by Sheedy, EC
OVER HER DEAD BODY
EC Sheedy
DEDICATION
For Tim … always.
My certainty in an uncertain world.
And in remembrance of Zuke, our wonderful Ridgeback friend. So missed.
Copyright 2015 EC Sheedy
OVER HER DEAD BODY
All rights are reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Thank you for respecting the work and legal rights of this author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author's imagination. Should there be any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, it is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Other Works
CHAPTER 1
Mary Weaver picked up the phone, scrunched her eyes tightly closed, and concentrated on her next move. What was it?
One more call to make. Yes. One more call.
Goodness, but her leg hurt. She looked down at it. All swollen up, like a fat blue-veined sausage, the stuffing inside too big for the skin holding it in.
I have to make things right. No time.
She rubbed her knee, looked around the large room she was sitting in, and forced her brain to plod through the mist blurring its edges, threatening to curl inward, obscure everything.
Rain. There was rain beating on the old roof, wind hissing down the chimney. Not light. Not yet.
Where am I?
Why is it so dark? She should clean the windows. Yes. They were all fuzzy.
She shook her head until it throbbed, then blinked. No, the windows weren’t fuzzy. She was.
Mary let the tears, frail and hot, run down her puffy cheeks and drip onto her stained nightgown.
She struggled to remember putting the gown on but could not. Buffeted by a new confusion, she sat stone still on the edge of the bed, clasped the gown’s lace-edged collar, and bunched it tight under her chin.
Naked. She’d been naked, dressed by a stranger. The grayness of shame colored the fog in her mind. So many strangers …
Maybe that woman … the one she didn’t like. The one with the hard hands. Hadn’t she come yesterday? Last week?
Out of memory, out of time, panic closed her throat. Urgency clutched her heart. She had to make things right.
“Dear God, tell me, please … where am I?” she screamed into the empty room.
And, as if her scream were a wind blowing at it hard and fast, the fog receded, leaving the barest of clearings. Thoughts straight and sharp rose on the landscape.
Relief flooded her. “You’re home, you mad old woman,” she whispered and ran a hand over the mattress of the familiar bed she sat on. “Home,” she repeated. “In Mayday House. Where you’ve always been.” She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “You’re here, in the now.”
She brushed the moisture from her cheeks, firmed her will, and tightened her grip on the phone still in her hand.
“And the now won’t last, so you’d best get on with things.”
And she did.
Keeley Farrell’s cab pulled up to Mayday House as two young men were rumbling a laden gurney toward the gaping doors of the County Medical Examiner’s van. Her heart constricted painfully, then shrank in her chest.
Oh, my God, I didn’t make it!
She flung the cab door open, got out, and ran toward the van. Unable to speak, she held up a hand to halt the men who were about to slide a sheet-draped body into the vehicle’s cavity. Several strands of long gray hair had escaped the white shroud, straggling across the white cotton as if drawn in charcoal.
Keeley closed her eyes to hold back the flood of tears gathering there.
“Ma’am?” one of the men asked. “You okay?”
She opened her eyes, took a breath and, ignoring his question and the concern in his curious gaze, placed her hand on the still, covered figure on the stretcher, near the heart. Mary’s fine, good heart. Stopped now. Never to beat again.
“I’m too late,” she murmured. “I’m sorry, Mary. So very sorry.”
“We have to go, ma’am.”
“I want to see her,” she said.
“I don’t know …”
While he hesitated, Keeley loosened the sheet and folded it back, exposing Mary from head to waist. She gasped.
Stringy gray hair framed a face so swollen and discolored that for a heart-stopping moment she had the crazy hope she was wrong, that this wasn’t Mary. Wasn’t the woman who’d raised her after the death of her mother, the woman who’d loved her. The woman who’d known her better than she knew herself. But of course it was.
Keeley reached for Mary’s hand, turned it over in her own, and gripped it tight.
Gently, she brushed the hair back and off her forehead and bent to kiss it.
“Godspeed, Grandmother. Godspeed,” she whispered against the cold flesh, wishing with all her heart her prayers carried past her own failed loyalties.
“Ma’am?” the attendant said again. “We really have to go.”
She nodded, straightened away from the body and, swallowing hard, covered Mary’s face.
The two men slid the body into the truck and closed the door. While one headed for the truck cab, the other gestured toward the house. “There’s people up there if you have questions.”
“Yes, thank you.”
Keeley dealt with the waiting cabbie, then towed her rolling suitcase up the broken concrete path to its latest resting place, and with luck, its last—Mayday House.
Home.
Sort of.
She was met at the door by a tall, dark-haired woman.
“I’m Keeley Farrell,” she said, attempting a smile.
“From your message to Mary, I expected you earlier. Considerably earlier,” the woman said, her tone cool, her eyes accusatory.
“Yes. Sorry. I had travel problems.” Understatement of the year but enough said to cover the subject. “What happened?”
