Egrets, I've Had a Few (Deluded Detective Book 2)

by Michelle Knowlden

  “That one doesn’t count.” She sighed and rifled through my purse. Digging past the final notice telephone bill, she extracted a hair pick. “Let’s fix your hair.”

  I plucked off the scarf and dropped it onto the dashboard, its silken folds shimmering. It also belonged to Jen.

  “I get a finder’s fee when you marry the old geezer.” She fussed with my bangs. “I should be telling you that one day this could be all yours.” She waved my hair pick in a wide sweep across the windshield.

  I blinked. “You’re giving me your car?”

  “What? No.” She laughed. “Took me four Abishag husbands to get the car. Not to mention the loft in Malibu and college fees paid through grad school. I’m not giving that up—even for my best friend.”

  Best friend? Jen had been my dorm-mate first quarter of our freshman year, but we rarely saw each other after she took her first husband and I moved into a West LA rental with seven other students. I never thought of us being close and definitely not best friends.

  She responded to my surprised look with a wry one. “Only friend, I should say. Since I turned Abishag, I’ve lost all my old ones and can’t make any new. And don’t get me started on dating between husbands. The good ones won’t date me, and I won’t date the scum that will.”

  I’d waked with a frisson of nerves, thinking that by day’s end everything would be different. Jen’s words made my stomach churn. Marrying Thomas would solve my money problems, but I hadn’t heard that it could ruin my dating life.

  Not that I had one.

  Weeks earlier, I’d called Jen because I’d run out of options. I couldn’t keep a job, was a month behind with my share of the rent, and unless I took out another student loan, I’d no way of paying school fees this fall. She’d done everything she could to discourage me from applying to the agency, but after doing her own assessment of my finances, she reluctantly coached me through the interviews, recommended me to the director, and helped me study for the licensing exams.

  I tried to puzzle through her logic. “What does being an Abishag have to do with friendship?”

  Her eyes suddenly welled with tears. Feeling the discomfort of something entirely different, the awkwardness of dealing with crying, I fumbled for the door handle. Jen stayed me with a perfectly manicured hand. “Les, I can count on you being rational. So what if being an Abishag wife is kind of sordid? That doesn’t make me bad friend material, right?”

  I chewed my lip. “Who says being an Abishag is sordid? For all the stupid reasons people get married, seems like caring for the dying is the kindest.”

  Laughing, she blew her nose and some of the butterflies abated seeing her return to her usual cynical pragmatism. “Yes, Leslie Greene, you are delightfully rational, with a perfectly daft view of relationships. It’s like you were made to be an Abishag wife. I bet you’ve already memorized the 89 rules.”

  Ignoring the comment about memorizing the 89 rules (which I had), I managed a wobbly grin. “A perfect Abishag as long as I keep my mouth shut?”

  Laughing again, she returned the hair pick to my purse. “Always a good policy with the tact-challenged. Rule 48.”

  I tried to pick up my purse, but her hand rested on it, her gaze fixed again on the second floor of the Abishag agency. “The rich are guilted into contracting an Abishag wife, you know. Can’t have their loved ones passing into the Great Unknown without the ultimate companion, all the peace of mind you can buy in one short, blonde package…”

  “Hey, I’m not…”

  She stared at the bougainvillea winding around the building’s windows, not hearing me. “Really, in the end, it’s not the geezers or the families or even the Abishag wives who profit. It’s the lawyers.”

  Of course they did. We lived in a capitalist society—thank God, as my political father would say. If there were no rich, there would be nothing like Abishag wives—and no way for me to return to the university in the fall.

  I knew Jen worried about me being happy, so I didn’t talk about economics. When she coached me, she went on forever about how an Abishag wife was not part of the family, to remember that I would only be a hospice worker with a title, and when I didn’t know what to say, say nothing.

  But I’d met Thomas’s daughter so I could assure her, “The family will be wonderful, Thomas will pass surrounded by love, and the summer will be over before I know it.”

  “Spare me your fairy tales,” Jen said, but she released my purse, started the car and said as she often did, “If Cinderella were an Abishag, she’d get the glass slipper but no prince. Remember, Les, you’re being paid to attend the dying. You’re not being adopted into his family.”

