What's The Matter With Mary Jane? , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Jane Dorsey Candas

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142 pages

English

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'A wise-cracking, grammar-obsessed, pansexual amateur sleuth is thrust into the world of the uber-rich when her enigmatic, now-famous childhood friend breezes back into her life begging for help with a dangerous stalker Our nameless postmodern amateur sleuth is still recovering from her first dangerous foray into detective work when her old friend Priscilla Jane Gill breezes back into her life and begs for help. Pris, now a famous travel writer, fears she s being stalked again after a nearly fatal attack by a deranged fan a year earlier. In Pris s dizzying world of wealth and privilege, nameless meets dreamy but sinister tech billionaire Nathan and his equally unnerving sidekick Chiles. Pris s stalker is murdered outside her book launch, and the shadow of obsession continues to stalk Pris. With no one she can totally trust, nameless knows she s not going to like the answer but she delves into her old friend s past, seeking the mastermind behind Pris s troubles befo

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	19 octobre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773057859
Langue	English

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What’s the Matter with Mary Jane? Another Postmodern Mystery, by the Numbers
An Epitome Apartments Mystery by Candas Jane Dorsey

Contents Epigraph What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s crying with all her might and main, And she won’t eat her dinner — rice pudding again — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain, And a book about animals — all in vain — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain; But, look at her, now she’s beginning again! — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? I’ve promised her sweets and a ride in the train, And I’ve begged her to stop for a bit and explain — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s perfectly well and she hasn’t a pain, And it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again! — What is the matter with Mary Jane? Rice Pudding (“What is the Matter with Mary Jane?”) Acknowledgements About the Author Copyright

Epigraph
“To be forgiven from beyond the grave could be important if that was the only quarter from which forgiveness could come, which, for many of us . . . might well be the case.”
Alexander McCall Smith, The Right Attitude to Rain , p. 33
Fore ðæm nedfere nænig wiorðe
ðonc snottora ðon him ðearf siæ
to ymbhycgenne ær his hinionge
hwæt his gastæ godes oððe yfles
æfter deað dæge doemed wiorðe. 1
“Bede’s Death Song” attributed to Bede the Venerable ( Bæ¯da or Be¯da ; 672/673 – 26 May 735)

1 Loosely speaking: “Awaiting death, it’s smart to ask ourselves, before it’s too late, whether our life has been lived for good or evil, and how we will be judged on [or after] our death-day.”

