by Reyna Favis
Lucas blew out a breath. “Well, the producers want this done yesterday. I’m not sure I can stall them.” He went silent again, but then tried for a Hail Mary. “Any chance I can jump on your local thing? If we had something to air in the near future, they might be persuaded to wait.”
I exchanged a sad glance with Cam and my heart sank. “I don’t think we can do it. The person involved is unaware of the underlying nature of the incidents and we’re trying to resolve it without her being any the wiser.”
Cam snorted. “She thinks it’s a raccoon.”
Lucas huffed out a rusty laugh. “Maybe it is. There are frequently rational, perfectly mundane explanations for what people experience.”
I smiled at how he stubbornly held on to reasonable explanations, even after all we’d been through. “Yeah, Lucas, not this time.”
Lucas groaned. “I have another call on the line. Hold on just a sec.” When he came back to our call, he sounded dull and listless again. “Can we maybe talk later? The producers just called and want to discuss sponsors.”
Cam’s brow furrowed at the sound of Lucas’s voice, but then he nudged me in the ribs. “How about we get together for dinner this week? I’ll give you a call later to pick a date.”
Promising to make contact soon, we said our goodbyes. Cam rubbed his face and then looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “Shall we go see if we can do something for Maggie?”
“Don’t we need Zackie for this?” Just as the words left my mouth, Zackie announced her return by poking me in the back of the head with her muzzle. “Never mind. I’ll meet you there.”
# # #
Gloaming, a Scottish word for twilight, seemed like the best description for the dying light. We stood in the forest as the sun began to set, infected by the melancholia from the clearing where Maggie had taken her life. The leaves, the trees and the sky were all in shades of gray, the air oppressive and still. She knelt in the leaves, arms wrapped around her torso, holding herself as she rocked. Maggie muttered something in a low voice that seemed to repeat, but the cadence of the refrain broke when she abruptly stopped and shook her head, spraying droplets of blood from her short, dark hair. Her hands reached up to her ruined head, but then dropped back before making contact, once again grasping at her torso.
Dropping to his knees, Cam placed his hands on her shoulders. “Maggie, it’s all right now. We’ll help you.” He sounded far away and his voice made a hollow echo in my ears.
Twisting away, Maggie rocked harder. “You’re not there, you’re not there, you’re not there…” The litany of denial went on and on as she refused to listen. Zackie crouched near her bowed head to reach Maggie’s face with tentative touches of her muzzle. Sobbing with naked grief, Maggie leaned in towards this comfort, but then wrenched herself away. “I can’t. I’m sorry… I’m sorry.” Her voice shrank to a thin, spidery whisper as her form faded and we were left alone in the clearing.
Cam looked at me with large, helpless eyes and Zackie circled the clearing, frantic to find the scent of that tortured soul. I closed my eyes and shook my head, swallowing hard on the funky, earthen taste in my mouth. “She’s in so much pain, Cam.” Wiping my mouth with the back of my good hand, I looked around the clearing for any signs of Maggie. “We can’t leave her like this.”
“She’s left us. I don’t know what we can do at this point.” Cam forced himself to his feet.
Unwilling to give up, I turned in a slow circle and called to her. “Maggie, come back. We can help you. You don’t have to stay like this.” I forced my senses to the extremes of their reach, desperate to make contact, and it took my breath away for a moment. I bent forward with my hands on my knees, recovering before I tried again. “Zackie can make the pain stop. You have to come back.” I gave it a moment, but felt nothing except the empty night.
Cam turned on his flashlight and walked in the direction of the trail. “Come on. She’s not going to come back.” Zackie followed him, making soft whining sounds. Both her head and tail were slung low and her pace dragged as she left the clearing. I wasn’t feeling much better, but staying here was futile. Reaching for the headlamp that gripped my baseball cap, I clicked on the light and followed Cam and Zackie back to the trail.
After a few minutes of silent thought, Cam ventured forth with a hesitant analysis. “She kept saying that we weren’t there.” He paused and stepped over a fallen log before continuing. “Do you think maybe she was not a believer in the afterlife? To discover existence was not over when the body dies would come as a terrible shock to someone who died by suicide.”
