The Funeral Pyre by Bret Jones

The Funeral Pyre by Bret Jones

“What am I looking at?”

“You tell me. That’s why I asked you to come see me.”

“It appears to be the wreckage of something that was set on fire in the middle of this lake.”

“More like a large pond.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

“Let me ask a question.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to do so.”

“Am I looking at a torched bicycle?”

“You are.”

“And a recliner, loveseat, an office desk?”

“Yep. All that and a lot more.”

“Please don’t tell me…”

“Tell you what?”

“Right there in the center of the photo there…”

“Yes?”

“Is that the remains of a body?”

“It sure is.”

“And you called me? For what exactly? Are you into shocking me these days, Carter? I hoped for a free lunch.”

Carter blinked several times before he spoke. “You want to see other angles?”

“To what end? These are obviously crime scene photos. I didn’t know I even had clearance to see these kinds of things.”

“You do now, Bianca,” Carter said with full authority. He could do that as chief detective for the police department.

“You must suspect something that I can give some clarity to, yes?” she asked. A curl of her brown hair fell into her eyes. She swooped it back with her index finger never taking her focus off the picture.

“I have a guess or two, but you’re the expert.”

“I am? I’m all the sudden flattered.”

“I don’t want to say it out loud,” Carter said.

“But you and I are both thinking it,” she shot back. “You want me to open my big fat mouth to either give confirmation or appear to be the loony when you take this up the chain of command around here.”

Carter remained uncommitted.

“Okay, stay tight-lipped. My rep has been kicked around before and it will again,” Bianca said with clipped enunciation on the last few words in her sentence.

“Of that, I’m sure.”

“It’s a funeral pyre.”

Carter sighed out loud long and hard.

“You asked me to commit. I did,” she said. “More fool, you.”

He looked at her and shook his head. “Don’t you want to know where these pics were taken?”

“Don’t need to ask, Detective Perry. And I’m using your official title to make it all legit—”

“Many thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said as she stood up to point a finger on his massive map of the city and surroundings areas. The popped a knuckle on a tiny blob of blue on the map. “Right here. And before you ask, no I didn’t do it. I recognize the foliage around the bank. I’ve fished up in there a few times and recognize this particular body of water mainly from the leaf—”

“You’re pulling my leg,” he said as he joined her at the map.

“Yep. And if you look really close you can see a sign behind the pyre that reads Lake Zebco, which covers about ten acres making it big enough to be called a lake, just FYI,” she shot back with her infamous snarky grin on her face.

“Come with me,” Carter ordered as he opened the door.

“Lunchtime has come and gone, big guy. I have an afternoon class to teach.”

“In what, pray tell?”

“Military History two, or as I call it, the ‘fun years,’” she said. The smile hadn’t left her face. “And before you ask, I’m a little rusty on my Viking, but I can tell you one thing…”

“Just one?” he asked. She playfully tapped him on the shoulder. “Lay it on me.”

“Your funeral pyre crime scene is pure bunk.” The grin vanished from her face. “I mean, sure, they used cremation, but it was on land. There isn’t anything in the historical or archeological record that supports it.”

“You’re hired,” Carter said. He gently grabbed her by the elbow and led her through the outer office filled with officers, detectives, and a few perps waiting to be processed.

“I have class, Carter,” she said begging off.

“Ten minutes, please,” he pleaded. “Come on, Bianca, you can put it on your annual faculty report for the university.”

“I’m not sure how the admin folks at T.U. will react to something like this.”

“In awe. Come on.”

Much longer than ten minutes later, they stood looking at what was left of the funeral pyre, including the torched remains of the corpse.

“Before you ask, male,” Carter said.

She stepped to a table to examine some of the smaller items. The charred remains of a tennis racket, a golf club, and a fishing pole were piled on top of each other. She ran her fingers along the ashes of what used to be a charcoal grill.

“So why do I have it in my mind about the Vikings burning their dead chieftains on a long boat out on a body of water?”

“Hollywood, mainly,” she answered. “But it came from Norse mythology. Balder, his wife, his horse, harness, and a gold arm-ring from Odin were all piled up on a ship and set on fire by Thor.”

“That rascally god of thunder.”

“Not the nicest of Norse gods, just so you know.” She lifted up a lump of metal with a question on her face.

