Dead Sleeping Shaman Read Online Free PDF Page A

learned a lot since the last couple of bodies we’d found.
    The M.E., having finished his work, stepped out of the grid the officers had set up and joined Dolly and Brent, heads down, glancing at the woman, and then at the ground. When their huddle was over, he motioned for the medics to come take the body, packed his bag, and walked off.
    I turned away as the dead woman was gone over, hands bagged, then lifted so her head fell back. A thin, white rope around her neck could be seen. I gagged, but not so loud anyone noticed. The body was wrapped and zipped, set on a stretcher—ready for the pathologist. As they wheeled her past me, Dolly must have noticed my face had gone green. She came to where I huddled in on myself and put her hand at my back, patting me awkwardly. “You ok?” she asked, bending her head to mine.
    I nodded even though a lonely Special K flake did gymnastics in my stomach.
    Dolly leaned closer. “Strangled. Rope. Guess you were right to begin with. Sure is dead. And you know what else? Another thing you were onto before me? I think it’s ours: me and Lucky, and you, of course.”
    She hesitated when I pulled away and gave her my version of a “you’ve-got-to-be-kidding” look. “I mean, I might know somebody who’s hunting for her. We got a missing person called in early today. And it’s all about Leetsville. We’ll have to take this one on, Emily. It’s ours—if it’s who I think it is.”
    “I don’t want a body,” I moaned as the sturdy little woman moved back, bottom lip determinedly up over her top lip, police hat sitting pertly atop wet-looking, semi-blond hair. Dolly ready for action.
    “Doesn’t matter what you want,” she growled. “We never get what we want, Emily. You, of all people, should know that by now. Didn’t sell a book yet, did ya? Didn’t get your ex-husband back. Don’t have a job. We get what we’re given. That’s all. We got to handle whatever that is.”
    After that little philosophical diatribe, I protested no more. All I wanted was to return to my quiet little house on my quiet little beaver-ridden lake, and be left alone. Again I didn’t get what I wanted. I had to wait for Dolly to finish and take me back to town to get my car.

Still 15 days
    A neat pile of doggie turds waited on the kitchen floor, narrow wafts of steam rising. There was a puddle of water next to Sorrow’s bowl. I assumed the water was truly water, dripped from one of Sorrow’s long, extensive drinks, and not dog pee. I cleaned up the very neatly coiled pile of shit, wrapped it in a newspaper, and set it out on the side porch to go to the garbage can.
    There was another pile to deal with here, a message from Jackson, who was staying in a cabin over on Spider Lake, outside of Traverse City, for what seemed to be an interminable sabbatical year of writing an opus on the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and his Canterbury pilgrims. He was into his second year up here. I wondered if he would ever go back to teaching at the University of Michigan.
    “I won’t take no for an answer,” he was saying. “I haven’t seen you in weeks so I’m picking up pasta at Gio’s, in Kalkaska, and coming over tomorrow evening. Now, don’t bother making faces and thinking up ways to rid yourself of my company, Emily. I’m going to be there. If you are still mad at me for that last … well, indiscretion, which meant nothing, and shouldn’t matter anyway since we are no longer married, as you should, by now, have noticed. You will simply have to get over it. See you about six. Oh, and tie that damn dog up. I will be wearing new, and very expensive, slacks and a cashmere sweater. I’d like not to have doggie prints on at least one outfit.”
    Yuck. I punched the button, erasing Jackson. No use calling him back and pleading the Black Plague. Nothing stopped him when he was on a tear. Like the men and women of the United States Post Office, neither wind nor rain nor sleet nor dark of night deterred