“Hullo?” I answered, stifling a yawn.
Mrs. Andersen apologized for calling, said her husband had called her a worrywart, but could she just ask whether the dogs were fine? And check I’d given them their weekly vitamins? And that I’d watered the plants and had been keeping an eye on the thermostat because, as she’d explained in her list of instructions, it tended to go on the blink from time to time. And had the utilities bill arrived yet? No? When it did, please would I scan it and email it to her so she could pay it? And yes, they were having a fabulous time, and Easter Island was next!
As I ran around, watering plants, checking the mailbox and thermostat, and feeding the dogs vitamin drops, I reflected that not only was I an unreliable psychic and useless private eye, but that I hadn’t even managed to house-sit very well.
“I’ve been a bad mommy. I’m going to make it up to you, I promise,” I told Lizzie and Darcy, fetching the cannister of dog treats from the kitchen.
They yipped excitedly at the sight, but when I opened it, there was only one treat left. I snapped it in two and gave each dog one half. They swallowed my meager offering and stared at me expectantly.
“Okay, let’s go for a walk. A long one.”
That, at least, I could do well. I was even willing to bet that I could do it without tumbling over another corpse.
As I fastened the leads onto the wriggling dogs, my phone pinged an alert for an incoming message. Checking it, I discovered my mother had sent three convoluted and confused texts over the course of the day, both apologizing for and defending her disclosures to the Bugle reporter. I had less than zero desire to speak to her; somehow it felt like this whole mess — even down to being in Pitchford at all — was due to her.
I deliberately left my phone behind on the dresser as I opened the front door, but the juxtaposition of my phone and my mother in my mind kindled a memory. I switched on my phone, found the recording function and activated it, then replaced my cell on the dresser.
“Ghoulies and ghosties, if you’re here, announce yourselves by making some noise or leaving me a message while I’m gone,” I said to the house, feeling like a complete fool.
Then I grabbed my jacket, gloves and beanie and set off with Darcy and Lizzie, locking the door behind us.
Jim had been right in his weather forecast — the temperature was dropping. But at least the bracing cold helped to clear my head. Walking at a brisk pace, I led the beagles — or rather, they led me — around the full perimeter of the estate, until all their excess energy was burned off, and I was a little breathless. When we passed the guardhouse, Doug tried to stop me for a chat.
When I refused to engage, he gave me a mean look and said, “You’ll regret it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I challenged.
He mumbled something about there being plenty of women who would be falling over themselves to spend time with him.
“Have at it, dude.”
By the time the dogs and I wound up back at the park in front of the house, my headache had mostly cleared. The sun had set, and the deserted park was lit an eerie yellow by the street lights. Since even the ducks had retreated to the shelter in their enclosure, I let the dogs off the leash to mosey around freely while I sat on one of the swings, lost in a funk of contemplation.
I’d tried my best to figure out what had happened to Laini, but I’d failed. I’d uncovered nothing useful with my visions. Sleeping off much of the day and cancelling the deal with Kennick hadn’t changed anything; I was still stuck somewhere between try harder and give up.
Giving up my “investigation” would come with the upside of causing no further embarrassment to Ryan, while trying harder might merely involve more banging of my malfunctioning head against a brick wall.
But the idea of quitting rankled. It would let what I believed to be a murder go unsolved. But if I pushed on, I risked alienating everyone without any guarantee that I’d ultimately be able to help anyone.
And it was so tempting to just give up. After all, I’d only come to Pitchford to finish my thesis, and I was almost there — would be there by the time the Andersens came back home. If I paid back Kennick’s advance and just kept my head down and my nose in my own academic business until the end of March, then I could escape back to Boston. Hopefully, I’d leave all the crazy stuff behind, too.
“That’s it,” I said into the dark emptiness of the park. “I quit.”
I’d expected that coming to a decision would make me feel relieved. Instead, I felt dissatisfied and empty. And cold — suddenly I felt icy cold, as though I was enveloped in a pool of glacial air. I shivered violently. Time to go.
“Dar-cy! Liz-zie!” I called, my breath coming in puffs of white which hung in the still, frigid air.
Silent and obedient for once, the dogs trotted over to me, but they slowed as they came closer, and halted a good five feet away. Lizzie whined and Darcy growled. Their eyes flicked from me to the empty swing seat on the left of me and back again. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted, and my eyes began to water. I turned to face the empty swing.
“You there, Colby?” I whispered.
Slightly but undeniably, the swing moved.
– 35 –
The world went silent as I stretched out a hand to the empty space where Colby was. I closed my eyes and leaned into the sense of him, the almost-presence.
“Hi,” I murmured.
My mind blossomed, not with a word or an image, but with a comforting sense of union, of touching and merging with the bright essence of him in some ineffable way. My heart warmed and expanded. Tears trickled down my face.
“After all this time, I still miss you,” I whispered.
We sat like that, moving gently to and fro on the swings, suspended in a bubble of us, while in the space outside, the dogs watched, and time ticked by.
