One by one the others turned to the dying man and spoke as if he heard them. Harvey thanked Jordan for his trust, for giving him employment when no one else would. Kat told him what she most cherished in his art. The doctor spoke of a friendship that ran deep and long. Sniffing and mopping his tears, Aaron promised that he’d secure Jordan’s legacy.
I almost missed it, the moment Jordan died. Uncomprehending we waited in the silence after the last beep of the monitor and the trace flat-lined. Then Aaron sobbed and cast himself over his friend.
In the moment between when darkness falls and Christmas lights in the surrounding houses flicked on, I heard a loud caw as two crows flew past Jordan’s window.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The doctor shooed us from the room so he could prepare Jordan’s body for transport to the mortuary. After migrating downstairs, I tucked myself into the dining room’s window seat where I could watch everyone, ponder loss, and fade into the background.
Dog settled Kat on the sofa in the living room and sat on the ottoman next to her, her left hand in both of his. In the kitchen, Harvey and Sebastian fixed Christmas grilled cheese sandwiches (cranberry relish between slices of cheese on rustic bread), brewed coffee in the urn, and dusted a large green salad with toasted fruitcake crumbs. They loaded the feast on the large battered dining room table. Around their quiet bustle, Aaron wandered into the foyer, talking with husky voice on his cell.
I hadn’t finished reading A Christmas Carol to Jordan, but I felt the story swirling around me. Looking like the large, big-hearted Ghost of Christmas Present, eyes still swollen from weeping, Jordan’s lawyer advised the mortuary of the death and then made a call to Jordan’s publicist. I wondered if he would contact the museum.
I should call my parents. They’d no doubt be jubilant. The announcement of Jordan’s death would ensure a large press turnout at the exhibit opening. I decided to call later, when Jordan’s passing felt less raw.
Until Professor Stegner burst through the front door, I hadn’t realized he’d disappeared. Arms filled with evergreen boughs and pine branches, he hummed O Tannenbaum as he decorated the hat rack with Fezziwig-like enthusiasm.
Looking across the foyer into the living room, I saw Kat’s hand still clasped in one of Dog’s hands, an ever-present medical book in his other hand. Generally Kat exuded a presence larger than life, but trauma reduced her to Tiny Tim’s size next to Dog’s brawny form. I knew she’d rally quickly. There’d be no small crutch left by the fireplace for us to mourn.
A weight seemed to have lifted from Harvey’s shoulders. Though his eyes were puffy with grief, a smile lit his face as he talked with Sebastian.
Descending the stairs, the doctor nodded easily to me and clapped Aaron on the shoulder as he headed for the coffee urn, his creased face reminding me of Bob Cratchit.
“First batch.” The Dickens’ scene disappeared as Sebastian handed me half of a grilled cheese sandwich wrapped in a napkin. I scooted over so he could join me, a tight fit on the window seat, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“When I was a kid, Mrs. Timmons used to fix these for me the day after Christmas.” His eyes soft in remembrance, he grinned. “Even when I stopped being a kid.”
She’d been his grandfather’s housekeeper and a sweet presence for me during Thomas’s last days.
“She invited me to Thanksgiving at her house,” I said. “Her grandkids keep her busy.”
He leaned against the wall and snorted. “So that’s why she invited me to Thanksgiving. Sandwich okay?”
“I could eat this every day.”
Jumping from the window seat, he pulled me to my feet. “Everyone! Lunch is ready.”
For a moment, I held his hand tight. “What did you mean by “So that’s why she invited me”?”
The others streamed into the dining room, taking seats, filling coffee mugs, exclaiming over the spread while Dog filled plates for him and Kat. Sebastian let go of my hand to pull out a chair for me. He leaned down to whisper, “She’s been pestering me to ask you out.”
I felt my cheeks flame and stammered, “Sorry. That’s awkward.”
Everyone was either talking or immersed in food, so Sebastian said in a normal voice as he took the seat next to me: “Not a bit. It’s your fault that I haven’t asked you out.”
“My fault?”
“Since Granddad died, you’ve either been dating the louse or married.”
