Superstition

by Karen Robards

  “Did you ever find out who screamed?” she asked. “During the broadcast, I mean?”

  Joe couldn’t keep the mock surprise out of his voice. “Don’t tell me you don’t think it was a ghost?”

  “That’s just it,” Nicky said, refusing to rise to his bait and sounding unhappy. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few days. You don’t think it could have been Karen?”

  He had been wondering that himself, almost from the moment he had realized he had a dead woman lying under the Old Taylor Place’s pines. From what he’d been able to determine so far, the timeline made it possible. As far as anyone was admitting, Karen had last been seen in a good light with a positive identification in the kitchen, just before she had headed out the back door to take a call on her cell phone. That had been some six and a half minutes before the screams had ripped through the night. The call, which had come from Sid Levin, who confirmed that Karen had been alive and well at the end of their conversation, had ended in a normal fashion approximately one minute and fifty-eight seconds before the screams. He’d checked the timing against tapes of the TV show; again, nothing to rule Karen out as the screamer. He’d even conducted a few impromptu tests of his own—having Dave stand in various places in the yard and shriek at the top of his lungs while he listened and recorded the sounds from different locations in the house—but none of the screams he’d been able to capture had matched the ones that had provided such a shattering finale to Twenty-four Hours Investigates. But then, of course, he had to take into consideration the fact that Dave wasn’t a woman shrieking in mortal fear for her life, either.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “So far that’s kind of up in the air. You’d tell me if those screams were part of the show and you knew it, right?”

  He heard her draw in a breath.

  There was no mistaking the bristle in her tone. “I’ve already told you—”

  “I know, I know,” Joe interrupted before she could finish. “I just had to ask again, that’s all. Because I’m really not coming up with a source for those screams.”

  “So maybe you should look harder.” Bristle had turned to bite.

  “I mean to,” he said amiably.

  A beat passed.

  “My mother is a genuine psychic medium, you know.” Nicky still sounded a little hot under the collar. “She truly is able to tap into energies and emotions that the rest of us can’t.”

  “You’re saying she can talk to the dead.” If he sounded skeptical, it was an accident. The tone he was going for was strictly neutral.

  “Yes.”

  “Then would you do me a favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Would you have her get in touch with Karen Wise and ask her who killed her? It would sure save me a lot of time and effort here.”

  This time, the ensuing pause practically crackled with ill feeling.

  “You’re not funny,” Nicky said, sounding as though she was talking through her teeth.

  Joe couldn’t help it. He grinned. Maybe not, but at least he was succeeding at amusing himself. The truth was, he was getting more enjoyment out of this phone call than he had out of anything in days.

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  He was surprised at how much he didn’t want her to. “Don’t forget to send me a copy of that e-mail.”

  “I’ll do it right now. Good-bye.”

  “Nicky—”

  “Hmm?”

  “If your mother should get a message from the Great Beyond, you’ll let me know, right?”

  An indrawn breath, followed by a sharp click, was his answer.

  She’d hung up on him. Joe was still grinning as he followed suit.

  In his before days, he wouldn’t have been able to resist putting some moves on her. But now it was after—and fortunately for his good intentions, she was in Chicago, and therefore out of reach.

  Joe tried to tell himself that that was a good thing as he padded back through the living room to the kitchen, where his computer was set up on the part of the kitchen table that he didn’t use for eating. Moonlight filtered in through the uncurtained glass top half of the back door, making the scratched metal countertops and scarred oak cabinets look almost presentable. The appliances were white and cheap, the floor was linoleum in a speckled gray faux-stone pattern, and the rectangular dark pine table with four matching chairs that took pride of place in the center of the room was a ninety-nine-dollar special from Wal-Mart.

  Like the rest of the house, which was one of the small, single-level dwellings located in the interior of the island, the kitchen looked better with the lights off. Not that that was the reason he didn’t bother turning them on. It was simply that he could see well enough to move about without them—and turning on the lights no longer served any purpose for him other than that.

