[Anthology] Close to the Bones

by Martha Carr

  “I’m okay,” she insisted to the DI.

  Although his nod indicated belief, when DS Ivy stepped forward with a mouthful of questions, Able stopped him.

  “Wait till we’re back at the station, there’s a good lad. I’d rather get the whole thing on the recording if you don’t mind.”

  Even in her state, mind reeling with other memories as though she was midway through a journey laced with LSD, Bretta recognized the power play. DS Ivy had been shoved back into the pecking order. For every ounce of blood that flushed his neck, she realized there’d be a shit ton for her to pay later.

  That was later, though. For now, Bretta was grateful of the short postponement. The flood of memories was so strong her own were washed far away. If she concentrated and stretched, she could brush them with her fingertips. In the extra time, it would take to get down the hill and drive to the station, she might actually be able to snag one or two of them back.

  The second time in, it had been easier for her to find the childhood memories. The panic experienced in the trunk of the car could be pushed aside as an overlay. Even knowing what to search for, there’d been scant nuggets there to find.

  Bretta balanced out the need to protect those treasures against the more vital urge to recover her own self. The push and pull started to hurt, not physically, but like a bad sprain had twisted her mind.

  Her brain was limping, trying not to do any further damage.

  “The second woman’s name is Ada. No surname that I could grasp. I couldn’t get a glimpse of her past childhood, but I think she was younger than the other woman.”

  The nicknames that were thrown at her like curses in the schoolyard. The cut and fit of the mother’s jacket, the style of her father’s tie.

  “I’d be looking for a woman aged in her mid to late twenties at most. She’s Caucasian, pale white skin with freckles, and she has curly, bright ginger hair.”

  “What about the other woman. The main one? Sabrina’s mother.” He flicked through a folder of papers in front of him. “We have her name as Monique.”

  Bretta looked at the men across the table from her. The interview that should be collaborative was set up to be adversarial instead. As though she was a suspect needing questioning instead of being the closest thing they had to the victim. The one harmed, her mind still reeling from the wounds inflicted, being treated like a criminal.

  “The other woman doesn’t matter,” Bretta explained. “She’s not the victim in this case. Not for the bones you found buried up on the hill.”

  “Why don’t you just answer our questions and let us sort out what does and doesn’t matter,” DS Ivy snapped.

  Bretta clasped her hands together in her lap. She wanted to give him a slap so badly, her skin crawled with the longing.

  “If you concentrate on the older woman then you’ll miss the actual victim in this case. If you were going to solve anything based on Monique’s information, then you’d already have done so.” Bretta stared at the DS across the table, refusing to be bullied. “I presume she’s the victim you prosecuted a crime on behalf of the first time, right?”

  No one had said anything, but Bretta was used to siphoning out information from a few tangled threads. It was what she’d done for a day job for the past ten years, at least. With this case a decade old, they hadn’t dragged her back to the crime scene to find out about Monique. Something had happened to their prosecution. Bad enough to make them reopen the case. So serious a challenge, they’d used several different channelers to try to pinpoint whatever they’d done wrong.

  The answer to her question was an extended silence. Bretta waited until the DS started to shift in his seat, and then spoke again. “I think it’s more important you find the actual victim for this case than revisit past mistakes. So why don’t you let me talk about her and get this sorted out.”

  “Go ahead,” DI Able said. “What other details do you have?”

  Bretta nibbled on the edge of her finger, biting through the nail, and chewing on its tough texture while she thought back through the tangle.

  “It’s childhood stuff,” she explained. “There was an incident where she cut off her hair, and her mother was angry because she had to go to school the next day. Girls were teasing her in the schoolyard. There’s nothing left of her adult self at all.”

  Except for the scrap. Bretta chewed on her fingernail again while she tried to place the interrupted thought. The hair incident was so strong, each time she attempted to concentrate on any other thoughts, they were overwhelmed.

  “You said she was drenched. Could you explain what that means?”

  Bretta looked up in astonishment. The phrase was slang, but it was common place. The DI nodded at the lights in the corner of the room, recording equipment capturing each sound. She nodded in understanding.

  “There are memories stacked on top of each other that don’t belong together. Monique’s experiences have been overlaid so that Ada’s personal recollections are almost wiped out.”

  Bretta raised a shaking hand to her forehead, thinking of the gap of time she’d lost to nothing. She wondered if that fear was what it was like to lose yourself in another person’s memory. What agony would a person’s mind go through to be erased while they were still alive?

  She cleared her throat and shifted in her seat. “When thoughts are overlaid like that, it’s usually because a person has been forced to stay in an imprint long enough that the residual memories of the deceased overwrite those of the living person. The common nickname is drenching.”

  Usually, when a person stepped into an imprint—and except for channelers that was an event that only ever happened by accident—they’d get out of it as soon as possible. A skin-crawling revulsion overtook anybody exposed in that way. It took time and skill to learn how to withstand that automatic compulsion. To stay inside the deceased’s memories long enough to read and retain them.

