by K. J. Emrick
“Go on, Miranda,” Jack encouraged her. “It might help to talk it all out again.”
She doubted that, but she went on anyway. “Well, years ago my Aunt Connie disappeared, and no one has ever known what happened to her. The article in the envelope? It was about Connie.”
“Bizarre,” Sapphire said, summing up exactly what Miranda thought about the whole affair. “And this was after that tour boat captain… what was his name? The man who came to your door and said he knew Connie?”
“Josh Bates,” Miranda answered, trying not to shiver when she thought of the bizarre little man who had appeared out of the blue, claiming a friendship to her missing Aunt Connie, or about how his boat had caught fire and sank, or about how he was now missing. Maybe even dead.
“Yes, Josh Bates!” Sapphire said, snapping her fingers as if responding to Miranda’s own thoughts. “That was him. Josh Bates. Well. So we have him arriving out of the blue, and then this article about your aunt, and so now you’re naturally thinking he’s involved somehow?”
“Sapphire,” Jack said abruptly, “stop!”
“What? I wasn’t prying. Miranda knows I have only her best interests—”
“No, no!” Jack said insistently, “I mean stop the car!”
Sapphire yelped and clutched the wheel until the knuckles around her turquoise rings turned white. She brought them to an abrupt halt, skidding to a stop on the shoulder. Miranda sat bolt upright as the seatbelt cinched across her chest.
Butter yelped as he was jerked awake, and his claws dug at the seats to keep from being thrown around. His brown eyes were wide as his head whipped back and forth looking for what the trouble was.
Kyle, on the other hand, didn’t have claws to use on the seats. He kept going when the car stopped, straight ahead and through the windshield as the van came to its abrupt halt. It was another moment before he came floating back to petulantly take his position in the back of the van again.
“It’s times like this,” he said seriously, “when I am so glad to be a ghost. Seriously, I didn’t feel a thing. Right through the windshield, and nothing. Of course, it would be just absolutely great if some people would learn to drive so there was no need to go flying out like I just did. Yes. That would be just great.”
“Kyle,” Miranda hissed as she unbuckled her seatbelt, “not helping.”
Jack gave her a questioning look, then turned to examine the back of the van where all of their camping equipment had shifted forward dangerously. Now he knew there was a ghost on board. He lifted his eyebrows, and Miranda wasn’t sure if he was happy that Kyle was here, or annoyed. He’d been blissfully unaware of Kyle’s presence for the entire weekend.
“Sacre bleu, Jack,” Jean-Paul was saying. “What on Earth are you going on about? We are stopping the car? For why?”
“That’s why,” Jack said, pointing off to the left side of the highway. “Is that what I think it is?”
Miranda looked out past the edge of the road, through the sparse trees to the lakebed. The summer had turned blisteringly hot over the last week or so and was typical January weather. Cool nights that required a jacket had been replaced with oscillating fans and sleeping in the nude to keep from sweating to death. Not that Jack had minded that part too much. The hot temperatures were causing everything to dry up. The leaves on the trees were wilting. The grass was turning brown. And, the water was disappearing.
The lake was down a good three feet or more, leaving the mud at the edges dry and cracked. The receding water was lapping at the feet of what appeared to be a man. It was hard to tell, and Miranda credited Jack’s keen police eye that he had spotted it at all.
There might be a dead body, right there in the lake.
“Oh, my,” Sapphire exclaimed. “I see it now, too. It’s a man. Oh, he isn’t moving! He must be dead. Oh, he is dead, isn’t he? I can see his spirit now. Oh, I can see it and he’s dead!”
Miranda stared as hard as she could through the patchy screen of leaves, but there was no ghost. Sapphire was in one of her fits again, convincing herself that her imagined connection to the other side was allowing her to commune with ghosts. She wanted so hard to believe that she was psychic, like Miranda actually was.
