The Ex Who Glowed in the Dark (Charley's Ghost)

by Berneathy, Sally

  Sunny lifted a hand to Amanda’s cheek. “You’re flushed and hot. I’ll grab a couple of bottles and we’ll drink them in the shade before we head out. Go on. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Sunny’s concern touched Amanda. She didn’t hover the way her mother did or make a big production of it, but she was obviously worried about Amanda’s health.

  Her daughter’s health.

  Not that she had any reason to worry since Amanda was suffering from exposure to Charley rather than from exposure to the heat. Feeling a little pleased and a lot guilty, she obediently walked over to the mottled shade.

  Sunny went to her bike, opened her pack and took out two bottles. “These were frozen when we started. They should still be a little cool.” She joined Amanda under the tree, opened both and handed one to her.

  “Thank you.” Amanda took a long drink of the tepid water, trying to swallow her feelings of guilt for accepting Sunny’s concern and care under false pretenses. The water went down nicely, but the guilt stuck halfway. “I have to tell you something,” she blurted.

  Sunny regarded her curiously. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “I haven’t been completely honest with you about some things, like how I knew somebody was following us or why I walked into that field.”

  “Okay,” Sunny repeated, waiting quietly for Amanda to continue, not pressuring her, just waiting.

  Amanda moved her bottle of water from one hand to the other, took another drink, looked at Charley hovering beside her and tried to think of what to say next.

  I see dead people. Well, not all dead people. Just one dead person.

  “What if I told you that Charley’s…um…essence is still around?”

  The concern on Sunny’s face intensified. “His essence? What are you saying?”

  “His spirit. His soul.” She swallowed hard. There was no good way to say it. “His ghost.”

  Charley scowled. “Damn it, Amanda, you know it hurts when you call me that!”

  “Ghost?” Sunny repeated. “You mean his memory? You’re haunted by his memory? I didn’t think you liked him very much.”

  Amanda drew in a deep breath and prepared to dive in headfirst. “No, not his memory. I’d happily forget about him if that was it. It’s definitely his ghost.”

  “I’m not a ghost! I’m me!” he protested.

  “You’re a ghost!”

  “No,” Sunny said quietly, the concern in her eyes ramping up another level. “I’m not.”

  Amanda tried to smile. “Of course you’re not. I was talking to him. To Charley. To his ghost. But he doesn’t like being called a ghost.”

  “I see. Amanda, you’ve had a really stressful day, physically and emotionally. Let’s finish our water and go find something to eat. Your blood sugar’s probably getting low. Did you eat lunch?”

  “I skipped lunch and I am hungry, but food isn’t going to change anything. Charley’s ghost is still going to be here.”

  “He’s here? Right now?”

  Amanda nodded. “Standing next to me.”

  Sunny’s worried gaze flickered from one side of Amanda to the other. “I don’t see anything.”

  Too late to back down now. “I know you don’t. I’m the only one who can see him. The irony is that I’m the one person in the world who has the least desire to see him.”

  Charley clutched at his heart as if wounded. “Ouch!”

  “Amanda, there’s nobody here except the two of us.” Sunny moved closer, her tone still calm but the words edged with concern.

  “You’re correct. There’s nobody except us, but there is also Charley’s spirit. You can’t see him. You can’t hear him. You can’t touch him. The only way you know he’s there is the sensation of cold when he touches you.”

  Charley shoved his hands in his pockets and looked dejected. “First I’m a ghost, now I’m frigid. Do the insults never stop? Just wait until you try to get to the light. They’ll kick you back too.”

  “Wave your hand right here.” Amanda dragged her fingers through Charley’s chest, shivering at the chill.

  Her expression anxious, Sunny reached for the space Amanda indicated.

  Charley zipped away. “Bad enough you do things like that to me. I can’t let just anybody reach inside my body.”

  “He moved.” It sounded lame to Amanda even as she said it.

  “Of course he did. Let me get you some more water. Dehydration can cause a lot of problems.”