  Turning them on did not, for example, make the things that went bump in the night go away.

  Not for him. Not anymore.

  Ignoring the shape-shifting shadows lurking in the corners had gotten relatively easy, Joe reflected as he sat down at the table, lit a cigarette, turned on his computer, and checked his latest messages. Ignoring Brian—

  “Whoever this dude is, he’s one bad poet,” Brian observed right on cue from behind him, apparently reading Nicky’s e-mail, too.

  —was harder. The guy popped up without rhyme or reason, with unnerving unpredictability, looking and sounding as real as he ever had when he was alive. When Joe had finally, hesitantly, told the doctors at the hospital where he was being treated about seeing Brian, they’d hemmed and hawed and adjusted and readjusted his medication to control his “hallucinations,” and finally referred him to a damned psychiatrist. At the time, Joe had been so bothered by the sudden appearances and disappearances of his new best buddy that he’d actually gone along with that and unburdened himself to the sympathetically nodding shrink. But when he’d seen where that was heading—they were writing him off as a nutjob, saying that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and should be relegated to desk work or retired from the force altogether—he’d seen the handwriting on the wall.

  If he ever wanted to get back to living a normal life, to say nothing of being a cop, he was going to have to suck it up and learn to live with his life as it was after, Brian and the shadows and all.

  With that in mind, he told the shrink, and the doctors, and everyone else he’d been stupid enough to mention the matter to, that Brian and the shadows were gone, that he didn’t see them anymore.

  The shrink had been pleased, chalking it up to the success of his therapy. The doctors had been pleased, assuring him that no more Brian meant that he was getting well. The department had been pleased, because before he’d been a hell of a cop and even now, even in the after, he still had a lot of good friends in the brotherhood who were looking out for him.

  Which was how he had gotten offered this sinecure position on this sleepy little island. When the situation had been made clear to him, when he realized he couldn’t go back to his old job, the powers-that-be had gone into networking mode and come up with this. He had, in effect, been retired at age thirty-six.

  Not that he had protested. Instead, at the time, being shuffled off to paradise had suited him just fine. The slow pace, the undemanding job, the sun, the sea, the beach, the bikini-clad babes at the beach—hell, what was not to like? Ninety-nine percent of the guys he’d hung with back in Jersey would have killed for a gig like this. Every time he talked with one of them, which was less and less often these days, they told him so.

  But the truth was, he was starting to get bored.

  Printing out a copy of the e-mail that Nicky had sent him—without so much as a “hi” or a “nice talking to you” of her own added on, which he interpreted to mean that she was definitely ticked off—Joe reluctantly faced facts: Paradise was in the eye of the beholder.

  Brian—ghost or hallucination or whatever the hel
l else he was—notwithstanding, he was clearly recovering. First Nicky, then the murder, had proven that all the usual juices were starting to flow again. He’d gotten a taste of the intensity that had once been as much a part of his life as the air he breathed, and he rediscovered what he’d actually known all along: He craved it.

  “Hang on a minute, I was looking for something,” Brian said as Joe started the process of turning off the computer. The protest—which might or might not have been in his head, but sure as hell sounded as though it had been uttered right next to his ear—made Joe realize that the computer had been scrolling crazily back through his e-mails, even as the newest one, the one from Nicky, was printing out.

  Joe gritted his teeth and punched the final button that made the screen go dark. If he hadn’t seen Brian dead himself, he thought savagely, he would have had real trouble believing that the guy wasn’t actually standing right there in the kitchen with him, being the same damned nuisance he had been in life.

  But he had seen Brian dead, which meant that Brian couldn’t be there in the kitchen. That being the case, Joe ignored whatever was there in favor of standing up and collecting his printout.

  He would put it in the file that he’d carried home from the office with him, and then he was going to go back to . . .

  There was someone in his backyard.

