The noise brought Grumpa stomping down the hall to them. “Here now! You be careful there. Don’t you have any respect at all? This isn’t going to work out. I can’t have all this commotion. And I’m not going to have you crashing around and destroying my things. You never could—”
“Now, Harlan, let’s just relax,” Ed interposed. “Nothing was broken, and it’s just as much my fault as Arie’s. Neither one of us meant to disrespect your belongings.”
“Oh, really? Well, if we’re talking about disrespect, none of this was my idea, was it? If barging into a man’s home and forcing him to play nursemaid to a—”
“It wasn’t my idea, either,” Arie said. “And, for the record, I’m the one supposed to be watching you.”
“That’s enough, you two,” Ed said. “This is going to help both of you. In fact, I’m sorry to have to point this out, but neither of you has a choice. Instead of snapping at each other, you should be grateful.”
“Grateful?” Grumpa snorted. “Grateful for—”
“Yes. Grateful. Now, we’re going to need to find a new place for this cabinet. It sticks out into the walkway, and it’s going to get bumped again. Do you want it in your bedroom instead?”
“I want it back where it belongs.” Grumpa pointed through the open door of Arie’s new room.
“I understand you don’t like change, but Arie has to have a place for her things, too. How about the den?”
“No, it doesn’t belong there.”
“Harlan—”
“It can stay right here until she gets her own place, and then it can go right back where it belongs. The girl can be careful, can’t she?” Grumpa didn’t wait for an answer before marching back to the kitchen.
Arie sighed. “Dad, I can’t—”
“Honey, this is just temporary. Heaven knows it’s not ideal, but really, what can you do? Not that I would mind, but if this doesn’t work out, you’ll have to move back in with your mother and me. And that means your grandfather would end up in a nursing home. Either that, or he moves in with us, and you find other arrangements. Or, heck! We might all end up living together—one big happy family.”
Father and daughter shuddered.
“Okay, but what about when I’m back on my feet?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. At any rate, with you living here, we’ll have a better understanding of Harlan’s situation. He seems sharp as a tack to me, but your mother’s worried. And he has made some unusual choices lately.”
Arie sighed again, then went into her room to unpack. She wanted to make it as comfortable as possible. She had a feeling she’d be spending a lot of time there.
CHAPTER TEN
A few days after she’d settled in with Grumpa, Guts finally called. The job was on the rich side of town. The huge white van with BioClean emblazoned on the side was parked in the lot, letting her know she’d found the right address. As Arie pulled in next to it, she noticed a man walking away from the building. As he crossed in front of her car, their gazes met and held.
Wow.
The blue of his eyes almost stopped her heart, but it restarted with a bang when he tossed her a wink. He was parked two slots down, and Arie got a nice, long bonus view of his butt while he walked to his car. She snatched her gaze away when he glanced back, but not before he caught her.
She waited until he’d driven off before getting out of her car. She noticed a sleek black pickup with the same logo parked next to the van. Oh, crap. The boss was here, and she was loitering in the parking lot, ogling strangers.
She thought about the guy’s wink and decided it had been worth it.
Guts stood next to Grady in the pristine white living room, issuing instructions. Grady had his clipboard out, and was nodding and taking notes. He wore his suit, too, but Guts was keeping it simple with jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with the BioClean logo. Arie hadn’t seen Guts since her interview and wondered if Grady had told him about her weird behavior at the hoarder job.
As she approached the men, Guts was saying, “Took the cops forever to release the scene. I was starting to think we weren’t gonna get the job, but the head of the HOA finally called and gave us the go-ahead.
“Bruno and Stan are gonna hate missing this one, but they’re on another job. So make sure you don’t eff this up. This is the big leagues here. The broad was a famous writer. Made a boatload o’ cash with some girly book”
“Cool,” Arie said. “What did she write?”
“How should I know? You think I got time to read? I got a business to run here.”
