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Crystal’s parents are in Amsterdam, or Antwerp, or something. Charles is at a concert no one else particularly wanted to go to. Niko is dead and Jenny is likely asleep at this time. Like a normal person. This is how, at midnight on a Saturday, Crystal ends up sprawled on the massive couch in her parents’ massive house eating potato chips and watching Edwin play the grand piano that her dad bought for decorative purposes. She’s been in this meditative state for at least an hour and so doesn’t pick up on it immediately when the music changes. Then, chip raised halfway to her mouth, she realizes she actually knows the song that’s playing.
After a second, she recognizes it as ‘Valerie’. Amy Winehouse. Surprising, she would have expected any modern music he knew to be something Charles showed him. The Clash or the Ramones or something equally jarring. He plays just as elegantly as before, but with a jazzier, more fleshed out sound. It actually sounds like something she’d want to listen to.
“How do you know that song?” she asks, somewhat amused.
Edwin pauses and sighs, annoyed at being interrupted. “We were in a music store on a case. I may have pocketed a copy of the record that was playing.”
“For your victrola?”
“Indeed.”
She thinks for a moment. “Do you know ‘Rehab?’”
He does the eyebrow thing and smiles. “Obviously.”
She stands up and walks over to the side of the piano. He plays, and she sings, and Crystal remembers the last time she sang this song. It was with a group of teenage girls, in actual rehab. They sat cross legged in the hallway, strumming their ukuleles or doing big, exaggerated finger wags and shakes of the head on the “no, no, no’s.” Crystal wonders how many of them are dead now. A couple of the girls had seemed to be doing better once they got out- but those weren’t the girls she kept up with. After all, they had nothing in common anymore.
The others- well there was always some guy to drag them back into their addictions. Ironically, David had done more than anyone else to keep Crystal alive- if only for his own entertainment. It was part of his pitch to her as to why she should let a demon invade her body. He would be the best designated driver there was- and if she was truly as fucked up as she claimed to be, what difference would a demon really make? So she had let David become her new drug of choice.
Nothing like meeting a pair of supernatural ghosts to bring oneself back to reality, apparently.
She hasn’t properly thanked Emma for having Charles and Edwin rescue her, either. They lost contact when David erased her phone’s memory. In Port Townsend, she’d found and tried unsuccessfully to log into her social media. She assumed she was remembering the passwords wrong. It turned out David had changed them. He’d even locked her out of Instacart. Lest she try to eat something other than dumpster fish, she supposes.
A completely blank slate.
She and Edwin continue their little impromptu jam-sesh well into the night. The only songs he knows are from ‘Back To Black’ or else classical pieces from dead German composers even older than he is. Crystal decides all three of them are going to have to go find a record store at some point. The victrola needs J. Cole and Kali Uchis. For mystery solving purposes, of course.
Crystal knows very few of the words to ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’ besides the chorus and by the third verse she and Edwin are both singing, harmonizing together. Crystal is maybe a split second behind him, stumbling on the lyrics. But it sounds good. So it is good. Tomorrow, the spell will have been broken and they can be back at each other’s throats. But for now, in this surreal little moment of friendship, they are singing the same tune.
Not all that different from those nights in the hallway at rehab.