Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (8 page)

“I wasn’t looking for proof. I don’t need it. I already told you, Wendell; I believe something very suspicious is going on here. What I didn’t find was
what
, exactly, it is.”

He reached for his cigarette case out of habit and stopped out of habit. It had been years since he’d been able to smoke in the restaurant.

“I went looking for clues—traces of magic, some discernible reason or way that this is happening to you and I failed. I still possess no explanation for how this is happening.

“The eight ball and the fortuneteller machine both showed absolutely no trace of magical energy and you, yourself, are displaying none of the traditional signs of someone who’s been cursed.”

Jonathan took a sip of his tea and added, “Hell, even the horoscope had been automatically downloaded from some online site. So, I got nowhere.”

Jonathan noticed Bao emerge from the kitchen with his order of Singapore noodles. His stomach growled and he began to suspect it may be formulating plans of jettisoning from his body just to get the food all that much sooner.

“Drink your tea, Wendell. Try to relax. We are going to figure what’s behind this. We just have to come at it from every possible angle.”

Bao placed the giant plate of richly aromatic noodles before Jonathan and turned to Wendell.

“Would you like anything, sir?”

Wendell shook his head and mumbled, “No, thank you.”

“Eat, Wendell. There’s nothing to be gained by not eating. I need you healthy and alert.”

“I really don’t feel—”

“He’ll have the dumplings, Bao,” Jonathan said, cutting Wendell off. “No one can resist your dumplings. Put them on my tab.”

“I couldn’t make you pay,” Wendell protested.

Bao, knowing Jonathan too well, ignored Wendell’s objection and headed back for the kitchen, writing on his order pad.

“Don’t worry about paying for the dumplings; they’ll be part of the expenses I’m going to bill you for after this is all dealt with anyway. Right now, just worry about eating them.”

Wendell acquiesced with a slow nod and lifted the mug of tea to his lips.

Jonathan didn’t stand on ceremony, or try pretending to be polite. He dug into his plate of Singapore noodles with the gusto of a starving dog. He had been waiting for this order since Wendell had knocked on his office door and refused to risk fate by not eating now.

After swallowing his third giant mouthful, Jonathan sipped from his tea and finally broke the silence slumbering between him and his client.

“All right, Wendell. As it stands, I got nothing. So, we need to go back to basics.”

Wendell nodded, and Jonathan began to think the motion might just be Wendell’s default reaction to someone talking to him.

“Look, there is a reason this is happening. Now seeing as I can’t trace the magic, let’s go for the person behind it.”

Jonathan took another forkful of food, allowing Wendell time to process the idea that there really was a ‘someone’ behind this.

“To do this to you, the party involved would definitely be upset, but odds are they don’t actually want to harm you. I don’t think anyone able to do this—
however
they are doing it,” Jonathan added, jabbing his fork into the pile of noodles, “would bother with psychological torture before actually killing you.

“So, we’re looking for someone in your life who’s upset enough to mess with you, happy to cause your life to fall into shambles, but not a homicidal manic.”

Jonathan took a moment to eat another mouthful of his belated lunch, hoping something would pop into his client’s mind. When it became clear nothing had, he went on.

“We need to be looking at all possibilities here: ex-girlfriends, co-workers—maybe ones passed over for promotion either by you or in favor of you, maybe ex-employees you fired or whose job you now hold. Maybe you inherited money someone else thought should go to them, even?

“It may not seem like much and the person doing this may, outwardly, act as though everything is just fine. To you they may appear normal, while inside they are a mass of seething, hungry leeches feeding on an anger which has culminated in this act against you.”

Jonathan stuffed more noodles into his mouth. He had stumbled on to a possible, though very unlikely, scenario. If someone with latent psychic powers retained a hatred for Wendell, they might be the cause of his problems.

If, in the deep recess of this individual’s subconscious, they wished Wendell dead, while on a more conscious level shied from such thoughts, the dichotomy of emotion could be manifesting as the threats.

The buried psychic power linked with the repressed desire could affect things around Wendell while leaving no residual energy or traces of magic.

The theory was more than just a long shot, however; it equaled hitting a marble from a hundred miles away with a BB gun. In all his years, he had never found actual proof of psychic powers.

Every time Jonathan had been involved with investigating a ‘psychic,’ the individuals in question were actually using arcane-based powers. In the majority of the cases, the ‘psychic’ turned out to be a witch who had no idea what they were really doing.

Even being theoretically possible, manipulating the physical world to such an extent would take a psionic strength that Jonathan had never even read about.

“Sorry,” Wendell said, and Jonathan knew by paying attention to his own thoughts, instead of his client’s, that he had just missed something.

Jonathan had many bad habits, some of which he tried to lose. The difficulty, however, lay in the amount of time he spent alone.

“I’m sorry, Wendell, I got lost in a train of thought,” Jonathan admitted. “Just entertaining a plausible explanation. Well, maybe not plausible. Feasible would be a better term for it. Let me stew it over for a while, though. Right now, if I let it out of my head, and expose it to the light of reality, I fear it will burn away completely.”

Jonathan waved his hand to dispel the confusion his own words created. “Anyway, I missed what you said, so if you wouldn’t mind?”

Wendell lowered his head and frowned a little, but said, “Of course. However, all I said was that I couldn’t think of anyone that fit any of those descriptions. I haven’t been promoted in over five years, and any long term romantic relationships have been brought to a close by the woman involved; not by me.”

Jonathan added, ‘jilted woman,’ as a maybe to his mental list.

He knew women just well enough to know that even if they ended the relationship, it didn’t mean it wasn’t the guy’s fault it failed.

There could be a woman out there still in love with Wendell, yet hating the poor shmuck for not doing whatever she had expected him to do. Jonathan would check into that one deeper. He earmarked it in his brain and set it aside.