Arie decided to fade into the background. She really didn’t want to call attention to herself. Given recent events, she had no idea how she would react to a murder, and she certainly didn’t want to risk having a vision in front of her boss.
As soon as Guts left, Arie started hauling supplies to the apartment while Grady set up a clean zone—an uncontaminated area they could use as a base for supplies and equipment. In a job this “wet,” booties and gloves were changed each time anyone on the crew crossed the barrier. In this case, the wide, square foyer was the obvious choice for the clean zone, and little more needed to be done.
Grady and Guts had done the preliminary inspection. The murder itself had taken place in the victim’s bedroom, but according to Grady, other areas were involved, too. Apparently, the victim had tried barricading herself in the bathroom, but then the attack crossed the hall to the bedroom.
Arie listened carefully as Grady outlined the plan.
“Okay, first we grab and bag. Then we do a preliminary wash down of the walls and exposed surfaces. I’m guessing we’ll have to dump the mattress. After all that, we’ll pull the carpet and see what we got to deal with then.”
“What do you mean?”
“If she bled out on a tile floor, there might be a chance that the underlayment wouldn’t be too bad. But a carpet? No way the underflooring won’t be a mess. This one time? The blood soaked all the way through to the apartment below.” Grady grinned. “That was a pretty good job there. It turned into a two-fer. We got called in to deal with the overflow in the downstairs place.”
Crime scene cleanup had its own special kind of humor.
Arie decided to do a preliminary look-see, so she’d know what to expect. She started with the bathroom. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared, but nevertheless, it was obvious that an attack had occurred there. Bloody footprints and streaks smeared in long swaths across the tiled floor. Arie could tell the victim had attempted to hold the door shut against the intruder. She avoided looking directly at the blood. For now, anyway. She wasn’t sure how she would handle it when she had to, and she didn’t want Grady popping in until she did know.
Following the blood trail, she saw that the attack continued across the hall into the victim’s bedroom. Once a pristine white oasis, the room now looked like an abattoir. Most of the furniture was covered with a fine layer of fingerprint dust. As nearly as Arie could tell, Grady may have gotten his wish about the mattress. It looked as if it had been spared.
Unfortunately, the carpet did not fare as well. Arie swallowed. Grady had said they might have to remove floorboards. How could that much blood come from just one person? That was when Arie made her mistake. She looked at the blood dead on.
A red haze covered her eyes, and utter panic flooded her body and soul. She grabbed the edge of a nearby dresser to steady herself.
As before, the blood shimmered with an almost painful radiance. Arie tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs would only cooperate with short, raspy pants.
Fear—no, panic—scattered her thoughts. Lossst. The thought intruded like a knife into her skull. So lost. Where am I? Good question. Not hell, Arie decided. But definitely not the place Arie had visited during her own time on the Other Side. Lossst. She sensed the voice coming from a place of confusion and despair. Arie felt it trying to take over her mind. There was an unearthly wailing and an endless stretching of time. A low, mo
aning chorus filled her ears.
“Holy, holy, holy.”
It took a minute for Arie to understand why Grady didn’t burst through the door. She wasn’t hearing with her ears but with her mind.
She began to hyperventilate. The white flash exploded in her head. Then . . .
Frenzied movement. A knife arcing through the air. Hands—a man’s hands—clutching at my throat. They grip like a vise, fingernails digging into the soft flesh of my throat. The pressure . . . closing around my neck . . . the red haze deepens.
Flash.
“Holy, holy, holy.”
Flash.
Head bowed, his honey-blond hair hides his face. He slips the ring on my finger. Thank goodness I’ve just had a manicure. I reach with my other hand to stroke his hair.
The engagement ring—an exquisite solitaire-cut diamond so large it weighs my hand down—sparkles like sunlight reflecting off a crystal-clear lake.
Church bells pealed so loudly that Arie instinctively flinched. She choked on the mingled scents of roses and lily-of-the-valley, so thick she could taste them.
Flash.
Hands clutch my throat. Pressure . . . building . . . the dark is coming.