“Donovan’s not a louse.”
From the living room, Kat who had the ears of a bat, yelled, “Yes, he is.” Which drew everyone’s attention to Sebastian and me. My face felt even hotter, but Sebastian only said, “More grilled cheese, anyone?”
Once everyone’s attention diverted to food again, I said quietly, “I don’t know if you’re teasing me or feeling sorry for me, but I know how guys, normal guys, feel about Abishags. I was lucky Donovan Reid asked me out. I hope he takes me back.”
Sebastian’s smile disappeared. “Why would you want him back?”
The doorbell rang, and Aaron stood aside for the mortuary attendants. An Abishag always stands in the background when her husband leaves the house. I wiped buttery crumbs from my hands and stood. Feeling Sebastian’s gaze on my face, feeling Jordan’s loss afresh, I said, “Because the hope of Donovan returning is all I have.”
I stood at the foyer entrance by the living room door as they zipped Jordan into a body bag in his room, maneuvered his gurney down the pitched stairs, passed me and proceeded down the walkway lined by squares of lava rocks and pebbles. Harvey, Sebastian, and Professor Stegner followed the attendants, Jordan’s rearguard.
In the living room behind me, Kat said weakly, “Reid’s a lout.”
Dog said, “He really is, Les.”
“Go out with Sebastian,” she said. “He likes you.”
Not wanting to hear more, I dashed upstairs. From the window of my room, I watched them load Jordan into the hearse. Among the squares of pebbles and lava rock, Aaron began to cry, his large handkerchief covering half his face. The doctor rested his hand on his arm. Harvey and Sebastian stood shoulder to shoulder, sentinels giving the artist full honors. Stegner watched from the front door, a sandwich in his hand.
When the hearse door slammed shut, I whispered, “Goodbye, Jordan.”
On that cold California Christmas Day, I didn’t know if I would ever see Donovan Reid again, if Sebastian would ask me out, if my dad’s campaign for state congressman would gain momentum.
I knew only one thing. As Jordan’s hearse rolled down the street, I still heard his indelible heartbeat.
Coming Spring 2014
Riddle in Bones
The Third Novella in the Abishag Mystery Series
An Excerpt from Riddle in Bones
Jen asked me later if I’d seen portents that day, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the Palm Springs’ laboratory, nothing hinted at trouble looming. As a student of mathematics, I don’t believe in premonitions, although as a romantic rationalist, I wished I could. I think the future should be murky, as if veiled in the mists of Avalon.
In a hallway that smelled of acetone, cactus and graves, I tried calling Donovan. My finger hovered over his name as I remembered how he broke up with me when he found out I married another comatose man. That was eight months ago. He still worked at the Abishag agency as principal counsel—Jen kept me informed.
“Miss Greene? I need those mule bones now.”
I pocketed the phone and picked up the long, wide box of bones. Still thinking about ways to get Donovan to call me back, I slid the box onto a lab table, scattering a raft of notes.
Hunched over the lab counter, Doctor Henry Telemann keenly studied a desiccated harness as if he held Cleopatra’s headdress. I rattled the box, but he’d already forgotten the bones and me.
If you measured the magnitude of peccadilloes, then Jen at six dead husbands far exceeded my measly two. I tried that defense when Donovan confronted me in the La Jolla home of my dying sec
ond husband. He informed me icily that Jen wasn’t his girlfriend, I was.
Smoothing his cropped red hair, his blue eyes narrowed. “I should say ex-girl friend.” Before I could plead for forgiveness, he disappeared in a black whirl of his Pasolini business suit and musky cologne.
“Are you seeing this, Miss Greene?” Doctor Telemann tapped vertebrae back in place. I blinked. Lost in thought about how to get Donovan interested in me again, I’d somehow missed the anthropologist opening the mule bone box and laying out the contents.
“Seeing what, sir?” Like everything else in my life, I missed the big picture.
