Pink Blooded: A Lana Pink Mystery

by Crystal Gallagher

  "I wasn't really supposed to tell any non-medical staff about any of this..." Grace said, glancing around furtively as though someone might be listening to this conversation in our very kitchen. Well, maybe that wasn't quite so far-fetched. If the Tree Valley government could tap a mud pit, they could tap a haunted cottage.

  And if Jyson and I could hack into the very program that kept Traralgon running...anyone could be listening anywhere.

  "But it's kind of been freaking me out," Grace said, clearly wanting to get something heavy off her chest.

  I wondered if the milk was still on the other side of the door.

  "You have to wake up pretty early in the morning to freak me out," I said. "So tell me. What's so terrifying down at the hospital lately?"

  Grace bit her lip.

  "It's okay. I don't want to freak you out as well," she said, suddenly picking up her tablet to browse a celeb news site. She shot me a secretive look out of the corner of her eye to check if I was still looking at her.

  "Is there anything I should be worried about?" I asked, only half-serious.

  But I never thought that Grace would be full-serious.

  She put the tablet down and laughed a little nervously. "No. Well. You haven't been stung by any bees lately, have you?"

  I glanced down at the giant welt on the underside of my arm, the veins there pumping.

  "Yes," I whispered, as the color drained from Grace's face. "What's going to happen to me?" Now it was my turn to nervous laugh. "Am I going to turn into a bee?"

  Grace gulped. But then she laughed. Then she gulped again. When she realized I wasn't kidding she finally spoke. "No, you're not going to turn into a bee..." She narrowed her eyes. "Lana, have you checked your blood lately?"

  I stared at her. "Not for a few days," I said, thinking about that morning I'd sliced my finger open and let the blood drip on Taj.

  "It's probably nothing..." Grace whispered, looking away. "It's just that we've had a few patients turn up with...strange coloured blood."

  "Excuse me," I said and raced to the bathroom.

  I took the razorblade and pricked the edge, just lightly, into the tip of my finger. Then I sliced it across the top, just to make sure, while the blood bubbled up from the top of my finger and dropped into the sink.

  I felt like I was about to faint. I could smash my head right open on the porcelain right there and then.

  Pink...it was pink....bright pink.

  I rinsed the blood down the sink, trying not to gag as I watched the pink liquid flow down into the drain. I closed my eyes. I was washing it away, just like Louis would be doing two days from now, at the beach.

  Oh no, I thought, my blood pressure dropping and my mouth filling with water. I was going to be sick.

  "You okay in there?" Grace asked as I re-entered the kitchen, lightheaded. I headed straight towards the kitchen sink and poured a glass of water. I managed to choke it down, just.

  "I'm fine."

  Graced tapped her fingernails against the bench. "It's probably nothing to worry about Lana. All we know is that the bee stings are infecting people's blood, changing the color. But there's been no fatalities. No one has ever actually died from their blood turning pink before."

  She didn't know the half of it.

  "And what about the cake batter sweet smell?" I asked her.

  Grace made a face. "I wish science had an answer for that. Best we can guess is that the bees are making the blood sweeter, somehow."

  Grace surprised me by reaching up to her eye and pulling off a row of lashes like it was a caterpillar and throwing it on the bench; I'd always thought her lashes were naturally thick and lush. She looked even paler and more tired now, but still barbie-like. "But the blood stuff hasn't even been the worst of it," Grace said, shaking her head. I was very surprised to hear that. What could possibly be worse than that? I gulped the rest of the glass of water down and started to feel marginally better. Less like I was going to barf again, at least. "Or at least, it's not the worst thing I've experienced these last couple of weeks at the hospital."

  "What could be worse than bright pink blood?"

  Grace toyed with the caterpillar in front of her.

  "Last week, do you remember there was one night I didn't come home till the next morning?"

  The day she'd come home grey-skinned with tiredness, yes. The day after the milk had gone missing and I'd kicked Harris out of my house because he'd made a fuss about some almost-off meat. Almost off meat is still edible.

