Fit To Be Dead (An Aggie Mundeen Mystery Book 1)

by Nancy G. West

  Whenever I engaged in a life-changing event, I held my good-luck charm. I’d held the talisman before I turned in my first Dear Aggie column, before I left Chicago, before I bought my house, before I enrolled in graduate school and before I joined Fit and Firm. I kept the amulet in a fake, hollowed-out book in my bedroom bookcase. The tome, titled An In-Depth History of the World, looked like it had a thousand pages. Nobody ever picked up a book like that.

  My good-luck charm was safe. The talisman wasn’t actually a charm; it was my baby Lee’s bracelet, the one they put on her arm in the hospital. “Lee Mary Mundeen. Girl. 7 lbs. 4 oz. 16 inches. Mother: Agatha Emory Mundeen.” I’d clipped off the bracelet as soon as we left the hospital. I knew I had to give her up, but the bracelet would help to keep her near me.

  I scurried to the bookcase, grabbed the book and opened it. Lee’s bracelet was gone. How was that possible? Nobody knew about it. Nobody came in my bedroom. I crawled around the floor searching behind the bookcase and under the bed, groping behind furniture legs. Where could it be? I hadn’t moved that bracelet. I never moved it.

  Flying around the house, I rechecked windows and doors even though Sam had already inspected the locks. Everything was secure. Nobody could get in without leaving marks. I remembered the hairpin method I’d read about, sped to the front door and stared at the lock. The mechanism appeared normal. Had somebody picked it with a credit card?

  A normal person would call Sam and have SAPD dust for prints, but then I’d have to tell him about Lee’s bracelet, which was not an option. If I refused to tell him what was missing, he’d stake out my home, admonish me never to return to Fit and Firm and banish me to boredom land. Also out of the question.

  Returning to the club was now urgent. Whoever took my baby’s bracelet knew about my past. I suspected the murderer knew, which apparently made me a target.

  Resigned, I put on my best workout clothes, a pink T-shirt and black Lycra-snug tights, fluffed my hair and headed for Fit and Firm. With the club full of people during the celebration, I’d blend with the crowd.

  I drove past Fort Sam Houston, veered left on Dover Road and snaked through Terrell Hills, wondering when the murderer had entered my house. Anybody who saw me enter the club to exercise knew they had an hour, minimum, to search my bungalow before I returned.

  Cruising through manicured neighborhoods, I admired various sized lots and homes. Small houses were costly and taxes were high, but residents happily paid them because of the Alamo Heights schools. One reason I’d chosen Burr Road was because the neighborhood was safe. Or so I thought.

  Nobody besides me possessed a key to my house. I’d hidden an emergency key in the bushes by my front porch and told Grace about it. Although Sam had made me paranoid, I knew Grace would never enter my house without asking.

  The club provided locker keys attached to safety pins. When members put valuables in lockers, they pinned the locker key to their shorts or swimsuits. I took the key with me to exercise, but somebody could have broken into my locker and pilfered my house keys.

  I wound around Dover to Garraty and veered right, then left onto Vandiver Road. After a few blocks, I reached the old Austin Highway, not far from Fit and Firm. I parked in the club’s garage and strode toward the entrance, determined to find the crazy psychopathic killer who’d swiped my baby’s bracelet. Adrenaline pumped through me. When I saw the huge sign draped across the front of the building, my excitement mushroomed:

  FIT AND FIRM HEALTH CLUB’S TEN-YEAR ANNIVERSARY!

  NEW SPECIAL RATES!

  The anniversary celebration was well timed. After Holly’s death, Harry had told Sam the club lost members pretty fast. Someone had draped balloons around the entrance and on the check-in desk and tied them to chair backs in Tofu Temptations Grill. The staff had even decorated doors to the men and women’s locker rooms and left them ajar so prospective members could tour the entire facility.

  I was excited enough to think I could operate every machine in the place. I didn’t see anybody I knew, but I smiled encouragingly at new people milling around. Getting in shape made you feel like everybody else should get with it. I was almost brave enough to scale the steps on the mountain climber. Instead, I walked forty minutes on the treadmill to ease my itching feet and tamp my zeal down to a manageable level.

