Spirits of Spring (The Haunting Ruby Series Book 4)

by Joy Elbel

  When I got to the bottom, I saw two things. The first was a large expanse of water that had pooled at the bottom of the path—a pool possibly much deeper than it looked. My first instinct was to drive through it anyway so that I could get to her faster. But when the crow hovered above it and began to beat its wings furiously against the surface, I changed my mind. I threw the car in park and turned to speak to Rachel. That’s when I saw the second thing. And I panicked like I’d never panicked before.

  The crow shot off to where she stood—her back toward me and unaware of the danger she was facing. It let out a mournful cry and so did I.

  “Ruby, look out!” I shouted as I ran toward her as fast as I could go. The ground was saturated and my feet slid with every step. It made what I was seeing seem even more surreal, more like a terrible nightmare instead of the concrete reality that it was. Everything unfolded in slow motion except for my thoughts. After all of those times I’d joked about this moment, I never truly thought it would come to pass. But here it was. Right in front of me.

  As I skidded into place between Ruby and certain death, I knew that I was exactly where I was meant to be. Where I wanted to be. There wasn’t time to save both of us—if one of us had to die, it was going to be me. I watched that bullet glide toward me without any sense of fear. Its aim was impeccable. I felt her turn around and clutch me from behind, her face hopefully shielded to the scene playing out before me.

  But of all the strange things I’d witnessed since I’d met her, I hadn’t seen anything yet. For a split second, the bullet froze in mid-air, wriggled slightly to the left, then plunged into my chest. I closed my eyes as everything went white.

  29. After the Rain

  It all happened so fast—I didn’t know which way to turn. Clay’s voice came from my left, Zach’s from my right. The deafening crack of the gunshot came from directly behind me. I turned around and clutched at Zach’s waist, shielded but still able to see what was happening. I watched as that bullet sliced into Clay from behind then squirmed its way out through his chest. There wasn’t any blood but once it passed completely through him, he disappeared. A split second later, Zach lurched under the impact and fell at my feet.

  After that, it was all a blur. I could hear Rachel screaming. I could hear someone else screaming, too. I would have given anything to hear Zach shouting, even to see him writhing in pain—at least I would have known that he was alive. As it were, he lay face up on the ground unresponsive.

  I dropped to my knees, lightheaded and in a daze. The rain that had been pouring endlessly all day suddenly stopped. Life and the world itself should have stopped, too. And yet, they continued to go on. I continued to go on. I heard the flapping of wings and watched as a giant bird flew off into the distance, visible only against the backdrop of the moon over the water. Its wings barely skimmed the surface of the lake as it disappeared out of sight. This couldn’t be how our story ended—could it?

  I rocked back and forth unsure of what to do next. There was so much blood pouring from the left side of his chest, soaking through his shirt, then running down into the mud beneath him. I was afraid to touch him, afraid that I might make things worse.

  “You have to stop the bleeding, Ruby!” Rachel screamed. “You have to put pressure on the wound!” “I’m afraid I’ll hurt him, Rachel!” I continued rocking in place, my stomach churning at the thought of making the wrong decision. I had felt passively responsible for Lee’s death. This—was a whole different ball game. If I made the wrong move, I feared that I would physically kill him.

  “Do it now, Ruby! You have to!” I lifted my gaze from him long enough to see that Rachel had somehow disarmed the shooter and was wrestling him into the mud. I couldn’t wait for her to help me—she already had her hands full. I took a deep breath and pressed both of my hands over the hole in Zach’s chest.

  That’s when I felt it—something I hadn’t felt in a long time. An electric shock shot through me just like it did the day we met in the diner, as it had several times since. This time, it was powerful and nearly knocked me backwards into the ground. As I caught my balance, Zach’s chest rose and fell slowly and he began to groan.

  “He’s alive, Rachel! He’s alive! We need to get him to the hospital!” I screamed as I ripped off my hoodie and pressed it firmly against the wound.

