Dead Man Talking

by Casey Daniels

  Without bothering to take one of the papers I offered, Absalom went back to his voodoo altar.

  Reggie and Delmar picked up their shovels.

  Sammi snatched one of the maps out of my hand and gave me a snappy, “Whatever,” before she walked away.

  “What have you found out?”

  Have I mentioned that ghosts don’t show up in real life the way they do on TV or in the movies? I mean, ghosts on TV, when they pop up, there’s usually some sort of spooky music playing. But the truth is, there’s nothing that signals their arrival. One second they’re not there, the next second they are.

  One second I was all alone watching my teammates skulk away.

  The next second, Jefferson Lamar was standing at my side.

  I controlled my little shriek of surprise, and just so nobody thought I was as crazy as Jake, I moved away from his grave. There was nobody around near that dilapidated

  “You haven’t exactly given me a lot of time,” I told him.

  “You had all night. What were you doing?”

  Honestly, did he expect me to answer that?

  “These things take time,” I told him. “Your case is more than twenty years old.”

  “But you could have gone to the library and read the old newspaper articles,” he said, and I made a mental note of it. It was what a real private investigator would do. “You could have checked out the scene of the crime.”

  Another mental note. “I’m going to do all that,” I said, my conscience clear now that he’d made the suggestions and I thought they were good enough to actually follow. “But I’ve got this day job, see, and the TV station is here filming, and—”

  I didn’t have a chance to explain the rest of my complicated life to Jefferson Lamar. I mean, how could I when I heard the unmistakable sounds of a fight?

  4

  By the time I got there, Absalom, Crazy Jake, and Sammi were standing in a circle, watching Reggie and Delmar go at each other. They were down on the ground, rolling in the dirt, and Reggie had Delmar in a headlock. That wasn’t enough to stop the kid. His teeth were close enough to Reggie’s arm to do some damage, and he took full advantage—and a huge chomp. Reggie screamed and swore a blue streak, and when he loosened his hold, Delmar rolled and kicked.

  Crazy Jake jumped out of the way just in time to avoid serious injury, but Delmar’s kung fu-fighter impression wasn’t wasted. He caught Reggie in the jaw with one beat-up Reebok, and Reggie’s head snapped back. He wasn’t down for the count, though.

  His eyes narrowed and fiery, his breaths straining, Reggie lunged, and when he did, he looked a whole lot like that pit bull on his forehead. Growling, he grabbed

  And I knew if I didn’t do something quick, somebody was really going to get hurt—and the whole crazy mess just might get caught on camera.

  “Stop! Right now!” I sounded like a desperate kindergarten teacher and, honestly, that’s exactly how I felt. I raced over, and because she wasn’t about to give an inch, I had to nudge Sammi aside to get close. Since I’m about twice her size and she wasn’t expecting it, my push knocked her off her feet. The last I saw of her, she was butt down in a patch of weeds.

  Sammi was less than happy, even after I mumbled a hurried, “Sorry.” Her curses were just as loud and colorful as Reggie’s.

  And I so didn’t care.

  It wasn’t until I was right on top of where they were still tussling in the dirt that I saw Delmar had something pressed to his chest.

  The something in question was a dirt-coated box. It was about half the size of a piece of computer paper and made of wood. I have a degree in art history, but believe me, that doesn’t make me an expert in things old and moldy. Even so, I could tell the box had been buried a long time.

  I could also see where it came from—there was a hole right next to Jefferson Lamar’s headstone.

  Automatically, my interest level ratcheted up a notch. Reggie and Delmar’s beef was small potatoes compared with the too-obvious fact that the box buried near Lamar’s grave might have something to do with him—and with his claim that he’d been framed for a murder he didn’t commit. I may have been taking my life in my own hands, but hey, I had a job to do.

  And I wasn’t talking about my job at the cemetery.

  With Reggie and Delmar still busy going at it, I made my move. I darted forward, dodged the next punch Reggie threw, and ripped the box out of Delmar’s hands.

