by ReGi McClain
“Harsha?” It sounded like Sargent Kapahu, a middle-aged police officer and regular massage client at Ho’ola.
She and Kapahu shared a table at the clinic café during lunch from time to time, but given the hour, she assumed he’d called about her brother and his bride rather than a friendly meal. Suppressing a groan, she tried not to contemplate what act of indecency the newlyweds might have committed to get themselves picked up by the police.
“Hello, Sergeant.”
“I’m sorry to tell you this, but Jason and Elaine were involved in a car accident on Kaumualii tonight.”
The statement jolted the irritation out of her. She sat up and switched on a light. “Are they all right?”
“You better get to the hospital. They’re in the ER.”
Her pajamas covered enough of her to be legal. Without another word, she sprang out of bed, shoved her phone into her purse, and ran to the car. She rolled through stop signs to make it to the hospital in two minutes.
The emergency room receptionist watched with a frown as she ran to the desk. “Have you been here before, ma’am?”
“I’m not here for myself. I’m here to see my brother.”
“I’m sorry. The way you hobbled in, I assumed you came for yourself. What’s your brother’s name?”
“Jason Craigson.” In the back of her mind, Harsha registered the comment about the way she walked, but she needed to worry about Jason right now, not herself.
The clerk typed in the name. He pursed his lips into a grim line and punched a few buttons. Behind him, a printer whirred and spit out a visitor badge with Harsha’s name, Jason’s name, and the room number on it.
“Show the security guard the sticker. She’ll tell you where to go.”
The guard saw Harsha coming. Before Harsha showed her the badge, the guard led the way to the treatment area. She looked back at Harsha a few times before asking, “Want me to get you a wheelchair?”
Harsha shook her head. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
When they arrived at the room, the security guard knocked, then left. A nurse poked her head out. “You’re the sister?”
“Yes.”
The nurse stepped out of the room and took Harsha’s arm. “Why don’t you sit over here for a moment?”
Harsha pulled her arm away. “I’m not here to sit down for a moment. I’m here to see my brother.”
“I understand, but you can’t go in right now. The doctor is with him.”
“But ”
“Please. You’ll make it much easier on everyone, including yourself, if you wait a few minutes.” She settled Harsha into a seat across the hall and poured a cup of coffee from the nurse’s pot. “We’ll tell you as soon as you can go in to see him.”
Harsha lifted the cup to her lips but did not drink. When the nurse went back into the room, she set the cup aside to watch the door. Her watch ticked the seconds off in rhythm with her heartbeat. The scent of burnt, cheap coffee mingling with disinfectant and vinyl singed her nostrils. At the nurse’s station, three or four women spoke in cynical tones, their harsh laughter biting through the echoing of patients’ groans and machines beeping. Her peripheral vision blurred until she saw nothing but the plain, brown door to Jason’s room surrounded by a halo of white wall.
A nearby clatter wrenched her out of her vigil. Two scrub-clad men with strained faces emerged from a room down the hall, pushing a gurney. A woman’s form lay beneath the white sheet covering the table. Sergeant Kapahu stepped out of the room and crossed to the nurse’s station without looking around. The nurse pointed at Harsha.
Kapahu nodded a brief thanks to the nurse. His stride fell heavy on the hard linoleum floor, bringing his grave face closer. He took a seat next to her and leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees.
They watched Jason’s door together, neither of them speaking, until the sergeant sighed. “I’m sorry about Jason. Do they know if he’ll make it, yet?”
“They haven’t told me anything.”
“Did they tell you about Elaine?”
She jerked her head to face him. “No. What’s wrong? Is she okay?”
He shook his head.
Harsha’s heart pounded and her breath came in short bursts as she grasped the connection between the sheet-covered gurney and Kapahu’s presence in the room it emerged from. Poor Kel! He’s going to be heartbroken. Then, If the crash killed Elaine… She refused to finish the thought. She pressed her lips together and went back to staring at Jason’s door. She could figure out what to say to Kel later.