Flash.
A voice thundered, “The blood cries to Me.” Arie stumbled to her knees, grabbing at her ears, even though the sound was internal.
Flash.
My old Raggedy Ann doll is in her place on the shelf next to the journal: cracked red leather, a silver lock and clasp. And a key—dull, though, and too large to fit the diary’s tiny lock. Rags. Keep it safe.
Flash.
The bathroom is filthy, of course. The tub’s loaded with dirty dishes, pots, and pans, just like it always is. They shut the water off ages ago. I’m filthy. I turn to the sink. It’s just as dirty. I’m not supposed to use the jug of water for bathing; it’s for drinking. But I have no choice. I’ll never make it out of this dump if I let myself—my outside self—look as nasty as I really am. I refuse to look in the mirror. There’s nothing there I want to see, anyway. I open the medicine cabinet, as much to avoid the mirror as to get the mouthwash I have stashed inside. Cockroaches scatter, as chaotic as my thoughts. I slam the cabinet door shut. And there I am—almost a woman, blond, green-eyed.
Flash.
A wash of bleach filled Arie’s nostrils, so real she choked, and her eyes watered. A two-inch stack of typed papers sits on the desk in front of me. The black ink nestles against the white background like a million spiders on a web. My book, and it’s finally finished. It’s going to be even better than before.
Flash.
The diary again. The smell of bleach lingers.
“What the hell are you doing now?”
Grady’s voice pierced through the red haze that enveloped Arie. She gasped, almost as grateful for the fresh air as she had been during Grady’s initiation test back at Leonard’s house.
Grady stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had. He crossed his arms and waited.
Arie stood and gave herself a mental shake. “I, uh, I was just . . .”
“Listen,” Grady said. “It’s just another job. You can’t let what happened here get to you. Don’t start imagining things. That’s what’s getting Rich into trouble. Imagining things. He’s letting it into his head, and that’s a bad scene.”
“What’s going on with Rich?” Maybe he had some weird psychic power, too? “I thought he was Guts’s go-to guy.”
“He is. He’s been with Guts since the beginning. But look at his life now. His wife took the kids and left him a year ago. Moved back to Utah with her family, and now he never sees the kids. He used to be on the bowling league, went to church, you know? He had a life. Now all he does is wash his hands a hundred times a day and run around disinfecting his house. Cleans all the time. He’s got this sweet Corvette he’s been working on for years, and now he won’t even go near it.”
“What happened?” Arie asked the question even though she’d already guessed the answer.
“This job happened,” Grady said. “He started seeing things.” At the look on Arie’s face, Grady shook his head. “Not like imaginary things. He just started seeing how things happened, you know, like, to the victims. You work here long enough, you start to figure things out. Probably every single one of us could be one of those CSI techs. Take this job—it’s obvious she tried hiding in the bathroom. If you let your mind go there, you can see it. Her running to the bathroom, some dude chasing her. She gets there, she thinks she’s safe, but he gets there, too. And she can’t get the door shut. There you go. You can see it, right? The whole thing. And that’s just the start. ‘Cause then you can see them cross the hall. Maybe he’s dragging her. Maybe she took off, trying to find the phone. Whatever. It’s all right here, laid out like a story. If you start telling yourself that story, you’re going to lose it. You can’t let that stuff into your mind. You’ll go crazy. And you won’t be the first.”
If he only knew.
After they had fully suited up, Grady handed Arie a box of red, heavy-duty garbage bags. The bathroom was too small for them to both work inside, so Grady settled in there and sent Arie to the bedroom to start clearing away items contaminated by fingerprint dust.
“But how do we know if the family wants some of this stuff?” Arie asked.
“You got to make a judgment call. The more personal it is, the more you know you gotta keep it. Just make sure you mark the bags and set them aside for the family. And for Pete’s sake, don’t mix them up.”
