Sinking Ships: An Abishag's First Mystery (The Abishag Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  SINKING SHIPS

  An Abishag’s First Mystery

  ∞

  Michelle Knowlden

  Sinking Ships: An Abishag’s First Mystery

  Copyright 2013 Michelle Knowlden

  Formatted by The Mad Formatter

  Kindle Edition

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It takes a community to finish a novella. My heartfelt gratitude to:

  Mari Lou at Elders Editorial Services (http://home.earthlink.net/~mlelders/)

  My Beta Readers: Kris Klopfenstein, Linda Knowlden, Rebecca Lang, Jean Riddell, and Kristy Tate

  Save the Cat! Novel Workshop: the beat sheet for this novella carried me to the end. Special thanks to workshop instructor Jessica Brody.

  OC Fictionaires: for support over too many years to mention and especially for the encouragement and comments for this novella.

  Formatter: Lyle at The Mad Formatter

  Cover Artist: Bethany Barnette ([email protected])

  Publishing: Debra Young

  Photo Credit: to former classmate Eric Hillendahl who provided the cover photo of the Dominator wreck, part of our childhood landscape in the South Bay.

  A very special thanks to: Gary Bale (retired homicide detective and terrific writer). I took your comments on the police procedures to heart, altering a whole scene to be more authentic. I changed one of the coffee flavors for you too. All remaining mistakes are my own.

  DEDICATION

  To my family with love

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Bainbridge Dictionary definition of Abishag

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  An Excerpt from Indelible Beats: An Abishag’s Second Mystery

  About the Author

  Bainbridge Dictionary, Seventeenth Edition, published November 2012,

  Abishag (also Abishag the Shunammite)

  last wife of King David, mentioned five times in 1 Kings

  from 1 Kings 1-3: Now King David was old and advanced in years. And although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm. Therefore his servants said to him, “Let a young woman be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king and be in his service. Let her lie in your arms, that my lord the king may be warm.” So they sought for a beautiful young woman throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. The young woman was very beautiful, and she was of service to the king and attended to him, but the king knew her not.

  Abishag (also Abishag wife, bed-warmer wife)

  1. In 1997, the state of Arizona legalized the practice of providing Abishag wives for comatose men that adhered to strict guidelines, contracts for the patient, patient’s family and service provider, and scale of payment for said services.

  2. In 2002 the US Congress, recognizing the need to standardize the practice of using Abishag wives as part of hospice care, limited providers to certified agencies and Abishag wives to licensed personnel. While an Abishag wife signs a marriage certificate with the patient’s power of attorney, it is the agency contract that defines her role, income during the patient’s last days, and severance pay upon the patient’s death. The terms of the contract have been updated by the Supreme court thirty-eight times between 2002 and 2011.

  In 2004, after the landmark case of Shulman v Miami Abishag Agency where it was argued that the emotional maturity required for Abishag services exceeded the current legal definition of adulthood, age restrictions were established: no females under the age of 18 shall be licensed as Abishag wives, and females between the ages of 18 and 21 are required to provide a parent’s signed consent for each contract.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Until I agreed to marry an 83-year-old brain-dead man, I’d never been on the second floor of the Abishag agency.

  “You can change your mind, you know.”

  Parked in front of the Westwood office building on a quiet, palm-lined street off Wilshire, I stared at the second floor overlooking the courtyard. Uncomfortable in my contract-signing clothes and hearing Jen’s words, I squirmed. Before she spoke, I’d only been thinking about not moving into Thomas’s Palos Verdes Peninsula home till tomorrow night and felt glad of the reprieve. I thought she at least would be on my side.

  I inhaled the scent of sage from the courtyard and warm leather seats in her Audi convertible. “I can’t back out now. I signed a contract.”

  “That one doesn’t count.” She sighed and rifled through my purse. Digging past the final notice telephone bill, she extracted a hair pick. “Let’s fix your hair.”

  I plucked off the scarf and dropped it onto the dashboard, its silken folds shimmering. It also belonged to Jen.

  “I get a finder’s fee when you marry the old geezer.” She fussed with my bangs. “I should be telling you that one day this could be all yours.” She waved my hair pick in a wide sweep across the windshield.

  I blinked. “You’re giving me your car?”

  “What? No.” She laughed. “Took me four Abishag husbands to get the car. Not to mention the loft in Malibu and college fees paid through grad school. I’m not giving that up—even for my best friend.”

  Best friend? Jen had been my dorm-mate first quarter of our freshman year, but we rarely saw each other after she took her first husband and I moved into a West LA rental with seven other students. I never thought of us being close and definitely not best friends.

