Another One Bites the Dust

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Another One Bites the Dust Page 17

by Chris Marie Green


  I don’t know how long I sat there absorbing just what kind of evil freak I’d been up against that night. Because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, right? I had ended up face-to-mask with a real live psycho killer, and no matter how many times I saw my death playing out in my mind’s eye, I could never quite convince myself that I’d been his victim.

  It’d been another Jensen Murphy. Another shit-for-luck girl.

  But that avoidance technique wasn’t quite working for me anymore. The wall that Amanda Lee had said I’d erected to block out the crime—the same wall that’d probably slammed me into my time loop—was beginning to crumble with the gradual help of my death spot. Questions plugged the places where the bricks had fallen out. For one, I wanted to know what my killer’s first murder had been like. Also, what kind of person had he been before he’d committed it? Had he been a mild-mannered guy who worked at a desk job, never giving a hint of the foulness inside? Or had he been more like Tim Knudson, sending off red flags to people like Heidi Schmidt?

  As I lingered over that, the back of my essence wavered.

  I felt watched again. But in a big way this time.

  With a panicked jerk, I turned around, only to exhale out a big unreal breath when I saw that it was only Cassie.

  “Sorry, Jensen,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sneak up and frighten you.”

  “It’s not you. It’s this.” I gestured to the woods. Brrr.

  She came forward, her complexion wan, even for a ghost, her paisley blouse dull with lack of color, her flared pants just as bland. “I came from my own death spot in Escondido. Not because I wanted energy. I can’t seem to absorb much of it tonight.”

  “You can’t refuel?” There was no way she should be this draggy after pulling from her spot.

  “No. That’s all right, though—my death spot always helps me to sort through my thoughts. It clarifies them.”

  “Me, too.” Maybe that was another reason some ghosts haunted the places they’d died.

  I remembered that she should’ve been with Amanda Lee right now, and just before I asked about that, she said, “Oh, don’t worry. Amanda Lee’s in good hands. Old Seth came over to poke around. He said he wanted to see, as he says, ‘What was what.’”

  I hadn’t encountered Old Seth, our nineteenth-century cowboy ghost, in over a month. I didn’t know him very well, but the others did, so I was sure he’d take care of Amanda Lee just fine.

  Cassie added, “When he arrived, I had the feeling that he’d been hearing about our activity the last two days, and he wanted in. So I asked if he would stay with Amanda Lee. Honestly, I had my doubts about what I could do for her, anyway, if that dark spirit had popped in on her.”

  “Cassie . . .”

  “Please don’t give me a false shot of optimism. That spirit got the best of me today. Don’t pretend like it didn’t.”

  Wow. The fight had really knocked her down a peg or two. “I still trust you to protect and serve here in Boo World. Don’t let one bad encounter bum you out.”

  She smiled. “Thank you for saying that. Louis tried to bolster me, too. And, yes, before you have to ask, I did go to him at Tim’s. I missed you by about a half hour, but he told me you were going to your new house up here. On my way, I saw you hanging around this spot and stopped.”

  “Is everything okay, Cassie?” I was getting a heavy feeling that it wasn’t.

  “Everything’s just fine.” Her tone was lemon-polish smooth, but the look in her eyes wasn’t so much that way. There was a cloudiness there that stood out from all the gray in her.

  She leaned back her head and watched the sky, like she was listening to the night around us. “I gave a shout for Twyla when I got here because I was hoping she would be looking for Milo Guttenburg at his old cabin, where he died. I also called an old acquaintance who likes these woods. He only haunts outside of them when he watches over his old girlfriend.”

  “Okay . . .”

  Before I could fire more But are you feeling all rights at her, she flipped into a different subject, like she knew what I was going to ask and didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Amanda Lee wanted me to tell you about the lunch with Nichelle and Heidi today. While she tried her best to talk sense into Nichelle, Amanda Lee and I stayed back, listening.”

  “Did Heidi get anywhere with her?”