“I think it’s a gas tank to a motorcycle. Whoever did this didn’t pile up everything in the boat, but what he could get his hands on.”

“The boat?”

“A small fishing boat. The killer used gasoline as the accelerant. And the boat either drifted out away from the bank, or the murderer pushed it.”

“And no one saw this?” she asked.

“It’s November, Bianca. Not many folks are at this particular lake, as you like to call it, to go fishing.”

“You’re going to have to do it sooner or later,” he said to her with a tone of finality to it. “It’s not like you to be squeamish all the sudden.”

She trod carefully to the corpse covered with a white plastic sheet. She ran her fingertips along the cool metal of the tabletop where it rested. Lightly, the sniffed the air. An ashy odor filled her nose.

“He thoroughly douses the body with gas?” she asked.

“Look under the sheet and see for yourself,” he dared.

“Fine. Be that way.” She eased the covering off the corpse. The sight of it made her suck in air. “How awful.”

“You said a mouthful,” Carter snorted.

Charred skin and muscle covered the skeleton in a black burnt coating. She saw two gold capped teeth toward the back of the jawbone. The ribs had ashen sinews strung like silly string across them. Bianca fought the gag reflect in the back of her throat.

“What’s the coroner say?” she asked.

“Male, middle-aged, probably around fifty or so, with no melted jewelry, or other identifying—”

“Except for the teeth,” she interrupted.

He nodded in agreement. “That’s right, except for the teeth, which we’re tracking down as we speak.”

She took another look at the remains. “There’s something else. The bones on his left arm and his right leg…” She let the thought trail off as she continued her examination.

“Yes, Madame West, what say you?” he asked. He strode over to her waiting for her to respond. “The clock is ticking.”

She grunted at him. “It appears as if he’s had quite a few breaks, and the bones have healed a bit off from what they should be.”

“Good eye. The coroner thinks he had osteogenesis imperfecta.”

“You’re kidding? Brittle bone disease.”

“Bull’s eye.” He checked his phone. “We’ve got twenty minutes to get you to campus.”

“Oh, shoot, Carter! Well, come on. At least traffic in T-town this time of day won’t be that bad.”

“Living on Tulsa time, girl, you never know. Let’s hit the trail.”

After class and keeping her office hours, Bianca drove the maddening rush hour traffic to her cozy two bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, in Kiefer, just twenty minutes or so out of Tulsa. Naturally, the drive time increased from five to six P.M., which she cursed herself repeatedly for not leaving early from the university. She couldn’t think of anything else other than the murder case Carter brought her.

A friend of her deceased husband, Carter Perry, stepped in after the funeral, got Bianca on her feet again, let her scream and yell and kick the walls at he injustice of it all, and made sure she didn’t fall too far into the abyss. She knew this morsel of a case was Carter’s way of keeping her interest in the land of living and not in her own demise. And since his passing, Bianca contemplated the end of all things many times.

She threw her keys into the ceramic bowl on the credenza near the front door, grabbed a thawed mouse from the fridge, and fed it to her pet ball python, Billy the Kid. Back in the kitchen, she poured a glass of hearty red and sipped away at it. Kicking off her shoes, she flopped on her comfy couch, turned on some trashy T.V., and let her mind drift back to the murder of the poor man on the funeral pyre.

She recalled her reading of Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which dealt with Norse mythology. Written in the early thirteenth century, it is the work that details the death of Balder, or Baldr, who was the son of Odin and the goddess Frigg and described as the “bleeding god.” He is loved by all but is killed by mischief created by Loki. The funeral pyre is piled so high that the gods had to ask assistance from the giants. His death foreshadowed the beginning of Ragnarök, the end of the world.

There it is again, she thought. Ragnarök, the end of all things.

She pressed her fingers to her mouth to stifle the oncoming cry. So deft at it, she knew how to hold back the screams of agony. She could go toe-to-toe with the best of them. But she believed everyone is set in place in this existence to suffer beyond the imaginable. She’d been there, done it, and as they say, didn’t get the T-shirt.

She gulped down the last of the wine. She wiped at a trickle that ran down her chin with the back of her hand. And Carter at the edge of the darkness grabbing at her to bring her back. One day he would reach, and she wouldn’t be there.

