A Scrying Shame

by Donna White Glaser

  Grady glanced at her. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine. I just, uh, dropped a book.” Arie picked it back up and waved it at him.

  “Dude, you left your gloves on. That’s cross-contamination. Now you gotta toss her book.”

  “Damn. I’m sorry.”

  “It happens, but you really gotta watch it. And make sure you never, ever forget and touch your face when you’re wearing them. So gross.” Grady turned back to his task.

  Arie grabbed the nearest bio-bag, but the photograph on the back of the book caught her eye. She looked closer. It was a slightly older version of the girl in the mirror. Something about the woman seemed familiar but Arie couldn’t chase down the connection, if indeed there was one. She flipped the book back around to verify the author’s name. Marissa Mason.

  “Didn’t Guts say that the victim here had written a book?”

  “Yeah,” Grady said. “Why?”

  Arie waggled the book again. “I think this is her. The victim. This must be the book.”

  Grady shrugged. “What’s the big deal? She wrote a book. Oh, wait. I get it. You want to read that book, huh? Gonna figure out how to catch a rich guy?” He turned back to the wall and resumed scrubbing. “Can’t say I blame you. It’s not like I want to be doing this job for the rest of my life, either.”

  Arie mumbled an agreement and, tucking the book under her arm, grabbed the trash bags. “I’m taking these to the van.”

  As soon as she reached the parking lot, Arie wiped the smear of blood off the book cover and hid it under the front seat of her car. As she bent over, she realized she’d forgotten to take off the outer layer of booties. Crap. She hoped Grady hadn’t noticed.

  She snatched them off and, intending to throw the bloodstained footwear inside, started picking at the ties on one of the trash bags. Then stopped. At some point, she was going to have to figure out what worked and what didn’t with this scrying thing. And for that, she would probably need blood.

  Grabbing a wadded-up fast-food bag from the back seat, Arie dumped a couple of straggler fries onto the ground and shoved the stained booties inside. The bag got stuffed beside Marissa’s book.

  After slinging the trash bags into the back of the van, she hurried back to the condo.

  Unfortunately, the rest of the day didn’t go any better. Death visions popped up everywhere she looked. Anything shiny or reflective, including liquids, served to channel the dead woman’s last moments straight into Arie’s brain.

  After the first hour and a half, Arie had worked up a migraine and was sick to her stomach. She tried to play it off, but when it came time to pull up the blood-soaked carpet, she couldn’t handle it anymore and ended up running for the bathroom.

  “Hey! Not there. I just sanitized that room,” Grady shouted after her.

  Too late.

  On her way home, Arie called Chandra and begged her friend to let her sleep over. With all that she had to wrestle, she couldn’t handle thought of going back to Grumpa’s alone.

  “Of course you can,” Chandra told her. “Do you want to swing by Subway or somewhere and grab something to eat on your way?”

  “Don’t even talk about food,” Arie groaned. Apparently, relentless visions from murder victims worked as an appetite suppressant. Who knew?

  She gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles blanched, and her eyes throbbed with the effort of concentrating on the road. Every time her gaze landed on something shiny or reflective—not a rare occurrence on a highway—the threat of a death vision vibrated inside her head. She managed to keep them at bay, but fighting them made her stomach roil. She pulled into a gas station so she could call her grandfather and let him know her plans.

  As delighted as Grumpa seemed about having the house to himself, it didn’t stop him from complaining. “What am I supposed to say if your mother calls? She might want to know what you made me for supper. That’s part of the deal, isn’t it? Taking care of your poor old grandpa? I suppose that’s too much to ask nowadays.”

  Arie sighed. Nice try. “Of course not, Grumpa. I can come home, and we can spend the whole evening together. Just you and me. I’ll just swing by the grocery store, so I can pick up some healthy food. You know Mother wants you on a gluten-free, low-carb diet anyway.”

  “Never mind. I guess one night won’t matter. I can make a sandwich.”

  “Well, if you’re sure.” Arie smiled for the first time that day. Her migraine slid back a notch. “And maybe we should keep this between us. We don’t want Mother worrying over little things.”