“A better question would be, what didn’t? Heart failure, dementia, edema …. Didn’t have to happen, either.”
“Then why did it?”
“She became difficult, refused to take her medication.” The woman’s face had the stern grain of old lumber, and her voice dripped disapproval.
Keeley, not impressed with either the woman’s manner or tone, leveled her gaze on her. “Who are you, exactly?”
“Marion Truitt. I’m a private nurse with Barrker Contingent Home Care.”
“Not much of one, by the look of things.”
“I beg your pardon?” Her eyes widened, her mouth tightened.
“Mary’s face was dirty, her nails—also dirty—were unclipped. And her nightgown looked as if it hadn’t been changed in weeks. If that’s how bad she looked on the outside, my guess is you weren’t doing much good for the inside, either.”
“As I said, she
was extremely difficult and—”
Keeley wasn’t in the mood for excuses. Incompetence, it seemed, stalked the world—that and not giving a damn. She pegged Truitt as guilty of both. “How about you get your coat and broomstick, Marion Truitt,” she said brusquely. “Your services—or more aptly lack of them—are no longer required. And if there’s money owing, forget it. I write a convincing letter. One your boss would not enjoy reading.” She walked past the gaping woman into the house and didn’t look back, even when the door slammed hard enough to shake the ancient rafters.
After propping her suitcase against the entryway table, she took a good look around.
The house looked as though it had been ransacked by a gang of bears on a honey hunt. Stuff—and there was no other word for it—was everywhere, a lot of it books, magazines, newspapers. A layer of dust and grime stuck to every surface unfortunate enough to have missed the plop of the daily press. Through the open kitchen doorway she spotted the sink. It looked set to collapse under the weight of dirty dishes.
Oh, Mary …
Numb, she stood in the front hall, rubbed her face, then shoved her hair back, unable to ignore the painful stabs of guilt poking her already overloaded conscience. Mary should have told her she’d been having hard times, shouldn’t have left her to hear it from some unknown female who’d left a whispery, virtually unintelligible message on the New York office’s voice mail. It was miraculous it had even found its way to the hospital—or the tent that passed for a hospital— where she was working in Darfur, Sudan.
A day later and she’d have missed it entirely.
The loss of three aid workers during a brutal attack on a neighboring village had her team again decamping and awaiting instructions. Given the dangerous, unpredictable situation in Darfur at the time, the directors of Medics-At-Large, MAL, the humanitarian organization she worked for, opted to pull Keeley’s entire team. Some of the newer arrivals were redeployed; others, like Keeley—with problems—were sent home.
In the dark of her sleepless nights, she’d been secretly relieved the decision had been made for her. Something else to feel guilty about.
The call telling her she was needed at Mayday House, the chance to help Mary, couldn’t have come at a better time. But she’d expected Mary to be here, for them to work together—
“Are you Keeley?”
Startled, her heart jerked in her chest, and she spun to face a young girl, late teens, early twenties maybe, standing on the stairs, her hand on the newel. “That’s me,” Keeley said. “And you are?”
“Bridget. Bridget Garner.” She hesitated. “I’m the one who called you. I hope that was okay.”
“Better than okay and greatly appreciated. Thank you. I’m only sorry I didn’t get here sooner.” Keeley gave the girl a quick scan. Short, blond, sickly thin, and with nails chewed to the cuticle.
“Yeah … I guess I should have called sooner, but Miss Truitt said not to, and like I didn’t know she was like going to—you know— I’m real sorry.”
Keeley shook her head. “It’s okay. But I did wonder who exactly called. You didn’t leave a name.”
“Didn’t I?” The girl frowned, brought her index finger to her mouth. “I thought I did.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Keeley forced a smile. “You’re one of Mary’s girls, aren’t you?”
“Not anymore, I guess. I was, though.” She touched her tummy with a splayed hand. “I lost my baby. Seven months along. That was a while back. I kind of like … stayed on,” She lifted a bony shoulder, then dropped it. “To help Mary.”
And because you had nowhere else to go, like so many of Mary’s sad and confused guests over the years.
“I see,” Keeley said. But from the look of the place, she assumed Bridget’s help didn’t amount to much. And from the look of the sad-eyed girl in front of her, she assumed Mary wouldn’t have expected it. Unless things had changed in the years since she’d left Mayday House, it would have been Mary doing the helping.
“When she was … okay, Mary talked about you a lot.” Bridget started to cry. “She was the only one—”
Keeley went to her and put an arm around her shoulder. “I know. Mary was the only one to help—to love—a lot of people. Me included. I ‘kind of stayed on’ with her, too.”
“She said you were like”—she gulped a breath— “her granddaughter or something.”
“Yes.” Keeley didn’t say more, afraid the words would turn to a river of tears. At the moment, the fine line between granddaughter and goddaughter was too blurred to explain.
Bridget sniffed and rubbed her cheeks with both hands. “She didn’t much like crying, did she?”