  She responded to my surprised look with a wry one. “Only friend, I should say. Since I turned Abishag, I’ve lost all my old ones and can’t make any new. And don’t get me started on dating between husbands. The good ones won’t date me, and I won’t date the scum that will.”

  I’d waked with a frisson of nerves, thinking that by day’s end everything would be different. Jen’s words made my stomach churn. Marrying Thomas would solve my money problems, but I hadn’t heard that it could ruin my dating life.

  Not that I had one.

  Weeks earlier, I’d called Jen because I’d run out of options. I couldn’t keep
a job, was a month behind with my share of the rent, and unless I took out another student loan, I’d no way of paying school fees this Fall. She’d done everything she could to discourage me from applying to the agency, but after doing her own assessment of my finances, she reluctantly coached me through the interviews, recommended me to the director, and helped me study for the licensing exams.

  I tried to puzzle through her logic. “What does being an Abishag have to do with friendship?”

  Her eyes suddenly welled with tears. Feeling the discomfort of something entirely different, the awkwardness of dealing with crying, I fumbled for the door handle. Jen stayed me with a perfectly manicured hand. “Les, I can count on you being rational. So what if being an Abishag wife is kind of sordid? That doesn’t make me bad friend material, right?”

  I chewed my lip. “Who says being an Abishag is sordid? For all the stupid reasons people get married, seems like caring for the dying is the kindest.”

  Laughing, she blew her nose and some of the butterflies abated seeing her return to her usual cynical pragmatism. “Yes, Leslie Greene, you are delightfully rational, with a perfectly daft view of relationships. It’s like you were made to be an Abishag wife. I bet you’ve already memorized the 89 rules.”

  Ignoring the comment about memorizing the 89 rules (which I had), I managed a wobbly grin. “A perfect Abishag as long as I keep my mouth shut?”

  Laughing again, she returned the hair pick to my purse. “Always a good policy with the tact-challenged. Rule 48.”

  I tried to pick up my purse, but her hand rested on it, her gaze fixed again on the second floor of the Abishag agency. “The rich are guilted into contracting an Abishag wife, you know. Can’t have their loved ones passing into the Great Unknown without the ultimate companion, all the peace of mind you can buy in one short, blonde package…”

  “Hey, I’m not…”

  She stared at the bougainvillea winding around the building’s windows, not hearing me. “Really, in the end, it’s not the geezers or the families or even the Abishag wives who profit. It’s the lawyers.”

  Of course they did. We lived in a capitalist society—thank God, as my political father would say. If there were no rich, there would be nothing like Abishag wives—and no way for me to return to the university in the fall.

  I knew Jen worried about me being happy, so I didn’t talk about economics. When she coached me, she went on forever about how an Abishag wife was not part of the family, to remember that I would only be a hospice worker with a title, and when I didn’t know what to say, say nothing.

  But I’d met Thomas’s daughter so I could assure her, “The family will be wonderful, Thomas will pass surrounded by love, and the summer will be over before I know it.”

  “Spare me your fairy tales,” Jen said, but she released my purse, started the car and said as she often did, “If Cinderella were an Abishag, she’d get the glass slipper but no prince. Remember, Les, you’re being paid to attend the dying. You’re not being adopted into his family.”

  I got out of the car in a twirl of Jen’s second signing ceremony dress, also a loaner. I read the worry in her grip on the steering wheel, and suddenly I felt calm. “It’s okay, Jen. Portuguese Cove’s a nice place, and the doctors say Thomas won’t last more than a month. Me being there means he won’t die alone, and I can go to school in the fall. It’s win-win.”

  She nodded although her anxious smile slipped. “Call me, okay?”

  I shut the door firmly. “Dinner when it’s over. My treat.”

  I heard the purr of the retreating Audi as I crossed the brick-lined sidewalk to the agency’s red door.

  The Westwood Abishag agency filled two floors in a Spanish hacienda-style building. The front half of the ground floor faced the courtyard and was used exclusively for the family of its elderly, comatose clients. Facing the alley, the back half was for interviewing Abishag candidates.

  California boasted fourteen Abishag agencies, but the Westwood office had the state’s third largest clientele and drew wife candidates largely from UCLA, USC and six other public and private universities between Bakersfield and the Mexican border. On the second floor, the Westwood legal offices created the contracts (and provided the occasional litigation and even rarer criminal case support) 24/7. As it supported satellite agencies in Palm Springs and La Jolla, the Westwood office had more lawyers than any other Abishag agency in the United States.

  Moments after I entered the front door, an assistant whisked me upstairs to a conference room overlooking the courtyard. Florence Harcourt had told us candidates the room was used in all the signing ceremonies.

