The Damned by Andrew Pyper Read Free Book Online Page B

a little give-and-go we did that prevented us from having to say we met at an Afterlifers meeting at the Sheraton in Syracuse, New York, where I was the keynote speaker. Following my talk, I took a chair behind a table bearing stacked copies of The After and readied my pen for the signing. Willa last in line.
    â€œWho can I dedicate it to?” I asked, too shy to meet her eyes longer than my standard nod and half smile.
    â€œWilla. Me, who’s wondering if you have time for a coffee when you’re done.”
    â€œI try not to drink coffee after noon.”
    â€œI mean a drink. ‘Coffee’ always means a drink.”
    â€œIt does? I don’t get invited for coffees—or drinks—much, I guess.”
    â€œNeither do I.”
    â€œThen how do you know?”
    â€œI watch TV. How does anybody know anything?”
    The thing I was thinking on the short walk down the corridor from the meeting room to the bar was how, if this woman wanted something more from me—as sometimes women at my events seem they might—I couldn’t let it go any further than this. It would be dangerous. Even as we sat at a table in the corner and ordered scotches I kept an eye out for Ash to show herself in the mirror behind the bar, or turn on a stool to glare my way.
    â€œYou like single malts?” I managed to ask.
    â€œI like having a babysitter until midnight,” she said.
    There was some banter about what it was like to have my job, talking about heaven to roomfuls of what she called “nervous ninnies looking for a sneak peek of the Great Beyond.” I told her that whatever comes next, cosmologically speaking, is up to you. And in any case, I did less and less public speaking these days, in part because everyone who might be interested in hearing my story had already heard it.
    â€œI’ve already heard it—or read it, anyway—a few times. And I’m here,” she said.
    â€œWhy’s that?”
    â€œBecause I was curious about what you were like outside of that photo on the back of the book that makes you look like somebody made you smile at the end of a switchblade. And I wanted to see if you were someone I could trust. Who I might be able to tell—”
    â€œâ€”That you know what it’s like to be dead, too.”
    â€œOkay,” she said. “ Okay . Guess I was right.”
    W ILLA TOLD ME THE STORY of her After the first night we spent together, a couple days following our drinks at the Sheraton. I’d driven up to her place, a yellow brick bungalow in an upstate town called Marcellus, the morning of the day she invited me, saying she’d arranged for her son Eddie to stay the weekend at her sister’s and wouldn’t it be a shame to put a good evening to waste? We’d eaten Chinese takeout and were finishing our glasses of wine when Willa got up onto her knees from where she’d been sitting on the floor and, her eyes steady on mine, pulled off her sweatshirt. For a time she knelt there, allowing me to clear my head of whatever I’d been talking about the moment before. Then she wriggled out of her jeans as well.
    â€œYour turn,” she said.
    The next morning, when I asked why she’d chosen me over all the other second-time-rounders out there, the unafflicted Marcellus men who could be hers, she laughed.
    â€œWho says it’s a choice? Decisions like this aren’t made, Danny. You’re just in one place one moment, and the next you’re in a new place. Hopefully it feels right.”
    â€œSo does this feel right?” I asked.
    She stroked her hand down the long journey from my lips to arrive between my legs.
    â€œDoes this ?” she said.
    L ATER, SITTING UP IN BED, Willa told me about the day she died.
    â€œThey came in the middle of the night,” was how she started, without introduction, as though in reply to something I’d asked, which in a way I had, the question of how she