Dog sprang for Connor. Gingerly avoiding his gun hand, he guided him to the armchair. Kat trussed Reich’s ankles. He’d been steadily cursing her, so she taped his mouth, too.
Sebastian nudged me. “Sorry for attacking you,” I told Connor. “We may have over-reacted.”
“You tink?” he growled.
Kat hastily intervened. “How come the FBI was acting as Sebastian’s hospice aide?”
I’m loosely translating what Connor said. Some of it will remain forever gibberish.
“Sebastian contacted Witness Protection about Simpson, and they called us when Sebastian was attacked. At the time, we weren’t sure if it was Reich or one of Tolliver’s people who nearly killed him. I’d been a medic in the army, so I got tagged to be Sebastian’s aide. My boss thought it would be good to have someone close by.”
Someone banged loudly on the door. Connor tried to stand and collapsed back into the chair. “Prob-ly my boss. P’tricia Haz-ton,” he said. “I called her.”
“I’ll get it.” Dog left the room.
Kat shook her head at me. “I can’t believe we didn’t search him after we knocked him out. We left him with his gun and his phone. What if he had been out to kill us?”
“And if we frisked him,” I pointed out. “We would have found out that he was FBI.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That too.”
Sebastian exhaled. “That was all you learned to-day?”
“Of course not.” I scooted back till I sat against the wall next to him. “I also learned that my Sebastian loves me. Like I love him.”
EPILOGUE
Six months later…
The four of us stood in the downstairs bathroom of the West LA house. After Sebastian and I married again, we bought the house from Professor Stegner and were in the process of slowly remodeling it. The kitchen was still in disarray, but our bedroom downstairs and Kat’s and Dog’s bedroom upstairs were finished.
Dog lifted the lid of the toilet. “Throw him in,” he said.
“Hey.” Kat mock-punched his arm. “Such things require ceremony.”
Our wedding had been a perfect ceremony. Only family and a few dear friends attended. Mrs. Timmons, Kat’s Westwood Irregulars, Jen, Heather, Stanley, Harvey Kassem, Connor and his FBI boss, Tricia Hazelton. (The latter definitely not as evil as I thought she was. She kept Tina and my mom contained at the wedding. For that reason alone, she will be my hero forever.) Still in a wheelchair, Sebastian wore a tux. I wore my grandmother’s wedding gown. Standing at the altar, Dog was Sebastian’s best man and Kat, my matron of honor.
Although Donovan Reid did not attend our wedding, he gave me a wonderful wedding gift. One that couldn’t be wrapped. He quit the Westwood Abishag Agency to take on my court case to remain Sebastian’s wife. We won. Even though Sebastian and I also had a traditional wedding, my Abishag marriage certificate remained in effect and always will.
Dog and Kat still lived with us. They’d stay till Dog finished his residency. Or maybe forever. We would raise our kids till they left home, and then we’d all grow old together.
In the bathroom, I leaned against Sebastian. Although he walked slowly and with a cane, he had regained the strength he had before the accident. He still sometimes misspoke, sometimes rhymed when tired, and his memory remained spotty, but the doctors kept telling us that Sebastian may one day be as good as new.
“I prepared a speech,” Sebastian said.
Dog groaned. Kat poked him hard.
“Go ahead, love,” I said.
He unfolded the paper and looked at the small box I held. “From the play for which you were named.” He cleared his throat. “For she had eyes and chose me.”
Kat sniffed and dabbed a non-existent tear.
I whispered to Sebastian. “Was that for me or for Othello?”
He squeezed my hand. “For you.”
Dog said impatiently, “Can we get on with it? My shift starts in an hour.”
I opened the box and sighed over the small, dead fish. “Good-bye, Othello. I loved you while you were with us and will remember you always.”
I tipped the box, and Othello’s body slipped into the toilet.
“Go, little one,” Kat said. “No more small globe of water for you. You belong now …”
Dog flushed the toilet.
She shot him a dirty look. “… to the sea.”
As they left the bathroom, I heard Dog ask about dinner but I’d already warmed something that Mrs. Timmons left. She only came Mondays and Thursdays now, and mostly to check that we weren’t eating Captain Crunch and pizza.
“Don’t be sad.” Sebastian hugged me.
“I’m not.” I rested my head against his chest, feeling his heartbeat, familiar and strong.
I still don’t believe in happily ever after. The doctors can be optimistic because the odds have improved, but they often remind us that the damage to Sebastian’s body may still cause an early death. When you don’t expect the fairy tale to last, each day proves more precious than the one before. An eggshell present to cherish.
As if following my thoughts, Sebastian said, “No more comatose husbands.”
I grinned. He’d said that on our wedding day and every day since.
“No more 89 rules for being an Abishag wife.” Which is how I answered him, although I still sometimes abided by the rules.
“Never endings, ...” I still read the Arabian tales from The Thousand and One Nights before we turned off the lights. As he did now, Sebastian always closed the book with those two words. No matter what happened, I would hear the echo of his promise before I slept.
His half-smile widened, and something both wistful and hopeful bloomed over Othello’s watery grave.
