I still don’t really get what you’re doing here. My father hired you to snoop into Professor Styles, and then he sent you to look for me when—whatever it was happened. How is this any of your business?”
“It literally is my business.” I smiled. “Look, you don’t have to talk to me. But I do have to ask questions. It’s my job.”
“Look, I know he hates Quentin,” David snapped. “It’s because he’s afraid Quentin’s going to, I don’t know, steal me away from the bright future in finance my dad has planned out for me.” He looked disgusted. “I mean, maybe he will, I don’t know. But it’s my life, isn’t it? Don’t I get to decide?”
I hid a sigh. “Of course. My father wanted—well, he never planned on me being a reporter, or a P.I. He was an accountant, and my mother wanted me to be an accountant too. But that seemed too boring for words. And I probably hurt his feelings when I said that to him.” I was getting off track. “The thing is, you never know where you’re going to end up, whatever your parents want. Or what you want when you’re 20, for that matter.”
David grimaced. “You sound like a professor.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“I don’t know what kind of class you’d teach.” He sighed again. “Okay. What do you want?”
“You call Professor Styles by his first name? Quentin?”
Not the question he expected. “Well, yeah. He told me. I think he’s trying to be the ‘cool’ prof or something. Is something wrong with that?”
“No.” I shrugged. “He came here to see you this morning?”
“Yeah, he came in at 6:30. I don’t know how he got in, but he woke me up.” David groaned. “I’m still not great.”
“What did he want?”
“What I found at the cemetery. He didn’t ask how I was doing, or anything. He just wanted to know about the cemetery.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Same thing I told you, I don’t remember.” He rubbed his head. “I mean, I told him about walking through the cemetery, and the map.”
“What map?”
He rubbed his head. “Uh, last night after you left I remembered someone said he thought he saw the symbol on the north side of the place. I don’t know where it was, but it was on the map.” His eyes widened. “Yeah. I gave him the map.”
“And that’s what Styles wanted? To find the symbol?”
“He was—I didn’t understand some of what he said. I don’t know if I was too tired or what. Some if it didn’t make sense, words that sounded like Latin or Greek. ‘Where is the—thing?’ But what he said wasn’t a word. I knew. ‘Did you see—something?’” David shook his head. “Then I remembered the map. It was in my pocket.” He pointed to a plastic bag in the corner. “My clothes are in there. He took it and left.”
“Did he say anything when he left?”
David frowned. “I don’t—I think I fell asleep.”
I nodded. “Okay. Sorry to bother you. You should get some rest.”
“What’s going on?” Hallie demanded, as if she’d been holding it in since I walked into the room. “What happened to David? Is he going to be all right?”
I sighed. “The doctors can tell you if he’s going to be okay better than I can. But what happened—I don’t know. Yet.”
“What are you going to do now?” David asked. “Report to my father?”
I shook my head. “I’m going to look for Professor Styles some more.”
“Where?” Hallie asked.
“Where else? The cemetery.”
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