“What’s that?” Ashara asked, coming in through the front door.
I repeated the morning’s events for her.
“Damn, girl,” said Ashara on a slow breath. She shook her head.
“Ashara,” her grandmother said warningly.
“I know, I know. Watch my mouth. But you gotta admit, Maw-Maw, that one might be worth a curse word or two.”
Maw-Maw laughed. “Maybe so,” she acknowledged.
“Okay, then,” Stephen said. “What next?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure.”
“I am,” Ashara said. She smiled smugly.
We all stared at her, waiting.
“Well?” I finally demanded. “Tell us.”
“Next, we need to find out who all is on the signature card for that safe deposit box--there's no way Jeffrey McClatchey could have gotten into it otherwise. But I’m guessing that money wasn’t his to begin with.”
“Of course,” I said, stunned that I hadn’t thought of it myself. “He might be on the card, but the money isn’t really his. Why would he have had to have Howard steal the key from Rick otherwise?”
“And you can do that--get into those records and find out who had access to the box?” Stephen asked her.
She nodded. “I think so. It’s not the sort of thing I usually have to look up, but I know how to do it.”
“You realize that looking up that information is probably illegal on several levels, don’t you?” I asked.
“Not as illegal as having some woman cut up and left in the bathtub,” Maw-Maw said. “No. You go get that information for us, Ashara. Just don’t get caught.”
“No, ma’am,” said Ashara. “I won’t.”
* * * *
“So are you at all worried about the fact that that Howard guy saw both of them?” Stephen asked me as we left Maw-Maw’s house. Ashara had stayed behind; she said she wanted to make sure Maw-Maw had dinner before Ashara left for her own house that night.
“Terrified,” I answered.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“If I could think of any way to keep them safe, I would,” I said.
Stephen nodded. “I suppose I could keep watch,” he said doubtfully.
I shook my head. “You’re only one person and you have to sleep at some point. No. I don’t think Howard is worried enough to do anything yet. And all he knows for sure about how to find them again is that Ashara works at the bank. I think she’s probably safe there.”
Stephen nodded. “You’re right. I’m sure they’re both safe in their own homes, too. But I’m still worried.”
I nodded in agreement. We parted ways at his car. “Sure you don’t want a ride somewhere?” he asked, rolling down the window and leaning out from behind the steering wheel.
“Certain,” I said. “I’m a ghost, remember? I don’t need a car anymore.”
He smiled wanly and put the car into gear.
“Come find me at work tomorrow if you learn anything new,” he said.
I nodded. “And if Jeffrey McClatchey comes in, try to act normal,” I said.
Stephen shuddered. “I’ll try. But he hasn’t been in since Molly’s death.”
“Good,” I said. “Maybe you won’t ever have to see him at work again.”
I waved at him as he pulled away from the driveway.
I’d lied. Sort of, anyway. I didn’t need a ride from Stephen, but it wasn’t because I could fly anywhere I needed to go. It was because I had no plans to go anywhere. Unlike the living, I didn’t need sleep. As long as I didn’t expend too much energy on trying to have some effect on the physical world, I could go for days without doing my little floaty-resting thing.
So I was going to spend the night moving back and forth between Ashara’s and Maw-Maw’s. Just to be sure.
I really hadn’t liked the way Howard had stared at them.
* * * *
Nothing happened that night. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble, flitting back and forth from one house to the other. But it made me feel better to know that they were safe. And what else was I going to do? Being dead and awake when everyone else is sleeping is super double extra boring. It’s like the worst case of insomnia you’ve ever had times roughly seventy-two. It’s that bad.
So yeah. Watching out for Ashara and Maw-Maw gave me something to do. Not that I had any idea what I could have done if Howard had shown up.
I needed to start practicing throwing things, I decided. Being a poltergeist might come in handy.
Anyway, I quit floating back and forth once the sun rose. By the time Ashara got to work, I was already in the teller’s booth.
“Hi!” I said brightly.
She ignored me. Probably the wise thing to do, since her co-worker Ann was already there.
“So,” I said. “When are you going to look up the safe deposit box number?”
She shook her head.
“That means not now, doesn’t it?”
She nodded slightly.
“You want me to go away now?”
She nodded again, this time more emphatically.
“Okay, I said, “but I’m going to check in later. Repeatedly. So you might want to look it up sooner rather than later.”
Ashara sighed.
I grinned and floated out through the bullet-proof window, waving.
“Hey,” I said, sticking my head back into the room through the glass. “Not ghost proof!”
Ashara sighed deeply and closed her eyes for a moment.
“You okay?” Ann asked from the other teller’s station.
I grinned even wider and pulled back out of the window.
My grin faded when I moved around to the side of the bank and saw Howard standing in the parking lot examining cars.
It didn’t take him long to find Ashara’s. I watched him as he wrote down the license plate number. Then he got into his SUV and started the engine.
I froze, torn between warning Ashara and trying to find out what Howard might do with the information.
At the last minute, I jumped up and into the back of the SUV. As long as Howard was leaving the bank, Ashara was in no immediate danger. And we needed to know what he might do now that he had a way to find out who she was.
