Dry Spell: A Mercy Watts Short Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  DRY SPELL

  A.W. Hartoin

  Copyright © A.W. Hartoin, 2014

  www.awhartoin.com

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  Cover by: Karri Klawiter

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Also By A.W. Hartoin

  Young Adult fantasy

  Flare-up (An Away From Whipplethorn Short)

  A Fairy's Guide To Disaster (Away From Whipplethorn Book One)

  Fierce Creatures (Away From Whipplethorn Book Two)

  A Monster’s Paradise (Away From Whipplethorn Book Three)

  A Wicked Chill (Away From Whipplethorn Book Four)

  Mercy Watts Mysteries

  Novels

  A Good Man Gone (A Mercy Watts Mystery)

  Diver Down (A Mercy Watts Mystery)

  Double Black Diamond (A Mercy Watts Mystery)

  Drop Dead Red (A Mercy Watts Mystery) to be released January 2015

  Short stories

  Coke with a Twist

  Touch and Go

  Nowhere Fast

  Talking was my first mistake. Listening was my second. Fitness fanatics can make anything sound reasonable and Val was definitely a fanatic. She was a nurse on the oncology floor where I was filling in for two weeks. I should’ve known by her body, not to mention weight or, heaven forbid, flab in front of her. Val was built like beef jerky and quickly compared me to a jelly donut. I’m not saying she’s wrong, especially after my recent adventure in Roatan, Honduras. I drank about a hundred Monkey Lalas in one week and the results weren’t pretty. I was always curvy. It was part of my charm, but that much charm was overdoing it to say the least. So I talked and then I listened to Val go on and on about her Iron Fit class. With the zealousness of a reformed heroin addict, she totally talked me into it. Now I was paying for that indiscretion by being trapped in the staff bathroom because my muscles were so shredded I was unable to lift my body off the toilet. That’s right. I couldn’t get off the pot.

  “Is anybody in here?” I called out.

  Silence. Isn’t that always the way? I usually don’t want anyone in the bathroom when I’m in there, but there’s always at least one other nurse and she’s destined to be chatty. The one time I could’ve used a woman telling me about her son’s horrid third grade teacher, she’s nowhere to be found.

  “Hello?” I tried again.

  Nothing, not a peep. I considered falling off the toilet and dragging myself to the sink to pull myself upright. No. First, it was gross to crawl around on public bathroom floors. I’d done it before and it was disgusting, but that’s another story. Second, I wasn’t completely sure my arms were up to the task. Fifteen rope climbs rendered my arms close to useless.

  I had to do it. I had to call Val for help. I’d done plenty of embarrassing things in my life, but help to get off a toilet was definitely in the top five.

  I dialed my phone. Even my fingers hurt. Why on earth did I think being called a jelly donut was bad? Everybody likes jelly donuts. I could’ve used one right about then. It would’ve made me feel a lot better.

  Val answered the phone at the desk with her usual clipped words.

  “Val, it’s Mercy. Um…can you come down to the staff bathroom?”

  “Is that where you are? Jesus, you’ve been gone for a half hour.”

  “Believe me, I know. Can you come down here?” I asked with as much dignity as I could muster. It wasn’t much.

  “Are you stuck?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Toilet or floor?”

  “We don’t need to tell anyone about this.”

  “Toilet, right.” She broke out in big guffaws at my expense.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call Carrie down on six.”

  Carrie would be nice. She was a big girl and fond of jelly anything.

  Val got herself together and said, “No, no. I’ll get you off.”

  She hung up on me and was there in a flash, laughing as she hauled me up. “Isn’t that the greatest feeling? God, I love it. You know you’ve done something right.”

  “If this is right, I want to be wrong,” I said, tying my scrub strings.

  “Double session when we get off. Let’s do it,” she said.

  I hobbled over to the sink and washed my hands. “You are a lunatic.”

  “I’m fighting fit and you will be, too.” She flung open the door. “Don’t be drinking any of those pumpkin spice lattes. It’ll ruin your form. I brought celery and snacking peppers.”

  I hate you.

  “Celery is just what I need.”

  She pumped her fist. “Yeah, it is.”

  Maybe I can fake a heart attack. Hell, I’d be willing to have a heart attack at this point.

  “Great,” I said, weakly.

  Val walked out and punched the door back open, nearly whacking me in the face. “I almost forgot. You have a visitor at the desk. She should come with us. She’s got some blurred lines.”

  “Visitor? Who is it?” I asked.

  “Ellen something. Says she has to talk to you. Tell her about Iron Fit.”

  Not in a million years.

  “Sure.”

  The door closed. Ellen was here at my work. My heart rate went through the roof. Ellen had been my best friend for forever. In all those years she’d never shown up at my work unexpectedly. She’d call. Ellen didn’t go to the bathroom without an appointment.

