by Mona Marple
“The lead from the show?” I ask, surprised that she’d be out driving such a beat-up old car.
“Oh, of course. I didn’t recognise her. Should have realised,” he says.
“She wasn’t drunk, I take it?”
Taylor shakes his head and moves off, “She was distracted but clearly sober. I figured a warning would be enough. Her record’s clean.”
“You can tell that?”
He laughs. “I called the details in. She was pretty shook up just to be stopped so I’m confident she’ll be more careful in future. She was trying to accept a call from her daughter, apparently.”
“That’d make sense,” I say. “Tallulah lives away at boarding school. I’ll bet she heard what’s happened on the news and rang to make sure Antoinette’s okay.”
Taylor shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. She hasn’t got hands free, she should have left the call to ring out.”
We drive past my house, which stands in darkness, apart from the flickering lights of the Christmas tree that I can see through the glass in the front door.
“Do you think I should check on Sage?” I ask.
“Erm,” Taylor says with an awkward laugh, “sure, if you want? I totally assumed you’d want to be together after what’s happened. Together with me, I mean. And Scarlett and Axel.”
“Well, sure,” I stumble, because my idea of family still revolves around my dead sister, who no doubt is off somewhere with Patton and not giving me a second thought. “I’m just used to worrying about her. But, yes, of course, let’s go to yours.”
We pull up outside his and stumble down the path, worn out now the adrenaline has gone. He opens the door and flicks on the light in the entrance hall. The house is silent.
“Sounds like the twins are down,” I whisper.
“Of course they are,” the wobbly voice of Ethel Grubb comes from the kitchen. She floats in, her spirit form illuminated a little, a dishcloth in her hand. “You’ve had a pleasant evening?”
“Not really,” Taylor says as he pulls off his coat and hangs it on the rack. “A man was killed tonight.”
“Men are killed every night,” Ethel says dismissively. “As Sheriff, you know that.”
“At the theatre, Ethel,” I interrupt. I don’t dislike the woman, but she has none of the warmth that I would have looked for when choosing a nanny.
“Oh,” she says, her mouth forming a tight little circle. “Well, how awful.”
“Lionel Wright, you know him?”
“Yes, yes, I knew him,” Ethel admits. “How very sad. Nobody should die this close to Christmas.”
“Another man was attacked,” I say. “My friend, Nick.”
“St Nick? Santa Claus?” Ethel asks.
“Well, not the real one,” I say in confusion, “but he does play Santa a lot. In shows. At Abe’s a few years ago.”
“Goodness,” Ethel says. “Now that is a problem. Is he… okay?”
“Badly burnt and a head injury too. Whoever it was hurt him good,” I explain, the warmth of fresh tears finding me. I force myself to open my eyes wide and stare at a point on the far wall, pushing them away.
“How have the twins been?” Taylor asks.
“Wonderful, as always, although Axel’s tooth made him a little crabby,” Ethel says. She does appear to like children, even if she never had her own and her ways are a little old-fashioned and regimented for my tastes. It’s not my business, I remind myself. These aren’t my children. “I put them down at eight and let them self-settle. They’re learning that I mean business when I say good night.”
I purse my lips. “Don’t you think they’re a little young for that?”
“I’m sorry, Taylor, am I the nanny here or not?” Ethel asks, staring at him.
“I’m sorry,” I volunteer. “They just seem so tiny still. I know you know what you’re doing.”
“Many happy households would agree that I do,” Ethel says, her tiny bosom swelling with pride. “The trouble nowadays is that children are spoilt. It starts when they’re babies, and the older they get, the harder it is to break the cycle. Begin as you mean to go on, that’s my motto. With clear boundaries and rules. Never give in when you’ve told a child how things will be, or what consequences they can expect.”
“It makes sense, Connie,” Taylor says, quietly, clearly not wanting to take sides. “I see in my work how many young people are out of control. Maybe if they’d had clear guidelines at an early age they wouldn’t have reached that point.”
