by H. P. Bayne
Sully was still basking in the relief Eva had just handed him, and it took him a moment to switch his brain from personal to whatever version of professional he worked within. “How are we going to do that, exactly?”
Eva’s answer wasn’t much of one. “Very carefully.”
9
Sully waited in the car while Eva returned to the Devereauxs with as much of an explanation as she could provide.
She was inside a while, leaving Sully with little to do but continually check the clock on his cellphone screen. As time ticked by, his anxiety grew until, ten minutes in, he was seriously contemplating a return to the house to check on his sister-in-law. Hal had been plenty pissed off when he’d pursued Sully from the house, clutching a wooden baseball bat like a caveman’s club and huffing out heavy breaths through his nose that sounded more angry bull than winded sprinter. Sully didn’t think the man would go off on a police officer, but the longer he sat here, the more he began to doubt his assumptions.
His shoulders dropped and his jaw unclenched as Eva emerged from the side of the house and approached the car. He waited until she’d dropped back into the driver’s seat before questioning her.
“What’s going on? Everything okay?”
“More or less. You’ve got the mom onside. Hal’s plenty skeptical, but Lana wants to hear you out. She says she’s had a bad feeling since it happened. They want me in there with you, though.”
That suited Sully fine. With police backup, he’d be less worried about the possibility of Hal-created broken ribs or black eyes.
“Pax has to stay in the car,” Eva said.
“He’s getting used to that.”
“He’s peed recently, right? I don’t want to have to hose down the backseat this early in my shift.”
“It hasn’t been that long. And he’s got really good bladder control.”
Pax whined miserably, emitting one loud bark of protest as the two humans left him behind in the cruiser and headed for the house. Sully pulled the hood back in place, head angled down to conceal his eyes as well as he could.
Even without looking, he felt Eva’s appraising eye on him.
“I’ve got to say, they’re a little freaked out about this whole faceless, skulking thing you’ve got going on,” she said.
“Can’t help it.”
“I know. I explained that you can’t have it out there, who you are and what you can do. I fed them a bit of a line, that you’re worried people will think you’re weird.”
“That’s not a line,” Sully said. “It’s kind of the truth.”
“There’s nothing weird about you,” Eva got out just before they reached the back door.
A second later, it was yanked open with almost the same level of violence as Hal had exited it not half an hour ago.
“I don’t know what you think you’re peddling, but I’m not buying.”
Sully kept his head down, avoiding meeting the man’s eyes—a move that concealed his features, but admittedly didn’t serve him well in earning a stranger’s trust. He’d had to make the choice before, and decided his own safety had to come first. He couldn’t help the ghosts if he was back in Lockwood—or, worse, dead himself.
“I’m not peddling anything, Mr. Devereaux. All I want is to help.”
It occurred to Sully belatedly he didn’t know precisely what Eva had told the couple. He hadn’t, after all, told them he had seen their dead son.
It appeared Eva had done the job for him.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Hal said. “And I sure as hell don’t believe my son’s wandering around out there somewhere, moaning and rattling any chains.”
There was no moaning and no rattling chains, but Carter was definitely wandering around out there. Come to that, he was actually wandering around in here. Sully felt him, the sensation of static electricity that prickled the hair on his arms and the back of his neck whenever they got close. Without a body to contain their energy, ghosts exuded it constantly, and Sully experienced it the way people sensed a change in the air during an approaching thunderstorm. He knew if he lifted his head, cast his gaze inside the house, he’d see Carter, bent, broken and bloodied.
Sully was happy enough not to look.
“Can I come in?”
There was no immediate movement at the door, Hal’s feet remaining exactly where they were. Only a softly pleading female voice, coming from somewhere just behind Hal, changed that.
“Let them in, Hal. I want to hear what he has to say.”
With clear reluctance, Hal stood aside, pulling the door open just enough to allow his unwanted guests to pass. Sully saw the base of a kitchen dining set, and he waited until he heard someone pull out a chair across the table before he followed suit. Eva sat next to him, and Sully could make out enough from beneath the confines of his hood to know Lana was across from him.
Hal’s location was not as easily gauged, and Sully decided he’d have to rely on Eva’s eyes to assure him the grieving father wasn’t on his way over to pummel him.
Now that he was here, Sully wasn’t quite sure where to begin.
Lana solved the problem for him. “Have you seen our son?”
“Yes.”
“Where? Is he okay?”
“I saw him in the park, near where he died.” Sully looked up, just enough for the confirmation he needed. “And he’s here now. I’m not sure for how long. He doesn’t seem to stick around in any one place for very long.”
He hadn’t answered Lana’s second question; it would be easier if he didn’t have to. Carter’s mother, though, hadn’t forgotten.
“And how is he?”
Sully searched for the words. “He… he needs help. There’s something more to what happened to him than anyone ever learned. I think that’s what’s keeping him from finding peace.”
He heard the quick breaths coming from the woman across the table, the sounds of distress and pain. It hadn’t gone unnoticed by Hal.
