String of Tears, page 6
“I was found, and now the question is, who was this person and why wouldn’t they have called for help?”
“Most people don’t call for help if they’re more afraid of what could result from the problem in front of them,” he explained succinctly. “So, if getting rid of a body was easier than trying to answer questions, they would have taken that route in a heartbeat.”
“Right.” She stared at the detective. “I don’t think I have very much if any connection to that world because everything you’re saying sounds so foreign to me.”
“That’s a good thing,” he said cheerfully. “I’d hate to have to come back and to imagine that you were a part of all this shit.”
She winced. “I don’t know how I could have been, and it certainly doesn’t make any sense that I would have been, since I don’t know anything and don’t have any answers for you. Plus I was dead for two days. Who does that willingly?” Then she stopped and asked, “How long was I in the hospital?”
“Four days. You were in the morgue for the first one. Then in a coma for two days and fully woke up on the next day, released that same day.”
“Oh good God,” she wailed. “I was lying in a cold body bag for all that time?”
He nodded slowly, his gaze intent. “That’s one of the reasons everybody was so shocked. They’d figured you’d already been dead for a day, if not longer, before you ever got to the hospital.”
She swallowed at that. “That’s a long time to be out of circulation in my own life.”
“Which is why I was concerned, and why I’m here now, to see if you have any idea who you hung out with, who might have known something, who might have seen something, who might have known who you were dating, or any questions like that.”
“That makes sense,” she admitted, frowning, “but, since I’ve been here, I haven’t come up with any names or any connections for you.”
“Of course not.” He gave a hard sigh.
“Why is nothing like this ever easy?”
He shook his head. “A case like this shouldn’t be easy because we need to make sure we get it right.”
She shrugged. “It just seems that there could be so many things wrong with this entire scenario. I just want to make sure that we get it right, whatever the answer ends up being.”
“I agree with you there.” The detective nodded, looking at her intently. “Still, without something to go on, not a whole lot to say. The good news is that you appear to be fine, and, if a little memory loss is the result, that’s still pretty minor compared to what it could have been.”
“Considering that I was thought to be dead, yes,” she murmured. “Absolutely.”
He looked over at Hurricane. “I presume you have an alibi for all this time.”
“I was out of state, New Orleans, in fact. But feel free to contact my boss,” he added cheerfully, presenting his business card.
“We’ll get to it,” the detective confirmed, then stood. “A certain number of cases we never ever get any answers to,” he shared, “and I’m not saying that this will be one of them, but honestly I’ve never seen a case like this before.”
She nodded. “I do prefer the idea of somebody coming upon me or having been out with me, when I suddenly collapsed. It does bother me to think that I would be with anybody who wouldn’t have my care or my health in mind and would have just dumped me on the side of a highway though,” she shared bluntly. “If we could find out who that was, I’d be happy to never see them again.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “Yeah, you and me both.”
With nothing else to discuss, the detective left soon afterward, leaving things murkier than ever.
*
As Hurricane came back from letting out the detective, he saw Jewel sitting there, on a kitchen stool, twisting a cup of coffee in her hands. “What are you thinking?”
Startled, she looked up at him. “What? Oh, it’s not as if that was helpful.”
“It gave us a timeline at least,” he corrected.
“No, that’s true,” she agreed, “and that just makes it all even more bizarre.”
He smiled. “It does, indeed, but I always like a challenge.” At her inquiring look, he shrugged. “So, unless you’re against the idea, I’d like to stick around, until we get more answers.”
He watched the skin under her eyes tighten, and he wondered just what reaction he was seeing. Then she relaxed and nodded. “Thank you, that would be nice.” And then she added, “You’ll also have to keep in mind that we may never get any answers.”
“I am an optimist,” he stated, “so I’ll assume that we will. This case is way too intriguing not to.”
She gave a bark of laughter. “Maybe so, but it’s not exactly the easiest to think that somebody could have done that to me.”
“No, and I’m quite fascinated at the concept of somebody having done that. Those aren’t the people in my circle, so I wouldn’t have thought they were in yours either.”
She frowned at him. “I get that people have circles of friends, but why would you think that our circles would overlap with the same kind of people?”
He gave her a ghost of a smile. “Generally, anybody who can see energy and be a part of the ether can see trouble coming at them.”
“Is that always the case?”
“Not always. We have certainly seen a number of criminals, with energy abilities, who have fooled even the best of us.”
“Even Stefan?” she challenged.
“Yes, even Stefan.” He hesitated and then said, “Now you contacted Stefan about these pearls, but did you by any chance contact anyone else?”
She stared at him. “I don’t imagine that I would have,” she replied, “but I don’t know that for sure.”
“Right. Because that would really be my number one suspect, if you had.”
“I don’t know about that,” she disagreed. “It seems like we would be judging them ahead of time.”