“Stay here, guys,” Jack said to everyone. “I’m going to have a look. If it is a man, and he is dead, then we’ll need to get more officers out here from the police station. Ones who are on duty. If the man isn’t dead and he needs help we’ll need to get EMTs out here on the double. One of you dial emergency and tell them I’m already here, okay?”
Miranda caught his hand before he left. “Jack, be careful.”
He winked at her. “Always.”
As a psychic who received visions of the dead on occasion, and as someone who seemed to keep getting sucked into a variety of mysteries, Miranda had seen more than her share of dead people. She knew it didn’t ever get easier. Jack had been a detective for a number of years, but she knew it was no different for him. Death was death, and it affected a person.
Jack got out and closed his door behind him. Miranda took out her mobile and went to dial 000… only to find her phone had no signal.
Hopefully, Jack‘s newer phone would have better odds of picking up a signal.
“Well, I’m not just sitting in here,” Kyle said abruptly. “You guys can sit here and watch. I’m a ghost. Jack won’t even know I’m there!”
Miranda looked up from her phone to see that he was already at Jack’s side, floating across the road and through the trees, down to where the body waited.
Chapter 2
Sometimes being a psychic was no fun.
From the moment she had seen that body, Miranda had a feeling deep inside that there was something sinister at play here. This man hadn’t fallen into the lake and drowned. This was no heart attack. It was worse than that.
Much worse.
She just didn’t know how. At least, not yet.
Butter seemed just as antsy about the situation as she was. He was pacing back and forth on that side of the seat, whining and panting, looking all the way out to where Jack was kneeling next to the body in the dry clay. Kyle was floating above, giving himself a bird’s eye view.
“It’s going to be alright, Butter,” she said to her dog, ruffling the fur between his ears. He laid himself out across Miranda’s lap and seemed to breathe easier. In the next moment he started snoring softly. Well. At least he would get a nap.
Miranda looked out the window again to see how Jack was doing. He was walking carefully up and down the side of the road now, taking big steps to avoid spots that Miranda couldn’t see. She wondered what it was he’d found out there. She would have gone out to look for herself, but she wouldn’t be much help. She was a novelist, not a police detective.
Although, that had never stopped her before.
Up front, Sapphire and Jean-Paul were quiet. They hadn’t said a thing since Jack had gone out to the lakebed. Both of them had tried their phones to make the call for emergency response. Jean-Paul’s was dead. Sapphire’s, however, had been charging from the car adapter the whole weekend. As it turned out it didn’t matter because her phone was unable to get a signal either. Still, she kept trying, over and over.
“Sapphire?” Miranda said to her gently.
“Sorry, Miranda,” was the sniffled reply. A tear trickled down her cheek. “I just can’t think straight. That poor man. Oh, why is there no signal out here? It’s like one of your books but here it is right in front of us. The ghost has gone, but the body remains.”
Jean-Paul reached over and held Sapphire’s hand to comfort her. Miranda knew there hadn’t been a ghost to see, but that didn’t make Sapphire’s emotions any less real. She was a very sensitive woman, and that was where all of the trappings of crystals and mysticism came into play for her. She hid behind them, trying to use them as a shield for her emotions.
Although, it was an odd thing. Usually when someone died Miranda could see their ghost. Sometimes it took a wh
ile for the specter to come wandering. Could that be why there was no ghost to see? If that really was a dead man out there, did he die a while ago?
Jean-Paul picked up Sapphire’s phone and tried for a signal again. The pinched look on his face told Miranda that it wasn’t working.
“I’m still getting nothing. We are in a dead spot… oh. A poor choice of words, I’m afraid. Sorry. I just meant… what are we going to do if Jack doesn’t get a signal? We can’t just leave the man here, can we? Should we put the body in the van with us?”
“No!” Sapphire said immediately. “I can’t have him in here. Oh, my, I simply can’t.”
“It is all right, my dear woman,” Jean-Paul said gently, putting the mobile aside and patting her hand. “We will not do that to you. I suppose we can wait for someone to come by, yes?”
