THE NEXT MORNING, after I awoke stiff and with tingling feet, I was booted out by the attending nurses.
With Ric in Helena 's time-slowed state, I had a choice of occupations.
I could sit by his bedside day after day, waiting for something to happen, or I could do what I'd always done, push out into the bigger world and make something happen myself.
The heave-ho seemed a perfect opportunity to do some quick, minor investigating.
Most of the things that had happened to me and Ric in Las Vegas since we'd met a few weeks ago had changed our lives and almost caused our deaths.
I needed to understand what every dedicated reporter needs to know: who, what, when, where, and why.
And I knew just where to begin.
TO ANYONE REARED in the Midwest, calling upon someone at home without notice was incredibly rude.
I cringed to park Dolly's huge shiny black presence, so like a stylish hearse, outside Caressa Teagarden's Sunset City residence, all exterior shingles and peaked roof, a gingerbread cottage for the Millennium Revelation.
I neared the front door but still I hesitated to knock. When "Sun City" retirement communities cropped up in Sunbelt states more than half a century ago, they were viewed as enlightened communities that encouraged the aging population to unite in child-free environments. The oldsters would never have to worry about breaking a hip by tripping on abandoned roller skates and could travel anywhere to see their families.
The Millennium Revelation changed even that.
Nowadays " Sunset City " is the Shangri-la for older people. These post-Millennium Revelation communities for the aged thrive in the hammock-shaped "smile" that the warmer Lower Forty-eight states create, from North Carolina to northern California through all the temperate zones in between.
Instead of signing up for "adult living" that would morph into assisted living and then medical bed-care until death, aging people could have themselves sucked and tucked to a fare-thee-well, then sign up to live on indefinitely in a physical virtual reality state as long as their money lasted.
It wasn't that different from the previous plan, except that weird science and possibly supernatural mojo were involved.
Of course, the Sunset City owners and operators never revealed exactly what they were doing. It was a "proprietary" program, rumored to rely on cellular and cloning experiments by the Koreans, later snapped up by the elusive Immortality Mob.
The artificially preserved oldies but goodies were happy. Their offspring may have resented not inheriting the family estate but could look forward to an extended self-care plan also. (I hate to call it an "extended life" plan. To me, it didn't seem so much life as the illusion of it.) I guess a lot of people had settled for that even before the Millennium Revelation.
Still, my unannounced visit was Caressa's fault. She wasn't listed in any directory either by a phone number or an email address. She was also "at fault" for following me from the Wichita Sunset City to this one near Vegas. Unlikely coincidences like that were starting to make me highly suspicious.
When I'd "interviewed" her recently, pretending to follow up on our mysteriously canceled Kansas appointment earlier, I'd originally made the usual mistake of the arrogant young. I'd considered her the typical rambling old dear living in the past. She was also the only "old-looking" person I'd met in Sin City, with the exception of Howard Hughes.
Caressa Teagarden had managed to take the "mummified" look out of the museum and return it to the parlor. I admired her for ignoring the siren call of eternal youth and beauty so easily achieved today.
"Oh, it's you again, my dear girl," she greeted me after I finally knocked on her unlocked front door and she edged it open. Unlike the usual glamorous Sunset City residents, Caressa's slight body curled over a supporting cane and her pale facial skin was crossed with tiny arroyos begging for a flash flood of daily moisturizer. I can't say how pleased-pink and lovely she looked.
"I was so hoping for another chat," her raspy voice welcomed me. "Don't pussyfoot around. Come in and sit down."
Hospitality was a challenge at Caressa's place. The furnishings all looked as elderly as she did.
I'm not fat, but I am farm-girl solid. So I perched precariously on a tiny wooden rocking chair with a needle-point seat that seemed like it belonged in a Victorian child's playroom. It was meant for adults back in the days when five feet tall was common for both men and women and thirty-five was the average life span.
"You can stop clutching that silly briefcase on a strap. Put it down."
I leaned my messenger bag beside the chair, feeling the silver familiar's charm-laden weight on my wrist as if reminding me of its presence.
"You reporters always have more questions," she told me. "Hurry them along. I take a daily afternoon nap, you know."
I let her continue to take me for what I'd been, a TV reporter, trying not to stare at the dark blue veins atop her hands.
Was her life's blood darkening and pooling in her extremities rather than running through them? Should I even be bothering this slip of shaky mortality relying on a semi-holographic appearance?
"Well?" she demanded.
"I do have questions. You mentioned your real name was Lila and you had a twin sister Lili, whom you lost track of in young adulthood."
"So? The Depression separated a lot of families and siblings."
"I may have been separated from a twin at birth," I told her.
"That is the beginning of a great story."
"Not if it's your life. They called me Delilah, after the street I was found on as an abandoned infant."
"Delilah. Most old-fashioned. Most naughty! It would have done well on the screen in my heyday, Delilah."
I gritted my teeth. Her coyness was getting as cloying as brown-sugar candy. "I saw my double on TV recently, in a bit part."
Caressa shrugged. "It's a start, but the internet is better for ambitious young people like you these days."
"She went by the name of Lilith."
"Are you accusing me of something, Delilah?"
"Knowing too much?"
"About what? Dragons?"
"We were... are Delilah and Lilith. You and your twin sister were Lila and Lili. Isn't that too much of a coincidence?"
"I was not named after a street," she said icily. "We took stage names, my sister and I. Both Lili and Lila were popular names in the nineteen twenties. Too popular. When my Hollywood career took off I made myself Caressa Teagarden."
I have a wordplay mind. I couldn't help musing that DElilah and LiliTH almost equaled DE-A-TH.
That reminded me of Vida, the nineteen-forties mistress of Vegas werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau. I'd seen her in a photo with him and the daughter he'd later had murdered, Loretta, whose bones Ric and I had found in Sunset Park. Vida. Wordplay. Vida equals Avid equals Diva.