  “That’s true. And she probably doesn’t need to know about a couple other things, either.”

  Arie’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, really? Like what?”

  “Never you mind, little girl. Never you mind.”

  They hung up, and this time Arie’s grin stretched cheek to cheek. What was that cranky old man up to, anyway?

  “What do you mean, they won’t stop?” Chandra looked horrified.

  “I mean the visions won’t stop.”

  Arie scrunched up in the yellow beanbag chair with her eyes closed. “I keep seeing them. It’s not just happening in the blood this time. They’re constant, everywhere I look.”

  “What about with your eyes closed?”

  “It’s okay now. But when they’re open, I can’t keep from seeing them.” Arie burst into tears.

  Chandra knelt and wrapped her in a hug. “That sounds hideous. I just can’t imagine it. But, Arie, listen. We’re going to figure this out.”

  Eyes still closed, Arie smiled and leaned her head on Chandra’s shoulder. Her friend smelled like cake.

  They sat like that for a few minutes, and then Chandra asked, “What’s different, Arie? I mean, about this particular job.”

  Arie took a deep, shuddering breath. She’d been too upset to share any of the details. Chandra scooted back to her favorite orange pillow and waited.

  “I guess the big thing is it’s a murder scene.”

  “Holy crap. I guess you could call that a difference.”

  Arie nodded at the understatement. “You know, now that I think about it, there has been something different about each of the scenes. At the suicide’s, there was a gray fog I was looking through. It felt cold. But at Agnes’s—that was the one where the little old lady just died—the fog wasn’t gray. It was green. And it exuded a feeling of happiness.”

  “That is so flippin’ awesome.” Chandra hugged herself.

  Arie smiled at her friend. “I guess it is. That one, anyway.”

  “So, you’re thinking, what? That the color of the fog matches the way they died?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? Leonard killed himself. The gray fog, the sadness. But with Agnes it was like . . . it was the same peace I felt when I was on the Other Side. I think Agnes was ready to die. She was okay with it. But with Marissa—”

  “Marissa?”

  “Marissa Mason. She wrote a book called Rich Bitch.”

  Chandra’s face scrunched in thought. “Her name sounds familiar. I’ll have to check it out.”

  Arie got up, grabbed the book from under her purse, and handed it to Chandra. Making an “ick” face, her friend held it with the tips of her fingers.

  “I wiped it off,” Arie assured her.

  “Oh, hey. I do know her. I read this.”

  “You read this?”

  For the first time in the thirteen years Arie had known her, Chandra blushed.

  “Well, I’m not saying it’s great literature, but everyone was talking about it. I was curious, that’s all.” As Chandra paged through it, a stiff rectangle of paper slid out from between the pages and fell to the floor. Arie snatched it up. Creamy white paper embossed with a border of flowers. Gold ink. And just the faintest . . . Arie sniffed the card. Yup, it was scented. Roses again.

  “What is it?” Chandra asked.

  “It looks like one of those wedding programs. You know, the one that tells you when they’re lighting
the candles or whatever, and who’s in the wedding party?”

  “Maybe she was using it as a bookmark.” Chandra went back to studying the book. After looking at the table of contents, she flipped it over and looked at the back.

  “I can’t believe she’s dead. She looks like one of those golden girls. You know the type. Like Barbie two-point-oh. It’s weird to think of her as just . . . gone.”

  “Well, I’m here to tell you she’s not gone. Part of her is alive and well and currently stuck inside my head.”

  “Maybe that’s the difference, then,” Chandra said. “She’s got unresolved issues. Isn’t that the deal with ghosts? She’s haunting you.”

  Arie shook her head. “This isn’t a ghost, or at least it’s not like any ghost I’ve ever heard of.”

  “The important part is that her death is unresolved. What is she showing you?”

  “It’s all jumbled up. It was a red fog this time. And I had this feeling of being lost or trying to find something. She did, I mean.”

  “Marissa,” Chandra whispered.