  Except for a bowl of white chrysanthemums on the conference table, it looked ordinary. A notary sat near the door, opening and shutting her inkpad in a bored manner, while Florence Harcourt’s assistant circled, whispering into her headset. I stood near the window, trying not to wrinkle Jen’s dress, trying not to sweat, wishing I could take off the pink sweater loaned to hide the mustard stained sleeve, wishing my new, strappy, white sandals didn’t pinch my toes.

  “It should be just another few minutes, Leslie.” Florence Harcourt’s assistant squinted, re-pinning a white rose corsage to the pink sweater. It was the fourth time she’d tried to straighten it, and I almost bit through my lip trying not to tell her that she should have used two pins to stabilize it.

  Jen told me to say as little as possible to the client’s family—actually to interact verbally as little as possible with anyone connected to the Abishag agency—so I gritted my teeth.

  “Miss Crowder is running late because of traffic on the 405,” the assistant told me. “She’s keeping Mrs. Harcourt apprised of her ETA.”

  Although my housemates were virulent in their opinions about Abishags, I thought I’d make a good one. Before I’d been fired from hospital volunteer work for mouthing off to a patient’s family, I liked working with the patients, especially the comatose ones. They never complained about anything I said.

  A few minutes later, Florence Harcourt breezed in with a harried-looking Tina Crowder and a senior lawyer carrying a thick stack of papers, contracts I assumed. When we met a week earlier, Tina had made me nervous. She was older than my parents, large boned, with short black hair. She cried every time she talked about her father.

  When I visited Thomas in his home the week before I agreed to be his Abishag wife, Tina had told me that she thought me “cute.”

  Florence Harcourt had explained that overly protective daughters usually wanted short, waif-like candidates for their fathers, and that would work in my favor. Short, yes, a feathery blond with enormous kewpie-doll eyes, but I never had thought of myself “waif-like.” Still, I had chosen Thomas because he didn’t frighten me as some of the other brain-dead clients had, so I was glad when Tina hired me.

  Tina dropped her Fossil purse on the table with a thud and sat. The lawyer slid a tall stack of pages toward her as the assistant set a glass of water near her.

  Tina shot me a perfunctory smile.

  Suddenly nervous, thinking I should speak, but remembering Jen’s strictures about staying silent, I bit my lip again.

  “Did you have any questions?” the lawyer asked Tina.

  Tina shook her head. “My dad’s lawyer reviewed the advance, and he’s fine with it.”

  My contract with the agency was only a page long, a standard employer/employee agreement. The Abishag contract didn’t have to be drawn up each time she took a husband, so I was there to sign only one piece of paper.

  My sandals still pinching, I shifted slightly. Florence Harcourt frowned, and I froze. What had I done wrong?

  “It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing for your father, Miss Crowder,” she said warmly. “A sweet and loving way to say good-bye.”

  Really? Signing a contract is sweet and loving? But Jen had reminded me that Abishag wives fade into the background. Rule 43. I practiced fading.

  The room went silent, and I realized everyone was staring at me
. The lawyer exhaled impatiently. “I’m sorry…” I stuttered.

  Tina patted the chair next to her. “It’s time to sign the marriage certificate, Leslie.” Her eyes welling with tears, she fumbled in her purse. “I’ve signed for Dad.”

  I eased into the chair next to her, uncomfortable with her quiet sniffing. Florence Harcourt squeezed Tina’s shoulder gently.

  Hand quivering, I signed the certificate just above her signature—Tina Crowder for Thomas Crowder.

  She stood, wiping her eyes, gathering her purse while I remained seated.

  I consider myself a Romantic Rationalist, believer of fairy tales but not in happy endings, dreaming of a soul mate but knowing nothing lasts.

  Even so, I couldn’t stop staring at my husband’s name.

  * * *

  Standing at the door of the Crowder mansion the next day a few hours after finishing my linear algebra final, the briny sea air swirled around me, cool and damp. I looked over my shoulder, down the long driveway to the locked gate, across the highway to where I could hear the waves crash in inky darkness. My husband lived (or lay dying) near Portuguese Cove, at the north end of Palos Verdes Peninsula.

  Shifting the gate key to my purse and dropping the duffel, I rang the doorbell again. No answer.

  In the packet of information I’d been given by Florence Harcourt was contact information for my husband’s day nurse, Hillary Lattimer. Although it was almost 8 p.m., Hillary was to be on duty when I arrived and show me around the house, go over schedules and answer any questions.

  I tried Hillary’s cell, heard its faint ringing inside the house before it went to voice mail.