What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s crying with all her might and main,
1. Once upon a time when the world was young . . .
During our second year of university, Priscilla Jane Gill’s cat Micah died, and she had him taxidermied.
We all thought this was gross, but she said he was the truest being she’d met up to that point. She said that when she was with Micah she had been able to tune in to a special place, in touch with a purity to which she could only aspire, and that reaching for such purity gave her life a through-line of calm. She wanted to recall that clarity every day, and she thought she would do so when she looked at his effigy, posed in a lifelike facsimile of his favourite “meatloaf” lounging position.
In those days, this sort of explanation made sense.
Besides, Priscilla was a folklore major, and they were all a bit like that anyway.
I think all of us saw Priscilla a little like she saw Micah — when he was alive, of course. To us, she was a symbol of a time out of time, a pure zone between childhood and real life where we could dream of a perfection for which we would not even remember to try once we’d put our college days behind us. But Pris didn’t distinguish between college life and reality, and that set her apart.
Maybe she was an early adopter of adulthood, or maybe she was a pure idealist. Either would have made her a wonder to us. We loved her evolved nature. She was an exotic, but she was our exotic, and long after we graduated, her image stayed with us, delicately posed in our history, perfect and without entropy, like a saint, or like Micah.
We got used to Micah’s Ghost, as we called him, after a while, and some of us also were able to take Pris for granted now and again — until she breezed out of our lives on graduation day, weaboutaring not much of anything under her graduation gown, and became one of our memories of university life, preserved in the amber of time — which is to say, idealised and mostly forgotten.
None of us had seen her since, but any time any of us encountered each other, sometime in the conversation we were bound to mention Pris, and smile, and shake our heads at our inability to match her grace and aestheticism.
The woman at my door that cold October day was tall, ascetic, and stylish, with a grey brush-cut and the hollow perfect cheekbones of a clothing retailer’s anorexic display figure. When I opened my door, she was looking away down the corridor, and I saw her strong raptor profile with a mysterious thrill of buried familiarity.
“I thought I heard — someone — never mind,” the woman said, turned her gaze back to me, and smiled. Then I truly recognised her, that crooked supermodel smile with the trickster underlay.
“Priscilla Jane,” I said with that tone of satisfied arrival with which we greet the inevitable return of unfinished business.
2. “Come in out of the cornstarch and dry your mukluks by the cellophane . . .”
“Yes,” she said. We stood for a moment, waiting.
“You look so different; it took me a moment,” I said.
“You look just the same. I knew you right away when you went by —”
“?” I made that all-purpose noise-with-moue I’ve perfected in years of living with my cat Bunnywit.
“I followed you from that store down the —” She showed me where with a sharp gesture with her head. Snow particles silvered the air around her head. She often failed to finish her sentences in those days too.
“Great!” I said. “I’m glad you took the trouble. Come in!”
She looked again toward the stairway and said to it, as she dreamily edged into my hallway, “I was coming anyway but it helped to see you before you saw me. Since . . . well, I haven’t been too . . . I’ve been . . . hmm, convalescing.”
“Tea?” I held out a hand to take her snowy scarf, and she carefully folded her gloves into the pocket of her pea jacket before shaking the snowflakes from its shoulders and handing it to me. She ruffled her hair for more haloing droplets.
“You’re supposed to wear that hat, not keep it in your pocket,” I said. I led the way to the kitchen, Bunnywit following us with his usual disdainful curiosity, ready to make her his as soon as she slowed down enough that he didn’t have to exert himself.
“Herbal,” she said. “I’m trying to cut down on caffeine and sugar. Not sure it helps, but it can’t hurt.”
“Cancer?”
“No. And it isn’t anorexia either. Make the tea.”
“Fuck the tea. What’s wrong? Anything I can — ?” Talk about seventy-five seconds’ worth of cut-to-the-chase. I bit my tongue, but it was too late.
“Of course. Why do you think I looked you up after almost two decades? Make the tea.” She sat down at the kitchen table in one of the sturdy oak chairs and leaned over to stroke Bun.
“Don’t remind me how old I am, Pris.”
“I’m older,” she said. She was. It had been one contributor to her charisma.
“I’m feeling a goose walking over my grave. What are you doing here, and why do you look like death warmed over?”
“Because I very nearly was dead,” she said. “I’ve spent the last year recovering from an attack.”
“A physical attack?”
“Oh, yes, it was very physical.”
“Who did it?”
“A guy.”
“Is that why you were looking over your shoulder? They didn’t catch him?”
“He’s in jail. No-one follows me now — I don’t think. I’m just paranoid. They say he followed me for months, learned my routine. Then when he jumped me, it was somewhere no-one could interrupt. I was stabbed seventeen times and my throat was slashed. And he broke my jaw and cheekbone. Did an after-knife kickfest.”
A seriously committed attack, in both senses of the words. I busied myself readying the teapot and left the silence there. She filled it.
“Nobody knows why. I didn’t recognise him. They say he’s a nutbar, but he was found fit to stand trial. I have nightmares and I wear too many clothes. That part doesn’t matter, the clothes, but I thought I’d get it over with.”
Coming back to sit and wait for the kettle to boil, I looked her up and down. If possible, she was even more beautiful than she had been, though her beauty was a whole lot spookier for having added a shadowy echo of those too-thin mass-media clichés who throng the red carpets at award ceremonies.
3. That was then, and this is now
“I had such a crush on you twenty years ago,” I said. “Well, we all did, but most of the women wouldn’t admit it.”
I didn’t say that today she almost terrified me. Or that I wasn’t necessarily delighted that she’d reached back into a place I kept in Dreamtime and brought that place into the present as if we’d never parted. Outside science fiction novels, I don’t like time travel.
So: “Hmph,” I said. “It’s like Then is Now. Weird. I don’t like time travel.”
“So eloquent!” she mocked. “I’ll tell you what it really is. In your head, you’ve kept talking to me all these years. So I show up, we have twenty-some years of friendship instead of a few years of old history.”
“And you? Have you been talking to me for twenty years too?”
“I didn’t have to,” she said. “I knew we’d meet again. I always knew. I just . . . didn’t know when.”
“Why didn’t you look me up, then?” The kettle whined and I got up. Bunnywit was still twining around her legs, which meant he wasn’t trying to trip me as usual.
She glanced up at me sideways with that same Farmer-Pang mischievousness that had glinted out at us sometimes. Now it was sharp and clear and wicked. “Why didn’t you, me?”
I laughed. “You were always in Kathmandu or Timbuktu or Mogadishu — my budget didn’t run to exotic destinations.” Until recently, and even then, not much, due to other decisions I will talk about in due time.
“You followed my career, though.”
“Hard to avoid it. I have