Bianca stared at Billy the Kid as he swallowed his meal that would last him for days. She envied the creature in every way, his habitat, his cycle of life, and his comfy glass cage. Like everyone else she knew, she grasped for the things she didn’t have. Never have, most likely.

To finish out the evening of miserable self-pity, she popped a microwaveable lasagna in and set the timer for four minutes, refilled her glass, and prepared to binge several episodes of her latest cheesy fairytale show. At midnight she plopped over on the couch and fell into a deep, disturbed sleep.

“I want to show you something. Get your shower and get dressed while I brew up some coffee,” Carter said. Bianca didn’t have a memory of opening the door to him. “Come on, slow poke, get it together. This is going to blow your mind.”

She mumbled something unintelligible.

“I didn’t catch that, B, get going,” he said as she tried to say something about the early hour of his arrival.

Her words didn’t form recognizable words until they were down the highway in his oversized SUV. The roar of the muffler caused her head to throb. She complained as he shoved the travel mug into her mouth.

“Carter, this is entirely unnecessary, okay?” she pleaded. “I don’t need a constant babysitter checking on me making sure I don’t do something stupid.”

“Can’t here you,” he said as he cranked the classic rock station to a decibel beyond her endurance. “Time for some rockin’. You need to wake up and enjoy the morning.”

Bianca focused all her energy on downing the coffee. She looked at Carter wondering if they would ever really address the pink elephant in the SUV.

“So much death,” she murmured to herself.

“Can’t hear you.”

She waved him off watching the road signs fly by. They exited off the highway and wove through the arteries of streets to Carter’s precinct. Finally awake, Bianca hit the sidewalk with both feet allowing her mind to erase the monsters from her night’s sleep.

He led her back to an area reserved for pieces of evidence for current cases. Her eyes fell on boxes of detritus from people’s lives meant to convict or set them free.

“What do you think?” Carter asked. He held up a ring of gold about two inches wide and bigger than a bracelet.

“What am I even looking at? And why?”

“We had some divers go to the bottom below where the burnt-out boat dropped to see if anything of interest drifted to the bottom.”

“And that’s what they found?” she asked, not hiding her irritation. She sifted through bits of charred lumps, not able to identify any of them. She reached out to touch a bike chain, what looked like was left of a Gameboy, and a Nokia phone. “Come on, Carter. I thought yesterday was just an academic exercise. And here we are again.”

“Are you blind?”

She looked at the remnants spread out on the table. Near the center an item glowed in the fluorescent light that caught her attention. Bianca grabbed a large golden ring and stared at it in awe.

“I know, right?” Carter said. “Tell me what I’m looking at.”

She turned it over in her hand taking in every detail of it. Her eyes never blinked. The smoothness of it fascinated her, as well as the weight, which had some heft to it. She gently tossed it up in the air several times testing it.

“Are you a hundred percent that this was on the boat, Carter?” she asked.

“Yes. It was in the middle of this other junk.”

“Whoever perpetrated this crime went to a lot of trouble here,” she observed.

“Tell me.”

“If we’re assuming that whoever killed your victim was reenacting what he thought was a Viking burial, correct?”

“That’s what you said. I’m trusting your judgment.”

She looked at him. He winked. “Okay. What I’m holding suggests something a lot more specific.”

“What’s that?”
“Draupnir.”

He joined her at the table. “You’ll be happy to know I looked this up.” He grabbed his phone and thumbed through a few windows online. “Let me see here…and I quote: ‘Odin laid upon the pyre the gold ring called Draupnir; this quality attended it.’ Ring bells?”

“Whoever did this was following the story in the Prose Edda,” she said.

“It’s more than that, Bianca.” He grabbed a magnifying glass off a steel cart near the evidence table and handed it to her. “Take a closer look at it.”

She peered through the glass at the armband made of gold. She marveled at the craftmanship of it. The surface had been etched with designs meant to resemble Norse artistry with serpents, bear claws, and Nordic knots.

“Someone spent some time and money on this,” she noted.

“Keep going.”

She spun the ring at a different angle and noticed something on the inner part of it. Placing the magnifying glass closer, she peered not believing her eyes. She grabbed a piece of notebook paper on the table and drew: ᛞᚱᚨᚢᛈᚾᛁᚱ

Carter took the arm ring from her and put it back on the evidence table. “Tell me what that’s supposed to be.”