“That’s enough. You’ve got no right coming here like this and upsetting my wife and I. Do you have any idea what we’ve been through? Four years ago, we stood every day in that park by that goddamned pile of rocks and waited. We spent the first few days praying maybe they’d find him alive, that maybe Evan was wrong about Carter having gone there, that maybe the stuff they found belonging to him in that cave was just there from some previous visit. You make up all sorts of things when the truth is unbearable. Carter’s mother and I, we had this entire scenario concocted to explain to ourselves why his car was there and his gear inside the caves. We told ourselves the heat sensors they were using to try to find him weren’t working because he’d escaped somehow. But days turned into weeks, and weeks into years. We buried an empty casket, and it took us a whole year to even manage that much. It’s the not knowing, the idea he might have been down there for days, waiting for us to—” Hal broke off, and Sully waited him out, listening as he choked back emotion to finish his statement. When at last he did, he spit it out, like the words burned the inside of his mouth. “To save him.”
Sully frequently had a nightmarish view of death, of the mechanics of it, the violence with which homicides were committed. Sometimes families were exposed to crime scene photos, but often they decided whether they could handle the agony of seeing their loved one in that state. Usually, the fact they were spared the graphic detail was a blessing. It occurred to him, in this one instance, that might not be the case.
“I can’t tell you certain things, because I can’t hear the ghosts,” Sully said. “But I can tell you this much. Carter died quickly. He didn’t suffer.”
This time, Lana was unable to hold back the sound of her sobs, the first one coming out amid a heavy gasp. Hal moved across the room to land a solid hand on his wife’s shoulder; Sully looked up far enough to see that much before returning his eyes to the tabletop. Hal was a hard man, but he’d been made hard by life. Sully could imagine this had once been a happy home, full of hope and dreams and promises
. Death had swept all of that away, leaving in its place a mother shattered by grief and a father who sought strength in anger.
Sully didn’t want to think what might happen once he figured out who was behind Carter’s death. The level of rage rolling off Hal told Sully some level of protective custody for the killer might be necessary.
He gave them a few minutes to settle their grief, waiting until one of them either asked him a question or demanded he get the hell out of their house. Either was a distinct possibility.
Hal recovered first, the fury in his voice doing what it could to mask the still-present emotion. “Why the hell should we believe anything you have to say? Why should we believe you can actually see him?”
There was no option anymore, Sully needing Carter to pass the test the teen’s parents required. He looked up just enough to scan the room, and it didn’t take any searching to find Carter standing—if standing was what you could call it—near the hallway that led from the far side of the kitchen. It was impossible, given the condition of his head and face, to tell what he was looking at, but Sully could sense the youth’s attention was on his parents and their pain. It was likely this was far from the first time the teen had been forced to see them like this.
“Carter, I need something,” he said. “A way for your parents to know it’s really you. And I can’t hear you, so you’ll need to show me.”
There was a pause, as if the ghost couldn’t figure out what was needed of him. Then he shifted toward the hallway and disappeared.
Sully thought he knew what that meant and took a chance at sharing his guess with the teen’s parents. “I think he wants us to follow him to his bedroom.”
It was unlikely Hal was pleased with the suggestion but, once Lana took up the lead, her husband had little choice but to follow. Sully and Eva trailed along behind as the couple led them to a bedroom at the far end of the hall. The door was closed, and it seemed to take Lana a long time to decide to open it.
“No one comes in here but Hal and I.” Her voice was hushed, so quiet Sully might not have made out what she said had he not expected the words.
“I promise to be careful,” he said.
He’d been in the rooms of dead people before, and he knew what he was likely to find on the other side. When at last Lana pushed the door open, Sully could see he was right in assuming this room would be the same.
The bedroom, once a teen’s haven, had become his shrine. It wasn’t a stretch to believe nothing had been touched in here after Carter left it for the last time. The bed was made—whether by Carter himself or one of his parents—but his video game controller remained unwound on the centre of the floor, a scattering of games next to it. A collection of clothes was bundled in a heap on a trunk at the end of the bed while, next to them, a pair of runners sat, one lying on its side as if kicked over. Posters still adorned the walls, though a couple had begun to fade. While nothing much appeared to have been moved, a housekeeper would have been hard-pressed to find any dust settled in here—evidence of the care his parents still paid to this space.
“I know it’s a mess,” Lana said. “I just couldn’t bear to move anything. It felt like putting his things away was like saying he wasn’t ever going to be home to do it himself. For the longest time, I could walk in here and still smell him, like he was here. I’m noticing it less and less, like he’s farther away. But it’s here now. Is he…?”
Sully gently pushed past Hal and Lana, entering the room slowly. “He’s here.”
His back now to Hal and Lana, Sully allowed himself to look fully at Carter’s spirit, standing in the middle of the room. There was something here, something the teen wanted his parents to see. That much Sully could sense. What it was, and how the torturously bent spirit was going to reveal it, was another story.
Sully had a possible solution, one he wasn’t particularly thrilled about providing. He’d been able to manage flashes of lives lost sometimes when ghosts touched him. It often wasn’t pleasant but, at times, it proved necessary.
He extended a hand, fingers splayed. “Think of what you want to show me and touch my hand. I might be able to see it.”
