Every Breath You Take

by Chris Marie Green

  But there was a little bit of ambitious coolness to her, too, as she glanced at J.J.’s camera, knowing she was in its eye. “Before we get to the nitty-gritty, why don’t we hear some background about Jensen Murphy? The audience always likes to know the spirits as people before they became legends.” She leaned closer to Amanda Lee. “This is where the drama comes in, so give us some buildup.”

  Then she winked.

  Amanda Lee widened her gaze, but then raised her chin. “I’m off camera?” she confirmed.

  “You bet,” Sierra said.

  J.J. gave a thumbs-up as he squinted and filmed. 10 kept rolling, too.

  Amanda Lee turned her back to the cameras like she was making one hundred percent sure she’d be anonymous. “Jensen was what you might call an Everygirl. Popular in high school, liked surfing and playing volleyball, and had a bright future ahead of her. But a few years after she graduated, her parents died in a boating accident, and she never quite recovered.”

  Oh, this was going to be fun, hearing my life spewed out in front of me for posterity.

  “She went into a tailspin.” Amanda Lee gazed at my photo, sympathy on her face. Suddenly, I saw the same Amanda Lee I’d first met—a woman who’d invested a lot of time trying to connect with a spirit who could cross into the ghost world to help her find the killer of her Elizabeth. I’d always felt like her tool, but looking at her now told me that she’d actually gotten attached to me somewhere along the line. I hadn’t just been an idea to her. I’d been a person and I’d never even known it.

  As she went on, I pressed my lips together, holding back a blip of emotion.

  “She became . . . I suppose you could say a shadow of herself.” Amanda Lee glanced up, meeting my gaze. Her eyes looked shiny. “She went through the motions of life, dropping out of college, waiting tables at a pizza place, shutting herself away in her apartment, and numbing herself with marijuana and beer. It was terrible enough to lose her parents but, not long before that, she also had a boyfriend who left her to go to school across the country. She was very alone.”

  I shook my head at Amanda Lee. Don’t bring Dean into this. Please.

  She gave me an apologetic expression. It was just that I didn’t want to think about how the love of my real life had left me behind. Before I’d died, it’d seemed like that’s all anyone had ever done to me.

  Now that she’d brought the crap up, I had to try extra hard to shut out how that fake spirit who called himself Dean had abandoned me, too, a few weeks ago.

  Screw him.

  Sierra had crossed her arms over her chest, a casual pose, her head angled. Her glasses made her look brainy and interested.

  “That’s sad, knowing she was in such isolation.” Genuine empathy poured from her. “You’ve been able to divine these emotions from her, and you, more than anyone, know how she was feeling on the night she . . . disappeared.”

  “You could say that.” Amanda Lee’s smile was faltering at the way Sierra seemed to be leading up to something.

  J.J. spoke up from behind the camera. “Can you tell us more about the fateful night?”

  I sensed Amanda Lee stiffen. She liked Sierra’s questions better.

  “Certainly,” she said, addressing Sierra and not J.J. “When she came here with her friends, she only wanted to forget her woes with some good company. You should know, however, that there was more to that night than a missing-persons case. . . .”

  Okay, here it came—Amanda Lee’s grand plan.

  Sierra held up a hand to J.J. “Wait! Mark that for editing, would you? It’s a perfect place for us to show Jensen’s profile through pictures. We’ll reveal who she really was besides just a story.”

  Who I really was?

  Almost unconsciously, I held a hand over my heart, but I didn’t feel a true beat, only a memory of it. I didn’t think I’d ever known who I was before I’d died. It was only after Amanda Lee had brought me back that I’d felt any real purpose or identity.

  Funny, but it seemed that Spirit Stalkers was going to feature the Jensen Murphy I never was. Huh.

  Now excitement was waving from Sierra Darque, and I grasped some of it, taking it in, letting it feed me.

  “Let’s go back to that night,” she said in a dramatic tone. “Jensen was feeling alone. . . .”