Wendell continued. “The last thing I inherited was a nice urn filled with my mother’s remains and her silverware—which I’ve never used.”

With the mention of remains, Jonathan put down his fork and, leaning on the table, asked, “Wendell, have you experienced any feelings of cold, or do the hairs on the back of your neck keep standing up?”

Not all ghosts manifest with a temperature differential, so it failed as a surefire way to identify a spectral presence in his life, but the possibility of Wendell being haunted, quite possibly by his mother, remained quite real. Those sorts of relationships can be very strained, dysfunctional, and turbulent.

“Uh, cold?”

“Yes, a chill—not necessarily when you were getting the predictions, but
any
unexplained chills?”

“Not, uh . . .” Wendell hesitated.

Jonathan felt his pulse speed up, but then Wendell shook his head.

“No, not as I could say so. Why?”

“Sometimes hauntings manifest as temperature drops.”

“You think . . .” Wendell looked into his mug of tea. “You think I may be haunted?”

“It’s a possibility,” Jonathan admitted, although if he were honest with himself, it didn’t seem likely.

Jonathan had been able to see ghosts his whole life and he had seen nothing while Wendell had used the Magic 8-ball.

“Look, Wendell, I’m stumped. Nothing’s making sense here, a ghost being able to do this is theoretically possible, so I’m just grabbing at anything that might fit, any ‘could be’ as it were. A haunting is possible.”

A
s Bao arrived to deliver Wendell’s dumplings, Jonathan took the moment to once more quell the beast growling in his gut.

Wendell regarded the plate before him with something akin to dismay. After a moment, he gave a barely discernible shrug, picked up his knife and fork, cut into a dumpling, and inserted a piece between his lips.

A moment later, as Jonathan had predicted, Wendell began eating heartily, which took one worry about his current client off Jonathan’s shoulders.

Both of them ate in silence for several minutes until Wendell paused and, placing the speared third of a dumpling back on the plate, looked at Jonathan.

“You think it’s my mother, don’t you?”

“Pardon?” Jonathan queried in an attempt to perhaps discourage Wendell from going down that thought path, or at least buy more time to come up with a good way to respond.

“You asked about the cold, the haunting, after I told you I had inherited my mother’s ashes, see?”

“Yeah, it’s true. I did.”

Jonathan took a sip of his now-cold tea, but Wendell wasn’t so easily dissuaded from the line of questioning. Clearly some mommy issues there, and Jonathan couldn’t see a way around the topic, especially if he wanted to get to the bottom of this.

“Yes. All right, Wendell, that was where my thinking left me. It’s possible—”

“I loved my mother and she loved me. I tended to her in her last days, see? I scattered her ashes over the river from her favorite spot, the spot where she and my father used to go all the time when they dated. I sprinkled her ashes there as she wanted, just like she’d done for my father.”

“Damn,” Jonathan despondently cursed before he topped up his tea.

“Damn what?” Wendell inquired hesitantly.

“It’s highly improbable your mother’s haunting you if you’ve scattered her ashes, especially if you dumped them into running water. It is possible but unlikely.” He ran his hand through his hair. “But still, damn—that’s one more off the list of possible causes for these threats, or taunts, or whatever they are.” Jonathan stabbed at his noodles, annoyed by the lack of leads or answers he had.

Usually he had something to run down, some clue or sign, but Wendell’s case had left him barking up empty trees everywhere he turned. Every time he thought he’d caught a glimpse of the perpetrator, it turned out to be nothing but the flicker of light as bird shit landed on his shades.

They finished the meal in silence and Bao took their plates away. At Jonathan’s request, he brought another small pot of fresh tea to the table with the bill and, as always, cellophane-encased fortune cookies.

Jonathan refilled each of their cups, picked up the bill, and slid one of the cookies towards Wendell.

He hadn’t thought about the action; it was just an automatic gesture. If he had thought about it, Jonathan would have chosen the same course of action. He just would have been better prepared for the outcome.

Jonathan ripped the plastic from off his own cookie, broke it in two, and pulled the two pieces apart, popping the half that didn’t contain the paper fortune into his mouth. He chewed the lightly almond-flavored dessert and then took a sip of his tea.

He took out his wallet and, as he rummaged for cash, asked Wendell if he had ever participated in a séance, performed a tarot reading, played on a Ouija board, or even attended a psychic fair.

When Wendell didn’t answer, Jonathan glanced up and the look on his client’s face stopped him cold.

Wendell held the cookie in his hand, but to look at his face you would have thought it a writhing asp. He seemed to neither possess the power to peel the wrapper from the cookie, nor the fortitude to fling it from him.

Wendell’s eyes betrayed the strain under which his soul labored.

The man had been happy living his mundane and boring life. He’d had routines, schedules, and known quantities. All of it had changed overnight and his mind had dealt with as much as it was willing to process.

By opening the cookie—a cheap confectionary and staple of North American culture—and finding another fortune of death, tailored specifically for him, Wendell would be pushed beyond the rational.

He had come to the point where, with one action, there would be no returning to his old life. This was the metaphorical straw. The humane act would have been to take the thing away, but Jonathan didn’t. What mattered at this junction was the outcome, not the procedure.

“Open it, Wendell. Get it over with.”

Lamenting his fate with a single sigh, Wendell’s shoulders sagged further, something Jonathan hadn’t thought possible.

Wendell pulled the plastic wrapper apart and shook the fortune cookie onto his hand.

He stared at it for a moment before closing his hand around it, crumbling the confectionary coating. Opening his hand, Wendell allowed the cookie pieces to fall onto his saucer and, without reading it, passed the slip of paper to Jonathan.