Other Half (PsyCop book 12)

by Jordan Castillo Price

  I’d have to concede, Barbara was already twitchy about my mediumship. I’m guessing a conversation about a psychic breeding program wouldn’t go over too well. And if his grandmother had anything to complain about once he’d finished with her, everyone would just chalk it up to dementia.

  “Be nice,” I said. Jacob gave me a look. “Or at least be gentle.”

  We pulled up in front of Barbara’s house, a brick ranch with a finished basement and a manicured lawn. Barbara was a single working mother, and in Chicago, the property would’ve been way out of her reach. But small-town Wisconsin wasn’t inner-city Chicago, and real estate here was not nearly as precious a commodity. Up here, I regularly marveled at the abandoned properties we’d pass on the highway (or the two-lane, as the oldsters called the winding country roads). But a lot of these places were dauntingly far from civilization as I defined it, which meant there were precious few jobs to be had nearby. And without an expanding population clamoring for somewhere to live, the buildings eventually fell in on themselves.

  Barb’s place was definitely not in danger of falling in. In fact, her shrubs were trimmed with such precision they looked fake. Jacob’s sister was a real stickler for the rules, and not just in terms of her home maintenance. As we pulled up, we found her standing at the end of her drive, checking her phone as if to underscore the fact that we were nearly fifteen minutes late.

  The mere sight of her made me question whether I was on-board with this harebrained idea of Jacob’s. “I don’t know if I’m up for this,” I whispered as she strode up to the car, already annoyed. “Your sister is weirdly intimidating.”

  “Keep in mind, you can always outrun her.”

  Based on stride length, maybe. But given my endurance levels, I wasn’t eager to put it to the test.

  Barbara climbed into the back seat and slammed the door like an accusation, but before she could start complaining, Jacob distracted her with a question. “Where’s Clayton?”

  “You didn’t expect him to come, did you? He shouldn’t have to see Grandma like that.”

  Neither should we, but since she was the last remaining grandparent we could question about Kamal, I’d need to pull up my big boy pants and tough it out.

  Jacob cut his eyes to hers in the rearview. “You left him alone?”

  “Yes. He’s thirteen years old, Jacob.”

  “We could have dropped him off at Mom and Dad’s.”

  “Their TV is too old to hook up his video games. Don’t worry, he’s fine. He spends hours building Minecrafts, him and all his friends online. He only gets up when he needs to pee. I’ll bet when I get back I find him sitting in the exact same spot.”

  Sounded like a win-win to me. Clayton got to do exactly what he wanted while Barbara got a nice break from being a mom.

  Jacob still wasn’t sold on the idea. “There are predators out there—”

  “If you want to be a parent, Jacob, then have kids of your own. Don’t dump all your baggage on me and act like you know best. You don’t live here anymore—you haven’t lived here for years—so you’re not the judge of what’s safe and what isn’t. There are no ‘predators’ lurking around this neighborhood. And I want Clayton to be able to stand on his own two feet someday, which starts with me leaving him alone now and then. Was it scary the first time? Sure. But I figured out that if I keep enough Hot Pockets in the freezer, he might spoil his dinner, but he’s not gonna burn the house down.”

  If I wanted to distract Barbara somehow, I’d need to figure out my strategy now, since we were already pulling up outside the nursing home. As we all climbed out of the car, I grabbed the only prop available to me: the photo album that had fallen to the passenger side floor. “Say, Barbara.” I shoved it toward her and her arms reflexively flapped up to accept the book.

  While she might have registered that Jacob was already walking away, she was more curious about the photo album. She juggled it awkwardly, then blew off some glitter. “Ope—what’s this for?”

  “To help jog your grandmother’s memory.” We’d shoved in our glittery scrapbooking efforts, as well. It was tempting to lob them in the trash on the way out of Happy Crafts, but we weren’t sure if Pastor Jill would demand evidence of our date, so we decided to hold onto them. And good thing. “Oh, crap, I got glitter all over you.”