I slipped into the back seat from the cargo space, hoping that Howard wouldn’t leave the city limits.
He didn’t. He went to the local library first. Which had internet access, of course. And there he looked up Ashara’s license plate number, just as we had looked up his.
Of course, unlike Howard, Ashara’s license plate matched up with her name and address.
Dammit.
My only consolation was that he hadn’t comparison shopped as Ashara had. He’d paid $99.99 for the information.
Then again, he had a briefcase full of cash, probably his ill-gotten gain from his murder of Molly McClatchey. He could afford it. The son of a bitch, I thought as I stared over his shoulder.
He reached for a sheet of paper and pen to copy down the address. And that’s when I remembered that I could screw with electronics.
I know. I probably should have done something before he looked up the information. What can I say? I’m still getting used to being dead.
Anyway, I did manage to short out the computer--put my palm on top of the casing and totally crashed it--just before he wrote down her name and address. A small victory, but his muttered curse made me smile.
By the time I was done with him, he was cursing out loud. Every time he tried to turn on a computer, it crashed. He moved from machine to machine until all three of the small library’s terminals showed nothing but blank blue screens.
A small Asian librarian came hustling over as Howard’s curses got louder.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “You can turn on one of these goddamned machines.”
She put her finger to her lips. “Of course, of course. Shh.”
She reached behind the row of monitors and flicked the switch on t
he surge protectors. All three computers booted up.
“There you go, sir,” she said in an exaggerated whisper. “All set.”
“Thanks,” Howard said gruffly. Then he sat down to pull up the information again. I let him get as far as the login page for the website he needed before sending a surge of electricity through the machine.
It rebooted.
Howard cursed.
The fourth time this happened--on the third machine--Howard stood up and slammed his hand down onto the monitor. The librarian looked up in alarm.
“Fuck it,” Howard muttered. I followed him as he left the library, hoping that he had gotten frustrated enough to forget Ashara’s information, since he hadn’t written it down.
That was my hope, anyway.
I was only half right. We got into his SUV and drove straight to Ashara’s street. But once we were there, he drove up and down it, peering intently at each house, as if he could somehow divine which one belonged to Ashara.
Eventually he gave up--with another loud curse--and headed out of town. I stayed with him as long as I could just in case he made a detour before heading home. But he didn’t, and as we passed the city limits sign, I felt the rubber-band tug at my stomach. With a pop! I stood in the middle of Maw-Maw’s living room. Maw-Maw sat in her usual spot in the chair.
She stared up at me through her glasses, unperturbed.
“Well hello, Callie dear,” she said.
“Hi, Miss Adelaide,” I said. I leaned in close to her and brushed a kiss near her cheek. She reached up and patted my cheek, ignoring the fact that her hand went halfway through my face.
“I can’t stay right now, Miss Adelaide,” I said. “I need to go talk to Ashara. But I’ll be back in just a little bit.”
“Okay, honey,” she said. “You just come on back here whenever you’re ready.”
I sped over to the bank as quickly as I could, eschewing street-level travel and skimming across the tops of houses. Once I got there, I slipped into the tellers’ booth.
Ashara took one look at my face and turned to her colleague. “I’m going to take a quick bathroom break, okay?”
“No problem,” Ann replied.
I followed Ashara into the bathroom, talking the whole time.
“So now he knows what street you live on and what car you drive. All he’d have to do is wait on your street and he’d be able to find out where you live.”
Ashara leaned against the closed door of the two-stall restroom.
“Damn,” she said. “That’s not good.”
“And that’s an understatement,” I agreed.
She sighed. “Okay, then. I’ll stay with Maw-Maw until we get this all sorted out.”
I nodded. “Good idea.”
She shook her head. “But there are things I’ll eventually need to get from my house. I keep a couple of changes of clothes at Maw-Maw’s, but not enough to get me through more than a few days at work.”
“We’ll figure something out,” I promised. “I just don’t want you to go back over there today.”
“Okay.” She nodded and put her hand on the door handle.
“And put your car inside her garage. Don’t just leave it out; he knows what it looks like and this is a small town.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work now.”
“Wait,” I said. “Have you had a chance to look up that safe deposit box yet?”
“Not yet. But I can do it when Ann takes her lunch break.”
I nodded. “And hey--don’t leave work tonight until I’m sure the coast is clear. I don’t want Howard following you to your grandmother’s.”
Ashara slumped against the door. “Oh, God. I never thought of that.”
“Don’t worry about it now,” I said. “Just go back into work. I’ll go see what I can figure out.”
I left the bank and headed straight for Rick McClatchey’s shop. I found Stephen in the back replacing the keys on a saxophone.
“Hey,” he said quietly, looking up from placing some arcane piece of metal into a C-clamp to hold it together while the glue dried.
At the sound of his voice, the older woman looked up from her bench. “Yes?” she said.
“Nothing,” Stephen said. “I need a break. I’m going to walk around the block or something. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The woman nodded and bent back over her task--something involving tiny pieces of metal and a miniature soldering iron.