  Amanda Lee sighed, probably because she was dying to get this over with. “Her friends wanted to cheer her up, so they invited her out to ‘party.’” She used air quotes with her free hand. “But Jensen had indulged too much the night before, and she told them she’d be the designated driver.”

  Once again, I thought of how lucky I was that I hadn’t been tanked when I’d died, just like Petty Officer Randy Randall. I would take too much Mello Yello over being a stumbling, slurring, adorable mess any day of the eternity.

  “And so,” Amanda Lee continued, “Jensen and her friends came to the forest, as so many others have done over the years.”

  Sierra interjected. “Elfin Forest is known to attract kids looking for ghosts and adventures, but they don’t end up like Jensen. The police said there was no body and, really, no trace of evidence to give them a direction in finding her. From what you’ve divined, would you say that Jensen never made it out of Elfin Forest? That she died here?”

  Amanda Lee paused a long time.

  Sierra used her hand to prompt some actual words.

  “There’s something I’d like to explain first,” Amanda Lee said, trying to bring the interview back around to her advantage.

  Both J.J. and 10 stirred. In the background, a gypsy darted from one tree to another. Daniel was watching him, not the interview.

  At any rate, Sierra seemed to have her own agenda, and she breezed past Amanda Lee’s request.

  She looked into J.J.’s camera. “How did Jensen find herself alone, away from everyone else? None of her friends knew how she disappeared or what happened to her.”

  Oh, don’t say it, I thought, as I shook my head at Amanda Lee again. Don’t tell them that I scampered off to take a wee.

  “The party broke up for a time,” she said instead, retaining my dignity, bless her. “And that brings us to her disappearance . . .”

  That’s when Sierra Darque went all P. T. Barnum on me.

  “During my interviews with hikers around here, I heard that Jensen Murphy committed suicide in the forest, and that’s why she haunts it.”

  You know those cartoons where a character’s eyes go Beee-boo! out of their sockets? I was pretty sure that’d just happened with me. And from the way Amanda Lee widened her own eyes at me, I thought it was about to happen to her, too.

  Luckily, the woman had Control with a capital C.

  She raised her voice only a little. “I can assure you there was no suicide.”

  J.J. and 10 had gone tense with enthusiasm, but I wasn’t so much focused on them. Not when Daniel was in back of me, shouting, “What’d I tell you, Jensen! Lying fame whores!”

  Without thinking, I joined him. “Bullshit!”

  The leaves on the nearby trees flinched roughly, just like I’d cuffed them. J.J. and 10 pulled away from their cameras.

  “What was that?” Sierra asked.

  Amanda Lee’s voice was tight. “The spirits around us are upset. They don’t like when idle gossip is spread.”

  J.J. was almost beside himself as he whispered to 10. “You caught those leaves jumping, right?”

  “Boo-yah,” she said, filming like a Bo Derek robot that’d been programmed to record through even the apocalypse.

  Sierra plunged ahead, stepping closer to Amanda Lee in her verve. “The hikers said that Jensen hanged herself from a tree, and her friends never found her because a forest hermit took her down and her body was never seen again.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Amanda Lee said under her breath, closing her eyes, holdi
ng on to her control.

  Daniel was laughing heartily now. “Yup—bad, bad karma for the ghost crew!”

  I started to circle them, my dander up. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but it had to be subtle, so I wouldn’t tip off the team to my presence—something that would fly in the face of what Amanda Lee was clearly trying to accomplish here. Yet even as I tried to contain myself, the air crackled with my anger.

  Sierra lifted her arm so the cameras could focus on it. “Check it out, guys!”

  Even from my vantage point, I knew that her arm hair was standing on end. Same with the camerapersons’.

  Amanda Lee’s voice rang out over the noise. “I’m glad you’re interviewing me, then, because it gives me the opportunity to clear the air.”

  The crew stared at her.

  She unfisted her hands and smoothed down her skirt. “Those hikers have it wrong. Jensen Murphy did not commit suicide. Your sources are mixing up her story with those who say the Native Americans were hanged here.”

