by J. D. Robb
She could hear the sisters chattering as she snatched up her purse and left through the front door.
She walked down the hill into the town of Johnnie’s Bend, noting how far up the hill the town had spread in the past few years. Hedbo Street, named after the man and the house, had been rezoned for commercial use and was now an oddly appealing mix of older homes and new businesses of every kind.
She didn’t expect to recognize anyone; she hadn’t lived in Johnnie’s Bend for years and hadn’t attended school there as a child for more than a few months or a single academic year between her mother’s marriages. So it was a surprise to her when halfway through the club sandwich she ordered at King’s Café, she heard her name ring out loud and clear.
“Maribelle Joy!”
She flinched and began to slide deeper into the shadow of her booth before she saw who was calling her and decided to stand her ground. She shook her head at Ryan Doyle, refusing to answer to that name, and picked up another triangle of the first food she’d eaten all day—it was going a long way to curing her headache.
He waved and patted the shoulders of other people he knew as he made his way across the room to her table. With laughter still ringing in his voice, he tried to cajole her.
“Ah, come on, don’t be mad. It was out of my mouth before I could stop it. Tell you what—we came in for hot fudge sundaes. Let us buy you one.”
“We?”
“My son, Jimmy.” He half turned and, sure enough, standing behind him was a small boy with shaggy black hair and wide, almond-shaped brown eyes that looked much too clever and much too old to belong to someone his age. He had on a multicolored striped T-shirt and denim shorts and his feet— below bone-thin legs with bandaged knees—were encased in red sneakers with no socks. She thought it ironic that she knew three ghosts who didn’t make her as anxious as this one little boy did. “Jimmy, this is the lady you heard talking this morning. Ms. Biderman. I told you she wasn’t a ghost.”
Jimmy narrowed his eyes and studied her assiduously as his father urged him into the booth and to move farther down the bench so he could follow.
“Mind if we join you?”
She gave him a do-I-really-have-a-choice look and he grinned at her—no.
“Okay, so the burning question on our minds is”—he wagged his hand between him and his son—“what happened to the cool backhoe?”
“The . . . oh, Mr. Brown’s machine . . . Well, he decided not to use it after all. Or at least not right now. We’re going to try to recycle what we can from the house first. Go Green.” She chanted the slogan lamely. The kid was still watching her. What went on in a head that small? “He tells me there’s a use for everything—even asphalt roofing is reused for hot-mix paving, and people will pay big money for some of the fine carpentry inside the house.”
“So you’re not even tempted to keep the old place.”
“No.” Her answer was too quick and too sharp. “I mean, I have no emotional attachment to the place. A few memories from my childhood, maybe, but it was more my mother’s touch-stone than mine. A place she loved and came back to when she needed to feel safe. I don’t have those sorts of feelings for the place.” She lowered her eyes from Ryan’s intense gaze to Jimmy’s—time for first contact? “And next summer you’ll have a Smoothie Hut in your own backyard. How about that?”
He tipped his head to one side and considered his answer. Suddenly his enormous brown eyes began to fill with tears, and his chin quivered. M.J. was so appalled he might as well have been growing extra appendages.
“What will happen to them?” he whimpered. “If you tear down their house and put up a Smoothie Hut, where will they go? Can they stay at the Smoothie Hut?”
In general, M.J. made a rule of not playing stupid, but in this case it felt . . . well, smart.
“Hey, champ.” Ryan put his arm around his son and tried to soothe him. “What’s all this? Don’t you want a Smoothie Hut next door?”
“No,” he wailed and turned his face into his father’s chest.
“Ah. You’re not worried that we won’t be having hot fudge sundaes anymore, are you? Cuz you know I can’t live for more than a week without one, right?”
“No.” He sniffed and lifted his tear-stained face toward Ryan. “I’m worried about my friends, Dad. Where will they go?”
“My guess is they’ll be coming to our house, hoping to get free smoothies out of me.” He chucked good-naturedly and glanced at M.J. as he smoothed dark hair from his son’s face. “I’ll have to get a second job—”
“Not those friends!” The boy was distraught now. “The ladies, Dad, the ladies who live in the house. Where will they go?” Once again he launched himself at his father’s chest. And the sisters thought Adeline was dramatic. “Where will they go if she smashes down their house? Tell her to don’t do it, Dad.”
Casually, as if this had nothing to do with her, M.J. picked up another triangle of her club sandwich and resumed her lunch.
It didn’t matter how he’d come to know there was more than one ghost in the house—whether Odelia had told him or if all three of them had been outside the house and talked to him—she thought it was cruel of them to make themselves known to him and couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been frightened at first. Terrified, maybe. And yet now he was concerned with their welfare?
Children were a total mystery to her.
To Ryan as well, if the look on his face was any indication.
