This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015
A Kindle Scout selection
Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
ALSO BY DONNA WHITE GLASER
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
The lights hurt. She blinked until her vision cleared, and the room came into focus.
Hospital. Damn.
Her mother stood at the foot of the bed, staring down at her. Arie closed her eyes again.
“Are you awake?” Evelyn’s sharp voice sliced into Arie’s brain like a scalpel. “Arie?”
No. Arie let herself sink back into the darkness. Maybe, she thought, just maybe she could find her way back to the Light—the real one—the Light that bathed her in warmth and an all-encompassing, no-words-for-it love. It had to let her back in. She didn’t think she could stand living if it didn’t.
The next time she awoke, her father’s gentle smile greeted her. Arie let the warmth of his eyes spill into her own, feeling simultaneously grateful and . . . disappointed. The love that she had always reveled in felt pale, almost sickly. A wave of guilt flooded into her for making such a comparison, but even her father’s love couldn’t compare to the Other.
“Hi, Daddy,” Arie whispered. Her throat burned.
“Hi, baby.” Her dad placed the straw of a plastic mug with the hospital’s logo on it to her lips. Water—cool and pure.
Her throat still hurt. Arie reached her hand up to it, grimacing at the pain.
What?
Her fingers ran across the cloth lump of gauze bandages and sticky tape. Had something happened? Strange that she could remember being there with such stinging, poignant clarity, but she couldn’t remember anything about what had happened to her body right before.
“Was I in an accident?”
Her dad hesitated and looked away. Arie’s heart thumped. Although a quiet man, Ed Stiles was a pastor and not one to avoid questions, especially hers.
“Arie.” He cleared his throat and took a sip of her water. “It wasn’t an accident, hon. Somebody tried to hurt you.”
“Hurt me?”
Her dad nodded.
Something felt wrong. Arie struggled to remember but only managed to work up the beginnings of a wicked headache. “Who?”
“We don’t know.” Her dad’s smile faltered and melted away. “We were hoping you did.”
The fluid dripping into her arm was clear this time. Probably a good sign. Her mother sat on the bed next to Arie, holding her hand. Oh, crap, I must be dying. Wait. That’s a good thing.
“Hi, Ma.”
“Don’t call me Ma. You know I hate that.” She sniffed and cleared her throat.
“Are you crying?”
“Don’t be silly.” She brushed her daughter’s hair back from her face, then held a straw to her lips.
Water. Arie swallowed. The cool liquid simultaneously burned and soothed as it went down.
“It was amazing—so beautiful.” A wave of frustration made Arie’s head pulse, proof her heart was still beating. The puny, everyday, earthly words weren’t enough to explain what she’d seen and where she’d been.
“I don’t see what’s so amazing about getting stabbed in a parking lot in the middle of the night.” Her mother’s face, devoid of makeup for the first time Arie could remember, contorted in pain. She stood and paced at the end of the bed.
“That’s not important.”
Her mother spun, face twisted with incredulity. “Not important? Honey, you were attacked.”
Honey? Another first.
The endearment and the residual effects of the Other Side created a joy bubble that rose and spread into a wide smile. Probably looked goofy as hell. Well, not hell. If the Other Side was anything to compare it to, hell probably shouldn’t be taken lightly, either. Arie pushed that thought aside. The things she’d seen were all that really mattered.
Arie tried sitting up, but tubes tethered her to the bed. She fell back, weak.
“I saw heaven. It was . . . I can’t even begin to—”
“Arie, that’s enough. You’re getting too excited. You need to rest.”
“But—”
Her father walked in, holding two cups of coffee. He was wearing his favorite Christmas sweater—a faded green wool sprinkled with appliqués of tiny reindeer pulling teensy Santas all over it. Arie had given it to him when she was twelve and he’d worn it every December since. His brown eyes sparkled when he saw her. “Well, look who’s awake.” He handed his wife her coffee, then took her spot on the bed.
More hair brushing. Must be a thing people do in hospitals.
Arie tried again. “Dad, I went to heaven. It was beautiful.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” her mother snapped. “Not this again.”
“Evelyn, it’s okay.”
She whipped around. “Did they say her medication would do this? I’ll check with the nurse.” She strode out of the room.
“It’s not my medication. It was so real. More real than this is. And there was a . . . Light. It was love. I knew who It was. It was as if I’d always known.”
“Shh.” Her father covered her hand. His touch was soothing.
“But why is she mad?”
“She . . . honey, she’s not mad. She’s just upset.”
Not a foreign state for Evelyn Stiles. But how could a pastor’s wife be upset about heaven? Arie was so tired she almost couldn’t force the question out of her mouth.