  I got out of the car in a twirl of Jen’s second signing ceremony dress, also a loaner. I read the worry in her grip on the steering wheel, and suddenly I felt calm. “It’s okay, Jen. Portuguese Cove’s a nice place, and the doctors say Thomas won’t last more than a month. Me being there means he won’t die alone, and I can go to school in the fall. It’s win-win.”

  She nodded although her anxious smile slipped. “Call me, okay?”

  I shut the door firmly. “Dinner when it’s over. My treat.”

  I heard the purr of the retreating Audi as I crossed the brick-lined sidewalk to the agency’s red door.

  The Westwood Abishag agency filled two floors in a Spanish hacienda-style building. The front half of the ground floor faced the courtyard and was used exclusively for the family of its elderly, comatose clients. Facing the alley, the back half was for interviewing Abishag candidates.

  California boasted fourteen Abishag agencies, but the Westwood office had the state’s third largest clientele and drew wife candidates largely from UCLA, USC and six other public and private universities between Bakersfield and the Mexican border. On the second floor, the Westwood legal offices created the contracts (and provided the occasional litigation and even rarer criminal case support) 24/7. As it supported satellite agencies in Palm Springs and La Jolla, the Westwood office had more lawyers than any other Abishag agency in the United States.

  Moments after I entered the front door, an assistant whisked me upstairs to a conference room overlooking the courtyard. Florence Harcourt had told us candidates the room was used in all the signing ceremonies.

  Except for a bowl of white chrysanthemums on the conference table, it looked ordinary. A notary sat near the door, opening and shutting her inkpad in a bored manner, while Florence Harcourt’s assistant circled, whispering into her headset. I stood near the window, trying not to wrinkle Jen’s dress, trying not to sweat, wishing I could take off the pink sweater loaned to hide the mustard stained sleeve, wishing my new, strappy, white sandals didn’t pinch my toes.

  “It should be just another few minutes, Leslie.” Florence Harcourt’s assistant squinted, re-pinning a white rose corsage to the pink sweater. It was the fourth time she’d tried to straighten it, and I almost bit through my lip trying not to tell her that she should have used two pins to stabilize it.

  Jen told me to say as little as possible to the client’s family—actually to interact verbally as little as possible with anyone connected to the Abishag agency—so I gritted my teeth.

  “Miss Crowder is running late because of traffic on the 405,” the assistant told me. “She’s keeping Mrs. Harcourt apprised of her ETA.”

  Although my housemates were virulent in their opinions about Abishags, I thought I’d make a good one. Before I’d been fired from hospital volunteer work for mouthing off to a patient’s family, I liked working with the patients, especially the comatose ones. They never complained about anything I said.

  A few minutes later, Florence Harcourt breezed in with a harried-looking Tina Crowder and a senior lawyer carrying a thick stack of papers, contracts I assumed. When we met a week earlier, Tina had made me nervous. She was older than my parents, large boned, with short black hair. She cried every time she talked about her father.

  When I visited Thomas in his home the week befor
e I agreed to be his Abishag wife, Tina had told me that she thought me “cute.”

  Florence Harcourt had explained that overly protective daughters usually wanted short, waif-like candidates for their fathers, and that would work in my favor. Short, yes, a feathery blond with enormous kewpie-doll eyes, but I never had thought of myself “waif-like.” Still, I had chosen Thomas because he didn’t frighten me as some of the other brain-dead clients had, so I was glad when Tina hired me.

  Tina dropped her Fossil purse on the table with a thud and sat. The lawyer slid a tall stack of pages toward her as the assistant set a glass of water near her.

  Tina shot me a perfunctory smile.

  Suddenly nervous, thinking I should speak, but remembering Jen’s strictures about staying silent, I bit my lip again.

  “Did you have any questions?” the lawyer asked Tina.

  Tina shook her head. “My dad’s lawyer reviewed the advance, and he’s fine with it.”

  My contract with the agency was only a page long, a standard employer/employee agreement. The Abishag contract didn’t have to be drawn up each time she took a husband, so I was there to sign only one piece of paper.

  My sandals still pinching, I shifted slightly. Florence Harcourt frowned, and I froze. What had I done wrong?

  “It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing for your father, Miss Crowder,” she said warmly. “A sweet and loving way to say good-bye.”

  Really? Signing a contract is sweet and loving? But Jen had reminded me that Abishag wives fade into the background. Rule 43. I practiced fading.