  “And they were!” I yelled, causing a tree branch to crack above the crew.

  They hopped out of the way, laughing nervously.

  “Shit’s happening!” J.J. shouted as he aimed his camera up there, just as 10 did.

  Whoops.

  “Jensen!” Sierra said. “Is that you? Are you upset? Why? Please tell us about it!”

  “Damn straight I’m upset,” I said, still itching to uncork some ugly bubbly on them.

  During all the hoopla, Amanda Lee gazed up at me, her teeth gritted.

  You’re giving them exactly what they want, she seemed to be saying. Let me handle this!

  Ugh. She was right. So I chilled out, bobbing in the air, easing my temper. And I chilled some more. By the time I chilled enough to be a calm cookie, the hunters realized that they weren’t getting any more out of me.

  Sierra fanned herself, letting out a happy, “Whoo!” then turned to Amanda Lee. “All right. If the suicide story isn’t true, then what is? I really think Jensen wants us to know.”

  Nope, Jensen actually doesn’t.

  “Jensen’s not here,” Amanda Lee repeated. “She ran away that night.”

  Come again?

  Amanda Lee forged ahead, now that she was finally able to launch her grand plan. “She didn’t want to be found, didn’t want anything to do with her old life, so she ran away that night and left everything behind.”

  The looks on the hunters’ faces were priceless. I mean, seriously, I would’ve paid beaucoup bucks to see those expressions on rewind. Even Daniel was amused, laughing his hippie ass off.

  “She . . . ran away?” Sierra asked.

  “I only want to put her legend to rest,” Amanda Lee said. “When I said I was in contact with her, I didn’t mean what you think I did. It wasn’t as a medium. I used my psychometric abilities to get readings from some of the items she left in her apartment. That’s how I know she’s not here.”

  Amanda Lee was goooood.

  “She doesn’t haunt this forest,” she added. “She died from complications after a bout with pneumonia in a Mexican village years ago. The friends she had there never knew her real name, but they quietly took care of her body, and now she’s resting in peace.”

  Oh my God. Yup, even I was stunned by Amanda Lee’s chutzpah. She’d totally erased all the salacious details of my death story in one fell, swooping lie: how I’d been chased down by my masked killer in the woods. How I’d hidden from him, praying he wouldn’t find me. How he had found me, appearing out of nowhere in that horrifically shriveled granny mask, swinging that ax down at me as my world had gone dark . . .

  I’d found out later, when he’d reappeared as the dark spirit, that it wasn’t an ax cut that’d killed me. I’d inadvertently moved and gotten the blunt side of the blade just at the right spot on my head, dying a far less grotesque death than he’d intended. Sure, he’d chopped me up afterward, just like he’d done to his other girls, but I’d been spared that terror while I was alive.

  Even though I’d relived those last few awful moments of life over and over again in a time loop, knowing my true fate made everything relatively okay now. I might’ve even still been a noninteractive spirit haunting my death spot if it wasn’t for Amanda Lee.

  “Pneumonia?” Sierra finally said.

  Amanda Lee flashed her an oh-well smile. “Pneumonia. Aren’t you glad that you’ve solved one mystery of the forest?”

  Laughter came from behind the trees. Or at least I thought it did. Were the gypsies entertained?

  Daniel sure wasn’t. He yawned, then, with a wave at me, took off, his backpack slung over his shoulder. Better things to do in Boo World.

  J.J. had lowered his camera, speechless. But Sierra had started smiling.

  “Good,” she said softly. “It’s good to know Jensen Murphy is at peace.”

  At first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. What about the drama? But then I remembered what I’d seen when I’d gone into her thoughts: her mom on her deathbed, saying, “You’ve got a gift, Sierra. Use it for good. Promise me . . .”

  Did she only want to contact spirits and then find a resolution for them? Was that what made this team’s show different from the other ghost hunters out there?

