When I was a baby and had shown Mum that I was also able to see spirits, Mum worked hard and ‘turned off’ my gift. Now with Ariel waking it up again, it was on full force and had totally upended my nice, peaceful, well-run life within a few short weeks. Professionally and personally.
If there was one person I needed now, it was my angel. She didn’t exactly give me a telephone number, so I was presented with the problem of being able to contact her. Maybe if I relaxed like I did when I wanted to separate from my body, she’d be able to hear me. I settled onto the bed, closed my eyes, and concentrated on her name, filling my mind with her beautiful image. Golden hair, flawless features, and a calming peace that could settle wars. “Ariel, if you can hear me, I need Elliot here with me. Please—bring him back to me. Now!”
There was a brilliant flash of light which I saw even behind my closed eyelids and a band of energy rocked my body. Elliot stood before me, albeit more than a little confused. “It worked!” then I gasped, “It worked.” Ariel hadn’t minced words. She said she’d help. And she had.
I gaped at the man I’d fallen helplessly in love with. Stupid I know, to fall in love with a ghost, but I couldn’t seem to help it. When I’d first laid eyes on Elliot I was overcome with an unbelievable sense of familiarity which had turned quickly into longing, yearning, and undeniable love. I’d been inconceivably drawn to him and against my better judgment, and my mother’s express wishes, I’d tried to help him remember who he was. To me, he wasn’t just a ghost. He was a spirit with amnesia.
He didn’t remember his life or anything about himself. I couldn’t leave him to drift about eternity in the Grey-Mists, not knowing who he was or what his life had been. Then he remembered a little about himself. He was a crooked cop, on the take, and he had gotten his partner shot on the night he died, but I was not going to believe that about him. Time and time again, he’d shown me he was a man with integrity and morals, something criminals were desperately short on. Even though he chose to believe the worst about himself, I was going to uncover the truth about him.
As for our future? Well, what future could a dead man and an alive surgeon have? At the moment, not much, except if I managed to get back into the Grey-Mists where I could touch him, kiss him, and maybe…well, probably…do a lot more to him, if I had my way. It was the one place we could be together.
Ever since Mum had seen Elliot she’d taken an immediate dislike to him. It didn’t make any difference that Elliot had the esteemed manners of the prior century. He’d come for me, specifically to help me with my ability, and that meant that not only would there be no room for a boyfriend of the more physical type, but no wedding and no grandchildren. Between Laura and myself, the pitter-patter of little feet was becoming a far distant dream for her. One that she clung to with every fibre of her being.
Elliot frowned, looking about, “Why am I back here? How did I get back here?”
“I asked Ariel and she brought you back. Where were you?”
“You care where I was?”
Crap. I hadn’t actually told Elliot how I felt either. That wouldn’t be fair. I wasn’t going to ask him to wait until I turned old and grey and died to be together. He had a life in the afterlife to look forward to and I wasn’t going to hold him back. “Well, when I saw you in the jaws of a Soul-Eater, feasting on your soul until there’s nothing left, then yeah, I care!”
Elliot grinned and looked pleased with himself.
“Not the reaction I expected,” I said, my worry-turning-anger spiking.
“I think you might care for me, Dr Hunter,” he said.
I flipped my hair over my shoulder. “Well…of course I care. What would I do about all of those lost wandering souls out there without you?”
I did care for him. Deeply. Even though I wanted to protect him, I also needed to protect myself, too. Once said, those words that were in my heart could not be taken back. And they could open me up to a whole world of hurt. If I didn’t say anything, I had a sliver of a chance to protect my heart from being smashed into irretrievable pieces. There was a very big chance that I might not have this ability forever, and then where would we be? Elliot would be hanging around and I wouldn’t even be able to see him. Both of us would be hanging in a state of immobility from opposite sides of the grave. I wrapped my arms around myself, warding off an internal chill.
