Preface
You asked.
No one would believe this story if it weren’t for the way it unraveled. People you go to for your medicine, people who sit in judgement of others, people who you vote for at the polls are involved, and you’re thinking they’re just good, decent, imperfect people like anyone else. You think they are like you.
I really didn’t know I was the perfect prey. I didn’t realize that being a good person who cared about others and did things to make others’ lives better made me an absolute target. My past was part of it, too: I had a tough way of coming up, and unconditional love wasn’t something I’d experienced as a child. Approval was granted to me only sparingly by my family. I went without having material needs met more or less throughout my childhood and youth.
And I had questions about my family. Many of them still linger, or in receiving an answer to one question I saw another open up, like finding a small hole in the rocks that opens into a small cave, which in turn leads to a larger cavern, which has tunnels here and there.
I had been snagged before. In fact, I was raised by two people of just the malignant sort. I didn’t realize that in seeking desperately for the love that they were incapable of giving me I was placing myself in just the position of being lured in by someone cut of the same sadistic cloth as they were.
Chapter One: Ethically Sourced
“Why don’t you get on this website? You’ll love it, Maye!”
I sighed. That wasn’t my kind of thing. I wanted to be sitting in front of a cafe in a rattan chair, drinking a skinny latte and reading a book when the man of my dreams walked up and said something alluring but not overly suggestive. That hadn’t happened, and I’d been single for a while. The dates I’d been on had led nowhere, which, I later came to realize, was a manifestation of my vulnerability to the wrong type of guy. No, let me be clear with you: I was actively pushing away genuine, honest men who might have been completely appropriate for me if I had been whole, if I had understood what love, attraction and honesty actually looked, sounded, and smelled like.
(I’d suggest that it doesn’t smell like expensive cologne).
“Okay, Lisa,” I said. “I give. What could it hurt?”
I signed up for a couple of sites, putting in my credit card information with little hope of return on my investment. I was asked about different preferences and information about myself. No, I don’t smoke. No, I don’t have any of my own kids, but it’s okay with me if a guy who is interested in me does. I’m divorced. I have a postgraduate degree. No, I don’t care if a man is of another race. Me? I’m white. A few extra pounds? Yes, I think that’s me. Maybe I should check average. But I don’t feel like that’s true. I want to be honest. What picture? Wait, I have to upload a picture? Can I just upload a picture of some dead leaves, or maybe my mom’s neighbor’s cat? What? that photo is not approved? I don’t want to put my face out there . . . .
My first resulting date was to take place at a bookstore. An independent bookstore with an independent coffee shop in the back. The kind that uses ethically-sourced beans and offers used grounds for use in your garden. I arrived early, fiddling with the absurd hot pink silk flower I had stuck in my hair to identify myself to the man I was waiting to meet for the first time.
I sat at a table for two, auditing the condition of my cuticles. Bored with that, I took a pen out of my purse and sketched a female face on a napkin. Soon I was engrossed in that bit of self-soothing activity, and worked downward, penning in her neck, shoulders, and arms. I don’t know how much time passed before I realized that someone was standing beside me, watching as I created a person on a napkin.
“You didn’t say you’re an artist,” said the stranger. I looked up at him, then stood up as I came to from my artistic escape, and extended my hand. “Hi, I’m Maye,” I said, my voice sounding to me like a rock clunking against the inside of an old tin bucket.
He looked nothing like the photo he’d posted. I wouldn’t have known him if he hadn’t come up to me. “Steve,” he said, smiling and grasping my rigid hand. “What’s good here” he asked.
“Uh, well, I like the skinny latte, but that’s just because it doesn’t taste like jet fuel and contains very few calories,” I explain. “Do you like something chocolatey?”
“Sure,” he says, shrugging slightly. He really looks like he wants a Mt. Dew.
“Actually, you might like the Italian sodas,” I suggest. He looks at me blankly andorders a mid-size coffee. I get a skinny latte with sugar-free vanilla syrup.
We settle in at our table for two. “How’s that coffee?” I asked.
“It tastes like jet fuel,” he says, stirring in three packets of sugar.
“That’s not going to be enough,” I warned him. He added two more packets.
He was at least ten years older than when his profile picture was taken, and possibly more like fifteen. I didn’t care about his age or have an issue with his looks, only the misrepresentation of them. At the same time, I kind of preferred the older version of him: more scars, more character, some sadness in his eyes that made him relatable.
“You look just like your photo,” he said, as if reading my mind, complete with a telling inflection that let me know he had read my expression.
“Guess I can take this out of my hair,” I said, unclipping the silk flower and throwing it into my purse. ” It’s dumb-looking, but I wanted to stand out so you’d see me.”
“Oh, I’d recognize you anywhere,” said Steve.
I looked at him quizzically.
“Your eyes. I’ve never seen anything like them.”
My face warms. It’s the tone of his voice.
Chapter 2: Red
Same bookstore, Saturday morning after yoga class. My hair is twisted up in an elastic and my deodorant has given up. I’m wearing yoga pants as pants. This is not my finest moment.
