A Spirited Gift

by Joyce Lavene

  “Sounds like you’ve got a haunt following you.” Shayla put down her empty tea cup and stood up. “Stand over there and let me clear your aura. That should help. Then get some rest and don’t eat any meat. My gran used to say haunts can smell that and find you again.”

  I stood toward the back of the shop, and Shayla stared at me for a few minutes before mumbling some words and walking around and around me. She threw back her head and wiggled her arms around like snakes.

  Then she patted her thick black hair and smoothed her black silk shirt. “That should take care of it. Not quite your normal green-blue Dae aura. But close enough. And at least it’s clear now.”

  “What was that?” Trudy asked.

  “I was working on Dae’s aura,” Shayla explained. “It wasn’t looking too healthy. Yours could do with a tune-up too, missy. I’ll do it for free right now.”

  “No thanks.” Trudy stepped back, almost behind Kevin. “My aura is fine just the way it is. I’m going to call my appointments for today and see if I can reschedule for when power comes back on. I’ll see all of you later.”

  “What was the bee in her bonnet?” Shayla asked when she was gone. “That woman has some serious superstition going on, you know? Okay, now that we’re done with that, can we go take a look at my shop? Kevin, honey, you bring that hammer right on next door. I’m sure we’re going to need it.”

  “But there wasn’t anything wrong with Missing Pieces or Trudy’s shop,” I said. “I’m sure your place is fine too.”

  Shayla turned up her nose. “Then you don’t know anything. My instincts tell me I’ve got some damage. I’m willing to put money down if you are.”

  But I never bet against Shayla’s instincts. They were usually right. She took Kevin’s arm and they walked out the door together. It only bothered me a little—they’d dated briefly before Kevin and I got together. It didn’t mean anything. Shayla liked to remind me in small, annoying ways that he’d been hers first.

  I glanced in the small mirror near the door as I was walking out behind them. I looked in it carefully and didn’t see anything unusual. All that reflected back at me was what was supposed to be there. With a smile, I left Missing Pieces and locked the door.

  There was a creak on the boardwalk behind me and a strange rattling sound from the locked door to the shop. The temperature outside was mild and damp after the storm. A gust of wind blew across the boardwalk and made me shiver.

  I heard laughter—solid, male-sounding laughter—and turned back quickly, but no one was there. I hurried into Shayla’s shop to find her and Kevin. Something was still not right. A haunt, she’d called it. Was I being haunted by a strange spirit that had been called up instead of my mother?

  Chapter 11

  There was only a little damage done to Shayla’s shop—nothing major, but she smiled and let us know that she was right about it. She hovered while Kevin did a few repairs to one of her windows and a warped spot on her door. He told her a professional should come and replace the door later.

  I was just glad to be there with them. I thought a crowd might discourage a ghost from making itself known. So far, at least, all my supernatural encounters had occurred while I was alone.

  Maybe Shayla’s aura-clearing ritual would help later. I definitely wasn’t eating any meat for a while. Despite my long-held desire to see a ghost, I was more than ready to get rid of this one.

  It was starting to get dark by the time we finished tidying up Shayla’s shop. The sun was setting—which meant Kevin and I needed to get back. I was dreading the coming night.

  “Do you need any help over there?” Shayla asked. “I’ve been a hostess at a restaurant before. I could do something along those lines.”

  “All we really need is a dishwasher,” I said. “The job’s yours if you want it.”

  She made a face. “I don’t think I want to do that. It’s not that I can’t—it’s just something I hate doing. I guess I’ll wander back home and try to find out what’s haunting you, Dae.”

  “Don’t you mean who?” I asked.

  “Not always. There are entities that have nothing to do with human beings. I hope one of them didn’t latch on to you.” She shivered. “They can be pretty nasty.”

  “Thanks for telling me that now!”

  “Don’t worry. Whoever or whatever decided to follow you—I’ll get rid of them. And that’s not to say getting the mud out of your aura won’t work. It’ll be fine.”

