Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3) (3 page)

Saturday, March 22, 2003

I
parked my ‘67 Impala outside a squat one-story house. The white wood had mud-scuffs along the side walls, and the windows were in need of a good clean after an assault of spring showers. A woman emerged from the house with a towel over one shoulder and a bottle of window cleaner in the other hand. I had one of those weird moments when you realize—
I was just thinking that
. Her chestnut hair was pulled up away from her face and her denim shirt was rolled up to the elbows.

“Mrs. Sullivan?” I asked and stepped away from the Impala. I extended my hand. “James Brinkley. We spoke on the phone. I’m real sorry to bother you, ma’am.”

Expecting resistance, I laid it on thick. “I’ve only got a couple of questions. I won’t take up much of your time.”

“I told you today wasn’t a good day.” She didn’t remove the rubber gloves to shake my hand, nor did she lower the spray bottle pointed at my eyes. I learned long ago not to underestimate a woman, however frail she might seem, so I thought it best to keep a safe distance.

“I know and I apologize, Mrs. Sullivan.” I did my best to look up at her with downturned eyes, but it was hard when I was a good head and shoulders above her. If that didn’t work I could try to charm her another way, but I had a feeling it would backfire with Mrs. Sullivan. She had the look of a beautiful woman who was damn tired of being looked at like she was beautiful.

“Phelps,” she said and turned away from me toward the first window.

“Ma’am?”

“Phelps,” she said again. “I’ve remarried.”

“Right.” I put my hands in my pockets. “Mrs. Phelps, I have someone looking for your hus—first husband, Eric. Do you have any information about where he might be? I just want to talk to him. He isn’t in any kind of trouble.”

She laughed. “Of course he isn’t.”

I noticed the tension in her shoulders, the way they crept up toward her ears.

“Do you know for a fact he isn’t in any kind of trouble?”

Her fist hovered over the glass, rag gripped tightly. “No. I do not know where Eric is.” She squirted glass cleaner against the first window pane and handed me the bottle to hold. I remember the way she said his name.

Eric
. With sarcasm and resentment sure, but a hint of something softer there on the end. The ‘c’ not quite as hard as it could’ve been.

When I didn’t move or speak, she continued. “It’s been six years since he died.
Un
died—whatever they are calling it.”

“You were married for almost nine, correct?” I asked. I wanted to keep her talking because even if she didn’t know where he was, she might know where to point me. So I tried to give the impression that I knew more than I really did because the public records surrounding Eric and Danica were few and far between. “How long had you known him?”

She stopped wiping the glass and turned those bright green eyes on me. Those few stray hairs falling down around her face drew the eye to her jaw and neck. “My whole life. We both grew up around here and got all the way through high school in the same class, most years. We’d been just friends, good friends, until the summer of ’87. He was married before, at 18 to his high school sweetheart, Shannon Flick. But they divorced a couple of years later.”

“Is she still around?” I asked. Because this was the first time I’d heard of her.

“No, she moved to California or something like that.”

“Any kids or anything to tie him to her?”

“Not that I know of,” she said. “He let her go and stayed in town to work at his father’s garage, another mechanic from a family of wrench-turners, that sort of thing. I was still working at Mabel’s Grocer. Neither of us were really the college types. I thought about going to get my teaching degree, but I pretty much let that idea go when I got pregnant with Jesse.”

“Eric’s daughter?”

She nodded. Her voice had changed at the mention of Jesse. There was more to that, but I was making good progress on Eric, gathering up my next leads. I’d have to come back to the girl.

“She had a real hard time when he died,” Danica said. “She hasn’t really been the same actually.”

“It’s hard to lose a father,” I said. I handed her the bottle again so she could spray the next pane. I let her make whatever assumptions she liked about me. She must have made some sort of assumption, because when she took the bottle from me she smiled.

“She had nightmares about him for the longest time after he died,” she said, scrubbing at the glass. “She would wake up screaming, and we saw doctors about it, tried sedatives, but it didn’t work. Then one night she woke me up and climbed into bed with me. She told me Eric was here, that he’d come home.”

“Had he?” I asked.

Danica looked at her reflection in the dirty glass before speaking. “I know he’s—not dead—but no, I didn’t see him.”

A strange sensation traced my spine as I listened to Danica. I recognized this feeling from cases in the past. I was hearing something important—even if I didn’t know what the hell to do with this information yet, it meant something.

“I asked her if she’d seen him, thinking, ‘Oh god, he’s finally come back.’”