  “Maybe. Now that you’ve seen into Tim, Heidi feels justified in coming out with her suspicions to Nichelle. Nichelle told her that she’d noticed his increasing dissatisfaction with life, too. Evidently he’s having a hard time at work and she thinks he’s taking it out on her.”

  “That’s what she’s blaming his attitude on?”

  “Yes. Nichelle thinks he’ll get over it sooner or later, and she’s going to stick by her man, helping him through it.”

  “That’s because she loves him.”

  “That’s what she said.” Cassie floated toward an oak, running her hand near the bark. She was paying a lot of attention to the simplest things around her, and that only added to my unsettled feeling. What was going on with her?

  She added, “If there’s one thing that astounds me about the living, it’s how they can’t see love for what it is. Or isn’t. She’s mistaking good sex for emotion. At least, that’s the impression I got from what she was saying to Heidi today about Tim.” She lowered her hand to her side. “I should know what I’m talking about. During fifteen years of marriage, I never stopped to wonder if I really loved my husband. It wasn’t until I was dead that I realized we didn’t have what I thought we had. But that’s what happens when you marry too young, I suppose.”

  Gosh, she was getting dolorous. It was like the dark spirit had stolen what little happiness Cassie had died with. I knew that she’d felt big-time satisfaction when she’d taken her life; in that one moment, she’d had some of the control she’d never had when she’d been living. It was just that, in death, the regrets had set in.

  She turned to me. “Heidi did suggest seeing a shrink to Nichelle, for Tim’s sake. Maybe that’ll work out.”

  “Maybe.” Uh-uh.

  Cassie’s smile was back, sweet and a little sad. “I just want you to know, Jensen—it’s been fun having such adventures with you around. You’ve brought so much activity and brightness.”

  I frowned, but I didn’t get to pursue my own suspicions because I felt another presence nearby.

  When a fortyish ghost with scraggly hair, a wild beard, and a definite Jesus vibe showed up carrying a backpack, Cassie clasped her hands.

  “Daniel. You came!”

  “You called.” He nodded at me. “You must be the serial killer chick. I’ve heard through the ghostvine about you.” With a gesture to himself, he said, “I’m Daniel Ashbury.”

  Cassie interjected. “He was my granddaughter Calliope’s boyfriend.”

  “I’m afraid my story’s not half as ear-catching as yours.”

  “It’s made the rounds, huh?” I asked.

  “Sure has.” He offered up his own death story. Ghost etiquette, you know? “I was just on a hike a few years ago when, apparently, a hidden heart defect got the best of me.”

  Cassie laughed softly. “I’ve told him that he should get together with Louis and have some sort of heart-to-heart club.”

  Daniel grinned, hover-sitting next to me on the curved oak limb. Just as he was probably about to start asking me details about how I was murdered—I mean, he had that ultra-curious gleam in his eyes like everyone gets when they meet me—the sound of a loud “Gawd!” rang through the woods.

  Three guesses as to who that was. But Cassie seemed very pleased that Twyla had answered her call, too.

  When I heard another voice with her, all deep and growly, I came to attention. Had she found Milo Guttenburg at his old cabin and death spot?

  Apparently so, because when Twyla came marching into our view, she had a scruffy, white wire-haired behemoth in plaid air-trudging after her.

  “Told you I h
eard her!” she said, pointing at me. “See, Milo, you didn’t have to drag your butt out of the woods after all. Jensen came here, so stop your pissing and moaning. I’ve been listening to it for what feels like hours.”

  He grumbled, fixing a lazy eye on me. At his sour mood, I think I might’ve rather run into the witch of the woods than him.

  Eh, maybe not.

  Twyla sighed dramatically. “Grumpiest thing I ever met, but when I told him that he’s being looked into again for your murder, he wanted to set the record straight with you. That got him out of his shithole.”

  Milo bothered to carefully pronounce his words this time. “I didn’t do it.”

  Still a growl, but very improved.

  “Clearly,” I said, “I don’t have to tell my story to you as a hello.”

  “Oh, blah-blah-blah,” Twyla said. “Let’s fast-forward through the etiquette, okay? Like, Milo stroked out and that’s how he bit it. Moving on.”

