by Etta Faire
Quickly, I put my foot on the gas again to make sure I wasn’t stranded. Commuting to work was not as safe as it used to be. It was definitely not worth the short hours and minimum-wage pay.
After lurching my car forward enough to know I was okay, I threw it into park and took a second to calm down, let my hands stop shaking before I moved on. And I remembered now how Justin and I had broken up originally more than twelve years ago. It had been a similar night to tonight.
I had a different car, though, a God-awful orange Volvo that I nicknamed the politician because I couldn’t count on it for much more than money-sucking and broken promises. This was around the time when Jackson started noticing me too, and unfortunately for me, I was a dumb 19-year-old who apparently liked to be noticed, and couldn’t tell the difference between a nice guy and a pile of… cash.
And I’ll just admit it; it felt good to have somebody rich treat me special, flaunting money, saying all the things I liked to hear like, “Here’s some more money.”
I didn’t choose Jackson over Justin for the money, but it sure made things confusing. I mistook generosity for kindness and love. It didn’t help that Justin looked the part of the bad boy. He had a motorcycle and tattoos, pretty much everything my mother hated in my boyfriends from high school because they’d all been selfish pricks. And before I knew it, I’d put Jackson in the nice category and Justin in the jerk one. I was a shallow, confused teenager.
The night we broke up, I knew I had to tell him it was over, but I didn’t know how. We were just about to snuggle on the couch like usual when I blurted out, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m not a kid. This was fun, but I need somebody stable and secure who cares about me for me.”
The politician wouldn’t start in the snow when I got back out to it. And after about 10 minutes of me sitting in my car outside his home, cursing into my steering wheel, trying to get the damn thing started, I got a text on my flip phone.
“You okay?”
I ended up staying over. He even insisted I take the bed.
I kicked myself a little just now in my Civic for not seeing true kindness back then, especially when it let me stay the night, after I’d been the villain.
Did justice for the dead really matter that much? Finding out what happened the night of the boating accident wasn’t going to change what happened the night of the boating accident. But it might change a lot of things for the people I cared about right here, right now.
I turned the heat higher and warmed my fingers on one of the vents, suddenly feeling like something was watching me. I looked around but didn’t see anything. That’s when I heard high-pitched screaming from up above. The sound grew louder and louder like it was plunging straight for my car. I screamed too, ducking, covering my face, certain whatever it was was coming straight through the windshield. I looked up just in time to see it stop. A crow zoomed past my windshield and down the road.
That was crazy.
I wasn’t sure if it was one of the thick-beaked bomber birds, or a shapeshifter, or just a regular bird who forgot to fly south and had apparently frozen in midair, plummeting to the ground like a screaming piece of hail. I maneuvered my way back over to the path again, the bird just in front of me now, soaring ahead like it was guiding my way. I got a look at its beak. It wasn’t crusty yellow, but still, that was not as comforting as you would think it’d be.
It took me more than an hour to inch up Gate Hill and I must’ve looked like hell frozen over when I finally stomped through the veranda door, kicking my boots off on the porch, as was required by my agreement. I leaned against the wall of the kitchen and closed my eyes, trying to feel safe.
Jackson appeared as soon as I opened my eyes again.
“Don’t start,” I said, my eyes stinging with rage. “I cannot get stranded on that hill without cell phone coverage. We will be making some upgrades to this place or I am leaving it. We need lights on Gate Hill. And paved roads.”
He didn’t say anything. He just calmly listened to me ranting about safety issues and improperly plowed roads. And then when I was finished, he looked at me with the kind of sad concern I saw way too much of nowadays, and I wanted to strangle him for it.
That’s when I noticed Ronald was there too, standing in the kitchen. Jackson’s lawyer, and probably the lawyer in my adoption 31 years ago.
He was a rail thin man in a perfectly-pressed, buttoned-down white shirt and a waxed mustache that bordered on handlebar, his hair neatly side-parted with a little swoop.
