1
438 Melrose Court
I tapped the address in my file with the lid of the pen I'd been chewing on. Beside the front door of the sandy beige new build, swirly metal numerals confirmed my location. Four three eight. Weird. Definitely the right number, but this was all wrong. I turned from the house and glanced down the manicured lawn to the street sign across the road. It promised in no uncertain terms that this was Melrose Court, just as it was supposed to be. I shut my file with a defeated sigh and went back in through the open door a second time.
"Hello?" I called yet again as I stomped through the kitchen. It was a kitchen that belonged on a show about kitchens more than in somebody's house: clean and white and open-concept, leading out into the high-ceilinged living room beyond. The "after" on a home renovation show. Not even a spoon in the sink or a crumb on the countertops. Which made the body sprawled across the tiled floor look even more out of place.
Now, slap a corpse on the floor of my dingy apartment kitchen and you wouldn't bat an eye, at least in my line of work. But in a place like this, a dead body really spoils the ambience.
I rounded the island and reopened my file.
Case # 507032
Conner Mateo Ortiz
Age: 17
Cause of death: Seizure
Time to Collect: 4:30 p.m.
"Conner?" My voice ricocheted off the stainless steel and marble surrounding me. I crouched by the body and attempted to hover in a squat, but my left knee protested my weight with a defiant pop, and I wobbled forward. "Nope, nope, nope," I muttered to myself, "no falling on bodies today. Not after last time." I lowered myself to my steadily widening bum by 507032's head. His rich brown locks fell over one closed eye, a spattering of freckles on his nose. I sighed, one hand at my stomach. Poor kid. He looked younger than his age lying there, long lashes pressed above bronze cheeks still full with the last remnants of baby fat. I'd found his basement bedroom not ten minutes earlier; a gallery of posters and mess and potential. It always felt wrong when they were young. Like their bodies should still have some life left in them. But of course, they didn't. That's why I was there.
Still, he was going to make me late, and the last man to make me late was the very reason I needed to get back to the office and then on my way home on time.
"Conner?" I tried again. Nothing. The house shuddered at my voice and fell still.
My phone vibrated in my back trouser pocket and I nearly puked, though I wasn't entirely sure the two were related. I scrambled for the phone and hauled myself to my feet.
Simon. He got the table for six thirty instead of seven. Of course he did. Shit. If we weren't already in the middle of a divorce, I'd consider filing over this.
This wasn't the way it normally worked-the way it always worked. Death, for all its unpredictability and unknowns, was remarkably routine on my end. It was one of the things I loved most about my job. Someone under my department's jurisdiction dies, I get the paperwork, carry out the collection, write up a report for Stu, and am on the couch watching Family Feud with a bowl of canned tomato soup by five thirty. That's how it was, how it always had been for the six years I'd been a Collections Agent with S.C.Y.T.H.E. But somehow today was different. Case 507032 was different.
I glanced back over the boy. My client files were always pared down to need-to-know information, and in my position, there isn't much I need to know. But it seemed clear enough from the body-long-limbed and dressed in faded jeans and a gray hoodie-that aside from his family's apparent wealth, 507032 was your average, unremarkable teenaged boy. So the question was, why wasn't he here?
I did a second tour through the house, Conner Ortiz's name bouncing back to me in my own voice from the high ceilings of every starkly furnished room. By the time I'd circled back into the kitchen, it was after five.
"Conner," I said into the definitively empty house, "I'm sorry."
I closed my file for the last time and left 438 Melrose Court.
2
Gemma Burke was still in her cubicle when I arrived at the office. She rolled her seat back and poked her head around our shared wall at the sound of my car keys hitting my desk. Her emergence was like a sunrise, the high dark blond ponytail and naturally veneer-white smile rising out of the mists of corporate gray. Gemma did Pilates and went to concerts and brought salads for lunch every day, which she genuinely seemed to enjoy eating. She had work friends she saw without the obligation of work. At a push, she might even consider me one of them, though I'd never braved one of her famous Friday bar nights. I had never been a Gemma Burke, but I was glad someone was.