  Rachel skidded over to us, every square inch of her covered in mud. “Help me get him into the car! I smashed Jeremy over the head with his own gun. By the time he wakes up, he’ll be doing it in his jail cell.”

  “Jeremy Carmott? Clay’s friend? That’s who shot Zach?” I asked, not really caring for an answer. Zach had a bullet lodged in his chest it didn’t matter who put it there.

  “Yes,” she replied as she grabbed Zach by the wrists and dragged him effortlessly through the mud toward the SUV. It was one of those super adrenaline moments—the kind where mothers are capable of lifting cars to keep their children from being crushed to death. She was calm—much calmer than I was. If it weren’t for her taking charge of the situation, I would still be hovering in shock over his lifeless body.

  I followed her every instruction to the letter. We heaved his limp body into the backseat and I climbed in beside him. Rachel leapt into the driver’s seat and whipped the vehicle around in one swift motion. When we approached the main road, she began to honk the horn to warn other vehicles to get out of our way. I sat in the back seat, cradling his head in my lap and keeping steady pressure over his chest. His breathing was ragged and shallow but at least he was still breathing.

  Time became warped in my head. It felt like seconds yet it felt like forever before we pulled up to the emergency entrance of Baker Regional Medical Center. With our horn still blaring, EMTs rushed out to see what was going on. Then immediately grabbed a stretcher when Rachel shouted, “My brother’s been shot!”

  My arms felt empty as they scooped him up and hustled him away. My heart felt empty with the knowledge that he took that bullet for me—just like he’d said that he would countless times before. I wanted to cry but I was beyond tears. Rachel parked the car and we rushed into the hospital together.

  The receptionist would give us no information. She kept repeating that we needed to have a seat in the waiting area. Rachel started to threaten Nurse Ratchett with bodily harm so I stepped in.

  “My father is chief of staff here—Dr. Jason Matthews. I want to speak to him. Now.” Rachel nodded her head in satisfaction that I had thought to pull such powerful strings. The nurse responded quietly, “One moment please.” We waited not so patiently while she made a phone call. A few seconds later, she hung up the phone. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. Your father is scrubbing up for surgery right now. He has a bullet to remove.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or more anxious. I knew that my dad was the best doctor on staff. I knew that he got plenty of experience at this kind of thing when we lived in Trinity. The hospital there saw at least one shooting victim a week and he once joked that he could remove a bullet with his eyes closed. But this all felt too much like the night that Lee died. My father was the attending physician that night, the one who signed his death certificate. It felt like the past was dancing a macabre circle around me, leading me back to the same exact spot where I’d began.

  Nurse Ratchett must have called Shelly because twenty minutes later, she came rushing into the waiting room. She took one look at Rachel and me sitting there dirty, wet, and frightened and threw her arms around both of us. They both began to cry but I sat there like a stone statue. I was afraid to cry for fear that once I started, I would never stop.

  Shelly used the receptionist’s phone to call over to the diner. In all of the commotion, we forgot that his parents still didn’t know what had happened. That’s when Rachel also remembered that we hadn’t called the police to have them arrest Jeremy. While we waited for everyone to get there, Shelly pulled some strings to get Rachel and me a hot shower and dry clothes.

  We emerged in o
ur poorly fitting scrubs to find the police waiting for our statement. With them was a still unconscious Jeremy, lying on a stretcher in the hallway waiting to be wheeled in for treatment. It wasn’t something I ever thought I would do to another human being. In fact, I thought that it was the most disrespectful thing you could possibly do to someone. But as I passed by him, I was overcome with a sudden urge to spit in his face. So I did. The anger I felt inside was worse than any I’d ever felt before. Rachel watched me do it then checked to see if anyone else was watching before doing the same thing herself.

  Thankfully, neither of the officers who responded to the call were ones I’d dealt with before. They took our statements with the utmost of professionalism, offering sincere wishes for Zach’s recovery. The one question they asked that I couldn’t honestly answer was this—why did Jeremy shoot Zach. Clay was the only one who might be able to provide that answer and he’d been mysteriously MIA ever since that bullet passed through him, too. For all those times that I wished I could send Clay into a proper afterlife, he had to go now when I needed him the most. No Clay and possibly no Zach. My heart was emptier than it had ever been before.

