OVER HER DEAD BODY: The Bliss Legacy - Book 2

Copyright 2015 EC Sheedy

OVER HER DEAD BODY

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author's imagination. Should there be any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, it is entirely coincidental.

Mary Weaver picked up the phone, scrunched her eyes tightly closed, and concentrated on her next move. What was it?

One more call to make. Yes. One more call.

Goodness, but her leg hurt. She looked down at it. All swollen up, like a fat blue-veined sausage, the stuffing inside too big for the skin holding it in.

I have to make things right. No time.

She rubbed her knee, looked around the large room she was sitting in, and forced her brain to plod through the mist blurring its edges, threatening to curl inward, obscure everything.

Rain. There was rain beating on the old roof, wind hissing down the chimney. Not light. Not yet.

Where am I?

Why is it so dark?
She should clean the windows. Yes. They were all fuzzy.

She shook her head until it throbbed, then blinked. No, the windows weren’t fuzzy. She was.

Mary let the tears, frail and hot, run down her puffy cheeks and drip onto her stained nightgown.

She struggled to remember putting the gown on but could not. Buffeted by a new confusion, she sat stone still on the edge of the bed, clasped the gown’s lace-edged collar, and bunched it tight under her chin.

Naked. She’d been naked, dressed by a stranger. The grayness of shame colored the fog in her mind. So many strangers …

Maybe that woman … the one she didn’t like. The one with the hard hands. Hadn’t she come yesterday? Last week?

Out of memory, out of time, panic closed her throat. Urgency clutched her heart. She had to make things right.

“Dear God, tell me,
please
… where am I?” she screamed into the empty room.

And, as if her scream were a wind blowing at it hard and fast, the fog receded, leaving the barest of clearings. Thoughts straight and sharp rose on the landscape.

Relief flooded her. “You’re home, you mad old woman,” she whispered and ran a hand over the mattress of the familiar bed she sat on. “Home,” she repeated. “In Mayday House. Where you’ve always been.” She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “You’re here, in the now.”

She brushed the moisture from her cheeks, firmed her will, and tightened her grip on the phone still in her hand.

“And the now won’t last, so you’d best get on with things.”

And she did.

Keeley Farrell’s cab pulled up to Mayday House as two young men were rumbling a laden gurney toward the gaping doors of the County Medical Examiner’s van. Her heart constricted painfully, then shrank in her chest.

Oh, my God, I didn’t make it!

She flung the cab door open, got out, and ran toward the van. Unable to speak, she held up a hand to halt the men who were about to slide a sheet-draped body into the vehicle’s cavity. Several strands of long gray hair had escaped the white shroud, straggling across the white cotton as if drawn in charcoal.

Keeley closed her eyes to hold back the flood of tears gathering there.

“Ma’am?” one of the men asked. “You okay?”

She opened her eyes, took a breath and, ignoring his question and the concern in his curious gaze, placed her hand on the still, covered figure on the stretcher, near the heart. Mary’s fine, good heart. Stopped now. Never to beat again.

“I’m too late,” she murmured. “I’m sorry, Mary. So very sorry.”

“We have to go, ma’am.”

“I want to see her,” she said.

“I don’t know …”

While he hesitated, Keeley loosened the sheet and folded it back, exposing Mary from head to waist. She gasped.

Stringy gray hair framed a face so swollen and discolored that for a heart-stopping moment she had the crazy hope she was wrong, that this wasn’t Mary. Wasn’t the woman who’d raised her after the death of her mother, the woman who’d loved her. The woman who’d known her better than she knew herself. But of course it was.

Keeley reached for Mary’s hand, turned it over in her own, and gripped it tight.

Gently, she brushed the hair back and off her forehead and bent to kiss it.

“Godspeed, Grandmother. Godspeed,” she whispered against the cold flesh, wishing with all her heart her prayers carried past her own failed loyalties.

“Ma’am?” the attendant said again. “We really have to go.”

She nodded, straightened away from the body and, swallowing hard, covered Mary’s face.

The two men slid the body into the truck and closed the door. While one headed for the truck cab, the other gestured toward the house. “There’s people up there if you have questions.”

“Yes, thank you.”

Keeley dealt with the waiting cabbie, then towed her rolling suitcase up the broken concrete path to its latest resting place, and with luck, its last—Mayday House.

Home.

Sort of.

She was met at the door by a tall, dark-haired woman.

“I’m Keeley Farrell,” she said, attempting a smile.

“From your message to Mary, I expected you earlier.
Considerably
earlier,” the woman said, her tone cool, her eyes accusatory.

“Yes. Sorry. I had travel problems.” Understatement of the year but enough said to cover the subject. “What happened?”

“A better question would be, what didn’t? Heart failure, dementia, edema …. Didn’t have to happen, either.”

“Then why did it?”

“She became difficult, refused to take her medication.” The woman’s face had the stern grain of old lumber, and her voice dripped disapproval.

Keeley, not impressed with either the woman’s manner or tone, leveled her gaze on her. “Who are you, exactly?”

“Marion Truitt. I’m a private nurse with Barrker Contingent Home Care.”

“Not much of one, by the look of things.”

“I beg your pardon?” Her eyes widened, her mouth tightened.

