“We didn’t really keep a whole lot of secrets from you girls,” Dad said. “We’re not exactly a skeletons-in-the-closet kind of family.”
Sadie watched as he again tapped his finger against the side of his face that was missing. She could feel a headache coming up from her shoulders and wished she was scrubbing a crime scene instead of acting as liaison between her confused mother and her dead father.
“I’ve got it!” Dad said suddenly. He looked across the table at her mom. “The lava rock!”
“Excuse me?” Sadie said.
“Your mom put a lava rock in the casket with me.”
“Why on earth would she do that?”
“On our honeymoon in Hawaii I picked up a small lava rock and gave it to her. We kept it always and used it every time we had an argument. When all was forgiven, one of us would use the rock as a peace offering. Sometimes your mom would slip it into my coat pocket and I’d find it when I was on my way to work. Many times I put it on her pillow after we argued during the day. When we separated, well, that was because she found out I’d had lunch with Molly Macgregor and hadn’t told her. It cost me a dozen roses, lots of chocolates, and promises of dinners out while I was begging forgiveness, but I didn’t come home until she put the rock in my car one day. Then I knew all was forgiven.” His voice was hoarse with emotion. “The night before the funeral, when she was getting ready to go to the viewing at the church, she took the rock from our bedside table and took it with her. I bet she put it into the casket beside me before anyone else was there.”
“Awww, that’s so sweet,” Sadie said, blinking back tears.
“Tell her,” Dad replied.
“The rock,” Sadie said to her mother. “The lava rock from Hawaii. It was a kind of peace offering since your honeymoon.”
“He told you about that too? Was nothing sacred between us?” Mom asked, making loud tsking noises.
“Dad just told me about it now. He also said he thinks you put it in the casket with him during the viewing.”
Mom’s eyes grew huge. “You—you and Dawn were at the viewing. You could’ve seen me do it,” she stammered.
“And she said something when she took the rock from my bedside stand,” Dad advised, and quietly repeated what her mom had said.
Sadie turned to her mom and quietly repeated, “When you took the rock from the bedroom you said you hoped he’d keep your side of the bed warm in heaven.”
“I’m making tea,” Mom said, jumping up so quickly her chair scraped the floor loudly and would have toppled backward if Sadie hadn’t caught it.
Mom opened a cupboard and took down a canister. Her hands were visibly shaking.
“This is the real deal, Mom,” Sadie said quietly to her mother’s back. “Dad’s here right now and you can say anything to him, or ask him anything, before he goes over.”
“We’re out of chamomile,” Mom said frantically. “I’m going to Safeway.”
She snatched her keys off the counter and ran out of the house.
8
“I hate to say it but that pretty much was how I expected it would go,” Dad said.
Sadie rubbed her temples. When she looked up her father was gone, and she could hear her cell phone ringing in the next room. She ran to catch it before it went to voice mail.
She answered the call with a breathless, “Hello?”
“You sound like you’ve just been running a marathon.” Detective Petrovich’s gravelly voice tripped over the line.
“In a way,” Sadie admitted. “An emotional one anyway. So what’s up? You giving me a heads-up about a new scene I’ll be cleaning? I don’t mind telling you I could use the work.”
For both money and sanity, she thought wearily.
“Not a new scene,” he said, and his voice trailed off a little as if he was trying to come up with the words. “We need to talk. In person is probably best.”
“Name the place.”
“How about Romio’s? Can you be there in half an hour?”
“I’ll see you then.”
While Sadie drove to meet the detective, she used her cell phone to try to reach Zack but she had no luck. She was worried about him. As soon as she was done with lunch, she’d make a point of going to the house and checking on him.
Sadie and Detective Petrovich had worked together many times over the years. As a homicide detective, Petrovich had sometimes recommended her services to families traumatized by death and needing someone to clean up their loved ones’ remains. When Sadie walked into Romio’s, she saw the detective in a booth they’d shared for business talk before. One look at Petrovich’s somber face and Sadie’s gut told her this wasn’t going to be a friendly chat.
