Blood Sisters

by Jim O'Shea

  Libby stood, went to the sink, and leaned on the kitchen counter trying to steady herself. “You’re taking the corners a little too fast for me, Detective Hunter.” She turned to face him. “Am I in danger?”

  "I don’t believe so, Ms. Meeker, because you’d be dead already if the man responsible for these murders had actually been in your home. However, there were too many unusual connections to simply ignore.”

  Libby closed her eyes.

  “Are you OK, Ms. Meeker?”

  “I’m a little creeped out, if you want to know the truth.”

  The corner of the Salt Lake City detective’s mouth turned up ever so slightly for a moment, before he centered his pen on the notepad in his lap. For the next twenty minutes, he prodded and poked into Libby’s world with questions that were methodical and meticulous, almost surgical in nature. His probing intensified when Libby told him about the second eyes puzzle piece she’d found in the credenza at her office, and doubt was apparent on his face when she told him she had its only key to her knowledge. But just when it seemed the detective seemed satisfied he’d gotten what he came for, his eyes told another story. She studied the man who was studying her intently above glasses still perched on the end of his nose. His eyes were bluer than she’d first thought, and more piercing—a trait that might come in handy in his line of work.

  “May I see the jigsaw puzzle?”

  “You can take it with you if you’d like.”

  “There’s no need for that.”

  Libby led Hunter up the stairs, down the hall, and pulled her office door closed as they passed to hide the tangle of architectural drawings spread out over the floor. She pushed open the door to the spare bedroom, flipped on the overhead light, and stepped out of the way. “The Tooele cops suggested I leave everything as-is,” she said. “In case it turns out to be something.”

  Hunter grunted what sounded like acknowledgement as he entered the room and paused just inside the door, taking in the scene with his head on a pivot. After studying the room for a few seconds, he pulled a phone out of his pocket and spoke over his shoulder. “Do you mind if I take a couple photos?”

  Libby leaned on the doorframe. “Knock yourself out.”

  The detective snapped a single picture of the puzzle, another of the two eyes pieces sitting side-by-side, and several of the room itself from different angles. When he was finished, he returned the phone to his pocket and stood over the nightstand staring at the partially completed puzzle. “Do you have any idea what it’ll be?” He swept his hand over the puzzle.

  “I believe it’s a baby picture of my sister and me,” Libby said. “The background looks like the hospital we were born…we were in.”

  “Melissa?”

  Libby nodded. The man was very thorough.

  “I recognized the balloon wallpaper pieces.” Without touching the surface of the puzzle, she pointed at several bright, colorful circles in the top left corner. “These are the pieces that showed up a few days after the party and caused my father to freak out. I believe it’s a picture he took the morning after our birth because my parents have had it on their bookshelves for thirty years.” She moved her finger from the left to the right edge. “There are empty bassinets on both sides of us in the original photo.”

  Hunter studied the puzzle for a few seconds without touching it. “Your father or mother must have given a hard copy of the picture to someone prior to your birthday.”

  Libby shook her head. “That’s what I thought,” she said, “but they were both as surprised as I was.”

  “How else could someone have obtained this photo?”

  “Dad had all their old pictures digitized a few years ago and posted a bunch on social media. I checked and found out this was one of them. Since he made them all public, it could have been almost anyone.”

  Hunter scribbled again in his notebook.

  “I did some research and found out there are a ton of companies that will take any photo and make a jigsaw puzzle out of it. So I figured somebody had one made as a gift for my birthday. I just assumed they didn’t have time to finish it.”

  Hunter closed his notebook and stared at her. “And decided to take the box and remaining pieces with them?”

  “That part doesn’t add up. But whoever it was did leave behind a birthday card.” Libby pulled a simple piece of folded white cardboard from the wicker basket under the nightstand and handed it to Hunter. The front had a picture of a cartoon owl with a word bubble coming from the side of its mouth that said, ‘Who?’ The inside of the card featured the same owl smiling with another word bubble that said, ‘You, Birthday Girl!’

  From the look on his face, it was clear the detective also realized the card was intended for a young child. “No envelope?”

  Libby shook her head.

  “No signature?”

  “I have no idea who left it. But with the timing and all, I was sure it was intended to be a birthday gift and they ran out of time to sign the card as well. Maybe they heard Aisha and I coming and ducked into another room.” Libby pointed to a louvered, bi-fold door on the opposite side of the room. “Or maybe they were in that closet the entire time, where I store my summer clothes.”

  The detective’s eyes squinted as he moved toward the closet doors. He pulled them open, revealing a row of garments hanging neatly on the closet rod—evenly spaced out across the width of the closet except for an open gap in the middle where they had been pushed to either side. He took an additional photo and wrote in his notebook again.

  “Prior to last Monday, I’d only seen the outer frame of the puzzle assembled and I had no idea what it was. I’d shoved the pieces into a wicker basket under the nightstand and had just returned from work when I noticed the puzzle was not only reassembled, but had new pieces too. The whole thing left me feeling kind of...”

  “Creeped out?”