“You disappeared and didn’t come back again. I can’t deal with the dead around here without you. I’m in a hospital, the second worst place to be for a person like me to be, well, after a cemetery that is. Why did you disappear like that!” Or a morgue. I shivered. That’s where I’d first met Elliot. Not the romantic beginnings I’d always thought I’d have when I met the man I’d fall in love with.
It was cowardly, I know. But it was all I could manage. I wanted to tell him how I felt. That I was in love with him from the depths of my soul. That if he wasn’t here for me, then I couldn’t function with this ability. That I would be totally lost and alone and cold inside forever. The desire to tell him hung heavy in my heart, urging me to utter them. But I didn’t.
Not only had Elliot had saved my life, from being on the wrong end of Paul Richards’ gun, he’d also saved my life from being attacked by the Soul-Eaters in the Grey-Mists. If the beautiful, silvery cord that connected me to my body had broken while I’d been there, it would have meant I wouldn’t have been able to come back into my body. He’d made sure he delivered me back to the living world, even though I’d pleaded with him to let me stay.
If I’d stayed there, I’d have been with him. Something I hadn’t quite forgiven him for.
“I saw something—someone—familiar to me. A face. From my life.” A pulse ticked at his temple as he clenched his jaws in a lock-tight clench.
Whoever this person was, it might mean that Elliot thought less of himself than he did now. “What? How?”
He frowned, sitting next to me, but not indenting the bed at all. He didn’t impact anything in this world and I hated that. “When I entered the Grey-Mists, he saw me and he disappeared right in front of my eyes.”
If there was one thing I knew about the Grey-Mists, it was that literally, anything could happen. A man disappearing was completely acceptable. I shrugged, “So?”
“It doesn’t seem right, somehow. If I saw someone I knew there, I’d want to talk to them. The Grey-Mists is a confusing place. I wandered there all those years and didn’t see a thing. Surely, when he saw me, he’d want to talk to me. Especially since I knew him. No matter what he did while he was alive.”
I wanted to at least hold his hand, but I couldn’t do a damn thing about that either. “I’d want to talk to you.”
His lips curved into a little smile and his eyes softened as he looked at me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was doing when I went after George. There wasn’t time. I ended up following the Soul-Eater through the Grey-Mists. Campbell screamed so loud I was able to follow the sound a long way. But it moved fast, faster than I could chase and I lost the trail.”
“And who was the man?”
Elliot’s eyes turned hard. I watched his jaw clench and unclench. “You think I’m good, but the more I remember about my life, the more I see what I really was, the more it just confirms what I know about myself.”
“You don’t remember your whole life. Only bits. The bad bits.”
Elliot pushed the rim of his hat back off his forehead with his index finger and grinned at me. His gaze softened and I read sadness there, “You’re too good for me, Cassie. But it seems you’re stuck with me. I promise I’ll try my best, but what I know is that people don’t change. Alive or dead.”
My heart did a little flip. He dressed like an early twentieth-century cop. Trench coat, grey three-piece suit, starched collar, tie. Even if he took his coat and hat off, when he reappeared, he was always wearing them. I figured he must have been young when he died. Early thirties. It was the look in his eyes, that aged look when people saw too much of the bad side o
f life, that made him seem older.
I held his gaze, “No. They don’t. And you need to see what I see.”
Elliot’s smile turned wistful, “Your trust is infallible. I’m grateful. The simple truth is I don’t deserve it.” He held up his hand when I went to speak. “The face I saw was a criminal from my time. Black John was his name. Murderer. Thief. Gangster. You name it, he had his hand in it.”
“Someone you were investigating.” I didn’t like the way he was so adamant he hadn’t any good in him. I didn’t like the way this conversation was going.
“More than that. I was investigating him, yes — but I was also doing business with him.”
I frowned, “You could be remembering bits and pieces of your investigation. You might have been posing as someone who wanted to do business with him to draw him out.”
“He recruited me. I sold and he bought. He asked me to do things for him…and I did. Bad things, Cassie. Things I won’t ever tell you about.”
