by Dale Mayer
“Well, I didn’t get abused,” she said. “I just basically got ignored.”
“I wonder what the connection is,” he said, “and why?”
Stefan broke in and said, “You need to find that out because there is a connection, and there’s a reason why it involves Gabby.”
“But that would also mean,” she said, “that there’s a reason why it was those women thirty years ago.”
“Absolutely,” Stefan said. “You just have to dig it up. Think outside the box and you’ll cut to the right answer, but it won’t be simple, fast, or easy.”
“As long as we get there, and we get there before somebody else dies,” Damon said, “I’m okay with that.”
Stefan’s golden orb disappeared, and Gabby helped Damon reheat dinner for them. After cleaning the dishes, Gabby returned to her suite and left Damon amid all his cold cases.
It never occurred to Damon that this would have anything to do with Gabby personally. And why would it? Stefan had just told them that ghosts only hung around those they loved or hated, so Damon wasn’t exactly sure what the connection was to Gabby. But now, armed with information on her adoptive parents, he sat down after dinner to dredge up whatever he could about her life. He had her social security number and her formal name. She didn’t have a birth certificate, but he quickly uncovered one.
As he sat here and stared at it, he felt everything coalescing. Putting that off to the side, he quickly brought up the info on the adoptive parents and didn’t find any formal adoption on file in the Aspen courts, but there had definitely been some kind of an agreement that they would come here and pick her up, that they would raise her until she turned eighteen. He felt it deep within his gut, without any written confirmation, just going by what Gabby revealed.
As he considered this further, he picked up the phone and called the lawyer. “Gabby is Jerry and Andrea’s daughter, isn’t she?”
The lawyer laughed and said, “Yes, I believe she is, although Jerry never confirmed it. Something about her really reminded me of someone, and I didn’t figure it out until dinnertime. Her resemblance to her mother is quite striking,” he said. “I was sitting here and realized that she looks a lot like how I remember Jerry’s wife. I found some photos, and they seem to confirm it too.”
“I only found out today that Andrea had a baby and that part of the reason people thought she may have jumped was postpartum depression,” Damon said.
“That’s what they said at the time. I know that, for Jerry, it was horrific to even think about, and he was left with a three-month-old baby that he could barely even stand to look at because she just reminded him of the loss of his wife.”
“Some of the written accounts suggest they had some marital issues that they thought the baby would fix.”
“She couldn’t get pregnant,” the lawyer said. “I was friends with him at the time, way back when, and it was a big problem within their marriage, and then, out of the blue, she got pregnant.”
“Did he know Gabby was his daughter?”
“He didn’t for the longest time, but he did wonder, asking me about a paternity test.”
“Would he ever tell Gabby about that?”
“I think he was working his way around to it,” he said. “He was still struggling to accept it himself.”
“There’s a huge age difference there, for a father and daughter,” Damon said.
“There was a significant age difference between Jerry and his wife,” the lawyer said. “Jerry himself just hit seventy, but Andrea was fifteen years younger. So she would have been fifty-five today. She was only twenty-five when she died thirty years ago.”
“With her whole life ahead of her,” he murmured.
“Exactly. But I know Jerry was incredibly devastated at her death. And he was completely overwhelmed with a baby that, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure he ever wanted.”
“No. That just adds to the pain for everyone, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” the lawyer said, “it really does. So he made arrangements with his wife’s best friend. They had just moved away a few months before Andrea found out she was pregnant, and Andrea was devastated over that loss as well. And, when Jerry told the couple what had happened, they agreed to come and get the child. He paid them for her upkeep until she reached the age of majority, and, as far as he was concerned, it was a good deal for all involved. But I’m not so sure that it was. As I look back on it, and I hear where Gabby is at in her life, I wonder. Clearly no one gave her any explanation of her birth family.”
Damon said, “I don’t think this environment was a very good family scenario. I’m pretty sure Gabby was more tolerated than anything else, and, when she turned eighteen, that was it. They were done and told her so.”
“And, of course, she didn’t know anything about her father to come look for him.”
“But he did know about her,” Damon said. “The least he could have done was look for her.”
“Well, we can make judgments all we want,” he said, “but there’s really no way to know what he was thinking, even at the end.”
“No, I guess not, but Jerry did seem to be in deep mourning over Andrea, even thirty years later. So maybe he didn’t have room for guilt over Gabby too.”
“I just don’t think he knew how her life was,” the lawyer said sadly.
“The fact that she found her way to him is just amazing in itself. It’s almost like it was fated,” Damon said.
“We hear stories all the time,” the lawyer murmured. “You know? How brothers find out that they’ve been neighbors all this time but didn’t know that they were brothers.”
“You’re right. I do hear stuff like that quite a bit,” he said. “You need to tell her.”
“You haven’t?” the lawyer asked.
“No, not yet. I thought you would handle that, with the distribution of the estate.”