“Colby?” I said at last. “Do you know anything about this crime, about Laini’s death?”
Silence, inside and out.
“You got nothing, huh?”
Of course he didn’t. He’d only known the details of his own life and his death. He wasn’t wandering about on the other side interviewing deceased souls, which was a damn shame because I could have used the help.
I wiped gloved hands across my eyes. “How does it work over there, anyway? Do you souls all hang out together, or only the ones with unfinished business? Is there a special waiting room for the lingering spirits of murdered people?” I could feel him smiling with me. “And why are you hanging around anyway? I solved your murder; we got the baddies.”
The words, “You can go now” raced to the tip of my tongue and hovered, waiting to be spoken, ready to set him free. But I could not utter them. Would not.
His words came then, three of them, loud in my mind.
Always and forever.
A sharp bark startled me out of my fugue. A car — my father’s — was driving past. Without hesitation, the dogs took off after it.
Standing up, I glanced back at the empty swing, but Colby was gone.
For now.
I caught up with my father at the Andersens’ front door where he was alternately ringing the bell and begging the dogs to sit.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said.
“You saw the Bugle?”
“I saw the Bugle.”
Unlocking the door, I asked, “And did Mom send you to come speak to me?”
“No, but you need to call her. And be nice, will you? She’s very upset.”
“She’s upset? I —”
“She meant well.”
“Yeah, well, she did harm,” I said, hanging up our coats. “And I know I did harm, too. So, if you’ve come to tell me to end this whole colossal screw-up before more people get hurt, there’s no need. I’m throwing in the towel.”
“Ah, kiddo,” he said pulling me into a long hug.
Blinking away tears, I freed the dogs from their leashes. They made a beeline for their water bowls in the kitchen
while we went to the living room.
“Want something to drink?” I asked.
He shook his head and I plonked on the couch with a deep sigh.
“So, you’re quitting? Just like that?” he said.
I’d expected him to console me, to agree that ending this mess would be for the best. I hadn’t expected a challenge. Dad didn’t even believe in the paranormal, let alone approve of my investigation.
“No, not ‘just like that,’” I replied, feeling defensive. “I tried hard, okay? I gave it my all.”
In reply, he merely raised an eyebrow.
“I did! I interviewed a bunch of people, I weaseled information out of Ryan Jackson, I investigated online and got nada. And then I did the whole woo-woo thing, trying to get readings from objects and people, staying open to messages from the beyond. I even allowed Mom to read my cards. And where did my so-called psychic abilities get me? Nowhere. Plus, I’ve done damage with my meddling. I’m hopeless at this — out to sea in a chicken-wire canoe.”
“You’re just out of your comfort zone.”
I snorted at this tactful understatement. “You bet I am. I have no idea what I’m doing. I didn’t study for this. Hell, I didn’t even go looking for it — I just sort of fell into it. And I’m useless at both logical investigations and psychic detecting,” I said, with bitter emphasis on the last words.
“Maybe that’s because you’re trying them separately.”
“Huh?”
“Perhaps it’s not a case of either-or. Maybe it’s supposed to be both-and.”
I fiddled with a fingernail, tugging on a cuticle. “Both-and what?”
“It seems to me that you have abilities in two areas. On the one hand, you’re a scientist with expert knowledge in psychology and excellent analytical skills when it comes to understanding and evaluating information, testing hypotheses, building logical arguments, that sort of thing.”
“Okay.” That much I agreed with.
“And on the other hand, you have these new abilities — ones which, admittedly, you’re not yet expert in using —”
I nodded fervently.
“— of receiving intuitions and perhaps even … visions.”
I could tell it was hard for Dad to talk about this stuff as if it was real.
“And what I’m suggesting,” he continued, “is that you use your scientific methods to study and analyze your psychic data, that you try to integrate the two approaches.”
I considered his suggestion for a moment. It was sort of what I’d tried to do with the grid I’d created to study my visions, but …
“They don’t integrate — they’re polar opposites, as different as night and day, black and white, oil and water. They just don’t mix.”
“What about twilight and gray and salad dressing?”
“Dad, you’re starting to sound a lot like Mom,” I said.
“There are overlaps between supposed opposites. And there are ways to blend and combine them which result in something more than the sum of the separate parts.” Reading the skepticism which must have been plain on my face, he continued, “The logical and the intuitive approaches must integrate somehow, because they’re both in you. You may not understand how just yet, but you are the integration. You aren’t who you were, Garnet. You came up out of that pond, back from wherever or however you were when your heart stopped beating, a changed person. You aren’t who you were,” he repeated. “Not physically and not psychologically. You’ve accepted the physical changes,” he said, gently touching the sides of my face beside my mismatched eyes. “Why are you kicking so hard against the changes in here?” He tapped my temple.
Good question. And how to answer it? How to explain, without sounding melodramatic, that it felt like a death to let go of my old, sure sense of self and fall into something new?
My father finished his drink and stood up to go.