  After exercising, I went to the locker room to shower. With the suspicious bottles gone, I felt safe. The staff had done a good job of roping off bathrooms and changing areas to provide members with privacy. After folding my clothes in a locker, I wrapped myself in a club towel and headed through the passageway partitioned off for members’ access to showers, nodding at a few women along the way. Outside the barrier, I heard visitors’ voices.

  When I reached the showers, I saw somebody had even tied balloons to shower curtain rods. The area looked festive. I stepped into the shower, anticipating feeling fresh and invigorated, and turned on the water. Glancing down, I noticed a balloon on the floor. Was it leaking liquid or was water dripping from the shower?

  My curtain cracked open. Somebody heaved in another balloon. When it hit the floor near the first balloon and burst, my feet started to burn. A horrible stench rose from the tile floor. My eyes stung. I gasped. Unable to breathe, I leaped from the shower, grabbed my towel and crashed into a woman careening out of the adjacent shower. With the asphyxiating odor engulfing me, I charged for the exit door. As people screamed and ran from the locker room, I thought I heard Harry Thorne bellowing orders.

  We charged in a nude herd past the reception desk—women and men, in various sizes and stages of undress, barreling out the front door and crawling upward onto the sloping, grassy knoll next to the club. We got as far away as we could from the building and stopped to pant, sputter and cough...a wretched sound. Some people vomited. Others grabbed their throats or pressed hands against their eyes while they tried to cover their bodies.

  Mindy stood a few feet away trying to hold a towel across her chest and another one in front of her pelvis while she coughed violently and shook, poor thing. Knobs quivered several feet from me. Bent over, she rubbed her eyes and held her throat without bothering to cover anything. Most of the women struggled to cover some part of their anatomy. I had grabbed only one towel, so every time I coughed, I had to readjust it.

  Harry, Pete, Sarah and the other trainers tried to help people however they could. Staff members stood out from the rest of the herd, being fully clothed. I guessed they’d been too far from the stench to suffer symptoms. Male clients jumped up and down, holding their throats. They looked like huge naked grasshoppers.

  We were quite a group: sixty to a hundred naked or nearly naked people, spread out over the grassy knoll within reading distance of the huge sign on the front of the building,

  FIT AND FIRM HEALTH CLUB’S TEN-YEAR ANNIVERSARY!

  We looked like a Roman orgy. Tires screeched on the freeway. I guessed motorists thought Fit and Firm was definitely a club to investigate.

  I heard sirens and saw two fire trucks pull up. Firefighters reduced power on their hoses as much as they could and sprayed us. The spatter helped clear the noxious odor and washed the burning substance off our skin. We stuck our tongues out and let water run down our throats. Onlookers probably thought the San Antonio Fire Department was breaking up a nudist riot.

  Sam ran up to me. “Oh, migod.” He raced down the hill toward the EMS truck, yelling at technicians to haul up a stretcher. I realized the last time he’d seen me appear normal was in Tofu Temptations Grill three days earlier.

  Two emergency technicians raced up with a stretcher. I crumpled on it, as thankful for the covering sheet as for a place to lie down. While I coughed and clutched the stretcher’s sides, techs jostled me down the knoll toward the ambulance. I felt like I was galloping on the Body Trek. I bounced through a sea of inadequately covered bodies and flew past Mickey Shannon, naked as Adam, jumping up and down without a fig leaf. I would always remember him that way. From all his weight lift
ing, he probably looked better than Adam. He saw me and snarled.

  We jounced past Ned Barclay clutching a towel in front of his groin. He saw me fly past and turned tomato red.

  The technicians stopped to catch their breath before they hurled me into the ambulance. At that moment, I saw Sheldon Snodgrass wearing club towels wrapped around him like a toga. Engrossed in some sort of yoga move, he was oblivious to his surroundings. He seemed deep in meditation but karma made him aware of my presence. He spotted me, raised his arms and screeched. Fortunately, the techs shoved me into the truck before Sheldon’s towels fell off.

