Here it is.
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Part two: a body in the kitchen
Shannon Morris stood outside her biology teacher’s house, ringing the doorbell. She was scheduled to have lunch and tutor with Professor Lombarre at noon. She walked by her professor’s car and to the door. Even after several minutes, the door remained unanswered. Shannon became concerned. She went to the kitchen window, which overlooked the sink. As the sight met her eyes, she gave a cry of distress. Her teacher lay on the tiled floor, motionless, a burn scarring the flesh of her right hand. Shannon pulled out her cell phone, and dialed nine-one-one.
“Hello, operator? I have a medical emergency. Not moving. I’m looking in through a window, the woman was unresponsive to the doorbell. Yes, she’s unconscious. I can’t tell if she’s breathing or not. I have no idea. She has a burn on her hand. Severe, fourth degree, I’d say. 1985 Araon Street, Weston. Yes, please hurry!” the young woman stuttered breathlessly. In minutes, the paramedics arrived, and went to work. They popped the sliding door off track and rolled in the equipment.
“Breathing weak! Pulse weak!”
“ Get her on oxygen”.
“ Burn on phalanges, metacarpal, carpal. Chem cold pack!”
Within a minute, the professor was on the stretcher and then out in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. It was only after the ambulance had left that the young woman noticed the patrol car parked by the road.
“Hello, I’m officer Osenwald,” the man said as he showed his badge. “I’m here to respond to the nine-one-one call that you gave. I understand that it was a medical emergency, but all the same, the department requires a criminal investigation to determine whether or not foul play was a factor. Can you show me the scene?”
Shannon pointed him to the kitchen, and restated her experience. The officer nodded, and began to inspect the scene. He first documented all the locations of objects in the room, or at least the ones in proximity to where the woman fell. He snapped photographs on a digital camera which he considered every bit as useful as his patrol car. He noticed that the spot Shannon had pointed to-where Clavia Lombarre was lying-was located directly in front of the sink. It appeared that she had fallen while standing near or at the sink. When he saw the blender in the sink, he knew at once what had happened. The appliance had fallen into the water, shocking the woman rendering her unconscious. Still, he roped off the area of the kitchen with crime scene tape, just for future reference, if further investigation was necessary.
Part three: from the depths
The next day, Clavia Lombarre had still not responded to the treatment administered by Emergency Room nurses, and was in the Intensive Care Unit of Weston Medical Center. The police had reported their findings and the diagnosis was shock due to high voltage electricity. Clavia was alive, but in a coma. She breathed with assistance due to two plummets in her oxygen level during the first few hours of her stay. The burn on her right hand and wrist was severe, and appeared to have been caused by a voltage much greater than the hundred volts used to run an appliance. But what in a kitchen had higher voltage than a wall socket? No one could answer that.
Her students had been instructed to care for the electric eels that she researched. Since it was a relatively easy job, they simply went in once a day, dumped food into the tanks and left. Tuesday, two days after Clavia’s initial collapse, Officer Osenwald visited the house to again review the evidences that were still present on the scene.
He looked again at the sink, and then at his clipboard with the evidence report, he realized that the drain in the sink had been unpluged. The paramedics wouldn’t have undone the drain, and the detectives that reported to the site as assistance were trained specifically not to erase evidence. Who had done it? Both doors to the kitchen had been padlocked. There was simply no way anyone would’ve accessed the kitchen after the police had set up the perimeter. And no one would’ve done that between the woman collapsing and the arrival of the authorities. So who was it?
It had to have been Clavia Lombarre. The next day, he reported to the station, and showing his detective’s identification badge, he went into the evidence room. The blender in the plastic bag had remained untouched, no one finding any reason to so much as look at it. Now, with latex gloves, Officer Osenwald opened the bag and took out the blender’s base. If he could get this to the forensics department, they’d have a field day. “A blender. Really?” his friend, James, an expert in the genetics section would say, his eyes rolling incredulously behind his protection goggles.
That was precisely what happened. “A blender. You can’t be serious.” James was always one to be blunt. Frank Osenwald knew that, but it stung just the same.
“Well, if it isn’t Detective Osenwald.” Helen, James’s co-worker in the electronics department commented as she stepped up to the table where they sat conversing.
“What is it? You know I am trained in electronics. I’d be glad to investigate this.” She pulled up a chair beside Frank.
“Brilliant,” was the only thing Officer Osenwald could say to that. He was confident that an extensive examination of the appliance would tell the tale of the college professor’s injury.
Yet he did not know where the lead would end.
Part two: Through the Mixture
That evening, when he was eating dinner, the phone rang. It was Helen, at the lab. “Frank, I tested the blender, looking for particles and water molecules, whatnot, like what would be in dishwater, and there is nothing. Nothing, at all.”
“What? There have to be particles of water in the blender, otherwise, where’d the shock come from?” Officer Osenwald asked.
“Frank, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but the results were quite clear. There was no dishwater residue in the electronic components of the blender.”
“ A woman collapsed, sometime last week, and a visitor saw her through the window. The paramedics came, got her. She was unconscious, with a severe burn on her right hand. She fell directly behind the sink. The woman’s been in a coma since then, so far as I know. And that’s the only theory that is at all supported by evidence. Shock to the system indicates, as well as the burns, that it was due to high voltage, at least from what I’ve heard.”
“I’m sorry to ruin your lead, but now you know the truth,” the woman encouraged him.
“Yes, thankyou for testing it for me. Goodbye.”
Part five: unbidden visitors
Janice Taylor, Clavia’s nextdoor neighbor, visited her at five o’clock, bringing along her eight year old son Harker. Janice stood over the hospital bed, seeing the numerous tubes of fluids and various sorts of medications that were inserted in a PIC line in Clavia’s arm.
Her skin was pale and yellowish, her hair lay limp and tangled on the pillow. Everything smelled of antiseptic, and the world was composed of sterile white. Heart and oxygen monitors beeped and flashed, but the unconscious professor sensed none of it.
She was somewhere else, decided the eight year old Harker, maybe inside her mind; maybe Heaven, but definitely not in the room, where her body was. He stared at his neighbor, perturbed by these wonderings.
“But mommy,” he said, “What happened to Ms. Lombarre?”
“She doesn’t hurt any, it’s like she’s asleep, in a coma. But we don’t know how to wake her up. She..went to sleep when her blender fell in the sink and shocked her. That’s why I always tell you to be very careful with electricity.”
“Oh,” he began, but was cut off by the shrill alarm an oxygen monitor emitted. A nurse rushed in and flushed out the visitors, telling them to visit again later.
