by Eli Constant
“You have to stop doing that.” Kyle murmurs, his hand reaching for me and cupping my face. “You’re beautiful, Tori.”
“It’s a hard habit to break.” I admit, playing with the sweating ice water glass and sort of sliding it back and forth from palm to palm like it’s a hockey puck. “I still feel really fat and uncomfortable in my own skin.” I give a little shrug. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic.
“You don’t need to feel that way.” Kyle lowers his hand and then places both of his hands on top of mine to stop me from moving the glass nervously.
“Of course I don’t. I don’t need to and I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. I am trying.” I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry. Screw you, tears, I think as I feel the dampness building in my eyes anyways. “I think I need to take a walk.” I pull my hands out from underneath his. I don’t do it quickly so as to be unkind. His fingers grip the edge of the counter and he watches me stand.
“I’ll come with you.” It’s not a question, but I respond like it is.
“No, I’m okay. Really. I just think I need to be alone for a minute. It’s not so much me, I mean my feelings about my body, as just being here I think.” I look at him, hoping I’m making sense. “Do you mind?”
“Honestly, I’d rather go with you, so I mind a little, but I do understand.” Kyle’s fingers loose their grip and I’m surprised to see that the wood seems to have been bruised… no, indented by the pressure of his hands. But the indentations are so minor that they only look like new shadows on the curved lip of the countertop.
I stare a little too long and he looks down, surprise registering on his face.
“Maybe you should give the work outs a rest.” I joke, getting ready to turn around.
“Since I met you, I’ve only been to the gym a handful of times.” He’s still staring at the marks his fingers have left. “And I’ve gained at least ten pounds from all the Chinese Mei brings over.”
“Well, you don’t look it. I wish I could eat a million wontons and dumplings and it not register along my stomach by the next day.” I pat my stomach and the pooch that’s there—albeit significantly smaller than it was over a year ago when I’d started dieting and running.
Kyle looks up as my hand is leaving my belly, his eyes scrunch and he gives me a stern scowl.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m beautiful. Stop with the self-deprecation. Yada-yada.” I wave a hand at him and give him my back. “Just enjoy the rearview and forget I’m a body-conscious girlfriend who works with corpses for a living.” It feels icky to say corpses; I’m not sure why I use the word. That’s how other people see them. To me, they’re still living and breathing entities, their souls swimming in the ether.
“It is a good view.” His voice carries me and I can’t see the grin he’s wearing, but I can hear it in his words.
Pushing out into the cool early evening air, I find myself in a cold sweat. The heat of the bar is still running beneath my skin, but the winter is breathing on me and causing goosebumps to rise on the surface. The clash in temperatures affects me unpleasantly.
For some reason, I head over to the vacant lot next to Jim’s, the place where Terrance and I found Braeden’s car last year. I imagine that it’s still there as I walk forward. And then it disappears, of course, a figment of my mind destroyed by a quick touch.
I pass over the lot and find myself aimlessly reaching with my power into the soil. There’s so much life beneath our feet. So many fail to recognize it. I raise my hands, palms down, and I concentrate a bit harder. I reach a bit deeper. Towards the back corner of the empty property, the furthest point from the bar, I feel a nudge.
Something alive.
Something dead, but alive.
A soul.
I close my eyes. The tendrils of my power dig and dig until they find a skeleton. It is distinctly she. There is hair still matted along the skull. It was once long and black. I can see it flowing in my mind. It would be shiny in the sun and a dull charcoal in low lighting. I mentally rebuild her until I see who she was when she was alive. She reminds me of Mei. Her skin is pale and her chocolate brown eyes are warm and kind. She’s small like Mei too.
When I open my eyes the evening has darkened more and my eyes take longer than I’d like to adjust to my surroundings, the deceased woman is standing in front of me, looking whole and altogether alive. Although, when the sun, low in the sky, peeks out from between tiny gaps in the cloud cover, she becomes a translucent thing, something I could put my hand through. It would disturb someone else. Someone who wasn’t a necromancer.
“What’s your name?” I speak to her as if she is a real person. Because she is. She’s dressed in a cotton dress, a simple design with a low waist. It’s not modern, not something you’d find on a shelf nowadays or even on shelves five or ten years ago.
Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. The speech is delayed, like when you are talking to someone on the phone and they’re within seeing distance. You see their mouth move and seconds later you hear the matching words. The effect is odd, like watching a dubbed movie.
“Maggie.” Her mouth is already closed, a tight line. It moves as if it is connected to a wire pulled by some invisible hand. “Maggie Elissa Smythe.”
“What happened to you, Maggie?”
“Killed.” She shakes her head roughly, as if she’s jerking free of something. She’s been here a while. Her soul has stayed behind because she has unfinished business. That is nearly always the case with murder victims, but then the longer they are attached to their brutalized body, the more and more they lose themselves. As I study her with my eyes, I continue to feel her out with my power. There is something about her, something about how her body was treated before she was sunk into the dark earth.