“Arie, I know something’s happened to you. Something . . . life-changing. And I want to hear all about it when you’re able. I do. But you need to understand; something happened to us, too. The doctor . . . honey, the doctor told us you were dead. We thought we’d lost you. We were still sitting with him in that awful little room, trying to comprehend what happened, when a nurse came running down the hall. I think your mother is still trying to process everything. She needs time.”
“Daddy, it was s
o beautiful.”
“I know, honey. You’re going to tell me. But not now. Close your eyes.” He trailed his fingers over her forehead, a magical touch from her childhood. It erased the day, he’d said every night as he tucked her in.
“But—”
“Shhh.”
Arie’s eyes fluttered. Maybe just for a minute . . .
CHAPTER TWO
The small room felt like a coffin, hot and stifling, all the air used up in the swelter. People always talked about Wisconsin as if it only had winters, but summer, though as fleeting as a butterfly kiss, also carried a punch.
If there was any air conditioning in the office, Arie couldn’t feel it. The one small window had two file cabinets jammed up against it. Dusty manuals and three-ring binders piled on top killed off any hope of fresh air. Arie angled her arms away from her sides, irrationally hoping for a stray breeze to offset the dark circles forming there. Another trickle of sweat slid down her spine, pooling along the waistband of her skirt.
The man sat silently across the table from Arie. Basil Gallo wore his cropped black hair short, tight to his scalp, broken only by a crescent-shaped scar over his left ear. The scar trailed across the side of his head like a little pink worm.
Arie tugged at the scarf she’d used to hide her own wound curling at the base of her throat. The fabric was itchy and didn’t help matters with the heat, but with only a few months having passed since the attack, the gash was still puffy and an ugly dark red. She hated it.
Gallo’s leg jiggled manically as though he was trying to siphon off an overflow of energy. Darting black eyes scanned the wad of papers he clasped.
Arie couldn’t help staring at his hands. When not scrutinizing papers, he gestured wildly, accenting every statement with emphatic jabs of his stubby fingers. Dark patches of silky hair scattered ever so lightly across his knuckles, adding shadows to the movement. His hands were so clean. Her gaze returned like a cognitive tic to stare at his hands, wondering how he got them so clean. Nobody else would notice or even care, probably, unless they knew what this man did for a living.
She needed this job. And considering the nature of it, she hadn’t thought there would be a lot of contenders for the position. But the stack of applications next to the guy’s elbow was disconcerting.
Arie cleared her throat nervously. Gallo looked up sharply, but she had already plastered on an appropriately pleasant expression. Her left eye twitched at the effort. She faked a cough into her fist, using the distraction to scoot back in the chair. Her pantyhose were in full mutiny; one side half-twisted clockwise in an attempt to cut off the circulation to her leg, and the other surrendered to a snag that, despite a blob of iridescent Tango Mango nail polish, threatened to uncase her thigh like an over-boiled sausage. She silently cursed her mother’s relentless indoctrination in “how to be a lady.” What other twenty-five-year-old wore pantyhose these days?
“So, Arie—”
He pronounced it “Airy,” an image she would never relate to.
“It’s Arie, like the initials R. E. Arie Stiles.” They were the initials for her given name, which Arie told only to the IRS and God. She tugged at the scarf again.
“Fine. Arie. What makes you think this is something you can handle? It ain’t like TV. I don’t care what you see on those stupid crime shows. There’s nothing exciting about death.”
Arie was tempted to tell him just how familiar with death she really was, but she wasn’t sure whether that would make her appear more qualified or just weird. Instead, she merely said, “I know it’s not. Blood doesn’t bother me—other people’s, that is.”
She didn’t think it did, anyway.
“Blood is the least of it. Wait ’til you go home and find someone’s brain stuck on your shoe. Besides, it’s the smell that gets to people.”
She swallowed hard. “The . . . um?”
“Smell. Death has a smell. It gets in your clothes, your hair, your mouth, everywhere. You’re gonna be tasting it days later. I’m tellin’ you. It gets inside you.” Smiling, Gallo tapped the cage of bone that protected his heart, assuming he had one.
“Providing this kind of service”—his eyes held Arie’s, as though daring her to challenge the euphemism—“is not for the weak. We take care of the problems no one else can handle.” His hand—that clean hand—cut through the air, sweeping the “problems” away. “Don’t kid yourself that this is just some small-town outfit. We’re right here next to the I-94 corridor. We run jobs from Madison to Milwaukee and wherever else we need to. We go in; we handle the situation. We’re what you might call the specialists of death.” His fingers twitched quote marks over the last few words.
“It’s nice that you take, um, pride in your work.” An errant, sweat-dampened tendril of brown hair flopped over one of Arie’s eyes.