  No one would ever end up drenched, except by force. The repelling nature of it drove people to desperate measures to escape its cloying grasp.

  And there it was. The piece that Bretta had been missing.

  The struggle in the boot of the car. One person panicked and trying to steady her breathing so she could calm herself enough to think. She knew the perpetrator, had personal dealings with him. In her mind was the belief that if she could forestall her panic attack, she could still reason her way out.

  The other, intertwined in the same memory, the same place. The woman had struggled against her bonds in frantic desperation. She’d been so overcome with fear that she tried to batter her way out of the boot with her head.

  “The killer has a mobile imprint,” Bretta said. The hesitancy she’d felt earlier disappeared as she voiced the logical thought aloud. “It’s in the trunk of his car. He’s tying each new victim up and drenching them, so they won’t remember who he is.”

  The impact of her statement wasn’t lost on anyone. To control something like that, to be able to carry it with you, was a terrible power. If a living being were shoved into an imprint too long, the deceased memories would overwrite them as though they’d never existed. The action wouldn’t usually take more than ten minutes, maybe half an hour.

  DS Ivy snorted. “He just happens to have an imprint in his car, does he?”

  Bretta stared at him with wide, frightened eyes. Her earlier power play was lost under the need to make him understand. “It could be from his first victim, or maybe he just brought a car and struck it lucky, I don’t know.”

  She shifted in her seat. Bretta’s buttocks were starting to cramp from being seated on the hard wooden surface for so long. She put her hand up to her throat, it was beginning to tighten. An asthma attack was on its way. Her breath held the high whistle of a teakettle as her lungs inflamed, so each exhalation came out in a wheeze.

  A killer lurked out there with a weapon so powerful, they might not ever be able to stop him.

  “If he can drench a person at will, then you might never
even find the original victim. What condition was the body in?”

  Blank stares looked back at her across the table.

  “What condition was the body in?” Bretta repeated urgently. “Why couldn’t you tell that the victim was a young white redhead rather than a middle-aged black woman? What did he do to them?”

  The room started to shimmer in front of her eyes. Cold fingers crept up from her tailbone to her neck. They dug themselves into her scalp, a cruel massage that caused her nerves to shriek with pain.

  “How did you not even know you had the wrong woman?”

  Her throat reduced to a pinhole and then sealed completely. Blackness swept over her vision like a dark cloth being thrown over her face.

  “You awake?”

  Bretta sat up on the crisp white sheets of the sick bed. She’d thought her reemergence into consciousness had been hidden from the attending nurse, but it now appeared her lie-still-and-keep-your-eyes-closed ploy had been seen through.

  DI Able grabbed her elbow as she stood. The leap down from the sick bed was a ridiculously long one. Especially if you were genuinely woozy, to begin with.

  “I think I’m fine,” Bretta said. She shot a quick glance at the nurse in case her assessment was off-base, but the woman just gave a short nod and left the room. “What happened?”

  “You collapsed in the interview room. The doctor said you had an asthma attack, but he couldn’t find any medication.”

  Bretta’s cheeks crawled with the familiar heat of shame. “The prescription for an inhaler is expensive. I don’t have attacks often, and they expire every few months.”

  The DI handed her a bag. “Well, this should keep you going for a while.”

  She opened her mouth to refuse, but he held up a hand. “It’s covered by insurance since you were under our care. Take advantage of it, I would.”

  Bretta nodded and curled the lip of the bag over a few times before clutching it in her hand. “What happens now?”

  “Now? I make sure you’re sent home safely in a taxi. That’s what happens now.”

  She clenched her lips in a tight line to keep them from trembling. The old stab of regret started to pierce into her chest. You failed, stupid girl. Your one big chance to make everything right, and you failed.

  DI Able gave her a push on her shoulder to bring her attention back. “Tomorrow, you come into the station nice and early, and we’ll sort out all your paperwork. The next intake for training is on Monday, so you’ll be squared away by then.”

  The room swam in front of Bretta’s eyes again, this time from the tears of gratitude that welled up. “I got the job?”

  He pushed her on the shoulder again, a gesture of comradeship. “You got the job. When you’re settled in next week, we may need to pull you out again. The doctor will need to check you over first, though. Make sure you’re fit to channel again so soon.”

  Bretta smiled at the thought. A doctor who would look after her interests and ensure she wouldn’t come to harm.

  “What did you mean, you’ve been channeling since you were six years old?”

  She frowned at Able, not following the change in the conversation.

  “Earlier today, when you were saying how great you were. You told DS Ivy that you’d been channeling imprints since you were six years old.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “My cat,” she said. “I had a pet cat, Panther, and I was really upset when he died. He’d scratched me when I was taking him to the vet, and I thought that meant he hated me. My dad brought the death sling home from the vet’s office so I could feel the truth for myself.”

  The DI stared at her for a long moment, concerned, then burst into laughter as well. “And did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Did Panther love you?”

