Get Up and Ghost

by Carolyn Ridder Aspenson

  “She’s wearing a wedding dress and has a rope around her neck.”

  “Oh bless her heart. She is real,” Thelma said.

  “I’d rather see a rat after all,” Olivia said.

  “Hush girls. We got a séance going on here. Let Chantilly talk to Agnes.”

  “She’s not responding.”

  The spirit twirled around in a clip and flew up to the rafter where she’d spent her last moments alive.

  My heart pounded and my head burned, yet my entire body shivered from the cold air surrounding me. My vision blurred, and I blinked several times to clear it, but it didn’t help. Knots formed in my stomach, and I felt sick, like I wanted to throw up.

  Suddenly a scene shaped around me.

  A person dressed in black.

  A rope.

  A knife.

  A letter dropping to the ground.

  A deep guttural scream.

  The stomping of feet, more screaming, arguing.

  “No, no. Please, don’t,” a woman cried.

  A beautiful woman with her long hair twisted into an up ‘do wearing a stunning white beaded wedding dress struggled on the wide curved staircase with a person dressed in all black. A suit maybe? The person carried himself like a man but it was too blurry to say for sure. She screamed over and over, begging and pleading for mercy.

  “No, no. Please, don’t.”

  The rope swung from the rafter, and the person in black caught it and wrapped it around her neck. She pushed at him, the piece of paper in her hand. She kicked at him, and screamed more.

  “No, please. Stop. Why are you doing this to me?”

  They wrestled and she fought hard to break free, but he had her arms pinned to her sides with one arm, his grip tight.

  “Please, you’re hurting me. Please.”

  She kicked and screamed, but the person in black was too strong for her. He lifted her up, the train of her wedding gown swaying and creeping down the grand staircase, and then heaved her over the railing.

  Her arms hung loosely by her sides as the last of the long dress train slowly fell through the railing. A plain white high heeled shoe dropped to the ground as the piece of paper dropped from her hand and slowly followed.

  A loud crack echoed through the room followed by a slow, rhythmic creaking sound, like the kind heard when a floor joint is old and loose. Creak. Creak. Creee-ak.

  The fog cleared, and as I peered up at the rafter, I saw her body swinging slowly from it, back and forth, back and forth, her lifeless eyes beating down at me.

  Creak. Creak. Creak.

  I jerked in my chair. “There. She’s right there. Don’t y’all see her?”

  They fixed their eyes on the rafter, but each of them swore they couldn’t see a thing.

  Delphina shouted, “Agnes Hamilton, go home You don’t belong here anymore.”

  The spirit just swung back and forth like we weren’t even there.

  “She can’t hear you,” I said. “She’s gone.”

  “She disappeared?” Olivia asked.

  “No, she died. All over again.” Like, I realized, she’d been doing for all these years.

  Olivia sighed. “Oh, my.”

  Thelma nodded. “Goodness. That’s just terrible.”

  “We have to help her,” Delphina said.

  I gazed up at her swinging body. “Hold on.”

  They kept their eyes focused on me as I stood and walked over to the stairs and climbed up to where Agnes Hamilton’s body hung, an image none of them could see. I reached out toward her lifeless body but I couldn’t quite get to her. She seemed so life like, so real, like I’d walked into a time warp and found her the moment she’d died. I gazed down for a moment and panicked. The restaurant was no longer a restaurant but a home. A grand, beautiful home with a dead bride to be swinging from a rafter.

  I had entered into some type of time warp. The room was a glorious entry with wood and marble floors, beautiful paintings hanging on the walls, and incredible furniture with intricate details.

  It was Agnes Hamilton’s home.

  Air rushed past me, and the man—I saw him clear as day and recognized him as male—raced down the stairs. He swiped up the paper that floated to the ground, read it, and then stuffed it into his pants pocket. He glanced up at the rafter, laughed, and walked out the front door.