  I yanked open the door and walked into the hall. The pain was gone like it’d never been there at all. Something was wrong with Ellen. My white tennis shoes made a squishing sound on the cream-colored tile as I walked down the wide hall past patients’ closed doors and innocuous prints of landscapes designed to be soothing but were merely nondescript.

  When I turned right, I saw the desk at the end of the hall. Ellen was standing there with her head down on the high counter. Everything about her said stress from her stiff legs to her hair. Ellen was, as my mom liked to say, neat as a pin with a sleek brown bob that had never known a tangle. My hair loved a good tangle. My best friend and I couldn’t have been more different. The hair was just the beginning.

  Ellen didn’t look up as I approached and I broke out into a jog. My squishing was more plaintive now. It was the sound of a code blue, an emergency and time to do your best. It was not the sound of a slow code, a hopeless case when nothing would be good enough.

  It seemed to take forever to run that hall and thoughts of what terrible thing had happened swirled around in my brain. Accident. Death. It could be anything. All I knew for sure was that it wouldn’t be good. Good news can wait. Bad news can’t. I reached the desk panting. Ellen looked up, her eyes red-rimmed. “Thank goodness! I thought she’d never find you.”

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I have to talk to you.”

  “Don’t do this to me. What is it?”

  “Can we go somewhere else, someplace private?” she asked.

  I took her arm, led her into the treatm
ent room, and closed the door. Val wouldn’t complain if I disappeared for a while. If she did, I didn’t give a care. I was PRN, not one of her regular nurses. I worked when and where I wanted. Val was sharp. She’d have noticed that I didn’t take a smoke break every hour or constantly call my boyfriend just to see if he missed me. Plus, it was her fault I couldn’t get off a toilet. That should buy me some leeway.

  “Alright,” I said, “What is it?”

  “I don’t know where to start. I’m so freaked out,” said Ellen, brushing damp strands of hair out of her face.

  “Just tell me, please.”

  “Promise you won’t say that I’m being ridiculous and stop worrying. I’ve heard enough of that.”

  “Promise.”

  “It’s Janine. I was going to call your dad, but I thought I’d talk to you first. I didn’t know what he’d say.”

  “What do you want with Dad?” I said, but the answer was obvious. She wanted what everyone else wanted. My father was Tommy Watts, famous, some would say infamous, private investigator. I felt my shoulders tightened with fear when I thought of Janine. She was four and the kind of child molesters wet the sheets over. Dad had spent twenty years on the St. Louis Police Force and he had connections in low places. Dad would be my first thought if I wanted a child molester quietly moved off my block. I, on the other hand, was useless in that regard.

  “Has someone hurt Janine?” I took off my stethoscope and ran the tubing through my fingers.

  “No, not exactly. Something’s going on. I know this can’t be right.” She ran her fingers through her hair and tore out a few strands. That really scared me. I’d never seen her like that.

  I swallowed hard. “Has someone approached her?”

  “No, nothing like that. We took her to a child psychologist and she said it was okay, just an imaginary friend. But I know this isn’t imaginary, and it sure as hell isn’t friendly.”

  Ellen turned, put her elbows on the counter and her face in her hands. “I think I’m going crazy. I’m scared all the time.”

  “Since when does Janine have an imaginary friend?”

  Her head jerked up. “Exactly. It just happened out of the blue six weeks ago.”

  “What do you want Dad to do?”

  “Check out the house. See if anything ever happened there.”

  “You think she’s seeing a ghost?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  I leaned on the counter next to her and rubbed her back. She started telling me about the man her four-year-old daughter had been seeing.

  Six weeks ago, Janine had been playing in the living room. Ellen heard her saying, “Don’t stand there.” Thinking Janine’s younger sister was pestering her, she walked into the room to settle the latest dispute. Janine was alone. Ellen left and later heard Janine talking again. She was answering questions, while playing with her dolls. Ellen asked her who she was talking to and she said the brown man. She said that the brown man was standing by the windows watching them. Janine was unconcerned and Ellen thought she had developed a fabulous imagination, but the brown man was back the next day and the next. Sometimes Janine would simply inform her mother that he was there. Other times she would answer questions or order him about the room.

  After a few weeks, Ellen began to get worried. Her husband, Jeremy, said it was a phase and ignored it. But Ellen wasn’t so sure. She’d heard of imaginary playmates before, but she thought that they were usually children or animals, not a man. Plus, Janine didn’t play with her so-called playmate. She didn’t blame him for her bad deeds. She treated him like another adult in the room. When pressed about the brown man’s appearance, Janine seemed confused as to the question. She knew that her parents and sister didn’t see him, but she didn’t understand why they didn’t understand that he was brown, all brown. When Jeremy asked what kind of clothes he had on, she said, ‘He’s brown, Daddy.’ It was the same with hair and eyes. Brown.

