by Laurel Dewey
Looking inside the side window, the interior was surprisingly clean and well appointed with a leather couch, basswood dining room table, matching chairs and two recliners. An incredibly small woodstove stood against the opposite wall, a few feet away from a teensy alcove that held a kitchen. Neatly hung dishtowels, copper-bottomed skillets and a stainless steel kettle atop the two-burner stove completed the cheerful motif. Jane factored that if the dwarfs crashed here, it was Snow White who decorated the joint. She motioned for Harlan to get out of the car and then searched for any open doors or windows. But the place was locked up tighter than an overfilled matchbox. Jane turned back to the front when she heard the sound of breaking glass.
“We’re in!” Harlan offhandedly said. Reaching his thick, calloused hand through the shards of glass on the front door, he easily unlocked the door and walked in.
Jane shook her head at the mess. But as the cool, high country weather quickly swept across the secluded hideaway, she was more than happy to crunch her boots against the glass and join Harlan inside. There was a ladder and loft with a futon mattress covered in a comforter with an attractive pine needle design. Harlan opened the mini-fridge and rooted around.
“We’re not stealing their food,” Jane declared. She retrieved the cooler from the trunk and dragged it between the two leather recliners. “We’ll sleep here,” she said, pointing to the chairs.
“Close to the grub. Works for me.”
Jane returned to the car to grab her leather satchel and computer, along with a small overnight bag. When she returned, Harlan had every light in the shoebox on.
“What in the hell are you doing?” she yelled, flicking off the lights one by one. “We don’t want to light this place up like a landing strip.” Searching through her bag, she brought out a large flashlight, turned it on and set it on the cooler.
“No fire either, huh?”
“No fire.”
“Their last name is Peal,” Harlan announced, pointing to a custom carved wooden sign that adorned the arch above the front door. It read: Welcome To The Peal’s Paradise!
“Shit,” Jane mumbled. “This isn’t a hunting cabin.”
“More like a love shack,” Harlan stated, motioning to a framed photo on the wall that showed a gray-haired couple in their seventies holding hands and standing in front of their tiny mountain retreat. The matte surrounding the Peal’s photo was shaped like a heart and across the bottom of the frame was a quote in gold relief: “The Opposite of Love is Not Hate. The Opposite of Love is Fear. Be Brave and Choose Love.”
Jane stared at the photo a little too long. The couple looked deliriously happy. They were the type of people, Jane figured, who probably met and married in their early twenties and somehow managed to navigate life’s ups and downs with grace and forgiveness. There was elegance in that design she mused—a rare and precious gift in our throwaway society. The longer she stared at the photo of the elderly lovebirds, the more she envied them. Love, it seemed, was effortless for these two.
Harlan gestured to the embroidered headrests on the leather recliners. One said “Millie” and the other, “Larry.” They were happily connected, Jane decided. Joined at the hip and the heart. The kind of couple where when one dies the other follows soon after—not so much from grief, but because their lifeline has been severed.
“You want to be Larry or Millie?” Harlan asked.
Jane turned to the recliners. “How about if I’m the woman for a change?”
Harlan plopped his large posterior into Larry’s chair and, like a pro, hoisted the chair back and the footrest up. “Now this is a comfortable chair.”
Jane noted a small bathroom behind a partition. Next to the composting toilet was a shower that she figured half of Harlan could fit into. But she wasn’t going to complain. They had a roof over their head, food to eat and a bathroom. Life was good. And when Jane turned to see a laptop computer on a tiny table near the kitchen, she factored that life just got better, thanks to Larry having Wi-Fi. Pulling out her computer, she was thrilled to find that there was enough of a signal to hijack. Harlan slammed eight raw eggs, a package of lunchmeat and a hunk of cheese while Jane eagerly made herself a hearty sandwich and washed it down with a bottle of water. She remembered the pack of cigarettes in her jacket pocket. Damn, that would taste like heaven, she thought. Nicotine fueled her thinking process, calming her while allowing better focus.
