The Metaphysical Detective (A Riga Hayworth Paranormal Mystery) (7 page)

“Eat,” Riga said.

Liz switched the brush to her left hand and picked up the fork with her right, blindly stabbing at a piece of sweet and sour chicken.  The fork hovered above the plate, making no move towards her mouth as she scrutinized her work in progress.

Riga leaned across the table.  “Liz!”

Liz wrenched her gaze from the canvas and looked at Riga, blinking as if she’d just awakened.

“Liz.  You need to eat something.”

“Oh.”  She looked down at the food, surprised.  “This looks good.  Thanks.”

Riga relaxed as Liz dug in.  Then she realized she was hungry, and joined her.  She had ordered too much and spring rolls, rice, and vegetables in orange-colored goo littered the plates after they had finished.  Riga leaned back in her chair, satiated, but she cracked open a fortune cookie anyway.  Fortune cookies never failed her.  This one read:  “Arrival of a tall, handsome stranger.  Trust him.”

Well.  They couldn’t always be right. 

“What does yours say?” she asked Liz.

“You are in the middle of something big,” Liz said, returning to her painting.  She still held the fortune in one hand. 

The movement on the television caught Riga’s eye.  A sink hole had opened up on a familiar-looking street.  Riga moved in for a closer look, pulling her jacket more tightly around her as a chill wind gusted through the window.  A blue strip flashed at the bottom of the screen with the street name in bold white letters and Riga’s shoulders tensed.  Her sister, Rebecca, lived there.  She squinted at the screen.  No homes appeared damaged, but Riga wanted to call her sister, make sure everything was okay.

She made her excuses and left, closing the window first.   If Liz wasn’t in a state to eat when she was hungry, Riga didn’t trust her to close the window when she got cold.

Once inside her own place, she called Rebecca.  Her sister sounded harried when she answered the phone, but she always did.  Rebecca had two loves – her family and sports – and Riga’s calls always seemed to interrupt one of them.  Tonight, however, she was glad to talk to Riga.  Her outrage at the state of the city’s streets had her in full flow.

“A sinkhole!  Can you believe it?  Pen could have been killed!  And God only knows what it will do to property values.  There’ll probably be an extra tax to pay for the repairs.”

“Back up,” Riga said.  “Was Pen nearby when it happened?”

“She’d just driven down the street!  The sinkhole opened up right behind her.”

“Shit,” Riga said, thinking hard.  It could have been a coincidence.  Sinkholes did happen.  But she didn’t like it.

“Damn right,” Rebecca said.  “Pen’s thrilled though.  She was first to post the footage on YouTube and that Tweeter thing.”

“Twitter,” Riga corrected absently.  She heard frantic barking in the background.

“Ranger!  Down!  Down, Ranger!  Oh for heaven’s sake, you’d think he wanted to talk to you.  I’ve got to go – this stupid dog…”

Her sister rung off and Riga carefully replaced the handset.  She turned on the TV, waiting for the local news station to start its ten o’clock show.  A sci-fi series was playing and she left it on as background noise, catching the occasional phrase: 
A body only turns to soap under certain conditions. 

She filled the sink and began washing the dishes, glancing at the television sporadically to see if the news had begun. 

A mad scientist raved: 
The universes are colliding!  The laws of physics no longer apply! 

The wine glass she was washing slipped from her grasp.  She cursed as it juggled between her two hands, but caught the glass before it hit the tile floor.  Dramatic music swelled on the TV and there was a quick cut to a car insurance commercial. 

Universes colliding.  Well, that could be a problem.  There were a lot of theories about the unseen world – alternate dimensions, spirit worlds, worlds of thought forms, daemonic reality, Plato’s realm of the ideal...  Riga thought any and all could all be possible, but there were always certain rules. The worlds might occasionally brush up against each other, but these encounters had to be brief. 

She pulled the plug in the sink, wiped her hands on a towel, then poured herself a glass of Zin.  Wandering to the living room, she dropped onto the couch in front of the television.  The news started, teasing the sinkhole story.  Riga kicked off her shoes, stretched her legs before her. 

The news station held the story until the very end and when it finally came on, her glass was empty.  The piece was dissatisfying, with no explanation of the cause, and an overhead view of the collapsed road.  Riga thought she saw her sister’s house in the far edge of the shot.  Rebecca would not be happy.

