Rita Herron - Under His Skin

Shivering, Grace flipped on the TV and checked the news while she ate a salad. Maybe they’d found the culprit and he was in jail now.

The report was already midway: “Tonight, we’ve had another case of what the police believe to be vandalism.” The camera panned to a cemetery outside of town. “Someone flooded the graveyard by Shiloh Church, saturating the ground so badly that several feet of dirt washed away and caskets have risen to the surface. A Halloween prank or is someone robbing graves now?”

Grace frowned and waited to see if they mentioned the corpse from the night before, but the reporter spent most of the segment on interviews at the church scene. Sighing, she chided herself for worrying, took her salad plate to the sink, rinsed it and stuck it in the dishwasher, then stepped outside on the back patio. The smell of the marsh assaulted her, and the sound of the ocean crashing against the shore filled her ears. But thunder rattled her nerves, and the wind brought the whisper of her brother’s voice.

“Help me…”

She froze. She must have imagined the words, had been thinking about Bruno too much lately because of these missing corpses.

That and the fact that his killer had never been caught.

Suddenly exhausted, she went back inside, stripped her clothes and slipped into a cool, cotton nightshirt. For a brief moment she allowed herself to think about Parker Kilpatrick, and imagined him beside her, watching her undress. Imagined him smiling as he ran his hands over her bare breasts. Imagined him erasing thoughts of dead bodies and replacing them with an erotic night of lovemaking.

But the image of his frown when he’d told her to leave returned, drowning out the fantasy, and she crawled into bed, reminding herself that nothing could happen between them.

He was a cop. She’d lost her mother and the two most important men in her life, everyone she had ever loved, to the job, and she refused to take the chance on that again. Besides, he wasn’t interested in her.

Feeling claustrophobic, she left the window open so she could feel the breeze and hear the waves during the night and soon fell into a deep sleep.

But rest didn’t come. Instead nightmares of her childhood did.

THE STORM RAGED outside, shaking the walls and beating the thin windowpanes. She was seven years old, huddled in bed with her teddy bear, trying to drown out the noise by covering her ears with her hands. Her little brother had gone to a friend’s for the night, and she wanted to climb in bed with her parents, but her daddy told her earlier she had to be a big girl.

Her chin wobbled as she fought tears. Suddenly a loud boom split the air. The storm?

It sounded like thunder. No…someone had screamed.

Her heart pounding, she slipped from bed and padded toward the door to the den. Mommy would hold her and make everything all right. Would keep her safe from the storm, and tell her the screams were all in her head.

But when she peered through the crack in the door to the den, she saw her parents hovering together on the sofa. Her mommy was crying.

Then she saw the other man. A big guy in black clothes with a ski mask over his face. He was waving a gun at her parents.

Another streak of lightning fell across the room and he shoved her father back onto the sofa and pointed the gun at his head.

Her mother screamed, then a gunshot blasted the air. Blood splattered the floor and walls. Grace closed her eyes and sank to the floor in horror, then covered her ears as a second shot blasted.

Without looking she knew her parents were dead.

TIME TO GO under the knife.

Parker grimaced as the first strains of daylight stole into the hospital room. In spite of his resolve not to get involved with Grace Gardener, he searched the faces of the nurses for her sea-blue eyes. Another nurse prepped him for surgery and when she started to give him a shot to relax him before they transported him to the operating room, he finally accepted that Grace wasn’t coming.

She had given up on being his friend. He’d driven her away.

Good. He didn’t need or want her hovering over him. Doing him any favors. Smiling at him like he meant something special to her when she probably treated all her patients the same way.

Besides, he knew she wanted answers about her brother’s death. Answers he didn’t have. As soon as he’d joined the precinct, the serial arsonist had struck and he and his partner had been swamped with the case.

But when he got back on track, he’d investigate and see what he could find out about Bruno’s death. All he’d heard when he’d replaced the investigating cop was that Bruno had committed suicide, although some of the locals suspected he hadn’t killed himself. He’d been found with a bullet in his head and had fallen over a cliff. They wouldn’t have a body if a storm hadn’t washed it back in. Which made him suspicious.

That was probably the only reason Grace had been so friendly. She wanted his help.

Still, he felt a tug of disappointment in his chest that she hadn’t dropped by to see him this morning. Hadn’t he learned? People only used you when they needed something. Promises were only words that were broken.

The medicine kicked in and his head became fuzzy, the room a kaleidoscope of beige on white that swirled in a drunken haze.

Suddenly two blue circles appeared in the haze. Grace’s smiling eyes. Then her angelic voice penetrated the fog, calling his name.

“You’re going to do great, Parker,” she whispered. “And when this is over, you’ll heal just like you want. One day you’ll walk out of here and we’ll never see you again.”

He smiled, or at least he thought he did. His face felt funny, as if it was melting clay, and his lips seemed gluey, his tongue thick as if it was swollen inside his mouth.

“I’ll see you when you wake up.” She squeezed his hand and he tried to squeeze back to let her know he heard, that he appreciated her visit, but he didn’t know if he’d actually moved his fingers.

Then they were rolling him into a room with bright lights. The operating room. A mask slid over his face. Faces blurred, voices became a rumbling echo, distant and indiscernible.

Slowly the world faded into nothingness, where he dreamed about death. He was being buried but someone had stolen his body from the casket…

GRACE TRIED NOT TO WORRY about Parker during the surgery—after all, this was routine compared to the condition he’d been in when he’d first been admitted. But something about the tissue recalls disturbed her.

What exactly was the problem with the initial tissues? Although the hospital was affiliated with CIRP and took advantage of all the cutting-edge techniques, it had an impeccable reputation. The area had become a hubbub of high-tech medical research, and patients came from all over the States to utilize the latest treatments available. Sometimes in desperation, they agreed to new treatments offered through the research projects as a last resort.

But these tissue transplants were fairly common. Perhaps the problem wasn’t with the hospitals but with the tissue banks.

She spent the morning tending to other patients, and when the orderlies wheeled Parker to ICU after he was released from recovery, she rushed to check on his condition. He was breathing fine, his vitals were normal, and he had come through the surgery with flying colors. He didn’t need her, just a nurse to take care of routine tasks.

So why did she stay close to his side all morning? Why did she run every time she heard his breathing turn erratic or hear him moan in pain?

Furious with herself, she allowed another nurse to help him walk the first time. And when they transported him to a regular room, she was relieved. No more making a fool of herself over the man. He was on his own.