She hoped she still had a lighter somewhere in her leather satchel. As she rummaged through it, the manila file folder holding Wanda’s photo and information fell out and splayed across the wooden floor. Jane went to grab for the photo page but Harlan swept it up first.
“Who’s this criminal?” he asked.
“Nobody. Give it to me,” she replied with an edge.
He kept staring at the photo and name. “Hey,” he said, seemingly mesmerized. “She favors you, especially around the eyes.”
Jane grabbed the sheet out of his hands and returned it to the folder. “This is none of your fucking business!”
Harlan studied Jane. “Is Wanda your cousin? It’s okay if she is. I had a second cousin who did time for moonshine—”
“It’s not my cousin.” Suddenly, she felt flustered—a feeling she never allowed.
Harlan continued to eye her carefully.
“Stop staring at me, Harlan!”
But he kept staring. “Who is she? I can see you care about her—”
“I don’t care. I don’t even know her.”
“Bullshit, you don’t care! You wouldn’t be actin’ like this or carryin’ her photo in a folder if you didn’t—”
“She’s my half-sister.” As soon as the words fell from her mouth, Jane regretted it. “She’s living in transitional housing in Northern New Mexico.”
“You’re goin’ to see her, aren’t you?”
“I was. And then you stole my car.”
Harlan’s mouth dropped open. “Aw, hell, Jane. If I’d known you were headin’ out to see your kin, I’d never of jacked your ride.”
“Well, no shit, Harlan.”
Harlan considered everything. “So, when are we gonna see Wanda?”
“We are not seeing Wanda. We are more interested in figuring out who set you up and how to get your entire case thrown out.”
He smiled. “You really want to believe that, don’t you, Jane?”
“I do. Why in the hell would I still be here with you if I didn’t?”
He looked at her with compassionate eyes. “I keep tellin’ you I’m a dead man—”
“Stop saying that.”
“It’s true. Whoever’s after me ain’t gonna stop until they get what they want.”
“And I explained to you before that people are only after you if you know something, stole something or saw something. And you tell me that none of that applies to your case. But it has to apply. You don’t get the elaborate set-ups, Harlan, unless you are seriously wanted.”
“All they want is me dead, Jane. They tried to do me twice. Once in the motel room and once in that doctor’s office before I escaped.”
“The motel was to set you up with the black prostitute.”
“No, remember? I told you I heard footsteps comin’ down the hallway outside the room and I grabbed a chair and shoved it under the knob. They were comin’ for me, Jane! Right then! That’s why I yelled like I did to make a scene and force ‘em to leave. I called 9-1-1 and passed out. I’m tellin’ you, they would have took me right then.”
She shook her head. “Why? Why you? You’re not an HVT, Harlan. You’re not even…”
Harlan looked at her, waiting. “What? Smart?”
She turned away. “I didn’t say that.”
“I know. I said it. And it’s true. I ain’t smart. I’m the first to admit it, although it does seem that you’re on board with that line of thinkin�
� too.”
Jane couldn’t believe how unabashedly secure Harlan was with his own mental shortcomings. “You’re not the sharpest tack in the box.”
He smiled. “I’m a few beers short of a six pack.” He cogitated on that one. “Damn, I wish I still loved the taste of beer.” He retrieved his bag of mystery items and sorted through it. The various prescription bottles fell out. “That reminds me, I got to take my pills.” He knocked back his anti-rejection drugs with a bottle of water.
“How many of those do you have left?”
“Enough.”
“How many days?”
He eyed the bottle through the orange plastic. “Four…maybe five weeks.”
And then what? she wanted to ask, but she didn’t. She pointed to the bag. “Let me see it all again.”
Harlan handed it to her and she laid the contents on the wooden floor. There was the bag of pine nuts, a pinecone, the comical illustration of the Blue Heron, a piece of lapis with the faux gold imprint of the Eye of Horus, a dog-eared copy of Autobiography of a Yogi, a teeny bottle of sandalwood oil and an old cassette tape of a Patsy Cline album.
