Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1)

by Rasmussen, Jen

  Instead I thought mostly about Nat, especially the further north I got, creeping ever closer to the place where he died, and the place I thought I avenged him. Yet there Helen was, doing the same thing she was doing before Nat came, as if neither he nor I had ever been there. She’d reversed any meaning I could find in Nat’s death. Bitch.

  All these years later, and it still wasn’t over. I tortured myself for a while with memories of the only member of my family who’d ever felt like family. The way he smiled, especially when he smiled at Charlie. They’d had a similar sense of humor, those two, so their house was pretty much a den of constant laughter. I loved going there. Even buttoned-up stick-in-the-ass Kevin loved going there. You just couldn’t help it. But he could be fierce too, Nat, so fierce. With apparitions, with our mother when she needed it, with haters of any kind.

  Someone had thrown a brick through their window, when he and Charlie first bought their house. Nat didn’t cower in the corner afraid of broken glass. He ran directly outside. Apparently the guy who did it thought going on foot was a better idea than driving, probably so nobody could get a plate number and identify him. Apparently he also thought gay men couldn’t fight. Both were mistakes.

  Nat ran that fucker down and beat the crap out of him. No charges were ever filed on either side, but it wasn’t Nat and Charlie who moved out of the neighborhood two months later. Charlie was a little uncomfortable, thinking they’d never make friends in a place where one of their first actions upon arrival was driving away a long-time resident. But it went exactly the other way. They’d all hated that guy. Amy Lin baked Nat and Charlie a cake.

  The first time I saw Nat hold Warren, now there was a bittersweet memory. I was happy for him, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt, too. All my struggles with infertility, all the fights with Kevin, all the poison that was being injected into our marriage, straight into my ass along with the fertility drugs. And there was my gay brother, getting a baby before I did.

  I tried not to let my resentment show, but he knew. Of course he knew. And he understood. That was the amazing thing about Nat. Maybe because he’d spent so much of his own life being judged, he rarely judged others. Even when they deserved it.

  Well, live others, anyway. He pronounced plenty of judgments on dead people, same as I did. Sentenced them to eternity in a netherworld he, presumably, knew nothing about. I couldn’t think of it any other way. Cyrus might have known the truth, but I couldn’t bear the idea that Nat knew what we were really doing and never told me. That was simply impossible. And if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to know. My brother was dead. My only comfort was being left to hero-worship him in peace.

  Brian had wisely fled his house, but the only hotel he could find was forty-five minutes away. Everything in the Berkshires was booked solid in the fall, and he had the extra complication of finding one that would allow his one remaining dog. He answered the door almost before I finished knocking, gray hair standing at odd angles, eyes bloodshot. If I didn’t know what he’d been through, I’d have said he was on a bender. At his side was a very cowed-looking corgi. And in my experience, corgis are not easily cowed.

  By way of greeting, Brian made a helpless sort of gesture at the dog. “Aristotle is the last one. I found Plato and Augustine in the barn. They...” He trailed off with a jagged breath.

  I felt sick to my stomach. I murmured something appropriate but not nearly adequate.

  He led me into the kitchenette and unwrapped some packaged cheese and pepperoni, which he put on a paper plate with some crackers while we went over things. Things like the state of the bodies of the animals they’d killed. By the sounds of it, Roderick had been at Plato and Augustine with his teeth. I wanted to kill that little shit more than ever.

  I didn’t mention anything about a fee, and Brian didn’t ask. Which was good, because the fact that the reason I wouldn’t dream of taking money was that this was my fault wasn’t really a conversation I wanted to have. Especially in front of Aristotle. I fed him crackers under the table. I don’t think I was even being very secret about it, but Brian didn’t seem to mind.

  “What about personal items for them?” I asked. This hadn’t been a problem last time, and I assumed wouldn’t be again. Helen and Roderick’s murders held a position of some notoriety in those parts, and some of their things had been saved through the years, passed from owner to owner as part of the sale, like window treatments.

