The Ex Who Wouldn't Die (Charley's Ghost)

by Sally Berneathy

  "When the victim is wealthy. You're not. Your parents are, but they're both in good health. You won't be inheriting money for a long time, and you've never made a lot at any of your short-lived jobs."

  Amanda's eyes narrowed. "Thank you for pointing that out."

  "So," the rude detective continued, "if it was all a scam, what was the scam? What did Charley Randolph expect to gain from marrying you?"

  Amanda was pretty sure she knew the answer to that one, but she wasn't about to admit it to this creep. Anyway, she felt sure from the man's shrewd expression that he had done his homework and already knew the answer.

  How many times had her father bailed Charley out of trouble, used his influence to get the charges dropped or provided a lawyer who could keep Charley out of jail?

  For a long time, maybe until this very minute when so many truths had been shoved in her face, she had believed that, in his own selfish way, Charley had loved her, that amidst all the deceit, that one element had been genuine.

  She'd realized shortly after their marriage that Charley lied to her when he came into the real estate office where she worked, claiming he wanted to buy a house. He had no money to rent a house, much less buy one. He'd sheepishly admitted, when confronted with his deception, that he saw her entering the building and fell in love at first sight, so he'd told "a little white lie" in order to meet her. Only after he'd begun to talk about marriage had she told him her father was a judge, and he'd seemed surprised. A judge would not, he'd said with a giant sigh, want his daughter to marry someone with Charley's dubious background.

  Until she could get her father alone, she had no idea why he had kept secret his knowledge of Charley's family, but she had an icy feeling that, when she unraveled all the secrets, she'd find that Charley knew, the day he walked into that real estate office and smiled at her, she was the daughter of a judge.

  "Mrs. Randolph?"

  She rose from the wooden chair. "Apparently, Detective Daggett, you know more than I do about my ex-husband. Since I can tell you nothing else, I assume we're finished and I can go home."

  "Ex-husband? Your divorce wasn't final, Mrs. Randolph."

  "Perhaps not, but death did us part. I think that's about as ex as it can get."

  The cop gave her a tight smile. "Go home. But don't plan any long trips."

  She returned the pseudo-smile. "I'll be sure to send you a copy of my itinerary."

  Brian took her left arm and her father her right as they hustled her out of the interrogation room. She let them. She wanted to get out of there. She'd had enough of answering questions. She wanted to get her father alone and interrogate him. She wanted answers instead of questions. She doubted those answers would be anything she wanted to hear, but she needed to know the truth. There'd been little enough of that since she married Charley Randolph.

  ***

  Amanda's first chance to talk to her father alone came that evening when she settled inside his silver Mercedes for the drive home. She perched tensely on the edge of the leather seat as they pulled out of the garage into the pleasant May evening.

  The neighborhood had a rich aura, cool and shady and prosperous. Mature trees lined both sides of the street, and the low sunlight touched the leaves, spinning the greens from light to dark as they fluttered in the gentle breeze. Though she couldn't hear birds from inside the well-insulated car, she knew the lilting songs of the robins and cardinals, the raucous summer calls of the blue jays and the ever-changing chorus of the mockingbirds. If you didn't look too closely behind the solid wooden doors of the houses on this street, the neighborhood was Utopian.

  The drive from her parents' house in Highland Park to her place off Harry Hines Boulevard was only a few miles, but the distance was more than spatial, a journey from the upper crust to the lower, to an area where Amanda could operate her motorcycle shop, live above it and have relatively low mortgage payments.

  "It's going to be all right," her father said, turning the corner and heading away from the quiet, tree-lined street. "They have no evidence against you that isn't circumstantial."

  Amanda studied his profile, the strong nose, stubborn jaw and clear brown eyes. He had always been her hero, her best friend and her opponent. Her inheritance of his independence and his obstinacy guaranteed the two of them would butt heads, but he'd never lied to her. At the moment, however, she suspected he was making an effort to divert her from asking for the truth, from forcing him to either admit to something awful or to lie to her. He wouldn't lie. She couldn't believe he'd lie.

  But he could refuse to tell her.

  "How long have you known about Charley's family?"

  For a couple of blocks they rode in silence.

  Eventually, her father did not disappoint her.

  "I ran a complete background check on him as soon as you said you were thinking about marrying him."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  Another long silence. "Charley didn't want you to know."

  Amanda's head snapped in her father's direction. "You hated Charley! Why would it matter what he wanted?"

  "Mandy, Charley is dead. Soon the police will find who killed him, or at least be certain you didn't, and everything…your marriage, the things he did…it will all be over. Charley is dead, and you need to put it behind you and get on with your life."

  Amanda shook her head and laughed, angry and amused at the same time. "Stop that slippery lawyer talk! You know better than to think I'm going to let this go until you give me a straight answer."

  Emerson's lips lifted in a faint smile. "You are definitely your father's daughter. You'd have made a good lawyer, you know." For a moment, his eyes gazed into the distance. He gave a resigned sigh. "So what do you want to know about Charley's family? They're small town, hard-working but uneducated. Blue collar. Maybe he was ashamed of them. Charley always pretended to be somebody he wasn't."

