SCRY ME A RIVER
Donna White Glaser
Book 2 in the Blood Visions Paranormal Mystery Series
Scrying: the ability to induce psychic visions using a reflective surface, such as a crystal ball or even… blood.
Crime scene cleanup technician Arie Stile is desperate for the visions to stop. Especially since the deceased whose memories she unwillingly reads while mopping up his blood is a most unpleasant man. Unfortunately, Arie knows from past experiences that the only way to get rid of the intrusive memories is to solve his murder.
If that means teaming up with her cranky, “senior delinquent” grandfather to infiltrate the River Rest Senior Center, then—like it or not—that’s just what Arie will have to do.
SCRY ME A RIVER, a humorous paranormal mystery, is the second book in the Blood Visions series. The first, A SCRYING SHAME, is a 2015 Kindle Scout winner. If you enjoy suspense with a dash of humor, then grab your copy now!
ALSO BY DONNA WHITE GLASER
THE LETTY WHITTAKER 12 STEP MYSTERIES:
THE ENEMY WE KNOW
THE ONE WE LOVE
THE SECRETS WE KEEP
THE BLOOD WE SPILL
THE LIES WE TELL
THE BLOOD VISIONS PARANORMAL MYSTERIES:
A SCRYING SHAME
SCRY ME A RIVER
One of the best things about being a writer is hanging out with my reader friends! If you are interested in hearing from me, you can join my Readers’ Group at http://donnawhiteglaser.com/readers-group/
CHAPTER ONE
The past two months had been particularly slow in the death business, so when Arie's boss, Basil Gallo—or Blood and Guts to his work crews—called her out to a job, she was more than a little relieved. That sounded ghoulish, of course, but somebody else's death was Arie Stiles's paycheck.
She wasn't thrilled about the time, though. Nine in the morning was way too early to be dealing with the cleanup of a dead body.
Grady, Arie's partner in grime, picked her up outside her grandfather's house, where Arie had been living for the past few months. The big white BioClean van had barely rolled to a stop before she clambered in.
"Dude," Grady said by way of greeting.
Arie had long ago decided her coworker was a misplaced surfer. Seriously misplaced since Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, wasn't known for big waves or sandy beaches. Cheese and beer were more like it. Both of which Arie had consumed too much of the night before while celebrating her best friend's birthday. Her return "hello" to Grady stretched into a yawn. "Where are we headed? And why couldn't it wait until a decent time of day?"
"It's already nine o'clock. Besides, death waits for no man," Grady intoned in a deep baritone. Then he laughed. "Really, dude. It's a fact. We're all gonna need someone to clean up after us one last time. And for..." He grabbed the clipboard of forms from between the seats and read. "...Bernard Reynolds, that day is today. Or last night, more likely."
Arie snatched the clipboard from his hand. "Are you trying to murder us?" Not that it would have been the first time Arie was murdered. Although there was a time after her mugging, death, and subsequent near-death experience when Arie would have welcomed a return to Over There, she had since resigned herself to life on Earth, at least for a little while longer. "Keep your eyes on the road." She ran her gaze over the forms on the clipboard. "River Rest Senior Center?"
"Yup. And Guts told me to be extra awesome. I think he wants to make a permanent arrangement with these guys. You know? All those old people. They probably get a dead guy every other day. That'd be like a steady income stream for us. Hey!" His eyes widened with delight. "Like the stream comes from the River! Get it? That's so cool."
Arie smiled. "Yeah, I get it. But I don't really see that happening, do you? It's a nursing home."
"So?"
"So what do they need us for? Their CNAs and janitors should all be trained in hazardous cleanup, right? Why are we even going?"
"Huh. That's so true, dude. I mean, for like an ongoing-type thing, you're probably right. But I know they called us in today because they, like, knew the dude. Guts said they didn't want to put an emotional strain on their staff."
"Whatever that means… You'd think they'd be used to clients dying. They are a nursing home, for pity's sake."
