Slumbered to Death

by Vanessa Gray Bartal

  When he realized what she had done, he tossed her off him. She landed hard on the floor beside him. “Sadie, why?”

  “Because it worked.”

  “Would you kiss an attacker?”

  “If that’s what it takes to win.”

  He said the words with her and sat up. “Do you want to know why I worry about you? It’s because of this, because you want to win no matter what. Do you know what a sensible person does? They run away. You get a foothold, you run away. Not you, no, you have to prove yourself. You have to win.”

  “What’s so wrong with wanting to win?”

  “When you win, there’s always a loser.”

  “What are we talking about here, Luke? Because all of a sudden it feels like we’re not speaking in hypotheticals anymore. Are you still so angry with me?”

  He opened his mouth to tell her that of course he wasn’t angry with her, that their past was ancient history and he had moved on, but the words stuck. With a start, he realized that he was still angry. Though it was buried deep, there was a cesspool of seething rage still bubbling inside him.

  “Luke, I was a stupid, mixed up kid, and I’m sorry. Please, can’t you let it go?”

  Could he? He didn’t know. Holding on to a piece of his anger felt safe. It kept his heart protected from her. “The ones you care about the most always hurt you the deepest, they say,” he closed the distance and clasped her hand. “Nobody ever meant more to me than you, Sade. I’ll work on it.”

  Sadie wanted to push him, to point out that they had been coexisting in peace the last few weeks, to tell him how much she had grown and matured, to list for him all the little ways she had been trying to make amends. But she knew Luke too well; pushing right now wouldn’t help her cause. She squeezed his hand. “I miss my best friend. I miss things being the way they were. There’s distance between us, and I don’t like it.”

  Luke didn’t point out that the distance was there for his own self-preservation. Sadie was a constant temptation. If he let go of his grudge, what was to stop him from falling for her again? And, even free of anger, he wasn’t sure he could ever trust her that way again. “I’ll work on it,” he promised again.

  He lay down again. They stared at the ceiling, their hands still clasped. “You wear me out, Sadie,” Luke said. No one had ever required as much of him as she did. If she wasn’t taking a toll on him emotionally then she was giving him a beating in the literal sense. His muscles were starting to ache from pinning her down, and he was emotionally drained.

  “Really? I feel energized.” She had worked up a good sweat while they were wrestling, and her synapses were firing on all cylinders. She felt ready to take on the world.

  Abby entered the room and lay down on Sadie’s other side, groaning as she levered herself down. “What are we staring at?” she said when she was settled and looking up at the ceiling.

  “Nothing. We wrestled, and now Luke’s trying to forgive me,” Sadie said.

  “Ah. I wish I’d known that before I got down here. I’m afraid I’ll never be able to get back up again. It’s rather peaceful here, isn’t it?” Abby said.

  “It’s nice,” Sadie agreed.

  Luke smiled. He was the lone voice of sanity and reason among them, but for now there was nowhere else he would rather be. “What’s everyone doing today?”

  “I have to check on Gideon,” Sadie said. “And then get started on the case. Mary gave me the files from the missing persons. I’m going to do some family interviews, see what I can find out. And then I need to talk to Ben to see if he knows any of them.”

  “You’re not doing that by yourself,” Luke said.

  “I’ll go,” Abby said.

  He rolled his eyes. Having an eighty year old for protection wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing. He could offer to go, but he needed space, and he had his own work to catch up on. “What’s wrong with Gideon?”

  “Abby shot him last night,” Sadie said.

  “I should find that more surprising than I do,” Luke said.

  “Got him right in the posterior,” Abby said, pride exuding from her tone. “Serves him right, cranky old codger.”

  “I think Mary’s in love with him,” Sadie mused.

  “Some women just aren’t sensible,” Abby said.

  “Some men, either,” Luke said.

  “Now, Luke, you’re plenty sensible. Except for those t-shirts you wear. And that haircut. You should do something about that. Also your girlfriend doesn’t speak a whit of English.”

  “I wasn’t referring to myself, Abby, but thanks for your input,” Luke said.

  Sadie giggled. Luke squeezed her hand. “Quiet, you,” he said.

  “Your girlfriend really doesn’t speak English,” she said. “’Her de he de goody, bork, bork, bork.’”

  “She does not sound like that,” Luke said.

  “Abby?” Sadie said.

  “She sounds like that, only the accent is more terrifying, more like she’s screaming ‘run for your life!’ all the time in Russian,” Abby said.

  “You guys are being mean. Vaslilssa only has nice things to say about you,” he said.

  “How can you tell?” Abby asked, and Sadie laughed again.

  “So mean,” Luke said.