I told him what I’d seen that morning as we moved around the downtown square.
“That sucks,” he said, stopping to stare at the display in the window of Felix’s Pharmacy.
“Sure does,” I agreed. “And it worries me.”
He nodded. “I think it might be time to go see Rick,” he said.
“Can we do that?” I asked.
“Well, they’ve moved him to Birmingham, so Maw-Maw will have to go with us if you want in on the interview.”
“Birmingham?”
Stephen nodded. “Haven’t you been watching the news? Or reading a newspaper?”
“Um. No. Can’t turn the pages all that easily,” I said.
“Oh.” Stephen stared at me for a minute. “I forgot.”
“Well,” I said, “you might as well tell me.”
“The Abramsville police department decided that they didn’t have a secure enough facility for such a dangerous criminal.” His voice sounded sour. “All they’ve really got is a two-cell jail, and both of those are usually taken up with drunks. So they’ve moved Rick to a jail in Birmingham.”
“Jail? Not prison?”
“No. I think they’re waiting for a conviction before putting him in with the really hardened criminals. Not that the media’s waiting for a trial. They’ve already decided he’s guilty. Even if they do say ‘alleged killer’.” He shook his head.
“Anyway,” he said. “If you can’t leave town without Ashara’s grandmother, then she has to go with us.”
I chewed on my lower lip, then nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to go. Ashara won’t be so happy with us, but she’ll get over it.”
“Hey,” said Stephen suddenly, staring at my face. “Can you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“When you chew on your lip like that. Can you feel it?”
I thought about it. “I guess so. I mean, it’s just a habit.”
“So you feel like you have a body?”
Now it was my turn to stare at him. “Yes. I feel like I have a body. It’s just that if I’m not concentrating really hard, it feels like the rest of the world isn’t . . . I don’t know. Real. Solid.”
I moved past the window display and headed back to Rick’s shop. “Mostly I don’t think about it.”
Stephen nodded, following me. “Makes sense. I mean, most of us don’t really think about our own bodies all that much. Not unless they’re bothering us.”
“Can we quit talking about this?” I said. “It’s kind of creeping me out.”
“Hey,” said Stephen. “You’re the ghost here. If anyone should be creeped out, it’s me.”
I sighed. “Just go back to work and tell them whatever you need to tell them. Then come pick me up at Maw-Maw’s.”
Stephen grinned, his usual good humor returning. “Yes, ma’am, Ms. Ghost.” He saluted me and loped back across the square. I watched his back as he departed. His blond curls ruffled in the slight breeze.
Kind of cute, I thought, then shook my head. Way too alive for me. Or maybe I was way too dead for him. Either way, it didn’t matter; his cuteness didn’t--couldn’t--concern me.
I sighed. I’d spent a lot of time avoiding thinking about all the things I’d never get to do again. Eat. Sleep. Touch someone. Have sex. Ever.
God. This is depressing, I thought. Maybe going to visit a man wrongly accused of butchering his wife would be just the thing to cheer me up. I smiled grimly and headed back to the bank to let Ashara know the plan.
“Oh,” I said as I moved toward the exit, “and don’t worry about being followed to Maw-Maw’s tonight. Just head over there after work today. I have a plan.”
I could hear her exasperated sigh as I ducked out through the bank.
* * * *
“Okay,” I said as Stephen, Maw-Maw, and I pulled out onto the highway. “I want you to pull over near Howard’s place. I have something I need to do before we go to Birmingham.”
“What you going to do?” Maw-Maw asked interestedly.
“I’ll tell you if it works.”
Maw-Maw looked at me suspiciously, then turned back around to face the front of the car. “Fine. You just keep your white ghost lady secrets.”
I laughed. “It’s not a secret, Miss Adelaide. I’ll tell you all about it after it’s done. And you can just quit calling me ‘white ghost lady.’ Don’t think I don’t know you only say that when you’re irritated.”
“Ooh,” said Maw-Maw, “now you’re Miss Uppity White Ghost Lady.”
I laughed again, and this time Maw-Maw cackled with me.
Stephen pulled over at the entrance to the dirt road that led to Howard’s place. As swiftly as I could, I flitted to Howard’s house. I didn’t move into the air until I was out of sight of the car, though. For some reason I was uncomfortable with the idea of Stephen and Maw-Maw seeing me float above the ground.
I was glad to see that Howard’s SUV was in its accustomed parking spot. I stood over the hood and closed my eyes--for some reason, that seemed to help me concentrate better.
And then, much like I had with the computers the night before, I put my hand on the hood, thinking of energy running through wires, overloading them, shorting them out.
I felt a snap and a sort of sizzle, and then smelled the faint sulfurous, ozone smell of fried wires.
I smiled. Beautiful. I’d be surprised if he could start that engine ever again. Not without some serious mechanical work on it and certainly not before we made it to Birmingham and back that day.
Howard would not be following Ashara anywhere today.
Maw-Maw cackled wildly and clapped her hands in delight when I got back to the car and told them what I’d done.
Waking Up Dead Page 9