My housemates, Kat and Dog, assured me that losing Donovan would prove a good thing, he had never been right for me, and I’d find someone better. Although Kat was my age and Dog only three years older, the other six housemates called them Momma Kat and Dog Daddy for their tendency to parent us whether we needed it or not. Although Kat and Dog had been against me signing those two Abishag contracts, they’d been there to help me both times, even risking their lives.
I envied their love for each other that spilled over everyone around them. That kind of love would never be mine. Jen had warned me that ex-Abishag wives didn’t get boyfriends. Once a…the rude term is bed-warmer for a comatose man, guys treated you differently. Like you smelled of embalming fluid.
I’d been lucky that someone like Donovan Reid—a successful, good-looking, young attorney—had been interested in me. I know because he told me so often. His tolerance stopped with my second husband Jordan, and I’d never find anyone else.
Hence the urgency to rekindle his interest.
I fiddled with the hipbone—it looked skewed to me. “Stop that,” Doc T said with irritation, and then he tilted his head. “No, wait, Miss Greene. You got it. Something’s wrong with that hip bone.”
I’d been lucky to land a job this summer. I married my first comatose husband Thomas a year ago because after a dozen short-lived jobs, I’d been branded unemployable. I found it difficult to deal with people. I’d once worked as a waitress in a coffee shop, the most efficient server they’d ever had. After three days, they let me go because of a tendency to “brow-beat customers into ordering faster.”
“Ante-version. Now why would a mule’s hipbone be twisted inward like that?”
“Don’ know,” I said tiredly. It’d been eleven straight days of studying dusty, dirty bits and drabs from a six year old dig in Palm Springs, trying to fill in some holes, literally, in Californian desert life a hundred years ago.
He picked up the harness again, and I yawned.
The Abishag stipend with a bonus from my second husband’s estate had generously filled my savings account. It would be a long time before I needed more funds. If I never dated again (and the chances of never dating again looked excellent), then I could stretch my current finances till graduation in two years. Dating Donovan required a wardrobe of haute couture that crippled me financially, the reason I’d married the nearly dead artist Jordan Ippel.
Sebastian Crowder, grandson of my first nearly dead husband, found this summer job for me with Henry Telemann. Like the distractions of school, working in the lab went a long way to stop me fretting over Donovan but didn’t halt my scheming to get him back. Dog and Kat approved of the job, partly because they thought Palm Desert a safe distance from Donovan and partly because Kat decided Sebastian wanted to ask me out.
Nice thought, but he did not. True, when dangerous art forgers and killers showed up at Jordan’s house, he hadn’t deserted us. Despite what Kat believed that did not mean that Sebastian liked me in that way. On the contrary, even though we attended the same university—me in my third year, him starting his doctorate—did he call me after his grandfather’s death? Okay, so I was dating Donovan at the time, but still he never called.
Did he call after Jordan Ippel died, after the police finished their investigation and made their arrest? He did not. Not once during the winter quarter, not a peep during the spring.
I thought since Sebastian found this job for me and had been working for Doc T for a year, I’d see him more often this summer. Didn’t happen. I knew he hadn’t returned to Santa Monica, but I hadn’t seen him since we’d driven here from LA in his beater car.
He and the professor had been working in the Palm Desert museum, which housed the artifacts, and in the Institute of Desert Antiquities since late May. I had to re-take Sociology 101 during the summer session, so I didn’t join them till August. I failed the class the first time, and even with Kat tutoring me, failing again seemed inevitable. Understanding human social interactions will always be a mystery to me.
“You’re standing in my light, Miss Greene.”
Doctor Telemann said that to me a lot. He also sighed when I broke something or asked a stupid question or fell asleep reading old mining journals. In the beginning, he sighed so much that I thought him asthmatic till I figured out I was getting on his nerves again.
I liked the old coot but figured he’d fire me any moment. When I accidently torched a dozen 103-year-old blacksmith receipts, I was astounded he hadn’t fire me on the spot.
One night while working late over what he thought might be a Native American saddle blanket, he brought up the subject of Abishag wives. He asked with such vague curiosity, such guilelessness, that I found myself talking about my sophomore year financial crisis, my parents’ approval and how they later leveraged my new connections with wealthy tycoons and famous artists for my father’s political aspirations. I also mentioned the murders that happened with both marriages.