"Yeah, but this dude offed himself." Grady pointed a "gun" finger at his head and pulled the imaginary trigger.
"Whoa. You're kidding." Suicide.
"Nope."
Arie knew a suicide meant looking forward to the gray fog that accompanied the visions that burst involuntarily into her mind whenever she looked at blood, which didn't make her job as a crime-scene-cleanup technician any easier. And of the myriad ways of dying, suicides evoked the hardest visions. The emotions of the dead that were evoked were so full of despair and anguish that Arie had a hard time separating herself from them. At least she would be prepared this time.
"They let them have guns?" Arie asked. This is Wisconsin, after all, not the Wild West.
Grady just shrugged. "Just cause they're old doesn't mean they can't be sneaky."
Well, Arie could sure relate to that. Her current roommate, if she could call him that, was her eighty-three-year-old senior delinquent grandfather. Technically, Arie was supposed to be taking care of him while Grumpa provided her with a place to live, according to Arie's parents, anyway. The reality was that Arie and Grumpa had fashioned a sort of detente with each other whereby each stayed out of the other's business. So far, that was working.
Grady swung the van into the parking lot of River Rest Senior Center, but instead of pulling up to the block-long one-story building, he followed a driveway around to the rear and backed the van up to the door of a back wing. A wooden sign on the lawn had a circle with three entwined Rs burned into it as if it had been branded. The words RIVER REST REC, likewise burned into the wood, were placed underneath the triple R.
Maybe it really is the Wild West.
In addition to the BioClean van, two other cars were there—a sleek silver Chrysler 300 and a Mazda whose primary color seemed to be rust—parked outside the brick building.
Arie jumped out of the van and joined Grady at the back. He handed her a bright-yellow biohazard suit. She sighed at the sight of it. The suits—both too large for her height-deprived frame and way too small across the chest—were the bane of her existence. She'd scraped brain matter off the top of a refrigerator (homicide in the kitchen) and scooped buckets and buckets of soggy, decayed flesh (suicide in the bathtub), but the thing that bothered her the most about her job was the banana-yellow biohazard suit she had to stuff herself into. Balancing her butt against the van bumper, she leaned over to roll the pant legs up so she wouldn't be tripping over herself. Again. Face-planting onto a corpse was not an experience she wanted to repeat.
"Did Guts say how long this one is gonna take?" Arie was fighting to get a rubber band around her ankle to secure the cuff, so her voice came out in a thin, labored wheeze.
Grady had climbed into the back of the van and was stacking the plastic crates of their supplies near the door. He was making such a racket, Arie didn't catch his answer.
"I said, 'How long is this going to take?' Is there a big spatter area, or was it contained?"
She hoped the job was in the bathroom. Bathrooms were more cramped, but with all the tile, they were a lot easier to—
Arie straightened and immediately wanted to bite her tongue off.
A quartet of elderly people s
tood silently underneath a large oak tree on the lawn about ten feet away, watching the BioClean team suit up. Although it was near the end of summer and a fairly warm morning, all but one of them wore sweaters, and they all had their arms wrapped around themselves as if for warmth.
"Uh, hello," Arie said.
Nobody answered, but one of the women nodded politely. All four pairs of eyes studied Arie, and she felt the warmth of a blush pinking her face.
Grady hopped out of the van. Seeing the onlookers, he waved politely. "Good morning."
Arie could see the response wash across their faces: Is it a good morning? One of their friends, presumably, had killed himself in a particularly gruesome fashion.
"I'm sorry for your loss," Arie mumbled in the group's general direction.
The only male in the group, tall and nattily dressed, with a silk scarf tossed over his shoulder and an incongruently industrial-looking quad cane, snorted derisively and turned away.
The woman next to him sighed and said, "Now, Alan." Her tone was a cross between chiding and... something else. A warning? Whatever it was, it made him shake his head and stomp off down the sidewalk to the other end of the long building, his cane making staccato taps punctuating his angry stride as he went.