I finished with my promise to him.
“… always beginnings.”
Available now
Jack Fell Down
A novella in the Missing Children series
An Excerpt from Jack Fell Down in the Missing Children series
Before the blackout
I swept back the embroidered gypsy scarf with bells that tinkled around my face. My earrings jangled. When I stretched my hands dramatically over the cards, the heavy bracelets clanked on the table.
I was a veritable symphonic fortuneteller—no extra charge.
The candle guttered as an evening breeze swept through my shabby 2nd Street office in Santa Ana. On the other side of the rickety table, the two sixteen-year-olds exchanged an apprehensive look. I didn’t need a sixth sense to read them: they wondered if ghosts, demons, or supernatural powers moved among us.
Except for a get well card, I hadn’t heard from Vice-Principal Jimmy Bettaker since the accident 17 months ago. Yesterday, with no preliminary chitchat, he called about the lovebirds’ parents who were willing to pay good money to break up the kids. He talked as if we still lived in my pre-accident days when I was a high school science teacher always ready to play fortuneteller (or investigate lost causes) for the additional income. As if we were still friends after briefly dating four years earlier.
Maybe we were. What I remembered since the accident was wrong more often than right.
I shifted in my chair, and the girl pursed her lips worriedly. Good. First rule of fortunetelling: keep ‘em off-kilter. My Aunt Hill always added, “then traumatize them but good.”
I shifted again, and this time the boy blinked. He’d been studying the room, from the scored wood floors to the half-filled bookshelves and the old desk that listed in the corner to the dusty rafters. Although I rarely needed an office, it often proved handy for working with troublesome children, researching cold cases, and random skullduggery.
While the boy studied me, I couldn’t scratch the scar on my left leg: three, deep tiger scratches that ran from mid thigh almost to my knee. Last week it started itching again.
The kids were cute. He had blonde curls, ruddy cheeks, and a linebacker’s build. She was a small, southeast-Asian exotic sporting a curve-hugging dress o
nly worn by high school girls and hookers, turquoise polish on her nails, and dangerously high heels. She held his large right hand in both of hers while his left arm draped protectively over the back of her chair.
When I’d talked to the boy’s parents, the dad sounded tentative, like he’d been steamrollered into sending his kid to the session tonight. The girl’s mother had the same reaction—why use a keg of dynamite when a few words of sense might separate them? Fortunately for my bank account, their spouses thought a supernatural look into the future would demolish their bond.
Twenty years of teaching high school students had made me cynical. No level of stupidity, no dramatic extreme went untested by teenagers in love. Romeo and Juliet were pikers compared to the thousands who’d passed through my classroom.
Hearing Jimmy’s coffee mug clatter down the hall, I decided the long silence had served its purpose. The kids looked rattled. I twitched a card from the spread facedown on the table, laid it before the boy—who sat across from me and to my left—and pretended a careful scrutiny of the Eight of Spades. I’d watched Aunt Hillary play parlor tricks a hundred times for family and friends. After adding a few flourishes of my own, I found it didn’t matter which card appeared. I could make it say anything.
“Hey, that’s not a Tarot card,” the boy said. I’d forgotten his name. Something like lunchmeat. Capicola?
“It’s not zee cards zat tell z’future,” I said in my gypsy accent. “It’s zee spirits speaking to me, Madame Pythagoras.” The bells on my scarf tinkled as I gestured to the sky darkening beyond the window.
The girl Kirsten (I remembered her name because it’s the same as one of my nieces) cast a quick frightened look out the window. The boy’s—Liverwurst?—stare remained on me. “So what do the spirits say?” His tone was patronizing.
I decided to go for broke. “Eight of Spades—zat is the card of destiny, zat is your destiny. In eight years, you’ll be an archeologist, traveling to distant lands, battling plagues, terrorists, desert heat, and spiders to unearth z’secrets of zee past.”
I collapsed in my chair and watched their reaction from hooded eyes.
“Like Indiana Jones?” the boy asked, his scornful attitude temporarily suspended. “Cool.”
“Spiders?” Frowning, Kirsten twisted a strand of hair, now holding—Baloney’s?—hand in only one of hers.
Hooked ‘em. Time to stir the pot. I extracted another card from the spread and laid it before the girl. Jack of Diamonds.
“Fascinating,” I breathed. “Such wealth, such joy, and z’loss of every-ting teetering on z’knife edge of fate.” I exhaled hopelessness, and Kirsten shivered.
The boy looked skeptical, but he also stared longingly at the adventure promised in his Eight of Spades. “What are you talking about?”
I tapped one be-ringed finger on her card. “Jack, zee card of chance. For z’girl, all hinges on z’next card.”
She shifted uncomfortably, and his arm dropped from her chair. “Let’s go, Devlin. I don’t like this.”
Devlin. Deviled ham. My mother’s favorite sandwich. I knew it had something to do with lunchmeat.
With feigned indifference, I shrugged and the earrings jangled. “Go if you like. Knowledge of zee future is not for everyone.”