“Jimbo.” Gently, he took the boy by the shoulders and held him away to look at his face. “Is this about those ghosts again?” Jimmy nodded, and M.J. chewed a little faster. Ryan sighed and sent an apologetic look her way. “You see what I mean? I’ve done everything I can to convince him there are no ghosts in that house. Would you mind giving it a try?”
“Me?” She squirreled her bite of turkey club in her cheek to keep from choking. “But I—”
The expression he gave her was beseeching; he was counting on her to tell the boy the truth. Her gaze gravitated to Jimmy’s . . . which was all but daring her to lie . . . because he already knew the truth. Instinctively, she knew this was a deal-breaker with the boy. Tell the truth and become an adult he can respect and trust or lie and become subhuman slime. And this mattered to her, why?
She nodded, looked down at her plate as she replaced her food and gathered her thoughts. Why was this suddenly her problem to deal with? Her mother and aunts should never have contacted Jimmy. Of course, once they found what they’d lost in the house and were free to cross over to the Other Side, this would no longer be a problem—for Jimmy or for her. The sisters would be gone, and the house would come down. So, as far as she could tell, her choices were few. She had to help the ghosts find what they had lost, and she needed to convince Jimmy that they had better places to go.
“Well, I don’t know that much about ghosts.” She saw Ryan’s face change in her peripheral vision as she directed herself to the boy. He’d just have to think she was humoring the boy to prove their point . . . well, his point, anyway. “But maybe if you come over tomorrow afternoon, you’ll see that that big old house isn’t as scary . . . or worth saving . . . as you might think.”
“I’m not a-scared of the house . . . or the ladies.”
“Good.” He was sort of cute in a fuzzy-puppy-on-a-thick-leash sort of way . . . from her side of the table. “Come after lunch and bring a flashlight.”
The waitress arrived to take their order.
“Let me guess.” She grinned at Jimmy. “Hot fudge sundaes.”
“You got it.” Ryan ruffled his son’s hair. “We’ll have our usual plus one more for our friend here.”
M.J. waved her hand, shook her head, and made negative noises as she finished chewing and swallowing her last bite of sandwich.
“Actually, would you happen to have any apple pie?”
Four
Her mother held out her hands to stop M.J.’s lecture, then turned them palms-up for understanding.
“Couldn’t she have waited somewhere else until he was gone?”
“It may not have done any good.” She walked by the cold fireplace to touch and readjust the pictures that were—and weren’t—on the mantel at the time of her death. Lingering over the photo in the center, she caressed the glass with two fingers as she spoke. “We can travel anywhere we want . . . anywhere we’ve been before, but there are places we, our spirits, are more attracted to than others. It’s usually a place where our strongest emotions were felt, a place we loved or a place where the decisions we made affected us most . . . or for some, places where we were murdered.”
“You weren’t—”
“Gracious no, Maribelle, I would have told you by now.” She turned from the mantel to face her daughter, her impatience present but short-lived. “But those are the souls who give us a bad name, you know . . . stuck in the places where they feel only fear and anger until they can find whatever they lost there and pass over to the Other Side. Dreadful, really.”
“You mean, find their lives again?” M.J. frowned. She stood and walked to the mantel to inspect the photos thereon. Husbands mostly. The shot in the center was of M.J. at age three, sitting on her father’s lap; his dark hair slicked back, his dark eyes wonderfully wicked and dancing happily. Her mother embraced them both from behind—blond and golden, blue eyes twinkling like sun on calm waters.
“Oh no.” She smiled. “The loss of your life is, of course, a permanent thing, sweetheart. But the dying part isn’t what’s important. It’s everything that leads up to it. And if you’re mostly satisfied with your life—content at the time of your death—then death is simply a part of the package. But murder . . . that’s unnatural . . . like suicide. Lots of issues there, let me tell you.”
Her mother’s tolerance in explaining how being a ghost—or becoming one—worked was uncharacteristic of the edgy, easily irritated mother she was accustomed to. In the past, as a child, M.J. was given adult answers to questions and was expected to look them up or fathom them out on her own . . . As an adult, she found she’d had no interest in her mother’s answers at all.
“So someone who’s been murdered would be looking for, what? Revenge against the person who killed them? What would they need to find to pass over?”
Her mother’s smooth, lovely brow furrowed as she thought of an answer. M.J. watched in silence, recalling a time long ago when she had considered her mother the most beautiful of all the princesses in the land.
She heard the words in her head in a deep male whisper and felt suddenly warm and happy and . . . entrenched in a love so deep and solid it rocked her to the core.
“Maybe revenge,” her mother speculated, drawing her back to their conversation. “Haunt the murderer, perhaps, but that still wouldn’t get them to the Other Side. They’d have to stay here to do that. No, I would think it would be more about what got them killed in the first place, some sort of explanation . . . forgiveness maybe, or just acceptance of the fact.”
“Some way to make peace with it.”
Adeline gave a short nod. “Peace. That would be nice.” She hesitated. “I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to not know what you’re looking for.”