“The trust pays handsomely for that road to be maintained,” he said. “I made a full inspection on my way in, and I can conclusively say it hasn’t been touched. I’m very sorry. I will immediately stop further payment to the city…”
“To the city,” I said, suddenly suspicious.
“We have never had problems contracting with the snowplow service they use.”
And now, I understood. I hadn’t even had a channeling with Gloria Thomas and the mayor was so scared he was trying to convince me to go no further with this. At least I knew what tread cautiously meant. “Yes, thank you, Ronald. Please do whatever you can to make sure that road is safe.” I thought about the bird I saw on Gate Hill. “And thanks for directing my way in. Bird’s eye view of the road helps, huh?”
I’d long suspected that man was a ghost. Now, I also suspected a shapeshifter too.
His face never changed expression. “We’ll go directly with a private contractor from now on,” he said, ignoring my comment. “I’ll call to see if they can come out tomorrow morning. And you’re right. It’s time for some upgrades this spring. I’ll put in an order.”
I had no idea what “putting in an order” meant, but I knew it was futile to ask. I was the owner of this place, but I had very little control over it. I had to follow a house agreement and, apparently, I also had to wait for approval before doing any upkeep.
I sat down on the couch and sunk into the cushions, yanking my super-soft throw blanket over myself. This case was already getting dangerous. Rex bounded over to me and I scratched him behind his ear. “I’ll feed you in a minute,” I said, knowing that was about all the time I had before I’d get docked for not feeding him on time.
My laptop was on the coffee table in front of me and I pulled it over so I could look up as much about this boating accident as I could before my channeling tomorrow. The Donovans. The Linders. The Bowmans and Wittles. The mayor was not going to stop me that easily. This investigation was moving forward. Like it or not.
“Sorry, Justin,” I said in my head. “Looks like you’ll have trash duty for a while longer because I’m choosing to be the villain again.”
Chapter 7
Golden Girls
My mother didn’t answer when I tried calling her the next day just before the channeling. I expected to get her voicemail. I didn’t expect to get her friend’s voicemail as well.
“Hi, this is Marlene,” my mother said.
“And Brenda,” said her friend.
“We’re not here right now,” they said together, giggling. “But leave a message.”
I left one. But not the one I wanted to leave, which was, “What the Golden-Girls is going on here? Are you and Brenda roommates now? And why are you so happy?”
It wasn’t any of my business, but I thought it was odd that I hadn’t heard a thing about anyone moving in.
“Call me when you get this,” I said, instead.
My choppy internet had been extra choppy last night, and I hadn’t been able to look anything up, so I was happy to have the printed library articles.
I spread them out along the dining table and glanced over them one by one. There were so many inconsistencies, it was crazy. From the misspelling of names (Linder vs. Lender) to the “blame the victims” defense, the Landover Gazette had dropped the ball on its reporting all over the place. And it seemed to be on purpose.
According to police reports, Miss Thomas and Miss Jerome secretly boarded the Donovan’s yac
ht after the Landover Country Club dance ended, apparently hoping to continue a night of carousing and debauchery.
“Myles’s dad had no idea the girls were even on there. He and Mr. Linder were asleep downstairs,” Clyde Bowman, 18, said. “Freddie and the girls were drinking. Beer bottles were everywhere, onboard and in the water, all over the place. Freddie didn’t do stuff like that. These girls were party girls from California. I think they were pretty ‘loose.’ They must’ve talked him into it. I bet that’s how he got drunk at the dance too.”
It went on to lecture about the perils of being “talked into stuff,” with advice backed by “experts,” of course. “It’s one of the dangers our young people face on the lake every summer, and when the university’s in session,” said Mayor Lawrence Peterton. “Outsiders who come here with questionable values and nothing but partying on their minds.”
The byline said the article was written by Ethel Peterton, same woman who wrote the other articles, and the same last name as the mayor.