  “I don’t know nothing new about how you died,” he said to me, already starting to float away. “So don’t come looking for me again.”

  “You didn’t see or hear anything that could help us figure out who might’ve killed me?”

  “Don’t know nothing,” he said again. “Christ on a cracker, I’d just like a little peace and quiet these days. If a man can’t even get it in his own home, then where’s it found?”

  Twyla rolled her eyes. “That home he’s talking about? It’s a burned shack that’s falling down like a house of toothpicks. Total suckarama.”

  He’d already gotten good at ignoring Twyla. With another grumble, he said, “Even if the woods get on fire, kids’re still coming here, wanting to track down cults or take goddamned pictures of ghosts or find the forest witch. Wish I still had my shotgun.”

  “So that particular night when me and my friends were here . . . ?” I asked.

  “I was in my cabin, listening to you carrying on in the distance with your music and laughing. You just have to be so loud about having fun, don’t you? You were lucky that night—I put my Walkman on and finished some woodwork I needed to get done for a shop in town. Otherwise . . .”

  Twyla chopped out a groan. “News flash, Milo. She wasn’t all that lucky.”

  He stomped off for good this time, and I called a “Thank you, sir” out after him. He flapped a hand up to me, all “Just bug off.”

  When he was gone, Twyla said, “I wish I could empathize with that guy. He, like, was the worst interview ever. Humans are way easier because you get to go into them. For being invisible, ghosts sure aren’t transparent.”

  “You tried,” I said. “And I appreciate it.”

  I hadn’t even finished my sentence when Twyla started checking out Daniel, and it was obvious from the way he put a couple of inches distance from her that they’d met before.

  “Twyla,” he said in greeting, keeping it short.

  “Hey yourself.”

  And that was that.

  Cassie laughed a little, but the sound died, straying into the night as she lavished a look on Daniel, me, then Twyla.

  Something was definitely up.

  “Cass,” Twyla said, “you’re awfully quiet. You have been since this morning.”

  “I’ve done some thinking,” she said, pushing back her light ponytail, which had flopped over her shoulder. “I’ve been around Boo World for a long time, Twyla. A very long time, and . . .”

  Twyla slowly said, “You say that like you’re a thousand years old.”

  “It really does feel like I’ve been in this place an eon.” Cassie looked upward again, toward the treetops, then directly at me. “I never expected to stay here for this long. When I slit my wrists, I did it because I wanted everything to end. But then I woke up here, in this dimension, and right away, there were ghosts surrounding me. Just before I died, my husband had moved us into a new house. It felt . . . strange. For the month we lived there, I never knew why there were such odd energies, but when I saw everyone around me after I passed on, I realized that the house had been haunted by good spirits. They took me under their wing until, one by one, they went into the glare. By that point, I’d found Twyla, wandering around after her own death, confused and a little off balance. I did for her what those ghosts had done for me.”

  Daniel said, “You paid it forward. Good karma.”

  “I was learning the ropes just fine, Cass,” Twyla interrupted, but she did it with a tenderness that made it obvious that she was lying about how much Cassie had eased her way into Boo World.

  “Of course you were doing fine,” Cassie said, smiling. She looked at Daniel. “I’d already realized that I wanted to see my children grow up, then my grandchildren. None of them have died yet, so when my favorite grandchild’s boyfriend here passed on, I made sure I was around for him. But there comes a time when you sense that there’s more for you, that the glare holds something new and exciting, and you realize that you’ve been afraid to see what it is this entire time.”

  Rushing forward, Twyla let off sparks. “No, Cass—”

  “Hear me out.”

  Twyla fell like an autumn leaf toward the ground, fear all over her half-and-half face.

  “After this morning,” Cassie said, “I want more than anything to go wherever we’re meant to go next. When that dark spirit plunged into me, I felt its bleakness. I still feel it, and it reminds me too much of the woman I used to be when I was alive—unhappy, hopeless. But I can make all of that go away.”

  A sudden sob broke out of her, and none of us moved.