“I think you’re killer went too far and may have tipped his hand.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m not expert on Old Norse, but if we look that up online, I’ll bet you five to one that it’s the Nordic word for—”

“Draupnir,” he said in his excitement. “It is.” He thumbed through his phone to another website and showed it to her.

“This isn’t just someone who was trying to do what he thought was a Viking funeral, Carter. This someone knew the Prose Edda, the name of Odin’s armband, tracked down the Norse spelling for Draupnir, and left it on the boat to burn up on the funeral pyre.”

“But why?”

She bowed her head pondering that. “There’s a good chance we’re looking at this the wrong way. The armband carefully crafted and put on the boat means premeditation.”

“Exactly.”

“But it means something else, Carter.”

“What?”

“Whoever did this was doing it for Balder who, if you’ll recall, was universally loved and honored. I don’t think this was done out of anger or revenge, or whatever motivates someone to kill another human being.”

“What then?” he asked.

“Love and affection.”

He clapped his hands together. The sound reverberated throughout the evidence room. “A mercy killing!”

“That’s my bet, yeah.”

“Bianca, you’re a genius. This is great.”

“You were almost there. Why call me in again?”

“Don’t you have a class to teach?” He checked the clock on his phone and showed it to her.

“In forty-five minutes,” she acknowledged.

“Let’s hit the trail then.”

At the University of Tulsa campus, Carter whipped the SUV into a fire lane. He jammed the gearshift into Park and waited for Bianca to exit. She didn’t move.

“If you don’t split, campus police will give me a ticket. How would that look?” he said all smiles.

“Give me a straight answer, Carter,” Bianca whispered. “You’re a sharp detective. You didn’t need me on this case of yours. Why bother?”

“I did, too,” he countered quickly. “I don’t know a thing about all this history and lit stuff.”

“It’s because of Hilary, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Let’s not do this right now. You’ve got a class to teach. I’ve got a case to work on and an identity of a dead body to determine—”

“Stop doing that and tell me,” she bellowed. “It because of Hilary, am I right? Look me right in the eye and tell me I’m right.”

He looked at her. “You’re right.”

She hit the side panel of the door with her fist as hard as she could.

Carter rubbed the palms of his hands on the steering wheel. “Let’s be completely honest here, B, you’ve been skating really close to the edge for a while now. And before you remind me of why, I absolutely get it. I was Hilary’s buddy, remember? I was there with both of you every step of the way.”

“I’m not a case of charity.”

“So, what if you are?” he threw back at her. “It’s my charity and I’m doing everything I can to keep you from diving into the abyss and not coming back. Hilary did that and I’m not going to let you do it.”

“You’re not some knight errant riding in on some white charger to save me. And I am not a damsel in distress, Carter,” she hissed.

He weighed his words carefully. “I totally agree. Totally. But from where I’m sitting, you do need help and I’m giving it.”

“I don’t want it!”

“I don’t care, Bianca! Your mind needs stimulation, or you’ll go stagnant on everybody. You need problems to work on. You need puzzles to put together. This is me giving you that opportunity.”

She doubled up her fist and hit him on the arm. “Ow!” she yelled. She kicked the door open. Hopping to the sidewalk, she pointed a finger back into the vehicle. “My despair is mine, big man. Hilary was mine. Got it? And my mind is my own and I decide what it needs…when, where, how…” She couldn’t find any other words to say but stood rooted to the sidewalk.

He didn’t turn to face her. “Let’s hope when you hit bottom there’s still someone there to help.”

She yelped as if suddenly taken with a bout of intense pain. She grabbed the door with both hands and slammed it shut. Carter pulled the gearshift into Drive, eased out of the fire lane, and disappeared down the street.

The day turned into a miasma of misery. Bianca couldn’t find her notes for her first class, lost her key to her office, and ate a sandwich from a vending machine that hit like a rock. She cursed, spit invectives, and kicked at the walls in the lady’s room.

And worst of all, she agonized over every shred of truth Carter flung at her. But she didn’t need truth. She certainly didn’t want it. She ached for Hilary, her other half, her every breath, her everything. She couldn’t handle Carter targeting the heart of her misery. She’d worked so hard to drape a veil between herself and reality. She didn’t want lifted, and especially not by the likes of Carter Perry.