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense. Elliot a gangster. I didn’t want to believe him. Couldn’t. “No!”
“He was there the night I died. It was him I was going to meet. Not to arrest him, but to work for him. I was on the take, Cassie. Working both ends. A cop — and a gangster.”
“No!” I stood, shaking. I put my hands over my ears, stood with my back to him, but he went on relentlessly.
“He was one of the vilest men I’d met in my life. And beyond. He raped. Murdered. Did it all with a smile on his face. He was the most immoral man I had ever met. He didn’t care what he did to anyone. Who he destroyed. He was only happy when he got his own way, other than that, he was a nasty piece of work. He was angry and underhanded and smart. He knew the streets and knew how to manipulate. I knew all that about him, and I wanted to work for him. I went there that night knowing what I was doing was lawless and immoral. I went despite everything, Cassie. If you want to know the character of a man, look at the men who are his friends.”
“Do you remember everything about him?” I turned to him.
His mouth formed into a straight line, “Do I want to remember any more? Maybe what I remember is enough. Anything else…and it’s just more damning.”
I clutched at straws. Desperate. “Then you don’t know the entire truth. Only bits and pieces. You can’t come to a conclusion if you don’t know everything.”
His sad smile was fleeting, a ghosting ironical twist of his lips, “You trust so easily, even when the evidence is stacked against you. I admire your optimism. Maybe in death, I can face what I didn’t in life. Maybe this is why I’m stuck between worlds. Maybe the more pertinent question we should be considering is why I saw him at all. Black John would well and truly have died and passed to his next life by this year. He shouldn’t be in the Grey-Mists.”
“What if he was stuck like you? What if the same thing happened to you and to him? It would explain why you saw him.”
Elliot put his hands on his hips, pacing, revealing his trim waist and slim hips. I noticed he did that when he was thinking and I didn’t mind it at all. “It would make sense. The likes of us don’t get to Heaven. Maybe we don’t pass to anything. Not even to Hell.”
I gulped, my mouth dry. I couldn’t bear to think about Elliot anywhere else other than right next to me. Heaven would be a great second best though. “It can’t be right. It’s not right.”
“But it’s a possibility. And a lead worth investigating. A start.”
“It doesn’t explain why he was there at the same time as a Soul-Eater.”
Elliot stopped pacing. “No. It doesn’t,” he said slowly. “That has to be more than a simple coincidence. In the seventy-eight years I was in the mists, nothing like that happened, then in one day I see both Black John and a Soul-Eater. Why?”
“We need details. Not bits and pieces.”
“We need leads,” Elliot said.
This was something Laura could help me with. I opened the side drawer in the little cabinet beside my bed, pulled out my phone and dialed Laura, “She can get Thadius to do a background search on Black John,” I explained as I waited for her to pick up.
“Everything okay?” Laura sounded stressed. I didn’t blame her, based on what I’d recently put her through. Also, the fact that both Mum and Dad had moved in with her while I was in the hospital didn’t help. I skipped recent events and told her Elliot had remembered the name from his past.
“Hell, Cassie. This is getting bad,” was her down-to-earth answer.
“Worse than being semi-ripped apart by a Soul-Eater and speaking to an all-powerful angel, you mean?”
Laura huffed. “Mum isn’t going to like this.”
“Then don’t tell her. What she doesn’t know she can’t get stressed about. Think Thadius can whip up a search for me?” I turned the phone to loudspeaker so that Elliot could hear. Thadius had helped us when Laura and I had researched Henry’s will. And he’d uncovered some early clues to Elliot’s life. Including a wife and child he’d preceded. Another chink in the armour that convinced Elliot that he was no good, and something else I had to prove he was wrong about. People didn’t choose when they died.
Thadius was one of those enigmatic characters that made me really wonder about my sister’s past. She clearly hadn’t told me everything about her job as a paranormal journalist. If that’s what she actually did; now I wasn’t so sure. One thing I was sure of was, she had a lot of explaining to do when I got out of here.