  The room went silent, and I realized everyone was staring at me. The lawyer exhaled impatiently. “I’m sorry…” I stuttered.

  Tina patted the chair next to her. “It’s time to sign the marriage certificate, Leslie.” Her eyes welling with tears, she fumbled in her purse. “I’ve signed for Dad.”

  I eased into the chair next to her, uncomfortable with her quiet sniffing. Florence Harcourt squeezed Tina’s shoulder gently.

  Hand quivering, I signed the certificate just above her signature—Tina Crowder for Thomas Crowder.

  She stood, wiping her eyes, gathering her purse while I remained seated.

  I consider myself a Romantic Rationalist, believer of fairy tales but not in happy endings, dreaming of a soul mate but knowing nothing lasts.

  Even so, I couldn’t stop staring at my husband’s name.

  * * *

  Standing at the door of the Crowder mansion the next day a few hours after finishing my linear algebra final, the briny sea air swirled around me, cool and damp. I looked over my shoulder, down the long driveway to the locked gate, across the highway to where I could hear the waves crash in inky darkness. My husband lived (or lay dying) near Portuguese Cove, at the north end of Palos Verdes Peninsula.

  Shifting the gate key to my purse and dropping the duffel, I rang the doorbell again. No answer.

  In the packet of information I’d been given by Florence Harcourt was contact information for my husband’s day nurse, Hillary Lattimer. Although it was almost 8 p.m., Hillary was to be on duty when I arrived and show me around the house, go over schedules and answer any questions.

  I tried Hillary’s cell, heard its faint ringing inside the house before it went to voice mail.

  I had met Hillary on my visit to view Thomas. She was somehow related to the family, but I hadn’t paid much attention to her, my eyes only on him.

  I tried the door, my damp hand jerking back when it easily opened. I felt like little Red Riding Hood, creeping into a house, a ravenous wolf waiting inside.

  “Hillary?”

  From upstairs I heard the faint beeps and clicks of medical equipment till I tiptoed through the dining room. Silence thickened outside the kitchen door.

  “Hillary?” I whispered, a cheek pressed against the icy door. I inched open the door, smelling something metallic and earthy. Heart hammering, I felt blindly for the light switch, unable to move my rooted feet.

  Tina had told me that her father had had the kitchen remodeled a few months before his first stroke—chrome appliances, black marble countertops, pale gray walls—very modern.

  Someone had left the back door open. It creaked on its hinges as I widened the kitchen door. The light from the dining room arrowed into the room, and lit the space between the two doors.

  Hillary’s body lay on the slate floor, a hand at the collar of her green scrubs, blood puddled around her head and shoulder. A red gash still glistened across her pale neck.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Between 1992 and 2011, Michelle Knowlden published 14 stories with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine that featured hypochondriac detective Micky Cardex and others that did not. The 1998 story “No, Thank You, John” was nominated for a Shamus award. Many of these stories have been included in anthologies and translated in multiple languages. She also published a science fiction story for the More Amazing Stories anthology published by Tor and another for Daily Science Fiction.

  Other mysteries: the Abishag mystery quartet, Jack Fell Down (Book One in the Deluded Detective Series), and The Admiral of Signal Hill are available on Amazon.

  Under the name Michelle Dutton, a 1920s romance novel: Lillian in the Doorway.

  Young Adult SF with Neal Shusterman: An X-Files novel Dark Matter for HarperCollins under the name Easton Royce and an e-novella Unstrung in Neal’s Unwind world published by Simon & Schuster. Three of their collaborated stories appear in UnBound, an anthology of Unwind stories published by Simon & Schuster December 2015.

  After leaving an engineering career of many years, Michelle lives in California with her family and writes full-time.

  Read more at Michelle Knowlden writes… at http://mlknowlden.wordpress.com/.

  Egrets, I’ve Had a Few: Deluded Detective Series Book Two

  Copyright 2016 Michelle Knowlden

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It takes a community to finish a novel. My heartfelt gratitude to:

  My Beta Readers: Jeanine Gattas, Kris Klopfenstein, and Rebecca Lang

  OC Fictionaires: for years of support, especially for encouragement and comments on this novel

  Cover Artist: Angie at pro_ebookcovers

  A special thank you to author Terry Black, who gave me the title of this book.

  DEDICATION

  To my family with love