I nod. I can’t argue with him. I hear it myself, the way parents blackmail children to behave around the supermarket, offering treats or toys as rewards for behaviour that was simply expected back in my day. I think of my mother, how she scrimped and saved so that we had food in the cupboards most of the time, and try to imagine her reaction to this constant bartering parents engage in nowadays. And then I take a step back, as I always try to when my thoughts veer this way. I’m not a parent. My ideals are based on my imagination of how I would parent, and I’m humble enough to recognise that the reality is very different. Times have changed. I fear that Ethel Grubb doesn’t realise that.
“Well, I’ll take the settee,” Taylor says as he stifles a yawn.
“Oh no, look, I wasn’t thinking. I’ll just go home,” I argue.
“I want you here, where I can protect you.” Taylor says, and I find myself agreeing. I want him to protect me. After years of looking after myself and being the only person I can depend on, I’m ready to play the damsel in distress occasionally. “Let me just grab my PJs.”
We bid goodnight to Ethel and climb the stairs together. Taylor peeks his head in to check on the babies. I don’t.
Taylor’s bedroom is masculine and dated, despite it being recently redecorated. The walls are beige, and the bed cover is an odd geometric design in various shades of brown. I sit on the bed and try not to think about Lionel Wright, lying in that dark pool of blood, or Nick, tied to the hissing radiator as his skin melted away.
“You don’t want to check on them?” Taylor asks as he walks in through the open bedroom door. He lifts a pillow and pulls out his neatly-folded pyjamas, which I’m fairly sure Ethel has ironed for him before tucking them there.
“No,” I say, quicker than I should. “Not when I’m so emotional. They might pick up on my energy.”
Taylor lets out a gentle laugh as he leaves the room to make his way back downstairs for the night. “You sound like Sage.”
I do. She’s the woo-woo one of the two of us. She’d totally believe that those tiny humans could pick up on my emotions. Whereas I just want to stay away to protect myself from them.
**
We’re all up and about early the next morning, both babies screaming their demands for milk before 6am. I busy myself sterilising bottles and grabbing diapers so that Taylor can’t ask me to help with the actual feeding.
When they’re full, and drifting back off to sleep, I allow myself to look in on them in their bedroom. They still smell of new baby and fresh laundry, and I have to stop myself from scooping them up and losing myself in their scent. Instead, I grab my things and return downstairs.
“I’m going to make a move,” I say.
Taylor nods. “Want me to walk you?”
“No, no, I’ll be fine. Maybe we could see each other later?” I suggest, “I want to go and see Nick again this morning. And check on Sage.”
“Sure thing,” he agrees, and I let myself out. There’s been a fresh snowfall overnight, making the world seem more peaceful than it is. A stream of school children dawdling on their way to class pass me. It must be the last day of term, or close to it. Several of the girls have crafted hair bobbles out of tinsel. The more rebellious have festive earrings dangling from their lobes. Are children allowed to wear jewellery to school now? Nobody would have dared back in my day.
When I reach my house, for some reason, I keep walking. There’s a December chill to the air that I like, and the thud-thud-thud of my boo
ts clomping through the snow is somehow comforting.
“Oh, Antoinette!” A voice calls up ahead. The battered old car is parked so that half of it is on the sidewalk. I frown as Tabitha Reed speed-walks, carefully in the snow, towards the car. “Goodness, look at this snow! They didn’t predict it, you know.”
The car door opens and Antoinette steps out, hair pinned high on her head in her customary bun. She glares at Tabitha and says nothing, just walks to the back of the car and opens the boot, which is jammed full of shopping bags. She picks up at least six, holding them all in her left hand, then struggles to close the boot with the same hand.
“Let me help!” Tabitha offers enthusiastically, grabbing another four or more bags before Antoinette manages to get the boot down. “Someone’s been busy! Christmas shopping, is it?”
“Tallulah’s decided to return for Christmas break,” Antoinette mutters.