Later that evening at home, Bianca shut all the blinds. Cooking greasy food, topped off with a hearty helping of ice cream, she made herself sick and on purpose. She watched trashy TV with a bottle of wine sans the glass. At one in the morning, she passed out.

Her phone buzzed a text at six in the morning. She forced one eye open to find Carter had found the ID of the dead man.

“Tatum Rhodes.”

“I don’t care, Carter,” she mumbled as she rolled over and hit the floor face-first. She let loose a few choice curses, but she didn’t move. Within five minutes she fell back to sleep.

By half past eight, Bianca found herself lapping up freshly made brew and doing searches on the internet for Tatum Rhodes. She refused to respond to Carter. She prayed he wouldn’t try and be gallant by stopping by her house. What she needed more than anything was to be left alone in her despair. The tapping away at the laptop kept her mind working on something, anything. And that she could agree with Carter. Without a problem to work on, her mind atrophied.

It took her thirty minutes to dig up info on Tatum Rhodes. Having brittle bone disease his entire life, Rhodes committed himself to the life of learning. By his mid-twenties he had written two articles questioning the reading of Norse runes. It caused quite a stir but brought him instant fame within certain academic circles. At age thirty-two he wrote a career-defining book on Norse mythology focusing on its impact on Scandinavian culture. His works apparently referenced Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda; Bianca found this in the bibliography for the book from a library source online.

In the past three years his complaints about his brittle bone disease occupied his postings. The pain, breakages, and other issues slowed him down. It caused him to be depressed.

“Who would love you so much, Tatum?” Bianca asked out loud. “Do I have anyone that loves me that much?” Her thoughts immediately went to Carter, but she refused to dwell on that particular wound.

With more trolling she discovered a cache of pictures of Tatum Rhodes with other academics, friends, and relatives. She made note of two friends who appeared repeatedly. Cecilia Matthews and Joshua Henley. More digging and she found that these two were into all things Nordic in their lives, hobbies, and online presence.

And one of them had an album on Facebook dedicated to engraving work on a variety of metals, including gold. Bianca pushed back from the laptop. She questioned the veracity of her research. It was online, after all. It seemed ridiculous to her that the photos would be left up online unless they wanted to be caught. But then again, she reminded herself, the armband meant to represent Draupnir was supposed to melt on the funeral pyre.

She grabbed her phone to call Carter. Would he believe her? Did she even want to take the time to try and explain it to him? And why did she care so much anyway?

“Too many questions,” she said to the empty walls. She punched the mouse and scrolled frantically. In five minutes she had an address in Owasso which amounted to a forty-five-minute drive from her house.

Grabbing her keys off the credenza by the front door, Bianca bounced down the steps and into her car. She cranked the classic rock station which reminded her of Carter, so she shut it off. She focused on the sound of the tires driving on the asphalt instead. The car’s GPS system gave her driving commands in a neutral computerized voice. She found it somehow soothing.

With forced aplomb, Bianca pulled her car into the driveway, shut off the engine, and waited. For what, she didn’t know. She fought against the confusion in her mind screaming at her demanding to know what she thought she was doing. I’m trying to solve a problem, she thought.

The house seemed so quiet, possibly unoccupied. Maybe the occupant had headed out for the day already. She knocked on the door with her knuckles. She couldn’t hear any stirring on the other side of the door. She knocked again.

The door swung open. Eyes peeked through the darkness of the house at her. Bianca saw something sensitive yet determined in those eyes. In that brief moment she regretted coming here. She nearly spun on her heel back to her car but fought the urge.

The door opened wider. “Yes?”

“Joshua Henley?”

The eyes narrowed to slits. “Please don’t tell me you’re soliciting.”

She wanted to smile but couldn’t. She looked for meaning in those eyes. Something in her demanded that she find truth in this moment. She craved it. Necessary, even. Death and dying and a husband who couldn’t come back from his own darkness…

“You must have really loved him. Didn’t you? Why would you have done it for any other reason?” she said.

“What are you even talking about, miss?”

“Tatum Rhodes.”

“Who?” he shot back not letting her finish pronouncing his name.

She raised her hands to her mouth as if about to pray. His mood shifted. She sensed his fear. She understood it completely.

“It should have melted on the pyre,” she heard herself say.