  Curious, I flew to J.J. to see what he was about, and just before I touched him, his bright blue eyes seemed to find me. I wasn’t sure, though, because the next thing I knew, I was inside his thoughts. . . .

  View from a child’s height . . . in bed, nighttime, sounds . . . whispers?

  A voice from the darkness. “Help me . . . ?”

  Over and over the whispers came, no sleep . . .

  Then, another night.

  A woman in a nightgown standing by the bed, watching, her head angled in sadness, reaching out . . .

  Pointing to the floor.

  Out of bed. A door in the floor. Opening it, finding the remains of a tiny skeleton in a blanket.

  A cry from above, and the ghost woman floating, diving down to join the baby and disappearing . . .

  I pulled out of J.J.’s thoughts with a pop, and his blue gaze searched around him.

  “Did it just get really cold?” he asked everyone else as he shivered.

  Amanda Lee was giving me the look. She’d seen me empathizing with him and was wondering what the story was.

  “They’re misguided,” I said, “but I don’t think they’re bad, Amanda Lee. J.J. and Sierra have had paranormal experiences as kids, and I’m not sure, but it seems like they’re trying to do good.”

  She nodded, but I couldn’t read her.

  Sierra laid a hand on Amanda Lee’s arm, and that hum I’d felt from my psychic medium earlier intensified.

  “There’re a lot of other spirits here that need a peaceful last chapter,” Sierra said, “and I’m going to provide it to whoever I can. Do you think you can help me find the truth with them, too?”

  As Amanda Lee hesitated, clearly reading Sierra’s thoughts through touch, I veered over to 10 to do one more round of my own empathy. Hell, maybe I’d even learn the girl’s name if I touched her skin.

  Then I heard a familiar voice behind me. And it wasn’t Daniel.

  “Of all the haunted joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.”

  I turned around to find fake Dean with his thumbs hooked into his belt loops, same as he ever was.

  4

  Every time I saw him, I went weak.

  Sappy, I know, but true.

  Fake Dean was just so beautiful, in a way that memories make your first true love beautiful. Unlike a regular ghost, he was all color, not even a touch of gray and, even though we were standing in the middle of the murky woods, I could still see the real Dean as he’d been on the beach so many years ago, his chin-length, straight, sun-blond hair and tanned skin spa
rkling with sand from the water, his light brown eyes smiling just as easily as his lips.

  Yeah, those had been the days . . . back when I’d really had my true Dean and not this mysterious spirit who kept imitating the human version for sheer entertainment value. He also drew energy from watching me run around, trying to find killers, and, whatever he was, he’d lived a long time—long enough to go to extremes so he could avoid boredom.

  I was pretty sure that another way he staved off the boredom was to give me a body whenever he was around. That’s right. My heart was beating, my skin heating, my lungs filling with breath. But I wasn’t dumb enough to believe this was anything more than an enchanted body. Something about his higher powers made my form humanlike again, even though the ghost hunters still couldn’t see me. And that was only a part of fake Dean’s arsenal of seduction.

  “First off,” I said to him sharply, “this isn’t your joint. My death spot’s nearby, so I’ve got bragging rights, remember?”

  “The whole world is pretty much mine,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

  Since he wouldn’t even give me his real name, I didn’t know what he did or didn’t own.

  I ignored his answer. “Second, didn’t you dump on me not so long ago?”

  In back of me, Amanda Lee cleared her throat, and I looked at her. She’d seen me talking with someone, and I doubted she could detect fake Dean, since he wasn’t exactly One of Us—a real ghost. I was sure she wasn’t about to ask me what was going on, though, seeing as the hunters were still here.

  But when she actually glanced at fake Dean with a what-gives? expression, I almost shit a glazed doughnut.

  “You can see him?” I whispered.

  She raised a brow. Yes. You might recall, Jensen, that I can see some, but not all, ghosts.

  Not a ghost! I wanted to shout. But I was too shocked already from realizing that Amanda Lee could see beyond the beyond. I’m not sure she’d even realized she could do that.