The Memory Giver (#Wattys2014)

Chapter 14

                                                          Chapter fourteen

        Bernie Pinkstring slipped away from the gathering, down the back staircase and into Miller’s grocery.  The air in the store was musty with the fragrance of overripe fruit. George Miller had given her permission to do a quick shop even though the store was closed. 

        Family and friends had all returned from a lovely service at Elysian Park and converged on the Miller’s place for a repast.  George had insisted on holding the repast in the little apartment above the store because it was Annabelle’s favorite place in the whole wide world.  Bernie knew that to be true.  Annabelle Miller was a homebody who didn’t care much for social gatherings.  Her favorite thing was curling up on the couch for a night of TV, tasty snacks and cocktails.

        A little while ago Bernie had commented—quite innocently, mind you—that she needed a pint of half-and-half for her coffee in the morning, and George told her to go downstairs and do a quick shop on him.  The store would be closed for a few days of mourning and he didn’t want his special customers going without… or going over to the larger supermarket in the mall never to be heard from again.  Bernie appreciated the kind gesture.

        The store was exceptionally quiet when Bernie entered that afternoon, no bratty kids running up and down the aisles, no gossiping biddies hanging around the counter. She couldn’t help but consider how nice it would be if she could do her shopping like this all the time.  This was how celebrities did it—after hours, so they could stroll the aisles leisurely without having to deal with autograph seekers, or the paparazzi.

        She immediately felt the sure hand of guilt yank on her skirt the way mother might have done when she got out of line as a young girl.  This was a one-time thing.  She should be grateful for it. She was only afforded the shopping privilege because one of her dearest friends and had passed away.  Thinking about herself at a time like this was just plain wrong, and God don’t like ugly.

        What a sweet, sweet man, Bernie thought, correcting her selfish and ungodlike thinking as she grabbed a hand-basket and started down aisle one toward the dairy case.  That’s when the thing hit her upside the head, a jolt of energy so powerful it sent her teetering, like a rodeo clown who’d just received a double dose of hind leg from a Brahma bull.  Bernie Pinkstring took two quick steps back, grabbed her head with one hand, and latched onto a shelf for support with the other.

        “Oh my!” she exclaimed as she exhaled dizzily.

        As he faculties began to return she realized she’d just received a jolt of psychic energy—the most powerful jolt she’d received in her entire fifty-six years of existence.  Her black Audrey Hepburn Breakfast at Tiffany’s funeral hat was cocked drunkenly to the side as she caught hold of her breath. Her thoughts ricocheted wildly inside her head like a bullet in a stone quarry.  Who? Where? Why?

        Whoever the spirit was, he (yes, it was a young man, she was sure of that) was no longer present.  That made the presence of psychic energy even more alarming.  Usually when she got a powerful jolt the spirit was nearby, but Bernie got no sense of the spirit’s presence.  This spirit was long gone and yet a heavy measure of his psychic energy had been left behind. It was throughout the store, thick in the air, a whip cream haze heavy with ill intention.

        The most powerful vibrations were coming from aisle two.  Bernie gathered herself, righted her hat, and moved toward the rear of the store to go around to aisle two and investigate.  A part of her didn’t want to investigate, wanted no part in whatever was going on in Miller’s grocery.  But Bernie knew it was her duty as a psychic and friend of the family to let George Miller know if something was amiss in his establishment.

        The closer she got to the rear of the store, the harder it became to breathe. It was as if an invisible weight were pressing down on her.  One thing for sure, the energy she was feeling was malignant energy, fraught with bad intention.

        Despite her chest feeling as though an elephant were sitting on it, along with the bad vibes the malignant energy was giving off, Bernie continued past the Miller Lite display and on around the corner at the rear wall of the store. 

        Even though it wasn’t very warm out and rather cool inside, she saw that the soda case was fogged over, as if the refrigeration equipment had been working overtime to keep the sodas inside nice and cold.  The glass was so heavily fogged she couldn’t see in.  What Bernie did see was finger writing on the fog in the glass.  The writing in the glass made her shallow breath hitch in the back of her throat.  Her legs turned watery, and Bernie again reached for a shelf to hold herself up.

                                                  REDRUM

        Bernie recognized the neatly written word in the glass from an old horror movie, The Shining.  It was MURDER spelled backwards. The spirit had left this behind, she believed, as a sort of private joke. It was spirit writing. The sprit didn’t suspect anyone aside him would ever see it.  The spirit didn’t know about Bernie Pinkstring and her abilities, and Bernie decided right then to keep it that way.

        She turned tail, and quickening her pace, moved away from the soda case, past the dairy case where, without stopping, she grabbed a half pint of half-and-half and continued on to the front of the store.  She dropped her basket near the stack (George could straighten it out later) and moved up the back stairs two at a time—something she hadn’t done since she was in grade school.

        Later that night, sitting at her dining table, pouring half-and-half into her coffee with a shaky hand (what she really needed was some brandy), Bernie allowed herself the luxury of thinking about what had occurred at Miller’s Grocery earlier that day.  Annabelle had been discovered by her husband lying on the floor of aisle two ten days ago, the same aisle now flooded over with malignant energy. 

        The coroner had ruled it a heart attack. Nobody thought anything of it, what with the way Annabelle scarfed potato chips, pork rinds and other high cholesterol snacks.  And everybody knew Annabelle’s idea of a workout was seated on her couch, exercising her eyeballs watching hours of TV.

        Yet as Bernie recalled the writing in the soda case glass, she knew Annabelle Miller did not die of a heart attack.  She’d been murdered by a spirit.  Why? Bernie didn’t realize it was possible for a spirit to take a life.  If it was a spirit.  Whatever it was, it was something from the spirit world, an entity the likes of which Bernie had never come in contact with, and God willing, never would. 

        Bernie shuddered as she wondered what the spirit thing might do to her if he found out she knew about his crime.  She vowed never to tell a living soul what had happened that afternoon at Miller’s Grocery, and decided it was high time she started shopping at the large supermarket in the mall.