  How could you comfort someone who would always be inconsolable? And how could you do it when you had no idea how to really feel about almost everything anymore?

  Twyla tried her best. I could see her harden her hand, then reach up to touch Cassie. But, as Randy had told me, ghosts didn’t feel that very human warmth and pleasure when they touched. So why bother?

  Cassie hardened her own hand, anyway, and they made contact, two unfeeling entities, trying so hard to soothe each other. Wanting. Wishing there could be more to it.

  When their hands fell away from one another, no one said anything. Not until Daniel came to a stand.

  “I get it, Cassie. When Calliope dies, I’m going to move on, too. She’s what I’m staying around for. I’m going to miss the hell out of you, though.”

  Cassie reacted only by smiling at him again, then looking toward the sky. But this time, there was an obvious reason for it.

  Something gray and expansive was gently winging down from the treetops, gliding so smoothly that it was enough to take anything’s breath away. If they had any.

  At first, I thought it might be the dark spirit and the moonlight was playing tricks with its color, but I didn’t get a terrible, negative feeling from it. As it skimmed over the ground toward Cassie, swooping to a stand, it slowly took the form of a flowing, lace-torn bride, thickly veiled and covered from neck to toe in a shroud.

  So this was it. Cassie had been calling out to everyone she could, just so she could say good-bye to us. Now I realized who her final call had been to.

  Her wrangler.

  Randy had told me once that every ghost had one, and sometimes they showed up on their own. But not this time.

  Cassie beamed at it, her relief a beacon, her eyes filling with the illusion of tears.

  Twyla didn’t hold back on the weeping, although I’m not sure any tears could come out of her. Daniel only put a hand over his heart in farewell.

  When Cassie smiled at me, I felt a shimmer of energy run through me. She was happy, at peace, and ecstatic about the last adventure she’d probably ever take.

  “I wish,” I said through the tightness of my throat, “you could come back and be the first to report what you find out there.”

  She laughed. “I’m hoping I’ll never want to come back.”

  The wrangler acted like nobody existed except for Cassie, angling its head as it adored her with its veiled gaze. Then it lifted its hand, resting
its gloved fingers on Cassie’s face.

  She closed her eyes. “This is the first time I’ve let a wrangler this close. I’ve always felt it near, aching to take me to a glare spot, but now?” She opened her eyes, looking straight at it. “I’m yours.”

  With an airy grace, the wrangler lifted its veil only high enough so it could drape the grayness over Cassie. Almost magically, the veil breathed toward the ground, consuming Cassie and erasing her like she’d never existed at all as the flowing material rested against the wrangler once again.

  It raised its arms, almost in a beatific way, then lifted off the ground slowly, slowly, until it started moving backward in the exact way it’d come.

  Winging.

  Flying.

  Disappearing above the treetops.

  It wasn’t until it was gone and I heard the sounds of Twyla crying that I realized I was doing the same thing, even though I couldn’t feel any tears on my face.

  14

  As life went on around us in the forest—with that owl hooting, then the sound of car wheels screeching on a road somewhere in the distance—I thought about how nothing outside of Boo World would ever care about what’d just happened with Cassie. Her kids and grandkids wouldn’t know that she’d been near them for so long after her death. She’d been lost in a history that’d never even made it into any books; she’d been here, then gone, leaving no trace of herself in the end.

  No trace except for a veiled-phantom memory that still stuck with me with all its awful beauty.

  But just as regular life went on, our existences continued, even without Cassie here. Daniel the hiker had moseyed back into the woods with a raised hand and a “See you later, Jensen,” like he knew I’d be back to visit my death spot sooner rather than later. Twyla, however, had stayed near my death spot and told me to go wherever I was planning to go next without her. I was pretty sure that this place had taken on new meaning for her, because it was Cassie’s memorial now, and she wanted to get as much from it as she could.

  I really liked the notion of that. Cassie had been completely joyful when she’d taken that final step with the wrangler, and it had brought something new and sublime to the spot where I’d died. When I came back, there’d be extra meaning.

 

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