“I’m okay to judge them ahead of time,” he declared, deliberately hardening his tone. “Something happened to you. I don’t know whether you knew or it was done with your permission,” he said, ignoring the look of shock on her face. “However, something happened, and somebody knows something. The problem is, we’ll have to find out who that someone is.” He hesitated, looked at her directly, and shared, “And the fact is, you may not like the answers.”
“I’m already not liking the questions, let alone the answers.” she said. “So what else is new.”
“Good, so, in that case, are you okay to stay here, or do you want to go somewhere else for the night?”
She looked around and sighed. “I think we can stay here.”
“Interesting phrase. Why I think?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, turning to swivel on the stool and to look at the space around her. “I really don’t know. Yet still I have a sense of uncertainly, so very much a case of I think.”
“Okay, we’ll go with that for now,” he murmured. “I guess we’ll have to see what comes up after this. I don’t know about you, but I’ll need some food.”
“Of course you do.” She winced and added, “My stomach is not terribly thrilled at the idea of food at all.”
“No, but then you’ve been eating hospital food for days.”
“I didn’t,” she murmured, shaking her head. “I don’t think I ate any of it.”
At that, he slowly turned and looked at her. “Were they feeding you intravenously?”
“I have no idea,” she replied. “Why?”
“Because your body needs sustenance,” he stated, looking at her intently. “Unless you have some magic trick I don’t know about.”
“If I did, it’s probably a magic trick that I wouldn’t want to share with everybody because then it’s not magic anymore, is it?”
Her tone was light, but her movements were jerky, as she got up and walked around to the other side of the counter. She picked up the coffeepot and dumped the last of the coffee into her cup. Looking over her shoulder, she asked, “Did you want more? I can put on another pot.”
“No, I’ll need food first.”
She just nodded and continued to stare out the window.
“Do you have any food allergies? Any preferences?”
Startled, she looked back at him and then shrugged. “I don’t think so. I guess that’s one of those things we’ll have to find out the hard way.”
At that, he allowed a ghost of a smile to escape. “I’d just as soon not though. We’ve already had enough excitement, and anything that might trigger another repeat—with you dropping to the floor, looking dead—isn’t something I want to experience.”
“No,” she murmured. “Can you imagine whoever would have been here and what they would have thought?”
“I can almost see why they would have run.”
She nodded. “Almost, yes. But somehow it does feel like a betrayal, and, no matter what, they should have stuck around and at least gotten me some help.”
“Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they had no internet service out there on the highway. Maybe they were a jogger with no cell phone at all,” he suggested, his tone gentle. “Maybe some poor kid found you, as he or she tramped through the forest nearby, and they had no idea how to deal with you. So let’s not judge them too harshly just yet.”
With a shrug, she replied, “Whatever. I’ll go back to cleaning this up. No food is here that’s really edible, but you’re welcome to take a look around.”
“That’s okay. I’ll order something in.”
She frowned. “I feel like some of the most common things are missing from my brain. Like it never occurred to me that you could order in.”
“I don’t think your brain is firing on all cylinders right now,” he noted. “So maybe just give it a break too.”
“Right, I’m not exactly doing any heavy in-depth brainwork right now,” she muttered.
“No? But you are because you’re still trying to figure out what happened to you.”
“Of course I am,” she cried out passionately. “How does one end up on the side of the road in the condition I was in, supposedly dead, and then wake up again?”
“I know of a couple people with this disease that the detective was talking about, the Lazarus syndrome, but I’m not sure the symptoms are the same. In this case, the heartbeat and breathing drops to awfully low levels, so mistakes can be made in declaring a death.”
“Nothing would ever be exactly the same anyway because apparently everybody is different,” she added, with just enough bitterness to have his eyes narrow.
“Stay strong,” he ordered. “We will get to the bottom of this.”
She gave a jerky head nod, got up from her stool, and told him, “I’ll go lie down.” She stopped, turned to him. “Unless you have any reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t. In fact, I think it’s a great idea.”
As she went to the stairs, she passed by the safe. “The detective didn’t notice the safe.”
“No, I don’t think he did,” Hurricane agreed.
“Why not?” she asked, pointing at it. “It’s pretty obvious.”
“Is it?” He gave a ghost of a smile. “Maybe it wasn’t obvious to him.”
She looked at him in confusion, then headed up to the bedroom. At the top of the stairs, she stopped and looked back at him. His gaze had followed her all the way up, making sure she went up to bed, a little worried about her physical condition but more about her mental state.
She hesitated at the top. “What’s the matter?” She stared at him, wordless.
He got up and walked to the bottom of the stairs and asked, “Do you want me to come up?”
She shook her head. “No. … Yes.” And then she shook her head. “No, at least not right now.”
And then he understood. “I’ll come up in an hour,” he offered. “To make sure that you’re alive.”
She grimaced. “Thanks, because, yes, that’s what I want. Somebody who checks on me and who doesn’t just dump me on a highway,” she stated bitterly. “But, at the same time, how will you know?”