“Mary’s face was dirty, her nails—also dirty—were unclipped. And her nightgown looked as if it hadn’t been changed in weeks. If that’s how bad she looked on the outside, my guess is you weren’t doing much good for the inside, either.”

“As I said, she was extremely difficult and—”

Keeley wasn’t in the mood for excuses. Incompetence, it seemed, stalked the world—that and not giving a damn. She pegged Truitt as guilty of both. “How about you get your coat and broomstick, Marion Truitt,” she said brusquely. “Your services—or more aptly lack of them—are no longer required. And if there’s money owing, forget it. I write a convincing letter. One your boss would not enjoy reading.” She walked past the gaping woman into the house and didn’t look back, even when the door slammed hard enough to shake the ancient rafters.

After propping her suitcase against the entryway table, she took a good look around.

The house looked as though it had been ransacked by a gang of bears on a honey hunt. Stuff—and there was no other word for it—was everywhere, a lot of it books, magazines, newspapers. A layer of dust and grime stuck to every surface unfortunate enough to have missed the plop of the daily press. Through the open kitchen doorway she spotted the sink. It looked set to collapse under the weight of dirty dishes.

Oh, Mary …

Numb, she stood in the front hall, rubbed her face, then shoved her hair back, unable to ignore the painful stabs of guilt poking her already overloaded conscience. Mary should have told her she’d been having hard times, shouldn’t have left her to hear it from some unknown female who’d left a whispery, virtually unintelligible message on the New York office’s voice mail. It was miraculous it had even found its way to the hospital—or the tent that passed for a hospital— where she was working in Darfur, Sudan.

A day later and she’d have missed it entirely.

The loss of three aid workers during a brutal attack on a neighboring village had her team again decamping and awaiting instructions. Given the dangerous, unpredictable situation in Darfur at the time, the directors of Medics-At-Large, MAL, the humanitarian organization she worked for, opted to pull Keeley’s entire team. Some of the newer arrivals were redeployed; others, like Keeley—with problems—were sent home.

In the dark of her sleepless nights, she’d been secretly relieved the decision had been made for her. Something else to feel guilty about.

The call telling her she was needed at Mayday House, the chance to help Mary, couldn’t have come at a better time. But she’d expected Mary to be here, for them to work together—

“Are you Keeley?”

Startled, her heart jerked in her chest, and she spun to face a young girl, late teens, early twenties maybe, standing on the stairs, her hand on the newel. “That’s me,” Keeley said. “And you are?”

“Bridget. Bridget Garner.” She hesitated. “I’m the one who called you. I hope that was okay.”

“Better than okay and greatly appreciated. Thank you. I’m only sorry I didn’t get here sooner.” Keeley gave the girl a quick scan. Short, blond, sickly thin, and with nails chewed to the cuticle.

“Yeah … I guess I should have called sooner, but Miss Truitt said not to, and like I didn’t know she was like going to—you know— I’m real sorry.”

Keeley shook her head. “It’s okay. But I did wonder who exactly called. You didn’t leave a name.”

“Didn’t I?” The girl frowned, brought her index finger to her mouth. “I thought I did.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Keeley forced a smile. “You’re one of Mary’s girls, aren’t you?”

“Not anymore, I guess. I was, though.” She touched her tummy with a splayed hand. “I lost my baby. Seven months along. That was a while back. I kind of like … stayed on,” She lifted a bony shoulder, then dropped it. “To help Mary.”

And because you had nowhere else to go, like so many of Mary’s sad and confused guests over the years.

“I see,” Keeley said. But from the look of the place, she assumed Bridget’s help didn’t amount to much. And from the look of the sad-eyed girl in front of her, she assumed Mary wouldn’t have expected it. Unless things had changed in the years since she’d left Mayday House, it would have been Mary doing the helping.

“When she was … okay, Mary talked about you a lot.” Bridget started to cry. “She was the only one—”

Keeley went to her and put an arm around her shoulder. “I know. Mary was the only one to help—to love—a lot of people. Me included. I ‘kind of stayed on’ with her, too.”

“She said you were like”—she gulped a breath— “her granddaughter or something.”

“Yes.” Keeley didn’t say more, afraid the words would turn to a river of tears. At the moment, the fine line between granddaughter and goddaughter was too blurred to explain.

Bridget sniffed and rubbed her cheeks with both hands. “She didn’t much like crying, did she?”

“‘Tears are for silly boys and sissy girls.’” It was oddly comforting to repeat Mary’s oft-used adage—always said with a grin. And empowering. Because as Keeley had learned so well in Africa, all the tears in the world, all the days and nights trying to stop your body quaking in pain and fear, didn’t bring back the dead, or make things the way you wanted them to be. No. A person had to
do
,
keep moving, make use of themselves. She’d come home to do exactly that.

Bridget smiled a bit. “Yeah.”

“Now, if I know Mary, there’s bound to be a cup of tea or coffee around here somewhere.”

Before following Bridget into the kitchen, Keeley took another look around at the sorry state of the house. One thing was obvious, if she planned to return Mayday House to Mary’s vision, make it serve again, she was in for an awful lot of work.

A mingled sense of calm and excitement settled over her. Anticipation.