I buy a book and proceed with my purchase into the coffee shop behind the store and order a cafe au lait with skim milk and a scone, then settle into a tiny corner booth and proceed to read about saloons and taverns in the 1870s.
About an hour later the barista wakes me from my reverie at my table and thrusts a bouquet of flowers into my arms. Red roses. I’m stunned.
“These arrived for you,” she says. “They just walked them over from across the street. It’s so romantic!” she gasps before prancing away. I’m left there holding a dozen red roses like it’s a baby I’ve found on my doorstep.
I look around, my eyes shifting focus from person to person. No likely candidates. No one I know is here.
Chapter Three:
Something felt off.
Curled up in my favorite chair, I had finished my saloon book and was idly checking out matches I had received on my dating sites. Some guy using the nickname twistedforlife was matched with me. I thought that was a bad sign.
And then there were the red roses. The card read “For the prettiest woman I’ve seen.” No name. The flower shop had told me it was a cash purchase and did not remember what the purchaser had looked like. The only candidate I could think of was Steve, and my gut told me it wasn’t him. Yet, all in all, it was not a leap to guess I would be at the same coffee shop I was at on the same day of every week at the same time, right after yoga.
The sender did not appear to know my name. It wasn’t on the card.
My ex had been big about sending me red roses. He had sent seventeen of them on my seventeenth birthday. He had sent them for every occasion. For some reason he had thought red roses were just right no matter how badly he had treated me or what the occasion was. When my father died, my then husband sent me two dozen red roses, delivered in my name at the funeral home. They matched the funeral spray perfectly. I tried to give them away, but nobody wanted them. They sat on the table, lingering as a vague threat long after he’d gone on to to something more important somewhere else.
God, I hate red roses.
They had been my father’s favorite flower. That’s why we had chosen them for his casket. When he was little, his grandmother would pluck one from the briars and stick it into his lapel before he went off to school, his lunchbox pack with some sort of bribe to get him to go to school, perhaps a sweet or a toy.
She felt sorry for him.
Chapter 4: A Bone to Pick
“No, I’m afraid you’ll die of boredom.”
“If you don’t want me to go, I won’t,” said Steve, sounding offended and looking hurt.
I sighed. “Fine, then. I insist that you come. But you are going to want to get some caffeine on the way. Stop at the gas station on the way into town. They have that crunch ice and a wide array of beverages.”
“You want me to pick one up for you, too?”
“Yes. A diet, the biggest size.”
“What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Dealing with dead people. What’s it like?” asked Steve, sipping his bright yellow soda.
“It all kind of depends,” I say, staring into the pool of condensation at the foot of my iced tea glass. “The first time I handled remains I actually held skulls up to my head to see if they would speak to me in some way. Nothing happened. They were just like animal bones, actually, in that way. Nothing magical or spiritual happened, in other words. But sometimes we do capture interesting phenomenae on our cameras or experience odd things.”
“Is it gross?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Well, actually, normally it isn’t. Of course, crime scenes would be different and so would a situation where a casket is well-sealed and the remains haven’t, well, they haven’t rotted down to bones. I’ve worked with both situations, and neither are pleasant. If embalming was particularly effective it probably contains arsenic, so then you have a poisoning hazard. Then it’s all hazmat gear and containment. We try to avoid such complications,” I explain. “But there was this one burial. This one perfectly preserved child that caused me great grief and pain. He was a little blond boy, so frail and small. His family had been wealthy, so it was the best coffin and they had the best embalming, and he was in this little suit. It was almost as if he had just fallen asleep, except that he was an odd blue-green-gray color. And then when I touched his skin with a tool it was dry and firm, sort of like papier-mache. Anyway, he reminded me of my little brother at the same age, and it still bothers me.”
(My eyes are welling up with tears).
“And in my research I found out he had a sister the same age as I would have been when my brother was his age,” I said, gesturing wildly. “Anyhow, the real thing you probably want to know is that human remains do talk. They tell a lot about a person. Teeth speak of nutrition and diet, for example. Bones show repetitive activity, illness and injury.”
“Is it spooky?”
Of course not, I think.
“Yeah, it is. Because–” I stop myself there.
“What?”
“Okay, I may as well tell you. You can laugh and run away if you want,” I say, “But I see things. Not like, well, not with my eyes. I get flashes in my mind when I handle remains or belongings.”
“Only in graves?”
“No,” I said.
His brow furrows and he sits back in his chair, arms crossed, and raises an eyebrow. I grab his keys off the table. “I see a pretty blond woman. She’s wearing a red and white striped shirt and tight, acid-washed jeans and canvas sneakers, red ones. She’s crying and screaming and she wants to know where you’ve been. Oh! She’s holding these keys. But they don’t have this on them, just the Honda emblem.”
I put the keys down on the table.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says quietly, looking down. He takes the keys and leaves.