It was impossible to gauge Carter’s response by expression, but the way he stalled in the centre of the room suggested some reluctance. Sully took it as a significant triumph the ghost hadn’t tried to run from him yet, and he achieved an even bigger win when Carter edged toward him.
Sully drew in a breath, the chill crawling over him as the spirit’s energy melded with his own. Then he felt the ice-cold touch of fingertips against his.
A memory hit, a flash of a laughing young woman in bra and panties, a short, brown bob and eyes concealed by a pair of New Year’s Eve joke sunglasses.
“There’s a woman,” Sully said, his voice sounding to his own ears as if coming from the deep pit of a well. “She’s—”
The image was ripped away suddenly, so quickly Sully was left with the belief Carter had revealed it only by accident. There were some things teenage boys weren’t eager to share with their parents.
“What woman?” Lana asked.
Right now, Sully needed to earn Carter’s trust more than his parents’. There would be no other way to provide the necessary proof, no other way to learn what had befallen the teen.
“I don’t know,” Sully said. “It was gone too quickly. Carter, please. Try again. Focus on what you want me to see.”
The spirit paused, then tentatively approached, hand again extended.
This time, the vision kept them in the bedroom. Through eyes not his own, he faced the closet. In his mind, a yet-alive Carter knelt on the floor and shifted aside a pile of boxes, shoes and old toys to access the baseboard running along the closet’s interior. Fingers that were thin yet strong pulled away the skirting and placed the item carefully behind before pushing the board back into position.
The flashback ended. A tension that always came with these things eased as Sully realized he’d felt neither pain nor fear. Some ghosts, it seemed, couldn’t help passing along the things they’d suffered. Carter had held back—likely in large part because of the lustful memory he’d inadvertently revealed moments ago.
Regardless, Sully believed he had what he needed.
Retracing Carter’s path, he eased open the closet and dropped to his knees. There were the boxes, shoes and discarded toys, left exactly where they’d been thanks to Lana. And there, as he carefully moved them aside, was the baseboard. With fingers no larger than Carter’s, Sully pried the board away in the spot he’d been shown. Having created just enough space, he reached two fingers inside.
Fingertips grazed what felt like metal, and Sully knew what it was before he withdrew it.
Lana inhaled sharply as her eyes settled on the small brass key Sully handed to her. One shaking hand reached out, palm open and up, and Sully dropped the key gently into it.
He was surprised when it wasn’t Lana, but Hal who spoke.
“We spent years looking for that. How did you know where to find it?”
“He showed me. Just now. He was hiding it behind the baseboard in the closet.”
A smile broke over Hal’s face. “Sneaky little sucker.”
Lana was crying again, and Hal left one hand on her shoulder while carefully taking the key from her with the other.
“It’s the key to his trunk,” the father explained. “He kept his most treasured possessions in there, stuff he wanted to keep to himself, he said. Lana and I talked about opening it. We were back and forth about it, about whether we’d be invading his privacy, or just learning more about our son. We had considered just popping the lock, but we decided against it. We figured if we were meant to look inside, he’d show us how.”
Hal looked from Sully to the key and back again. “This means he doesn’t mind us looking?”
“He wanted me to give you the key, so I don’t think he’d mind.”
Hal nodded, eyes returning to the key, grin back on his face.
“S
neaky little sucker.”
The find proved the tipping point, allowing Sully to make the welcome jump from intruder to guest.
Hal and Lana left him and Eva alone in the room, giving Sully a chance to try to speak with the teen.
“I don’t know how much you know about your death,” he said. “Not everyone remembers what happened to them. It’s like they lose time.”
Sully took a deep breath, steeling himself for the response to his next question, to what might well turn into the vision-induced sensation of dying. “Can you show me what happened to you?”
This time, though, Carter didn’t make any effort to reach out.
“I know it’s hard to think about it. It can’t be easy, what you went through. But I need you to show me.”
Still, the youth didn’t move.
“What’s wrong?” Eva asked.
“I don’t know. I think he trusts me, but he doesn’t want to show me.”
Eva had been standing close to the door. Now she did what Carter wouldn’t, closing the distance until she was standing right next to Sully, close enough nothing she said would be heard outside this room.
She had good reason for caution.
“There are a few reasons people might refuse to report who it was who hurt them,” she said. “The most common one is they don’t want to report someone they care about.”
10
A long hour passed with no sign of Tessa Montague, nor the man her husband suspected her of seeing.
When at last she did emerge—alone and moving a little more stiffly than she had going in—Dez was thrilled by the prospect of doing anything besides sitting here, staring at the back of a vehicle he’d never be able to afford.
As she started her car, he was left to question whether the best route was to go back to tailing her, or to follow his hunch to the door of Lars Ahlgren. He decided on the latter, shooting Justice Montague a text to ask him to monitor Tessa’s movements while Dez checked out the teacher. If Lars was alone, sweaty and smug, Dez’s suspicions would be well on the way to confirmed. If it turned out the guy had nothing to do with Tessa, Dez would still be able to make some inroads for Sully.