“Yeah, me, too.”
“So, he’s really married?” she asked, her voice turning whiny again. “Like forever?”
“Go,” I ordered, pointing toward the door.
She disappeared. Hopefully for a very long time.
Before I made it back to my bedroom, a harried Rocket popped in. Apparently, my visiting hours had changed. I’d have to post a sign.
“Rocket Man!” I said, surprised as I waited for him to adjust. He didn’t get out of the asylum much, and the last time I’d left him, I was being attacked by an angry hellhound.
He blinked, orienting to his new surroundings before giving me his attention. His pudgy face and bald head glowed in the low light of my living room.
When he finally focused on me, he crossed his arms over his chest. “No breaking rules, Miss Charlotte.”
Here we go. “I know, hon.” I put a hand on his shoulder. He would never have come here if he weren’t distressed. “What rule did I break?”
“All of them!” He threw his arms in the air, completely disappointed in me.
Damn my disdain of rules.
“I had to erase, Miss Charlotte. Three names.” He held up three pudgy fingers. “Three. One, two, three. Three.”
I frowned in confusion. “You had to erase? You mean you had to take names off your wall?” Hope engulfed me. “Was one of them mine?”
“No. You already died.”
I did die. I did die! Wow. I knew I saw an angel. A real one with a quizzical brow. Odd, that.
Reyes appeared beside me, framed by the door to my bedroom as Rocket scolded me. I looked at him, and Betty White overflowed with joy. I’d died, so I could cross that off my to-do list. Next up: honeymoon.
“Not you,” Rocket continued. “The others.”
“Okay, well, now that that’s cleared up.” I patted his shoulder to encourage him to leave.
“The ones in the hospital. Heaven is so mad.”
I stopped as a sickly kind of dread crept up my spine. “What do you mean, ‘heaven is mad’?”
“It was their time. You can’t just do that. You can’t just save people for no reason. I had to erase!” he shouted, reiterating his original point, the one that seemed to be at the fore of his misgivings.
My curiosity of how he would erase names he scored into a plaster wall notwithstanding, I steered the conversation back to heaven. “Rocket, heaven. What’s up in heaven?”
“Chaos!” He flailed his arms again. “They are very upset that I had to eeeeeee-rase!”
He was apparently not into erasing. “I’m sorry, Rocket,” I said, giving Reyes a worried glance.
He lowered his head, and his mood hit me. It was somber once again.
“And just so you know, great. I have to go erase another one. No more touching hospitals. That’s cheating. Michael says so.”
“Michael?”
“The archangel.”
“The archangel?” I asked, knowing who Michael was but a little surprised he’d been brought into the conversation.
“He’s only the biggest archangel ever.”
He’d been hanging around Strawberry way too long. Her attitude was rubbing off. “No, I know who Michael is, but —”
“Miss Charlotte, I have to go erase.”
Before I could stop him, he vanished, and I stood gaping at Reyes. “Did I really piss off an archangel?” When he didn’t answer, I strolled past him into my room. “That can’t be good. That cannot, in any way, shape, or form, be good.”
I grabbed an armful of clothes out of my closet and turned, first spotting Reyes, his head inclined, his gaze averted, then spotting my dad.
“Dad!” I yelled, tripping over an evening gown I doubted I would need in an abandoned convent, but one could never be too prepared.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. He was in front of my window, silhouetted by the streetlight outside, his hands in his pockets.
Ecstatic, I dropped the clothes on my bed before a ripple of disbelief hit me. I straightened and paused, curling my fingers into the pile of clothes in front of me.
“You should get that,” he said, and only then did I realize the phone in my pocket was ringing.
Consumed with disbelief, I dug it out and slid the bar over.
“Ms. Davidson?” It was Captain Eckert, his voice low and formal.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“We checked out that address your uncle gave us. The one with the storage unit you found in your father’s hotel room.”
“Yes,” I said again, dread rising from the floor and drowning me.
He cleared his throat and said, “We found a body.”
My vision blurred as he spoke, as I looked at my dad, at the two gunshot wounds in his chest.
“We have reason to believe it’s your father.” After a long moment in which he allowed me to absorb what he’d just said, he asked, “Did you find anything more about what he was doing? Whom he was investigating?”
Though I didn’t feel it, the phone slipped from my fingers. Reyes caught it and told the captain I’d call him back before ending the call.
“Dad,” I whispered, unable to take my gaze off the gunshot wounds, the blood that had saturated his light blue shirt.
I started toward him, but he took a step back, ducked his head as though ashamed, so I stopped.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry, pumpkin. I never knew.”