Jackson appeared beside me. “I see you’ve found the work of my great aunt Ethel,” he said. “Henry Bowman had four children. Ethel was one of them. Such a dear, dear woman. Loved by all.”
“Sounds like she and the mayor pitted the whole town against the outsiders,” I said. I’d been an “outsider” once too. And I’d felt every bit the pitted part. “I take it the mayor’s her husband?”
He nodded. “They made a great team, like a deadly version of Bonnie and Clyde.”
I snatched my laptop from the middle of the table, happy to see the internet was working again.
I looked up the Landover Gazette itself, clicking on the “about us” tab on its website. A rich history of serving Landover County with accurate and timely reporting for more than a century. I also saw that it had been established in 1888 when Landover was just becoming a rancher town, but was sold to the Peterton family in the 1930s and then to the new owners in 1993.
“If you think my uncle is a crooked mayor,” Jackson said. “Ethel’s husband, Lawrence, made Uncle Clyde look like the Dalai Lama. Lawrence was supposedly an ex-mafia lawyer.”
“Interesting,” I said, taking mental notes to keep the couple in mind as potential suspects. I couldn’t decide which was more crooked. The mafia or the Bowmans.
At that moment, Gloria appeared. She was brighter now. I could see the blonde highlights in her brown hair where it had lightened over the summer. A good sign she was strong enough for a channeling.
Jackson whispered in my ear. “Be careful. This is harder on your body than you think.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, even though I had no idea if I would be fine or how to be careful, anyway. I hadn’t done a channeling in a couple months. But I was still having weird side effects that included a hallucination or two. I kept hearing birds when there weren’t any. But then, maybe I was fine and there were just ghost birds flying around my house. Anything was possible nowadays.
I asked Gloria about her sister.
“I do have a sister,” she said like she was just now remembering that fact. She closed her eyes. “June. June Bug, that’s what I called her. I don’t know what happened to her, or anyone for that matter. I couldn’t get myself to leave the lake. I got so caught up in knowing the truth.” She hovered back and forth. “Bug was thirteen when everything happened.”
I quickly did the math in my head. “So she’d be in her 70s now. What’s her full name?”
It took Gloria a good ten seconds before she answered. Ghosts seemed to have a very hard time recalling specifics outside of a channeling. “June Marie Thomas,” she finally replied. “Dark-haired girl with freckles. Please, let me know if you find anything about her.” Her voice trailed off. “I should’ve sought her out. I should’ve been a better sister.”
“I’ve found it’s never too late for that one,” I said, mostly thinking about the case I had with the suffragette not too long ago.
Jackson left “to give us our privacy,” and I stacked my articles up into a short pile on the table, the afternoon light shining in on them from the opened curtains. “I’d like to go back to the beginning of the dance, if you’re able to,” I said, pulling the curtains closed so the room would be darker, the mood more appropriate. “We’ll channel until one of us gets tired.”
I said that like I knew how to get myself out of a channeling. They’d ended before with either a death, a pass-out, or someone shaking me from the present.
For some reason, my heart raced thinking about this one. Seeing the town back then and the people in it might change the way I felt about them now. And truth was, we were all different people. I sure wasn’t that same dumb 19-year-old who’d picked Jackson over Justin.
I took a deep breath to calm down, reminding myself I could be a fair and nonjudgmental bystander no matter what I saw or went through. And I could go through death again. I could do this. “I’m ready whenever you are.” I lied.
She nodded. And I stared at one of the golden fleur de lis in the wallpaper, concentrating on its curves and shimmers, trying to think of nothing.
I barely felt her entering. It was a lighter touch this time, much different than when I channeled with Jackson, Martha, or Bessilyn. They had all been heavier, more confident ghosts. Gloria was a bit reluctant, almost like she was as afraid as I was. Maybe she didn’t really want to relive this. It’s one thing to want to know what happened and a whole other thing to want to go through it again, second by second.
