The Others by Sarah Blau (e reader for manga txt) 📕

burst into wild laughter. The medical staff tonight all sounds like a bunch of nosy aunts at the Passover table. I’m still laughing when he fits me with the grey lead apron.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, no tot, no tot.

“Rest assured, we’ll check the hospital records,” Shorty says, scribbling something in her notepad.

“I’d expect nothing else,” I reply.

“So, what did they tell you in the ER about your nose?” Again, that hint of a smile.

“It isn’t broken,” I say, and suddenly I’m sorry it didn’t shatter and land me in a comfy hospital bed for two months.

“And at what time did you get home?”

“I don’t know, it was already very late.”

“Ronit was murdered very late!” Froggy stirs awake. “And the pathologist thinks that—”

“Saul!” Shorty shouts, and it’s enough to shut him up.

So his name is Saul. Interesting – Saul and the Witch of Endor meet again, only this time I’m afraid it’s Saul who has all the information here, not the Witch. Use your famous intuition, come on, try to focus: do they actually think you’re a suspect or are they just fishing?

I try to pick up their energy, sense their intentions, but I can’t.

“You really think I killed her?” I have no idea how I let that question come out of my mouth, again!, but I can’t stop. “You honestly think I went to her house, stripped her, tied her to a chair naked, drained her blood and glued a doll to her hands? You really think I did that?”

Finally, I come to screeching halt, hoping Froggy won’t ask me again how I know all that, and judging by the icy glare Shorty shoots him, it seems she’s hoping for the same thing.

“Look,” she says, “people reported tension between you two.”

Big surprise. Ronit dragged my plus one to her bedroom, so, yeah, that could definitely cause what you’d call “tension.” But you should have expected it, Lilith will be Lilith.

“What people?” I ask.

“People.”

“So why aren’t you questioning them, if they were so eager to give a report?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll question everyone,” she says, “your boyfriend as well.”

For one insane moment it seems she’s referring to the palpably absent Micha, and actually, where have you gone?, but then I realize she’s talking about Eli.

“His story is just as strange as yours,” she states.

“I don’t see what’s strange about my story,” I say, but she offers nothing but a small and highly unpleasant smile, and suddenly she doesn’t seem so short any more. She keeps asking more and more questions from which I gather that they’ve got nothing. Zilch. Nada. Not even a lead to a lead. And when she leaves with Froggy, I realize two things: one, that she didn’t tell me her name, and two, that the smell left in her wake, the fragrance now filling my nostrils, is Blue Lagoon.

Eli is so appalled he can barely speak. He hardly ever comes by, and his presence feels almost eerie.

This time I’m the one serving him a can of Coke and a few cookies (given the hostility wafting from the duo’s direction, I wasn’t about to offer them snacks), but Eli just stares at them.

“They talked to me like I was some kind of criminal,” he says. “Especially her.”

Poor Eli, torn from his peaceful life by two cops at his doorstep. C’est la vie, my friend. He that lieth down with bitches shall rise up with fleas.

“They didn’t believe me when I told them nothing happened between me and Ronit at the party.”

“Nothing? Oh, please,” I snigger, “even I don’t believe you.”

Gone for half a night, locked up in her bedroom, and “nothing”? Who is he trying to fool here? Sure, she wasn’t the twenty-year-old siren she used to be two decades ago, but her song still echoed, luring him into her bedroom like a sailor to a shipwreck.

“I’m telling you nothing happened.”

“Chickened out, huh?”

The fragile male ego bruised, his lips pursed with insult. “Not in the least. I was totally into it,” he says.

“So what happened?”

“I don’t know, we kissed for a while.”

For a moment I picture his hamster teeth bumping against Ronit’s beautiful pearly whites, and try to imagine (and not for the first time) how he kisses. Probably with puddles of saliva, swallowing you with klutzy desperation.

He must have read my mind because he immediately adds, “And it was amazing. Boy, is she a great kisser!”

Irked by his little remark, I retort, “Was a great kisser, you mean.”

That shuts his trap.

We sit side by side in frozen silence, and he seems so miserable and hopeless, like a sick, scolded hamster, you kissed a dead girl, that I take his hand in mine. It’s cold.

“Don’t worry, Eli, everything will be okay,” I say, though I myself seriously doubt it.

“It was so weird,” he says. “We started kissing, and things were heating up, and then she suddenly pushed me off her, collapsed on the bed and burst into tears.”

“Tears? Ronit?”

“It all happened in a matter of seconds, I didn’t understand what was happening, and then she sat up and motioned me to sit next to her on the bed and started kissing me again. She was an excellent kisser.”

The pining tone is getting on my nerves. “And then?”

“Same thing. She pushed me again, and started sobbing like crazy.”

I conjure Ronit’s red-eyed image as she handed me the frozen peas. What I took for compassion towards me and my poor nose must have been residue from her little pity party in the bedroom, but what brought it on? Could it have had anything to do with what happened to her later that night? Was that the reason for her bizarre behaviour with Eli? Did Ronit know she was going to die? And then I remember, after I wished her a happy birthday, that bone-chilling whisper, “It’ll be my last,” and that mystifying look in her eyes. I wasn’t imagining it. Is that what she meant? My head starts spinning, enough, stop it, Sheila, none of this makes any sense. And the