and lo and behold Mystique turned up.
"Where have you been?" She typed. "I was starting to get worried. That last message was so vague. I know you're mad and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But I just wanted to talk to you and I knew you wouldn't. Don't you understand that?"
"I guess." I typed for and non-combative and non-communicative answer.
"I was worried about you." Mystique wrote. "And don't get mad, anyone can get sick or have an accident. I looked up your phone number and I left you a couple of messages. I gues syou got those. I'd rather have you yell at me than not talk to me at all."
"I'm not Danny." I typed. "I'm looking for Danny. He hasn't been around in a few weeks. And I'm just getting worried."
"Who are you?" She wrote.
"I'm a friend of his, we go way back. We've done the comic thing together for years."
"Simon?" She typed rather unexpectedly.
"Yes." I replied.
"What's your number?" She asked. "I'll call you."
A minute after I replied my phone rang.
"It's me, Jennifer Wells." She said.
"Oh my God." I said. "Jen."
"Yeah. I think that's what Danny thought when he figured out it was me he was talking to."
Jen had been Danny's girlfriend for a couple of years before his accident. They were crazy close and she did her best to stand by him after the accident. She talked to doctors and took notes and made the funeral arrangements for his parents. And one day he just cut her off and had her barred from his room. He wouldn't read her letters or take her calls and nothing anyone said could change his mind. She had been in despair for a long time, then finally moved away to Florida to get on with her life. She'd gotten married and opened a business. Both had gone south about the same time. She was just trolling around looking for some comic sites and she came across Danny's board and figured out it was him. He hadn't figured out that Mystique was her at first and they had hit it off famously, just like the first time. Jen, like Ellen and Maricel, was a girl who really dug comics.
A few weeks ago, Danny had decided to come clean and let his on-line honey know that he was confined to a wheelchair. Then it was her turn to come clean and confess that she already knew that.
"God he was mad at me." She said. "Cause he hardly said anything or typed anything. You know what I mean. When he's really mad, he won't talk he just says two or three words."
"I think he's pretty mad at me." I said. "I was meeting a new girlfriend out at Comic Con in Vegas and I didn't even offer to take him this time."
"He wasn't mad about that. He thought it was cool that you had a girlfriend." She said. "He told all to Mystique."
"I'm just worried." I said. "And I talked to my friend who's a cop and he's not technically missing, though he supposed to have gone to Florida."
"Why would he come here?" She asked. "You don't think that he's here, do you? Or that something happened to him on the way here?"
"I don't know." I said. "I really don't know."
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