“It’s possible…” I let the thought trail and released my foot from a vine. “You think she’ll come around if we just give her time to adjust?”
Cam grunted a little as a rock tipped under his foot, turning his ankle a small ways before he adjusted his balance. “Probably, but that’s assuming we’re right about her.” He stopped and cast his flashlight in front of us, seeking the best way through the forest growth. Skirting a briar patch, he continued walking and talking through the difficult case that was Maggie. “She also said she was sorry. That statement combined with her method of suicide indicates she might feel guilty about something.”
“Maybe she was apologizing for not being able to move on when Zackie offered.” I tried to untangle a thorny branch from my shirt, but ended up cutting it with my multi-tool to get free. Ducking my head to avoid some branches, I stepped forward. “While we let Maggie simmer, we should try to understand her story. That might give us a clue if we’re on the right path.”
“How about asking Jill Creighton?”
Working through a thicket, a branch caught me in the face and I was happy to be wearing eye protection. I answered Cam as I untangled my hair from snagging branches. “She was at the search, so she might know something.”
Cam caught himself as he stumbled over a decaying branch, but then picked up the conversation when he was steady on his feet again. “Cops talk to each other. I’ll bet she knows something about what happened with Maggie. If nothing else, we could at least get confirmation that it really was suicide. Remember the search for Amy Turpin?”
My head snapped up and I almost tripped. “How am I supposed to forget that? Zackie almost killed a guy.”
“Focus, Fia.” Cam made an exasperated noise. “What you’re not supposed to forget is that we made a wrong assumption. Amy was not a despondent. If we had been more critical at the start, we would not have ended up on the wrong end of a .38 special.”
I nodded slowly and picked my way through the vines that tripped Cam. Thanks to Zackie, we survived and also thanks to Zackie, the explanation for our survival was considered an unbelievable stroke of luck. Jill Creighton was a New Jersey State Trooper on the search and we discussed this mad miracle over cold pizza as I waited for the police to finish questioning Cam. When Jill learned that in addition to almost being shot, I had also recently lost my job, she helped hook me up with my new gig at the crime scene cleanup company. A friend indeed…
Sighing with relief, we emerged from the woods and hit the trail back to the parking lot. “I’ll give Jill a call tomorrow to see if she knows anything. But here’s the thing, this feels like a suicide to me. I get all the telltale sensations that, for me, are linked to suicide.”
“Look Fia, you might be right, you might be wrong. The best you can say is the sensations you experience are consistent with suicide. Don’t disregard them, but don’t completely buy into them. Untangling the emotional states involved in a death is a complex problem. It’s possible to feel similar sensations for different reasons.” He stopped on the trail, waiting until I nodded that I understood what he was telling me. “You can use your senses to rule something out, but it’s impossible to make a definitive judgment based on your perceptions alone. The best advice I can give you is to get as much information from different lines of evidence as you can before drawing a conclusion.”
“Nothing’s ever simple, is it?” I shook m
y head and kicked at a small rock. My shoulders slumped a little as I followed Cam up the trail. Just when I thought I was mastering this stuff, I learned a little more and saw the limits of my understanding.
“If it were simple, no one would be earthbound. We could just point them to the portal and be done with it.” We walked quietly for a while and I let the lesson sink in. Just before we reached the parking lot, Cam spoke again. “While you’re chasing down Jill, don’t forget about Ron Falling-Leaf. We need to know if he can help with our angry, trailer-thumping friend.”
I made a check mark in the air to let him know I’d do it and continued to the parking lot.
CHAPTER 2
I had gone to bed feeling virtuous. Even though we had not been able to bring closure to any of the spirits under our care, it was at least a start. I had even been able to get in some grocery shopping after our interlude with Maggie. Everything was as under control as anyone could hope. But I awoke feeling crappy and unwilling to get my day started.
