"Engrams"

by Brian Butler

Copyright ©2003
ISBN: 0-87714-819-8 eBook edition
ISBN: 0-87714-306-4 PB edition

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

THE AUTHOR

Brian Butler lives in Montana. When not writing or remodeling houses, his spare time is spent hiking and fishing in the Beartooth Mountains. He also enjoys white water rafting, snowboarding, and horse back riding with his wife, two daughters and their families. Engrams is his first novel and his professional writing credentials include several TV commercials and non-fiction magazine articles for major publications.

THE BOOK

Robyn Cosgrove is a dejected heiress with an unfulfilled life. Her will to live is gone and someone else also wants her dead. An attempt on her life precludes Robyn's plans for suicide and leaves her with a potentially fatal brain injury. As she lies near death in the hospital, Carol Martin, housewife and mother of two young children, is killed in an automobile accident.

A small section of Carol's brain is transplanted into Robyn's in an effort to save her life. Maxine O'Donnell, a Physician's Assistant to neurosurgeon John Colby, discovers the very essence of the donor imbuing itself into her host's total being as Carol tries to come back to life.

Detective Gary Benson is certain that the attack on Robyn Cosgrove was not just a burglary attempt gone bad and Robyn must stay alive for Carol's resurging essence to have any chance of rejoining her husband and children.

SAMPLE

Engram: the hypothetical impression or trace created by memory; the mechanism for recall of the memory.

Thanatological Theory: any person who has taken a road to the end has not merely left something behind; at the same time, something new began.

Prologue

In the flight from eternal death,
every soul seeks its eternity.
The power is needed from within
to live again.
Acceptance of death is the end.
The Will must survive.
Unrecognizable, unknown life
far exceeds eternal death.
It matters not that you live.
In dying willfully, you can do nothing.
Continuing life, you can do all.
Forever.

A small sliver of the new November moon rising in the east cracked a star-studded sky overhead as he waited, crouched behind three Japanese yews near the edge of a manicured lawn. Cedar bark mulch covered the ground under the shrubbery adjacent to the wide driveway and gave his feet a small amount of protective insulation from the frozen turf. He breathed uneasily, his short, nervous breaths causing a hoar frost to form in tiny spikes on the yellowish-green branches scratching against his face.

Shivering, knees stiffening, he hunched his back against the cold northeast wind to blow a meager amount of warm air into his hands covered by cheap cotton gardening gloves. The mint-flavored gum he chewed became hard as the night air whistled quietly in and out through his clenched teeth. His jaws ached and he cursed under his breath whenever he bit the inside of his cheek while gnawing on the taffied chaw.

"About time," he muttered, dropping flat onto the ground as approaching headlights cut into the darkness, highlighting the icicled boughs. A pair of high-powered lights above each of the four, double car garage doors flicked on as the car neared. He congratulated himself for being smart enough to stay out of sensing range of the sensitive motion detecting spotlights now illuminating the shiny aggregate surface of the entire driveway as if it was mid-day.

The paneled door closest to the adjoining house opened slowly as the two-door Cadillac STS turned into the drive. The security lights reflected kaleidoscopically off the car's deep metallic green finish and there was the subtle rumble of a big V-8 engine as it cruised past him. The Cadillac stopped in the garage when its windshield came into contact with a yellow tennis ball dangling from the rafters by a length of twine.

He watched as a woman got out and retrieved two large department store shopping bags by their looped string handles from the back seat. She entered the house, set one of the bags down and hit the garage door control switch with the side of her fist. A multi-carat diamond on her ring finger flashed in the light as she pulled the door shut behind her.

When he heard the motor kick into gear, the man jumped from his hiding place and stiffly ran toward the descending garage door. He took the wad of gum from his mouth, pinched it between two gloved fingers and pressed it against the electronic eye of the door's safety monitor laser beam sitting a few inches above the concrete floor. The door stopped a foot above his hand and the light on the opener drive began flashing off and on. Blinded by the mint-flavored obstruction, the door automatically reversed direction with a loud clanking noise.