  “Hey!” Delmar was small and wiry. He was on his feet in an instant, his fists on his hips, his chin stuck out. He was so intent on glaring at me, I wondered if he even realized Reggie had hopped up, too. He was standing at Delmar’s side with the same defiant look in his eyes.

  “What the hell you think you’re doing?” Delmar demanded.

  “Keeping you from being sent to jail. And you, too.” I turned what I hoped was a fierce look on Reggie. “Somebody finds out you’ve been fighting—”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna find out,” Reggie spat. “Not unless you tell ’em.”

  “I wasn’t planning on doing that.” It was the truth, so it wasn’t like I was giving in to Reggie’s threat or anything. When he spun away and stalked over to the fence and left a good bit of distance between himself and Delmar, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was the first I realized that Sammi was still down on the ground. I offered her a hand along with an apologetic smile.

  She got to her feet without my help, but not before she tossed me a snappy, “Piss off.”

  “Fine.” I backed off and went to stand where I could keep an eye on the entire team. Not that I’m paranoid or anything. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on around here?”

  “That idiot took what don’t belong to him,” Reggie sneered.

  “Got as much right to that thing as he does,” Delmar added, pointing to the box.

  I could see I was getting nowhere. I looked to Absalom for help.

  He shrugged. “Don’t like stickin’ my nose in other people’s business,” he said. “It ain’t polite.”

  “But it is your business. It’s all of our business. That TV crew is going to come over here and—”

  “Who cares what that man-woman thinks of us?” Sammi brushed off the seat of her red shorts. Checking me out, her expression soured. “Who cares what you think? You’re a spoiled little rich girl. You got no idea what real life is like.”

  “You think?” Yeah, I was tempted to lay it all on the line: the stuff about my dad and the once-upon-a-time Martin money. The bit about the fiancé who dumped me rather than be associated with my shame. I was even willing to go for broke and mention the ghosts.

  I would have done it, too, if I thought it would get me anywhere. But hey, I know a losing cause when I see one. And this one took the cake. Rather than mention that my real life was no doubt more complicated than Sammi could ever imagine—and sound like I was looking for sympathy—I glanced from the box in my hands to the hole near Lamar’s grave.

  Automatically, I looked around for Lamar, too, but he was MIA, and didn’t it figure. That’s the thing with ghosts, see. When I want them to leave me alone, they’re all about help me, help me. And when I need some ectoplasmic assistance? Well, that’s when they tend to go wherever it is they go when they’re not bugging me.

  With no help coming from the disembodied, I concentrated on the living.

  “How’d you find the box?” I asked Delmar.

  “He didn’t find it.” Reggie marched over. I swear, there was steam coming out of his ears. “I found it.”

  “I saw it first.” Delmar plunked down on a handy headstone. “We was digging around a little bit. And I saw the corner of that box there.”

  “I saw it,” Reggie insisted. “I saw it first.”

  “Whatever!” I gave his comment all the attention it deserved before I turned back to Delmar.

  “I saw it first, and I got it out of that hole,” the kid told me. “What’s that saying about possession being nine-tenths of the law?”

&
nbsp; Reggie had no response. Then again, I don’t think Reggie understood the law. Or fractions for that matter. He grunted. “If there’s something valuable in that box—”

  “If there is, it’s mine,” Delmar said. His jaw was rigid.

  “Not a chance!” Reggie closed in on him. “If you think you can—”

  “Hold on!” I stepped between them. “The box doesn’t belong to either one of you. It doesn’t belong to me, either. If it was buried at this grave, then it belongs to this man.” I looked down, as if I had to check the headstone to know who was buried there. “Jefferson Lamar. It belongs to Jefferson Lamar. Or to his family.”

  Delmar wasn’t convinced. “Ain’t no dead man needs anything valuable.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing valuable in it,” I told them. “Maybe it’s just a nasty old box. Did you ever think of that?”

  Delmar hadn’t. Neither had Reggie. I could tell because, suddenly, they were all about keeping their mouths shut.

