004 - Mincemeat

[deadly_ned]

Hello, Barge. My name is Ned, and I have a completely arbitrary and unrelated question to ask.

If you had a minute - 60 seconds - with any person currently dead and could talk and interact with them as normal, alive people would...

What would you say or ask them?

I suppose this question goes to the people who are currently...dead....and have alive people back home they're separated from as well.

It's an odd question, I know. But I've been...curious, lately.



Also, would the elf who took my wallet please give it back now? I hope you remember me; I was the piemaker dressed as a Franciscan monk. I hate to treat the network as my own personal Lost Connections newsletter but I really didn't know what other way to get in touch with you.

And if you're not actually an elf, I'm sorry for calling you one.

Comments

[routemistress]

Well, you say that now, but think 'ow I'd feel watchin' your brains dribble down your shirt front, sweetheart. No, it wouldn't be right.

[deadly_ned]

Iris, I really don't give a rat's ass if you curse around me.

[routemistress]

Language, young man!

[deadly_ned]

I-I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. It won't happen again. That was horrible.

[routemistress]

[She can't hold her straight face any longer; it cracks into the giggles, so that it's a minute before she can speak again.]

...Oh Ned, I am sorry. Your face. I couldn't stop meself.

What've you seen that's melted people? That's 'ardly natural causes for humans that I know of.

[deadly_ned]

That was. Oh. You were joking. Right, the. Yes. I should have...I'm sorry.

It wasn't a melted head. More like a half-melted whole body.

I, um.

I work with a private investigator investigating homicides.

Part time.

[routemistress]

It's an 'abit of mine.

[She's almost sorry. Not, probably, sorry enough not to do it again, mind you, but she might be gentler another time. Ned's just a little too literal to be a really satisfying target.]

...Oooh, now, see, that's interesting. Tell me about that one; did you catch who done it?

[deadly_ned]

Is it? I guess it's. Better than biting your nails or pulling your hair.

Yes. It was, um. See, there was a widow who owned a lighthouse with her young son and she was found dead and melted to the intense heat lamp of the lighthouse. Only it turns out she actually was no longer a widow because her husband, lost at sea, had come back from sea after being stranded for ten years and was finally rescued by a gay cruise ship. And then when the murder happened, the husband had disappeared and the deceased widow's young son had hired Emerson and me to find the killer and we were sure it would have been the husband but it turned out to be the jilted one-time affair of the man whom the widow had been seeing when she believed her husband was dead.

I.

It was complicated.

But it turned out all right. For everyone who survived. Not for the half-melted widow.