Chapter 12:  Pumpkins on the Shore

The next day, Riga kept her mind fixed on prosaic rituals: washing windows, scattering dust bunnies from beneath the couch, mopping the kitchen floor.  She gave Brigitte the mystery novel.  The gargoyle exclaimed delightedly and soared to the rooftop to read.  At least Riga had made someone happy today.

By afternoon, however, she was restless enough to eat her way through the refrigerator.  Recognizing that impulse for what it was (bad) she drove down the coast to Half Moon Bay, its farm fields dotted with orange pumpkins.  She stopped at a beach, pulling into its small gravel parking lot.  As she stepped from her car, a wind kicked up, lashing the waves into a dark frenzy.  Riga crunched down the shore, feeling her tennis shoes fill with sand.  She found a rock and sat against it in the sun, a woolen shawl pulled taut around her shoulders.  Drawing an Agatha Christie from her bag, she began to read, her gaze drifting from the Pacific to the page, with little attention paid to either.  Like the pull of the tide, sleep tugged at her.  Her eyelids drifted downward and in that liminal place she fancied there was another beach, just on the edge of her perception, someplace warm and perfect.

A cry rang out from behind her.  She stumbled to her feet, turning toward the source of the sound – a young couple, arms wrapped around each other.  The woman pointed towards the ocean, her mouth open in astonishment.  Riga followed the direction of her arm.  A waterspout danced far off shore.  She stared, disbelieving.  Then she gathered up the book which had fallen open upon the sand and left hurriedly.

*****

When she arrived in the lobby of her condo, Dog greeted her with an excited bark.  It followed her to the elevator, prancing with delight.  She scratched its neck while they waited for the elevator to arrive.  The doors slid open and the dog backed away, then sat down.

Riga looked up in surprise.  Donovan stood waiting inside.

“You’ve been avoiding me.”  His green-brown eyes mocked her.

She rose, slinging her leather bag over her shoulder, unable to deny it.  “I guess I have been.”

“Going up?”

She nodded and joined him in the elevator.  The dog remained behind.

Donovan followed her silently into the condo.  He removed his long woolen coat and tossed it over the back of her sofa, then made a beeline for her wine cabinet.  He stopped in front of it, admiring.  “As wine cabinets go, this one is a thing of beauty.  Did you get this in Afghanistan?”

She gave him a long look.  “How did you know I’d been in Afghanistan?”

He shrugged.  “I had you checked out.” 

He ran his hand across the woodwork, its paint faded blue, then flipped open the locking mechanism and unerringly withdrew the most expensive bottle.  “Mmm...  An obscure little winery, but their 2008 Tempranillo is outstanding.”

“You know your wine.”  She didn’t want to talk about Afghanistan.

“Of course.” He handed her the bottle. 

She removed the cork with a church key, poured the wine into two wide bottomed goblets.  “Who are you?”

“I’ve told you that.”

“No, you’ve told me your name and I haven’t had you checked out.  Yet.”  She handed him a glass.  “What do you do?  Where are you from?”

He swirled the glass and held it up to the light.  “Vegas.  As for what I do, I’m in the sin industry.”

She laughed.  “I hope you mean gambling.”

“What else—?  Oh.  Yes, just gaming.  But Vegas has grown up.  Now it’s about more than gaming, it’s entertainment.  Good food, good wine, good music.  Cheers. ” He clinked glasses with her and took a sip.

She didn’t. 

Donovan leaned casually against the kitchen counter.  “You’re not drinking?”

“It needs time to breathe.  And the last time I drank with you I blacked out.”

One side of his mouth curved upward.  “Blacked out?  Come on,” he scoffed.  “You didn’t drink that much.”

She walked past him.  In the narrow confines of her kitchen she brushed his elbow and felt another quiver of recognition.  Magic?  Or something else? 

He followed her into the living room and chose a chair close to the fireplace.  “We should have a fire.”  He looked around and, beside a bookcase, found a basket with logs inside. 

“Did anything… unusual happen that night?” she persisted, watching him kneel before the fireplace, stacking wood and paper.  The muscles played across his back, shifting the fabric of his clothing.  She felt a hunger surge within her and looked away.