  Twenty-Seven

  I wasn’t on my leopard bedspread. My body lay on something hard and scratchy. I peered down through oxygen tubes taped to my nose and spotted white hospital sheets. Something weird had happened. I hoped the oxygen was destroying aging free radicals roaming inside my body. When I spied the plastic circle on my wrist, I remembered that somebody had stolen Lee’s baby bracelet. Taped to my other hand was an IV tube.

  Meredith laid her hand on top of my hospital bracelet. “Aggie. You’re awake.” She smiled. Her hair, usually perfectly groomed, resembled matted hay. Her clothes were wrinkled.

  Sam, trying to avoid the IV, patted my other arm above the elbow. “Boy, Aggie, you really scared us this time. How do you feel?” The thatch of hair splattering his forehead was beyond recovery. When I looked at him, his somber eyes perked up. I remembered being furious with him, but I didn’t feel angry anymore. What if I died and never saw him again?

  “I feel okay.” I sorted through memories, trying to figure out what was wrong with me, and remembered Sheldon’s party. I was definitely not hungry, but my stomach felt settled. I’d apparently survived Sheldon’s food euphoria. I hoped the purpose of the IV was merely to provide fluids.

  I peeked up to see if the egg above my eye had returned. My forehead appeared normal, except for scraggly bangs thrust forward like a broom. When I coughed, my insides hurt down to my navel. My lungs felt like rusty buckets. I remembered the awful smell in the shower. When I tried to inhale, I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs. I wheezed like an asthmatic—me, who was never allergic to anything. Having reduced breathing capacity scared me.

  Meredith reached beside my bed for a metal canister with a plastic cup attached to the top. “Here. Dr. Sheeply said to use this when you woke up. He called it a nebulizer, an aerosol inhaler to open air passages in your lungs to help you breathe.”

  She pointed the cup toward my mouth. “Exhale as much as you can through your nose, put the mouthpiece into your mouth, past your front teeth, and close your lips around it. Take a slow deep breath while you press down on the container to spray medication into your mouth and lungs.” Meredith would make a great nurse. I did exactly what she said.

  “Hold your breath five to ten seconds.” She checked her watch while I tried not to explode. “Now remove the cup and exhale slowly.” When I exhaled, Sam exhaled with me.

  I immediately felt better. “What is that stuff?”

  “Albuterol,” he said. “You can use it every four hours. If you need it again, Dr. Sheeply said to call the nurse.”

  Now I remembered technicians wheeling me into Methodist Hospital’s emergency room with my eyes watering. Every time I’d taken a breath, my chest hurt. Somebody slapped an apparatus on my face. I heard the words “chest x-ray,” “oximeter” and “blood gases,” then blacked out.

  “What day is it? How long have I been here?”

  “The ambulance brought you in yesterday, Monday. You were here overnight.” He looked like he’d been crumpled in a waiting room chair ever since I’d been admitted.

  “What was that stuff in the club shower that smelled so bad?”

  “Chlorine gas.” He paled. “Somebody placed a balloon filled with ammonia on the shower floor, then threw in another balloon filled with Clorox. The creep who did it cut slits in both balloons. When they collided, Clorox mixed with ammonia to produce chlorine gas. The lab boys figured that out. Our team, in rubber suits and gas masks, stormed in as soon as they could to confiscate the balloons. Chlorine gas is extremely caustic—burns everything it contacts—eyes, skin, respiratory track. That’s why you’re receiving nasal oxygen...to counter effects of the gas.”

  I remembered panicking in the shower, unable to breathe and desperate to escape.

  “Victims cough violently, can’t breathe and are terrified,” he said.

  I remembered hearing wretched coughing sounds as the naked herd charged for the exit.

  Everybody’s eyes, throats and feet were burning. No wonder they gyrated on the grassy slope.

  Sam held my upper arm with both hands, cradling my puny biceps and triceps in an effort to comfort me while avoiding my IV. “If your lungs had been seriously damaged, you could have suffered respiratory failure, had a heart attack and died.”

  When I tried to inhale, I coughed. My lungs were damaged. I couldn’t breathe deeply like I was supposed to, to lengthen my life span. The gas had destroyed my cells: traumatic senescence. My vital parts had suffered so much wear and tear, Error Theorists could display my organs in their lab. What few hormones I had left were in hiding. Izumi’s record was safe. I felt like I was a thousand years old. Maybe other club members actually died.