  “Like hallucinations? You think I’m hallucinating?”

  “Yes. Like hallucinations.”

  “I don’t want any more water. I’m already probably going to have to stop to go to the bathroom before we get to Dallas.”

  Sunny laughed abruptly, the sound a tinkle of magic in the dusty, mundane countryside. “That sounds more like my daughter.”

  And Amanda wanted nothing more than to please her, to earn the right to be called her daughter. But she couldn’t do that by being deceitful. “Maybe this will convince you. After he came back as a ghost, Charley told me things. He told me that he broke into your office and found the file cabinet where you had pictures of me and my original birth certificate. Then he came to Dallas to meet me and blackmail my dad.”

  “Blabbermouth,” Charley said.

  Sunny paled, licked her lips, opened her mouth as if to say something then closed it again.

  “I would have no way of knowing that if Charley hadn’t told me,” Amanda said.

  “I believe Charley told you, just not his ghost. He told you while you were married to him, before he died.”

  “If he’d told me that, I’d have known you were my mother when I first met you. He was already dead by that time, remember? I didn’t know. Not until the night you told me. Anyway, if he’d told me about trying to blackmail Dad, I’d have killed him and saved Kimball the trouble.” She shoved her helmet on her head, strode to her bike, got on and started it before Charley could protest her statement or she could see Sunny’s reaction.

  This confession business was tough.

  But she’d made the right decision even if it was going to be difficult to convince Sunny of Charley’s unreal reality. Deceit had no place in a close relationship. And, to her surprise, Amanda found it was a relief to tell somebody else even if that somebody didn’t believe her. Yet.

  *~*~*

  When they got back to Dallas, they stopped for burgers and Amanda had to spend some time convincing Sunny she was rehydrated with stable blood sugar and could safely be left alone. She didn’t mention Charley again and neither did Sunny, but the subject hung in the air between them, more palpable than Charley himself.

  It was almost dark by the time she got to Dawson’s apartment.

  “You look like you haven’t slept in a week,” she said when he answered the door.

  “Yeah? Well, I feel like I haven’t slept in two weeks.” He moved aside for her to enter.

  Jake sat at the table where the three laptops were up and running. Ross stood just outside Grant’s room, zipping up his backpack.

  “See anything today while riding nowhere near Wagon Wheel Park?” Jake asked.

  Amanda set her helmet on the sofa and pulled off her jacket. She wanted to be able to tell him they’d learned something, wanted to throw in his face proof that her search had not been completely futile.

  “Tell him about the van,” Charley urged.

  Oh, yeah, she could report the totally boring story of how she and Sunny had pulled off the road and a van with two ordinary people stopped to offer them help.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t see anything of interest on my ride. How about you?”

  Jake’s lips thinned as if in frustration and he shook his head. “I drove around the area. It’s a big area. Even if we brought in a search team, it would be tough.”

  “And they’d kill Grant if they saw people searching,” Dawson said.

  “Heard anything else from them?” she asked.

  “No.” Dawson
sat at the table in front of two of the laptops. “I’ve been going through everything on all our computers again.” He no longer sounded panicked. Now he sounded dull, detached, dead inside. “Maybe I could give them all three of these computers and they can find what they want.”

  That didn’t sound like a very good plan to Amanda but she refrained from saying so. She looked at Jake and then Ross. Neither one of them appeared any more hopeful than she felt.

  “We may have some leads,” Ross said. “I need to get everything I collected back to the lab.”

  “What did you find?” Amanda asked, suddenly hopeful. “Fingerprints? DNA? Fibers?”

  Ross laughed at her eagerness and hefted the bag onto his back. “Maybe. Among other things, I found some blue fibers that could be from a blanket, and Dawson said he’s never had a blue blanket.”

  “That blanket in the van was blue!” Charley darted over to stand beside Ross. “Tell him about the beige minivan!”

  “A blue blanket?” Amanda repeated. “But there are probably thousands of blue blankets around.”