“What d’you expect? It’s a business.” Gallo squinted at her. “That’s what you gotta keep telling yourself. A business. Keep the emotions out of it. And what you gotta ask yourself is: Can you do it? Can you handle it?”
Arie cleared her throat. Could she?
“Don’t forget,” he added. “If you work up to full time, after a year, you get three sick days and a week’s vacation. Also health insurance. It’s crappy, and the premiums are killing me, but still.”
Thank goodness. Death had benefits.
CHAPTER THREE
“I don’t understand. Did you say ‘BioClean’?”
Arie could see the war waging beneath the facade of her mother’s near-perfect control of her facial expressions. Despite the barest Mona Lisa smile that a lifetime of cloaking her emotions automatically carved out of her mother’s lips, disgust showed in the infinitesimal tightening of her eye muscles and in a shadow curling at the corner of Evelyn’s mouth.
“What exactly is this BioClean, sweetheart?” Dad asked.
“It’s a crime scene cleanup company. I interviewed last week, and the owner called this morning to offer me the job.” Arie almost overdosed on the toxic levels of perkiness her own automatic response produced.
“But, why on earth . . .?” Her mother’s voice trailed off. It did that a lot. Her long, pale fingers touched the amber beads around her neck that coordinated perfectly with the rich earth tones she favored. The perfect pastor’s wife.
Exhausted, Arie dropped into her usual spot at her parents’ kitchen table—only four long strides from the back door or seven to get through the door leading to the living room. She’d known the measurements since she was fourteen.
Arie sighed. She’d never acquired the stamina to sustain social falseness the way her mother had. “I need the job. I haven’t worked in over six months.”
She decided not to bother with the obvious. Her parents were well aware of the circumstances that ended her last job. After all, working late nights at the bar had killed her. It wasn’t her fault it didn’t take. And her parents didn’t know that her rent was already three months past due, and she’d started hiding her car in back alleys to avoid the repo dude—when she could rally herself enough to get off the couch, that is. The eviction notice had finally penetrated the haze of depression she’d been living with since being squashed back into her body shell against her will. Some wills were bigger than others.
At any rate, Arie needed a job. Any job.
Her mother lifted her fingers to her temples, rubbing at the tension that details of her daughter’s life inevitably brought her. She threw in a grand display of in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth breaths designed to illustrate her control and dropped her hands to her teensy waist. “What about the job at the bank? I gave you the application, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but it’s only part time, and it only pays minimum wage. And no benefits.”
The latter fact scored a direct hit, what with the hospital bills that kept piling up after “the incident,” as Evelyn insisted on calling it.
Sitting quietly at the kitchen table, her dad nodded slightly at the point Arie made, but his wi
fe slid a quelling glance in his direction.
“Besides . . .” Arie eyed the back door. Just four strides. “It’s temporary. Just while I figure things out. You don’t understand what it’s like to have been—”
“You’re right; I don’t understand. I’ve never understood what you’re doing with your life.” Evelyn reverted to her usual back-up weapons: a main course of disillusionment with a topping of guilt. “Regardless of what you think happened during that incident, you still have to make your way in the real world with real people doing real things. You can’t keep living in this fantasy world that you’ve decided . . .” Evelyn pressed her fingers to her temples. When she finally spoke again, her voice was I-am-calm, I-am-peace saintly. “You have such potential. All of your teachers said so. Didn’t they, Edward?”
Permission granted, her father nodded.
“Ma—”
“Don’t call me Ma. You’re not a sheep. And you know I’m right. If you would just apply yourself, you could do anything. What about college? You only have a year left. Don’t you want to matriculate? I don’t know how you can just leave your education dangling. Of course, you need to rethink that silly degree you insisted on. I mean, really? English Lit? Is that going to help you get ahead in this economy? You should have taken something in computers or business, like your brother. He’s doing so well—”
“Mother, stop.” Arie’s shoulder muscles scrunched so tight they almost twanged. Not again. “I’m not Brant.”
“And we don’t want you to be.” Arie’s father stepped in on cue. “You just need to buckle down, that’s all.”
“Edward.” Evelyn reclaimed the conversational helm. “You can’t tell me that you think this disgusting cleaning job is a good idea?”
He cleared his throat. Loudly. “I can’t say I like the idea—”
“There. You see?”
“But if this is what Arie wants—”
“And that’s another thing, this ridiculous refusal to answer to her own name.”
The screen door banged against the frame on Arie’s way out, the same bang as when she was fifteen and forbidden to go to Leanna Schwarz’s birthday party because Leanna’s mom worked as an “entertainment specialist” at the Boys Only Club. It had happened again at seventeen, when nobody had believed her story about burglars taking the minivan on a joyride up to Madison and, in an amazing coincidence, left it outside Abercrombie & Fitch, Arie’s favorite store at West Towne Mall.
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