  I ran as fast as I could down those stairs, part of me afraid I’d be stuck in that moment in time, and the other part cursing myself for making my head throb more than it had in hours, but I needed to follow the man, to find out who he was. Because I knew the truth. Agnes Hamilton didn’t kill herself. She was murdered.

  Only when I went through the door, he was gone, and wherever I’d been was gone, too.

  I walked back inside, my head hung and my shoulders slumped.

  “What happened?” Del asked.

  Olivia ran up to me and hugged me. “Oh, Chantilly, where did you go? One minute you were here, and the next you disappeared on the stairs. Heavens, I thought I was going to die.”

  Thelma adjusted the wrap around her curlers. “Yup, you just up and disappeared in a poof.” She accentuated the oof in poof. “My Uncle Henry used to think he could make himself invisible. He’d sit on the couch and say he was going, and then he’d do the most horrific things because he thought we couldn’t see him, but we could.”

  Delphina sighed. “I know I’m going to hate myself for this, but what horrific things did he do?”

  “Oh, horrible, terrible things. He would pick his nose and flick the boogers at us, and then he’d scratch himself in the most inappropriate places. It was just terrible.”

  Delphina stared at Thelma like she always did. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”

  That all would have been funny had I not just seen a woman killed a minute before. I shivered but sweat at the same time. I needed to sit. I needed to catch my breath. I sat in my chair and stared up at the rafter, the empty, barren rafter. “I think I went back in time or something. I don’t know.”

  “You went back in time?” Olivia asked.

  Delphina remained calm while the other two freaked out. “What did you see?”

  “I saw what happened to Agnes. It was like I was right there watching it as it happened, only they couldn’t see me.”

  Thelma raised her eyebrow. “They?”

  “She wasn’t alone.”

  Delphina led me back to my chair. “Who was with her?”

  “A man, but I couldn’t get a good look at his face.” As if I would have recognized him anyway. “He...he wrapped the noose around her neck and pushed her. She didn’t kill herself.” I fell into the chair.

  “She was showing you what happened to her,” Delphina said. “She wants the truth to be known.”

  “God rest her soul, maybe she’s been trying to tell people all along, and you’re the only one that could see her,” Thelma said.

  My hands shook, and my teeth chattered, neither of which I realized were happening until that moment. “I guess, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I just imagined it.”

  “Oh sugar, you didn’t imagine it. The room was freezing, and I know for a fact the air conditioner doesn’t work that well. Bobby was too cheap to replace the darn thing.”

  “Um, excuse me.” Olivia raised her hand. “We’re all forgetting one important thing.”

  “No,” I shook my head. “At least I’m not.”

  “What?” Thelma asked.

  I sighed. “Poor Bobby Joe Pruitt. He’s not here.”

  “Well, maybe he went to the other place after all,” Thelma said.

  My eyes widened, and Olivia gasped.

  “That ain’t the respectful way to speak of the dead,” Del said.

  Honestly, I thought she’d burst a blood vessel, so I was quite surprised at her composure.

  “She’s fixin’ to blow but good,” Olivia whispered. “Nobody’s allowed to say that about her kin except her.”

  She was right.

 
I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Bobby was family to Del, and even though she knew he wasn’t the nicest peanut in the bag, she was the only one left allowed to say that.

  “Thelma, God is a forgiving God. If he wasn’t, he’d have taken you out years ago.”

  I glanced at Olivia. She shrugged.

  Delphina held back, so I assumed it was out of respect for her unofficially adopted child.

  “I, uh...I think we need to do this again,” I sat in Delphina’s chair. “This time, I’ll try.” I wasn’t sure what I’d seen, if it was my imagination or what not, but I needed to know. “I feel like I’m missing something here.” I encouraged them all to sit.

  When they did, we all joined hands again, of course, after Delphina gave Thelma a pinch on her forearm.

  “Oh, that hurt.”

  “Was supposed to. That’s for saying Bobby’s in the other place.”

  “Okay, I don’t know if I need to say anything specific, but I don’t care.” I bowed my head and then lifted my eyes to everyone. “Please close your eyes and bow your heads.”