A mild tingling began in my fingertips, travelled up my spine, and spread across my face.
Music played all around me, along with lots of talking and laughing. The smell of adolescent sweat mixed with chips and punch.
“He was absolutely the cutest. The cutest,” a girl’s voice said while See You Later, Alligator played in the background. “He says he’s one of the richest boys on the lake.” She squealed. “His name’s Freddie. So cute.”
“You can open your eyes now,” Gloria said to me in our now-meshed mind. I looked around. A large dance floor was surrounded by a pool table and some couches. A couple of girls with short curled hair and high-waisted shorts with no shoes or socks sat on a couch in front of us. One of the girls bounced up, folding her legs underneath her. “My parents told me we can’t afford Purdue anymore. Can you believe it? They actually suggested secretarial school,” she said. “Who are they kidding?”
I didn’t recognize them. The dance floor was also filled with kids I didn’t know. Some were twirling around in a jitterbug fashion, others bobbed up and down, squatting and twisting to the beat. Most the girls were in tight long skirts but some had casual shorts or capris on and sandals like they’d thought to come straight off the lake.
Gloria was an out-of-towner, so I knew she was not going to be able to show me around. I scanned the room for people I recognized myself. Their faces were all so round, rosy, and wrinkle-free. How would I be able to tell anyone?
A chubby dark-haired college girl stood at the entrance to the dance hall. She was wearing a puffy pink dress and an awkwardly large corsage. Every once in a while, she looked over at the tall, thin man beside her who was wearing a suit slightly too short for him. And I knew instantly who they were. Mildred and her now-husband, Horace.
“Please don’t leave me here alone. Promise me you won’t go off with anyone,” Gloria begged the girl standing by her side who was wearing a tight-fitting black dress with her bleach blonde hair done in a high ponytail, and more makeup on than Shelby Winehouse (and that girl was a walking makeup sample). I knew it was Annette.
Gloria went on. “He’s probably just telling you he’s the richest kid on the lake because… you know how boys are around you, Nettie. They’ll say anything.”
Annette laughed. “You think?” She smiled even broader, her penciled-on beauty mark cracked a little with her facial muscles. A boy looked her up and down and she looked back.
“Please,” Gloria said, squeezing her cousin’s hand tighter.
“Stop being such a wet rag tonight, Gloria. Gosh. Have I ever left you anywhere?” She turned her head to the side in a coy kind of way. “Okay, maybe I have, but I won’t go off with anyone tonight.” She held up three fingers on her right hand. “I solemnly swear I won’t have any fun at all tonight. I promise.”
Gloria didn’t respond and Annette pulled her onto the dance floor, almost bumping into a tall, muscular boy in a plaid shirt. He smiled at Annette and she batted her false eyelashes back at him.
“You’re the girls from California, huh?” he asked.
She grabbed onto Gloria's arm. “Los Angeles.”
He pointed to Nettie. “You were hanging around with my friend Freddie earlier, huh?”
“Well, I’m certainly not married to him,” Nettie replied, taking a step closer to the boy. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Who?” Nettie asked.
The boy rolled his eyes, and I suddenly recognized him from the way his forehead crinkled when he was annoyed. Myles Donovan, looking vaguely similar to his promotional photos around town. There was one at the gym and another in the grocery store. He owned half this town and you couldn’t go many places without feeling like he was following you.
He brought out a comb from the back pocket of his jeans and combed his hair a little. “You wanna dance?’ he asked.
He licked his lips and Nettie leaned into Gloria, grabbing her arm. “Isn’t he the cutest? The cutest. To die for.”
“I thought you were just telling me the other boy was the cutest?”
“Can’t they both be?”
Gloria talked to me. “Annette was a little bit of a flirt. She hadn’t always been that way. It was only after she started dyeing her hair last summer. Everyone told her she looked like Jayne Mansfield and she’d been nonstop ever since.”