Chapter 2

Twenty years later...

Sitting at the outdoor café, Lilyana Jessalyn Johansen looked at her phone for the twentieth time in half an hour, wondering if Marlana flaked out and stood her up again for the guy she met online and claimed her crystal runes said was her soul mate. Sunday Brunch was their time, and she hoped Marlana didn't bring Erik with a 'k' with her. Her new InstaChat boyfriend seemed arrogant and annoying.

"Can I bring you a menu?" The waiter asked for the third time.

"I told you I was waiting for my friend, and she's not here yet." Huffing at his look, she glanced back toward the owner standing by the Mimosa Fountain in the nearly empty dining room. The man was dressed like an extra from a bad mafia movie. His look was anything but welcoming, as he chewed on a cigar.

Lily stood up, throwing the money for her coffee on the red linen. She spat sarcastically, "Fine, I'll leave. Sorry to wait at one of your tables because you're so crowded this morning... We won't be back. If your boss wants his Sunday Brunch to work, he needs to buy better coffee and not serve food that smells like it belongs to a prison cafeteria." Grumbling about how much she hated Lana's favorite eatery, she stalked out. Reminding herself that no matter how much they offered in the recruiting memo on the jobs board at the college, she would never work here.

Walking out toward her car, she saw her roommate's car in the parking lot. Pivoting, Lily looked for Lana. Gritting her teeth, she headed for the jetty, silently cursing her flaky best friend for her insistence on meditating every time the mood struck. As she walked on the uneven stones toward the spot Lana usually went, the seagulls screamed and squawked around her. Slipping, she grabbed the metal pole that served as a rail, then she hissed profanities as she tried to wipe away the smear of bird droppings on her jeans.

Lily had always hated seagulls. In her opinion, they were nothing but sky rats like pigeons, not that she didn't despise rats too. She hated rats since she was a little girl, though she didn't remember why. However, she hated Great Lakes Herring seagulls the most. Living with her mother's great-aunt on the Wisconsin coast cemented her hatred of all seagulls. Their shrill, crying sounds, their filthy droppings, and their smell; she hated everything about them and being in Florida, hadn't changed that.

It wasn't until she noticed the red painted on their golden beaks that she realized something was wrong. She followed the fluttering of the flock and the cacophony of their bickering to the bloody mess they were haggling over. It was a woman in a lavender sundress. There were ugly purple bruises around her neck where wooden prayer beads should lay. Her face was freckled with the pecks of the scavengers and one of her eyes was already carried off. The screeching seabirds she loathed were scavenging the corpse of her best friend.

"Stop it! Stop it!" she screamed and waved her arms to shoo them away, but they attacked her.

Sobbing, Lily ran back down the jetty, sliding and slamming into the rail. Clinging to the metal pipe, she bent over it and vomited into the spray-splashed rocks. The waves washing away her coffee before she collapsed onto the path. She knew why her roommate missed brunch now. Lana's sparkling, laughing eyes would never smile at her again. As she fainted, Lily realized she found her best friend murdered, and she couldn't even stay awake to call the police.

<<@>>

Sitting on Marlana's bed in their dorm, Lily stared at pictures of them on a board. Criss-crossed ribbons held the images of best friends in place. There was a knock at the door and Lily put down her gin glass next to the bottle on the desk area they shared.

'Had shared,' Lily reminded herself then she covered her mouth and sobbed.

The knock came again, then a key card swiped and the door unlocked. "Miss Johansen? It's the Dorm Manager, Paul... I have Mrs. Nixon from..." He stopped when he saw her.

A large woman Lily had never met knelt in front of her, "Oh, sweetie." Her sweet accent and gentle tone drew more sobs from Lily's soul as the large dark-skinned woman hugged her. "Paul, call Emily over at the clinic and have her sent over straight away. I don't care if she has a patient. Lilyana, Lily? You need to breathe, sweetie. Slow deep breaths, it's going to be okay."

"He killed her, and the police won't do anything," Lily sobbed out. She held out her phone showing the InstaChat profile of Erik with a 'k'. "He's still online and talking to girls. They didn't even arrest him."

Mrs. Nixon tutted and held Lily. She knew that the young man in question was suspected in a string of assaults and the disappearance of another coed while in Barbados. His father worked for the Netherlands Embassy and was a wealthy shipping magnet. The diplomatic immunity afforded the family an escape from the investigation of the crime.

Lily's watch beeped and she wiped her face, slurring drunkenly, "I have to go to class."

"No, you don't." Mrs. Nixon helped her off the floor and got her a glass of water which Lily gulped as she said, "Our school policy has an allowance for student bereavement in the loss of a roommate. You will be given grades based on the work up to Miss Basnet's death and the school will cover all your counseling for a year should you remain. Do you understand?"

Lily nodded then she got up and woozily walked over to the pictures, putting her forehead on the board. "She was my best friend."

"I know."

"She wanted to be a preschool teacher."

"I know."

"She never hurt anyone or anything ever. She was a Buddhist." Lily wailed the last, "Why? Why her?"

"I don't know," Mrs. Nixon answered then she looked around the room as Paul returned with the counselor from the school clinic. "But I think we need to move you to a new room before Mr. Basnet comes from Tibet to pack her room."

"No!" Lily refused vehemently. "This is our room; I want to stay here." She went over to the statue of Buddha and lit an incense stick with a shaking hand and knelt, drunkenly repeating one of the prayers Marlana said daily.