Chapter 5: A Little Too Much Empathy
My time slot was 11:00 a. m., but we were missing a couple of presenters, so I volunteered to go ahead. Just as I was covering the dentition of state hospital burials in 1845 someone walked into the back of the conference room holding two large foam cups. He walked up to the front row, handed me a cup, and sat down.
“Somebody has a fan,” shouts Cray Clarence, an archaeologist with the forest service.
“Oh, thanks, Cray! I didn’t know you cared until now!” I volleyed back. Cray was our resident heckler. People always complain of his interjections, but I remind them that we need him to wake us up during these paper sessions.
After my session we had a break for lunch since nobody else volunteered to present. Time for lunch in the lodge as planned, and the buffet was out, complete with odd dishes like hot banana pudding with meringue and lima bean and chicken soup. I ordered a cheeseburger and fries. It seemed safe. Steve ordered a chicken wrap.
“Uh, yeah. So, why are you here?” I asked. “I can’t figure you out.”
“Sorry about leaving last time. I just thought . . .”
“Does this have something to do with those roses? Was it you who sent those roses? Because I went to the florist and asked who sent them and they didn’t know.”
“Can’t you do that magical thing like you did with my keys?” he asked.
“Sure. The customer who purchased the roses never touched them,” I explained.
I look at him hard.
“So then it wasn’t you?”
“I didn’t send you roses,” says Steve.
“God that’s scary! Oh, and thanks for not sending me roses. I fucking hate them. Especially red ones.” I make a puke-face to drive home the point.
Steve stares at me blankly.
“Did you catch any of that presentation, then? Did I live up to my promises of being boring?”
“I didn’t understand any of it,” he says. “I’m sure it would have been interesting if I had known anything you were talking about.”
“Bottom line: the people who were patients buried on-grounds at the state lunatic asylum in 1845 were mostly poor people who had subsisted on mostly inexpensive, starchy foods and had lots of cavities, and most of them died of cholera, which is exactly what the records said.”
“Why would you not just use the records if you needed to know that?” Steve suggests.
“That’s simple: because they may not be accurate. How do we know whether they are or not if we don’t consult the physical evidence? Plus, we were able to actually mark some of the graves with markers that have names on them instead of just number markers because the burial records were detailed enough to identify some of the individuals.”
“What about DNA?”
“Do you know how much that would cost?”
“So, who’s the new fella, Maye?”
It’s Cray. Cray is short for Crayfish, a corruption of Craig. I remind myself that I like Cray. I remind myself that I’m the only person who does, and that, therefore, he needs me to like him.
“Oh, Cray. I couldn’t wait for any longer for you to fall in love with me and gave up. This is Steve. It’s our third date. The last one ended when he grabbed his keys and ran out.”
Cray studies us, his eyes shifting back and forth. “Oh, you’re serious,” he says to me.
“Yeah, I am.”
“She doesn’t bite, man. I’ve known her for a while. I promise. She’s the nicest person I ever met.”
“Thanks, Cray. I didn’t think I’d see him again,” I said.
“Do him,” says Steve.
I give Steve a censoring look.
“Now that sounds exciting!” bellows Cray.
“Give me something of yours for a second. No, not a coin. Everything under the sun will come up. Okay, that will work.” Cray hands me his sunglasses.
“Your aunt Maggie shouldn’t have said that to you, Cray,” I whisper. “She was the one who was wrong, not you. You shouldn’t feel bad about it any longer. She was–she was a lot like my husband. I’m so sorry,” I sputter, starting to cry as I feel the pain stored in Cray’s sunglasses. I hand them back to him and look him hard in his eyes.
“Thanks,” he says. “Hey, I’ll see you later, okay?”
“You bet.”
He walks away, wiping his face.
“Lima bean and chicken soup,” I say softly, “is better than it sounds.”
Chapter 6:
Hot air balloons fill the afternoon sky over the state park. I sit on the porch and sketch with pastels. Steve is making a phone call in the lobby. I’m not sure why he is still here. He should have run away again by now. In fact, I can’t figure out why he showed up.
I shrug and gaze into the distance.
I would not have shown him my quirk if it weren’t for the fact that I liked him. I didn’t want to be dishonest, and if I had just told him he would have guessed me plain crazy. If it was going to make him run away I wanted to know earlier instead of later so that I wouldn’t get attached and neither would he. That he was back was bad. He should have just stuck with his decision to stay away from me.
“I don’t know. I saw him walk to his room a while ago. He seemed upset.”
“Cray’s never upset.”
I jump up from my rocking chair. “What’s his room number?”
“249”
I run down to his room, leaving my pastels to roll across the porch. “Cray!” I shout, banging on the door. “Let me in. You have to let me in. You have to let me in right now.”
An hour later I emerge from the room. A crowd is arrayed around the door.
“He’s fine, now,” I whisper. Act like nothing happened, okay?” I command.
They all look at each other. Matt has my stuff packed up and hands it to me.
“Thanks, man,” I say, grabbing his arm.
survivedthescourge 