  Grace looked up at me. "You were all in a tizz about something...oh, that's right, you were hiding that cute guy in your room. Hey, whatever happened to him?"

  "He's in a pit in the ground. Continue."

  "A what now?"

  She'd been flirting with Taj that morning. A pretty crazy day. "You were acting kind of...strange when you got home."

  "Yeah...I'd taken a pill..." Grace said guiltily. That explained the flirting then. "Just a little something to calm me down. Soothe my nerves."

  Wondered if she'd prescribed it to herself. That would be interesting. I thought about the new car in the driveway. Maybe saving on rent wasn't the only reason she could afford a new beamer. Maybe she was dealing drugs on the side.

  "There was an emergency delivery..." Grace shook her head and her voice almost sounded like it was going to crack. No happy pills this afternoon then. "A baby..."

  "I didn't think you worked in the maternity ward."

  Grace shook her head. "I don't. But the mother needed surgery. Well, she was kind of the mother..."

  "Kind of?"

  "She was a surrogate."

  The nausea in my stomach started to swell again. I made sure I to close to the sink.

  "A surrogate for two men?"

  Grace nodded.

  "Were their names Brent and Jyson?" I asked softly, my voice seeming to come from another planet it sounded so far away.

  Grace hesitated a moment before nodding. "Yes, I think so," she said. "That sounds right." She stared at the kitchen bench, the counter top was old and scratched from decades of cutlery and knives and keys being thrown on it. One day I will get around to fixing it -- and the rest of the house. If one day ever comes for me. The cut in my finger started to leak and I shoved my hand under my armpit, hiding it.

  Now there'd be pink blood on my leather jacket.

  "The mother didn't make it," Grace said bluntly. "I tried everything I could. I've never lost a patient before, Lana."

  "Oh my goodness."

  "And the baby..." Grace said. "Well, she was born with blocked tear ducts, which was only one of her issues. But we had to operate right away because her eyes were so swollen and pink. She couldn't cry. We had to make that right. Babies have to be allowed to cry."

  She hadn't stopped crying since.

  "Anyway," Grace said. "The baby was, like, completely abandoned...she was crying, and screaming, for her mother, or who she thought was her mother, but she was dead. And her two daddies were nowhere to be found all night. No one could get a reach of them on their phones all night...."

  "What night was this again?" My voice was a whisper.

  "Sunday, a week ago."

  The night that the money had been taken from May's account.

  Grace nodded. "I sat and sat with that screaming baby, thinking she was going to be an orphan, born into this messed up town..."

  "Near-Utopia," I corrected her.

  "With no one to love her or care for her...." Grace's voice trailed off. "I almost thought I'd have to bring her back here. And this is no place to raise a baby." She looked down at the rubbish on the floor. I'd really have to find a bin for that at some point.

  "Did the fathers really not show up all night?" I whispered.

  "Eventually one of them did," Grace said flatly. "The one with floppy hair..."

  "Jyson."

  "But the other one..." Grace said, shaking her head. "He still hadn't shown by the time the baby was released two days later. I
only managed to grab a glimpse of him when he turned up in a BMW to pick the other two up. I thought I recognized him from...well, from where, it doesn't matter." Grace cleared her throat. "Anyway I just shook my head and watched them drive off, relieved that at least they had an almost happy ending. I suppose."

  "And you never found out where he had been all that time? Brent, I mean."

  Grace pulled a face. "What am I, a detective?"

  "I suppose not." That was my almost-job.

  "Since that night, I haven't stopped working," Grace said. "I feel like I had to redeem myself. Having your first patient die on you is kind of life changing."

  "I'm sorry," I said. "That must have been tough." I let out a very soft laugh. "The worst thing that happened to me that day was that I found pink milk in the fridge..."

  "Pink...milk?" A sudden look of realisation dawned across Grace's face.

  "Yeah. It kind of freaked me out. So I poured it down the sink," I murmured.