"You comin’, dude?"
Arie jumped again. Grady was standing outside the entrance to the rec center, balancing two crates in his arms and waiting for her. She scooted up the sidewalk and swung the unlocked door open for him.
They walked into a small tiled foyer, which led to a cavernous room filled with tables and chairs. Arie knew right away that was where they would establish the clean zone—the uncontaminated area where they would store the majority of their cleaning supplies and change in and out of clean booties and gloves as they went inside and out. Grady plopped his load down. The noise must have alerted someone, because a door at the far end of the large room opened. A woman, tall and statuesque, stood in the doorway.
"We're from BioClean 911, ma'am," Grady said. "Are you Mrs. Clarkson?"
"Yes. Thank you for coming." The woman crossed the room, an ebony cane tapping against the tile floor like a metronome. She wound her way between banquet tables, most of them with chairs placed upside down on top to allow the floors to be cleaned. As she drew closer, fine wrinkles became more evident by her eyes and lining her neck like tree rings, readjusting Arie’s estimate from late fifties up to midsixties. When Clarkson reached Grady and Arie, she reached out to shake their hands, pausing in confusion at the sight of their bright-blue latex gloves. "Oh, uh. My name is Jane Clarkson. I'm the director here."
"Yes, ma'am. I understand you have a difficult situation?" Grady said.
"Difficult situation" being the unspoken code for "messy dead body that no one wants to deal with."
"We do, yes," she said. “I'll show you where he... The police have already been here and removed his body, but... Well, you'll see."
"Yes, ma'am," Grady said. "We understand."
Arie, still considered a newbie with only three months on the job, had learned to keep her mouth shut and let Grady deal with the bereaved. In a sharp departure from his relaxed, inland-surfer personality, Grady had perfected a matter-of-fact, businesslike tone that he used with clients. That, more than a gentle or commiserative approach, often worked best to calm the recently—usually unexpectedly—bereaved.
"Why don't you show us where the problem is, ma'am? We'll need to get an idea of what the job will entail."
"Of course." Jane took a deep breath then motioned for the pair to follow. She led the way down a short hall and through a door marked Staff Only. It opened into a kitchenette, a typical staff break room with a kitchen table and a big white refrigerator covered with notices and memos and a yellowing cartoon clipped from some newspaper. The cabinets formed an L shape with the fridge at the end of the shorter side, nearest the door. A light-green laminate counter held the usual coffee maker and requisite microwave.
The "difficult situation" was easy to locate. The far wall was streaked with blood and other, more gruesome body materials that had sprayed in an arc from the gunshot blast. What would have been a fairly simple job was complicated by a row of cubbyholes that ran shoulder height right above the affected area. The blood had sprayed across, and thus into, the majority of the cubbies, contaminating everything they held.
Jane turned her back on the sight and focused her attention on the technicians. "Can you give me an idea of how long you might be? We're not allowing the residents in today, but I've called a meeting for my staff at eleven so we can decide how to approach this tragedy."
"Uh, you mean in here?" Grady's usually unflappable features flapped a little. "That's going to be a little difficult. We've got to clear out all those box things. You probably got brain matter stuck all the way—"
"I was thinking we'd meet in the social hall," Jane said, gesturing toward the door they'd just entered. "Although the nurses are used to coming in here to drop off their things, I'll just tell them this room is off-limits until you're done."
"Well, if you need coffee or something, we could probably—"
Jane closed her eyes and swallowed. "No, don't worry about that. Just... let me know when you're finished. We need the center to get back to normal as quickly as possible." She left.
After the door swung shut behind her, Grady grabbed the pair of disposable booties he'd tucked into the crime-scene tape he wore as a belt around his suit. Only after tugging them on over his tennis shoes did he walk closer to examine the affected area more closely. Standing outside the blood spray, he leaned over as far as he could in order to study the cubbyholes from a distance. "This is going to be a problem."