I sat on the edge of the bed and contemplated the heavy neoprene diving glove on my dead hand. I normally sleep with a light, cotton glove, but upon waking up and making my discovery, I leaped out of bed and put the heavy glove on over the sleeping glove. The dead hand had been active last night. In addition to a burnt piece of paper on my nightstand, one of the large kitchen knives also graced this surface. A sense of dread had shot me through me as I gazed at the staged display. Hoping against hope, I had probed my environment for the presence of a spirit, desperately wanting to find an alternate explanation. But the fact was, the dead hand had somehow persuaded the rest of my sleeping body to get up and do things. This knowledge left me feeling shaky and not in control.
This dead hand was violating my autonomy and the more I thought about it, the more outraged I became. Outrage was better than feeling weak and powerless, so I deliberately fed the anger and thought about all the dangerous and humiliating possibilities of not being in control when I slept. What if I woke up one morning in a back alley shooting heroin, or maybe peeling off the pasties as I left a strip club? The anger got my blood flowing and made me want to hit something. I have few possessions, all bought with hard-earned money and I didn’t really want to sacrifice anything to this growing rage. I reined it in, stood up and stalked off to the shower to get ready for work. In a world frequently ruled by chaos, my first step was always self-control.
I was still seething as I shoved spoonfuls of cereal in my mouth and gulped coffee, but my mind churned, thinking it through and forming and rejecting ideas to deal with this new threat. I finally decided to tell Cam about this latest symptom and ask him to take me in if it got worse. We could buy handcuffs and he could lock me down every night. Of course, this all might be an overreaction. The dead hand had never done anything remotely like this before, so it was possible this event was a one-off. We might never have to resort to a lockdown, but I wanted a plan, just in case. With a working solution to manage the situation, I forced myself to pretend everything was normal and got through the routine of washing the breakfast dishes and driving to work.
Cleanup work tended to be sporadic. While each job paid pretty well, the frequency of jobs was fairly random, ebbing and flowing according to local crime rates, suicides and random deaths. Happy to have been called in, I wasn’t about to screw this up, issues with my dead hand or not.
Arriving at the job site, two white company vehicles stood in the driveway, so I parked in front of the house. Both the truck and the van bore discreet labels with the company name “BioSolutions” written in an unassuming font. People did not want to chat about crime scene cleanup with their neighbors, thus the non-descript company name and low-key presence. We were not the type of company that could leave a little sign on the front lawn to advertise our efforts when the job was done.
I walked to the truck and met Robert Gander, my on-site boss. Looking up to read the expression on his weathered face, I felt reassured that I wasn’t late, and offered a greeting. In stark contrast to his mahogany skin, Gander wore a white hazmat suit that distinguished him as the consummate professional, on the scene and ready for action. This was my second job with Gander and I had so far learned just enough from him to get into trouble, if left to my own devices. The job was more than just cleaning, requiring a lot of technical know-how to prevent spreading biohazardous contamination. Coming around the truck and limping into view was the site safety specialist. JoJo Kennelly had a lot of metal in him from a motorcycle accident in his youth, so he couldn’t do any of the heavy work. His job was to make sure we were properly suited up before entering any hazardous area. JoJo reminded me of an Old English Sheepdog, with a heavy fringe of gray hair flopping into his eyes and a sturdy build.
“Morning, Fia. Step in and suit up.” Gander held the truck’s door open for me and I made my way inside the vehicle. As soon as the door shut, I stripped down, placing everything I was wearing into a large, plastic container. Donning disposable underwear and socks, I stepped into the Tyvek hazmat suit and zipped up. Next came the boots, which I duct-taped around my ankles before pulling on disposable boot covers and duct-taping these securely to the boots. Grabbing a tight-fitting cotton hood, called a spray sock, I pulled it over my head and down my neck, and then enlarged the holes around my eyes and mouth so they could accommodate the goggles and the respirator. Corporate drilled into us the importance of universal precautions, which meant treating all bodily fluids as if they were infectious for bloodborne pathogens like HIV, hepatitis B and other stuff they don’t even know to test for yet. We suited up for every job and everything we removed from a site was treated as a biohazard.
