Sadie's Spirit - CB Samet (important of reading books txt) 📗
- Author: CB Samet
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“Then what? He left?”
“Yes. No.” She frowned. “He moved my body off the path.” Sadie remembered his mechanical motions—as routine and dispassionate as someone changing a tire.
Asher was shaking his head. “That’s not a mugging, Sadie.”
“I just explained what happened,” she protested.
“Yeah, you described someone who intentionally killed you, frisked you for ID, and hid the body. You were murdered.”
“You're saying someone intentionally targeted me?”
“No one robs hikers to find an abundance of cash. You’re not describing a crime of passion, or a serial killer or rapist.”
He lowered his voice. “Can you think of any reason you might be—might have been—a target?”
“Do I know anyone who’d want to kill me? No.”
“An angry patient?”
“I work in the ICU. Mortality rate for the critical care populations is always high. I don't recall any angry families, but it’s not impossible.”
“Angry colleagues?”
“No.”
“Frustrations at work?“
“Always.”
Asher arched an eyebrow.
“My mentor, Louie, and I are—were—part of a drug study. A new drug for septic shock.”
“Why do you say were?”
“The drug’s faulty. It’s not effective and might drops platelet counts, if anything. The pharmaceutical company will probably have to withdraw it.”
Asher continued his investigation. “Angry boyfriend?”
Sadie gave him a wry grin. “Only you.”
Asher sighed. “I’m not angry. Okay, I guess I was angry. I don’t know what I am now.”
“Resentful?”
“Sure.”
“There hasn't been anyone since you. A few dates, but nothing more.” She wanted to shift closer to him, but was afraid he would glare at her again.
“Same here.”
“I died still in love with you.”
“Sadie.” His voice cracked.
She averted her gaze, stood up, and paced the living room. “So, murder. Now I’m even more pissed off. Is that why I’m still here? Because I need to solve my own murder?”
“Or let the police handle it.”
She looked daggers at him. “They don’t even know I’m dead yet. By the time they find my body, the trail might have gone cold.”
“What trail?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one who worked with the police for a year.”
“Which ended in flaming disaster.”
“Perhaps. But you closed other cases before the one that fell apart. You can help me.”
“Yes. I can help by leading the police to your body so they can start the investigation.”
Sadie put her hands on her hips. “As much as I’d like my body found—because the thought of becoming scavenger food sickens me—how do you explain yourself when you show up at the police station knowing where my corpse is?”
He sat silently, pondering her words.
“You'll be the prime suspect,” she continued. “Other than turning your life inside out, there’ll be no investigation.”
Heavens! What am I getting him into?
“Okay, point made.” He stood.
“Where are you going?”
“To pack. I’ll need to make a few calls to get my shifts covered for the next few days. We’ll start our investigation the same way the police would if they were investigating. Where are you living these days? I mean, where was your last place of residence?”
She told him the address.
“You riding with me?”
She shook her head. “Making constant contact with matter drains me, though I think I’m getting better at it the longer I’m a ghost. I’ll go on ahead and see you when you arrive.”
Sadie dissolved into her rental home, on a mission. Someone had intentionally murdered her. Her blood felt like it was boiling. Premeditated murder. Despite being a physician and researcher, she had been snuffed out faster than someone could say the longest medical term in the English language—pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis—or at least stare at if before losing interest. She was going to find her killer, and…
She looked around her living room. The place had been ransacked. A trail of icy fear ran down her spine. Despite being a ghost, the sight of her scattered belongings frightened her. She took a quick inventory. Medical textbooks and novels were strewn across the floor. Her shelves were bare, photos of family and friends having been carelessly knocked to the floor. Drawers were either half-open or dumped out onto the floor.
She stepped through the television screen that lay face down on the carpet, as she made her way toward the kitchen. The cupboards there had been decimated, with plates and glasses littering the countertop and floor. Pieces of the vase she had kept on the windowsill were now scattered over the countertop and in the sink. The hand-picked daisies that had been perfectly arranged in it lay limp on the countertop.
My daisies.
Like her life, they had been left to wilt and die, having been brutally disrupted from their previously peaceful existence.
Sadie felt outraged and destitute. Her stomach clenched at the injustice of it all. She couldn't explain why her emotions spiked at the sight of inanimate objects, while her own death had been less disturbing. Perhaps the utter desecration of her home had simply accentuated the reality of her situation.
She walked into her bedroom. Shredded. Every drawer, even those containing her lingerie, had been relieved of their contents. Her pillows were in pieces. Her quilt—the daisy embroidered quilt given by her grandmother—had been ripped apart.
Ash she stood in the center of the room, shaking with fear and fury, the items in the room began to lightly bounce like they were puppets on a string. Frigid anger cocooned around her until there was nothing but blinding white light, as if she were standing in the center of a blizzard.
Asher drove south toward Sadie’s house in North Fulton, following the directions on his phone app. She had apparently moved out of her apartment and into a house since he had last seen her.
He tried to focus on what she told him about the death rather than dwelling on the death itself. Someone had killed Sadie. His Sadie. Except she hadn’t been his; not for a long time. If they had still been together, she might still be alive as they had usually hiked together. Showing up as a ghost and recruiting his help almost made him furious enough to want to kill her himself ... or maybe just to pin her against his car and kiss her.
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
If she hadn’t pushed him away—
If he had taken her back when she called—
His phone rang. “Hi, Sanchez.”
“Brenner, hey. I wanted to check on you. You left the station in a hurry. You okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” he lied.
“You were mumbling about a woman when you took my peas out of the freezer.”
“Was I?”
“And you were white as a ghost.”
“Ha! Imagine that.”
“Sorry, Brenner. I didn’t mean anything by that.”
Juan Sanchez knew the truth. In fact, everyone within a hundred-mile radius of Asher knew about the psychic police detective’s debacle. Well, they knew the media version at least. To the world, Asher Brenner was a fraud. Only Asher knew the truth, but now Sadie understood. The one person he had shared his secrets with—his soulmate who was supposed to believe in him fully—finally did, only she was dead.
“I’m not that sensitive, Sanchez.”
Fortunately, the small town of Helen, Georgia, didn’t give a rat’s ass if he was a psychic fraud so long as he put out their fires and drove their meat wagon. His buddies at the fire station occasionally cracked jokes about his “sixth sense,” asking him to read their fortune, but no one dished out any judgments once they got to know him.
Sanchez, a cheerfully rotund man in his forties, was different. His Mexican mother had instilled mystical beliefs in him about the dead. Sanchez seemed to sense when Asher was channeling contact from the other side.
During a fire at a family home, the ghost of the father had led Asher to the closet where his daughter was hiding, still alive. Sanchez had cornered Asher about the “miracle.” Asher had tried to downplay it as a hunch, but had finally admitted to it being a strong pull and a whisper that had led him to save the child. Sanchez respected him rather than belittled him.
“So you’re okay?” Sanchez asked again.
“Yeah.”
“Liar.”
“I need to help out a friend. I'll be back in a few days for my next shift.”
“Fine, don’t tell me. Al mal tiempo, buena cara.”
“Thanks, man.”
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