  The five of us sat there alternating between nervous chatter and awkward silence, waiting to hear news from the ER. Every time I saw someone out of the corner of my eye, I instantly assumed that it was my dad coming to tell us that Zach was fine. disappointment. each time using Every time, I met with heartbreaking

  Rachel recounted the story multiple times, a phrase that grew on my nerves at an alarming rate. Finally, after about the sixth time I’d heard it, I snapped.

  “The sound of the gunshot was terrible. It sounded like the Holocaust. It—” “Rachel! Stop being so stupid! There’s no such thing as sounding like the Holocaust. The Holocaust wasn’t a tangible object that made noise. It was an era in history, a period in time where millions of innocent people were slaughtered. It was a time of great sorrow—not a sound.”

  Rachel’s bottom lip began to quiver. “I know that, Ruby. I’m not being stupid. I know what terrible pain those people must have felt. It’s the only way I could think of to accurately describe how devastated I was to see my brother being shot. I’m just not good with words. Forgive me for not being a walking stegosaurus like you.” And then, she burst into tears.

  Suddenly, I felt like the stupid one. And I totally had no desire to point out the fact that she inadvertently referred to me as a dinosaur instead of a reference book. I now understood exactly what she meant by the Holocaust reference. And I agreed with her wholeheartedly. When Zach got shot, it felt like my entire world and everything in it had exploded in front of my face. The stone statue turned to dust and I cried like a baby right along with her. It may have stopped raining outside, but there was still a terrible downpour raging that night.

  30. Not Eggs-actly What I Was Expecting

  When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t where I expected to be. I expected to still be at the lake, drenched, bleeding, and in serious pain. Or at the very least, in the hospital dry, stitched up, and in serious pain. Instead, I found myself on a farm. Grandpa Mason’s farm.

  “It’s about time you showed up, Squirt. I’ve been expecting you for a while now.” What was going on here? Had I traveled back in time to the night he died? Was I being given a second chance to fix my mistakes? Or was this just a dream, a terrible, taunting nightmare where I would wake up and he would still be dead and Dad would still hate me for it? I’d had several of those dreams recently but none of them came close to feeling this real. Did this mean that I was…dead?

  I was too shocked—too confused—for words. When I hesitated a bit too long, he spoke again.

  “Don’t just stand there with your teeth in your mouth— come give your old grandpa a hug.” This time, I didn’t waste a second. I threw myself into his outstretched arms and squeezed him harder than I ever had before. Dream or no dream—dead or alive, I wasn’t going to pass up this kind of opportunity.

  He was exactly like I remembered him—tall and thin with hair of pure silver. He still smelled the same, too. He was always a variety of perfectly blended scents—Old Spice, vanilla pipe tobacco, and the peppermints he always chewed on right after he was done smoking. I missed that smell terribly. One night shortly after he died, I tried to recreate that scent myself. I snuck off into the woods with a tiny pouch of tobacco I’d procured from his unfinished tin and tried to smoke some from the wooden pipe I’d whittled for him in Cub Scouts. I ended up setting the entire pipe on fire and cursed as I tossed it into the snow. Dad smelled the smoke on my jacket and assumed I’d been smoking cigarettes. I was too hurt to admit the truth. I took my punishment—no television for two weeks—without arguing and went to my room to cry. It was bad enough that he was gone but now everything about him was gone, too.

  “There, there, Squirt,” he said as he patted me on the back. “There’s no time to cry now—the chickens need to be fed.”

  How did he do it? How did he know that I was crying the very instant the first tears rolled out of my eyes? Even when he couldn’t see my face, somehow, he always knew. When I was little and trying to be brave after skinning my knees or bumping my head, I would ask him how he did it. Every time he would say that it was because he had special grandpa powers that I wouldn’t have until I was his age and had little squirts of my own to tend to. Every time, I would smile at the thought that I would have special powers someday, too. I still didn’t know how he did it but that memory made me forget my tears once again.

