Page 100 of Unalive On Air

“Agghhh, my eyes!” he screams and disappears again.

“Fucking knock next time!” Trystan yells.

“This is payback for the other day,” Stove’s disembodied voice calls out. “I’ll give you ten seconds to get dressed.”

“How about go fuck yourself?” I shout.

“This is important,” he says back. “Also, I already did that.”

I turn to Trystan. “I don’t even know where my clothes are. Or my glasses.”

“Let me show you this little trick I learned.” Trystan stands tall, straightens his spine, and places his hands over his chest, like a vampire in a coffin. He closes his eyes, and a second later his clothes magically appear on his body and a surfboard under his feet.

“What the . . . How did you do that?”

“Remember when I said you can go into stasis standing up? It’s the quickest way to get dressed.”

“I’m coming in!” Stove yells.

“NO!” both Trystan and I shout.

“Gary’s still naked.”

“So what?” Stove calls back.

“So, I’d rather you didn’t cop an eyeful of my bollocks again,” I say.

Stove sighs. “Well, hurry! I’ve got something really important to tell you.”

“It’s okay, I’ll just get dressed the old-fashioned way,” I say, pulling on my ExorSquad overalls. Trystan finds my glasses and brings them to me. For now, I forgo the socks and pants.

Seconds later, Stove floats back through the wall. He looks me up and down, then raises an eyebrow. “Um . . . what was it again? Oh, yeah, Angel’s been arrested for Jeanie’s murder.”

twenty-five

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Jeanie is quietly losing her mind. She glances between Pixie and me like we’re two opponents at a Wimbledon match, and if she keeps chewing her thumbnails the way she is, she’ll be at risk of exposing ghost metacarpals.

“What happened?” Trystan asks. He knows there’s something unsaid between Jeanie, Angel, and Peter, but it wasn’t my place to tell him.

“Angel’s been arrested, keep up,” Stove says, bopping Trystan on the head with his boom mic.

Trystan simply sighs and looks to Pixie for the actual answer.

“Apparently, there was a tip-off. Somebody told the police to look into the medical records just after the time Jeanie went missing. There’s a hospital admission record a couple of days after August nineteenth. Kelsey Cobbledick got treated for dog bites to his leg and hands that were turning gangrenous,” Pixie says.

“How did you find this out?” I ask.

“Two officers were chatting about it next to Jeanie’s burial site. They were keeping their voices down, obviously so the press and public didn’t hear them, but they didn’t count on it not being a ghost-free area.”

“No, Angel wouldn’t . . . It’s just not possible,” Jeanie whines. She sits folded in two on her cabriole settee. Her eyes lift to mine, pleading.

“Angel has an alibi. He wasn’t even in the county when Jeanie went missing,” I say.

“How do you know that?” Peter asks.

I take a subtle step away from him. Now that I know what I know about him, I can’t look at him the same way. Not only did he try to end his wife’s life, but when it came to owning his mistake, he took the coward’s way out and fucking died.