Two:
The phone rang a half dozen times before it connected. A clatter, a curse, and a series of thumps greeted her, as if the handset had been fumbled and dropped.
"Hello?"
"Hi!"
The voice on the other end was chipper and unfamiliar. Stacy frowned at the numbers on the photograph, wondered if she'd misdialled.
"Hello," she repeated uncertainly. "I'm looking for…"
Who was she looking for, exactly? She set the picture on her desk and rubbed her forehead, the skin bunching between her brows. This was absurd. Lunatic. It gave chasing ghosts a whole new literalness. She tried again. She was out on this limb anyway.
"I'm Stacy Warner."
"Uh huh?" There was no recognition. No indication that this stranger knew who she was or why she might be calling. Then, all of a sudden, he fell over himself. "Oh! Oops. Sorry. My bad. This is Lucas Douglas. P.I."
A private investigator. Well, that made sense. Of a sort. This private investigator? Hapless. Disengaged. Disorganised. And, by the sounds of things, asleep in the middle of the day.
"How can I help you?"
She honestly wasn't sure that he could. Tentatively, she decided to give him a chance.
"I…um…do you investigate missing persons cases?"
"Do I…? Yeah! Yeah. No problem!"
He sounded like a kid on caffeine pills. What was this? Some posthumous prank on House's part? Nothing about this contact was convincing her that he could find his own head without a map and both hands. How was he supposed to help her find a dead man? Drive to Princeton. Turn right inside the cemetery. First left after the broken-winged angel statue… This was ludicrous.
"Never mind." Losing faith abruptly, Stacy shook her head and apologised: "I'm sorry to have troubled you."
Embarrassed, surprised, and more disappointed than she had any logical right to be, she snapped the cell closed and dropped it onto the table.
No sooner had she done so than it rang.
"Hello?"
It was the P.I. again. His bright, boyish voice held a perspicacious note that hadn't been there before.
"Sorry. You said Stacy, right?"
He met her in a café a few blocks away from the firm. A few inches shy of six feet, with two-day-old dark stubble, bed-head and a grubby white t-shirt that had clearly been slept in, it was only belatedly that she recognised him as Lisa's one-time fiancé. But in spite of his shambolic appearance, his blue eyes were sharply astute.
"This is nice," he announced, as he ordered her a coffee at the counter. "Covert. Should I have brought my cloak and dagger?"
"I beg your pardon?"
What had Lisa seen in him?
He tossed her an oddly sympathetic look.
"This isn't where you take your clients."
"No…" How had he known that? "You're not a client."
"Yet." This time the look was twinkling, all mischief and meddlesomeness. Espirit de House. Okay, Lisa, now I get it. "Depends on who you want me to find. I never know what I'm getting into. I might need a lawyer."
So might she, if this half-baked hope of hers turned out to have a reason.
"If I get you into a mess, I'll get you out of it," she assured him firmly.
Where had that saviour complex come from? She half-glanced around as Lucas led the way to a corner table, appropriately flanked by a jungle of plastic plants. Was Wilson haunting her as well?
As if on cue, his sceptical frown flashed across her mind's eye. Firmly, she took a hold of herself. She was not being haunted and – if she were right about that for the right reason – she was not more than mildly crazy to be doing this.
"So, who're you looking for?" Lucas dropped down into one side of the red plastic booth, plunked his mug on the table and stirred four packets of sugar into his frothy cappuccino. He sipped, slurped, grimaced and added two more. "Husband run off with another woman? Another man? Illegitimate love child out there somewhere?"
She appraised the sparkle in his eyes, knew he was teasing her. Did he know why he was here? Know more than that she was a friend of Lisa's, that was? God, was the whole world in on this secret or joke or whatever it was and she the only one still searching for the punch line? She took her coffee black but she stirred it all the same, trying to soothe her rampant thoughts out of the paranoid tangle they were in.
"I'm looking for an old friend," she said finally. "Friends, actually."
Lucas slurped again, cocked his bushy brows at her. "You know, there are websites for that now—"
She raised a hand to cut him off, opened her oversized black leather purse and drew out a copy of the photo she'd made. She passed it across to him. He unfolded it one handed and studied it without reaction.
"You know them," Stacy pressed, scanning his quirkily expressionless face for some hint as to what he was thinking. "Doctors Gregory House and James Wilson. I don't even know if they're still alive..."
Lucas took his turn to interrupt.
"Greg House died five years ago in a warehouse fire. You know that. You were at his funeral. I saw you there." His attention ticked from one man to the other. "James Wilson died three and a half months later, in Las Vegas, from complications arising from a prior radical chemotherapy attempt to treat a stage two thyoma. There was no funeral and no official obituary. His family were notified. He donated his body to science."
Stacy's gut caved in on itself as though she'd been kicked. Her tiny little hopeless hope shrivelled and shrank.
Lucas gulped down the last of his saccharine coffee and stood up, tucking the photo into his pocket.
"I'll see what I can do."
"What?" she blinked at him, confounded.
"Here." He rooted around in both jacket pockets and all four of the ones in his jeans before he located and extracted a business card. He handed it over, back first. Small print detailed eye-watering rates. She nodded her agreement and he winked. "Then I'll be in touch. Hasta la vista, senorita!"
His Spanish accent was appalling.
"Wait." Slinging some change down to cover the tip, Stacy abandoned her untouched coffee and hastened after him out onto the sidewalk. "Mr Douglas – what exactly are you going to do?" She had a sudden, horrible, vision of him digging around in the moonlight in an unmarked grave. "I'm not in the black-market for…souvenirs."
He grinned at her, squinting in the brilliant summer sunlight that streamed in under the café's red and white striped canopy.
"I was thinking more along the lines of a Ouija board. Though I can probably raise to a white goat sacrifice, a robe, maybe some chanting…"
"You're not as funny as you think you are."
His smile broadened, tilted craftily at the corners.
"I've been told that," he admitted; then, weighting his words carefully: "But I'm definitely not boring."
That – a pure Houseism if ever there was one – made her let him go. Watching him stroll away to a beat-up blue Volkswagen van that looked more fit for a gap year student's 'round the States expedition than a P.I's base of operations, she wondered if she should have told him that there was a clock ticking. But she had the feeling he already knew.
TBC...