“This road isn’t used for much,” Miranda reminded him. “It’s scenic, and there’s some houses out this way but nothing much else. We’re still a good half hour from Moonlight Bay, even.”
“So we do what, exactly? We wait for Jack to stop dancing around the corpse?”
Sapphire groaned when he said it.
“It’s alright,” Miranda told her this time. “There’s no room in the van anyway. We’d have to leave all of our camping equipment behind if we did that. Listen, I remember seeing a place a little way back. Maybe two or three miles? A rustic little house. They probably have a landline phone there and it wasn’t that far.”
Jean-Paul eased back in his seat. “Well. This is why I love where we live, and hate it at the same time. The solitude. But you are correct, Miranda. If we find a place with a landline, we’re in luck. I do not like the idea of leaving this poor soul here, but I do not see an alternative.”
“Miranda, dear,” Sapphire asked quietly, “what does Kyle think of it all? He must have something to say about this, doesn’t he? After all, ghosts know everything about the ghost realm.”
Miranda knew exactly how untrue that was, especially of Kyle, the spirit guide who apparently couldn’t even remember why he’d come back to Earth to guide her in the first place.
“Is he here?” Sapphire pressed, looking all around as if Kyle would pop out from under her seat if she looked hard enough.
Jean-Paul blew out a long-suffering breath. “Sapphire, honey, not this again. Kyle is not real, as I have said before. You need to take this seriously. There is no ghost here. Just us, and a dead man, but we can handle this together, oui?”
Although Jean-Paul spoke with the utmost care, Miranda could tell he was exasperated. He’d always humored the pair of them when it came to tales of their sixth sense, but it had been clear to Miranda from the start that Jean-Paul did not believe that anybody was psychic. She let it go and didn’t bother trying to prove otherwise to him. Short of turning herself into a carnival attraction and performing parlor tricks with crystal balls for anyone who could pay the price of admission, she would never convince everybody that her gifts were real.
Which was just fine with her. She preferred to hide that part of her life anyway.
“Pish posh,” was what Sapphire had to say to Jean-Paul. “Kyle is a friend, and he is very real. The veil of death can’t keep us from our true friends.”
She went back to staring out the windshield and Miranda was happy about that, because she didn’t have an answer for the question she had asked. Kyle hadn’t returned yet from his examination of the body with Jack. She had no idea what the two of them had found out there.
There was only one way to find out.
“Guys, I’m going to go and see if Jack can get any signal on his phone,” Miranda said, gently freeing herself from Butter and dropping him back into a comfortable position on her seat. The dog woke up for just a moment, and then went back to sleep again.
“But Jack said we should stay here,” Sapphire protested, sounding suddenly worried that if Miranda did go out there, she might end up like the poor man in the lake, too.
“It’s okay, Sapphire. I’ll be careful.”
Miranda slid back the side door of the van and made her way out. As she crossed the road she saw Jack bent over on the opposite shoulder, studying faint tire tracks on the pavement. A car had been through here, at some point, and swerved right off the edge of the road and over the shoulder. Had the man in the lake been hit by the vehicle first? Was that what killed him?
If so, then Miranda knew for a fact that it hadn’t been accidental. She still had that funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. Something evil had been done here.
“Jack?” She called out to him, keeping carefully back away from where he was looking for clues. “How does it look?”
“I don’t know, I don’t like it.”
“But he’s dead? The man down there is dead?”
“Yes,” Kyle answered her, a moment before Jack did.
“Yes, I’m afraid so. His body’s been baking in the sun for a day or two at least. Before that it was under water but, you know, with the drought... it came into the light of day again. For all I know it was here when we came through to go camping. Three days ago. It’s just hard to see from the road.”
“So he was underwater?” Miranda theorized.
