"I didn't think you noticed me."
Mary smiled a little. "I've been dead a while. I notice everything."
"I guess I should have expected that," said Fran, and stepped out from behind her tombstone. She shouldn't have been able to hide herself there, but the laws of physics were different for the living and the dead, and it would have been a poor ghost who couldn't hide behind her own grave marker. "You're lookin' good."
"You're looking dead," said Mary.
Fran smiled wryly. "I suppose it comes for all of us, given time enough. I didn't look where I was goin'."
"You could stay with them."
Frances Healy—who had been called the Flower of Arizona in her time, and the Star of New Mexico—looked up sharply, a scowl on her pretty, faintly translucent face. "Don't you say that. You think I don't want to? But I wouldn't be going back for them. I'd be going back for me, and that's not fair. I had a good run. I did good work. I made a beautiful little girl, and I'm sorry I won't get to see her be a woman, but she'll be all right without me. You'll see. She'll be just fine."
"You could say goodbye."
"No, I couldn't." Fran shook her head. "I go back to say goodbye, and then I think ‘it'll be easier if I stay a few days.' Only it doesn't get easier, and then it's the summer, and then it's the holidays, and then I'm haunting my family, and they're never getting the chance to let me go. It's better this way."
"I suppose that's true," said Mary reluctantly. "You want me to show you where to go from here?"
Fran shook her head. "I think I know the way. I bet Rabbit's waiting for me. I always loved that horse. You look out for my family, you hear? Make sure they're taken care of."
"I will," said Mary solemnly.
Fran smiled at her, tipped an imaginary hat, and was gone, leaving the ghost of Mary Dunlavy—who was haunting no one but herself—standing alone in the graveyard. She looked at the space where Fran had been for a while. Then she wiped her spectral tears away, and turned to walk back to the Healy house. Alice would be waking up soon enough, and she would want her favorite babysitter when she did.
It had taken nearly two weeks to arrange the funeral of Frances Healy.
For the ones she'd left behind, it would take a lifetime to say goodbye.
The Star of New Mexico Page 3