Kapahu put a hand on her shoulder. “I know this is a bad time, but we need help.” He nodded toward the covered gurney. “We need you to identify the body.”
Harsha’s breath caught, stilled by the implied question in his statement. “Can’t you do it?”
“It has to be a close friend or family member.” Kapahu gave her a little squeeze. “I can call her folks, if you prefer, but you’re already here.”
“She doesn’t have any other family.” Her stomach sank with the weight of her next words. “Just Jason and Kel and me.”
“Then we’re going to need you to ”
“Isn’t there another way?” She flicked her gaze back and forth between his eyes, as if she might find a different answer in one or the other, and looked at him with a pleading expression, begging him to give the task to another.
His eyes retained their compassionate gleam, but his jaw set.
Understanding, Harsha clenched her teeth. She needed to get this over with. She strode to the gurney and ripped off the blanket before the startled hospital staff reacted.
Her hand rushed to her mouth, not quite catching her shriek. Black and blue bruises covered the right side of Elaine’s face. Only the tips of her inky, black eyelashes jutted out from between her swollen lids. None of this surprised Harsha. She knew car accidents caused such injuries. It was the dent that shook her. The dashboard had bashed Elaine’s skull hard enough to misshape her head.
Harsha tried to speak, but her words came out as gurgling gasps. After several attempts, she nodded her head. Kapahu gripped her elbow to guide her back to her seat. As she sank down, an alarm blared.
A woman stuck her head out of Jason’s room. “Code Blue room seven,” she yelled in the direction of the nurse’s station.
In jaded monotone, “Code Blue, ER seven. Code Blue, ER seven,” sounded over the intercom.
Scrub-covered figures sprang from everywhere, all rushing toward Jason’s room and disappearing behind the door. Sergeant Kapahu kept hold of Harsha’s elbow. She wrenched her arm away and snagged one of the people going into Jason’s room. “What is it? What’s happening?”
“Code blue. You better just sit there for now.”
Everything faded but the number seven of Jason’s room and the plodding tick of Harsha’s watch until the door swung open. One tired face after another floated out of the room, veered to the right or the left, and evaporated out of sight until one set of eyes, weary and discouraged, met hers.
“I’m sorry.”
She stood, set down the cup of water someone had put in her hand, and drifted across the space between her and Jason. He might have been sleeping, but for the large gash across his forehead and the purple impression of the steering wheel on his chest. Brushing the hair from his face, she kissed his forehead, hoping to watch his eyes flutter open as when he was a child. They didn’t open. They would never open again.
Chapter 17
Harsha had a vague memory of Sergeant Kapahu driving her car, but otherwise she may as well have teleported home. What she remembered was crying herself to sleep on Jason’s bedroom floor. Awake now, the well of sorrow surged up and flowed toward the surface.
The front door opened and shut. Kel’s voice echoed around the house, eager to share his sleepover adventure with his mother. He ran into the room, eyes bright and words tumbling as he tried to detail every event of the adventure at once. He stopped short when he saw Harsha. Sh
e pressed her own grief out of the way and held out her arms to him. She explained in gentle tones, rocking him as his tears soaked into her pajamas.
He fell asleep in her arms, the combined forces of his sobbing and slumber party sleep-deprivation taking their toll. She hoisted him onto Jason’s bed, marveling at how much such a scrawny kid weighed.
She let her tears flow while she mulled over funeral preparations. Both she and Jason had long-standing plans in place, so his burial would be simple. His wife, she feared, would require negotiations with the director. She phoned the funeral home with an idea. By giving over the plot adjoining Jason’s, the one she’d bought for herself, she completed the arrangements in no time. Except for the irritating blip of a call-holding tone that interrupted the process a few times, she considered it one of her better business transactions. Small comfort for the situation. She called the hospital to tell them when to expect the funeral home people.