  But Brian shook his head. “Gone. Besides the ones we used, most of them were wrecked in a flood I had in the basement.”

  “Well, that’s a problem.” I chewed at my lower lip while I tried to think of a solution. “What about the garden? Something from the land itself? Home would have been dear to them. Or...” Or what? Because the garden idea is pretty stupid.

  “Actually, I had an idea,” said Brian.

  Oh good, I hope yours isn’t stupid too.

  “Helen and Roderick and Jacob are there,” he said.

  “Jacob? You didn’t tell me—”

  “No, I don’t mean their ghosts. I mean their bodies.”

  “You what?”

  “There’s a family plot at the edge of the woods on the south side of the property. It goes back to the seventeen-hundreds. And our Turners are in it.”

  For a second I was distracted by the sadness of this. “I hope they didn’t bury Jacob beside the little boy he killed.”

  “No, he’s on the opposite side. And his stone is kind of... well, you’ll see.”

  “And why will I see?” I thought I might know where he was going with this, but I hoped I was wrong.

  I wasn’t. “Well, what was more dear to them than their lives? Each other’s lives? I thought about their bones.” Brian just shrugged when he saw the look on my face. “I know, that’s why I didn’t want to do it myself. Plus I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”

  Well there you go. Just when I was at a career crossroads, here was a new and exciting opportunity in grave robbery. “Great. When do we start?”

  If Brian had his way, the answer to that question would have been somewhere around never, even though it was his idea. He insisted on having breakfast the next morning before we checked out, because we’d need our strength. Then he had to stop and buy gloves for digging. Then at a different store for bottles of water and granola bars, so we had snacks while we were out there. I bit back a dozen snarky comments during all this stalling. I couldn’t blame him for being terrified to go back to his house. But I also didn’t know how long digging up bodies and stealing their bones would take, having no prior experience in the matter, and I was getting impatient to get it over with.

  “Have you considered moving?” I asked when we were approaching his place at last.

  “Of course. I almost certainly will,” Brian said. “But we have to do this first. It would be unconscionable to sell it to someone in this condition.”

  I nodded. I had to respect him for that.

  “It wouldn’t matter if we wrecked it, would it?” he asked. “Just tore the house down?”

  “No. It’s the place they’re anchored to, not the actual wood and bricks.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Brian gave a resigned sigh as he turned his pickup truck into his long driveway.

  Helen Turner’s eighteenth-century farmhouse was a perfect place for a haunting. It sat at the sunless base of a small mountain, fifteen miles from the nearest town, three from the nearest neighbor. No need to worry about Helen’s death-date approaching, at least. She and Roderick had been murdered in February, with snow sitting heavy over the fields and their house wrapped in ice and no birds in the sky. I imagined what it would be like in this isolated, unforgiving place in the winter. Was that enough to drive Jacob Turner into darkness, unable to hang on to his sanity for just a few more weeks until the thaw? Could it have been that simple? How many other families he’d destroyed, when he destroyed his own. Families who’d bought that house. My family.

  I got out of Brian’s t
ruck and stood for a full minute looking up at the sun shining behind all those gables, the neat garden, the black shutters. It was like a postcard. It was horrible.

  We didn’t go inside. Instead we went to the barn for shovels. I wished he’d just bought some of those at the home improvement store where he bought the gloves. The blood stains on the concrete floor made me stop short, halfway through the door, and the eggs Brian had forced me to eat earlier curdled in my stomach. I’ve banished baby-killers and axe murderers, and I’ve seen photos that would give most ladies the vapors. I wouldn’t say I qualify as squeamish. But animals, for whatever reason, are different. Especially dogs.

  Aristotle had refused to get out of the truck. I went back and sat with him until Brian found the shovels.