“Yes. You can see the marks on his clothes.” Miranda looked toward the body lying face down in the bed of the lake and could just make out a dirty dark blue flannel shirt, wrinkled jeans and brown boots on his feet. “He didn’t drown, though. That’s not what killed him. I can see bruising around his neck. Almost a straight line the whole way round. He was—”
“Strangled!” Kyle interrupted, as if he were the lead detective here.
“—strangled,” Jack finished, unaware that his ghostly shadow had just spilled that bit. “Then there’s these tire tracks here.”
“They go right off the road,” Kyle pointed out.
“See how they go right off the road?” Jack said, pointing as he traced the curving lines into the dry grass where they stopped. “They’re old, a couple of days as well. I think our dead man was killed somewhere else—”
“Somewhere else,” Kyle said with a serious nod of his head.
“—and then brought here—”
“Right here to this lake,” Kyle agreed.
“—and dumped.”
“Dumped.” Kyle slapped his two hands together for emphasis. The sound of it was a muffled echo in the ether.
Miranda put a hand up over her mouth as she tried to cover her smile. Even with a dead man not three hundred feet away it was still hilarious to see Kyle’s antics. Jack saw it in her face right away and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he sighed out a long breath. “Kyle is telling you the same things I am, isn’t he?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, hand still concealing her grin. “I think he fancies himself a detective now.”
“Hey,” Kyle protested. “I would make a great detective. I mean, if I didn’t have this spirit guide thing going on. That job has to come first. I’m here to help my good friend Miranda, and don’t you ever forget it.”
“He says you’re doing fine without him,” Miranda told Jack.
Kyle gave her a dirty look. “That is not what I said, and you know it.”
Jack took out his mobile and snapped several pictures of the edge of the road. “Well, tell him thanks for the help, but we’re going to need more than a ghost with issues about personal space.”
“Hey!” Kyle barked, right in Jack’s face. “I resent that remark.”
Miranda thought it was more the case that her ghost pal resembled that remark, than resented it, but she kept that comment to herself. The issue at hand was the body over there in the lake. “I wonder what the guy was doing? I mean, he’s in the middle of nowhere and somebody tosses him from a vehicle?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said, again. “Maybe a hitchhiker killing? Maybe something personal. Maybe something else entirely. He wasn’t a young guy. Somewhere in his fifties I’d say. I need to get this scene processed as soon as possible if we’re
going to get any of these answers. Do you have signal on your phone? I’ve got zero bars. Took lots of pictures, but it doesn’t do me any good if I can’t call in to the station.”
“No, sorry,” Miranda told him. “No signal. Sapphire’s is charged but it’s the same as ours. Jean-Paul’s phone has no charge. Does our dead guy have anything on him? I mean, do you have an identity for him?”
“No. There was no wallet, no driver’s license. Nothing but this.” From his pocket he took out a single slim key. He came over to her from the roadside, giving her a better look at it before returning it to his own pocket for safe keeping. “And, since this is the only thing he’s carrying, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to know what it opens.”
“So… check every door in the state?” She said it as a joke, but then she realized that yes, that was exactly what they might have to do in order to find the lock it fit into.
Then Jack made her see it was even worse than that. “Every garage door, every vehicle, bus station locker, foot locker, high school locker…”
“Okay, okay, I get the point.”
Not to be outdone, Kyle added, “Don’t forget every little girl’s hope chest.”
Miranda gave him a sharp look, but he only smiled and shrugged. “I’m just saying. We need to be thorough.”
“We’ll leave little girls’ dreams out of it,” she quipped.
Jack stared at her. “Little girls? Do I want to know what you and Kyle are talking about?”
“No,” Miranda decided quickly. “It’s not important.”
Kyle crossed his arms over his chest and floated higher off the ground. “Humph. You wouldn’t treat me that way if I had a badge of my own.”
“What we need,” she said to both of them, “is more people who do have badges out here to process the scene. If we can’t use our phones, then we’ll need to call from somewhere else and I think I know just the place.”
“You mean that little place a few miles back?”
Miranda smiled at him. “I should have known that you saw it, too.”