  “Now, Luke, don’t be sensitive,” Abby admonished. “And don’t tell the Mata Hari on us.”

  Sadie went into gales of laughter. She laughed harder when Luke let go her hand and poked her ribs. “So what if Vaslilssa doesn’t speak much English? We communicate just fine in the lab.” She was a couple of years ahead of him in her doctoral program. Watching her in the lab was what had first attracted him to her; that and her astounding Amazonian good looks.

  “I know she makes your beaker boil, but I’m not sure that’s enough for a substantive relationship,” Abby said. “However, you’re young, and young men need to get these things out of their systems.”

  “You know you’re saying all this out loud and I’m right here, don’t you, Abby?” Luke said.

  “When you’ve put in eight decades on this earth, you earn the right to say whatever you feel whenever you want, Luke,” Abby said.

  “Yes, but why do I have the feeling you were like this when you were our age?” Luke said.

  “Because you’re a smart, smart boy,” Abby said. “Now, why don’t you put that brain toward working on how to get me off this floor? I think my bones are starting to meld to the wood.”

  Sadie and Luke stood to help Abby off the floor. It took a lot of pushing and pulling to get her up. “I’m going to go check on Dad,” Sadie announced.

  “Do you want me to come?” Abby asked.

  “I think you should probably stay here and give him a while to simmer down,” Sadie said.

  “What’s the cooling off period for shooting someone?” Abby asked.

  “Definitely more than a few hours,” Luke said. They began to debate how long Abby would need to avoid Gideon as Sadie set off to see her father. She knocked and used her key to open the door when there was no answer. Gideon always locked the door, no matter what. Sadie always felt a little uncertain of her welcome, so she always included the knock.

  She found him lying face down on the couch, looking grumpy. “How are you feeling, Dad?” Before he could blast her, she held up her hand to cut him off. “Let me guess: like someone who has been shot in the butt.”

  “That woman should be in a home,” Gideon said.

  “She is, she’s in our home, right next door,” Sadie said. She let it go and gave her father a pass since he was probably in a fair amount of pain. “Did you eat this morning? Did you take your pills?”

  “I’m not a baby or an invalid, Sadie.”

  “Did you eat? Did you take your pills?” Sadie pressed.

  “No,” Gideon said. “Not hungry, and it doesn’t hurt that bad.”

  Sadie ignored him, went to the kitchen, and prepared scrambled eggs, toast, juice, and coffee so black it could stand on its ow
n—just the way he liked it. Before carrying it to him in the kitchen, she crushed some pain reliever and sprinkled it in the orange juice, stirring to make it dissolve. She set the tray in front of him and watched as he devoured it.

  “Drink your juice,” she urged.

  He downed it and then pulled it away for a better look. “Hey, there’s stuff in there. Did you drug me?”

  “Just some pain reliever, Dad. Do you want me to make you a packed lunch before I go? You could keep it here until you’re ready to eat it.”

  “I want you to tell me how I got from the hospital to here last night,” he said.

  “Hal and Mary helped,” she said.

  He seemed mollified by that until a new thought occurred to him. “Who is this Hal guy? Is he your boyfriend?”

  “No, Dad. He’s a friend. Believe it or not, I can get within a hundred feet of a man and not fall in love with him.”

  “That figures—I actually liked this one. Far be it for you to date a man I like.”

  “I married a man you adored, Dad,” she pointed out. That had been the one thing her parents agreed on—they had both liked Kai.

  “Wrong. I didn’t like or trust him. But your mom liked him and she was dying. For once, I deferred to her, and look where that got us.”

  “Rest assured that Kai is out of my life forever,” Sadie said. As long as she didn’t watch professional football or the sports channel, she hardly thought about her ex-husband anymore.

  “He’s having a good season,” Gideon grudgingly admitted.

  “Good for him,” Sadie said. She couldn’t have cared less if he won the super bowl. She had moved on.

  “You should have gotten a better settlement from him. You supported him all through college, and you were married during the draft. I’m not saying you should have gotten rich off him, but you should have gotten enough to last until you got settled and found something else.”

  “I just wanted it to be over; I wanted him gone,” Sadie said. By the time her marriage to Kai ended, money had been the least of her concerns.

  “It doesn’t seem right, him being a multi-millionaire and you not having a job, having to live off Abby’s charity,” Gideon said.

  Sadie supposed she should feel cheered that her father was taking her side for once, but she was annoyed. “I’m not living off Abby’s charity. I pay for most of the food in the house, and I do all the cooking. And I do have a job. I happen to have a paying client.”

  “Leftover Salisbury steak does not count as payment,” Gideon said.

  “No, this one is paying real money.”

  “To do what?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “To help him figure out some nightmares he’s been having.”