  With a little wave of her mocha-colored hand, she swept down the boardwalk toward the parking lot.

  “Don’t let her get to you.” Kevin put his arm around my shoulder. “She’s just playing with you.”

  I felt as if I should be the one saying that to him. I’d known Shayla longer and I realized she liked to play games. “Thanks. I’m feeling a little like a mouse to her cat right now.”

  He laughed as we walked more slowly behind Shayla toward the parking lot. “I think you’re probably just jumpy from everything that’s happened. Get a good night’s sleep tonight and you’ll be fine tomorrow. If you want, I can dance around and chant a little, like Shayla.”

  “That’s okay.” I stared down from the boardwalk into the parking lot where several EMS vehicles were gathered. “I wonder what’s going on down there.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  All of the emergency workers were from Duck. Their exhaustion showed on their smudged faces. A few of them—Phil De Angelo from the Coffee House and Bookstore, Luke Helms, a retired attorney who’d recently moved here, and Barney Thompson from the Sand Dollar Jewelry Store—nodded to me. Cailey Fargo, the fire chief, was outlining some kind of rescue plan they were all about to embark on.

  “Need some help?” Kevin asked when Cailey was finished.

  “Yeah, I’d say so.” Cailey smiled and thanked him. “I hope everything is okay over at the Blue Whale. It must be since Dae’s here.”

  Kevin gave her a brief account of Sandi’s death. She nodded and told him the problem they were facing on Duck Road. “Some man is trapped in his van. A transformer fell on top of the vehicle. We’re scrambling for manpower as it is. I grabbed these fellas out of their homes to help me with this.”

  “I’ll be glad to do what I can,” Kevin said.

  “Me too,” I added with a bright smile. “I don’t know a lot about emergency work, but I can drive or fetch equipment.”

  “You’re hired!” Cailey slapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s get going. It’s gonna be dark real soon. I managed to get a generator and one flood light so we can work, but that’s about it.”

  I drove one of the smaller vehicles with Cailey beside me. Kevin rode with Phil and Barney in the lead. Everyone else followed behind us. Cailey was working the radio trying to find a paramedic in case the man in the van was injured.

  The crash site was easy to spot, even in the deepening twilight with no streetlights. The van had smashed into the power pole, and the transformer was sending showers of sparks across it and into the street. We all found places to park along the road and walked to where an EMS worker from Corolla was already on the scene

  “Have you been able to communicate with the driver at all, Dwight?” Cailey asked.

  “Not yet,” he told her. “We can’t get close. We need someone to cut the lines to the transformer so we can move it off the vehicle.”

  Cailey surveyed the transformer. “Did you try the power company?”

  “A dozen times,” Dwight said. “Their emergency lines went down about two hours ago. We’re on our own out here, Chief.”

  Cailey looked around at her dirty, exhausted crew. “I don’t know what to say, boys. We’re not supposed to touch that equipment without someone here from the power company. Any suggestions?”

  “Have you got the tools to cut it?” Barney asked. “I’ll step over there and take it out.”

  “We have the tools, but we need someone with the expertise,” Cailey answered. “I’ve never worked as a lineman, Barney.
Have you?”

  “We can’t let the man die in the vehicle,” Luke said. “There must be some way to do it.”

  “I have an idea,” Kevin said. “Is there a rescue pole in one of the trucks?”

  “Never go out without one,” Barney said. “We’re kind of surrounded by water you know.”

  “What do you have in mind, Kevin?” Cailey asked.

  Kevin explained that there was a cutoff lever at the top of the pole. “The power company has a tool to shut it down from the ground. I think we could modify the rescue pole to do the same thing.”

  “Sounds good,” Cailey said after a brief hesitation. “If the power company doesn’t like it, they can give me a call. What do you need, Kevin?”

  It sounded simple until I realized Kevin was going to be the one climbing up on top of one of the EMS trucks and using the makeshift pole.