“Are you high, ma’am?”

“Draupnir,” she said almost holding her breath as she did so. “The work is exquisite, by the way.”

In that moment she watched as his face contorted. She guessed his mind calculated all the responses at his disposal. His eyes narrowed and she braced for the worst. He chose violence.

He dove at her with hands extended toward her. They fell backward off the porch onto the damp grass. As he fumbled to get a grip on her, she noticed the tears welling up in his eyes. She felt his fingers fight past her best defenses to grip her throat. Bianca kicked to no avail. She brought her knees up as a barrier. He deftly used his body to pin her legs away from him.

In a surge of animal strength, he got ahold of her just under her chin. He squeezed. He cried angry, lost tears. He growled. His own pain engulfed hers. Bianca tugged hard against his hands. He overpowered her and his fingers dug deeper.

She felt herself battling to breathe. She heard herself gasp for air. And as the adrenaline flowed in this fight-or-flight moment, she pictured her dead husband frowning at her. In those final months of his life that’s all he did. His soft brown eyes that made her melt during their courtship period turned hard, accusing. Bianca reached out to him every night after his return from the tour in Afghanistan, but he rolled over away from her every time. He came back wounded. He came back broken. The doctors at the V.A. prescribed him oxycodone. She begged him to see another physician. She flushed the pills down the toilet several times.

She failed him. He became addicted and one morning she woke to find him gone. Dead. The military refused to call it suicide. She didn’t know what happened. Still didn’t. And Carter, who served with Hilary for a couple of years, swooped in to save the day.

“I don’t need saving,” she tried to say as Henley tightened his fingers.

She opened her eyes wide and stared into his. He hated himself for what he was doing. She saw that as clear as day.

He loosened his grip just enough for her to speak. “What did you say?” he asked.

“I don’t need saving, Joshua,” she managed to say. “I don’t.”

But Hilary did. She lost him. Her failure. Her loss. Her misery.

As if seeing what he was doing for the first time, Henley fell away from Bianca onto the grass. His body shook as he released a yell of complete agony from the deepest part of himself. His tears washed down the sides of his face onto the ground.

“The best man I’ve ever known,” he blurted out between sobs.

“They always are,” she whispered. “Those stolen from us…”

She heard a car screech in the street. She didn’t have the strength to lift her head to look but she knew who it was. Heavy footsteps pounded on the ground. She saw in her peripheral Henley swung over onto his face and cuffs secured to his wrists.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“It’s called Life360, remember?” Carter said. “You refused to let me do it, so I did it anyway.”

“That’s you all over.”

“It sure is. Hold that thought. I’ve got to talk to this guy and read him his rights.”

A week later she decided to let Carter into her house. She even prepared him dinner. Not wanting him to get the wrong idea, she ordered pizza. She did, at least, break open the best bottle of wine she had in the house.

“This has to be the most bizarre case of my whole career,” Carter admitted as they kicked off their shoes and got prepped to watch trashy TV.

“Henley couldn’t stand to see Rhodes suffer anymore.”

“So he gives him a tap on the skull and burns Rhodes and his belongings on a boat?”

Their glasses clinked as they toasted. He sipped. She gulped.

“Our capacity for loving another human being, friend, lover, or spouse, can’t always be defined in a conventional manner,” she philosophized.

Carter frowned.

“Don’t,” Bianca said. “I can’t.”

He ignored her. “I fought tooth and nail for him, you know.”

She grabbed his hand. “I said don’t. Just shut up and find us something ridiculous to watch.”

His face scrunched as he fought back the pain.

She slapped him on the leg. “I promise you I will kick you out of this house. You just solved a big case. One for the books. How many detectives can say they’ve had a crime scene that was a Viking funeral pyre?”

He tried to grin.

“And thank you, by the way,” she said.

“What are talking about?”

“Since everything…happened, I have tried to dive off into the darkness and not come back. You’ve been there every time to stop me.”

“Bianca…”

“Nope, nope. Trashy TV. Stat!”

He acquiesced by grabbing the remote. “Trash, it is.”

“The last thing we need right now is reality,” she said.

“Preach it, sis.”

Bianca finished her glass and smiled in spite of herself.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Bret Jones 2026

Image Source: Bruno van der Kraan from Unsplash.com