  Barbara was not nearly as alarmed by this as I might have been, but she did attempt to bat off some of the sparkle. “That’s glitter for ya.”

  I deliberately fumbled the album as I turned it the right way around in her hands, dousing her with even more glitter. “Sorry—”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You’ve got some on your—” I whapped at her shoulder a few times.

  She shook out both her arms as if she was trying to take flight. “Vic—it’s fine. It’ll come out in the wash.”

  “No, hold on.” I brushed vigorously at her shoulder blades until she relented and stood still for my de-glittering process. How long would Jacob need to question his grandmother? No idea. But probably longer than I could manhandle Barbara before she got suspicious.

  “Aw, jeez.”

  “Just a little bit more.”

  “Really, it’s…fine.” Barbara said this without much conviction, since she was thumbing through the album as best she could while awkwardly holding it aloft and open. “I’ve never seen this. These first pictures have gotta be a good dozen years older than me.” She set the album down on the hood of the car, and I stopped swatting glitter and came up beside her to look, figuring the best stalling tactic was to not annoy her too much.

  The photos were roughly chronological, with Baby Jacob appearing about halfway through and Little Barbie about ten pages later. Back when you had to actually buy film and pay for developing, most people took only a small fraction of the photos they did today. Kids always seem to merit a few shots, though. Especially birthdays and Christmas.

  Jacob’s birthday is at the height of summer, when July makes way for August and the humidity’s thick enough to eat with a fork. There was a whole page devoted to a series of birthday shots, judging by the banana bike with the big red bow on it, and Jacob grinning like he could hardly wait to hop on and go cause trouble. Barbara was a tiny thing with a wild mop of dark hair, maybe three or so, which would make Jacob nine or ten. Jerry looked about the same, though his hair was more poofy without the Bryl Cream. Shirley had started to pack on weight—maybe she’d quit smoking. And Uncle Leon was young and vigorous, even without his right arm.

  I wondered if Leon’s mill accident had actually been an accident. And then I told myself that even if I proved otherwise, it would hardly bring his physical arm back.

  “Look at my grandmother.” Barbara pointed to her and I barely stifled a flinch. Grandma Marks was lurking in the shadow of the garage like she was about to lure a few unsuspecting kids out of the forest with some gingerbread. Doing the math, I realized she wasn’t too much older in that photo than Jacob was now. But even in her fifties, she looked old and brittle.

  “Was she always so…?”

  “Miserable?” I’m glad Barbara said it, not me. “I didn’t notice it when I was a kid—that’s just how she was. But now, thinking back on it? I dunno. Maybe she was struggling with depression, or some other issue you could talk to your doctor about nowadays. Not back then, though. Too much stigma.”

  There was still plenty of stigma attached to mental health. I wasn’t about to volunteer about the time I’d done in a nuthouse, for instance. Even though the doctors eventually figured out I wasn’t schizophrenic, I knew that piece of my history made people look at me different anyhow.

  I said, “But you were close to her, right? That’s what your parents said.”

  “I spent time with her, I guess. But I never saw us as close. Not like I was with Grammy Joyce—my mom’s mom. She was always covering me with slobbery grandma-kisses.” She found a very 70’s fishing photo of the Larsons. Her nice grandmother was proudly brandishing a catfish whil
e her grandpa grinned around a cigarette. Barbara sighed sadly. “Grammy died when I was in college, and Grandpa Gus was gone a month later. I miss them so much.”

  When most people tell me stories like this, they’re followed by a hopeful look. I don’t think they even realize they’re doing it. But the allure of getting one final message from a loved one is strong. At least, from what I gather, it would be—if you didn’t know how gory, grabby, or just plain freaky ghosts usually were.

  Not Barbara, though. She wasn’t fishing for a visit from beyond the grave. She was just conveying information: she missed her dead grandparents. In fact, if anything, Barbara avoided talking Psych with me. She related to me not as the guy who slimed her brother with ectoplasm (or even the guy who slimed him with other things) but the guy he’d made a home with. As future sister-in-laws went, I could do worse.