He sprinted back to his hiding place behind the yews and counted a half-dozen openings and near closings before the woman came out, grabbed a rake off a neatly organized tool rack and used it to pull the opener's plug out of the ceiling receptacle. Her home's security system had been breached for the remainder of the night.

Chapter 1

She lay half submersed in a large concave bed of ice. A heart-lung machine gurgled quietly behind it, preserving the viability of her few undamaged organs. Carol Martin's skin was still a healthy pink, kept refreshed by the continual flow of oxygenated blood to and from the device through two plastic tubes tactfully shielded from view by the white sheet hiding her bruised, naked body. He stood up and approached the ice tub, crying shamelessly in human anguish, the full impact of her death wrenching the gush of tears out of him. Carol stared back at him through sapphire-blue, lifeless eyes, ready for the harvest of tissue and organs.

Philip Martin's steps had been hesitant while he followed Maxine O'Donnell, a woman who had introduced herself to him as a neurosurgeon's assistant when the police came to call, into the hospital through an employees' entrance at the back of the building. Their wet shoes squeaked as they walked down a long, polished hallway to the stairs leading down into the bowels of the facility. At the foot of the steps, was a set of steel doors leading into the hospital's morgue where he had stopped to check his cell phone to be sure that the battery power level and signal indicator were still strong. His hands were shaking so badly that it was impossible to read them.

He had stuffed the phone into his jacket pocket, taken a deep breath and gone in; denying to himself that the body inside was his wife's. He only hoped that Carol was alive and that she would call any minute now, tell him she was home from her karate class and to send the Park City police officer babysitting their two children home to his own wife and kids before the weather got any worse.

An older woman holding several sheets of legal forms had met them at the doorway and Maxine introduced her as Nora Elverson, one of the hospital's administrative people who took care of transplant matters. The man standing next to her, Dr. John Colby, wore a nametag to that effect and introduced himself.

Formalities aside, Philip's window of hope had slammed shut and the shades had been pulled down. Tears welled up in his eyes as he identified Carol. He fell to his knees, his face sickened at the sight of her body lying in a huge stainless steel tub in that subterranean enclave.

"I'm very sorry," Dr. Colby said, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder and guiding him away from Carol's body.

"Would you please sign these authorization forms for us, Mr. Martin?" Dr. Colby asked, pointing to the documents that Nora Elverson had laid out on a nearby table. "We need them approved before we can legally start any harvesting procedures."

Philip's hand shook as he signed the papers by the red X's that were barely visible through his tears, not wanting to read them. Carol was dead. Nothing he could do now would bring her back. He walked over to Carol's side, leaned over and kissed her cold lips. Gently, he closed her eyelids. They eased open again, her blue eyes sparkling in the reflection of the overhead lights, staring at him, refusing to say good-bye.

Philip Martin would not stay for the harvest and a taxi was waiting when Maxine escorted him out of the hospital. Warm tears streamed down his face, making a slight mist of steam in the sub-zero night air. He stumbled into the black vinyl confines of the cab while Maxine gave the driver his address along with a piece of paper detailing the hospital's billing instructions.

The taxi's tires spun on the icy pavement and the bright yellow vehicle fishtailed into the night, leaving a tracer of frozen exhaust fumes to guide the dark spirits to the harvest while Philip Martin sat in a crumpled heap in the back, weeping and trying to erase the night's events from his mind.

Earlier that night, he had pushed himself off of the couch facing the fireplace to stir a few fading embers and was groggy from cat-napping. His lanky body had wedged itself into a soft cradle in the cushions that was almost too comfortable to escape from. A strong northwest wind, an Alberta Clipper, as the Friday night news at ten that he had awakened to was calling it, was going to plummet daytime temperatures to sub-zero levels and keep them there well into the rest of next week. Wind chills would hit seventy below.