  The one perk of haunted land is that it comes cheap; Brian’s property was huge. It was a long walk across the fields to the edge of the woods, and a pleasant one only for Aristotle, who didn’t mind mud. Some of the soft ground was completely impassable thanks to a long stretch of rain. In the end it took us over an hour to get out there.

  While we took a break for a snack and a drink, Aristotle huddled underneath a tree and didn’t even beg for granola. The sullen-looking clouds looked like they might be building up to something, and I hoped it was anticipation of a storm that was making him so anxious. I didn’t like to think about the other possible causes. I’d never dug up an apparition’s body before, but I had a hunch that it wouldn’t be welcome. Especially if they had an idea of what we were going to do with those bones, which after two rituals—three, if you counted getting out of the netherworld—Helen and Roderick most likely did.

  Jacob’s grave was at the back, set apart from the others, where the incline of the land and the tree line worked together to keep it in perpetual shade. It was marked by a small, chipped black stone with, as far as I could see, no epitaph of any kind.

  “How do you know it’s his?” I asked. “There’s nothing written on it.”

  “It’s on the back.” Brian gestured for me to come around the other side of the grave. There was barely room for us both to squat beside the stone, with the aspens crowding us, threatening to consume the grave itself. Brian pushed aside the ferns so I could see the base of the stone on that side: JACOB TURNER, MURDERER.

  Helen and Roderick’s graves, by contrast, were in a place of honor, surrounded by a knee-high wrought iron fence and marked by elaborate stones, despite Helen being a Turner only by marriage. It was something I saw a lot in my line of work: murder victims got whitewashed into heroes, no matter how bad they’d been in life.

  But of course, Helen hadn’t been bad at all. I bet the people who buried her here would have been shocked to the point of disbelief, if someone told them how spiteful she would become in death.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if I might get just as spiteful, if I watched someone stab Warren to shreds. My mind wouldn’t hold the thought long.

  Helen’s stone had, ironically enough, an angel etched into it, wings spread wide. But the angel’s face was not beatific. Maybe it was just because I knew whose grave she was guarding, but she looked vengeful to me. Below her outstretched arms was a verse:

  Remember friends as you pass by

  As you are now so once was I

  As I am now you so must be

  Prepare for death and follow me

  As you are now so once was I. The similarity to my own thoughts a moment before was jarring. And I didn’t even want to think about Prepare for death and follow me, not while I was standing in that place.

  And beside her, Roderick, a lamb resting on top of his little stone. A voice we loved is silent. Did Roderick even have a voice? Had I ever heard anything but snarls and cries and awful laughter from him? I didn’t think so.

  I stared down at them and nearly started to cry for these people who had been not only savagely killed, but twisted into monsters in the process. The injustice of it. The sadness.

  But then I remembered about Brian’s horse and his dogs. I remembered about Nat.

  “Let’s get moving,” I said to Brian, and I thrust my shovel into the dirt.

  I don’t care how it looks in the movies, I can tell you that digging up graves is not easy. It took us hours, during which we became achy and hungry and not a little bit cranky. (Granola bars, really that’s it? If you knew you were going to dick around for the entire freaking morning, you could have at least sprung for some sandwiches.) At one point Brian accused me of having the better shovel, just because my hole was a little deeper than his. We traded shovels. Aristotle panted under his tree, although the temperature felt like it was in the high forties at best.

  It wasn’t just the digging and the low blood sugar that frayed my nerves. Every breeze was Roderick’s breath. Every twig that snapped in the woods was Helen coming for us. But they never came.

  It was approaching dinner time, and the clouds were stacked up thick, by the time we found the bones. Helen’s first. A lot of her coffin had rotted. Even her bones seemed like they weren’t all that well preserved; I had no problem snapping a finger from her hand. I tried to pretend it was a plastic skeleton, a Halloween decoration maybe. I didn’t look directly at it for any longer than necessary.

  Roderick’s bones, being smaller, took longer to locate. If he had a coffin, it was entirely gone. Eventually we found a rib.