  “We shouldn’t leave Jacob dealing with Grandma by himself,” Barbara said…in the way I might say, “I shouldn’t eat so many gas station burritos.” Instead of heading inside, she propped the photo album on the hood of the car and started paging through it. “She’s not in very many of the pictures, is she? I remember her being there for most things—like, look, here’s Jacob starting high school.” Wow, his teeth were ginormous before his head grew into them. “Makes you wonder if your memory really is all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Maybe she just didn’t like to be photographed.”

  “Yah, maybe not.” She flipped through the next few pages, then paused. Her brow furrowed, and she looked an awful lot like her big brother. Then again, he’d been making that face a lot lately. I peered over her shoulder.

  The photos appeared to have been taken at regular intervals—a year apart—but other than that, they were all the same. A carnival, with Jacob and Barbara standing beside a cutout sign of a painted pelican that read, “Riders must be this tall,” with the pelican’s wing stretched up to indicate 48 inches.

  Barbara stared at the page for a long moment, and eventually said, “Is this weird?”

  The pelican was not only pointing out the four-foot mark, but holding a long ruler—which reminded me of the sort of thing you see in mugshots, or mounted beside the door of a bank or convenience store. But people liked to track their kids’ progress. Didn’t they? “I dunno. Weird…how?”

  “That Grandma insisted we go to this carnival every year.”

  “Maybe she wanted to spend time with you.”

  “Maybe.” Barbara didn’t sound particularly convinced. “But we didn’t even like it—look at our faces.”

  I had to admit, no one looked particularly happy to be there.

  “Plus, it was a really long drive. There must be a reason she dragged us there year after year. People don’t just do things for no reason.”

  That’s true. Even the most random and senseless acts of violence I’d seen in all my years on the force had some logic behind them. Far-fetched and screwed up? Yes. But still, a reason.

  If it weren’t for Kamal’s notes, I would presume the reason Grandma Marks tracked her grandkids’ growth was purely sentimental. But having seen that branching tree of initials, I couldn’t help but wonder….

  “What else do you remember about the carnival?”

  Barbara’s gaze turned inward. “It was a fundraiser for Sacred Heart Hospital—I don’t know if that place is even around anymore. It was way off in the middle of nowhere.” Funny, this was how I viewed the majority of Wisconsin. “I guess you’d just call it our tradition. There was a big field behind the hospital where they’d set it up every year. Grandma took Jacob and me out there, and we’d spend the day playing carnival games.”

  “No rides?”

  Barbara looked puzzled. “Grandma always steered us away from the rides.”

  Which made the pelican even more suspect.

  Barbara said, “I guess the whole point was to make money with the games.”

  “Is that something hospitals typically do?”

  “Catholic churches have bingo—so why not? They sure made enough off us. I remember Grandma would get this big load of tickets, split them in half, give them to us, and tell us to go win a prize.”

  “That sounds…fun.”

  Barbara shrugged. “Does it? She wouldn’t let us stop until all the tickets were gone.”

  She closed the photo album decisively, and a puff of glitter sprayed out. “Anyways. Maybe this will help Grandma get her bearings.”

  By the time we joined Jacob, Barbara was pretty darn annoyed—but since that’s par for the course, I doubt anyone thought much of it. “Look what Jacob brought,” she said testily as she held up the photo album.

  If I wasn’t watching Grandma so closely for her reaction, I might not have seen it, but she glanced up just long enough to take it in, then looked away just as quickly.

  “It’s pictures,” Barbara said. Rather loudly, at that. “From when we were little.”

  Grandma was propped up in bed with a tray table beside her. Oddments of institutional pre-package food littered the tabletop: a Jell-O cup, a small plastic juice with a foil lid, a packet of untouched saltines. Barb shoved them aside with her glittery forearm and parked the photo album in their place. She opened it to a random page and said, “Look, there’s dad on his bowling league.”

  No response.