“Well, why don’t you bring her in tomorrow morning,” he said, “and I can tell her all of it.”
“That’s a good idea,” he said, then hung up and contacted Gabby. “We have an appointment at the lawyer’s at nine tomorrow morning.”
“We do?” she said in surprise.
“Yeah. Are you okay if I come?”
“Sure,” she said cautiously. “So it’s an official visit?”
He heard the worry in her voice. He smiled. “Kind of. I have a bunch of questions I need to find out about too.”
“Fine,” she said. “I was trying to go to bed early, but I’m having trouble sleeping.”
He chuckled. “I can understand that. A lot is going on.”
“Well, and he still hasn’t paid me,” she said. “I’m really worried.”
“Get some sleep,” he said gently. “Tomorrow’s a whole new day.”
“It’s a new day, but that doesn’t mean it’s a new good day though,” she said in exasperation.
At that, Damon burst out laughing. She, of course, had absolutely no idea what was coming, but he was thrilled for her. “Just stay positive,” he whispered. “Good night. I’ll grab some sleep myself and hope there aren’t any more crazy calls.”
“By our calculation, the killers are not working tonight, are they?”
He stopped, and then he said, “Well, I guess, if they’re on schedule, it would be tomorrow night, or early morning on Sunday.”
“Right, so we should both sleep tonight.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We should have found somebody involved in this already.”
“If it’s a ghost, then nobody to find,” she said. “And that’s the problem.”
With that, she hung up, and he sat here, staring at the files in front of him. If this ghost was connected to her, and it was connected to what was going on, was Gabby the possessed killer? Was this some kind of vendetta? But why would a mother, Andrea, go after her daughter, Gabby? Because there’s no doubt that she had at one time. That whole dancing-on-the-bridge thing? At that, he picked up the phone, and he contacted Stefan.
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“You decided to try it my way, huh?”
“I’m too tired to be rattled,” he said. “Tomorrow night is the seven-day mark, if it follows the same pattern from thirty years ago for another murder to happen,” he said. “I’d really like to avoid that.”
“I’m sure you would,” Stefan said.
“And we found the connection with Gabby.”
“And it’s familial, isn’t it?”
“Maternal. Her mother was the bookseller’s wife, who was suspected to have committed suicide from postpartum depression by jumping off the mountain. Although everybody said no way she would have done that. Given the time frame back then, nobody had any other explanation. But she appeared to fly through the air off the mountain.”
“And she’s Gabby’s mother?”
“Yes. I just confirmed that with the lawyer. Gabby doesn’t even know yet.”
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“So I suspect that’s the reason for the ghostly visits to Gabby,” Damon said. “Andrea, if she’s the ghost, obviously knows who Gabby is, but I don’t know if that’s connected to the murders.”
“Well, if Andrea was murdered it would be,” he said. “If she wasn’t murdered, then it could just be her need to reconnect with Gabby and to say that she’s sorry.”
“Well, Gabby’s life would have definitely been different, if her mom hadn’t gone over that mountain,” he said.
“Exactly. And that would be what the ghost needs to say,” Stefan said.
“Do they really hang around for something like that?”
“Absolutely, and she wouldn’t necessarily have gone after Gabby. Andrea would have thought that her baby was here in town and could have been searching for her all this time.”
“That’s very sad,” he said.
“A lot of these cases are sad,” Stefan said simply. “These are just people who loved and lost, for whatever reason.”
“And here I was thinking the ghost was the vengeful killer. I just didn’t know how they went about killing.”
“They can utilize somebody else, either through physical possession or verbal manipulation,” Stefan said, “and we don’t ever really understand how, but they do take possession and somehow make them act in a way that the host doesn’t know about.”
“Like, when Gabby was dancing out on the bridge here,” Damon said.
“But remember. Gabby has two spirits attached to her. The question is, was that her mother back then on the bridge?”
“Would her mother do that?”
“Quite possibly,” Stefan said. “Maybe she just wanted to experience life in her daughter’s body, or maybe she thought it would help her to connect to her daughter again.”
“By possessing her?”
“Ghosts don’t think things through necessarily the same way we do,” he said. “Some of them are very advanced, but some are just basically operating ectoplasms.”
At that, Damon laughed. “I get more confused the more I even talk about this,” he said. “You know how bizarre it all sounds, right?”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “I spend my life trying to make sense of this.”
“And it’s not something that we even can make sense of. I mean, Andrea died thirty years ago, and I have four other unsolved murders back then, not including Andrea’s death.”
“And the fact that she wasn’t included is also interesting,” Stefan said, “because she could very well have been the first victim.”
“Except we found more victims thirty years before that, so sixty years ago, but the information is very sketchy.”
“Ah,” Stefan said, “now that’s interesting.”
“Why?”
“I feel like it’s all connected,” Stefan said.
“Sure, but how long would a killer keep doing this?”
“I guess it depends on what the connection is to all these women.”