“What’s up?” Sadie asked, slipping into the booth.
“My acid reflux,” he replied drily. “Let’s order first.”
Petrovich was a man who was serious about many things, and food was one of them.
A young waiter sauntered over and attempted friendly banter while taking their order. Petrovich’s clipped tone while ordering his calzone and Diet Coke quickly changed the waiter’s tone from overtly friendly to businesslike.
“I’ll have the chicken gyro sandwich and coffee,” Sadie instructed.
Petrovich drummed his thick fingers on the tabletop. Sadie watched him but knew better than to try and get him to say anything until he was ready. Once the waiter delivered their drinks and promised the food would be arriving soon, Petrovich started in.
“Something’s rotten in Denmark,” he said. “And by Denmark I mean Green Lake.”
“Oka-a-ay. Are you talking about Sunnyside Avenue? Mrs. Wicks’ house?”
He nodded sharply and then drank down half his Diet Coke and belched softly behind his hand. “The detectives working the scene have had their hands full.”
“Well, sure. They’ve got a mountain of stuff to get through. It’s gotta be tough going through the lifetime collection of a world-class hoarder like Mrs. Wicks.”
“That’s only half of it.” He scrunched up his face and sighed as if he didn’t quite want to say what came next. “There’s weird stuff happening.”
“Weird stuff?” Sadie asked. Her throat was suddenly tight. She reached for her coffee and sipped slowly while she waited for him to continue.
“Things have been . . . happening.”
“Happening?”
“Sort of falling around them.”
“Falling?” Sadie parroted.
She didn’t want to keep repeating what he said, but she didn’t know how else to respond. She took another quick sip of coffee and carefully averted her eyes. She had a feeling she knew where this was going. A certain ghost must’ve started throwing his weight around against more than just Zack. She didn’t want to have this conversation. She definitely didn’t want to discuss her ghost-whispering capabilities with Detective Petrovich.
The detective’s hands made fists and he gently pounded the table. “Look, I don’t know how to say this so I’m just going to say it. People talk about you.”
“All good things, I hope.” Sadie smiled nervously.
“Cops have mentioned they’ve seen you talking at a scene. Rumors go around that you’ve got . . . that you’re, um . . .”
He was floundering but Sadie made no attempt to offer him a lifeline. She hoped he’d give up on the direction of this conversation. Up until this morning with Mom, she’d had a pretty happy life keeping her ability from a lot of people. She liked it that way. She preferred it that way.
“Psychic. People say you’re psychic.” He bit the words off sharply. “There. I said it.”
Sadie wrinkled her nose. “That’s kind of a weird thing for people to say.”
“They say you see ghosts and stuff.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Is it?” He nailed her with his best don’t-mess-with-me cop glare. The same stare that had made murderers confess.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Dean,” Sadie said, sw
allowing thickly.
“How about the truth?”
“The truth is that talk like that could ruin my career. How would it look if the public thought they were hiring some nut who talked to the dead instead of a trauma clean company? I’d not only lose my credibility; I could lose Scene- 2-Clean.”
The look Petrovich gave her told Sadie he was well aware she hadn’t denied his allegations. His gaze held steady and Sadie felt a nervous heat coil inside her belly.
She was first to break their silence, blowing out a long breath of air. “What exactly do you want from me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, throwing his hands in the air in an unexpected display of helplessness. He looked so utterly conflicted Sadie couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
They sat there both looking miserable and deep in their own thoughts until their food arrived and they ate in silence. As delicious as it was, Sadie could hardly eat her pita sandwich. Petrovich, on the other hand, devoured his calzone. When the dishes had been removed and their drinks refilled, Petrovich cleared his throat, placed his hands palm down on the table, and looked Sadie in the eye.
“So will you do it?”
Sadie blinked in surprise. “Do what?”