He drew a match across the brick hearth and lit the paper.  The fire sprang to life.  He sat back on his heels, regarding her.  “We drank.  If you had too much, you hid it well.  I brought you back here, you went to sleep.  So did I.”

“Sleep.”

“Just sleep,” Donovan confirmed.  “Your bed is much more comfortable than mine at the hotel, by the way.”

“It’s a new mattress.” She gracefully lowered herself into the chair opposite him.  “I never black out.”

“I don’t know why you would have last night.”  He made himself comfortable in the chair and stretched his well-clad legs toward the fire, wine glass dangling loosely from his finger tips.  “You’ve had an interesting international career – your own PR company, big clients.  And then you gave it all up to become a metaphysical detective and you don’t even have a webpage.  Considering the timing, I assumed the career change was because of what happened in Afghanistan—“

“You don’t know what happened there,” she said sharply.  She turned away from him, swirling the wine in her glass.  The deaths hadn’t made a ripple in the US news feed – Iraq was hot at the time and Afghanistan the “good,” ignored war.  However, if someone dug, they’d find a short, uninformative news blurb.  The reporting had been poor but the Internet had a long memory.

He gave her an appraising look. “But now I think it might have something to do with your ability to turn off streetlights when you get within five yards of them.”

She felt the glass slip from her nerveless fingers.  Donovan moved in a blur, catching it before it hit the carpet.  He placed it atop a stack of books lying on the coffee table between them.  “Careful.”  He gave her a long look.  “It looks like you need a drink.”

“I think I do,” she said hoarsely, and took a gulp.  The warmth of the fire bathed her skin as the wine blossomed inside her.  Light folded in on itself – billions of dazzling stars followed by the cool sweet dark of infinite space.

Chapter 13: Ariadne’s Secret

Riga dreamed she was Ariadne.  Their ship docked at the port of a fishing village at Naxos, waves slapping against the sides of the wood planking, sailors bustling with ropes and shouting to men on the pier.  Her lover, Theseus, was busy below deck.  He’d kept away from her lately; she knew it was over.  She had betrayed her father and king by helping Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape the labyrinth.  It had been the right thing to do – the sacrifices to the minotaur had to end – but she felt hollowed out inside.  She couldn’t go back, and her dream of escaping with Theseus was dissolving.  His coming betrayal should have stung more, but it seemed small payment for her own treachery. 

The youngest sailor, a boy of no more than twelve, took her hand, startling her from her reverie. 

“Let’s go to the town,” he said. 

She looked toward the ship’s cabin. 

Theseus emerged, his hair shining in the sunlight, his toga hanging loosely about his waist and shoulder.  “Go, enjoy yourself!  We depart at sunset,” he said, waving her off.

Liar
.

“You should stay on the ship, little one,” she said.

The boy had attached himself to her not long after she and Theseus had escaped Crete.  He looked at her now, adoring, and shook his head.  He took her hand and led her across the wooden plank to the pier.  The boy exclaimed with delight over the baskets of fish, the jars of olives, the smells from the bakery stall. 

The two walked to the top of hill overlooking the port, the sun high above them and she watched the ship move steadily out into the waters, away from her.  Ariadne’s only regret was for the boy, who had been abandoned with her by his shipmates.  He tugged at her hand and she looked down upon him.  Their eyes met.  She had the sensation of falling, the stars spinning about her.  This was no boy, it was Dionysus, and he had come for her.

Riga awoke, the dream hanging on her and it felt as if she had experienced events that had actually occurred.  She knew the story of Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus (the jerk) on the island of Naxos, and of her rescue by Dionyus, but the idea of him appearing to her as a young boy onboard ship was new.  Had she read it somewhere? 

A pan clattered in the kitchen and she became aware of the scent of breakfast – onions, fragrant cheese, bacon.  She belted a cotton robe about her waist and padded into the kitchen. 

Donovan was there, in a display of either nerve or innocence.  She voted for the former.

He flipped an omelet in one of her non-stick pans and turned to her with a rakish grin.  “Morning, Beautiful!”  He was barefoot, in loose black pants and a white tunic. 

Riga wondered where he’d got the change of clothing.  He had gorgeous feet, perfectly formed, as if they’d never been tortured into shape by modern footwear. 

Something was off though.   She looked at him carefully.  His insouciance remained in place, like a shield, but she felt something behind it.  He was worried.