The weather front was sharing headlines on the news with an up-dated story about the foiled burglary and attack on toy heiress Robyn Joseph-Cosgrove at her estate in Stone Harbor, an exclusive suburban area a dozen miles west of Minneapolis.

According to the news lady, the prognosis for Mrs. Cosgrove's recovery was bleak and charges against the unknown assailant looked as if they would soon be changed to include murder. He had been more interested in the worsening weather than a dying heiress; his wife was out driving around in it and she should have been home an hour ago.

The news lady turned things over to the weatherman who went on to explain that icy winds, being pushed by arctic air tumbling down through Northern Canada, were hitting head-on with a warm front whistling northward from the Gulf of Mexico. The foul weather caused by the collision of these two air masses would pummel the Twin Cities with another foot of snow.

Red sparks flew up when he stabbed a large poker into the charred remains of the logs smoking lazily on the grate. It was pointed, with a wicked-looking hook near the tip; a miniature version of a tool that loggers used to snag fallen trees from rivers and divert them into a sawmill run for processing. Carol had bought it at an antique store as a house-warming present and given it to him on the first cold night after moving into their house. The gift had been accompanied by a bottle of chilled champagne and a night of loving in front of a roaring fire that he'd never forget. Their youngest child was born nine months later.

Memories had swirled through his sleepy mind, rekindled by the fire's radiant heat. One of the reasons they had bought this particular home was because of its brick fireplace that took up nearly a third of one wall. The masonry work was pure craftsmanship as was the hand-carved ash mantle.

Carol found the fires romantic. Their six year old son, Jason, would sit very still in front of the fireplace, entranced by the crackling yellow, red and blue flames sparking like Fourth of July fireworks from the seasoned oak and birch logs. He would often let him toss in a few cedar twigs to give off a woodsy aroma and add snap to the pyrotechnics. Jill was two years younger than Jason and loved to cozy up as close to the hearth as her parents allowed and absorb its heat beside the family's cat, a monstrous black female that had followed them home from Woodbine Park across the street two days after they had moved in. None of the neighbors claimed the thing and it refused to leave.

He had thought about throwing in another log, but decided against it and walked over to the front bay window. The weatherman was right. Things had worsened considerably since Carol had left home earlier that evening. The thought that she might have stopped at the grocery store crossed his mind, easing some of his anxiety about her tardiness.

She had met him at the back door when he came home from work and he recalled her assuring him as she was leaving that everything would be alright.

"I'll be just fine. I've been driving a car around in this crap since I moved to Minnesota ten years ago," she had said with confidence.

"Yeah, I know. And starting at the age of eleven, your grandfather let you drive his pickup truck around the farm in Indiana while he tossed hay bales off the back to the cows," he had countered with a smile that had disguised his concern.

"Twelve," she corrected him, slinging her purse and gym bag straps over her shoulder. "Besides, I don't want to miss this karate class. It's my last chance to review everything before I take my black belt test next week."

"Maybe we could play with the kids for a while, and after we put them to bed, we could go upstairs and you could bounce me around."

"We'll have plenty of time for that later," she had said, stroking her free hand softly across his crotch and then reaching up quickly to pluck away his car keys.

"You play with the kids. Use your imagination for dinner. I'm out of here, bye."

She had given him a quick brush of a kiss on the lips and he had watched her walk quickly toward the garage lugging her bag full of full-contact karate gear. It always amazed him to see her go from the small, size two gi to approximately the stature of the Michelin Tire Man when she put on the padding required by the sport - foam helmet, combination chest and belly pad, foot pads, shin pads, knee pads, elbow pad, forearm pads, hand pads. Add in the mouth guard and she went from one hundred-fifteen pounds to about one-forty in his mind.

He realized that she had been cooped up in the house with the kids all week and probably needed a break, not to mention some adult companionship. This was not an area that he had been much of a contributor in as he had been bringing work home every night for the last month from Computer Specialty Systems for a project that dead-lined that morning. His evening routine had been to eat a quick dinner and go to his office nestled in a far corner of the basement. It was usually after midnight when he slipped into bed with Carol and went to sleep before his head bounced twice on the pillow.