  The brown man sightings increased until he was constantly with her, but he never went to the grocery store or the park. When her parents asked why, Janine shrugged her shoulders and continued to play. She wasn’t as interested in the brown man as her parents. Ellen read everything she could find about imaginary playmates and none of it matched her daughter’s experience. After a month, even Jeremy became unnerved by his daughter’s casual mentioning of the man in the room with them and agreed to a visit to a psychologist. The woman was no help. She thought Janine wanted more attention from her father and made up a man to fill a void. ‘It’s a phase,’ she said, ‘pay no attention and it will go away.’

  And that is just what Jeremy and Ellen did, but the brown man didn’t go away. He became interactive. He found Jeremy’s lost wristwatch that had been gone for two weeks. He turned off appliances when they’d been left on too long. It could have been chalked up to failing parental memories, but Janine would say, ‘The brown man told me where it was, Daddy’ or ‘The brown man said you forgot to turn off the TV when we went to church.’ Ellen was frightened, but tried to behave like an adult, not a teenager in a horror film. She was able to keep it together until the brown man hit the five-week mark. Janine started mentioning a girl that her parents should help. She was quite put out that they weren’t doing anything, when clearly something should be done. Over that last week before Ellen’s visit, more details began coming out. The girl was underground. She wanted to go home and that she had a pink bike. The most important thing to Janine was that she was underground and she didn’t like it. Janine said the brown man showed her these things and would go back to playing with her dolls while her parents tried to control the cold shivers going up their spines.

  “Janine’s telling you about a dead girl?” I said.

  “I think so. What else could she mean?

  “Do you think she knows what she’s saying?”

  “No. I don’t think she knows what dead is.” Ellen lifted her head out of her hands and looked at me with swollen eyes and trembling lips. Then she looked back at the counter and the tears started afresh. My shoulders tightened further into an unbearable knot. Ellen was a crier. I’d seen her cry hundreds of times. She cried to get her way, to get out of trouble, but I’d never seen her cry like that before. She was losing her grip rapidly.

  “I get off shift at seven. I’ll call dad as soon as I get home,” I said still rubbing her back.

  “What will he say?”

  “He’ll look into it. We’ll figure something out.”

  “There’s something else. It’s why I came tonight, why I didn’t wait or call.”

  “Something worse than that?”

  “I think so.” She hugged me until my ribs hurt. “I want you to believe me,” she said.

  “I will,” I said never doubting for a moment that I would.

  “Tonight Jeremy had a dinner meeting, so I gave the girls their dinner and baths by myself. After I put them to bed, I kept feeling bothered, uneasy, like the room was filled up. Mercy, I felt like I wasn’t alone, like something was invading my personal space. I told myself that I was spooked by Janine’s talk and I was letting my imagination run away with me, but then Janine got up to ask for a glass of water. She does that sometimes. I was in the kitchen and when she walked in…Mercy, she said, ‘Why are you standing so close to Mommy. She doesn’t like you.’ I almost threw up and then the feeling was gone. I asked Janine and she said that the brown man left. I grabbed Janine and put her in bed with Jilly. I got in with them. If we had a gun, I would’ve gotten it. When Jeremy came home, I told him and came straight to you. I had to get out of there.”

  “I’m glad you did,” I said, although I wasn’t exactly. My experience with ghosts was minimal and I wanted to keep it that way. My experience with the mentally ill wasn’t much greater. There was a reason I didn’t focus on psychology in my training. I had enough crazy in my life already.

  “Come over for dinner tomorrow and see what you think,” said Ellen
.

  “What time?”

  “Five.”

  “I think you should go back to that psychologist or find a new one,” I said.

  “Okay. Thanks for listening.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  Ellen hugged me and walked out the treatment room door. She seemed to feel better. I didn’t.

  When I got off work the next morning I called dad. As expected, no one answered the phone because it was Sunday morning. My mother was at church and Dad usually turned off his phones. Sunday was the day he was selective. I left a message and he called me back an hour later. I was in.

  “Mercy. What’s this about Ellen?”

  “Don’t make fun of her, Dad.” I told him what Ellen told me. “What should I do? I could recommend a new psychologist.”

  “Think, Mercy. You know how to do this.”

  “No, I don’t. This isn’t a real investigation.”

  “Isn’t it?” he asked. “You’ve got a witness and a crime.”

  “Come on, Dad.”

  “You come on. I don’t doubt my witness until I have a reason.”

  “You always say that people lie, even when they don’t have to.”

  “They sure as the hell do, but you don’t start out thinking that this is impossible. You won’t be able to see the how picture comes together.”

  “So you’ll help?” I asked.

  I could hear him scratching his stubbly chin and that meant he was thinking. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I want you to look into the house's history. See if anything has happened there,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you right now, it hasn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Ellen and Jeremy have lived there for, what, five years?”

  “About.”

  “That house was built in the fifties, so it doesn’t have much of a history. If anything had happened, they would’ve heard about it by now. People love to tell people about grisly murders on their property.”