“Oh, how delightful. I’ll bet she’s grown. When does she arrive?”
“The day after tomorrow,” comes the reply. Antoinette looks Tabitha up and down and begins the walk across the sidewalk and through her gate. I watch the scene, wondering how Tabitha can be so oblivious to the fact that Antoinette appears not to like her.
The two women reach the small veranda and I see how chipped the paint work is. Perhaps boarding school is taking up all of Antoinette’s money, I think to myself.
“Well, I think it’s marvellous that she’ll be home for Christmas,” Tabitha continues to babble on.
“You’ve no idea, Tabitha,” Antoinette says as she drops all of her own bags and fishes around in her handbag for the house keys. “All of the best parts for the upcoming shows are decided over Christmas break. She’s ruining her career before it’s even begun by being such a home bird.”
7
Sage
I throw myself down those stairs like a puppy when I finally hear the front door open.
“Connie!” I call, and I pull her into a tight hug. Her face is red raw and freezing, as if she’s been wandering the streets all night. “Are you okay? Please tell me you were with Taylor.”
“I was with Taylor,” Connie says, pulling away a little. “What’s wrong?”
“I thought you were coming home!” I exclaim, feeling a little hysterical now that I’m saying these things out loud. Connie’s a grown adult. She doesn’t have to explain to me if she’s breaking curfew. “You always come home.”
“Oh Sage, I’m so sorry,” she says, and pulls me back towards her. I allow myself to sink into the embrace and tell myself to let it go. To forget the nightmares that stopped me getting any sleep last night. I should have just wandered across to Taylor’s and knocked on the door. It’s my own fault, I tell myself, for having an overactive imagination. Connie’s my best friend and my sister. Nothing can ever happen to her. I won’t allow it.
“I need to go and see Nick,” she says, and I feel my stomach churn as she brings me up to date with the full horror of what’s happened. This is a nightmare. It can’t be real.
“Can I come?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “They’re keeping him under pretty strict conditions. They might not even let me in. You stay here. I’ll come straight back, I promise.”
**
Patton says his own goodbyes not long after Connie sets off for the hospital, and I decide to sit on the rocker on the veranda. It feels safer than being in the house alone. Patton heads off to the police station, hoping to get a full briefing from Taylor Morton, after I assure him that I’ll be fine.
And I will be fine. Let’s remember, I’m a spirit. I can only die once, and I’ve already had my turn. If you’re wondering how I died, just let it go, you ghoul. I can’t remember. It’s not uncommon for spirits to never remember how they passed over. Maybe it’s the brain protecting us from something awful. I have no idea. Sure, I could ask Connie, but that’s not going to happen.
It is pretty weird though, I’ll admit. Whenever I hear of someone dying, I wonder if that’s what happened to me. You’d think a news story might jog a memory for me, but that hasn’t happened yet and I can’t believe my own death was because of such a rare sequence of events that I just haven’t watched the right news story yet.
I hope I didn’t die like Lionel Wright did. That was messy and gross. And someone would have had to discover me. God, I hope it wasn’t my daughters who found my body. Maybe it was a nurse in a hospice. Although I think I’d have memories of a prolonged illness.
Ugh. This is what murder does to me. I’m usually so upbeat and carefree, and here I am, rocking back and forth, considering ways of dying. Not good.
I focus my attention on the street instead, and right there, by the fence, watching me, is my husband. He moves to raise his left hand and before I know what I’m doing, I’m off the rocker and forcing my spirit form through the front door, not even wanting to spare the extra second it would have taken to open the handle and walk through.
Once inside, I lock the door and bolt upstairs. Bernard could walk through the door like I did, but every spirit knows they shouldn’t enter a private dwelling without permission. I position myself in the front bedroom and sneak a glimpse out from behind the blinds. He’s still there, his gaze moving from window to window.
How long had he been there? Why was he just watching me? And what the heck is he doing in town?