  “Have you ever done anything like this before?” I asked while they got the pole ready.

  “The FBI trains agents to think on their feet and come up with alternative scenarios,” he explained.

  “In other words—no?”

  “In other words—but it will work.”

  I watched nervously as Kevin climbed up on the vehicle, sparks from the downed transformer flying around us like thousands of fireflies. Barney handed him the pole when he was in place, and Cailey held the floodlight on the pole so he could see what he was doing.

  “Don’t walk too far that way,” Phil said, joking. “We can’t rescue you too.”

  There was some pathetic, exhausted, good-humored bantering for a minute or two, then everyone was quiet as we all watched Kevin try to hit the cutoff switch.

  I held my breath as he tried to maneuver the long pole into place without losing his balance on the vehicle. A few times, I started to reach up and steady him—Cailey pulled my arm back.

  It was dark by then. Even the floodlight seemed useless against the night. I couldn’t see Kevin’s face without getting too close to the transformer. All I could do was pray that everything would be okay.

  “Praying never did no one any good, girl,” a voice I was beginning to recognize told me. “Next time, tell the lad not to be such a hero.”

  Chapter 12

  “I don’t know who you are,” I whispered, “but leave me alone. Go back wherever you came from.”

  I wasn’t sure whether that was the proper response to a ghost—if a ghost was what was bothering me. It probably wouldn’t work as an exorcism. But it came from the heart.

  “Aw, don’t be that a’way, girl,” the voice continued, mocking me. “He’s a good lad, no doubt. Not too bright, eh? Maybe you should look around a little more. You could do better.”

  I spun around and stared into the face of Dwight, the EMS worker from Corolla. There was no one else in sight.

  Of course not. It was a ghost. Or something.

  “Are you okay, Mayor O’Donnell?” Dwight asked.

  “I’m fine—sorry if I—”

  “He got it!” Cailey yelled. “Good work, Kevin. You’re not too bad for an outsider.”

  “Thanks,” Kevin replied. I could hear the smile in his voice though I couldn’t see his face. “Just how long is somebody considered an outsider here?”

  That brought a few chuckles from everyone.

  “Probably until you die,” Cailey assured him.

  “Yeah,” Phil said. “I’ve been here ten years. Still an outsider.”

  The transformer was sparking less and less. Long wires hanging down from the pole were cut away from it. It took four men to lift the transformer away from the van. No one knew what to do with it—there was no truck to transport it. Eventually they put it into a drainage ditch on the side of the road near the pole. Cailey said she would call the power company and tell them where to find it.

  Barney Thompson had to use the jaws of life to get the door open so they could reach the man in the vehicle. They shone the floodlight in the opening as Dwight, the only licensed paramedic in the group, came to check out the driver.

  “He’s the only one in there,” Phil said after looking through the back of the van. “But he either robbed a liquor store or he was having one hell of a party. There must be at least a dozen cases of whiskey in the back.”

  I heard Cailey swear under her breath. “Great! Is he okay?”

  “Looks like a bump on the head,” Dwight said. “Could be a concussion, but he’s conscious. We should take him in anyway—just to be sure.”

  My hands were tingling as I moved closer to the vehicle. I usually have that kind of reaction when I’ve located a fantastic treasure for Missing Pieces. Lately, it’s been happening a little more often. It struck me that I might know the driver we’d just rescued.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” Phil said. “I don’t recognize him.”

  “Can you tell us your name, sir?” Cailey asked the driver. “Where are you from?”

  A shaken, breathless voice replied, “My name is Danny Evans. I live in Duck. Get me out of here, huh?”

  Danny Evans—the tingling became a buzzing in my ears. My father.

  Chapter 13

  No one there knew that I was related to Danny Evans—except me. I’d only recently learned who my father was and that he was alive. My mother, even Gramps, had always told me he was dead. It was only by chance that I found out otherwise.

  “Bring in the stretcher,” Dwight yelled back to the others.