Arie steeled herself as she went into the bedroom. Like the living room, the decor was white-on-white, except, of course, for the surfaces that had been splashed a gory brownish maroon or coated in black fingerprint dust. A four-by-five puddle of blood pooled at the foot of the bed. There was no way the carpet could absorb the amount of blood that had been shed there. As Arie stared the center of the pool, it began to shimmer and glisten. A tendril of fear twisted through her body.
Arie shut her eyes and took a deep breath. When she was certain she wasn’t going to succumb to another vision, she opened her eyes, careful to look away from the puddle.
Her eyes fell on an object on the floor near the walk-in closet. It was easy to understand how she’d missed it. Like everything else in the room, it was white.
And it would certainly qualify as a personal item.
Arie walked closer and picked it up. A wedding dress. An expensive one, by the look of it. A bloody shoe print on the embroidered bodice was its only imperfection. She checked the label. Yup. Vera Wang.
The dress reminded her of the engagement ring from the death vision. That had also been pretty spendy. The embroidery glittered. So pretty. An alien trickle of pride flittered through Arie’s chest. Arie shuddered, dropped the dress, and backed away.
Closing her eyes didn’t help this time. Someone else’s fear swamped Arie, flooding her from the inside out.
Flash.
The hands at my throat . . . squeezing . . .
A crash from the bathroom jolted Arie out of the trance. She leaned against the dresser, trying to catch her breath.
“Sorry about that,” Grady called from the other room. “I knocked over the bucket.”
“No problem,” Arie managed to say.
“You okay in there? You don’t sound good.”
“I’m okay. I just, uh, it’s just hot in this suit.”
To Arie’s relief, she heard Grady mutter his agreement from the bathroom. With grim determination, she grabbed a fresh garbage bag and approached the Vera Wang as if there could be a cobra hidden in its folds. A thought occurred to her.
“Hey, Grady? This dress has blood on it. It’s evidence, isn’t it?”
He came and stood in the doorway. “If it was evidence, they would have taken it.”
“But look.” She spread out the dress. “It’s got a bloody footprint. Maybe they missed it.”
“I doubt it. Cops don’t miss things like that.” At her expressi
on, he sighed. “Okay, stick it in a separate bag, and we’ll have Guts call ‘em. And see if you can hustle a little bit more. You should be done clearing by now.”
This was going to be a long day.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Grady wiped the walls as Arie continued clearing the room of blood-contaminated objects. She started with the Vera Wang. The bloody smear seemed to hum when she picked up the dress, but she took a deep breath and forced herself to stuff it deep into a large red biohazard trash bag. She moved to the dresser, a modernistic black-lacquered monstrosity. Its surface was so shiny, her face loomed out of the black depths when she peered down at it. Suddenly, a red haze misted over her reflection. An atonal chorus sang, “Holy, holy, holy . . .” Arie gasped and pulled back as though from an abyss.
The blood cries to Me . . .
Teeth chattering, she cleared the dresser, tossing a hairbrush and a deodorant stick into the bag as she went. When she came to a jewelry box, she set it aside. There wasn’t any blood on it, but it was covered in fingerprint dust and needed to be wiped down.
Arie moved to the nightstand beside the bed. Sprays of blood streaked across the top, and it looked as though it had been shoved to one side. A drawer was open a few inches. Had the victim been trying to reach into it? Some people kept guns in their nightstands for home protection. A can of mace, maybe? Or had the killer rifled through it, looking for something? Arie glanced at Grady. She knew he was right about the dangers of speculation, but she found it nearly impossible to resist.
She glanced at the small pile of books on the stand. Romance novels. Something stirred inside Arie. She bent over and picked one up.
Not a romance this time. This was a hardcover in a paper jacket. The title, Rich Bitch, was embossed in a glittery gold font. A wedding ring set with a rock the size of Gibraltar sparkled just below the title. In fact, the set looked a lot like . . . My engagement ring—so large it weighs my hand down. It sparkles like sunlight reflecting off a crystal-clear lake.
Arie dropped the book, and it slid under the bed.
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