  Libby nodded and suppressed a grin. She could feel his rough side without touching him. It was cold and hard, yet with a definite purpose. To protect her, she decided.

  “Please don’t touch anything in this room, Ms. Meeker. I’ll have everything dusted just in case.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  Hunter was nodding when a chirping sound emerged from the breast pocket of his blazer. One hand produced a business card from his pants pocket, while the other pulled out a phone. “If anything happens or changes, give me a call,” he said, handing her the card. “Anything at all.”

  Libby shoved the card in the pocket of her sweater.

  “It’s most likely nothing,” he said, as he manipulated the phone’s screen. “But there are a few too many coincidences as far as I’m concerned.”

  Libby slumped against the doorframe again. By the look on his face, the detective from Salt Lake City was undoubtedly following the same line of thought.

  “Could this get worse?”

  When the detective looked up, his eyes were narrowed to pinpoints. “I’m afraid it already has.”

  16

  Skinny legs swung out from under the pleated gingham dress. Libby was lighter than air for the briefest of moments, until gravity took over and she once again began her downward arc. The empty tire to her right still hung motionless and hanging over a newly formed precipice, a grave-sized crack in the earth that appeared to have no bottom. The shadowy driveway looked even longer this time, stretching out from the old oak tree like a gravel ribbon. Under the canopy of spruce, the figure in white was closer than ever before.

  She was dreaming again.

  Libby had known it all along and tried desperately to cling to the fading images, but they drifted away into a bright, fluorescent light. She longed to be anywhere but where she was, in her dad’s hospital room. And with that sudden realization, the dream’s residue swept away—replaced by her stark reality.

  A wall full of sophisticated medical equipment monitored Nicholas Meeker’s various body functions, and an intravenous drip provided life-giving fluids and drugs. But despit
e all the technology and medical expertise, Libby’s father was a tiny shadow of the man she knew just days ago, his damaged body almost disappearing inside a white hospital gown.

  Aisha stood hunched over him, brushing wisps of gray hair from his forehead. She closed her eyes and mouthed what Libby assumed was a silent prayer. Then she held her father’s hands for a long time in a silence interrupted by the irregular beep from the heart monitor. “No change,” Aisha said.

  Libby took a sip of the water Aisha had brought her.

  Aisha glanced quickly back at her father, and gestured toward the door. “What’s up with the dude standing in the hallway?”

  “Hunter.”

  “What?” Aisha tilted her head at an angle.

  “His name is Hunter.”

  “OK. Why is Hunter standing in the hallway?”

  “He’s the detective I told you about from Salt Lake, the one investigating the murders. He heard about Dad and was concerned.”

  Aisha’s gaze betrayed suspicion.

  “He was here yesterday too.”

  Aisha was about to respond when her father’s wrinkled hand suddenly reached out from under the white hospital linens and seized Libby by the wrist, causing her heart to leap into her throat. For a brief moment she thought it was a miraculous recovery, before recognizing it as nothing more than the desperation of a dying man. When his eyes closed for what she knew was the last time, a myriad of machines signaled the event.

  Nurses flooded the hospital room within seconds, all in a vain attempt to save her father’s life.

  ~*~

  It was bleak the afternoon they buried her father.

  The crowd was much bigger than the one for her mother, and Libby had no stomach for another reception at her parents’ Stockton home, so mourners paid their last respects at the cemetery and she thanked as many as she could. After considerable pleading, she managed to convince Aisha to give her some personal time to mourn, and Libby wound up alone at the Meeker family plot on a late September afternoon—curled up at the foot of her father’s grave sobbing uncontrollably.

  The sun was setting before she finally found the strength to pull herself up to her knees and take one final look at her father’s grave marker. Nicholas Meeker was laid to rest next to his parents and between his wife and daughter, and the sight of the three matching white tombstones caused a sudden and strange reaction inside Libby’s brain—inexplicably flooding her five senses with childhood memories.

  Crystal clear images of the snow forts Nicholas had helped his girls build in the backyard on Stansberry Lane. The creak of the hayride wagon wheels during their annual trip to the Christmas tree farm outside Provo. Warm summer afternoons playing Little League softball, followed so often by the smell of her mother’s cinnamon pie cookies in the oven.

  The pleasant imagery was interrupted by a tiny sound. It was similar to the sound made when Libby would knock lightly on her mother’s bedroom door as a child, and at first, it was almost too small to hear. But the distinct resonance persisted and grew louder, forcing her eyes to close and teeth to clench. She almost toppled over when she recognized it, as if the ground had shaken violently underneath her.

  It couldn’t be…

  Libby made fists with both hands and planted them firmly on the ground next to her knees. No. Her primary senses had betrayed her all too often in recent months. They couldn’t be trusted. Each time they had tried to convince her of things that weren’t real, and this time her ear drums were the culprit—vibrating to a frequency so unique that it threatened to bridge the gap between the living and the dead. Her sense of touch joined the party when her spine, as if a tuning fork for messages from beyond the grave, enabled Libby to feel the vibrations inside her body as clearly as she heard them in her ears.