“Hello. This is Harsha Mooreland. May I sp ”
“Oh! Yes, Ms. Mooreland. I’ll patch you through right away. One minute please.”
Her stomach rumbled, so she squeezed the phone between her ear and shoulder to have her hands free for making a snack. She considered putting it on speakerphone while old Kenny G tunes tried to convince her being on hold could be a relaxing experience, but decided against it. A good thing, because she made it three steps toward the kitchen when a male voice cut Kenny off.
“Ms. Mooreland?”
“Yes. I need to ”
“Thank you for calling back.”
Calling back?
“I’m very sorry, Ms. Mooreland, but there’s a problem. Your brother and his wife are missing.”
“What, like…” Harsha had a vision of Jason and Elaine walking out of the hospital and wondered if the unicorn horn did more than cure the disease. For a moment, she couldn’t keep herself from hoping. Then she remembered their damaged bodies and pushed the hope aside. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“I mean our staff couldn’t find them this morning.”
She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes while she looked for a less belligerent response than the first one to come to mind. She wanted to tell the man off for being cruel. She managed, “Have they checked the morgue?”
“Yes, ma’am. We searched the whole hospital. We’re trying to figure out how it happened, but the bodies of Jason and Elaine Craigson are missing.”
She tightened her grip on the phone. This cannot be happening. “Don’t you have security? Did you check the security recordings?”
Mr. Walker’s voice took on a thick, rough tone, a sound born of bewilderment and irritation but trying to be placating. “Yes, of course. One moment the bodies are there, the next, they’re gone.”
Harsha bit her tongue, forced her fingers to relax their grip, and counted to ten in her head. Having reached that milestone, she proceeded to one hundred.
“Ms. Mooreland? Are you there?”
“Yes.” It hurt to press the syllable through her clenched teeth.
“The police are here. We’d appreciate it if you’d come over and talk with the officer in charge.”
“Fine.” She tapped the hang-up button. She found a sober neighbor to watch Kel and sped down the road. Mr. Walker met her in the hospital lobby and escorted her to security, where four men in uniforms watched screens. Mr. Walker introduced her to the officer in charge.
“Hello, ma’am. I’m sorry about the situation. I need you to answer a few questions.”
Harsha gave rote answers to his questions while she stared at the footage. The guards played and replayed the image, slowing it down or zooming in on specific areas with each repetition. Nothing changed but the hands of the clock.
The officer in charge asked a question she half-caught.
“What did you say?”
“I asked, can you think of anyone who might have a reason to steal your brother’s or his wife’s body?”
The unexplained incidents surrounding her trip to L.A. tumbled together as she registered the meaning of his words: the strange letter that came with her records from Rice, the Los Angeles hospital’s claim they never admitted her, the lack of a Dr. Green on staff. As far as she knew, the Rice Clinic people were still out there. Maybe they were behind this. Telling the police a team of fanatical geneticists out to study and exterminate aliens were responsible for her brother’s disappearance, however, struck her as a bad idea.
“Ms. Mooreland?”
She took a slow, deep breath and smiled without mirth, hoping she looked like a woman who is done playing and wants to go home. “Why would anyone want to steal a body? Last time I checked, dead bodies only hold value to worms.” The cruel speech tried to stick in her throat, but she forced it out.
The officer patted her on the back. He looked like he wanted to cry for her. “I understand it’s a strange question, ma’am, but please try to think. However farfetched it may seem, is there any reason someone would want to harm your brother or sister-in-law, even posthumously, or yourself?”
“You could start with Elaine’s ex. I don’t know anything about him.” Elaine had rarely spoken about Kel’s father. Harsha assumed he would want to be told the mother of his child had died, if nothing else. More to the point, if the police busied themselves on that front, it gave Harsha the freedom to look into less conventional explanations.
The officer nodded. When they dismissed her, Harsha walked down the hall until she rounded a corner. Then she ran. Her heart raced with the need for results. She got home, hurried her neighbor out the door with a fifty-dollar bill, put on a movie for Kel, and shut herself in her room. Pacing, she dialed Seraph’s number, hung up when she got the voicemail, and tried again. “Please, please, please, please, please.”