  The first fat drops of rain fell when we were about halfway back to the farmhouse. It was already dusky by then. Brian stopped when the house was in sight. “I don’t want to do the ritual after sunset.”

  “That’s a myth, Brian. Ghosts are no more powerful at night than they are at any other time of day.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not doing this in there in the dark.”

  I sighed. “Okay. We can stay the night then. You have a guest room, right?”

  “I’m not sleeping here!”

  It was a struggle not to shout at him. I was tired and hungry and now, thanks to his inconvenient choice of location for this argument, wet. But shouting wasn’t going to get me fed and dried any quicker. I took out my phone and called the hotel we’d checked out of that morning.

  There were no rooms. I argued with Brian that it would take a long time—while standing in this wet field that was getting wetter by the second—to call around trying to find another one, and even if we did it was bound to be a long drive. We argued the point for a while. He flat out refused to do the ritual before morning, insisting that it didn’t matter if his fear of doing it in the dark was irrational, because irrational fears could aggravate a heart condition just as bad as rational ones.

  “Do you have a heart condition?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it, at this point.”

  I could see I wasn’t going to get anywhere with this. “Fine,” I said. “Then we need to spend the night here. I’m sure Helen and Roderick are worn out from their last attack.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” he said.

  “Brian. Think about it. Don’t you think if they had enough energy to hurt us, they would have done it while we were stealing their bones? The worst they can do is a few tricks to scare us, and frankly, so much the better. If they want to wear themselves out before the ritual tomorrow they’re welcome to it.”

  We went back and forth a little longer, but eventually he agreed to staying at the house. It made sense, after all. It had only been a few days since they’d killed his animals, and he had enough experience with ghosts to know how their energy supply worked. By the time we came to this decision, Aristotle was soaked and shivering and whining for his dinner, and I was pretty close to the same. There was no reason for me to second guess it.

  When we got inside Brian found me some sweats, then went to put our clothes in the dryer and make up the guest room while I rummaged through the fridge. I made everyone omelets (including Aristotle), which we ate by the fire in the living room. My mind cleared a little once I was warm and fed and not digging up a grave. And that was when I s
tarted the second guessing.

  There had been nothing from Helen and Roderick. No attempts to scare us, not even a ghostly wail just to let us know they were there. Even Aristotle was starting to relax. But their bones were there on the coffee table. Brian had wrapped them in cheesecloth and then stuffed them into a canvas shopping bag, but it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see them. I knew they were there, and I knew that somewhere, Helen and Roderick knew it too. Whatever I’d said to Brian, I didn’t like it, sitting in that house with their earthly remains, while rain pelted the windows and Brian kept chattering away, presumably to soothe himself, about pretty much nothing. It was maddening. I was sure they were toying with me. I was sure they were up to something.

  I was right on both counts.

  It’s no surprise I had nightmares that night, who wouldn’t? Warren screamed at me that I wasn’t his mother while Helen dragged him away from me, into a swamp where, I understood, she was going to bury him until he rotted, then raise him up as another Roderick, a monster made only of ill will and claws and black sharp teeth. I tried to run after them, but you can never run in dreams. Nat came and told me to just sit down and relax, and guided me to a filthy, threadbare armchair as the swamp faded into Greta Litauer’s house. Just relax, he told me, and Dr. Litauer will take care of everything. Nat morphed into Jeffrey, wearing scrubs and brandishing a pair of pliers.

  “You can’t take my teeth,” I hissed at him. “I have to bite back!” By way of demonstration, I bit down on my finger where the scar was.

  Then I was standing, and Helen was behind me. I was back in Brian’s guest room, standing in front of the mirror hanging on the back of the door. Our eyes met in the reflection, and Helen gave me an approving smile. “Prepare for death and follow me,” she said. I looked at my mouth and saw that the teeth around my finger were black and pointed, like Roderick’s.