Constructed of wood and painted mint green, all but two of the seven cubbies were stuffed with papers and whatever personal items the employees felt comfortable storing there. Each had a white label with the person's name neatly printed in black marker. The setup reminded Arie of kindergarten.
"How deep are they?" she asked.
"About eighteen inches square, all of them. And they caught a lot of spray. They're going to have to decide what they want to do with all these papers. I mean, we can clean a lot of it, but the papers...?" He shrugged. "As much as they may not want to, they're going to have to sort through them themselves."
"Yeah, but it's probably only the top layer, right? Whatever's underneath should be fine."
Grady straightened then stretched and made his back pop. "Depends on how soaked everything got. Why don't you make a list of everyone's name? We'll need to keep separate piles for the uncontaminated stuff for each person. I'm going to start hauling the rest of the supplies in." As he passed by, he handed her the clipboard he'd been holding while talking to Jane Clarkson. Just as the two had fallen into the pattern of letting Grady do the talking, they'd also decided Arie would do the writing.
As soon as the door closed behind her coworker, Arie took a deep breath and approached the spot where the man had died. She wanted her first encounter with the blood to happen while she was alone and didn't have to worry about being caught looking weird. Steeling herself for the onslaught of murky gray fog and the anguished emotions that would churn up within her, she faced a long streak and forced herself to gaze into Bernie Reynolds’s blood. It instantly shimmered, the edges taking on a vibrant glow.
Red. A frenzied swirl of red fog—not gray, as she'd expected—filled her vision, both outward and inward. Her heart squeezed.
An explosion of brilliant white light flashed through her brain.
A man's voice, shrill with fear: "Why? What the hell? You can't—Don't!"
Then a gun blasted in Arie's ear, and she dropped the clipboard and shrieked.
CHAPTER TWO
After a moment, Arie realized the gunshot had occurred inside her head, not out. She'd been ready for a vision, of course—they were standard with her job—but she'd been expecting the gray, murky landscape of a suicide. That was bad enough. But red fog meant... Also, there was n
o mistaking the gunshot or the man's frightened plea.
"He was murdered."
Before she could pull herself together, Grady reentered the lunchroom. "Dude, you talkin' to yourself again?"
"I... I was..."
Without waiting for her answer, Grady handed her a box of ordinary garbage bags. "How about you start on all the junk in the cubbies? Separate what's contaminated and what's not. Put the uncontaminated stuff in these bags." Walking over to the cubbyholes, he pointed at the white—though splashed with blood—name labels that identified each storage area. "Make sure you mark the bags so their stuff doesn't get all mixed up."
"What about the contaminated items?"
"Set that somewhere where they can look through it all and decide what's important enough to keep. There's, like, all kinds of papers and stuff in these cubbies. No way we can know what's okay to throw away or not."
"I'll use the table in here. I don't want to track back and forth to the main room."
"Good idea. Just make sure you cover it with something. They ain't gonna want to eat their lunch off something that's had a bunch of blood and brain matter on it, even if they are nurses."
"Gotcha."
Arie followed Grady back to the clean zone in the entryway. He squatted down and sorted through the cleaning supplies he thought they'd need.
"I need something to cover the table with," Arie said.
Grady nodded over his shoulder toward the door. "There's plastic sheeting in the van. You gotta get it yourself. Grab a marker while you're out there. I think there's one in the console."
Arie slipped her booties off before crossing the clean zone then headed outside. As she crossed to the parking lot, she noticed the quartet was still camped out under the tree. In fact, they'd been joined by two more seniors, a diminutive gentleman with wisps of white hair circling the shiny dome of his head like a snowy crown, and a sturdy-looking woman who wore a smart navy-blue pantsuit but still had her hair done up in big pink rollers. They all stared at Arie, watching her as she rooted through the supplies, looking for the roll of plastic sheeting. Of course, they could have been simply curious, but the group's mood seemed far too somber for that.
Scry Me A River: Suspense with a Dash of Humor (Blood Visions Paranormal Mysteries Book 2) Page 1