  “Yeah,” Ross agreed. “But every small piece of information we find narrows the scope and gets us closer to the truth. Add the blue blanket to the beige minivan—”

  Amanda’s breath caught in her chest. “Beige minivan? What beige minivan?”

  Ross nodded his head toward Jake. “My buddy had a little luck, too.”

  Amanda looked at Jake. He scowled and shook his head slightly.

  “Tell me!” she demanded. “We’ve got to work together on this. You can’t pull that official police business on me. I’m involved too.”

  “The lady downstairs,” Dawson said. “Detective Daggett talked to the people on the first floor and he found somebody who saw a beige minivan leaving early this morning.”

  She whirled on Jake. “Really? You can tell Dawson but not me? I’m the one who called you!”

  “Dawson doesn’t use the information to go out and do crazy things.”

  “I’m going to do something crazy if you don’t tell me. Dawson will tell me anyway if you don’t.”

  Jake lifted his hands defensively. “Okay, okay. I talked to an exotic dancer who got home around 3:00 a.m. She said she saw a beige minivan. She only noticed it because it was pulling away from in front of the building at three o’clock in the morning. Not many people out and about at that hour. But she didn’t get a license plate or anything, and there are an awful lot of beige minivans in Dallas.”

  Charley dropped his head into his hands. “I don’t remember the license plate number!”

  “I do.”

  Chapter Eight

  “You do what?” Jake asked.

  Damn! She had to get better at not talking to Charley in public. “I do have a license number for a beige minivan. This may be a coincidence, but Sunny and I saw one today.” She described the encounter, omitting the part about Charley seeing a blue blanket though without that bit of information, the story seemed inconsequential, a coincidence.

  Jake and Ross exchanged glances. Ross set his backpack on the floor. “What color hair did the woman have?”

  “Kind of a light brown, mousy blond. Why?”

  “Short or long?”

  “Short, and the man was bald. Why are you asking about hair?” She thought of his answer when she asked if he’d found DNA. Among other things…

  Ross shook his head. “I found a couple of long blond hairs in Grant’s room.”

  “Oh. No, it didn’t belong to either one of those people. Her hair was very short and his was nonexistent.”

  “Tell him about the blue blanket!” Charley insisted.

  Other than claiming she had x-ray vision, Amanda couldn’t think of a single way to bring that blue blanket into the conversation. Besides, a blue blanket in a beige minivan was not exactly a unique occurrence.

  “The van’s worth checking into,” Jake said. He took his notepad from his pocket and wrote down the number as Amanda recited it.

  Jake and Ross left, and Amanda sat down at the table with Dawson. She was exhausted and wanted desperately to get home to her bed, but she hated to leave Dawson alone. Not likely he’d get any sleep that night.

  He was typing rapidly on one of the laptops.

  “Have you found something?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He moved the mouse, clicked and looked at her, his gaze feverish. “I found the license plate.”

  “What?” That was not the answer she’d expected, though she probably should have. Dawson would have started hacking away as soon as she verbalized the number. Daggett and Ross would have to go through regular channels to find it. Dawson suffered from no such constraints.

  He shot up from his chair. “One of the women next door, the ones who weren’t home this morning. It’s her license plate! And she has long blond hair!” He charged toward the door.

  Amanda lunged after him. “Wait! I’ve got Jake’s cell number. They’re probably still downstairs on the way to their car. We can catch them!”

  Dawson wasn’t listening. He was already out the door.

  She yanked her cell phone out of her purse and tried to hit the button to call Jake as she hurried after Dawson.

  By the time she reached the hall, he was already banging on the door of apartment 3A.

  Jake answered his phone.

  “Get back up here now,” she said and disconnected the call. No time to explain.

  An attractive brunette opened the door of 3A and smiled. “Hi, Dawson.”

  “Does your blond roommate have a beige—how do you know my name?”

  Her smile widened. “You live next door to me. I’ve talked to your little brother. He’s not as shy as you are.”

  “You talked to Grant?”