  Bretta thought back through the long years in between. Reached into her memory and dug out the experience. “He loved his bowl,” she said slowly, working back through the years-old imprint. “He loved his favorite sardine flavored pet food. And yes,” she nodded. “He loved the servant who stroked his back when he’d spent the day getting groggy in the sun.”

  “His servant, eh?”

  Bretta nodded, lost in the thought. “Yeah. Why?” she turned to him with her eyebrows raised. “Isn’t that how you lot think of me, too?”

  His face flinched at the barb in her voice, but he didn’t contradict her. He walked her out to the curb and punched a request into his phone.

  “The cab shouldn’t be too long.”

  She expected him to go and leave her waiting alone, but he stayed put. His eyes scanned the streets restlessly, searching for the vehicle.

  “They’re ordering an exhumation of the victim,” DI Able said after a few minutes. “The ME doesn’t think it’ll make much difference. He’s already pulled everything he could the first time around.” He cleared his throat and drew a line along the pavement with the tip of one polished black shoe. “There wasn’t a lot to work with.”

  Bretta stood as still as possible. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself. The police had never shared any details with her before. Turn up, sign-in, do the job. That was the extent of it. She wasn’t sure if his willingness to share now was because of her contract, or because he’d forgotten who he was talking to.

  A taxi pulled around the corner, and the DI stepped out into the road, waving an arm. As Bretta opened the door to the back seat, he placed a hand on her shoulder. A light touch, barely there before it was gone.

  “You take care of yourself tonight.”

  She nodded and got inside, but he still leaned in through the door. His blue eyes fixed on hers, commanding attention.

  “From now on, don’t do any moonlighting, okay? That shit’s dangerous.”

  He slammed the door shut before Bretta could think of a retort. Just as well, anything she did say would probably have been a lie. She raised a hand as he stepped back onto the sidewalk, tucking his hands deep into his coat pockets. As the car turned the corner, she saw he was still looking after her. He continued to stare as the taxi drove her from his line of sight.

  An exhumation. The process took so much paperwork it was the final proof Bretta needed that they were taking her seriously. For some reason, that mattered just as much as the job security and the money. Respect for the skills she had and the evidence she could provide.

  She shivered as the cab drove up to her door and she hurried up the stairs. The elevator was broken, had been since she first moved in. One reason for the cheap rent. One of many.

  Only when all eight of Bretta’s locks secured her inside the apartment did she breathe freely. Despite all her happiness about getting the job, there was a killer out there. One who could wipe a victim’s mind at will.

  There was no more threat to her safety than there had been the day before but Bretta still felt jumpy. As she ate yet another bowl of noodles and sat on the couch, staring blankly at the TV, her mind worked at the edges of the new memories.

  Sharp now, they would fade like Polaroids left out in bright sunlight. The images would grow milky, the emotions would gray out into a dull façade.

  The imprints were a nightmare to most people, an anomaly that no one had been prepared for. Even now, decades after they first began to accumulate, people were still just beginning to feel their way around the edges.

  Despite the innate fear they evoked, sometimes the imprint of a lifetime's worth of memories was the only way a victim had of telling the truth. A last lingering finger pointed in a killer’s direction. A fallible eye-witness that might still yield a license plate or a face glimpsed in the shadows.

  Bretta wondered about the redheaded child who’d grown into an adult victim. From what DI Able had said, her physical body had been destroyed—consumed by acid or tossed into a raging fire to cover the killer’s tracks.

  The only thing left behind to show she’d ever lived was the imprint, and that had almost been wiped clean of her memories. The injustice tore at Br
etta’s stomach. It twisted through her until she wanted to collapse into a pit of sorrow or vent her rage in a yell that echoed across the city.

  All the unknown redhead had to defend her was Bretta, reliving the tiny scrap of memory the woman had clung to as she died at a killer’s hand. A life, reduced to one fragment of a snapshot, lying close to the bones.

  About Lee Hayton

  Traveling is a great expander of ideas and the understanding of other cultures, and although I’ve explored this facet of the world many times, in the end I’ve always made the return journey to my home—just a hop, skip, and a jump from my birthplace.

  I love to entertain readers with a good story, whether it’s one designed to make your blood curdle with fear or have you explode into fits of laughter. I’m delighted you’ve found this story and hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to explore my worlds in more detail over in Ye Olde Amazon Shoppe.

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  Three

  Fatherlands

  By Basil Sands

  Balch Homestead

  Wahpeton, North Dakota

  November 3, 1930

  A crowd dispersed from the small Lutheran church on the cold late autumn day, shaking hands with the priest as they passed. Behind the church, in the small graveyard reserved for original Swedish pioneers who homesteaded the area, grave diggers shoveled dirt back into the hole where the coffin had been laid. Their shovels smacked the soil with a sound that made ten-year-old Joe think of being slapped in the face. Dirt tumbled into the pit, pebbles rattling on the casket.