“I don’t have to research Black John. I run up against his name all the time when I investigate prison hauntings. Meanest SOB Melbourne produced in the mid-half of the twentieth century. Police couldn’t pin anything on him, no matter how hard they tried and no matter what he did. He made lots of enemies. Ruled with a dirty iron fist. Even his own crew hated him. In the mid-fifties, he was shot down at the docklands surrounded by his crew in broad daylight. Fascinatingly, no-one saw anything. Even in death, he slipped through police fingers.”
“Sounds like him.” Elliot stopped pacing to listen to Laura’s run down.
The information added up to what Elliot had told me but still, I didn’t want to believe it, but I stubbornly held onto another thin straw. “I need personal details, Laura. Was Black John married? Did he have children? Who were his friends?”
“I’ll ring you back and put you on conference with Thadius.” Two minutes later my phone rang.
“You are two of the most interesting sisters I’ve ever met,” Thadius said.
“Hi, Thadius.” I quickly gave him a run-down of what we needed.
“Let me see…” I heard a few clicks of a computer keyboard, “He had a wife, Estelle. She died in nineteen fifty-two. Survived by two daughters. Adele and Lorna. Adele moved to the United Kingdom. Probably too ashamed of her father to remain in the country. Lorna stayed in Melbourne. Made good use of her father’s money by the sounds of it. Seems to be a bit of a shady character also. Did a stint in prison in nineteen sixty-six for running a brothel. When she came out, she married Arthur King, the son of her father’s business associate. Both husband and wife started Kings Loans. They had one child. A boy named Leonard in nineteen sixty-nine.”
“Kings Loans,” I mulled. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“Kings Loans became Kings Building Society, then after the GFC became Kings Crown. Superannuation and financial advisors.”
“Superannuation?”
“Accountants. Super. Loans. Property acquisition. They’ve been through the courts recently for not paying dividends,” Thadius said.
“That’s right,” I clicked my fingers. The story had begun filtering into the news a year ago. “Kings Crown was accused of underpaying hundreds of dividends for superannuation accounts, saying money was lost on the market, but they’ve been unable to prove any of it. They’re up for millions if they lose.”
“They’ve been asked to open their books for commonwealth forensic accountants, but they refused.”
“Bla
ck John’s legacy continues,” I commented.
“Leonard has friends in high places. A handful of politicians. Cops. I’ve got a picture of him recently having dinner with the police commissioner. He nearly did time for some creative accountancy some years ago. Didn’t pay taxes. And got off.” Silence, then, “Hang on,” there were a few more keystrokes.
I didn’t do waiting well, “What is it?”
“This is bad.”
“Bad? What’s bad?”
“It involves Elliot. Or rather one of his descendants.”
I glanced at Elliot. I had told him about his wife and child, but I hadn’t said anything further than that. Of course, there would be descendants. His child would have grown and had children of his own. The fact Elliot had grandchildren walking around was odd, considering he didn’t look much over thirty-five. A guilty twinge prodded my conscience since I hadn’t been upfront with the information, knowing it would have pushed him further over the edge at the time.
“Okay. Leonard King is in a bit of hot water now, right? Been leading the courts for months, stalling for time. Seems he’s put himself out to hire a team of hot-shot lawyers. Privately.”
“He’s paying them?”
“They’re now official Kings Crown employees. They have no affiliation with other law firms.”
“And what’s this got to do with Elliot?”
“A lot actually. He’s hired Elliot’s grandson as his chief lawyer. Thomas Stone.”
“My…grandson?” Elliot looked so lost. My heart gave a huge lurch. This wasn’t just anybody we were talking about. This was someone Elliot would have deeply cared for.
Elliot had been cheated not only out of his life but a future life with his family. Getting to know his son and his grandchildren. Growing old with them. Years he was cheated out of.
“I’m not sure if he knows what he’s getting himself into,” Thadius continued. “Seems like Thomas is pretty clean.”
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