It leaves a taste in my mouth, chemical and strange. She doesn’t exactly feel like other bodies, not ones that have been untouched and left to die with blood flowing from their veins. She feels a bit… other. I recognize it, but I cannot place it at this moment. And I feel I should. I feel like, when I do put my finger on the difference between her and other victims I have helped, I will feel stupid. But that does not help me now.
The feel of her spirit is fading, the humanness seeping away.
My mind goes to Sausage Fingers, how I’d thought he was a wraith when he’d attacked me in the embalming room, but he had not been that. This woman though, she was on the precipice of a great fall from consciousness, right on the edge of deteriorating into only the basest of her personality, the beastly part, the part that a living human normally keeps hidden from the world.
It’s a sad truth that victims are more prone to become wraiths, as if they have not suffered enough in their lives already that the afterlife must also be a thing of pain.
“Who did it?”
“A man. Discolored hands. They were blue. His face…” She raises her fingers to motion around her cheeks, but she freezes when she sees them. The dying sun has once again found a sliver of a gap in the clouds. It has shined on her hands and she can see the ground through them. “I’m dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
She stares at me, her eyes no longer warm at all. They’re haunting. She drops her hands and her entire form shivers, vibrates, and begins to disappear.
“No, please stay. What else do you remember?” I take a step forward and my words bring her slightly back. She is an outline though, no longer a person at all.
“His face. Brown and White. Like someone had taken a paint brush to him. No. A mask. God. I just saw a mask. Did he have blue eyes?” She shakes her head again, more violently this time. “My head… it hurts.”
“I’m sorry. You’ve been here too long. What’s left of your mind is… dying too. Like your body.”
“Can you find my son for me? I had a son.” She shakes again, a head to toe jerking. She waves in and out of sight, like she is floating on a wave that continues to crest and fall. But she manages to speak, full sentences. Full words. I k
now it will not last, that this is just a last resurgence of her will to stay glued to the world. “His name is Jacob. He’s eight. He’s eight…”
“I’ll find him for you. I promise.”
“The world looks different.” Maggie turns in a circle, her head tilted to the sky. It’s not a smooth motion, as if she’s not in control of her own movements. “So different.” She does a 360, but doesn’t stop turning there. She continues to spin. She spins slowly and does not stop until she has dissolved back into the ground that holds her body captive. And then I feel it.
Her release, her movement into the ether. It causes my body to grow hot. When it is gone, I feel I will freeze and sweat beads along my forehead. The transfer is not normally like this. I can feel them, understand them, watch them, but it has never affected me so.
Another change in my gift? Another thing I can thank Liam for?
I look up at the sky. The world is falling into the dimness of twilight. The clouds are a bumpy greyscale sketch above my head. I know what I have to do, but I also know that it’s going to lead to questions. I’ll have answers. I won’t be able to explain where I got them. It’s always a choice I have to make, but really there is no choice. I cannot leave the body where it is, not now that I’ve found it and touched it with my gift.
My purse is in the Bronco. I leave dad’s watch on the ground to mark where the body is and I go and get my phone. I’ve set the watch’s alarm to go off in a few minutes so the shrill beep will lead me back.
I scroll through the address book until I find Terrance’s name. I finally got smart after being kidnapped and held in a cage and I put his cell phone number in my phone as soon as I was released from the hospital. It beat the hell out of calling through the station and arguing my way into talking to him. That new girl they’d hired to man the phones is not the most cooperative person in the world.
“Tori, what’s up?” Terrance skips the niceties.
I sigh. “Don’t ask me how I know, just get over to Jim’s bar. There’s a body buried in the vacant lot next to it.”
“A body?”
“A woman’s body.” I hesitate and then decide ‘what the hell; go big or go home’. “Her name was Maggie Smythe. She had a son named Jacob.” I bite my lip, thinking about Maggie’s request that I find her son. “You should find him. Maybe he knows something. He was eight when she was taken and killed, but I don’t know what year that was. Although her clothes were pretty out of date, the kind of things that were for sale during the war. I remember my grandmother still wearing that sort of thing well after the war when I was little though. People hang onto things, so the body could be newer than that.”
“All right,” Terrance’s voice sounds suspicious, but I know he believes me. Someday, I’m going to have to tell him the truth. That day is not today though. “We’ll be there soon.”
The line goes dead against my ear. I shiver and wrap my arms around myself protectively. For some reason, my thoughts venture to Liam. I wonder why he hasn’t returned. I wonder where he’s gone. I wish he’d told me he was leaving.
“Tori, are you okay?” Kyle is standing in the doorway of the bar calling out to me. I might as well warn him that the cops are on their way.
Chapter Five
The vacant lot has become daytime, daytime before the war that is. The standing lights cast artificial sun across the world like the gods clapping things into existence with only their force of will.
I could see the other uniforms, aside from Terrance, casting me dirty looks—as if I’d made up a murder victim to keep them from going home to their warm houses.
The body was buried deep, nearly ten feet down. I yelled at the diggers as they got closer, warned them not to damage the evidence. I was the crazy woman yelling into the night. They didn’t listen to me, not until Terrance gave the same orders to take care. I was offended, but I shouldn’t have been. He had the badge, the authority. My authority on the matter wasn’t something I could easily flash around like a badge. Even if I did have it written out on a badge or a nametag or whatever, flashing it would equate to a death sentence.