  Once I made sure everyone was in compliance, I took a few deep breaths and prayed I wasn’t doing something I shouldn’t be, then I bowed my head again. I kept my eyes open that time though. “Bobby Joe Pruitt, we’d like to talk to you. We want to know if you’re okay, and if you can tell us what happened to you. We want to help you.”

  Nothing happened. No flash of cold air, no trembling table, no stopping of time, nothing.

  “Come on, Bobby. We’re trying to help here.”

  The table vibrated just a bit beneath our hands.

  Olivia lifted her head. “Did you feel that?”

  “Shh,” Delphina said.

  Olivia bowed her head again.

  “Bobby, is that you?” I asked.

  The table shook again ever so slightly, but other than that, nothing happened.

  “Bobby Joe Pruitt, you do what your momma taught you, and you acknowledge someone when they’re talking to you, you hear me?” Delphina said.

  Nothing.

  Everyone lifted their heads and opened their eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought maybe it would work.”

  “Maybe Bobby’s not interested in helping. Maybe he just wants to be left alone,” Thelma said.

  A knife flew through the air and across the room, stabbing and sticking straight into the stair wall.

  Olivia screamed, Thelma ducked under the table, and Delphina pushed her chair away and marched over to the knife, pulling it out of the wall. “Looks like Bobby came by after all.”

  “How did that happen?” Thelma asked.

  A knock on the front door set Olivia screaming as she hid under the table with Thelma. It scared me too, sending a rush of panic from the pit of my stomach and up my throat. Del stayed glued to the stairs holding the knife.

  I shook away the fear as Del said, “You gonna get that?”

  “Uh, I guess?” I slowly walked over to the door. “Who is it?”

  “Jack Levitt, ma’am. Castleberry PD. We got a call someone was inside the restaurant.”

  I breathed a huge sigh of relief and unlocked the door.

  When Jack saw my face, he raised his left eyebrow. “Everything okay in here?”

  Thelma and Olivia crawled out from under the table. Jack watched and glanced at me. “Bunco night, perhaps?”

  I’d never been a Bunco girl. “No. We were just, um...we were just...” I wasn’t exactly sure how to explain what we were doing.

  “We were calling on Bobby’s spirit,” Del said. “Trying to figure out who killed him.”

  Great, I thought. Just what I needed Jack to know. His eyes opened more, and I blushed.

  “And what did you find?”

  “Uh, we...uh—”

  Del waved the knife. “We found this.”

  Jack climbed up the three stairs to where Delphina stood. He removed a glove from his pocket and I wondered if he always had those on hand. “May I have that?”

  Del handed it to him.

  “Excuse me, but you should have seen it Detective Levitt,” Olivia said. “It just flew across the room from right over there and stuck into the wall like a pig in mud.”

  “She’s right,” Thelma said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

  He pursed his lips and crooked his finger at me. “May I see you for a moment? Alone?”

  I glanced back at the women as I nodded and followed him outside.

  “Care to fill me in here?”

  “We aren’t breaking any laws. Delphina has a key. If that’s what you’re wondering, I mean.”

  “It’s an active crime scene. You aren’t allowed to be here.”

  “But the crime happened upstairs. We haven’t gone up there.” Not yet, anyway, I thought.

  A small smile crept over his face.

  I smiled, too. I couldn’t help myself. He had a cute smile.

  “Typically when a crime happens, the entire area is closed off, but since we wrongly assumed no one would enter the restaurant, we didn’t tape off the entrances.”

  “Oh, so we’re not—”

  He hung his head and shook it. When he looked at me again, the smile was still there. “Were you really trying to summon Bobby Pruitt’s spirit?”

  I blew out a breath. “Maybe?”

  He nodded. “Good grief. Y’all are a hot mess, aren’t you?”

  “In my defense, it was Delphina’s idea, and it’s really hard to say no to that woman.”

  “Especially when she’s pushing hard. That’s why I went out with Lonna in the first place.”

  Delphina set them up? “I didn’t know that.”