  10

  JOE’S HEAD WHIPPED AROUND as he caught just a glimpse of movement, a flash of moonlight on metal, like a watch or something, through the ratty mini-blinds that covered the glass-set-into-a-wooden-frame back door. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to send another revivifying jolt of adrenaline through his nervous system. Stubbing out his cigarette, he moved as silently as a cat to the door to look out.

  Careful to stay out of sight, he scanned his moonlit backyard, which was about as big as a postage stamp. There was a fence around it, a would-be privacy fence of rickety upright wood pickets that might actually have provided some privacy if about half the pickets hadn’t been broken or missing—something he’d been meaning to fix ever since he’d moved into the rental property five months before. As it was, three other households—the two on either side of him and the one directly behind him—had at least a partial view of his little patch of earth whenever they were out in their yards. The deck, which was a long, narrow, low-to-the-ground oasis of treated wood planks, took up about a fifth of the available space. Beyond the deck, short tough beach grass, green as a dollar bill when seen in the daylight, fought with a profusion of taller weeds and the remains of the previous owner’s perennial garden for supremacy. A six-foot-tall stand of sunflowers grew wild against the north side of the fence, and a trio of thick old blackberry bushes, their dusty boughs heavy with leaves and thorns but devoid of berries, huddled together in one corner. A black gum with a gnarled trunk and low, spreading branches grew just beyond the deck on the south side of the yard. Its thick foliage partially obscured Joe’s view.

  But there was no doubt about it: There was someone in his backyard. He—Joe was willing to bet dollars to doughnuts it was a man—was over by the blackberry bushes now, bending low, clearly up to no good. The darkness kept Joe from seeing more of him than his crouched shape outlined against the broken pickets. He spared a thought for his Chief, which rested on the small table beside his bed, and his department-issued weapon, which was at that moment tucked away in the glove compartment of his cruiser. But fetching even the Chief would take precious seconds, by which time the intruder might well have gone.

  That being the case, Joe opened the back door, stuck his head out, and yelled, “Hey, you! Freeze!” into the dark and hoped to hell whoever it was wasn’t armed.

  The intruder jumped at least three feet in the air and gasped out, “Crap!” as he whirled around to face the door.

  Even before Joe heard that “crap,” he knew who it was.

  “Jesus Christ, Dave, what the hell are you doing prowling around in my backyard in the middle of the night?” he demanded with disgust as his Number Two started walking toward him. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

  “I would’ve called, but I didn’t want to wake you up.” Dave sounded sheepish. Joe’s eyes narrowed as he observed that something was trotting along beside Dave, something a little less than knee-high and about a yard long and round as a barrel. “I guess you were already awake, though, huh?”

  “Looks like it,” Joe said grimly, eyeing Dave’s companion. “What’s up?”

  “Well, see, it’s, um, Amy.” Dave stepped up onto the deck, and his barrel-shaped friend came right along with him. The do-it-yourself deck creaked under their combined weight. “There was an, um, accident, and she’s madder than a wet hen. She said I had to choose between her and Cleo. So I brought Cleo over here to stay for a day or two, just until Amy cools down. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Like hell.” Cleo was Cleopatra, Dave’s beloved pot-bellied pig. That was what was trotting along beside him, and that was not spending a day or two in Joe’s backyard. Paradise he could deal with if he had to. Paradise with a pig in it he could not.

  “Joe, please. Amy said that if I come back with Cleo, then she’s throwing me out.”

  Joe stared at his Assistant Chief. Dave’s eyes were wide and pleading. His round face was as innocent-looking as a little kid’s. He was dressed in what looked like cotton pajamas, some dark color, complete with button-up shirt, with his work shoes on his feet.

  The guy was so clueless that you had to feel for him.

  “Get in here.” Joe stepped back so Dave could enter, then glared down at the pig, which was kind of a grayish-black with floppy ears and a squiggly tail. He blocked it with his legs when it gave every indication that it intended to trot inside the house at its master’s heels. It looked up at him then, with little black eyes that he was ready to swear gleamed with intelligence.

