“You cared for us almost as much as you cared for Buck.”
“Just family doing their job.”
Jack released his embrace but Anaea held on for a few extra seconds.
“Get off me, MILF. I love you but I’ve got a boyfriend to go special hug.”
“I can’t believe you told my daughter about sex.”
They laughed.
“See you at four, Jack.”
“See you, budget Ronda Rousey.”
She raised her right knee dangerously close to his groin, causing him to deflect it with his hands.
“You’re learning,” she said with a smile.
II: The Green Treatment
In daylight, the infinity pool deck of the Coal Ridge Immortuary had a breathtaking view of the island’s rugged and mostly undeveloped east coast. In the early morning, however, darkness extended from the somber lights of the immortuary over the dense tropical forest and rocky promontories jutting up through the rough Atlantic Ocean to the stars and full moon above. Now that it was approaching six, the sky brightened considerably, and the sounds of animal life grew louder.
“I’m still surprised work gave you time off,” Jack whispered to Anaea.
“My grandfather was murdered and he’s about to be resurrected. Work didn’t have much choice. And I think that’s my cue,” she replied while adjusting the flowing white robe she wore for the ceremony then walked to the water’s edge.
Jack, Vanessa, and representatives from the hospital, police, and prosecutor’s office sat in wicker chairs at mahogany tables arranged in an arc around the large circular pool’s near edge. Rising ceremonies were all essentially the same, varying only in the amount of money you wanted to invest to make sure they actually worked. Most were lavishly catered affairs like this one with incense, exotic sweets, expensive alcohols, and cooked meats in abundance to entice the recently released spirit temporarily back to its former carcass prison. There was no need for this extravagance, though. The centuries-old original way with participants smoking tobacco while eating raw sugar, drinking cheap rum, and slaughtering livestock worked just as well sometimes if the spirit was truly eager to return. And the spirit had to be willing. There were reports of souls being dragged back to their corpses and trapped there, but immorticians denounced such tales as malicious rumours.
Two attendants in black wetsuits helped immortician Yewande Ayodele bring the white shroud-covered body of Buchanan Robinson through the small crowd and down a ramp into the pool. Ayodele, a middle aged, thin woman with light brown skin, wore a top hat and a well-tailored tuxedo into the pool where Anaea joined her. The mistress of ceremonies’ watch vibrated with her two minutes to sunrise warning, and the attendants left her and Anaea holding Buchanan’s body in the water.
“The souls of the departed can always hear us but today, All Hallows’ Eve, when the walls between the living and the dead become fluid,” immortician Ayodele pronounced, “we can also hear them. There are many words that can be said to the dead, and none will move them except words from those they loved.”
Anaea leaned down and whispered in her dead grandfather’s ear, “Come back to us, Papa Buck. Just for a little while. Please.”
As dawn threatened, the two women submerged and surfaced his body once, then again. On the third submersion, immortician Ayodele let go of the body, leaving Anaea alone holding him. As the sun broke over the Atlantic with a green flash at 5:52 AM, Anaea saw a similar tongue of green fire appear on Buchanan’s head underwater, then his eyes and mouth opened to show verdant energies burning within. Steam rose and the infinity pool’s water bubbled and roiled as Anaea raised Buchanan’s head and shoulders into the light of a new day. The young man in her arms who had seconds before been a supercentenarian shouted his last words first, “Keep that damned needle away from me!”
“Papa Buck! What does that mean, Uncle Jack?” Vanessa asked.
Jack remembered his distant Sunday school lessons, furiously made the sign of the cross, and mumbled, “He’s had too much wine.”
III: Harlem Smoke
“How did he die?”
Seated in the living room, detective Bosch cleared her throat before answering Anaea’s question.
“We found Herb Easterman dead in his cell two hours after your grandfather identified him as the nurse who caused his fatal cardiac event. You know Easterman confessed to using an ajmaline and lidocaine cocktail.”
“How did he die?”
“Easterman had brain hemorrhaging, bits of his glasses embedded in three skull fractures, a shattered eye socket, multiple cracked ribs, a punctured lung, ruptured spleen, bruised kidneys, and a broken collarbone.”
“Someone beat the shit out of him.”
“Someone beat the life out of him. He looks like he went ten rounds with Mike Tyson but the irony is the coroner thinks Easterman died of cardiac arrhythmia.”
“And Buck used to be a boxer.”
“Yes, a world champion nicknamed the Harlem Smoke, and you’re one of this island’s best amateur mixed martial artists.”
“We went with you to the hospital and the police station after the ceremony, then you made sure we got back here safely.”
“Can anyone vouch for you after I left?”
“It was just me, Buck, Jack, and Vanessa here for hours. Buck’s been following the immortician’s orders: meditating and contemplating and all that.”
“I’ve heard of risings where paraplegics come back able to walk again, Ms. Robinson. No one has ever heard of one where the dead returned a century younger.”
“Immortician Ayodele is just as shocked as the rest of us, detective, and she’s researching it right now. If she can look up the esoteric stuff, why can’t you just look at video to see who killed that pale bastard?”
“Our cameras in that part of central station haven’t worked in weeks. We’re fully staffed so security hasn’t been a problem… until now.”
“The regular police beatings were fine but this one got out of hand? The thirty six murders Easterman confessed to were too many?”
“Stop that ‘arrest and molest’ foolishness. We don’t abuse our prisoners, Ms. Robinson,” detective Bosch said sternly, “despite what people may think. Look, we have no idea how someone could have gotten into the station, slipped past a dozen officers, beat the nurse to death, then escaped without anyone seeing or hearing anything.”
“Sounds like you’re here trying to find a way to blame this on anyone but fellow officers,” Anaea said as she got up and opened to the front door. “If you have any more questions or accusations, we can speak in the presence of the most expensive lawyer the hospital’s blood money can summon. Until then, please leave.”
The unmarked police car backed out of the driveway, and Anaea watched it disappear down the palm tree-lined avenue. Plastic skeletons and papier-mâché gravestones decorated the house across the street, a sign of the more Americanized tastes of her upper middle class area. The neighbourhood children would be trick or treating in a few hours so Anaea had a jack o’lantern bucket filled with candy by the front door to be neighbourly even though she wouldn’t allow Vanessa to go door to door begging almost strangers for confectionery. She unwrapped and munched on a mini-Uranus bar as she walked to the backyard gym. Some local priests decried anything to do with Halloween as pagan but most people simply saw it as another opportunity to get drunk and dress up provocatively.