His smile was deep and genuine. “Hey, I’m an energy worker,” he reminded her. “If your cord is attached, I’ll know.”
She gazed at him, startled, then gave him a dawning smile that hit him like a punch to the gut. She nodded. “Thank you. That’s the first bit of sense I’ve heard yet.” And, with that, she disappeared at the top of the stairs.
A moment later he heard her flop down onto the bed.
He thought about her words and realized just how much pain and fear was sitting so close to her energy. He called up, “If you have the means, you should work at clearing some of that fear out of your energy.”
When no response came, he wasn’t sure whether it meant she didn’t have the means or if she was just too tired to do anything. He’d remind her when she woke up again. Then he winced because it really was a case of if she woke up again, and that worried him above all. He had no idea if she would wake up.
Chapter 7
Jewel woke suddenly, half out of bed, her eyes flashing open to stare up into the darkness of the room around her, then directly into Hurricane’s blinding light-blue eyes, staring at him in shock.
He smiled down at her. “Hey, it’s all right. Calm down.”
She relaxed slightly. “Is there a problem?”
“No, I was just checking that you were okay.”
She stared up at him, the conversation before she’d gone to sleep barely in her brain. “Looks like I got to wake up another day,” she noted lightly.
He nodded, but his gaze was watchful. Something was almost reassuring about the intensity of it too. She sighed. “It’ll take a bit to get used to.”
He laughed. “I would think so. Not everybody has a chance to be dead for as long as you were and come back.”
“And yet why?” she murmured. “I was afraid I wouldn’t fall asleep at all, and yet I went out without any trouble. How does that even happen?”
“You were exhausted. Remember? A lot of things transpired in the time you were awake and while you were in the hospital. Yet even you didn’t have any trouble sleeping.”
“Right, and how does all that work?”
He smiled. “Maybe just accept that some things we won’t know the full answers to.”
But inside something twinged at her heart, almost as if she had expected to wake up. And, of course, she had because, in her mind, she always had. She didn’t know whether the morgue was completely incompetent or if something else was at play. “Could somebody have faked my death? Or maybe they thought I would just die slowly in the body bag?” she murmured.
“It’s not a small town,” Hurricane noted. “The coroner has degrees, credentials. Could somebody have mistaken you for being dead? Yes, I’ve heard of that happening,” he noted. “But, in this case, for as long as you were supposedly dead, I don’t know how that would work with competent medical personnel. And deliberately? Well, we have a word for that.”
“Yeah, it’s called murder,” she declared, her tone turning harsh. “But, in that case, why wouldn’t they have done something to have completed the job?”
He gave a clipped nod. “Exactly.”
She pushed back the light blanket she’d tugged over her shoulders and sat up. Almost instantly a yawn split her face wide. She groaned when her jaw came back together again. “Wow, even that yawn hurt.”
“It looked like it was coming from a long way away,” he murmured lightly. Holding out his hand, he added, “Come on. Get up, and let’s see if you can walk.”
Without question she put her hand in his and slowly stood. “Was there any reason to suspect I couldn’t walk?” she asked curiously.
“Not really, but nothing about this makes any sense, so I just want to ensure that you’re alive and well and fully functioning.”
She cracked a smile at that. “The fully functioning part was in doubt from the beginning,” she murmured.
He gave her another ghost of a smile. “If you’re feeling better, maybe you should go to the bathroom and then come on downstairs.”
“What will downstairs do for me?”
“Food,” he stated. She frowned at that. “No, I don’t want to hear it,” he ordered, his gaze ever watchful. “I need to know that you’re eating.”
“Why?” she groused. “Especially if I’m not even hungry.”
He didn’t say anything, but something stirred deep beneath the surface.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted, “but I want you to come downstairs, and I want to see you eat.”
She frowned at that, not liking anything about his tone of voice, but more so about the oddness in the tone than the words setting her off. She shrugged. “Fine, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
She walked into the bathroom, washed her face, and used the facilities, then slowly made her way downstairs. She was feeling better, but nothing about this entire scenario was geared to make her feel good, and good versus better were two very different things. As she walked into the little kitchen area, she saw him sitting there, with a big mug of something. “What, more coffee?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s tea. You had some herbal teas, so I’m trying them.”
“Herb tea?” she repeated. “You really don’t look like the herb tea type.”
He didn’t respond but lifted it and took a sip from his mug. He pointed to the pizza in front of them. “I also had pizza delivered.”
“Here?” she asked, startled, as she looked around.
“Yes, here. Although I met him outside at another door.”
“Why would you do that?” she asked, twirling to face him.
“To keep our location secret.”
“But how secret is it if we’re sitting here the whole time?”
“That’s what I don’t know,” he replied. “It’s just one more of those questions that I don’t have answers for.”
She nodded, put on the teakettle, and added, “I’ll have a cup of tea too.”
“Good,” he said, and he waited.
