Page 35 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“I can feel her spirit. It’s still here. It’s trying to get past that awful man, that shadow, whoever he is. I can’t leave until I figure out who he was. For her.”
She let me go and stepped away so I could see her face. “Go see her first. Collect the body, and let her tell you what happened, however she can. I can feel her in the house still, Cass, and I know you could too if you just reach past the voice. So you know she’s here for you,” she said. “Her energy is love and whatever happened there is in the past. Take solace in her presence, while she still lingers.”
I nodded. Reina got into her car and started backing down the driveway.
“I’ll be fine,” I whispered when she stuck a hand out of her window to wave.
When she turned onto the 101, I didn’t even bother going back into the house. Instead, I got into Gran’s Prius, which still smelled of the juniper sachets hung from the rearview mirror. The car was cold and clean since she rarely drove. Like me, she walked when she could, had her groceries delivered from the local store, and often talked Jerry the postmaster into picking up her hand-knit sweaters from the house instead of shipping them herself.
The distinct lack of her presence told me just how long it had been since she had driven anywhere. I pushed the ignition button and left the house to its own devices until I had some better answers about what exactly had happened to the woman who raised me.
11
THE BODY
When shall the swan, her death-note singing,
Sleep, with wings in darkness furled?
— THOMAS MOORE, “THE SONG OF FIONNUALA”
“Do you have some I.D.?”
I fished through my purse, then handed over my driver’s license to the impatient, helmet-headed clerk at the Tillamook County morgue, housed in the basement of the local hospital.
“Ms. Whelan?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Your name doesn’t match the deceased.”
“That’s correct. As I mentioned earlier, she was my maternal grandmother. I was listed as her next of kin on hospital records, though.” I bit back my impatience, but it was getting harder. I had already filled out several forms, waited nearly forty-five minutes in an otherwise empty room, and had two otherconversations about this issue with this person already. “I called ahead two days ago to let you know I was coming.”
The clerk glanced at her computer screen again, as if that would help her deny access.Just let me in!I thought.
To my surprise, the woman’s eyes immediately locked on my name. She smiled sweetly, revealing several crooked teeth. “This way, please.”
I followed her down a hallway into a large room filled with stainless steel drawers. A collective hum emitted from what was essentially a collection of refrigerators. Inside one of them was Gran.
We crossed the room, and the clerk knocked on the door to an office, then led me inside. There, a middle-aged man with horn-rimmed glasses and floppy, uncombed hair looked up from a cup of coffee, which he proceeded to spill all over his white lab coat.
“Agh!” he cried, dabbing himself with a dirty handkerchief. In another circumstance, I might have stifled a laugh, but I stood there passively while the clerk introduced me.
“Dr. Aaron, this is Cassandra Whelan. She is here to collect the body of Penelope Monroe. Shesaysshe’s her grandmother.”
“Oh, yes, um, hello.” The man stood while wiping one hand down the side of his coat, then reached across the desk to shake mine while continuing to blot his shirt. “I’m the, ah, assistant medical examiner.”
He was also a minor disaster, with one of his scuffed brown shoes untied and a stained lab coat covering a rumpled plaid shirt. Through my glove, a vision of a raccoon scuttling through a pile of trash flashed through my mind, and a shadow of a mask seemed evident just behind his glasses.
A shifter, then. Hmm. And a raccoon.
The medical examiner taking care of my grandmother was someone who potentially scavenged trash in his spare time.
Fantastic.
Dr. Aaron sniffed and offered a lopsided smile, though wariness shuttered his eyes as he also seemed to notice what I was. “I’m sorry about the mess,” he said, indicating his stained coat. “Gladys here always catches me a little off guard.”
Gladys sniffed in response and turned on her orthotic heel, leaving Dr. Aaron and me in his disheveled office.