  I saw my opportunity and took it. I hadn’t thought to bring gloves. Too bad. The wooden box was mushy. One corner of it was splintered, too, probably less from time and weather than from where Delmar and Reggie had knocked into it with their shovels. It had a small metal lock on the front of it, but since one side of the box was completely rotted away, opening it wouldn’t be a

  I held my breath, gritted my teeth, and got to work.

  Delmar and Reggie stepped closer. So did Absalom and Sammi. Crazy Jake took pictures.

  I hoped when he developed them, I wouldn’t look as disgusted as I felt sticking my fingers inside that box.

  I picked a piece of fabric out. It was torn and faded, but it looked like it had once been orange. It unrolled, and a fat brown spider dropped to the ground, and it’s not like I’m a chicken or anything, but I was so startled, I jumped back. I was so busy watching that spider scuttle under a nearby rock, I wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t until I saw something silvery and shiny on the ground that I realized that along with the spider, a coin had fallen out of the box. By that time, it was too late.

  Absalom bent to retrieve it. “Look at that!”

  “What is it?” Delmar asked. “You think it’s real?”

  “Heck with real. You think it’s worth something? If it is,” Reggie reminded us, “I found it.”

  Crazy Jake took a picture.

  Surprise, surprise . . . Absalom handed me the coin. I held on tight and, fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as dirty as the box it came out of. I buffed it against my jeans and took a good look. “I think it’s silver,” I said. “There’s an eagle on one side of it, and it says here that the coin is worth one dollar.” I flipped it over. “There’s a head of a lady on the other side. It’s dated 1902.”

  “That’s old,” Crazy Jake informed us.

  “That means it’s worth something. I’m thinkin’ it just might make me rich.” Reggie made a move to snatch the coin out of my hand, but I turned so he couldn’t reach it.

  “I don’t know what it might be worth,” I said, “but I

  “Who cares about the friggin’ competition,” Sammi bellyached.

  “We should care.” OK, I sounded a little too much like a cheerleader, but let’s face it, if any team needed encouragement, it was mine. “Like Delmar said earlier, the producer, Greer, is probably going to suck up to Team One. I’m sure that’s why she decided to start with them today. So we’ve got to make it so she can’t ignore us. This is going to help.”

  “If that coin is worth something,” Sammi grumbled, “we should all get a cut.”

  “You ain’t listening.” Absalom took a step toward her. Sammi wasn’t about to back down, and either Absalom didn’t notice the fire in her eyes, or he didn’t care. “This is going to make us look good,” he added. “We got ourselves a genuine mystery here, and that TV chick is gonna love that. Bet those rich ladies, they don’t got a treasure like this in their section.”

  As if his words were the magic abracadabra that made them appear, we heard rustling through the weeds and the sound of Greer’s squawking as she instructed her cameraman to start filming.

  “Let’s not tell them. Not yet, anyway.” Making sure that fat spider was long gone, I retrieved the faded orange fabric, wrapped the coin in it, and tucked it all back in the box. I dropped the whole thing in an especially dense patch of spiny weeds behind Absalom’s voodoo

  “I’d rather do a little research before we let anybody know what we’ve found,” I said, when what I meant was that I wanted to talk to Jefferson Lamar before I showed the coin to anyone else. “That way when we reveal we have the coin, we can show how good we are at research, too.”

  I don’t think any of them agreed with me, but I never had a chance to find out because just then Greer and her cameraman showed up.

  “Keep doing what you were doing.” She gestured in a way that told us to get busy and act natural all at the same time. “We just came to see what Team Two is up to.”

  She wasn’t kidding when she said we. Team One trailed behind Greer and the cameraman, and even before they stepped into the little clearing near Lamar’s grave, they were mumbling to each other.

  “Not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as the section we’re working on,” Lucinda Wright commented as she adjusted her picnic basket over one arm. She shook her head sadly.

  “Not nearly as promising,” Katherine Lamb said to Gretchen Hamlin.