  “You be careful, Sadie. Only nutjobs pay someone to do something like that,” Gideon warned. “Especially someone who looks like you.”

  She threw up her hands in frustration. “First you slam me for using my looks to get ahead, and then you say people are going to prey on me because I’m pretty. I can’t win with you, Dad. If I were an accountant with a steady income, I think you would still find a way to be disappointed in me.”

  “Try it and see,” Gideon said. “Now go away. Those pills you gave me are making me drowsy.”

  She had given him nothing more than pain reliever, but she was too happy to oblige his command. “Fine. Goodbye, Dad. Call my cell if you need anything.”

  “I can take care of myself just fine,” he said, a claim which would have been easier to accept if her weren’t curled in the fetal position with his eyes closed, orange juice rimming his upper lip.

  There was a small part of her that was tempted to stay, but if she did, they would no doubt come to bloodshed, especially in his current mood. Promising herself to check on him later, she eased out the door, remembering to lock it behind her.

  Abby was waiting on her when she arrived back at the house. “Are we ready to do some detecting?” Abby asked.

  “Yes. Let’s go prove our client isn’t a murderer,” Sadie said. She didn’t exactly believe they would resolve the case that day, but they needed to find some answers and closure for Ben.

  “Sadie, be careful,” Luke admonished. He hovered in the background, his hands in the pockets of his jogging pants. His expression was such an endearing combination of worry and exasperation that Sadie had the mad desire to kiss him again.

  She refrained and waved instead. “Abby and I will be together. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “That’s a question sure to give me nightmares for a while,” Luke said. He walked them to the door and lingered on the porch, watching as they drove away.

  Chapter 7

  “Luke’s worried about us,” Abby said.

  “Luke wouldn’t be Luke if he didn’t worry about something, but I suppose he has a point. Things could get dangerous.” Sadie glanced at Abby. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Abby.”

  “Are you kidding? Ever since getting out of that home, I have a new lease on life. I’m like a pound puppy that’s been rescued from being euthanized. I intend to make the most of the time I have left. Now where are we going?”

  “There are three missing people, and all of them have been missing since before June thirteenth—that’s the date Ben woke up with blood on his hands. One is a fifteen-year-old girl, one is a thirty-five-year-old man, and the other is a twenty-eight-year-old woman. We’re going to start with the teenager. For a missing teen not to be getting a lot of press is telling. I think there’s more going on behind the scenes; I think it’s likely she really is a runaway, and I would like to discount her first.”

  She turned into a shabby housing development that was literally on the other side of the tracks from Abby’s grand mansion. Abby clucked her tongue with disapproval. “I remember when they built this place. My father rallied against it. Someone called him a bourgeois snob. But the proletariat had their way, and this is what we get—ramshackle slums. My father wanted to build nice brick houses. They cost a little more up front, but we wouldn’t have had any of this peeling paint or collapsing siding. Would anybody listen? No.”

  Sadie listened with amusement. Sometimes it was difficult for her to fathom the way Abby’s life had been. Her family founded the town. At one point that had meant something, and Abby had been akin to a princess. Now she was just another face in the crowd. Sadie thought the most difficult aspect of Abby’s life now was simply being normal after being special for so long.

  “That’s a pretty sweater,” Abby commented as they stood on the crumbling front stoop and rang the bell.

  “Thank you. It’s a holdover from my days as a reporter.”

  The door was yanked open. “Reporters? Y’all are reporters?” A woman stood on the other side, boxlike in form and booming in temperament. She radiated anger and bitterness. Sadie was good at reading people, and she had the uncanny sense that this woman would not take kindly to the fact that they were investigators.

  “Sadie Cooper.” She thrust her hand at the woman and they shook.

  “You got any ID or something?” the woman asked.

  Sadie fished in her purse and pulled out her old press pass, keeping her thumb over the part that identified her station in Nebraska.

  The woman’s eyes narrowed on Abby. “Who’s she?”

  “She’s my photographer.”

  Abby pulled out her phone and took a picture—of herself. She had always had trouble with the more technical aspects of her phone. “We’re here. Begin documentation.” She turned the camera around and took a picture of the woman.

  “She’s a photographer?” the woman said.

  “You know those pictures of babies in flower pots?” Sadie said.

  “Yeah,” the woman replied. She eyed Abby with keener interest.

  “She didn’t take any of those. May we come in?”

  “I suppose,” the woman replied, scratching her cheek in confusion. They followed her into a tiny living room that,
though dumpy, was clean and free of clutter. They took the couch while the woman sank into a puffy recliner.

  “We’re here to ask you about your daughter, Alana,” Sadie said. “I assume that you’re her mother, Mrs. Firestone.”