  Meredith seemed to read my mind. “Since you ran the water, a lot of the mixture washed down the drain. Gas still rose up the sides of the shower, but because you jumped out fast and ran to fresh air, the effects weren’t disastrous, thank heaven. The woman in the shower next to you didn’t act as fast—she didn’t see the balloon thrown in—but she wasn’t as close to the gas, either. They kept her overnight for observation and released her this morning.”

  I sent up a quick prayer, thankful to be alive. “Was anybody else hospitalized?”

  “No. They brought several people to the emergency room to be checked, but they’re all okay.”

  Sam regained his composure. “Since the gas was partially enclosed by the shower, the damage was contained. Somebody also tossed a couple of balloons into the men’s locker room, but no one was harmed.”

  With Sam back in efficiency mode, this seemed like a good time to ask why I was still in the hospital. He cleared his throat. “Dr. Sheeply wants to observe you and do a couple more tests. He’ll be in after lunch.”

  I didn’t like the expression on his face. “What tests?”

  “He mentioned a chest x-ray and oximeter.” Sam was usually very direct. I knew chest x-rays weren’t a big deal. The oximeter thing must be the booger.

  “Dr. Sheeply is a very kind man, a pulmonary disease specialist. Best there is. I checked around.” He patted my hand.

  I was grateful, but I didn’t like the “diseases” designation. Aging progressed more slowly in the absence of disease.

  At least Sam seemed to care about me, especially when I was incapacitated.

  Meredith reported the health club would close for a week. Staff had told members that workers were repairing a gas leak.

  Fit and Firm seemed doomed to suffer from lousy timing. Not only was their ten-year celebration ruined; they had to put off new prospects eager to join the club—all those people who witnessed the grassy slope dance. Maybe that was a good thing.

  “Did you hear any more about Harry?” I asked.

  “He’s very despondent. We’re keeping an eye on him.”

  Poor Harry. I decided not to mention I thought I’d heard Harry’s voice not far from my shower.

  Sam said once SAPD’s lab teams removed traces of chemicals, he could investigate the club without members and staff hovering around. I felt a twinge of guilt for not telling him all I knew. My remorse didn’t last long.

  Meredith said she was relieved to forego working out for a week. Her coursework for American and British Literature was getting heavy. I couldn’t process any more information. Until Dr. Sheeply came to discuss my condition, I just wanted to drowse.

  When I woke up, Meredith and Sam we
re gone. Dr. Sheeply held my wrist to take my pulse. Tall enough to play college basketball, he had chiseled features and a high forehead, which undoubtedly housed a bundle of brains.

  His kind eyes comforted me. I felt silly introducing myself to a man who was thoroughly acquainted with my innards, so I smiled meekly and waited.

  “Your pulse rate has slowed, Ms. Mundeen. That’s good. Let’s see what happens when you inhale.”

  Cautiously, I sucked in air. Inhaling was easier than before, but I still coughed.

  “Your heart rate is better than when you came to the emergency room. It approached one hundred sixty beats a minute when you arrived.”

  “Is my heart enlarged?”

  “No.”

  “I know I inhaled chlorine gas. What, exactly, did the stuff do to me?”

  “It irritated your lungs, made breathing difficult, made your eyes water and your throat burn. Chlorine gas acts like an acid, burning whatever it touches. If a person inhales enough gas, it attacks dry areas of the lungs, mixes with water and makes hydrochloric acid.”

  My heart skipped a beat.

  “The results can be fatal. Since you escaped the gas quickly, irritation to your respiratory track was minimal.”

  “Then why am I getting oxygen?” I was worried about oxidative damage.

  “To raise the oxygen level in your blood. When gas irritates your lungs and makes breathing difficult, the oxygen level in your blood decreases. Normal oxygen saturation is over ninety percent. Yours was seventy-eight percent when you came in. That’s why I kept you for observation.”

  I perked up. If my oxygen saturation returned to normal, I might be all right.

  “I want you to have another chest x-ray to check for fluid in your lungs and oximetry to measure your oxygen saturation.”