“Harsha? Is something wrong?”
“I need your help. I need your help right now. How fast can you get here?”
“What happened?”
“They took Jason’s body!”
“What? You’re not making sense.”
“Someone took Jason and Elaine’s bodies from the morgue.”
“Morgue? Harsha, what happened?”
Harsha sputtered an explanation, each word racing the other to the end of her tongue.
“We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
Harsha let Kel stay up watching TV long past his bedtime while she made crème brûlée and kolache. She nixed the zombie movies—they hit too close to home—but stayed on her feet through three zombieless favorites until he staggered into the hall with his eyes shut. When she guided him toward his room, he veered off and went into Jason’s room instead. She let him.
With her nephew tucked safely in bed, Harsha set her alarm for an hour before she expected her friends to arrive and tried to fall asleep. An image of Jason and Elaine slamming into the dashboard of their car flashed behind her eyelids over and over. She repeated mantras said to promote peace and well-being, envisioning serene temples, while systematically relaxing her limbs. All failed.
Frustrated, she flung back the covers and sprang out of bed. Without bothering to put a robe over her pajamas, she rushed to the kitchen and pulled out ingredients for making an angel food cake and started beating the egg whites by hand. Haunted, she turned on Pretty Woman and shoved a handful of lavender and rose candies in her mouth, gagging herself. She worked out charts of income growth based on various interest rates in her head while she continued to whip the eggs with every ounce of physical energy available to her.
About the time Richard Gere snapped the necklace box on Julia Roberts’ fingers, Harsha felt a memory snag at the back of her brain. A detail about the last time Seraph and Zeeb came to her home.
She put down her whisk and grabbed an armful of used grocery bags, then went into Kel’s room to raid his stash of glow-in-the-dark spray string. She grabbed all the cans and rushed to her backyard to write dragon landing in gigantic letters. Finished, she resumed her assault on the egg whites.
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nbsp; Harsha started awake. One arm circled her mixing bowl while the other arm rested on the counter as a pillow for her head, hand still grasping her whisk. Her backside protruded far into the kitchen and drool slicked the arm serving as a cushion. She straightened, groaning, and winced at the popping in her lower back. Looking around for what woke her, she blinked several times to clear the sleep from her eyes and wiped the saliva off her chin.
The sound of a masculine tenor stringing together curses with impressive creativity and vulgarity outside snagged her attention.
Harsha wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and stepped outside in time to see Zeeb climbing out of her pool, which gave off steam like a jacuzzi. “Seraph, you dumb dragon, are you trying to boil me to death?”
Seraph sputtered while she clawed her way out of the water, her sharp talons leaving long score marks in the lawn. “I’m sorry. I forgot about the pool.” Her copper skin glowed bright orange, steaming away the water dripping off her.
Zeeb, not so lucky in his biology, pulled off his shirt to wring it out and shook his head. Harsha grabbed a towel from the storage bin and held it out to him, but drew it back when she saw how much of him got burned when Seraph hit the pool. His entire upper body looked sunburnt, and he walked with his legs held far apart, implying his jeans chaffed his legs and more sensitive areas.
Harsha cringed. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine. It’s just first-degree burns.” He put a warm, damp hand on her arm. “Are you okay?”
Harsha opened her mouth to give him a noncommittal answer, but Seraph finished misting into her human form and enveloped her in a tight hug, cutting off the words with, “I’m so sorry.”
Harsha pulled away from the hug rather than letting herself relax into it. “Let’s go inside. You need to run cold water over those burns, Zeeb. The bathroom is straight down the hall. Don’t worry about dripping on the floor.”
Zeeb accepted the towel and nodded, but glanced at the pool and grimaced. “My backpack is at the bottom of your pool. I’ll have to wait until the water cools to get it.”