  I released my grip on him and nodded my head. “We can’t keep the chickens waiting!” I exclaimed as I grabbed a bucket and handed him one as well. I was too afraid to ask him what was going on for fear that my time with him would come to an end the moment I did. It didn’t matter anyway—dead or dreaming—all I wanted was to spend time with him.

  I dipped into the feed bag, filled my bucket, and then began to dish out their evening meal. I missed those chickens—Grandma sold them all to a farm near Graysburg after Grandpa died. When I was about six years old, I tried to give every one of them its own name. After exhausting the names of every cartoon character I could think of, I came up short by about a hundred names. Grandpa came up with the perfect solution.

  “Pick the name that you love the most then use that name for every hen.”

  I thought for a minute then asked, “Grandpa, what’s your first name?”

  “Ralph.”

  “I made up my mind then. I’m going to name the chickens Ralph.”

  He’d laughed until he nearly choked. “Okay, Ralph it is. First we feed Ralph and then we collect the eggs.” Once I was old enough to understand that all of the chickens were female, I saw why he’d laughed at my choice and laughed about it myself. But silly or not, the name stuck and from that day forward, every bird was christened with that same name.

  I walked up and down the barn saying, “Time for dinner, Ralph,” to every hen I fed. Grandpa chuckled but followed suit. Once they were all fed, he flipped his bucket upside down and sat on it. I placed mine beside his and took a seat as well.

  “Well, Squirt, tell me why you think you’re here.” In order to do that, I first needed to find out where “here” was. The likelihood of this being a dream was pretty slim. Time travel was impossible outside of science fiction. That left only one alternative. I was dead.

  “I died saving Ruby’s life,” I said quietly.

  “Did you?” he asked as he pulled out his pipe and began packing it with tobacco. That’s when it hit me—taking that bullet for her didn’t necessarily mean that she survived. Easily, Jeremy could have picked her off with his next round. In fact, my death could have made her an easier target than she already was. I imagined her kneeling by my body sobbing and unaware that he was taking aim again. I’d saved her life so many times before without incident. This time, I screwed up. Bad.

  “Is she dead? Is she here?” I asked, afraid to hear the answer. “Have you seen her?”

  “Take i
t easy there, Squirt! Ruby’s alive. She’s at the hospital waiting to see whether or not you are, too.” She was alive! I didn’t completely screw things up after all. “So they didn’t tell her yet? No one told her that I’m dead?” She was not going to take the news well.

  “That’s because you aren’t dead. Yet. You have to make that decision yourself.” Deciding whether I lived or died wasn’t as easy of a choice as it may seem. Aside from my love for Ruby, life wasn’t all that great lately. I’d even begun to distance myself from her, too. I’d been blaming it on depression but maybe there was another reason for it. Maybe deep down, I’d known this moment was coming and I’d been doing it to prepare her for life without me. Maybe there really wasn’t a choice to make after all—maybe I’d already made it a long time ago.

  “Break’s over, Grandpa,” I said as I stood up and offered him a hand to do the same. “Time to collect Ralph’s eggs.”

  31. Destiny Delayed

  Five and a half hours, five thousand tears, and five hundred tissues later, Dad entered the emergency room waiting area looking as exhausted as I felt. Immediately, the five of us mobbed him for news of Zach’s condition.

  “He’s stable but still in critical condition in ICU. Garret, Diane—come with me.” As Rachel and I began to protest in unison, he added, “I’ll be back for the two of you in a few minutes.”

  We flopped back into our chairs angrily. Though I felt definite relief at hearing that he had survived the surgery and was at least stable, his use of the word “critical” was unsettling. The fact that he wouldn’t allow Rachel and me to see Zach, didn’t help either. There was something wrong—something besides the obvious, that is. I tried to get comfortable in my chair but it wasn’t happening and I soon gave up trying.