  Her brain told her to run, but something much more powerful prevented it. Libby leaned over and put her ear to the cold dirt, despite being firmly in the grip of a visceral fear.

  Three light taps at first, sounding as if they were reverberating off hollow wood. They were followed by a pause before two more light taps—each rising up deep from within the cold earth.

  17

  Libby ascended into the fuzzy space between awake and sleep before making the conscious decision to return to the dream, diving even deeper. This time the tire swing suspending her hung motionless with two tiny legs dangling over the bottomless grave, and the mysterious figure in white was almost within her grasp. But the entity had no face, or perhaps it did, and it was too hard to look at. She had no way of knowing for sure.

  Libby turned away from the fuzzy images, expecting to see her physical self once again twisting in a restless sleep, but could make out nothing but a tiny point of white glimmering in an ebony sea. She concentrated on the light until it grew larger and brighter, gradually washing away the darkness that engulfed her.

  She gripped the arms of a chair and let out a deep breath. She was in her psychiatrist’s office and it was a Wednesday afternoon in October. Although the quick nap temporarily exorcised her from the pain of her reality, it quickly rushed back unchecked.

  The shock of her father’s death and subsequent episode at the cemetery was eventually replaced by grief, blanketing Libby like the snow covering most of northern Utah. It had been a month since Nicholas Meeker’s funeral, and in that time, Libby’s life had returned to normal in many ways.

  But not all.

  The killings had stopped, and the handsome detective eventually surrendered the search for the killer in Tooele and returned to Salt Lake City. The convention center project was back on track, and thanks to a few kind words from Marcia Olds, Libby was still employed at Long+McCauley. Ryan Florich continued to flirt with her every chance he had, and the opportunities seemed to be coming in much greater frequency in recent weeks.

  No new jigsaw puzzle pieces had appeared, and Libby had long since given up trying to make any sense of her mother’s deathbed words. Only her recurring dream remained a constant.

  Libby Meeker’s life, however, now had an unofficial before and after. Before her sister and parents’ deaths her life was like most—defined by family, friends, work, and play. But her after life was now becoming increasingly defined by paranoia—by possibilities that defied rational thought.

  She’d always been skeptical of anything that even hinted at the paranormal, but Libby couldn’t escape the reality that she—like her parents before her—was seeing, smelling, and hearing a presence that could not logically exist. She wanted to believe what she was dealing with was a simple emotional issue or perhaps an adverse reaction to stress. Not that an entity from another physical plane had entered her universe, and especially not as a result of a flaw in her own psychological makeup.

  Libby poured more hot water in her cup, bobbed the tea bag a few times, then stood and pulled the curtains back from Dr. Lambert’s office window. The trees were done trading their fall wardrobe of reds and golds for winter’s gray, and cold sleet fell in icy sheets from a leaden sky. The wintry scene was interrupted by the sound of a door handle turning.

  “I’m so sorry.” Dr. Lambert pulled the door shut behind her before returning to one of two identical brown leather chairs in the middle of her office. “I hate to interrupt a session with a call,” she said, “but this patient is potentially suicidal and my receptionist had very explicit instructions.”

  “I totally understand, Dr. Lambert,” Libby said, as she sat down in the chair across from her.

  Lambert grabbed the notepad on the table next to her chair and dropped it in her lap. “We were talking about your father,” she said. “His cause of death.”

  Libby covered a cough with her fist.

  “So…” Lambert paused and looked down at the notebook. “According to the doctors, it was either an extraordinary shock or high level of stress that forced large amounts of adrenaline into his bloodstream, thus narrowing the main arteries to the heart.”

  “They said it paralyzed his heart’s main pum
ping chamber causing a sudden change in rhythm similar to a heart attack.”

  “Like your mother?”

  Libby nodded.

  “I seem to remember you telling me both of your parents took heart medicine for that specific type of ailment.”

  “They both took beta blockers and anticoagulants on a daily basis. The doctor said they needed to be diligent about taking their meds because they were both very vulnerable otherwise.”

  “Were they?” Lambert stared at her for a few seconds before adding, “Diligent?”

  Libby’s shoulders rose and fell, as she struggled to manage her own heart’s normal beat. “Both of their medicine bottles were over half empty, and they each had pill dispensers labeled by day. Every compartment was empty up to and including the day they died, and full after. I’m positive they were on the meds.”

  “It would be unusual for people with heart conditions like your parents to not take their medications, but not unprecedented.” Lambert offered the thinnest of smiles. “But it’s not unusual for people married as long as your parents were to pass away so close to each other. What was it, forty years?”

  “Almost,” Libby stood, circled the chair, and leaned on its back. “But as I said, I don’t believe their deaths are related to what’s going on with me right now.”

  Lambert set the notepad back on the table and crossed her legs. “Think of it this way, Libby. Your psyche is like the buildings you create. The tiniest flaw in a design can have disastrous results over time if not remediated. It’s the same with your mind. As we discussed in our last meeting, if your brain chemistry is not kept in balance, everything can collapse down around you over time.”

  “You’re suggesting drugs again?”