“Murders?” Doctor Telemann absently squeezed a stack of desert land deeds from the early 1900s and paper flaked onto the table. I gently retrieved the deeds.
“Murders,” I said firmly. “Marriage to the wealthy is not the cakewalk you’d think. But ask me no details. An Abishag wife is always discrete.”
He looked wistful but didn’t ask again about the murders. Instead he used those long hours of brushing bones, sorting land deeds, and lining up mule vertebrae to ask about Abishag marriages.
It’s not that I haven’t been asked before, but I knew when someone wanted only the sordid details. By the way, there aren’t any. Trust me. Doctor Telemann wasn’t like that. He was more interested in the differences between a traditional marriage and an Abishag one than in what exactly were the parameters of therapeutic touch. Really, people can be so stupid.
I suspected Doctor Telemann didn’t know about any sort of marriage. A kind of innocence softened his face as he asked his questions. Although the sum of my two marriages didn’t add up to 25 days, I had more experience than he did.
I explained my own theory of love, which fell under what I called romantic rationalism. “As a romantic, I believe in love and prince charming, in glass slippers, dragons, and gingerbread cottages. As a rationalist, I don’t believe in happily ever after. Nothing lasts: not the love or the charming or the glass slippers. Only axes and poisoned apples.”
Doctor Telemann looked distressed. “I don’t think I’m a romantic rationalist, just an old bachelor who gave up on marriage a long time ago.” Later, when I spilled coffee on the mule’s jawbone, he told me that he’d been in love once, but she’d belonged to another. He’d never found anyone else who suited him like she had.
He smiled wistfully: “She was my Guinevere.”
I squinted at Doc T, but I could not imagine, even in his far away youth, that he’d been that master of medieval jousting, Lancelot.
I considered telling him about compromise and Donovan Reid, but I couldn’t corrupt that sweet innocence. Better that he’d loved once, really been in love, than test the dodgy waters of dating.
On the eleventh evening of my desert job, I took pictures of the mule’s twisted hipbone to send to a veterinarian Sebastian knew. Yes, Sebastian finally appeared in the lab as Doc T and I finished for the day. His shock of black hair unruly as usual, his eyes appeared shadowed with fatigue. Obviously seething about something, he cur
tly gave me the vet’s number, answered Doc T in monosyllables, and didn’t look at me even once.
Doc T handed Sebastian a shoebox that rattled like bones and believe me I now recognized that sound. “Take this back to LA with you,” he said. “Put it in my university office when you get a chance.”
Sebastian took the box and stomped out of the lab.
I didn’t know he was going back to LA. “Am I staying here with you or going with Sebastian?” I asked. Since he had the only car, I figured Sebastian would have to take me home when Doc fired me.
“You’re staying. The boy’s got some business at home. Said he’d return tomorrow.”
“You’re not firing me?”
He stared at me in surprise. “Fire you? Why would I fire you? You’ve lasted longer than any intern I’ve had here. It’s 120 degrees in the shade, most of the town has flown north, and we’re doing the dullest work imaginable in physical anthropology. If I had the funds, I’d give you a raise.”
I laughed. I really did like Doc T. Sebastian told me more students attended his seminars than any other on campus. Back when Sebastian still spoke to me.
“An old friend’s dropping by the lab and taking me to Sherman’s for dinner,” Doc T said. “You should get a ride back to the motel with Sebastian.”
I grabbed my purse and headed for the door, expecting Doc T’s last question, the one he always asked as I left for the day.
“Miss Greene?”
I grinned, my hand on the doorknob, and turned. “Yes, Doctor Telemann?”
With that familiar wistful smile and his head slanting left, he asked: “If I were a wealthy comatose man, do you think an Abishag wife would choose me?”
I said the same thing, I always did. “Doctor Telemann, if I were still an Abishag wife, I’d like no one better.”
With a happy nod, he wished me “Good night.”
Indelible Beats: An Abishag's Second Mystery (Abishag Mysteries Book 2) Page 10