  “The woman is a powerful force when she wants to be.”

  “So you understand why I’m here?”

  “I understand that woman gets what she wants when she pushes, but a séance? That’s a little over the top.”

  “She wants to know what happened to Bobby.”

  “Chantilly, if that stuff worked, police departments all over the world would be using psychics to help solve cases.”

  “I know some do. There’s that woman just a few counties south of here that works with the Atlanta police. I read about her in the newspaper when I visited my parents a while back.”

  He laughed. “I think I know who you’re talking about, but I’m not convinced those kinds of people are the real thing.”

  “We just thought the séance might help, and we wanted to do it for Del.” I breathed heavily, feeling deflated and a bit embarrassed.

  “Well, did it?”

  “Help?” If he considered my seeing Agnes Hamilton’s death and knowing it wasn’t a suicide, yes, it did, but I wasn’t prepared to have that discussion. “Not really, except the knife. It honestly did fly across the room.”

  He flipped the knife in his hand and examined it. “Probably just fell off the table.”

  “And flew several feet through the air and stuck itself into the wall?” I opened the front door. All three women fell forward, obviously listening to our conversation. “Besides, it wasn’t even on the table. No utensils are on the table.”

  “It’s true,” Delphina said. “Look how far it went.” She walked over to the area the knife came from. “From here.” She walked to the stair where it landed on the wall, counting each step along the way. “That’s twenty-six steps. There’s no way that knife would slip and go that far, let alone pass over our heads and over the railing like it did. Especially since it came flat out of nowhere.” She straightened her shoulders. “It was Bobby trying to talk to us.”

  “With a knife? Maybe someone else was here and you didn’t see them?”

  “How could they be? I locked the door behind us.”

  “Could they have come in another way?”

  Delphina rubbed her chin. “I guess through the cellar, but they would have had to walk by us to get behind us, so I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “It was a ghost,” Thelma said.r />
  “It wasn’t a ghost. Ghosts can’t throw things.” He opened his mouth and closed it, and then a second later said, “I can’t believe I even said that.”

  “How do you know that? One time my Charlie came by for a visit. I’d left his favorite pillow on the couch because I like to nap on it. It reminds me of him. I went into the kitchen for lunch, and when I came back, the pillow was on his recliner again where he liked it.”

  “We thought he’d come through to Chantilly like Agnes did, but he didn’t,” I said.

  Jack’s eyes shifted to mine. I shrugged and looked away. “Well, whatever’s happening here, this is an active crime scene, and I need you all to get on home, okay?”

  Olivia perked up, and I knew she was relieved. “You mean we’re not under arrest?”

  “No, ma’am. You’re free to go home.”

  She pressed her hand to her chest. “Oh, thank heaven for that. I didn’t want to upset my family name by being a common criminal.”

  “Bless her heart,” Delphina said. She attempted to blow out the candles, but there were a lot of them. “Can I get a little help here?”

  Olivia darted back to the table. She’d been carefully making her way toward the entrance, I assumed to skedaddle as quickly as possible. “Oh, yes. I’ll help. I have stronger breath because of my age.”

  Del just shook her head. I was actually quite proud of her. She hadn’t tipped over the edge the entire night. Lord knew she’d had plenty of opportunities.

  They blew out each candle with Thelma on their tail gathering them up and stuffing them into a small box. Where the box came from, I had no idea.

  “Ladies, did any of you drive here?”

  “No, sir. We met at Delphina’s café and walked from there,” Olivia said.

  He nodded. “Did anyone drive there?”

  Everyone said no.

  “Then come on, it’s late. I’ll drive you all home.” He popped the door open, and after we’d made sure we had everything, he let us out, one by one, Delphina last. “You’ve got the key?”

  She nodded and handed it to him. He closed the door and locked it.

  After dropping them all off, we headed to my house. “So you want to give me any more details?”

  Not really, I thought. “I already told you. Delphina had this crazy idea to perform the séance, and she corralled us all to go along with her. We thought it would make her feel better. That’s about it.”