Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [31]
The Wren had a rep for never failing once an assignment was taken. The fact that that rep was as much careful PR as actual fact didn’t make it any easier to admit defeat.
“Okay, totally useless, thank you very much.” Wren deleted the first e-mail, and went on to the next one. It claimed to be from a psychic channeling the spirit of Old Sally, with a list of demands to be met before she would rest.
“Give me a break,” Wren muttered in disgust, using her toe to pull off one sneaker, then returning the favor with the other foot. “She’s a horse, and one stuffed with sawdust, making her dumber than the average equine. Which is saying something.”
Wren didn’t have much use for psychics. There might be real ones out there, just like there might be actual spirits haunting the airwaves, but she wasn’t going to hold her breath until someone proved it. Generally speaking, dead was dead, and telepathy only worked in fantasy novels.
The last e-mail had information that might be of more use, involving several potential scandals that might break in the next month or so. Old Sally could be expected to show up at any of them.
Unfortunately, four of them involved people on the West Coast, and another two were up North. She would have to call in too many favors to cover them all.
“Nothing to do about them for the moment,” she said in disgust. It wasn’t a rush job, thankfully. She could postpone it a few weeks, and worst-case scenario involved somebody getting some bad news a little ahead of the fact. Wren could live with that, so long as the client didn’t get too antsy.
God, she hated working two jobs. Surefire way to get something screwed up, make her look like an idiot.
Moving that e-mail into the folder for current cases, she looked at what was left.
One from her mother, without a subject line. Wren hesitated, her finger over the delete button. Then she sighed, and hit the enter button instead.
“Hi, Mom,” she said to it. “No Mom, I’m not. Yes Mom, I am. Yes, I will call Aunt Missy. Someday. No, I don’t need a loan. Yes, I’m remembering to lock my doors at night…no, I don’t want to meet a nice boy. I don’t even want to meet a bad boy!”
How could she lose an argument with a woman who wasn’t even there? It was a gift, she supposed. A decade past Margot Valere had trusted a well-spoken stranger in a suit and tie to give her daughter a better life than the one she’d had, waiting tables and living in a trailer. For that reason alone—ignoring the first eighteen years of pretty good times despite themselves—Wren knew that she would always owe her mother a debt which made it impossible for her to deny the older woman anything. She couldn’t imagine a life in which she wasn’t Sergei Didier’s partner. Even if he did make her crazy with the overprotectiveness sometimes.
The rest of the e-mail looked innocuous enough: she belonged to several listservs, some professional, some personal, and they all were pretty high-volume during the week. Weekends, they slowed down. The friends, at least, were out having lives.
“I need to get me one of those, some day,” she said to herself, pushing the chair back and stretching. Her jaw cracked open in a yawn, and she looked at the clock at the lower right hand of her monitor screen.
Only 8:00 p.m. Then again, it had been a damn long day. And dodging wizzart current took a lot out of you. Getting up, she padded down the T of the hallway to her bedroom, sloughing off her jeans and top and draping them