That evening, he had come into the house as usual through the back door from the garage abutting the alley. Snow had already begun falling heavily on the drive home from work and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees in the twenty minute time span between leaving his office downtown and getting home. Spending time with Carol and his children was foremost on his mind now that the latest systems security analysis had been completed for one of his company's biggest clients.

There were few homes with attached garages in that area of Park City. Woodbine Avenue was lined with starter homes built in the early fifties. They were affordable homes, built en masse for families having children after the war. Most were single or one and one half stories tall with two or three small bedrooms, a decent sized kitchen, dining room, living room and a lone bathroom. Some of the homes had distinguishing features to belie their cookie-cutter architectural design such as a bay window in the living room facing the street or gabled dormers expanding the usable space of the top half-floor. Twenty years before they had moved in, the neighborhood had been a feasting ground for aluminum siding and window salesmen.

Jason was two when they had bought the house from an elderly widower whose wife had passed away the year before. Kindergarten classes at the nearby grade school were filled to capacity and the large park across the street was always crowded with kids on nice summer days.

"The wallpaper goes first," Carol had told him the day they learned their purchase offer had been accepted. He had agreed to that and some further cosmetic work on the house that included new carpet and more painting than he had anticipated. His work load had not allowed him to get around to retiling the bathroom.

Soon after Carol had left for her karate class, he fed Jason and Jill leftovers from last night's spaghetti dinner along with a fresh salad he concocted with lettuce and coarsely chopped raw vegetables. It was topped off with Thousand Island dressing that he whipped up with mayonnaise, ketchup and sweet pickle relish with a dash of chili powder for color and mild zip.

"McGhetti and McSalad," he had described the fare to the children.

"McLeftovers, dad," Jason responded, screwing up his face in a fake grimace.

Jill held her nose and stuffed a handful of spaghetti into her mouth, still eschewing the regular use of table utensils, especially when her mother wasn't around to work on her table manners.

He had put Jason and Jill to bed an hour later than normal after letting them stay up to watch a cartoon special on the big screen television in the living room. Once they were settled down, he had eaten the cold remains of the pasta from the microwavable container and the salad directly out of the wooden bowl so that he wouldn't have to wash an extra set of dishes. Getting Carol a dishwasher was next on his list of major expenditures. Christmas had eaten up his last bonus check and the next one was due soon, but the end of March was still a long way off.

Returning to the couch, he had plopped down and put his bare feet up on the coffee table and began channel surfing with the remote, finally settling on more storm coverage with the weatherman on channel seven before he dozed off again. The sound of thumping doors from a car that had pulled up to the curb in front of the house awakened him and he looked up at the softly ticking clock on the mantle. His neck hurt from the position he had been slouching in and it was well past eleven.

The door bell rang and he wondered if Carol had lost her keys again and had to use the key hidden behind the license plate to get the car home. He could also envision her arms full of groceries, and given the bad weather, not wanting to put the car into the garage until she had brought all of the bags in from the front as opposed to coming in through the longer distance from the back yard. The thought that she might have some ice cream or other late night snack brightened his spirits. He was hungry after his nap.

Crossing a short distance to the small foyer, he unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open. A gray-haired man accompanied by a young woman stood in the porch light.

"Philip Martin?" the man had asked.

A green scarf wrapped loosely around the man's neck flapped at his face in the gusting wind.

He had nodded his head affirmatively; silent, sensing that something was wrong. At this hour, these were not Jehovah's Witnesses out for a late night conversion.

"Is Carol Martin your wife?"

"Yes, why do you ask?" he answered, suspiciously closing the door a little and became acutely aware of the sub-zero draft and snow blowing over his bare feet. The chill had run up his legs, through his spine and clutched at his neck.

"I Sergeant Krause, Park City Police Department," the man stated, showing him his badge.