  "Oh, I was wondering what happened to my strawberry milk!" Grace shouted, howling with laughter. "I flavoured it with Nesquick! I didn't worry too much, though, I mean, I don't even drink milk that much. Don't know what I was even thinking when I bought it. I was actually starting to think that your crazy theory was true, that there really was a portal in the back of the fridge that was sucking our milk into it."

  No. But I was starting to think that another one of my crazy theories might be true.

  "Grace," I said, staring at her. "I took your car. And I wrecked it."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Friends Who Torture Together.

  "It was super cool of you to agree to come with me up here..." Jyson said, stepping out of the car. He had to zip up his hoodie as we approached the reserve because the temperature had dropped mightily during the car ride. "Taj might actually agree to talk to me if you are here as well!" He looked me up and down and winked. "I think he has a bit of a thing for you, you know."

  I felt my cheeks burn and looked away, my boots already caked with mud and clay. What did he know anyway? I did kind of what to ask for more details, though.

  But I was in no mood to be buddy-buddy with Jyson. Not when he had stolen my best friend's entire fortune.

  I suppose my current tally was one friend: My leather jacket.

  "So once we're done here, we're going to take all the info to Louis, right?" Jyson asked. He seemed a little nervous as we walked past the "Don't Enter" sign and the barbed wire and I wondered if that had anything to do with the fact I'd barely said a word to him in the ten minutes it took to drive from his townhouse to Taj Robinson's "house". Even though I know I should have kept up a facade that everything was fine and normal, I'm a Scorpio, and we just can't put on masks that easily.

  I nodded non-committedly.

  "What star sign are you, Jyson?"

  "Gemini."

  I bit my lip so as not to give my expression away. Probably a Leo moon as well. And something super evil for his rising, possibly an Aries.

  "So what do you think that is?" Jyson asked, looking down into the pit.

  "It's my housemate's wrecked car," I said flatly, even though I knew he was talking about the UFO. "Or, I should say, ex-housemate. She's going to move out." I turned to face Jyson properly. "Hey, I think you know her, actually..." I said, casually, as though the thought had only just occurred to me.

  "I do?" Jyson asked.

  I nodded, musing. "Yes. She was the one who looked after your newborn baby at the hospital on the night that you abandoned her to steal millions of dollars."

  I've never seen a man freeze with fear before. Jyson was so stiff that I could have shoved him the tiniest bit and he would have fallen into the pit, smacking his skull against the wreckage of either the UFO or my ex-housemate's car, whichever one got him first. I hoped the UFO.

  Taj suddenly appeared as if from out of the very toxic smog he lived and thrived in. "Hello Jyson," he said in a low voice, while I grabbed the squirrelly little boy-band member before he could run.

  "You can't do anything to me!" Jyson yelled. "This is Tree Valley where crime doesn't exist! Help!

  I shook my head. "This isn't Tree Valley, Jyson. This part of town is still Traralgon. And in Traralgon, no one can hear you scream."

  Taj grabbed Jyson from me and pulled him down the clay mud slide. I almost sliced my hand open on the side of the UFO wreckage as I went down too.

  Taj already had his tin shed prepared. A little too prepared. We'd talked about interogating Jyson all right, but I hadn't expected to be confronted with a chair, a rope, and a knife.

  "Don't worry about the knife, it's just for show," Taj whispered to me.

  Some show.

  "What are you two planning on doing with me?" Jyson screamed. "Torturing me?" He tried to kick Taj but Taj was almost a foot taller and at least twenty kilos heavier so it was like watching a kitten bat at an elephant.

  Taj and I exchanged a look. Torture sounded way too severe for what it was we were planning on doing. Right? It was going to be very gentle torture, if anything.

  Right??

  I kept looking at the knife laying on the card table that Taj called a kitchen table. It looked like something you would use to hunt and gut wild animals. Were there wild animals in the railway reserve? Bears? Panthers?

  I'd heard the rumors.

  Taj, the one with less to lose, grabbed Jyson and tied his hands to the back of the chair with the rope. The knife remained just out of reach. I thought I heard a bear growl but it was all in my head. We were in Australia, not America, and bears had not been part of the new program, nor the Upgrade.

