Twice Bitten, Once Shy: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #5

Chapter 7

That's Not a Fruit Salad, THIS is a Fruit Salad

Blood on the toilet. Blood on the sink. Blood on shaky fingers. Needles. Thread. Pills spilled on the floor. The sour musk of body odor. All of this, plus two sets of worried eyes, reach out at Zandra from the open doorway of the bathroom.

There's only one way to deal with this.

Zandra shuts the bathroom door and starts to walk away.

"Zandra?" comes a voice from inside the bathroom.

Damn. Almost got away.

The door opens again. Zandra reacted too fast to notice the occupants before, but she does now.

"Chad," Zandra says like it's a diagnosis. "And Bexley."

Bexley bleeds onto the toilet from her arm. Chad hunches over her with a needle and thread, guided by squints behind thick eyeglasses. They're both wet with water.

"See? I told you she'd find us. It's the Law of Attraction," Bexley says to Chad.

Chad smiles at Zandra. "Just a minute. Finishing up here."

So Bexley's gunshot wound back at Carey Manor wasn't fatal. That's good, I guess.

"And what is it you're finishing up?" Zandra says, although she can guess by the location of the wound.

"I'm re-doing the stitches. They came open again," Chad says. He still sports his leather jacket, unzipped and without a shirt underneath.

"Your doctor owes you a refund," Zandra says.

"No, no doctors. I did it all myself," Chad says with a proud grin. He paused mid-stitch to talk to Zandra, leaving Bexley's open wound weeping. "I watched a video about it online. It was in Spanish, but I turned the English subtitles on. The nurse did this viral dance at the end of it, too. It was educational and fun."

Zandra coughs into her sleeve. She leans into the bathroom and spits into the sink.

"Should I tell her?" Bexley says to Chad in a half-whisper and distressed jeans.

"She probably already knows," Chad says.

"You're going to tell me anyway," Zandra says.

I don't have a clue what they're talking about.

"We registered for this event when we heard you were going to be here," Bexley says. "I didn't want to wait, though. We snuck in early."

"Yeah, we climbed up the side of the boat," Chad says.

"And that's how the stitches came open," Bexley says.

"We only fell in the water twice."

They could've walked up the ramp like anyone else. With all the crew going back and forth, it'd be easy to slip by. Maybe they were trying to traumatize themselves into psychic powers again.

Not that that can't work.

The pills on the floor are too numerous to be illegal drugs. By the size and the shape, Zandra figures they're over-the-counter pain relief.

"You came early for a chance to meet me?" Zandra says.

"Yeah, and now you came to us, like it was meant to be," Bexley says.

Zandra steps on a nearby pill. It pops into bits and powder beneath her foot. "Skip the pills. Soak in the pain. Hope that that's enough."

Bexley raises her injured arm and wags a finger at Zandra. She says, "See, Chad? See? I told you. It's all for a reason. If we didn't come here early, the stitches would still be good."