The shield was inside a black, well-worn leather wallet that he had held out at arm's length, too close to his face for him to read clearly without his glasses. The sergeant's voice sounded official, practiced at defining his authority from experience.

"Is there something wrong?" he had asked in a hesitant voice, and his bowels went hollow as they constricted inside him.

Sergeant Krause looked directly into his eyes. The scarf made sharp snapping noises in the wind and the policeman's voice was flat and unemotional as he raised his hands slightly in an open, shrugging gesture of pity.

"There's been an accident. Your wife was killed."

"Oh, my god," he had gasped and turned away, staggering to the couch with pain consuming his entire body.

"Are you sure?" he asked in disbelief as the pair had followed him uninvited into the living room.

"Yes," Sergeant Krause answered, this time looking over the top of his bowed head in an apparent effort to avoid eye contact and to keep his voice from choking on the horrific news that he was delivering. "The car is registered to you and the address on her driver's license matches this address. I'm sorry, but you'll have to give us positive identification at the hospital."

Disbelief and emotion had crackled in his voice as he dropped his hands away from his pallid face and gaped at the policeman in a daze.

"How did it happen?" he had stammered, not that it mattered to him now. Why did it happen? Did it really happen? Those were the questions he had wanted answered. It was unimaginably cruel news for this to be a prank.

"Apparently, the car spun out of control and hit a tree when she tried to pass a truck on Highway 7 near the Lake Street intersection," Sergeant Krause told him, again looking over the top of his head.

"As near as we can tell, she died on impact," the young woman standing at the sergeant's side had interjected.

Grief stabbed into his skull, numbing his lips and sense of hearing. He could no longer listen to what the man and woman had to say; the news they had brought in with the frigid night air was too horrible. He was paralyzed and sat frozen to the couch, head down, hands tightly covering his ears to keep his throbbing agony from leaking out through the orifices.

"My name is Maxine O'Donnell," the woman said, interrupting his anguish. "The reason I'm here with Sergeant Krause is that I have something to ask of you."

He had stared up at her with his mouth hanging open and his hands still clasped over his ears.

"What is it?" he moaned. He didn't want to hear any more. His life was being sucked up through the chimney along with the pale smoke from the embers to be crystallized and shattered by the icy winds howling outside with the spirits of the dead. Devastation was the only thing left inside him; cold ashes lining the bottom of the fire chamber that he had been staring into.

Maxine O'Donnell walked over to the hearth and had stood in his line of sight.

"I realize your feelings at a time like this, Mr. Martin, but we have a patient with severe brain damage who is dying. We need your permission to use a very small portion of your wife's brain for a transplant to replace a section of traumatized tissue," she had said, holding up her right hand and displaying a space about the size of a golf ball between her thumb and forefinger.

His gaze had burned into Maxine's face.

"Who is we?" he snapped.

Mist rose up in front of his scalding eyes glazing over with tears as his emotions boiled. Grief and pain seared his entire being and he had lashed out, teetering on the edge of hysteria.

"Who the hell are you, Mrs. Igor looking for body parts for Dr. Frankenstein?"

"I'm sorry," Maxine had responded with a look of pity.

There had been genuine sympathy in her voice, but she was not backing off. He could tell that she was on a mission and it was not that of chauffer for a plainclothes policeman on a miserable, freezing night.

"I'm a neurological surgeon's assistant. I work for Dr. John Colby at University Hospital. He is the one who developed most of the new techniques used in this type of procedure. Your wife had an organ donor's card; if we needed any other of her organs, I wouldn't need to be here now.

"Most organs are mechanical type things such as pumps and filters. Brain tissue is another story, and has not been classified as a standard transplant item like a heart, kidney or liver. This is complicated by the fact that many people believe the brain is where the soul or essence of the human species resides. I know that this is an unusual request, but we have a chance to save another life. Please help us."