  Bianca didn’t speak a word. She just gave me a look, head to toe, that said she was assessing my fashion sense.

  It was the first I realized there were bits of rotted wood and a streak of dirt across the front of my emerald green scoop-necked tee.

  “Well . . . ?” Her top lip curled, Greer gave my team a collective look that clearly said we were a disappointment. “You’re supposed to be doing something. Anything. Anything?” This time, her gaze fell on me.

  “We were just—”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” She waved away whatever explanation I was about to give as inconsequential. “We need a scene where we introduce both teams. I thought we could do that now. You know, like you’re working in this section over here . . .” She waved my team to one side. “And Team Number One . . .” When she turned to the other team, she smiled in a way she didn’t when she looked at the rest of us. “You’ll come through over there, between that mausoleum and that headstone there with the angel on top and—”

  “I thought this was reality TV.”

  Greer laughed. Not in a that-was-funny way. More like in a you’re-incredibly-stupid way. She rolled her porpoise eyes. “Get real, Ms. Martin. The appeal of reality TV is that it’s real without being too real. You know what I mean?”

  Before I could tell her I didn’t and I never wanted to, she dismissed whatever answer I might give.

  “So let’s get you over here, Team One. Mae, you’ll be telling your team all about the cemetery. That way, we’ll be able to provide our viewers with some historical background without hitting them over the head with it. So you’ll want to mention that Monroe Street was officially founded in 1841, but that burials have taken place here since 1818. And remember to say something about how it was an ideal spot for courting. Couples walked the grounds arm in arm!” She sighed. “It was all very beautiful, and very romantic.”

  “And yuck!” Really, I was supposed to keep quiet when this sort of nonsense was about to be filmed? “That’s sick and twisted.”

  “It’s history.” If Greer’s eyes were lasers, they would have cut right through me. Not so the look she turned on Mae Tannager. “So you’ll be doing all that, and Team

  Good thing that camera wasn’t on Sammi right then and there; she gave Greer the finger.

  As ordered, we trudged over to the mausoleum to wait. Well, some of us trudged over to the mausoleum. I noticed that Absalom kept his distance, just like I saw that in spite of her one-finger salute, once she was away from the group, Sammi didn’t look as angry as she did upset.

  Remember
how I said that I knew better than to go chasing after ghosts? Well, I knew that having a heart-to-heart with Sammi was not in my best interests, either. Still, I couldn’t help myself. There was something about seeing tough Sammi with her eyes bright with unshed tears that made me feel like it was my duty, as team captain, to say something to cheer her up. I walked over to where she was leaning against the mausoleum, her leg (the one with the electronic monitoring device on it) bent and one foot against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest.

  I smiled, but since she refused to look at me, it didn’t much matter. “Don’t pay any attention to Greer. She obviously wouldn’t know fashion if it came up and bit her in the butt.”

  She snorted. “And you would?”

  I tried not to take the comment personally. I mean, coming from a woman in red shorts and a purple shirt

  “For an old-folks’ country club, maybe.”

  “How can you—” I bit off the rest of my comment. Sammi’s opinion was just that, an opinion, and dead wrong, besides. She only said what she did because she was itching for a fight. I refused to be the one to give it to her. I didn’t care enough, in the first place. Plus fighting teammates would make Greer salivate, and who knows what Bianca would think of me if she saw me duking it out with Sammi.

  I held my arms at my sides, the better to control my temper. “Greer doesn’t shop where I shop, or where you shop.”

  Sammi’s top lip curled. She plucked at her purple top. “You think this kind of quality comes off the rack? I make my own clothes. I design them, too.”

  OK, so we didn’t share one iota of the same fashion sense, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t impressed. Suddenly, the whole saint-on-the-shirt thing made sense, too. “You’re name is Sammi Santiago. And Santiago, that means—”

  “St. James. Yeah.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “That’s how you can tell it’s one of my own designs. I put St. James on all my stuff somewhere. You speak Spanish?”