"May all be free from sorrow... and the causes of sorrow... May all never be separated from the sacred happiness which is sorrowless..." She stopped to weep for a moment before continuing, "And may all live... live in equanimity... without too much attachment and too much aversion... And live believing in the equality of all that lives." Whispering out the last, she bent forward and put her head on her hands before she passed out.

Mrs. Nixon shook her head as Paul reached to snuff the incense stick while he revealed, "She screams in her sleep about the seagulls eating Marlana almost every night, I have had to move everyone around her to other rooms."

The nurse turned counselor, checked Lily's pulse then said, "She is very traumatized from finding her roommate like she did." She looked at Mrs. Nixon. "I will do my best to help her, but this isn't helping her." She picked up the almost-empty gin bottle and waved it toward the other empty bottles in the trash bucket. "I am worried she will become an alcoholic. Does she have any family she can move in with?"

"I don't know. She was raised by her great-aunt in Minnesota, and her emergency contacts are a sister in Washington state and a half-sister who lives in Tampa Bay," Mrs. Nixon revealed. "I'll make some calls."

Emily nodded, adding, "I'll send one of the student nurses to stay with her until someone from her family gets here."

Paul refuted them, "She won't let anyone stay with her. You should put her in a mental ward. She's cracked like a nut."

"Paul, you are neither qualified nor graduated from my counselor program, so unless you want me to put you back a semester, you will never refer to a potential patient or current patient with that phrase again," Emily chastised him. "They... she is a person who has been overcome by a trauma, not a nut.

"Yes, Dr. Klein," Paul answered.

<<@>>

Lillian Jessica Johansen arrived in Tampa and was shocked at the state she found her half-sister Lilyana Jessalyn in. Lily was lying in a bed, the room stank of sweat and vomit, unmasked by the heavy odor of incense.

"You know you could be twins," the Dorm Supervisor said in a casual flirty tone.

"Thanks for letting me in, Paul," Jessica responded, almost rolling her eyes, then she closed the door behind her. She hated what men always implied when they saw the two of them together. Standing over her half-sister, Jessica shook her head then got a wet washcloth and wiped Lily's face.

Groaning, Lily tried to turn her face away from the cold cloth. She blinked as she looked up. "Jess?" Then she rolled on her side and vomited violently as Jess jumped away.

Shaking her head, Jess went to get a towel from the tiny bathroom. "Sis, you gotta pull yourself together. It's been three weeks. You can't stay here."

"I... I won't leave Marlana stuff. Her dad is coming."

"No, he isn't. They sent him her ashes and he said you could have everything. I'm taking you home with me. You have the rest of the semester off and the next one to according to Mrs. Nixon." Jess opened the door and pulled in a stack of moving boxes.

"I don't want to go to Oconto in the winter," Lily whined. She sat up and reached for the gin bottle on the floor, but it was empty.

Jess took the bottle, scolding, "You don't need any more of that, and I wouldn't send you back to that frozen hellhole in November. I love Aunt Evie, but winter on the lakeshore sucks. You're coming to Miami with me. Grandma said you could live with us."

"Us? But I thought your Grandma Ann was in a nursing home."

"She is but Kitty will be here for Christmas and she's going to stay for a while," Jess assured her in a calm tone as she turned the crank on the window to air out the room. "Let's get you down the hall to the showers, then we'll pack. You can't stay here; it isn't good for you."

While Lily showered, Jess packed after propping the door open.

"Lily," a tall woman tapped on the door. "It's good to see you up and around."

Shaking her head, Jess held out her hand. "I'm her half-sister, Lillian Jessica Johansen, call me Jess. Are you Mrs. Nixon?"

"No, I'm Dr. Klein. You and your sister certainly look a lot alike," Dr. Klein looked at her in surprise.

"We all look like our dear dead philandering father, there's eight of us. He was killed by fake wife number five or maybe it was three. They never figured out which one did it or maybe it was all of them." Jess laughed at her shocked look, "It's fine, Aunt Ava was a doctor and made certain we all had plenty of therapy before she passed away."

"Is that when your sister began showing her addictive tendencies and depression?" Dr. Klein asked. "Lily refuses to talk about anything except Marlana's murder."

"Then you don't know," Jess scowled, "Lily started having issues in High School when three of her friend died after a party, they got worse after Aunt Ava's heart attack. She and Kitty had it the worst of all of us. They were physically abused by their mom and allowed to be molested by multiple men before their mom went to prison for murder."

"And your mother was okay after finding out the truth?"

"Oh heck no. I was raised by my grandma after my mom went to jail for a drunk driving double homicide. She ran over a guy who looked like Dad and a woman she didn't know. She and the other moms... they could have been sisters. Ava and Evie, and Carl and Bess, the parents of Lorane who was wife number three found us all after Dad's murder. Dad had a type and that is why we all look the same and he also made certain all us kids had the same initials."

"Will... will Lily have access to counseling in Miami? Where will you be living?"

"Only if the University provides it," Jess admitted. "We are a big, weird family... We are staying in my Grandmother Ann's house with Kitty and our brothers are coming down from Atlanta for Thanksgiving week."

"Well, here is my card. Try to get Lily to call me. She can take a year off without any penalty to her scholarship or class schedule." She turned and smiled brightly at Lily who had a towel wrapped around her hair. "Hello Lily, I stopped to see if you would like to talk today? Paul said we could use the empty room next door."

"I got this, Sis. Go talk to the Doc, and I'll be done when you are," Jess encouraged but Dr. Klein didn't miss the half-sibling's worried look as they went out.