He remembered getting the cards, having them witnessed in two places by family members and mailing them to the state. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but having the marker called in on Carol now was harsh reality at its worst.

"Who would receive the transplant?" he had asked, shivering uncontrollably.

"Sorry, please understand I can't release that information," Maxine had told him. "But I will tell you that our patient won't live much longer if something isn't done now."

"I'd like some time to think about it."

Maxine had pressed him, emphasizing the urgency of time.

"There will be no disfigurement of your wife's body, Mr. Martin. I need an answer now, before there is any further deterioration in her brain cells."

He had rubbed his hands over his eyes, feeling pain and grief so intense that his ears were ringing.

"OK," he heard himself say over the internal cacophony. "Take what you need."

He had looked away and said nothing more. His anger had passed, leaving only massive amounts of sorrow in its wake. He broke into wracking sobs.

Maxine moved away from the fireplace and stood next to him, putting her hand gently on his shoulder.

"Thank you, Mr. Martin. Could you please come to the hospital with me now? We need a positive identification and some forms need to be signed before we can get started."

"My children are asleep," he had answered with a weak gesture toward their bedrooms on the other side of the wall behind the couch.

A faint hope had glimmered in the back of his mind that the body they wanted him to identify might not be Carol's after all. Maybe some woman had stolen her purse and hijacked the car, wrecked it, and gotten herself killed in the process. Serve her right, he had thought, holding on to this surge of anger that would give him the strength to get to the hospital

"It shouldn't take too long. Sergeant Krause can stay here with your children until you get back," Maxine said.

He had frowned at the man and focused his doubts on the longish gray hair in disarray atop his large head.

The sergeant had glanced back at him and said, "Don't worry, I had six kids and am a grandfather ten times over. The youngest is two and I take care of them a lot."

"May I use your telephone and call Dr. Colby while you get ready to go?" Maxine asked, politely implying that this was an acceptable option as far as she was concerned and that he should get moving.

"It's on the wall in the kitchen," he had told her and pointed toward its location as he unsteadily got to his feet. He was a zombie; unthinking, numb to his bones, not feeling the tears streaming down his face.

"Who did you say would be doing the transplant?" he had asked while Maxine drove toward University Hospital. She was not going by the shorter route that he normally would have taken, but he had said nothing. It was clear to him that she was avoiding the Highway 7 and Lake Street intersection she would have to cross in order to get around the lakes at the southwest corner Minneapolis.

"Dr. John Colby, the chief neurologist," Maxine told him as her four wheel drive Yukon turned off northbound 100 onto I94 east and she shifted back into fifth gear.

He had listened with detachment as Maxine continued her dissertation.

"Dr. Colby is one of the premier neurosurgeons in the country. Brain tissue transplants are relatively new and they used to be almost impossible until he developed the techniques for reconnection nerve endings in adult brain matter and making them grow. It worked to some degree, but most research in the United States stopped when a ban was placed on using the brain tissue from stem cells that was obtained from aborted fetuses, the main source of material. I think we'd be light years ahead of where we are now in this area if the research had not been curtailed."

He remembered the matter-of-fact way that Carol's obstetrician had offered to terminate her pregnancy with Jason if she had felt that it would disturb their plans. They had one more year of college left before they would graduate and decided to get their degrees as Mr. and Mrs. Philip Martin. The flashback put a knot into his throat to match the one in his belly and caused him to wince. How was he going to tell Jason and Jill that their mother was dead?

"Should I go on, or am I boring you?" she had asked.

"No, I mean yes, I'm interested. Please tell me more about Dr. Colby's work," he had answered.

"Well, the brain is a relatively tolerant organ and rejection is not a severe problem like it is with hearts, lungs and...," Maxine continued, her soft voice fading in and out as his thoughts wandered back to last summer and their first camping trip with Jill, hiking up and down the trails along the Kettle River in Banning State Park. Now, missing one family member, their lives would never be the same.