After running some tape down the zipper front to seal it, I grabbed goggles, a respirator, and then slipped on two pairs of nitrile gloves before hopping out of the truck. I guess I was still slow in suiting up, since a short line had formed outside the truck door. “Sorry, guys.”
“No problemo, Fia.” Goose favored me with a lazy smile and tucked a wild strand of white blond hair behind an ear. His real name was John Broker and he was a transplanted West Coast surfer dude. He adopted Goose as his handle after he started working for Gander and kept repeating that whatever was good for the Goose was good for the Gander, not realizing that since Gander was the boss, the order ought to have been reversed. Goose jabbed a thumb towards the new guy standing behind him. “Oh, hey, this grommet is Rory Craymore.”
The new guy nodded my way. “Call me Roar.” I honestly didn’t think I could, so I just nodded back. He simply didn’t look like someone with that name. His build wasn’t fat or thin, just middling and kind of doughy. He was a little on the short side, with dull brown hair and a bland, non-descript face that would not stand out in a crowd. Rory Craymore would have made an excellent spy because no one would ever notice him. Apparently, an attention-grabbing name was a way to overcompensate for his physical limitations.
Gander propped the truck’s door open and motioned for the guys to get in and suit up. Once the two men were sealed in, Gander leaned against the closed door and then cocked his head, looking to me for clarification. “What does grommet mean?”
“I think it means something like newbie.” Oddly, my ability to interpret spirit meaning also seemed to work in translating surfer speak.
Nodding, Gander folded his arms across his chest and filled me in on the job. “What we have here is an unattended death.” He spoke with a gentle, Southern drawl and his tone was very matter-of-fact. “An elderly man passed away from natural causes and, unfortunately, his passing went unnoticed for several weeks.”
“And that’s where we come in?” I could only imagine what I’d be scrubbing today.
“Correct. The heirs wanted to sell the house, but they can’t put it on the market in its current condition. Remediation will include a mattress in the master bedroom, possibly the floor underneath it and we’ll have to neutralize the odor throughout the house.”
I turned to look at the house in question. It w
as ranch style and that was a big help when removing contaminated items. I was happy not to have to run up and down stairs to deal with the bedroom, but if anything leaked through the floorboards, I might end up going up and down the stairs to the basement. As I surveyed the house, I caught a glimpse of an old man with white, wispy hair gazing at us from a window. Glasses distorted his watery blue eyes and made them appear enormous. His mouth hung partially open in shock and he clutched at a gray cardigan around his thin chest, his fingers worrying the edges of the garment near his neck where a swarm of maggots crawled in decaying flesh. Just as our eyes met, Goose and the new guy piled out of the truck and my attention was drawn away. By the time I looked back, the man in the window had disappeared. Tensing, I bit my lip, but forced my attention back to the job.
The final touches of suiting up required JoJo’s help. After taping the hood to the hazmat suit, he then snugged the sleeves around the wrists of our gloves with some more tape and we were at last ready to slip on the goggles and respirators. I was just starting to drip sweat when Gander directed us to the van where we loaded up on duct tape, zip ties, a large roll of heavy plastic and some biohazard bags. Burdened with the tools of our trade, we entered the house through the back door. The smell hit me immediately, but I did my best not to show it. Goose was a veteran of these jobs and was not so inhibited in front of Gander. “Bro, good thing they hired us. That’s foul, totally buggery.”
Gander led the way through the living room and then cut right to a hallway that took us past the open doors of an office and a guest room. Aside from the odor and a thin film of dust collecting on surfaces, the house seemed neat and orderly. The last room at the end was the master bedroom. On the bed lay a comforter and sheets, stiff and encrusted with a dried substance that proved to be the source of the house-penetrating odor. I set to work stripping the bed, first placing the pillows in a biohazard bag and sealing the twisted end closed with a zip tie. Next, I unhooked the corners of the fitted sheet from the mattress and wrapped the other sheets inside of this, keeping the contaminating material contained in the bundle. This too went into a biohazard bag. Grabbing a bag in each hand, I headed out of the bedroom while the others hoisted the mattress and began sealing it in heavy-duty plastic.