Eighth Grave After Dark

“I was scared to death of you. You were something else, something … not human, and I was scared of you.”

“Oh, so now you believe in all this?”

“Please listen to her, Charley. It’s taken us a long time to get to this point.”

“So, you’ve been counseling her? Five syllables: antipsychotic. They do wonders.”

“You owe her at least a little of your time.”

“She treated me like shit my whole life. The only thing I owe her is my middle finger and a cold shoulder.”

“You’re right,” Denise said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“See?” I said to Gemma.

“If you will let me explain,” she said, “I will leave tonight and I will never come back if that is still your wish.”

“Can’t beat that with a stick. Shoot.”

Her cheeks were wet and her fingers shook as she stared down at her lap. “When I was little, my mother was in a car accident.”

Not her life story. Damn it. I had to pee. This could take forever.

“They had her in ICU. They’d stabilized her, so they let me and my dad in to see her. It was so scary seeing her hooked up to all those machines.”

I gazed longingly at the door, wondering if anyone would notice if I just slipped away for a few minutes. Beep was playing hopscotch on my bladder, and this was clearly going to take a while.

“My dad left to get coffee, and Mom woke up while he was gone. She looked at me sleepily and held out her hand right before the machines started going crazy. Her blood pressure dropped. The nurses and doctors came in and they tossed aside one of the blankets that was on her. A blue blanket.”

Blue wasn’t my favorite color.

“They were working on her, trying to bring her back. I guess she was bleeding internally. She woke up again while they were working on her, but the machines were still going crazy. She looked up at nothing and spoke. Just said things like, ‘Oh, oh, okay, I didn’t realize.’ She had a loving look on her face. When I looked over, I saw what she was talking to. An angel.”

I saw an angel once, too, but now probably wasn’t the time to bring it up.

“He disappeared. Everyone had forgotten I was even there. They took her back into surgery, performing CPR on the way, but she was already gone. When my father came back, he dropped his coffee. I tried to tell them there was an angel, but all he saw was the blanket. He thought it was a blue towel.”

I suddenly knew where this was going. When her father died, I was four. He came to me and asked me to give her a message. Something about blue towels. I was too young to understand. Later, I didn’t care.

“They came back and told us she was gone. My dad broke down. I tried to tell him about the angel, but all he saw was a blue towel.”

I was going to need a blue towel if I didn’t get to the bathroom soon.

“He said sometimes a blue towel is just a blue towel. That became our mantra. Anytime anything unexplained happened, we repeated it. But we didn’t talk about the actual event until about two years before I met Leland.”

Wonderful. We were jumping ahead in time. I crossed one leg over the other and tried not to squirm. Gemma sat beside her on the bench and put a hand over hers. They were always so close. I’d tried to understand over the years, but some things were just impossible to explain. Like UFOs and bell-bottoms.

“My dad had a massive heart attack, but he survived. Then one day we were having dinner and he looked at me and said, ‘Sometimes a blue towel isn’t just a blue towel.’ Sometimes it’s more. But by that point, I’d grown up. I was a bona fide skeptic. And—” She ducked her head as though ashamed. “And I didn’t believe him. After everything that had happened, I didn’t believe him. I chalked it up to the medication they had him on. But then, right after I met your dad, I was in a car accident.”

“So, the point of this story is to not get in the car with you or any of your relatives?”

“Charley,” Gemma said, her voice monotone. Nonjudgmental. I loved psychology.

“Your dad rushed to the hospital. He had to bring you girls. They said I nearly died.”

Nearly being the salient word.

“I guess because he was a cop, they let him bring you two in to see me.” She laughed humorlessly. “I was pretty out of it.”

Like now? I wanted to ask.

She looked at me at last. “That’s when I saw it.”

I had so many comebacks, it was hard to pick just one, so I remained silent.

“I saw your light, Charley. But only for an instant.”

“I didn’t know about your light,” Gemma said. “Not until Denise told me.”

“Join the club,” I said. “I can’t see it either.”

Denise stared wide-eyed for a moment before continuing. “I just figured I was seeing things. Then about a year later, I was having dinner with my dad again and I told him what I saw. He tried to tell me how special you were. I scoffed and repeated our mantra. ‘Sometimes a blue towel is just a blue towel.’”

“I’m not really sensing an apology here.”

Gemma scowled at me. If only she knew about the bladder situation. It was making me cranky. I didn’t want to go now, though. It would be my excuse to leave the room when they were getting ready to go home. I could hurry things along then.

“I slowly began to realize my dad had been right. You were special. Different. I didn’t know your father was using you to help solve his cases, though. He hid it from me for a long time.”