“I don’t know.” He threw up his hands a second time. “I guess talk to whoever, or whatever, it is and get it or them to stop making everyone’s life hell at the Sunnyside Avenue house.”
“Look, obviously you’re under the misguided impression that I’m some kind of a magician or something and—”
“Cut the crap.” Petrovich leaned back in the booth and eyed Sadie critically. “I’m not asking you to go public with this woo-woo bullshit.”
“Woo-woo?”
“Yes. Forget the damage to your own reputation. Do you have any idea what it would do to the status of the Seattle PD if word got out we hired a psychic to take care of a ghost problem at a house that also had a mummified baby?”
He rubbed the area between his eyebrows until it was red and angry. “Shit. Just thinking about it nearly gives me an ulcer. The media would have a field day and my ass would be grass. So I’d be thrilled to death if you could somehow take care of things while trying your best to be . . . um . . . discreet about the whole thing. Hell, I can’t even officially hire you. I’d pay you out of my own pocket and—”
“I’d never take money from you,” Sadie said firmly.
“So you’ll do it then?”
“Just tell me exactly what’s been going on at the house.” Sadie had a pretty good idea what Mr. Ugly had been up to, and she also had a feeling this conversation could change her career forever.
Detective Petrovich went on to describe the strange goings-on at Sunnyside Avenue. Objects had been seen moving around inside the house, including boxes levitating and flying through the air. There’d been a number of direct hits to personnel, and the most recent one had ended with a crime scene investigator getting clobbered in the head with a lamp. He’d suffered a dozen stitches to his scalp and a concussion. Nobody had come right out and said “ghost,” but Petrovich now had officers that were too freaked out to go inside.
“In our reports we’ve been calling it hazardous material. My guys have said I need to make the house safe before someone else goes inside,” he finished.
“And by ‘safe,’ you want me to work some kind of voodoo magic or exorcism?” Sadie asked, trying to be funny. “I should wave a wand, chant a spell, something like that?”
“I don’t care what you do or how you do it. Just make it stop.”
“And what if I can’t?” Sadie chewed her lower lip.
“We’ve got a crime scene that we can’t work because it’s unsafe for our guys to be in the building. It’s just a matter of time before the vultures get hold of the story and run it on the six o’clock news.” He waited a beat. “I’m not above begging but I’ll start by just saying, ‘Please.’ ”
Sadie sighed and sharply nodded her assent.
They worked out the details that involved Petrovich opening the locked-down scene to allow Sadie inside. Anyone watching would just assume she was there to clean. What they wouldn’t know was that she was there to clean up an ornery ghost.
9
Petrovich walked Sadie to her van after he paid the bill.
“So I’ll see meet you at Sunnyside Avenue in an hour?” he asked.
“Give or take,” Sadie replied. “I have to stop at home and get more gear.” And to check on Zack.
She opened the door to the van and Petrovich glanced inside. “Whoa! Who the hell’s been sharpening a blade inside your vehicle?”
“Vandals,” Sadie remarked. “I was parked at Bellevue Square mall most of the night ’cause I caught the decomp job there.”
“I heard about that one. The bum who died in a changing room, right?”
“That’s the one. At the end of the night, this is what I had to greet me as my reward for a hard night’s work.”
He leaned into her vehicle and caught the Queen of Clean graffiti decorating the dash.
“Nice,” he remarked sarcastically. “You report it?”
“The Queen of Clean?” she guffawed. “C’mon! If I called that in, I’d never live it down. It’s a stupid rhyme but not a crime. . . . Hey, what do you know? I’m a poet too,” Sadie said with a smirk.
Petrovich laughed along.
“I’ll put seat covers on the seats and use solvent for the writing,” Sadie told him. “Better that than paying higher insurance.”
Petrovich nodded in agreement, then turned to walk away. Sadie was about to close her driver’s door when the detective turned back.
“By the way, I don’t mean to be nosy, but, uh . . .” Petrovich began, his voice uncertain. “Everything okay with Zack?”