After what seemed to have been an eternity, Maxine's SUV pulled into one of the hospital's parking lots and stopped in front of a sign reading RESERVED PARKING ONLY - MS. O'DONNELL, P.A.

"We're here," she had said quietly.

Chapter 2

Things just didn't seem to matter anymore and Robyn Cosgrove wanted to die. Her rationale for this conclusion was rooted in simplicity - life had not turned out to be perfect, money was not buying happiness, her father was buried six miles down the road and her marriage of three years was headed for divorce court.

There was no one she could turn to for help. She was an only child, born of parents who were only children themselves. Her mother had died giving life to her and Robyn really wished that no one had ever told her that. It made her feel that it was her fault. Better she had been told that her mother had been eaten by lions while on an adventurous safari in the Serengeti. It would have been a proud and respectful way to die; certainly no more grotesque and painful than the vision she held of her mother lying spread-eagle on the birthing table, screaming in agony and gushing blood faster than the medicos could pump it in.

Nightmares at rest, she had awakened early that morning on the first of November. The beginning phase of the Hunter's Moon had hung in the sky most of the night and she had watched it creep from east to west from the bedroom windows between brief periods of fitful dozing. It was hovering a few degrees above the western horizon, turning pink in the light of the rising sun when she could no longer bear to lie in bed and got up and went to the undraped window. The sky was already deep blue and the evergreens surrounding the house glowed deep green in the flat, early morning light. Robyn thought that if she had any artistic talent whatsoever, this would be the time of day that she would like to be painting. Unfortunately, as close as she could come to artistic expression was doing things like choosing the color for her new Cadillac to match the shade of the sun-basking evergreens or hiring a pricey decorator to pick out furniture and fabrics.

Wind rattled the desiccated leaves stubbornly clinging to the multitude of maple, elm and oak trees strategically placed around the estate grounds to maximize shade during the summer and let in the sunlight through their bare branches in the winter. Lake Minnetonka frothed heavily as the wind blew the spray off the white-capping waves in the large bay beyond the beach area where she had played and swam as a child. Posts and dock sections were neatly stacked next to the boathouse, a sign that Minnetonka would begin to freeze over in a few weeks. By January, shantytowns of ice fishing houses would litter the view until the last day of February when the law required them to be removed.

"Not a bad looking day for your last one on earth," she said aloud, turning away from the window and heading to the kitchen bare-assed naked to make some coffee. Living alone without proximate neighbors had a few advantages that she took advantage of.

Her plan for the day was almost complete in her mind; shop, pick up her prescription for sleeping pills along with a bottle of good wine - red - none of that sissy pink stuff, be home by late evening, ingest no food to ruin the effects of the drugs and alcohol, and be peacefully dead by morning. It was to be a little selfish enjoyment first, then lights out; forever.

Robyn had rationalized the suicide calmly. It was not a case of good-bye cruel world, it was just good-bye. No hard feelings. No one would be agonized by her passing. She had no family, no close friends to be left bereaved, no one to find comfort with, no one to love, and no one to love her back. She would die silently and painlessly; even turn the heat way down so that the cleaning lady would find her cooled corpse lying on the pink designer sheets a week from today and not have to deal with the stinking, rotting mess you get with dead things and heat. The pajamas that she planned to wear would have a note pinned to them requesting a simple cremation without ceremony and instructions to toss the ashes in the trash.

The disposition of her estate had been taken care of yesterday by a few major changes to her will, and the end of her scheduled day did not go as planned. Having to leave a message with the garage door repair company was only a minor irritation, not a mood breaker, not any more than the power going out in the house as she hung up the telephone to investigate a noise in the library.

Chapter 3

He had felt the man's grief radiating in through his touch when he guided him away from the corpse and it had accentuated the gravity of the pending harvest. Harvest; the word used to describe the taking of vital organs from the dead for transplants to the living. The Grim Reaper had already taken a life; it would soon be time to gather up what was left. Gleaning, Dr. Colby believed, would probably be a more appropriate term for the procedure.

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