“Hang on, you got some more in here,” Harlan told her.
He handed her the key he said he found on the street, the ten-page newsletter titled “Eco-Goddesses” and that sparkly Easter card featuring the Angel Gabriel. Finally, he handed Jane his small, black spiral notebook. Jane placed them in a neat row on the floor and then stood over them, looking from left to right and back again in search of any clues. The pine nuts and the pinecone seemed redundant but maybe that was on purpose. Perhaps Harlan was drawn to these two items because whatever was guiding him wanted him to make sure he recognized their importance. Her eyes drifted to the book. She picked it up and turned to several pages in the front. The spiritual classic was penned by Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian visionary and Yogi who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles, California in 1920. His life’s work was to bring both awareness and appreciation of Eastern religion into the West.
In 1952, according to the text, Paramahansa Yogananda knew his death was imminent, even though he was only fifty-nine and in good health. On March 7th of that year, he attended a dinner at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. At the conclusion of the evening, he spoke of a “united world” of peace and loving partnership between nations. He then read from a poem, “My India,” and ended with the line, “Where Ganges, woods, Himalayan caves, and men dream God—I am hallowed; my body touched that sod.” At that point, he looked up and slumped forward, dead. His followers insisted that he chose that exact moment to exit his body, citing Mahasamādhi, the conscious and intentional act of leaving one’s physical body at the exact moment of spiritual enlightenment. While some conspiracy theorists claimed that the famous guru was poisoned by his enemies, his followers held fast to the understanding that their teacher left this life on his own accord.
Jane sat on the floor and flipped through the book, landing on a page that spoke about the bewildering months that followed Yogananda’s death. As reported in Time Magazine in August of 1952, the mortuary director at Forest Lawn Cemetery wrote in a notarized letter that “the absence of any visual signs of decay in the dead body of Paramahansa Yogananda offers the most extraordinary case in our experience…No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death…No indication of mold was visible on his skin, and no visible drying up took place in the bodily tissues. This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one…No odor of decay emanated from his body at any time…”
Jane felt a shiver run up her spine. She instantly recalled the words of Stella Riche and how Harlan’s donor was “the most superior specimen” his doctor had ever seen, even after being shot in the head and dumped at the hospital’s front door. And there was that random comment Stella made about the donor’s body having no signs of age-related decay. Jane worried she was reading far too much into Riche’s comment but still…there had to be an odd connection between this book and Harlan’s donor.
She picked up the “Eco-Goddesses” ten-page newsletter and flipped though it. On the last few pages, there was a large black and white photo of fifty people standing in front of a field of vegetables. A banner in front of them read: Working Members of the Green Goodness CSA. Jane remembered hearing about CSAs—Community Supported Agriculture groups. Individuals or families buy shares in the participating farms and enjoy weekly baskets of fresh produce. But these organizations require a lot of volunteers to make them work, including farm hands, who often intern with the various farms to gain real-world experience. Jane stared at the photo in the same manner she examined a piece of evidence back at Denver Homicide. The names of everyone in the shot were squashed together at the bottom of the photo, as if the typesetter wasn’t given sufficient space to hold all the letters. Checking the address of the CSA, she noted it was located in the San Luis Valley, which was nestled in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range. While she couldn’t be certain, Jane factored they weren’t far from the farm.
“Don’t you wish we had a cassette player?” Harlan asked her, distracting Jane.
“We do. I’ve got one in the car.”
Harlan handed her the Patsy Cline tape. “Check it out, huh?”
She took the tape and shoved it into her jacket pocket. Leaning down, she picked up the black spiral notebook. There were pages she hadn’t really examined that closely so she started flipping through it from back to front. Her eyes spotted a word and she returned to that page. “SUNNY” it read, in all caps and underlined. Jane’s mind drifted to the billboard featuring Sunny and Son Farms and their “Spud-tastic potatoes.” All caps and underlined told her that Harlan’s subconscious needed to emphasize it. But why? She turned a few more pages and saw the picket fence drawing with the arrow pointing to the word “blue.” Blue picket fence. Several pages after that was half of page of the letter “M,” with a heart symbol after the last letter.