“Would that have been a problem?” I asked.

“I’d just had Daniel,” she said, wiping at a smudge of dirt on her face. “Another man was sleeping in the house. What do you think?”

“Did you know he’d return?” I pressed.

“We got a notice that he would be released New Year’s Day. I was at my mother’s with the kids for Christmas, you know, so I wasn’t sure if he’d come home or not. I don’t know if you know, but I am the one who called and—reported—him.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s not like I wanted them to come and take my husband away,” she said, her voice rising. “They told me these people were sick and needed help. People were panicking about what it meant and everything was just—I didn’t
want
him to be taken away, but I have a child, you know.”

“But he was taken away.”

“And I knew he might be angry at me for that, so I wasn’t sure if he’d come home. But I wanted him to. I really did.”

“Sure,” I said and wondered if she was lying to herself as well as to me. “Is your daughter home now?”

“No.” Danica’s shoulders tensed again. “She’s with her friend Alice, at the Methodist egg hunt. They’re bound at the hip those two. But Alice is a sweet girl—and it gets her out of the house.”

“Does she know he’s alive?”

“No. I don’t want her to know,” she said, firm. “I told her he was dead.”

As I looked at the back of her denim shirt, I realized the door to this conversation was closed and trying to pry it open wouldn’t get me anywhere. So I handed Danica my card. “I’ve taken up enough of your time, Mrs. Phelps. I won’t take up anymore. But if you think of something, anything else about Eric that might help me find him, I’d appreciate it if you gave this number a call.”

“Is he in trouble?” she asked. She laughed. “Would you tell me if he was?”

“Like I said, a friend just wants to find him.”

“What friend?” she asked. “I knew all his friends.”

“Maybe you did,” I said and turned toward the Impala. “But that was another life.”

Saturday, March 22, 2003

I
found the county morgue empty on the Saturday before Easter. The examiner agreed to meet with me, despite the holiday. I sure as hell wasn’t going to complain about that, even though the spring air was freezing my balls by the time the skeleton decided to show up and let me in.

A balding, crooked man climbed out of his hearse and shuffled toward me. His face was gaunt with the pallor of a vampire and he looked like he would fall over any second. Someone needed to feed grandpa a good steak dinner.

“Brinkley,” I said, forgetting again for the thousandth time to refer to myself as
Agent Brinkley
or even
Sergeant Brinkley
.

“Oscar Sampson, at your service.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Sampson.” I pointed at the hearse. “Are you a funeral director as well?”

“Funeral director, mortician, county examiner, all of the above. In small towns it is more profitable to be a jack of all trades, if you get what I am saying.”

“I do, sir, and I’m real sorry to pull you away from your family on Easter weekend."

The old man croaked and cawed and I realized he was laughing. “Purely my pleasure, my dear boy.”

“Why’s that?” I asked and waited behind him as he turned the key in the lock, and when the door stuck, bumped it open with his bony hip.

“Easter is an excuse for the whole family to come home,” he said.

“Isn’t that a good thing, sir?” I stepped into the cramped dark room after him. A wave of dusty, stagnant air welcomed me. Cabinets full of medical textbooks and artifacts. A few jars, probably responsible for the rancid chemical smell, rested on shelves. A half-eaten sandwich lay forgotten on a desktop overflowing with papers. In the middle of the room were two large metal slabs for what I imagined to be bodies. That day, they were clean and bare.

As crowded and claustrophobic as the room might’ve been, at least it was warm.

“I had six children with my late wife, God love her,” he said. “But all six of them are no better than shit on my shoe.”

I clenched my teeth together rather than laugh aloud.

“The first two—my two eldest sons, John and Jack, fight about everything. This morning, they had a two hour diatribe about butter. Butter. ‘It’s good for you. No, bad for you. Margarine is worse. Is life worth living without a bit of cholesterol’—that sort of thing. When you get to be my age, Agent Brinkley, you simply cannot dream of giving up even one hour, let alone an entire precious morning arguing about a condiment.”

“I understand, sir.”

“My third, my first girl Denise, is a lawyer and is always pestering me about my will and financial assets. ‘Are you ready to go?’ she asks. ‘Is everything prepared?’ ‘What are your wishes?’ These would be splendid questions if she intended to send me on a Mexican cruise, mind you. But since it pertains to my death, it gives the impression that she has nothing better to do than wait for me to die,” he said. “And maybe that is true. The fourth and fifth, Peter and Pauline, have launched and destroyed no less than ten business ventures, and neither one has reached their fortieth birthday. If even one makes it to retirement with their head above destitution, I’ll be surprised. Not that I’ll be alive to see it. If nothing else, I pray they soon discover the willpower not to tell me about the latest
opportunity
.”

