SavageTimes

The following is an excerpt from my novel, published on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Reunion-Lake-Whisper-Elena-Savage-ebook/dp/B0098TMN0Y?ie=UTF8&keywords=reunion%20at%20lake%20whisper&qid=1463946681&ref_=sr_1_1&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

“So,” my mother said to me. She closed her eyes and swiped at the dice. The dice lifted a millimeter off the board for a split second.

“You’re getting better,” I admitted, picking them up and rolling for her. Both dice came up sixes, and I picked up her metal race car to move it down the board.

“Let me try,” she said.

“You sure?”

With her eyes still closed, she took a breath—or was that my imagination?—and with great effort, steered her hand down to the game piece. It jittered, vibrated in place, and then turned over with an soft thunk.

“Good try,” I said.

“You don’t really mean that,” she said with a sniff. “Trust me. I’ll get there one of these days.”

“Sure,” I allowed. “You’ll be driving the car before we know it.” I placed her race car on Park Place. “Mine,” I said. “You owe me—hold on, where’s my card?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to sell to me, lovey? Let me take it off your hands. Going down with honor is so much better than going bankrupt.” She smiled.

“Not on your life,” I said, which made me laugh, given the circumstances. I found the Park Place card on the floor beneath the table and held it up with more triumph then necessary.

All the friendliness had gone by the wayside several hours ago. It was six a.m., and we’d started at noon the day before. Mom had slowly bought out everything on the board. I was hanging by a thread with the Park Place/Boardwalk properties and the Gas Electric companies. When I was little—hell, even last year–Mom would let me raise a white flag at this point. But she was immune to pity. Apparently, crossing the boundary between life and death could to that to a person. She was going to take me all or nothing.

“So.” She counted out the money she owed me on rent. It was like Bill Gates paying for a coffee. “Did you RSVP for your high school reunion?”

“I told you,” I said, taking her money with relish even as I questioned the ethics of that. Maybe I should be letting her win. “I’m not going.”

She pouted. “Come on, Alex. I already bought you an outfit.”

“You bought me a Halloween costume,” I said. My dice skipped out of my hand and came to a stop. Snake-eyes. Just perfect. That put me on Mom’s Marvin Gardens with four hotels. Not that getting a higher number would change anything. She was Donald Trump in Manhattan.

“You might be missing out on a great time.”

“Doubtful.”

A month before, I received an invitation to my twentieth high school reunion. It was a little late, given that my class actually graduated twenty-one years and two months ago, but Dennis Simpson, our Class President, found it difficult to put together a reunion committee while serving five to seven for running a prostitution ring out of his mother’s garage. You might think other members of my class would stand up and spearhead the planning, but my class wasn’t big on standing up. Our class advisor accused of apathy when we voted Simp the Pimp—as he was affectionately called–into office in the first place, and apparently not much had changed in twenty years.

I proved my own apathy by trashing the invite before my eyes hit the “RSVP by” line.

My mother–as usual–had other ideas for me, and although she needed help getting from the living room to the bathroom at that point, she found the strength to go shopping and find me what she called an outfit, what I called The Dress.

The Dress was the kind of red that a vampire might wear to cover up bloodstains. It was low in the chest, tight in the waist and cut up to the mid-thigh in the skirt. It looked like something a hooker would wear. Or Pamela Anderson, who was the only person I could imagine looking good in something like that and not be a hooker.

“Walk let you into the evidence lock-up, didn’t he?” I accused. “And how did you even manage to go shopping? You complain of your very bones hurting when you drink a glass of water.”

“Let’s just say there are more drugs out there then the neighborhood pharmacy offers.”

“Hell, Mother,” I snapped. “Please don’t tell me you’re buying crack from Blow-by-Blow Billy on the Square.”

She just laughed, which was her response throughout my entire life whenever she thought I was “showing the stick up my ass.”

Her laughter was interrupted with a bout of coughing so harsh I had to catch her before she slipped to the floor. The chances of her faking were slim. She knew I was helpless in the face of her illness. But she also knew I wouldn’t take the chance that she wasn’t faking, and that this was it, her last moment on earth, and her last wish was for me to try on the dress.

Once I did, she pulled out three inch red heels to match the dress and a little dangly red silk purse that was too small to conceal my gun much less my badge.

“Christ,” I’d repeated, staring at myself in the mirror. My boobs hung out. I flashed crotch whenever I moved. My toes hurt.

“I am not going to the reunion, Mother,” I’d said. “Especially not in this.”

Of course, she laughed some more, like she was laughing now. At least now it wasn’t interrupted by a fit of coughing anymore.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said, trying for the dice again.

“What kind of deal?”
“A bet,” she said. “I get my strength back, you go to the reunion.”

She screwed up her face and pushed at the dice. They lifted, turned over on their corners, dropped.

I grinned. “And what do I get if you don’t?”

“I’ll go away.”

I watched her hand sweep down on the dice one more time like a raptor after prey. This time the dice didn’t even move.

“Deal,” I said, even though I wasn’t completely sure I wanted her to go away.

My cell phone rang, and grabbing it off the end of the table, I said, “The reunion’s in three weeks. You better get cracking” as I hit the answer button.

“McHale?”

“Here.”

“What’s in three weeks?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone.

My mother snickered. I stuck my tongue out at her.

“Wasn’t talking to you, Howell. What’s going on?”

There was a pause, and then, “We’ve got a body at the beach. I’m heading over. You’re on my way.”

“I know the way, Ben,” I said, not unkindly. Detective Ben Howell and I had a relationship for about five minutes when I first moved home three months ago. I wasn’t on the LWPD payroll yet, but when I wasn’t taking care of my mom, I hung out in the local cop bar and down at the LWPD station with Walk and his team.

Life without a badge was like living without oxygen: something was always missing.

24 hours after I sprinkled my mother’s ashes over Lake Michigan from an official Sheriff’s helicopter, I signed onto Walk’s team and broke up with Howell. I don’t mix business with pleasure.

Besides, Ben was already dreaming about white picket fences and two Detective Howells in the department (not that I wouldn’t take his name, but he didn’t even ask). Plus, he was a good ten years younger than me. It was time to cut my losses.

Ben didn’t see it quite the same way.

There was a long pause and then he said, “North end of the beach. By the lifeguard stand. Park across the road and come at it from behind. We have footprints.”

I was about to remind him I’d been approaching crime scenes when he was still the star quarterback for his Minnesota PeeWee football league, but he hung up on me.

“Benjamin?” My mother was watching me.

I nodded. “Body out by the lake.”

“I wish I knew some nice young girl to introduce him to.”

“That’d be like diner coffee after Hawaiian Kona,” I said, grabbing my shield and jacket off the chair where I’d left them when she appeared in the living room eighteen hours before and discovered the cable was out.

“I happen to like diner coffee better,” she said, a gleam of amusement in her wide dark eyes. “It gives you the same kick and isn’t nearly as expensive.”

“You should give Ben a call.” I clipped my cell onto my belt and slipped on my LWPD windbreaker. Three days after the fourth of July, Lake Whisper thought it was August, blasting the town with record-high humidity and heat records. The lake usually cooled everything down. This year it was just evaporating.

“Is Ben into ghosts?” Mom said.

“He’s 28,” I said. “He’s into everything.”

copyright 2010 Elena Savage