"Hey, Kath!"
I placed file 507032 face down beside my computer and fell into my chair, a small bubble of anxiety rising in my stomach.
The anxiety bubble burst in a shaky, "Have you ever failed to collect?"
Gemma cocked her head at me, her brows creasing.
"I had a routine collection just now, and my client . . . wasn't there."
"Wasn't there?" Gemma repeated. "Oh no, Kath, that's not good. No, it's never happened to me. Ugh, I'm sorry, that's so stressful."
The look on her face, tight and pitying, confirmed my fears. I glanced down at my hands. They had a way of making a mess of things-I had a way of making a mess of things-and somehow I'd finally messed up the one aspect of my life I thought I'd had under control.
Gemma's voice snapped me out of my thought spiral. "Have you told Stu?"
"Not yet, I just got in."
"Oh, fair enough. Well, I mean, that's definitely not supposed to happen."
"No," I agreed, swallowing the lump in my throat. "It isn't." I took a breath and remembered the thing I should have said from the start. "How was the funeral?"
Gemma shrugged. "Like, typical funeral vibes."
I nodded uncomfortably. This was uncomfortable. Death was our job, and seeing it on a daily basis made us pretty blasé about the whole ordeal fairly quickly. But when death came to our own doorsteps, there was no telling how one of us would react, and I was not equipped with the skills necessary to handle big displays of emotion. I cast a cursory glance around me, noting the quickest exit in case of a tears-related emergency, and said, "That makes sense. For a funeral." I cleared my throat. "My aunt's somehow ended with a fire in the church cloakroom."
"Oh. Yikes."
"But your dad's was nice?"
"Nice enough, I guess," said Gemma. "I always find funerals kind of pointless. I mean, maybe it's because of the job, you know? Like, the whole idea of funerals is to say goodbye, but we know it isn't goodbye, that there's something else, even if we don't know exactly what."
I let out a small breath of relief as I realized there wouldn't be any shoulder crying, when the clock on the wall across from me caught my eye.
"Shit. I'm supposed to be having that dinner tonight," I said. "With Simon."
"Simon? Really?"
My shoulders sagged. "Yup." I slid the file back off the desk. The time had come. "Assuming Stu doesn't eat me alive first."
"He's really not that bad once you get past . . . you know . . ."
"His personality?"
Gemma gave a girlish giggle.
"Wish me luck."
"Good luck! See you tomorrow, Kath."
My knuckles rapped softly on one of the windows of Stu's office. Almost the whole thing was windows. He'd said when he installed them that he wanted us to feel he was more approachable, but those windows had shown him picking his teeth with empty file folders and blotting his armpits after lunchtime workouts enough times to make me avoid approaching him unless it was absolutely necessary. Well, a missing client seemed to fit that bill.
"Come in," Stu called from his desk on the other side of the glass.
I slid into the office.
"Kathy," Stu said by way of a greeting.
"Stu," I replied. "Mr. Calhoun," I corrected quickly, blinking hard in a futile attempt to Etch A Sketch away my slipup. Stu was only Stu when you weren't talking directly to Stu.
"What can I do you for?" Stu eyed me with his usual cool blue intensity, his over-attended muscles flexing impatiently beneath his pale button-up. I watched a bicep bounce, and for a moment I swore the sound of it rubbing against Stu's shirtsleeve was a sigh of disappointment.
"Well," I started, still eyeing that bicep in case it had anything else to add, "one of my scheduled collections today didn't go according to plan. This has never happened to me before, and it's been years since I was in training, so I need a bit of a refresher on protocol."
Stu pulled a stress ball from a drawer in his desk and squeezed, his massive hand enveloping the little ball until all that remained was a tight fist. "Didn't go according to plan how?"
"The client." I held up the file. "He wasn't there."
Stu's knuckles whitened. "Wasn't there?"
I shook my head.
"So you didn't collect the client."
"No," I said.