“Maybe the sixth isn’t so bad?” I asked, rubbing a finger over the nearest surface and leaving a long clean line in my wake.

I wanted to know what the hell was causing all the dust. The particles in the air alone made my nose itch and eyes water.

He turned and placed the card I gave him with my name and number on the fridge for safe-keeping, his whole frame shaking in his oversized suit. “My youngest, Dolores—Lori as she likes to be called, has many preferences, let me tell you. She’s smart and very kind and probably the most salvageable of all my offspring. But that one shall not be carrying on the Sampson line all the same, as she just brought home her girlfriend this weekend. Her
life partner
, she says. Tells us she prefers the terms
lesbian
and
alternative lifestyle
.” He shook his head.

“At least there are no bodies this weekend,” I said, searching for ground to settle on.

Sampson looked up at me with large, soulful eyes. “I much prefer the dead myself.”

With nothing else to throw at him, I thought it would be best if I simply got to it.

“So, you found Eric Sullivan?” I asked.

“I find everyone, eventually,” he said. “I’m the only mortician and medical examiner for this county. And Old George, in the next county over, isn’t in the best of health, so I shoulder much of his work these days.”

“So it is my understanding that a car collapsed on him over at his parent’s garage, correct?”

“Indeed. One of the mechanical arms responsible for lifting the car broke. I’d heard it said that Sullivan Sr. was told to replace the lift arms no less than a hundred times. Look what it got him. Thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs, loss of customers, and a dead son.”

“How did they react to the news that he had NRD?”

The old man shrugged, and realizing he had pulled down the wrong book, replaced it on the shelf and chose another. “Who is to say? What happens in the home—that kind of thing.”

“Are his parents still alive?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Sullivan Sr. had a heart attack about three years ago. And his wife contracted cancer later that year. I saw her the next spring.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question but he cut me off. “Ah here we are. Sullivan, Eric. Died, March 5, 1997. Cause of death: massive thoracic contusions and internal bleeding.” When I didn’t appear to understand he added. “His chest was crushed by the car. Lungs and heart,
kah
-put.”

“Lucky for him, his head was OK,” I said and flipped open the small notepad I carried to take notes.

“Ah, yes, I’d heard that,” the old man said. “They can’t resurrect if they’ve injured their gray matter. No, Sullivan was lucky I suppose. Had the car fallen forward a bit more instead of straight down, I suppose he’d not have resurrected at all.”

“Did you see anything unusual?” I asked, “When preparing the body?”

“No. That is why we buried him. Do you know that you must insist on embalming now? In the past it was simply par for the course but now, we must leave everyone
au naturel
. Just in case. So if you would like to be sure you are dead, Agent Brinkley, I suggest you request embalmment.”

“But Eric didn’t?”

“No, like most people, I assume he didn’t know he had a choice. He was young enough that he wasn’t expecting to die. Frankly, I am quite ready to go.”

“So you’re saying he was buried and then—?”

“Yes,” he said. “Mr. Young is the one who heard the bell ringing, late one night up at Remmington’s Cemetery. You know, because we’ve started running strings to the boxes again, safety coffins they’re called, like in the old days, just in case.” I nodded, having seen the air tubes and bell strings myself. “To hear Young tell it, it was a dark, cold night, and all he could hear was this frantic ringing—said it was the most haunting sound of his life. He still wakes up hearing that bell, or so says Mrs. Young. It was one of our firsts, you understand. When the dead start doing things they aren’t supposed to, it stays with you, if you know what I mean.”

A headache was starting to build behind my eyes and I knew that if I didn’t take more aspirin or even better, have a drink, I wouldn’t get much further.

“Anyone else I could talk to about Eric in the area? Any siblings?” I asked but had a feeling that Eric Sullivan didn’t have much left to this old life that could lead me to his new one.

“He had an older brother, Dyson, who died in a motorcycle accident when the Eric was almost out of high school.”

“So no one?”

“Just the two wives and little girl that I know of,” he said. “But it is hard to tell these days. I just read in
The Post
that a man had two entire families. Two wives, two sets of kids, two lives. And not one after the other, but both concurrently, for nearly 35 years. Can you believe it?”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” I said.

The old man sighed and closed his book. “Yes, but maybe I would’ve had better luck with the second lot.”