“Did you know that to become a butterfly, a caterpillar must first digest itself inside that dead-looking chrysalis? I read up on it. It dissolves into a soupy, enzymatic mess, but some bits and pieces survive the digestive process and adapt themselves to be reused in the next life stage. And there are these clumps of specialized cells called imaginal discs that grow into the new parts it will need. Turns out that those cells were inside the caterpillar all along, lying dormant, like genetic blueprints waiting to be activated. Some species even walk around with rudimentary wings tucked up inside them — invisible, inactive, but there all the same, waiting to be called into use. In the process of eating itself up, the caterpillar unlocks the information in its cells, and metamorphosis happens.”
At the front door, he shrugged into his coat and patted the dogs goodbye.
“And when the butterfly emerges, wet-winged and no doubt more than a little shell-shocked, it can’t yet fly. But it doesn’t throw in the towel and stay stuck on the branch as if it was still a caterpillar. It takes a moment to expand its wings and exercise its flight muscles, to take in all the crazy changes to itself. And then” — Dad opened the front door — “it puts all its trust in its wings, and takes flight, a miraculous integration of the old and new.”
He kissed me on the forehead and left.
For several long minutes, I stood staring at the door, lost in thought. Integration. Was it possible? To my chagrin, I realized that this was what my mother had been getting at, too, albeit in her muddled and mystical way. She’d thought the Lovers card meant I should unite my mind and heart, my conscious and subconscious minds, my logic and my intuition.
Well, it couldn’t hurt to try.
On my laptop, I created a new spreadsheet. This one would contain the information I’d gleaned from both my visions and my more regular investigations, and once I’d captured it all, I’d use my academic skills to analyze it, in the hope of wresting meaningful information from the raw data.
First, I listed everything I’d learned about Laini Carter, organizing it according to who I’d learned it from.
Next, I listed what I’d seen with my own eyes and research — Laini’s broken body at the quarry, the blue note creased with fold lines, the car in the quarry lot, the placement of her desk in the office, the globe on her shelf, the broken photograph in Carl Mendez’s trash.
I filled more rows with what I’d learned about the other players in this case — heart-broken Bethany, sneaky Denise, creepy Jim, inscrutable Kennick and angry Carl — listing their possible motives for murder, and their alibis where any existed. Thinking about Carl sparked an idea. I switched over to my search engine and checked the date of the World Golf Championship in Mexico, punching the air when I discovered that the final playoff had occurred several days before the Sunday of Laini’s death. Then again, Mendez hadn’t said he’d watched the action live.
I switched back over to my spreadsheet and thought for a moment, chewing on a thumb. Then I entered what I knew of Laini’s last twenty-four hours, cutting and pasting details until I had what I thought was the most likely timeline, although there was still one item I couldn’t make fit.
Finally, I listed all my visions, flashes and intuitions related to the case. I color-coded those items red because, although I was learning to trust my abilities a bit more, I still wasn’t entirely convinced of their reliability. Like a good academic, I wrote down the exact details of what I’d actually seen and heard, rather than my interpretation of them. I left off the flashes I figured weren’t connected to the case — my sense of being watched, the oddities in the Andersen house, the bone and button, my encounters with Colby and guessing Jessica’s pregnancy. I racked my brain for any other intuition I might have forgotten, any other “message” I might have received or recorded in my abnormal brain.
Recorded. My phone was presumably still recording from its spot on the hallway dresser.
I fetched it and settled into my favorite spot on the couch in the living room, Lizzie and Darcy at my feet.
“Here goes nothing,” I said, hitting the playback button.
The hair on the back of my neck rose, and my scalp tightened. The recording played on, showing the raised graph of a series of soft noises. Could those be footsteps? Was a freaking ghost walking around the house? My eyes filled with water as they always did when I was seriously spooked. Was I about to hear audio evidence of a visitation?
Then I heard music — the radio in the kitchen was playing — and I also thought I heard a strange, non-musical droning. I pushed the volume on my phone to the maximum, and held it up against my ear, closing my eyes to try to hear better. The music played and the odd buzzing which almost sounded like an off-key tune continued. Then I heard a series of sounds that were easily identifiable.
“What the actual fuck?” I said out loud.
I listened to more of the recording, gasping, swearing and yelling at my phone as I heard more of what the recording had captured. Then I pressed pause and, for once grateful for my mother’s crazy ideas, dialed the familiar number.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m sure you don’t feel like talking to me, but I need help.”
– 36 –
I listened through to the end of the recording while I waited, and I was a hot mess of emotions by the time I opened the door for Ryan Jackson. He must’ve been able to tell I was seriously freaked out, because he’d come over at once. He really was a good guy, I thought, bitterly regretting how I’d made his life more difficult.
I led him through to the living room, explaining that I wanted him to listen to a recording I’d made while I was out of the house.
His brows drew together. “And you did this, why?”
“Strange things were happening in the house, and my mother thought I could record some ghostly activity.”
The First Time I Fell Page 21