  Taj leaned against the card table and looked down on a trembling Jyson. To be honest this was way more hardcore than I would have liked. I'd just thought the railway reserve was the safest place to get Jyson to confess. What was Taj thinking, though, that it was the safest place to dump a body?

  No one would ever dare come here to look for it. The three people currently in the room were the only three people dumb enough to come to the Railway Reserve.

  I stood beside Taj, my arms folded across my chest.

  "Tell me what you did with the money, Jyson?"

  "What money?" he said, rivers of sweat dripping down his brow.

  "You know I know people who can make your life a living misery." Taj was trying his best to sound menacing but he wasn't really that capable of it. Although he did know people. Who knew aliens. So he was kind of scary anyway in spite of himself. I was scared and I wasn't even the one being tortured. Almost-tortured, I mean. Not actually tortured. Tying someone up was fine if it was for a good reason.

  "May's money. You know what I'm talking about, Jyson. You and Brent were absent during Lucy's birth, at the same time the money was being drained...I know that you did it. It had to be you. You're the only one who knows the codes to get into May's office."

  I took a step closer to him and leaned down. "I honestly don't want to hurt you, Jyson," I said matter-of-factly. "We were almost friends. I just want you to give May's money back. Hey, if you're lucky we won't even turn you over to Louis." I wouldn't wish that fate on anyone even the person who had stolen from May. "And if you're super lucky...we won't even tell Harris that you tried to pin it all on him."

  Taj shook his head. "Not a very smart move, trying to pin this all on the most powerful man in Tree Valley..." Taj looked up towards the sky. "Especially one with such...other worldly interests..."

  Jyson's mouth was wide open, his face stretched bloated like a balloon that had been blown up too far. "I don't know anything about this!"

  "Aliens, remember," Taj said, raising his eyebrows. "Not all of them are your friends."

  "Oh, you two are ridiculous."

  "The truth. Or the truth is going to come and find you," Taj said, leaning closer to Jyson. "They've bugged this place, you know."

  Jyson laughed at that. " 'They' didn't do that Taj. I did."

  Taj's face went red.

  "You're
the one who got me caught by Louis? You almost got Lana killed as well..." Taj said, his eyes turning to fire.

  It was time for me to cut in. "Not killed, but I did get to see a sweet little light show down at the airport."

  Jyson's eyes grew wide.

  "Yeah," I said, hand on my hips. "I saw the live UFOs and you didn't, Jyson. So think about that. Your little plan backfired."

  I felt sick with the knowledge that it wasn't Harris who had stolen the money from May: it was Brent and Jyson. I'd almost been stupid enough to go to the cops with Jyson, to turn over the most powerful man (was he even a man?) in Tree Valley. To frame him, for crying out loud. I would have been lucky to survive the ensuring...oh, wait.

  "My only plan was to make this town a better place for my daughter," Jyson said through gritted teeth. "I had to know the truth."

  Taj and I exchanged looks. So, he did have a plan then...

  But it was only a plan to prove that the Tree Valley government was corrupt, as I was about to find out.

  "Tell me what you did with May's money...Or I swear, Jyson..." I could also make idle threats if I had to.

  "You swear what?" Jyson asked, sweating even more heavily. I was almost starting to feel sorry for him. Almost.

  Taj wasn't the only one with nothing to lose anymore. "I'll take you down with me."

  "Down where?"

  "Down to...death..." I said, then backed away a little, realizing how ridiculous I sounded. I'd lost Jyson's attention and some of the fear drained from his face. Maybe we weren't the best almost-torturers on the planet.

  "Hey, look at me!" I said, hitting the front of my leather-covered chest like I was a gorilla. "I got two days left in this world Jyson so I don't care. Tell me what you did with May's money." I side-eyed the knife and then nodded at him. "Why would I care about the consequences of my actions now, Jyson?" I asked, bluffing big time. I'm a Scorpio and I believe, at the very least, in some kind of reincarnation so I wasn't about to go murdering someone right before I died. That would just be stupid.