“They look similar in appearance, but they weren’t sexually assaulted. They were basically terrorized and completely brutalized,” he said, “but it was over fast.”
“Like an execution?” Stefan asked, curiosity in his voice.
Damon thought about it and said, “Potentially, but their chests were also flayed open. With a sword.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He described the scene to him.
“That’s a very distinctive mode of killing,” Stefan remarked.
“Yes, and I can confirm that the ones from sixty years ago were the same. Rougher execution but same idea.”
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“You keep saying that, but I don’t know what it means.”
“Well, nobody does,” Stefan said, “and you won’t, until we can get a little further into this.”
“And how am I supposed to get further into it?” Damon asked.
Stefan laughed at that. “We just keep digging. But we must dig into the mother-daughter relationship, and then we have to spread out to all those victims.”
“Maybe, but I don’t see any connection to all those victims.”
“Well, it’s there,” Stefan said. “You just haven’t found it yet.”
With that, Stefan hung up.
Chapter Twenty
The next morning, Gabby woke up and had the last of the bread and coffee. As she was getting dressed for the meeting with the lawyer, Damon sent her a text, asking if she wanted breakfast.
She responded, typing how she’d cleaned out the bread.
Her phone rang immediately after that, and he said, “Don’t be a fool. Come over here, and get some real food.”
“Hey, I had lots of bread,” she muttered.
“That’s not terribly healthy all by itself,” he said.
“Maybe not, but it’s what I had.”
“Stop being so stubborn, and get your ass over here this minute.”
She groaned because he’d already hung up, so nothing she could say would make a difference. Shaking her head, she grabbed her purse and a winter coat and headed over. “I don’t think we have time,” she muttered.
He looked at the clock and said, “We’ll take my car. We’re not walking, so we have time.”
“Fine.” And, with that, she sat down to see fluffy scrambled eggs and hot toast waiting for her. “You really can’t spend so much of your time taking care of me, you know?”
“Why not?” he said. “I’m kind of getting used to it.”
She snorted. “That’s not exactly a good answer.”
He chuckled. “Why not?” he asked. “I like you. I like spending time with you. I was kind of hoping we could go boarding up on the mountain together.”
“Sure. How about tomorrow. So you work ski patrol this Sunday? That would be good, if you want. I know Wendy doesn’t want me to go alone.”
“Why?”
“She thinks I’ll end up in another weird possession case again,” she said with a shrug.
“Well, I suppose it’s possible,” he said. He stared at her for a long moment.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s all a little foolish.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but it’s what we must deal with.”
“Very true,” she replied, as she quickly polished off her eggs and toast. Within minutes, they both stood, ready to go. “I just hope he gives me my check,” she muttered.
He glanced at her, smiled, and said, “I don’t think that’ll be an issue.”
“You say that, but you can’t really understand until you’ve been on the edge of having no money and really see what they’ve got for you as a lifeline.”
“Let’s get going,” he said, as they climbed into his car. Smoothly he pulled ahead and drove to the lawyer’s office.
As they got out, she frowned and said, “It’s a pretty high-end place.”
“Lawyers offices tend to be that way,” he said, laughing.
“I guess, but I know Jerry didn’t think much of them.”
“Well, for some
body who didn’t think much of attorneys, Jerry certainly used Nathan’s services.”
“Interesting, isn’t it?”
“Apparently they were good friends.”
“Maybe,” she said, smiling, but clearly unconvinced.
As they walked forward, he said, “So keep an open mind, all right?”
“Sure, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to keep an open mind about.”
“All kinds of things today,” he muttered in a cryptic tone.
She stared at him, surprised, but they were already inside. As she walked forward, she spotted the lawyer and said, “Good to see you again.”
He turned toward her, gave her a long close look, almost blinked, and said, “The resemblance is really striking.”
She frowned. “Resemblance to what?”
He smiled as they followed him into the back office. “Come on. I’ve got some photos for you.”
“What kind of photos?”
He reached into a folder and pulled out a single photo of a woman. He held it up and asked, “Does she look familiar?”
She looked at it in surprise and said, “Well, it kind of looks like me.”
“That’s because it’s your birth mother,” he said.
She stared at him in shock. “What are you talking about?”
“Gabby,” he said, “your mother was Andrea, Jerry’s wife.”
She sagged into the nearest chair. “What?”
“Yes, and, just like a homing pigeon, apparently your need to come back here to Aspen also brought you back with the same love of books to her bookstore and to your father.”
She stared at him in shock. “Jerry was my father, and I didn’t even know?” She couldn’t get her mind wrapped around it. “What happened that—” And then she stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “that he gave me up?”
“He couldn’t handle life after your mother’s death, and he didn’t know what to do with a newborn. Your mother’s best friend was Bernadette, the woman who raised you after Andrea’s death. Jerry agreed to pay for your care, so she came and collected you and raised you.”