“‘Tears are for silly boys and sissy girls.’” It was oddly comforting to repeat Mary’s oft-used adage—always said with a grin. And empowering. Because as Keeley had learned so well in Africa, all the tears in the world, all the days and nights trying to stop your body quaking in pain and fear, didn’t bring back the dead, or make things the way you wanted them to be. No. A person had to do, keep moving, make use of themselves. She’d come home to do exactly that.
Bridget smiled a bit. “Yeah.”
“Now, if I know Mary, there’s bound to be a cup of tea or coffee around here somewhere.”
Before following Bridget into the kitchen, Keeley took another look around at the sorry state of the house. One thing was obvious, if she planned to return Mayday House to Mary’s vision, make it serve again, she was in for an awful lot of work.
A mingled sense of calm and excitement settled over her. Anticipation.
Because if it was true hard work was good for the soul, she needed all she could get.
Gus Hammond paced the plush carpet in bare feet, his white linen slacks wrinkled from the heat, his black shirt still crisp from Rodina’s meticulous ironing—his state of mind somewhere in between. He used both hands to shove his thick, sleek hair—nearly as black as his shirt—behind his ears. When this was over, the first thing he’d do was get it cut and buy some goddamned jeans. The GQ model look, always Dinah’s choice, was history.
He poured himself a JD neat and walked to the window, a wall of glass twenty feet high and probably three times as long. He stared for a moment at the horizon, a sharp sunlit line where a diamond-bright ocean met a shimmering blue sky, a sky deepening slowly into early evening.
Gus glanced down at the view of South Beach far below, the old neon-lit hotels; the blue of the Colony, the hot pink of the Boulevard. Throngs of people cut through the heat, out for a night of salsa and sex—the women wearing barely enough to stay legal. Miami Beach, where the perfect body hunted the perfect checkbook—and generally found one.
As he had.
From his vantage point, the street action was so far below, the scurrying people were ant-sized, too insignificant to matter. Exactly how Dinah liked them.
The penthouse, Dinah’s latest acquisition and decorating work in process, boasted the best views in Miami. A guy could see forever, if there was anything out there he wanted to see.
He drank his whiskey slowly, thinking how he couldn’t wait to leave this place behind, get back to Seattle where he could do what needed to be done. Hands on, goal in his sight line, with the added bonus of having Josh close by again. Damn, he missed the kid.
“Mr. Hammond?”
He turned. “Uh-huh.”
Rodina, the housekeeper, had taken a step or two into the room and stood silently with her hands clasped in front of her. “Mrs. Marsden is on her way up. She’d like a gin and tonic,” Rodina said. “I’d do it, but she said—” She looked momentarily timid.
“She said, tell Gus to do it.”
She nodded.
He moved automatically to the bar. “Thanks, Rodina.”
She’d barely left the room when the elevator doors opened and Dinah Marsden entered. Tall, slender, and attractive in the high-toned, casually sophisticated way she favored, she looked at least a decade or two younger than her fifty-eight
years, the feat a combination of good genes, a rigorous fitness regimen, and the best cosmetic surgery money could buy. In Dinah’s case, her money bought a lot.
Oh, yeah, and sex. Dinah believed great sex, and lots of it, was the real fountain of youth.
The sex was Gus’s contribution, or had been, until he’d developed a chronic headache.
Dinah dropped her tote and a couple of logoed bags on the pure white leather sofa. The massive room had two colors, white and a blue so pale it barely registered as a contrast. The bags, one silver colored, the other black and gold, slid from the sofa to the carpet like a dark stain. Dinah ignored them and walked toward Gus.
Taking his face in her hands, she kissed him hungrily, and he let her, out of habit, enfolding her in his arms. She pulled back, touched his mouth with a long crimson nail. “I’ve missed you, baby,” she whispered, running a finger along the jagged scar that ran from below his ear, along his jawline, almost to his chin.
He didn’t bother mentioning it was her call to spend the whole goddamn day at the spa. No doubt because she knew what was coming. He picked up her G&T from the bar and handed it to her. “We need to talk,” he said, setting down his glass.
She immediately looked wary, then kicked off her shoes and took a seat on the sofa. “I can think of other things that are a lot more fun.” She undid the top two buttons of her shirt, stretched out her long tan legs, and looked at him from under her lashes.
“Kittenish isn’t your thing, Dinah.”
“I know, but it was worth a try.” She laughed then, pulled her legs up under her, and took a sip of her drink. “God, it’s miserable out there today. Hades hot and the humidity’s thick enough to drown in.” She took another drink “Thank God for air conditioning. Did Peter call about the tapestry for the bedroom?”
“No idea. I didn’t answer the phone.”
“Why not?”
“I was busy.” He took the chair across from her, leaned back, and perched one ankle on the opposite knee. He gripped it tightly instead of gritting his teeth at her latest attempt to divert the conversation, escape the inevitable.