  “And there were hands at my throat. They were choking me. I can’t even . . . I could feel her dying, and it felt like it was me.”

  Arie could feel her throat close as the memory grew more vivid.

  “Who was it?” Chandra whispered.

  Tears welled in Arie’s eyes. “I don’t know. I can’t see his face. I’ve tried and tried, but . . .” A deep, shuddering sob twisted through her body.

  Chandra reached over and held Arie’s hand. “It’s okay. You’re doing good. How about the hands? What did they look like?”

  Arie pressed her fingers to her forehead and forced herself to stay calm. “I don’t know. But I don’t remember seeing anything distinctive. No scars or tattoos or anything. At the time, I couldn’t really think. It was . . . this feeling that I was about to die.

  “You have to understand. When it’s happening, it’s like I’m them. It’s not like a movie. I’m not watching. It feels like it’s actually happening to me.”

  Chandra squeezed Arie’s hand and took a deep breath. “Let’s take a break. I think we should get something to eat.”

  “I can’t eat.”

  “You have to try,” Chandra said. “You need to keep your strength up. And—I don’t know—you need to keep doing normal things.”

  As if to prove Chandra right, the visions receded a bit while they ate their meal. Arie still felt them, though. They lurked at the edge of her awareness as if waiting to pounce the moment she dropped her guard.

  After supper, Arie was able to tell Chandra about some of the other elements of Marissa’s death vision—the wedding ring, the diary and papers, the trailer.

  Chandra was suitably grossed out by the image of the cockroaches scattering from under the medicine cabinet mirror. “That is so creepy.”

  “The whole thing is creepy. And I know I’m not remembering everything. It’s hard. I can’t separate myself from her when it’s going on. I can’t concentrate. I know I’m forgetting things. Did I even tell you about the weird angel chorus?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Angels?”

  “Well, something keeps chanting the word ‘holy’ over and over again. And then this other voice, really loud and booming, says something about the blood calling to him. You know . . . like in the Bible?”

  “That’s your department, preacher kid, not mine.”

  “Genesis. Cain kills Abel and God finds out when Abel’s blood calls to Him from the ground and, like, tattles, I guess. Then God curses Cain and so on. Don’t tell me you never heard that one before.”

  “Well, yeah,” Chandra said. “But I didn’t know about blood calling or whatever. So does this mean God’s talking to you or something?”

  “I don’t know.” Tears welled in Arie’s eyes. “I don’t want God to talk to me. I’m freaked out enough as it is.”

  “Okay, I can’t help you with the God thing. Way above my pay grade, but as far as forgetting things, why don’t you try writing it down the next time?”

  Chandra jumped up and rummaged through her bookshelf. She came back with a half-used spiral notebook and handed it to Arie.

  It was a good idea. Arie set it by her purse, then retreated to the bathroom to wash her face and put on one of Chandra’s oversized sleeping T-shirts. Time for bed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Arie overslept. Worse, the assault of visions continued, and it showed. She didn’t even have time to head back to Grumpa’s house for a change of clothes. No makeup either, so she ended up using Chandra’s. Her friend favored dark and dramatic. Not Arie’s best look.

  The more she thought about Chandra’s theory that Marissa Mason had unresolved issues, the more anxious she grew. It felt right, but she didn’t know what that meant for her. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

  Grady put them right back to work on the carpet. Guts was coming by to check on the job that afternoon, and they would need to evaluate how extensively the flooring had been contaminated. That meant pulling up the plywood underlayment, and that couldn’t happen until the carpet was dealt with.

  “How are we going to do this?” Arie asked.

  The Mason condo was the top floor of a five-story unit. Arie couldn’t imagine how they would navigate the flights of stairs with a sodden, blood-soaked roll of carpet without contaminating their path every step of the way. She was exhausted even thinking about it.

  Grady’s answer didn’t sound any better.