“You mean his foot? It should be fine. He has to wait until the swelling goes down before they can cast it.” Sadie buckled up and jabbed her key in the ignition.
“Guess he’s on some wicked painkillers then.”
From the seat in her van Sadie was slightly higher than the detective. She looked down at him now, a question on her face.
“I called the house looking for you,” he explained. “He sounded pretty out of it.”
“Yeah,” Sadie said. Offering no more explanation than that, she closed the door to her vehicle and started it up.
All the way back to her house, Sadie thought of how to talk to Zack. In her mind she took turns starting the conversation off gently.
I care about you and I’m worried . . .
Then just as quickly Sadie’s anger took over and she was thinking of starting the conversation with:
What the hell are you thinking?
She pulled into her driveway and fumed as she stared at the house. Her house, where she lived with her boyfriend. Yet Paula Wicks had waltzed in, kissed Zack’s foot, and drank vodka with him. It made Sadie want to punch something.
She walked in the house already furious. When she entered the living room, the first thing she noticed was the empty vodka bottle on the end table. Next to it was a bottle of Vicodin innocently calling to Zack to take another dose. Zack was on the sofa, snoring softly in front of the television. She wanted to be angry but worry caused her irritation to dissipate. Emotion swelled in her heart as she looked down at him. His foot was still up on the coffee table, and the rest of his body was slumped to the side, his head at an awkward angle with one arm tucked behind it. She touched his forehead, moved a lock of his hair with the tip of her finger, and bent to place a gentle kiss there.
“Aw, Zack . . .” she murmured, shaking her head slowly from side to side.
Just then Hairy hopped over and sat at her feet, twitching his nose up at her.
“Bet you haven’t been fed,” Sadie said, scooping up the bunny and touching his nose to her own.
She took him into the kitchen and filled his food dish with his pellets and then garnished the kibble with broccoli and baby carrots. Next she topped off his water dish and change
d his litter box. After taking care of her pet, Sadie walked back into the living room. She snatched up the vodka bottle and brought it to the deck out back to deposit it into the overflowing recycle bin.
Hairy was busily chomping on a carrot in the kitchen.
“I’m staying at Mom’s again tonight,” Sadie told Hairy. “I’ve got stuff with my dad to deal with there. I’d take you with me, but Mom would probably have a fit and she’s already got enough reasons to be ticked off with me. Besides, you’ve got to keep an eye on Zack.”
Hairy’s only response was to continue munching his food. Sadie suspected the rabbit was giving her the cold shoulder because she hadn’t been around much. He may be a low-maintenance pet, but he somehow managed to provide high-quality guilt.
Sadie promised Hairy she’d be back soon. She wrote Zack a note that said: Please call. I’m worried about you. Love, S.
She was about to leave the note on the end table when she paused and scowled at the small bottle of prescription pills mocking her. Sadie snatched them up and stuffed the bottle into her purse, where the other bottle still remained. If Zack was going to allow this ankle break to give him an excuse to spiral into hell, she’d do everything in her power to stop it.
She propped the note up against the bottle of ibuprofen and covered Zack with a light blanket before heading out the door.
Back in her van, Sadie had time on the trip to Sunnyside Avenue to agonize over the Zack situation. Still no word from Paula but hopefully the foot-loving slut would just stay away and keep her pills to herself. Zack had been hurt, and being weakened by physical pain was tough on anybody. Especially a manly man like Zack. She told herself to cut him some slack and do her best to let the whole Paula thing go. She’d keep an eye on the drinking and pills, but she felt confident that as soon as the ankle felt better, all would be fine. With Zack. And with them as a couple. After all, what kind of girlfriend would she be if she bailed on him during their first rough patch? She made a mental note to be sweetness and light to him when she took him to the doctor.
“And when I tell him to pull himself up by his jockeys and stop feeling sorry for himself,” Sadie said aloud to herself, “I’ll make sure my tone is nothing but loving and supportive.”
Dead and Kicking Page 11