The Woman Who Died a Lot

As I stood there trying to remember the last word, I saw Landen’s hand move to his pocket. Not usually an issue, only I knew he kept a COP357 there, a small pistol that packed enough power to punch holes in . . . well, almost anything.

“Newton,” I said with a stupid smile. “It’s a Newton. ‘It’s not a cookie, it’s a Newton.’ ”

Landen breathed a sigh of relief and took his hand out of his pocket. “Don’t do that,” he said. “It just makes me jumpy.”

“Sorry.”

“How did it go?”

“Pretty shittily.”

I told Landen all about Braxton’s offer, and how Phoebe Smalls would be heading up the Literary Detectives’ office, and how I felt that everything was just falling down around my ears because of the blasted accident. I may even have mentioned something about “unfairness” or “a waste of good experience” before I’d gone on to a Level 2 Rant at that point, the sort where you raise your voice in public and sound like an idiot, but without realizing it. I paused at the end, expecting him to agree, but he didn’t. He simply stared at me with an expression of benign conciliation.

“Look,” I said, “I’m kind of looking for agreement here.”

He took a deep breath. “Listen, Thursday, I’m your biggest fan. I’m your husband, lover, best friend, confidant, back rubber, bridge partner. You’ve even got one of my kidneys. I have invested in Thursday futures my entire life and not regretted it for one moment. I’m the last person to stand in the way of anything you want to do and would follow you anywhere. But even I think you should be taking it easy. They damn near killed you, and . . . well, I think you’ve done enough for the moment. You deserve some downtime. We all deserve some downtime. A change of pace.”

Landen had been on at me since I turned fifty to slow down. The accident had made it easier for him. Before, he was a man in love. Now he was a man with a mission to protect the one he loved. And he was making it hard to ignore him. But I tried nonetheless.

“What are we here for anyway?” I asked. “None of us shop at TJ-Maxx.”

“Aornis Hades,” he said. “We need to find her.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Because SO-5 has failed, and finding Aornis is the only way to get rid of the mindworm.”

“What mindworm?”

“The one she gave to . . . someone we know.”

“Have we talked about it?”

“Often. That’s part of the mindworm.”

“Ah.”

I followed Landen to the manager’s office. The assistant manager rose to shake our hands. He was an earnest, helpful young man, part of the retail industry’s fast-track scheme to have people at a regional sales level in as little as twenty-six years. He said his name was Jimmy-G and that he’d read our request and was keen to help. We explained to him that we wanted to see the security-camera footage for the day that Aornis was released, and he said he had to clear that with head office, so he went out of the room to make the call.

“So let’s suppose I slowed down,” I said to Landen. “What would I do?”

“As Braxton suggests: become chief librarian.”

“Aside from that.”

“You could start a restaurant. You do really good Sunday roasts.”

“A restaurant that only opens one day a week is destined to fail,” I pointed out.

“Then that’s our unique selling point—Sunday lunches . . . on weekdays.”

“You’ve got it all planned out, haven’t you?”

“No, I’m making it up as I go along.”

“A restaurateur?”

“Okay, maybe not. But your career path has been heading in only one direction for a while now, and, biggest fan or not, I don’t want to lose you.”

“And I don’t want to be lost.”

“Then tell Braxton you’ve changed your mind. That you’ll take the job.”

And at that moment the assistant manager walked back in.

“That’s all cleared with head office,” he said with a smile. “If it were anyone but you, Detective Next, we’d not entertain the idea. In fact, helping you now makes me feel like what I should be doing. I received my Letter of Destiny last week. I would have been running all the enloopment facilities for SO-12 after I was retired from field duty when a jump to the sixteenth century dumped me in the forty-fifth due to a gimbal-lock precession error on the fluxgates.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ve absolutely no idea. I didn’t get the ChronoGuard career. I got the retailing one. Ask me about monthly sales figures, dismissal procedures and weekend comparison stats and I’m your man. This way.”

He led us through to the security office, which was of a larger-than-normal size. On the main console were several smaller monitors that surrounded a central, larger one, and they all looked a bit dusty. In fact, the whole room looked very disused, and several cardboard boxes of wire hangers and security tags were lying on the floor.

“No one has used this place since they switched off the enloopment engines two years ago,” said Jimmy-G. “Before my time, I might add.”