From start to finish, it took four hours to dig her out. When they finally glimpsed the bones, they were stunned. Even Terrance.
It was one thing to give him a clue here and there, to have a ‘hunch’ and question someone like Jim; it was quite another animal to randomly identify the burial plot of a victim, know the victim’s name, and details that were so outside the realm of my personal knowledge that I’d be proven a raving lunatic if I hadn’t been… proven right.
“Jesus, she was right.”
“Fuck, think she did it?”
I can hear the whispers of the people still down in the grave.
“Look at the bones, look at what’s left of her. She’s been down here for a long time. I doubt Ms. Cage was even alive or if she was, she wouldn’t have been old enough to kidnap and kill someone.”
“Then how in the hell did she know the body was here?”
Terrance put a stop to the speculation. “All of you, shut your traps and get on with your jobs. It’s ten o’clock and I for one would like to get home to my wife and kids.” After he admonishes the officers and county morgue staff, he walks over to me. Slowly, and with a thinking expression across his face.
“Don’t ask me questions I can’t answer, Terrance.” I say the words before he’s even near enough to properly hear them. He does hear them though. His eyes meet mine and they say all the things that cannot be said.
When he’s next to me, he turns and leans against the Bronco. I’ve moved it to the vacant lot, the exact space where Braeden’s car had been last year. I did it before the cavalry arrived, before they could tell me not to.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Tori. I’ll give you a month to figure out how you want to say it, but you are going to say it. You’re going to tell me how you know things, how you rescue four girls from being sold into prostitution, how you find a woman’s body buried over three yards underground.” His voice is even and certain, as if he’s thought about the words more than once and honed them to perfection.
“I can’t tell you—”
He interrupts me. “Tori, I don’t know what it is, but I can promise you one thing—whatever it is, I’ll accept it at face value. I’ll believe you and we’ll move forward.”
“Terrance, it’s not that I think you won’t believe me.” I pause. I’m not always good at thinking my words through. I’m often too impatient for that. Although, with how long Kyle and I are waiting for sex, you’d think I was Mother Theresa-esque when it comes to patience. “It’s that I don’t know what you’ll do to me if I tell you the truth. I don’t know how you’ll react.”
The police chief is quiet for what seems like a never-ending moment. He stares at all the activity, at the bones of Maggie Smythe being delicately lifted from the pit that has been her resting place for far too long. “I don’t make promises lightly, Tori. Maybe you know me well enough to know that already, maybe you don’t.”
“I know you well enough.” I murmur, my gaze moving to stare across the vacant lot. Everyone will just see the bare skull being lifted, but I see Maggie’s face. Her beautiful, lovely and pale face.
“Good. Whatever you tell me, I’ll believe. Whatever you tell me, I’ll continue to count on you. I may not know your sins, I may not have them numbered one-by-one in my brain, but I know you. You have helped me on no less than a dozen cases since you took over your father’s funeral home. Sometimes, it has been the smallest detail that put us in the right direction. Other times, you saved children, Tori. You singlehandedly saved four little girls. Can you imagine their fate if you hadn’t found them?”
“I had help.” My voice is still a low hum. My head is buzzing. It is not just Terrance’s words, it is the fact that Maggie has finally, fully been released from the prison. I feel her spirit become free from its chains. In the distance, I see her materialize only for a moment. She is gazing down at her bones.
There is a peace and calmness about her. The faintest of whispers sounds against my left ear. A reminder to find her son.
“Yes, you had help. Just like you have been a help time and time again.”
“Terrance, it’s not so easy as that.”
“Tori, it is.” He stands up and turns to me. “It is just that easy if you let it be.”
I nod at him. “I’ll think about it, Terrance.”
“And I’ll give you a month. I’m in this profession to find truth. And I need your truth. I think, after all this time and faith, you owe me that much.” He turns away and he walks back to the crime scene. Halfway there, he turns back around. “Go home, Tori. We’ve got it from here.”
I know I’ve been dismissed. He wants my honesty and I don’t know if I can give him that. I’d give my life to save someone, but letting my truth be known would mean a very different sort of dying. An empty kind. Not a sacrifice at all.
I get in the Bronco and crank it up to move it back to the bar. Kyle won’t close for another three hours, sometimes he leaves early and hands things over to Mikey, but with the police activity around, he might not want to leave. Of course, if the totally empty parking lot is any indication, Kyle might not have a reason to stay tonight. Maybe he’ll decide to close. I leave the Bronco in the closest spot to the entrance that isn’t a handicap space and I walk inside.
I’ve not entered since I found the body. There was something too keen about entering and passing right next to where Jim died against the discovery of Maggie, who has been dead for a very long time, but is a new death as far as I’m concerned.
“They found the body?” Kyle makes me another glass of water without being asked. I don’t realize how thirsty I am until I see the beads of sweat created by fridge ice meeting room temp liquid.
“Yes.” The word sounds wet, said around a swallow of water.