Winningly, Devlin squeezed Kirsten’s hand, his superior attitude gone. “We’ve got to see what happens next, babe. Don’t you want to know? She said you could be wealthy.”
“She said there’d be plagues and snakes. And now this Jack thing? I’m done, Dev. Take me home.”
Sweet. I relaxed in my chair, the only comfortable one in the office. I’d draped it with garish shawls for the evening’s performance. The headache that had been threatening all day—another constant since the accident—intensified. I’d have to wrap it up fast or I’d be calling Aunt Ivy to drive me home.
An air of unreality flooded me, blurring the teenagers, turning their spat into gibberish. I gripped the armrests tightly. When my vision cleared, the room was silent, and they stared at me uneasily.
“Z’spirits.” I waved vaguely, wondering why I hadn’t heard Jimmy in the hallway for awhile. “Zey grow impatient. You stay or you go. Decide now.”
“We stay,” Devlin said, his arm encircling Kirsten and hugging her firmly. She wasn’t convinced, but said nothing. “Flip the card.” Devlin tapped the table as if he were in Vegas. Nothing says confidence like a varsity football player.
I flipped the card. Hoping for hearts, but I could work with the Ten of Clubs I dealt.
“Death,” I said.
Kirsten yelped. Devlin frowned. “Death? You mean like digging up dead mummies?”
I shook my head, which almost made me yelp too, headache red-lining. “Remember z’Jack? In z’desert, death stalks z’girl.”
Kirsten burst into tears. “Your stupid mummies. I’m going to die because of your stupid astrology job in the desert. And you don’t care.”
I didn’t bother correcting “astrology.” Devlin patted her arm tentatively. “I care, babe.” He shot me an accusing look. “What happened to the money?”
“Jack of Diamonds,” I said. “Her future teeters on z’edge. Wealth and happiness on one side. Death in clubs on z’other.”
“Told you.” Kirsten sullenly moved her chair out of his reach. “I stay with you in some crappy pyramid, I lose all my money, and then I die. You get to be a famous astronomer, and some hot star plays you in the movie about your life. How fair is that?”
I couldn’t contain myself. “Not astronomer. Not astrologer. Archeologist.”
“Whatever.” She sniffed and then narrowed her eyes. “What happened to your accent?”
“Come on, Kirs. You’re not taking this seriously?” Devlin’s skepticism suddenly returned. “It’s a joke. It’s your parents and mine trying to break us up before we apply to colleges next year.”
Maybe Lunchmeat wasn’t an idiot after all—which would have shaken my entire belief system if he hadn’t added, “Babe, you know my parents think you’re not smart enough to get into the universities scouting me. They think you’ll hold me back. Crazy, right?”
Hello? I switched my attention to Kirsten.
Kirsten’s tears evaporated, and the office temperature plummeted. “Really? My parents think you’re a loser jock who’ll flunk out first year in whatever loser school takes you. And she said …” She pointed at me. I had a sinking feeling that I wouldn’t be paid for this session. A brutal breakup was acceptable, a broken heart expected, but God forbid anyone’s feelings get hurt.
“The psychic said if I don’t marry you, I’d be happy and have scads of money. Come to think of it, she never said that you’d be rich or famous or happy. She said terrorists and plagues were your destiny.” Kirsten punched the air triumphantly.
Devlin turned to me. “You didn’t say archeology would suck, right? Getting my destiny is good, isn’t it?”
Nervously, I squirmed in my nest of shawls. “Strictly speaking psychics and fortunetellers aren’t precisely the same thing.”
Kirsten’s lip curled. “You lost your accent again.”
“Come on, Ms Graff, tell Kirsten my destiny rocks.”
Jimmy had introduced me as Madame Pythagoras. Where had he learned my real name? I shook off my shawls, tremors and heat pouring through me.
“How do you know me?” My voice shook like my hands and legs.
Devlin’s eyes widened. God knows what he saw, but for me the office was capsizing. Unless something happened fast, I was going down. “You used to teach at my school, Ms Graff. I took your Physics for Athletes class, till—you know—you left.”
Kirsten frowned. “You were a teacher before you became a psychic? Can you do that?”
With every muscle stiffening, I couldn’t speak.
Her narrowed eyes on Devlin, she said to me, “Is that your, what-do-you-call-it, your spirit guide channeling you? Can you ask it to inform my ex-boyfriend how he’s gonna die of a snake biting his neck,
but not before his hair falls out.” She sneered. “My grandmother said you got all the signs of going bald before you’re thirty. Tell him, Ms. Graff.”
That’s when I blacked out.
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.
In 2013, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing released Sinking Ships, her first short novel in the Abishag Mysteries Quartet. In February 2014, the second Abishag mystery, Indelible Beats, was published, followed by the third, Riddle in Bones, April 2014.
In July 2014, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing released Jack Fell Down, the first mystery novella in the Missing Children series.
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.
In 2011, Michelle left an engineering career of many years to write full-time. Read more at Michelle Knowlden writes… at http://mlknowlden.wordpress.com/.
An Eggshell Present: An Abishag’s Fourth Mystery (Abishag Mysteries Book 4) Page 15