Sadly, Rocket wasn’t the easiest being to get information out of, but he was going to give me a few more details if I had to strangle them out of him. First, however, I needed to know about the suicide victims. I could keep his attention for only so long. If I had to choose between me and the suicide victims, I’d have to choose the latter. They could’ve been abducted. They could still be alive and suffering. Their safety had to come first in this situation. Then maybe I could convince Rocket to tell me something about my own demise. Demises in general sucked. My own would probably suck even worse from my point of view. It was hard to tell at this juncture.

I took the stairs to the basement. He’d been favoring the basement lately, as it had a few unused walls. I turned on my flashlight and slowed the lower I got.

“Could this place be any creepier?” Jessica asked, appearing behind me, her hands cradled at her chest as though afraid to touch anything.

“It is now,” I said, refraining from doing a fist pump and shouting, Score!

A singsong voice fluttered through the air toward me. “Somebody’s in trouble.”

I recognized the voice as Strawberry Shortcake’s – not her real name – a girl who’d drowned when she was nine. She’d taken up residence with Rocket and his little sister, Blue Bell. My gratitude with respect to that fact knew no bounds, because before SS had taken to squatting at the asylum, she was better known as a crazy stalker chick who warned me repeatedly to stay away from her brother, David Taft, a police officer in my uncle’s precinct. And she often tried to scratch my eyes out. Not an endearing quality.

Since Taft and I could barely stand each other, her concerns had never truly been an issue, but she’d seen me as a threat until her brother started dating skanks. Her words. After that, she decided I needed to date him after all. Thankfully, she was too busy being Chrissy from Three’s Company to push the issue.

Jessica and I turned toward her. SS wore her usual pink Strawberry Shortcake pajamas that were all the rage back in the day. Her long blond hair hung in tangles down her back as always, and her baby blues shimmered a silvery color, even incorporeal as she was. Though her luster had a general grayness to it, she was as solid to me as the walls around us.

The grayness often gave the departed away. And the cold. But more than that, their lack of emotion was a real tip-off – I couldn’t feel any radiating off the dead, as I could the living. Even without those signs, there was something intangible about the departed that made me instinctively know they were no longer among the living. It just registered in the back of my mind when I met someone who’d departed. I could always sense it. From the day I was born, I knew there were two kinds of people: the living and the dead.

What took me much, much longer to comprehend was the fact that not everyone was able to see the departed. My confusion had caused me problems growing up. Especially with my stepmother. But that was a story – or, well, a dozen or so stories – for another time.

Strawberry stood there, petting a ragged Barbie doll with its hair chopped off in large chunks. Which wasn’t creepy at all. Poor Malibu Barbie. All her Malibu friends would be horrified. Taft told me his sister had always cut off her dolls’ hair. A fact that kind of scared me. I did have to sleep occasionally, and the thought of a departed child in dire need of therapy cutting my hair in my sleep did nothing to ease my mind as I fell into oblivion.

“Why am I in trouble this time?” I asked her, kneeling down and wiping a smudge off her cheek. She really was quite beautiful. It pained me to imagine who she would have become, given the chance. For the life to be ripped away from someone so young just seemed so terribly, terribly unfair.

“Because you’re going to die soon.”

On second thought, maybe she was better off. Away from other people and most sharp objects. I had a sneaking suspicion she would have become a serial killer. Or a telemarketer. Either way.

“Well, I’m hoping I don’t.”

“I hope you do. You can live with us.”

“She is adorable,” Jessica said, kneeling beside me. “What’s your name?”

Strawberry frowned. “I can’t talk to strangers. And I especially can’t tell them my name is Becky. Or that I’m nine. Or that —”

“Have you seen Rocket?” I asked, interrupting. We’d be there all day.

“I see him all the time.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

She lifted a shoulder. “Maybe. But you need to run the mean man out first.”

My brows slid together. “What mean man?”

“The one sleeping in the cold room. He eats cat food out of a can with his fingers.”

I tried not to gag on that thought. “Hon, are you telling me there’s someone here? Someone living here?”

She nodded, petting her bald Barbie harder and harder.

What the hell? How could anyone get in with all the security measures? I knew the razor wire wouldn’t deter anyone, but the code on the doors should have helped.

“He cut a hole in the fence out back with this big whacker thing and he crawls in through a basement window. He brings little brown bags.”

Oh. Well, that explained that. “He must be homeless.”

“No, he has a home.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because he goes there.” She pointed. No idea why. I got so turned around in the place, I barely knew which way was up. “He goes to that ugly house and then comes back here.”