She held the page up to Harlan. “This ‘M?’ Didn’t you say you had dreams about a woman whose name started with an ‘M?’ Someone you felt a lot of love for?”
“Yep. But so much more than love. I can’t describe it, Jane. It’s like we’re one person. I never felt that with anyone in my entire life and here I am feeling it in a dream with a woman whose face I can’t remember.”
Jane turned to the next page. There was just one word on it. Mike. She turned back to the page of “M’s” and then stared at Mike. “Shit…”
“What is it?”
“Military code. ‘Mike’ is code for ‘M’” A sudden thought crept into Jane’s head. “Golf Charlie,” she said to Harlan. You said that in your sleep. ‘G.C.’ Maybe that’s…” Jane stopped.
“What?”
“Your donor’s initials?”
“Or the guy who’s after me?”
“Possibly.” Her eyes fell to the glittery Easter card. She felt her heart suddenly race. “Golf…” she whispered. Jane looked at Harlan. “Gabriel?”
CHAPTER 10
For a split second as Jane stared into Harlan’s eyes, something shifted. It was so quick that anyone else would have missed it. But it was there and it was precise and deeply felt. It was acknowledgement fused with fear and then laced with gratefulness. Harlan slumped forward, his huge fingers working their way through his chopped hair cut.
“Harlan?” Jane said carefully.
He looked up at her. “That’s his name. I can feel it,” he quietly admitted.
Jane didn’t want to believe it could be that easy. But there it was. With nothing but a feeling to back it up, she agreed. “Okay. Now all we need is a last name that starts with ‘C.’ An Italian sounding last name.” This is when a cigarette was useful to Jane. She hadn’t had a cigarette in weeks but the need for nicotine was starting to intrude on her ability to focus. A few puffs, she lec
tured herself, and then she’d toss it away.
Harlan announced he was going to take a shower. Since he was starting to smell rather ripe, Jane didn’t have a problem with his plan. She stood up, feeling the ache of the last couple days settle in her low back. If sixty was the new forty, based on the way she felt, thirty-seven must be the new eighty. The walls of the tiny house felt as if they were closing in on her, so while Harlan took the five foot walk to the sliver of space Millie and Larry called their bathroom, Jane ducked outside with her computer.
Unable to find her lighter, she hunkered in the Mustang with the driver’s door wide open, and shoved the car lighter into position. That was just one of the many advantages, she reasoned, for owning an old vehicle; car lighters weren’t politically correct any longer and had been replaced with the jack for the iPod. All well and good, Jane thought, but you can’t light a cigarette with an iPod. The lighter popped out of its socket, signaling it was ready with its glowing red tip. What a beautiful ritual, she reckoned, as she ceremoniously unwrapped the pack of cigarettes, lifted the top of the pack and pulled back the foil liner. Holding the pack to her nose, she drank in the fresh tobacco aroma, earthy and rich with subtle undertones of wet dirt. Sliding the cylinder from the pack, she stared at it a little too long. “I’ve missed you so much,” she whispered to it as she pressed the tip between her lips. Returning the pack to her jacket pocket, she reached for the car lighter. There was a moment of guilt as she drew the burning red lighter toward her. Jane made a promise to herself that she would quit after her recent health scare. But it was organic tobacco, she reasoned. And yet, there was a slight giddiness—a sense of doing something bad—as she held the lighter to the tip of the cigarette and sucked in that first intoxicating hit. She closed her eyes and felt the nicotine bathe her nerves in a soothing blanket of serenity. Two more deep, invigorating puffs and she felt the familiar release of endorphins that spurred her forward and enhanced those powers of deduction.