  “Not you,” he said to it, and shut the door in the animal’s face.

  “Hang tight,” he said to Dave as he flipped on the light. The sudden brightness made Dave blink, and did the small kitchen no favors. “I’ll be right back.”

  Joe headed for the bedroom to throw on some clothes, glad to realize as he did so that Brian seemed to have vanished. That was the thing about his experience with the undead: There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. Brian and the shadows just popped up at random. If he’d been the kind of guy who lost his cool easily, the whole thing would have been damned unsettling.

  The worst part was that there didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot he could do to make it go away. Basically, the only thing left that he hadn’t tried was an exorcism.

  “Want a beer?” Dave asked morosely as Joe, now clad in jeans and a T-shirt, rejoined him in the kitchen. Dave was sitting at the clear end of the table, nursing a bottle of Bud Light. And yes, he was wearing pajamas, a matching set of pants and top: smooth, navy cotton piped in white with big white buttons up the front. Joe hadn’t even realized they made those anymore. “There’s plenty in the fridge.”

  “Yeah.” And never mind that he was being offered his own beer out of his own refrigerator. Joe helped himself.

  “Love sucks, don’t it?” Dave took a swallow of beer.

  Watching Dave swig beer was sort of like watching Mister Rogers do it, Joe discovered, but his Number Two looked so thoroughly miserable that Joe felt sorry for him anyway.

  “So, you want to tell me about it?” Beer in hand, Joe leaned back against the counter and settled in to listen. The role of father confessor was not one he wanted to assume, but Dave was so far out of his depth with Amy that it was like watching a minnow swimming around all unknowing in a tank with a shark. Having already over the course of the past few weeks had his nerves stretched to the limit as he waited for the inevitable moment when the poor guy was devoured, Joe discovered that he couldn’t just watch and wait anymore.

  “Amy says Cleo attacked her.”

  Go pig! was what Joe almost said, but he managed to swallow it in time. Instead,
he went with a neutral “Oh, yeah?”

  Dave nodded, swilling his beer and looking despondent. “Amy had to work late tonight, see, and when she got home, she came in through the back door so she wouldn’t wake anybody up. Cleo was sleeping in the kitchen, and she must have thought Amy was a burglar or something, because Amy says she went after her.”

  Since Amy’s “late nights at work” had been arousing Joe’s suspicions for some time, Joe’s sympathies remained firmly with the pig.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said again for want of something better.

  Dave took another swallow of beer. “I was sound asleep, and then I heard Amy screaming and cussing a blue streak and Cleo squealing and all this commotion like you wouldn’t believe. So I jumped up out of bed and ran into the kitchen, and there was Amy, standing up in the middle of the table hollering her head off, and Cleo up on her back legs with her front hooves on the table trying to get at her.”

  Dave shook his head, remembering. Joe couldn’t help it: At the picture this conjured up, he had to smile.

  “Go ahead and laugh if you want to. I don’t blame you.” Dave didn’t miss the smile. It was a measure of his distress that he managed only a half-hearted grimace in return. “It was a sight, let me tell you. So then the kids come running in screaming, and Amy is screaming, and I’m yelling, and it all must have scared the daylights out of poor Cleo, because she hopped right up on the table with Amy.”

  By this time, Joe’s smile had turned into a full-fledged grin.

  “Amy must have loved that,” he said as Dave paused to take a fortifying sip.

  “Oh, yeah.” Dave rolled his eyes. “So she shrieked like somebody was killing her and jumped off the table. Then, wouldn’t you know, as soon as she hit the floor, her feet slipped out from under her and she sat on her butt and cracked her elbow on a chair. That’s when she said Cleo had to go. I thought after I got Cleo outside and her and the kids calmed down that she’d kind of get over it, but she didn’t. She said either Cleo was leaving or she was.”