My heartbeat thumps in my chest, loud as a drum, and when his eyes eventually settle on the window where I am, I feel sure it’s the noise of my own heartbeat that gives me away. He stares right at me for what feels like an eternity, and then he opens the gate and begins to walk down the path.
“Crap,” I whisper to myself. Should I hide? Or confront him? I was never scared of Bernard a moment in my life, but him just standing there watching me, after Patton’s warning, has got me spooked. You think you know the person you share your life with, but in reality, could I say I really ever knew Bernard? The workings of his mind? What made him tick? I gulp as I hear a noise from downstairs.
Silence follows. A few moments later, I hear the gate click shut, and I peek back out to see Bernard walk away without a backward glance.
Downstairs, a letter waits on the mat. My name is scrawled on it in writing I don’t recognise or, rather, don’t remember. Bernard wasn’t a letter writer. He had no need to be. We never moved out of town, so his family were always there in the flesh, much to my eternal disappointment. And he was no romantic. Cards were a rarity; an odd birthday here, one Valentine’s Day after my endless hinting. He could write, he’d been a fairly good student at school, it was just as if he finished school and considered his writing days to be over.
The number of times I’d be on the phone, the corded house phone, screaming at him to fetch a pen so I could note something down. He could never find one.
So the scratch of my name in his handwriting makes me catch my breath. I tremble as I move to the stairs and sit down, trying to build the courage to read what the note says.
**
They all arrive together, bursting out of the doors of the vehicle as if they’re doing a synchronised getting-out-of-a-squad-car routine.
I tuck the note in a cupboard and try to look nonchalant as the front door opens.
“You locked it?” Connie asks, “Good.”
I shrug. “Seemed sensible. What’s going on?”
“I had a visitor this morning.” Taylor says, a dark shadow of stubble across his jaw. It suits him. “Someone who was filming the play. Thought they’d bring in the recording, see if it might help.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. I forget that people can do that; just press a button on their cell phones and suddenly they’re recording what’s happening. “Is it helpful?”
“No idea yet. I thought we should watch it together.” Taylor says. He pulls out his cell phone and a wire and then gets on his hands and knees, hooking the phone up to the TV, which Connie switches on. Suddenly, the home screen of Taylor’s phone appears on the TV. Whatever he loo
ks at on that small screen is copied onto the big screen. This stuff is unbelievable.
“Here we go,” Taylor says as he manoeuvres through various option screens and then presses play on a video. It begins just before the shooting. The person recording clearly wanted to capture Nick’s role but wasn’t too interested in the others. I can’t blame them.
I force myself to watch the scene play out. It’s the exact scene that I’ve been trying to block from my mind since it happened. The aftermath is worse than the shooting in some ways. As it happened, I was so panicked that I couldn’t have told you what was occurring. The person recording the video clearly panics too, because the phone drops to the floor when the shot is fired. But it continues recording, and it falls in such a way that it keeps recording from the floor.
It’s the shot being fired, a moment or two of darkness, and then a face appears. A person I’ve never seen before, clearly ducking as low as they can on the floor. Bizarrely they don’t cry, but their nose won’t stop running and the young man makes no effort to wipe the snot away. He’s just there, his face trembling, his nose running, while all around comes the terror. Screaming. Lots of screaming. Sobbing. An occasional authoritative voice of someone in control or trying to be.
I’m tempted to close my eyes after the fourth run-through, but I know that I have to see this through. Taylor needs our help. Patton needs my help. Mystic Springs needs my help.
I force my eyes to stay open and move closer to the screen. There’s an awkwardness about the Santa Claus that I didn’t really pay attention to at the time. He appears on stage and his walking is fine, so it’s not an injury.
But when the killer raises his arm ready to shoot, their actions become less polished. Less natural.
The nerves of a first-time murderer, perhaps?
“You guys see anything?” Taylor prompts. He does this a lot. He never wants his opinion to pollute anyone else’s, so he takes input before giving his own.