  “We’d better do a sobriety test on him,” Cailey said.

  “Hey! Just because I work at a bar doesn’t mean I’m drunk,” Danny protested.

  “I guess that explains the whiskey.” Phil laughed.

  “It does since someone already broke into the bar and stole a couple cases. My boss expects me to protect his investment until this is over,” Danny explained.

  “It’s just for your own good, sir,” Cailey told him. “The drugs they give you at the hospital might work against any alcohol in your system. Best to know ahead.”

  “I haven’t been drinking,” Danny said again. “I don’t drink. Not anymore at least. I’ve been sober six years, five months and seven days. I’m just good at being a bartender.”

  “We’ll have to test you anyway, sir,” Cailey repeated. “Sorry.”

  He was an alcoholic. I knew from the way he’d said exactly how long he’d been sober. My father was an alcoholic.

  I’d followed him around a few times since finding out about him and where he worked. I didn’t want him to know about me. I wouldn’t introduce myself, although I ordered a drink from him once at his bar, the Sailor’s Dream.

  Gramps told me that Danny hadn’t wanted me, or my mother. He’d never checked to see what I was like as I was growing up. There was never a card or a phone call. I figured he wouldn’t want me now either.

  But every new piece of information I learned about him was like a treasure from Missing Pieces. I’d tuck it away to look at later as I tried to understand him. What had my mother seen in him? How was I like him?

  I mentally filed this latest discovery that he was an alcoholic. I’d retrieve it when I had time to scrutinize it properly.

  Gramps didn’t know I’d looked Danny up and had come in contact with him. Having kept him a secret for more than thirty years, he wouldn’t have been too happy about my interest. I didn’t tell Kevin either, even though he’d offered to help me find Danny. I just wasn’t sure he wouldn’t tell Gramps.

  And there was something exciting and satisfying about not sharing the treasure I’d found with anyone else. Maybe it only meant something to me, but my mother must have loved this man. I didn’t know what had happened between them that had made her lie to me about him. I might never know. But I wanted to figure it out.

  I watched as Cailey and Dwight helped my father out of the van. They placed him on the stretcher and took him to the ambulance. I knew they wouldn’t make him do a field sobriety test to tell if he was impaired. They’d do a blood te
st on the way to the hospital. I hoped for his sake that what he’d told them was true.

  Next in line was getting the van off the road. While traffic was minimal, no one wanted to get a call later that night about another accident involving the vehicle. Kevin and I waited with Luke for the tow truck while Cailey, Barney and Phil went on to the next emergency caused by the storm. It was going to be a long night for everyone.

  We sat around in the emergency vehicle, talking about our experiences during the storm. I had the best story—hands down. No one else was actually involved in a possible homicide.

  It wasn’t much to brag about, of course. I didn’t have my usual relish for telling what was bound to be a tale that would go down in Duck history. Despite Luke urging me for more details, I was finished quickly, then listened to Luke and Kevin talk about their experiences working with other emergency crews.

  The tow-truck driver—all the way from Sanderling—wasn’t in a mood to talk either. He kind of grunted as Kevin and Luke explained that the van needed to go to the Duck Police impound lot. Our usual Duck tow-truck driver wasn’t able to come because part of his house was on his truck. They finally made the Sanderling driver understand the request, and he hitched the van to the back of the tow truck.

  While they were talking, I noticed something on the wet street right outside the van door. The floodlight was gone with Cailey, but this glinted in the bright headlights shining across Duck Road from the tow truck and the emergency vehicle.

  I walked over and picked it up. It felt cool in my hand. It was a smooth, flat rock that had been made into a necklace. The gold chain that ran through it wasn’t new. As I held it, a flash of emotion went through me.

  They were playing around at the beach when they saw the stone. She picked it up and held it for him to touch. The sun was hot on their hands as they held the stone between them. He kissed her and she laughed, splashing water at him before she ran away. He put the stone into his pocket as he followed her.