  Barbara tried again. “Remember this? The Christmas we tried to go caroling but we got snowed in?” I craned my neck and glimpsed a group of mostly dark-haired Markses laughing in outrageously big parkas. Barbara took in Grandma’s non-acknowledgement, then flipped to the page of the kids and the pelican sign…which definitely did look weird once you compared it to all the other normal photos. “How about this, Grandma? Sacred Heart Carnival. Remember that?”

  Jacob hadn’t kenned to the fact that anything was wrong. But something told me Grandma had. She jerked her head away as if something on the page offended her, which only made Barb try harder to make her acknowledge it. “Remember? We went every year. You and me and Jacob. Every. Year.”

  Grandma blew out a whuff through her nose—but hard to say if she was trying to communicate something, or just breathing.

  “You made us play games till we cried.”

  “I did not cry,” Jacob said firmly.

  Barbara ignored him. “All day long, even after dark sometimes—and it was summer, too, so the days were real long.”

  Grandma huffed and shook her head, glaring.

  “You forced us. Every darn year. Why? So you could get your grandma duties over with and act like you loved us?”

  Grandma’s gaze snapped to Barbara’s, and she said, “You have no idea how much I sacrificed for you kids.”

  I wasn’t expecting an actual answer—I don’t think any of us were. Barbara jumped like she’d grabbed the wrong end of a hot glue gun. “Well. At least you recognize us today.”

  16

  I’M NOT SURE what was worse—Grandma babbling at Jacob and calling him Freddie, or Grandma giving Jacob the cold shoulder and refusing to speak to him at all. Our plan to visit her while she was lucid hadn’t exactly panned out. And this time, no one suggested pie.

  Barbara glared out the backseat window. “What is with that woman?”

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” Jacob said. “If her mental condition changes throughout the day, maybe we need to catch her first thing in the morning.”

  Barbara said, “She knew full well what was going on. Stubborn. That’s what she is. Just plain stubborn.”

  I wisely refrained from any comment about it running in the family.

  Barbara flipped open the photo album. “You remember Sacred Heart, right? The dumb carnival? The pelican? How she always bought us that big wad of tickets?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems weird.” She fell silent again, and I figured that was that…until she piped up with, “I can’t find Sacred Heart.”

  I turned around so fast I nearly got whiplash, but the damage was al
ready done. Barbara was swiping away at her phone, where a search on the old hospital had pinged through the cloud, alerting every governmental agency keeping track of peoples’ curiosity that someone was poking their nose where it didn’t belong. I wanted to grab that phone out of her hand and snap, “What, are you stupid?” But of course she wasn’t. She just had no idea that she had more than one big brother—and the one she was unaware of was really big on surveillance.

  Once I was sure my voice would be normal, I said, “Can I see?”

  She handed me her phone. It was nowhere near as slick as mine and clumsier to navigate. You don’t realize how good you have it with top secret government tech until you’re forced to fumble around with a civilian phone. Then again, maybe civilian phones weren’t quite so easy to monitor. I poked back through her search and looked at the results for Sacred Heart Hospital. One in Eau Claire—hardly out in the middle of nowhere—and another “up north.”

  “That isn’t the one?” I asked.

  “Vic…that’s four hours away.” The “What, are you stupid?” came through loud and clear in Barbara’s tone, which made me feel pretty virtuous for holding my tongue.

  Jacob said, “It would’ve been somewhere south. Toward Platteville.”

  My clumsy searching turned up nothing. I gave the phone back to Barbara.

  Jacob said, “It probably merged with something else twenty years ago.”

  “I guess.” Barbara swiped around without much enthusiasm, then pocketed her phone and sighed. “There’s nothing out there but dairy farms and trees.”

  Jacob cut his eyes to me. I gave him a subtle nod. Hopefully, between the civilian phone and the fact that she’d given up so easily, no one back at HQ (or worse, F-Pimp National) would be pawing through Barbara’s browsing history.

  Then again, maybe she’d just given the whole thing a rest because we were practically home already. Jacob made the final turn onto her street, and she scooted across the seat to mash her face into the opposite window and said, “What on earth is Clayton doing outside?”