  “We’re going to cut it into strips, roll them up, and bag ‘em. It’ll be a lot more trips back and forth—”

  “You mean up and down, don’t you?” Arie was still thinking about those five flights of stairs. Using the unit’s only elevator was out of the question. The condo’s homeowners association was already upset at sharing the tiny elevator with “janitors of death” in their banana-yellow spacesuits and crates of cleaning supplies. The residents had voiced numerous complaints—and that had been before they’d started hauling out bright red biohazard bags filled with the gory realities of violent death. The HOA president owned several area bars, and Guts wanted to work out a contract for whenever the inevitable bar fights broke out and involved blood. Guts was determined to keep her happy.

  “The whole thing?” Arie stared at the thirty-four-by-twenty-foot expanse of lush wool Berber carpet.

  “Nah,” Grady said. “Just the blood site. We’ll have to take an extra five feet or so of what looks uncontaminated to make sure the blood didn’t travel. You’d be surprised. But my guess is it didn’t flow side to side.” He shook his head ominously.

  “You think it went . . .”

  Grady jabbed his finger at the floor. “Down. My guess is it soaked into the floor trusses. We’ll see. If it did, we can only do so much. That’s why Guts is coming over. It’s his call.”

  They got to work. Cutting through the backing of the carpet proved incredibly difficult. The razors in their utility knives dulled quickly. Arie was afraid she was going to cut off a finger. She could imagine Grady bitching at her for recontaminating the area. The only good thing was that, although they had to wear their biohazard suits—they did on almost every job—and rubber gloves, they didn’t have to wear face masks. Nevertheless, Arie was sweating like a pig within the first twenty minutes.

  They heard the condo’s front door open.

  “Dammit,” Grady said. “Guts is early. He said he wouldn’t be here ’til this afternoon. Go head him off, and tell him to come back after lunch.”

  Arie trudged off down the hall, happy to have a break, but wondering how Guts was going to react being told to go away and come back later.

  She rounded the corner and almost ran smack into the amazing-blue-eyes-nice-butt, winky guy.

  “Holy crap,” he said.

  Apparently he’d never seen a life-size ambulatory banana before.

  Up close, the guy was even more gorgeous than she’d remembered. Coal black hair, those startling—and now star
tled—delft-blue eyes, and the hint of dark stubble that made a man in a business suit look rugged and sexy as hell.

  “Who are you?” Arie managed to ask.

  “No, the question is: Who are you?”

  He sounded pissed, but Arie thought that was probably because she’d scared the hell out of him. Men didn’t take well to bananas leaping out of dark hallways.

  Recognition crept into his eyes. “That was you in the red Focus the other day, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh huh. I was late for work. I’m a cleanup tech,” Arie said. Duh. Like he couldn’t figure that out.

  She scrambled to regain her composure. “I don’t think anybody is supposed to be here. This is a crime scene.”

  She almost gasped at the brilliance of his smile. Unfortunately, it vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  “I’m aware this is a crime scene. In fact, it’s my crime scene. I’m Detective Connor O’Shea.”

  “Oh.” Arie’s mind, not at its best today anyway, went utterly blank.

  They stared at each other. O’Shea’s eyes dipped, scanning Arie from her scraped-back-from-her-head-into-a-ponytail hair to her blue-booties-over-yellow-suit feet. Her heart skipped around a little until she remembered he was a cop. They had a tendency to look people over.

  And she was blocking the hallway leading to his crime scene.

  He raised a sooty eyebrow, waiting for her to figure out she needed to move aside.

  “Oh,” she said again. She stepped back against the wall, rattling the painting next to her head in its frame.

  He slid past, but as he did, she could have sworn he stole another quick peek at the “girls,” which jutted out like two cantaloupes. Arie’s body flooded with heat. Damn it. She was blushing. She snatched up two trash bags and fled to the van.

  Arie would have stayed away until she was certain that he had left, but she knew Grady would pitch a fit. As she tossed the bags in the back of the van, she remembered the wedding dress. She’d set it aside as Grady had suggested, but she didn’t know if he’d told Guts or not.

  When she returned to the apartment, Detective O’Shea stood in the living room. He had a small notebook out and was jotting something down.