“We’ll figure it out.” She, too, nodded, realizing that might have been the nicest thing she’d said to her mother in quite a while. “We used to be a team, remember?”
Adeline took on that same inner glow of tranquillity and delight that M.J. had seen the day before . . . the one in the picture on the mantel. Why, oh why, wasn’t she enough to make her mother shine all the time?
“The boy and his father are arriving,” Imogene announced, appearing in the room beside her sister. Despite her more youthful appearance, she had the same sad, woeful expression on her face that M.J. had come to associate with her in the past—which hadn’t been there the day before.
“Is something wrong, Aunt Imogene? Has something happened?”
She smiled kindly. “No, dear. I’m just having one of my days.”
“It’s the boy.” Adeline put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. “Children upset her.”
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How could you?” Still smiling, she laced her fingers with her sister’s and gave her a hug. “But don’t concern yourself with me. It’s more important to ease the boy’s fears, the poor little thing. He must be so confused.”
M.J. chuckled as she stepped to the door. “No, actually he’s not confused. He’s as certain you’re here as I am.” She turned to look at them. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
She was halfway down the wide staircase when the door knocker echoed through the lower floor. She looked over the banister to make certain Odelia was out of sight for the time being, then skipped down the last few steps and across the foyer to welcome her guests.
“Hi.” She didn’t mean to sound so exuberant, but after spending the entire morning with ghosts, real people made her feel . . . well, glad to be alive. “Welcome. Please come in.”
Ryan, clearly assuming her high spirits were for his benefit, grinned back and nudged Jimmy. Jimmy drew his left arm out from behind his back and shook a bouquet of cheerful white daisies at her. “Dad says we have to give you these.”
She pressed her lips together and took them as solemnly as they were offered. “Thank you, Jimmy, they’re beautiful. I . . . You know, there used to be flowers everywhere here when I was a little girl. Inside, outside. The air was sweet with them.”
“Now the air smells like apple pies.”
She closed the door, her nose sniffing. The scent was there but very faint. “Is that what that is? My aunt Odelia liked to bake. I bet she baked so many apple pies the smell is stuck in the wallpaper.”
“Na-uh. It’s stuck in the kitchen.”
“It is? Well, let’s go see why.”
He was off like a light, needing no further permission to seek out proof of his ghosts. M.J. and Ryan followed at a sedate pace.
“Thanks for doing this.” She could see his prime objective was to put his son’s mind at ease; seeing her a clear but solid second. Trying to fool one and lying to the other wasn’t how she would normally handle . . . well, any situation involving a father and his young son. But what was normal about ghosts? “I’ve tried everything I can think of. . . . I’m lost.”
“I’m no expert, but I’ve been told that their imaginations are almost as strong as their sense of reality. I thought if he came over and took a good look around, and if I got a little creative myself, maybe we could work something out.” Still, she felt like she was doing something wrong. “I’m not making any promises. Like I said, I’m not a child psychologist or anything. I mean, the last kid I had any contact with was me, and I have to tell you I was not, in general, a happy camper.”
He laughed. “So what do you really think about kids?”
“I don’t know. I think I could take one in a fair fight if it was small enough, probably, but I tend to group Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle, and kids in the same weird little mystery group.” She held the tips of her fingers together to show him.
“But you don’t hate ki
ds, right?”
“No. I just don’t know any.” She looked at him. “Yours seems okay.”
He laughed. “Even with the ghost thing?”
She was thoughtful. “Yeah.” She especially liked that he didn’t back down when he knew he was right . . . which might also be a problem for her. “I like that he’s worried about them, where they’ll go when the house comes down.”
They entered the kitchen to find Jimmy standing near the tiled counter, arms at his sides, his expression mutinous and suspicious. “What’d you do with her?”
Okay, so maybe not a fair fight. “Well, it’s not like I killed her, Jimmy. We talked. I told her I had plans for the house and that it was time for her to leave.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know. Wherever ghosts go when they’re done being ghosts.”
“Heaven?”
She needed to think quickly . . . she wasn’t a particularly religious person, but she didn’t know what he’d been taught. She glanced at Ryan, who was watching and revealing very little.
“I’m going to say yes,” she guessed, nodding. “Odelia was a very sweet, very good person. I think she did go to heaven.”
“What about the sad one?”
“The sad one?”
“The one who watches me from the upstairs window and cries.”
“You’ve heard her crying?”
“No, but I can tell. I see her tears and then she puts her face in a paper towel or something and her shoulders shake. I can tell she’s crying.”
Her mother? No, the concept of her mother crying over a child for no reason just didn’t fit. But Imogene, who had lost her young son . . . well, watching over Jimmy every day must be a torment for her. M.J. reasserted her resolve to help the three sisters find their way out of the house, and not for the sake of the Smoothie Hut anymore.
“That would have to be my Aunt Imogene. She had a little boy a long time ago. He got sick and died. But she’s gone, too, Jimmy. They’re all gone.”