"I see." The bicep jumped again. I jumped slightly with it. Talking to Stu always put me on edge. He was disconcertingly good-looking in the sort of way that reminded me I was a pear-shaped forty-two-year-old near-divorcée, and yet he was perpetually disapproving in a way that made me feel like a first grader who'd just been caught eating crayons. It made for an awkward position to be in under the best of circumstances, and this was not the best of circumstances.
"I'm sorry," I whimpered at the bicep.
"This"-he tossed the stress ball into the other hand, which promptly ate it-"is unprecedented under my leadership. No client has gone uncollected for as long as I've been here."
"I looked everywhere for him-"
"This is bad, Valence."
I gulped at the sound of my surname. It sounded harsher, sharper than I was used to.
"Our company prides itself on having revolutionized the way these things are done. For almost two hundred years now, we've been the world's leading soul collection and transportation service, and do you know how? By making sure things like this don't happen."
"Right, yes, absolutely, of course. So what do I do?"
Stu sat frozen for a beat, the stress ball unsqueezed, the bicep unflexed. He repositioned himself in his leather-upholstered ergonomic chair, arms crossed over his desk. "I need time to run this upstairs. I hope you understand the severity of this situation, Valence. You know what happens when souls go uncollected."
I did know. It was one of the first things you learned in training; day one, hour one. Agents, whether day shift or night shift, collected their assigned souls and delivered them to a designated processing facility. If a soul wasn't collected and delivered within forty-five days of its body eviction, it would be relegated to stay on earth as a soul forever. In layman's terms, a ghost. There used to be a lot of these incidents, back when my field was more negligent and less knowledgeable than it is today. The last ghost created by S.C.Y.T.H.E. was due to a mishandled case in 1906. I didn't know exactly what happened to that agent, and I wasn't keen to find out for myself.
I gulped in reply.
"Go home, Valence. Sort yourself out. I'll be in touch with instructions as soon as I've talked this over with my higher-ups."
I stood, the takeout lunch in my stomach rising with me.
"And, Valence?" Half a box of chicken fried rice marched up my throat. My hand was near the doorknob. So achingly close. I could feel the cold metal brushing my fingertips. I turned back to Stu. His bicep stared back at me. "I am not pleased."
I gave a somber nod of understanding and threw up in his garbage can.
3
Forty-Five Days to Ghost
The dim amber light of Papa Giuseppe's Pizzeria turned the pale blue and yellow flowers on my dress into splotches of discolored mud. I'd barely had enough time after work to run home for a shower, throw my poof of hair into a bun, and change into the only dress that still fit me. And now, in the lighting that had been romantic on my first date with Simon but currently felt like I was walking into an Italian-themed circle of hell, that dress looked like military camouflage. I ran my palm down the front, shoulders drooping, and hauled my way through the crowded restaurant to our usual table near the back.
Simon was already there, head buried behind a menu even though he never strayed from the chicken Parmesan. The menu dropped as I approached, and Simon clambered to his feet, one knee hitting the table as he tried to scooch around the patrons beside him without sweeping their spaghetti onto the floor with his butt.
"Kath." His arms were open to me before he'd finished rounding the table. I let him envelop me in that tight, all-consuming strangle hug of his, wondering if he could feel anything different as he squeezed.
Simon pulled away, taking my hands in his and beaming up at me.
"Simon," I said back, breathing him in. He was a solid inch and a half shorter than me, several more rounder, with a hairline that had given up merely receding years ago and was now bent on a full, surrendered retreat. I peered around the glare in his glasses to the pale gray eyes underneath. My heart gave a reluctant flutter, and just like that I was back in the dairy aisle of the grocery store where we'd met; a pool of broken eggs forming a viscous puddle around my sensible loafers, at least one shell fragment inexplicably nestled in my hair, and a stocky stranger bent at my feet, ready to fearlessly tackle my mess before I even had time to right the now-empty carton clutched upside down in my hands. I was meant to be cooking for a date that night-a blind one, arranged by an old roommate, and one that I was having seventh thoughts about (second through sixth having taken place throughout work that day). Those thoughts had led me to distraction, which had led me to drop the eggs, and which in turn had led me to tears, which were flowing freely by that point.
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