I recently completed my latest book Life Like - a high tech ghost story.
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| The Black Cat |
The coroner placed her time of death sometime between two and four. Her body was found in a tub of cold bathwater, which prevented a more accurate determination. She was thirty-five-years-old.
Her maid, or housekeeper, or whatever the politically correct term is now, arrived at her gated Brentwood manor precisely at nine as usual. Gabriel Elser, Claudia’s husband, was already gone. The police later learned he left the house around seven. He went to his club and played a few vigorous sets of racquetball before heading to the office. He reported making no attempt to see his wife that morning. The two had ceased sharing a conjugal bed months earlier.
The maid found the house silent. That wasn’t unusual. Gabriel was a workaholic who only came home to sleep. Claudia, on the other hand, often fell prey to depressive slumps where she would remain in her bedroom suite for days at a time. The maid reported this was one of those periods.
After putting on a pot of coffee, the maid went upstairs and gently tapped on Claudia’s door. She got no response. She tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked, so she looked inside. The bed had been slept in, but Claudia was nowhere to be seen. The maid entered the room. She saw the door to the bathroom was partially open. She went over to see her long time employer lying motionless in the tub. With a scream, the maid raced inside. While trying in vain to revive her, she thoroughly disturbed the crime scene. Fortunately, she didn’t corrupt the glass on the floor beside the tub. Police later found traces of bourbon and barbiturates in it.
Claudia’s death made the news. She wasn’t a well-known public figure, but she was the primary owner of the privately held Montclair Media, a broadcast empire of over fifty television and radio stations and a patchwork of cable systems throughout the South and Midwest plus a stake in over twenty cable networks.
I spent the night Claudia died playing WarQuest, a massive, multi-player online fantasy game. In my defense, it was business, not pleasure. My roommate Clay played the game for a living. WarQuest had over twenty million subscribers and there was a hefty real world black market for rare and exotic items found in the game. That night, the two of us, and a team of online allies killed Askow, a dragon on the third elemental plane. Askow’s eyes were magical items highly valued by fantasy sorcerers and enchanters. Clay had a buyer in Japan willing to purchase them for six-hundred-dollars in real money. Our share of the rest of Askow’s loot brought us another two-hundred-dollars.
I found four hundred dollars waiting for me in my PayPal account when I awoke at ten the next morning. I needed them because I was supposed to be at work at Starbucks at eight-thirty. That was it for my boss. He was a pretty cool guy, really, but he took the whole tardiness thing way too seriously.
Oh well.
That was a pity. I liked working at Starbucks. Making coffee was cool, and I loved the smell. It was a thousand times better than waiting tables. There was no way I could go back to restaurant work. It wasn’t pride. I didn’t mind serving people. I simply lacked the coordination or balance necessary to carry the trays. Every one of my attempts at waiting tables ended with an embarrassing spill. Mexican food, I discovered the hard way, looked the most disgusting all mixed up on the floor.
My car wasn’t good enough for Uber or Lyft. I made better tips delivering pizzas the old fashioned way than I could with Grubhub or DoorDash, but it was too dangerous. I was never robbed myself, but every driver gets a gun shoved in his face eventually. You just had to knock on enough doors. Plus, it was pretty embarrassing to deliver a pie to a party you should have been invited to as a guest. That, I had experienced.
I could actually make more money playing WarQuest with Clay than I could at any of those jobs, but my girlfriend Holly nixed that idea. She said I’d never be able to get a real job if the only thing listed on my resume was playing a videogame. Technically speaking, WarQuest wasn’t a videogame. It was an online game. But her point was well taken.
She was right.
She usually was. Or so I thought. Claudia would disagree, but I’ll get to that later.
The Promise - Chapter 2 - My Death
The Promise - Chapter 3 - Childhood
The Promise - Chapter 4 - Saved!
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