  She held the door wider. “Come on in. I’m Megan Thornton, and this is my roommate, Hannah Wilder.” She indicated a blond woman sitting on the sofa with a book in her lap.

  Grant’s kidnapper?

  “Don’t go in there!” Charley warned.

  “Grant’s missing,” Dawson blurted.

  “He’s missing?” Megan’s hand shot to her mouth. “What do you mean?”

  Once again somebody needed to take charge, and it wasn’t going to be Charley or Dawson. Amanda shoved her assistant into the apartment and followed him in. “Hi. I’m Dawson’s friend, Amanda Caulfield.”

  Megan looked a little disappointed at those words. She had seemed happy enough to see Dawson. Was it possible there could be some romantic interest there? Well, probably not if she was involved in Grant’s kidnapping. But that wasn’t proven yet.

  “His employer friend,” Amanda amended just in case. “We need to talk to you about Hannah’s beige van.” Not her choice of how to start a conversation, but they didn’t have time to dink around.

  Hannah rose from the sofa. “I don’t have a van. I drive a red Kia.”

  Dawson looked from one girl to the other and blinked a couple of times. “What’s your license plate number?”

  Hannah and Megan looked at each other and frowned. “What’s this about?” Megan asked.

  “As Dawson said, his brother is missing, and a beige van with your license plate number is, uh, a vehicle of interest.” Amanda recited the digits. “Is that your number?”

  Hannah looked confused. “Maybe. I don’t know. Who remembers their license plate number?”

  “I do,” Dawson replied.

  “Of course you do,” Amanda said. “You probably remember the address of the hospital where you were born. Hannah, would you be willing to take us downstairs to the parking lot to check the license plates on your car? It’s important.”

  “Sure, if it’ll help find Grant.” She retrieved a ring of keys from her purse.

  “I’ll go too.” Megan opened the front door.

  “I’m so sorry,” Hannah said. “Grant’s a great little guy. Last week he helped me carry my groceries upstairs. The bag wasn’t heavy, but he wanted to help.”

  Halfway down the sec
ond flight of stairs they met Jake and Ross coming up.

  “What’s wrong?” Jake asked.

  Amanda paused while the others continued downstairs. “We have to go to the parking lot to check Hannah’s car. Dawson traced the plates to her but she says she drives a red Kia.”

  “How did he trace—?”

  “Don’t ask. Let’s just go check it out.” She pushed past him, following Dawson and the girls outside to the parking lot in back.

  “That’s my car.” Hannah pointed. Even in the darkness, the vehicle was obviously small and red.

  Amanda looked around at the dozen or so vehicles in the lot. Not a beige minivan to be seen. She felt a stab of disappointment. They were back to ground zero. No leads. No clue how to find a little boy who must be very scared by now. She thought of the raggedy dog in Grant’s bed. He would be sleeping without it tonight.

  “That’s not the license plate.” Dawson moved closer to the car. “Maybe I got the numbers wrong.”

  Amanda shook her head. “We know that’s not possible. Maybe I got the numbers wrong.”

  “That’s possible,” Jake said.

  He was only agreeing, but Amanda thought it rather rude of him to do it so readily. “Or maybe I didn’t.” Her hopes rose. “Maybe—maybe somebody switched the license plates. Don’t you think it’s a pretty big coincidence that those plates led Dawson to his next-door neighbor?”

  “She’s got a point,” Ross said.

  Jake took his notebook from his pocket and wrote down the number of Hannah’s plates. “Why don’t we go back upstairs and Dawson can do whatever illegal search he just did to find out where this license plate leads us?”

  Taking two steps at a time, Dawson led the group back upstairs and was already inside his apartment when Amanda reached the third floor.

  She was halfway across the landing with the others close behind when the door of 3B opened and Nick Farner stepped out. “I thought I heard you coming up the stairs. You have a distinctive step. Did you find the missing boy?”

  “No, we’re still looking,” Amanda said.

  “Hi, Nick.” Megan waved then hurried on into Dawson’s apartment.