  "That's nuts. He'd make up a story about a drug dealer and a prostitute mother to cover the fact that his parents were blue collar? I don't think so. I think he'd have hidden his family no matter who they were. Charley was always pretending, always lying about who he was. Maybe he had to disconnect from everything and everybody real in his life so he could live the fiction he created."

  "That's possible," her father agreed, eyes on the road ahead. "Perhaps in order to become the persona or personas he became, he needed to block out the truth even from himself."

  "Could be. I don't suppose we'll ever know the answer to that question, but that still leaves my original question which can be answered. Why didn't you tell me about Charley's family, my in-laws? They were my family, too."

  "I'm your family. Your mother, your sister and I. We're your family. If Charley chose not to share his family with you, that was his decision."

  "Damn it, Dad, you're doing that lawyer thing again!"

  Her father turned off the street and down the driveway beside the large building that housed her shop, Amanda's Motorcycles and More. He pulled close to the outside staircase leading up to her apartment and stopped. Putting the car in park, he turned to face her, his expression serious.

  "You're my daughter. I'm your father. I love you beyond all reason, and my number one priority has always been your happiness, yours and your sister's. But I don't worry about Jenny like I do about you. She's easier. Her life flows smoothly along her pathways, no speed bumps. You came into the world screaming and waving your clenched fists, and you've been fighting ever since." He touched her cheek with the back of one hand. "You refuse to take advice. You refuse to learn from the experience of others. You're stubborn and willful and determined to make your own mistakes, and because I love you, I try to stop you. Maybe my advice isn't always right, but it isn't always wrong, and always my intentions are to spare you pain and make you happy."

  Amanda gave a frustrated sigh. "You're not going to answer my question, are you?"

  Her father leaned across the console and kissed her cheek. "I love you, Mandy." He opened h
is door and started to get out of the car.

  Amanda placed a hand on his arm. "If you can't be honest with me, you can't walk me upstairs."

  Emerson nodded gravely. "Very well. I'll wait here and watch until you get inside."

  She glared at him. "This isn't over."

  One side of his mouth tilted upward in a half-smile. "I know."

  Amanda shook her head, opened her door and exited the car. Her father could be very stubborn.

  But so could her father's daughter.

  She strode determinedly toward the old two story red brick building with her shop on the ground floor and her apartment on the second.

  Fumbling with her keys, she climbed the rickety wooden stairs to her front door then turned to wave to her father. He waved back but showed no signs of leaving. Irritated as she was with him, she couldn't stop a slight smile at his protectiveness. Whatever his reason for withholding information about Charley's family, it probably sprang from some absurd notion of protecting her. She couldn't be truly angry with someone who loved her that much.

  Grasping the door knob, she inserted her key in the deadbolt…and realized with a shock that the door was unlocked. Had she been so upset she'd forgotten to lock it the day she left for that insane ride to Charley's? No, she distinctly remembered locking it then testing to be sure since she planned to leave town.

  Dawson had a spare key. Could he have come up for some reason then forgotten to lock when he left?

  Not likely. Dawson was OCD to the nth degree. When he closed up the shop downstairs, he always checked the door, sometimes two or three times. If he'd gone into her apartment, he'd have locked, checked, relocked and rechecked.

  He tried to kill you! He'll try again! You're in danger!

  Oh, for crying out loud! Why did she keep remembering those stupid warnings from a pain-induced hallucination?

  She turned the knob forcibly and shoved the door open so hard, it slammed back against the wall.

  The place was dark, all the blinds down. That was creepy. The living room had great windows, and since this was the only two story house on the block, she always kept the blinds open.

  She licked her dry lips and told herself to stop being silly. Dawson could have closed up if he'd been in here. He preferred a cave atmosphere to a glass house. The two of them alternately and obsessively opened and closed the blinds over the small windows in the shop downstairs.

  That had to be it. Dawson checked on her apartment and closed the blinds then inexplicably forgot to lock the door. Even Dawson couldn't be one hundred percent OCD.

  She took a step inside, flicked on the light switch, heard her father's car drive away, and suddenly had to fight a rising, irrational panic at the thought of being alone.

  She straightened her spine, closed the door behind her and turned the lock. She'd never been frightened to be alone, and she wasn't going to start now.

  She was home. Home was a good place to be.

  Immediately upon moving in, she'd freed the hardwood flooring from the ugly green carpet that had protected it through the years and insured it was only slightly battered, just enough to give it character. Coffee table, lamp tables and a large bookcase—garage sale treasures of different wooden hues and textures—gave the place an air of genteel antiquity. Her sofa blazed with brilliant bursts of red, purple, yellow and green, adding a bright, eclectic note to the room.

  Her home would never appear in Better Homes and Gardens, but the effect pleased her.

  Tonight, however, as she moved through the room, the familiar aura of comfort eluded her. Something didn't feel right. But nothing was wrong. Nothing was out of place.

  Except the unlocked door and those blinds.

  Get over it! she ordered herself. Check the closets and under the bed, then have a glass of wine and relax.

  Tomorrow she'd open the blinds again. Not tonight. Not because she was frightened of what she might see outside. She just saw no reason to open them tonight when it was dark out there.

  She strode determinedly into the large kitchen with its white-painted cabinets and her old-fashioned enamel-topped table. Everything seemed in order there…except again the blinds were closed.

  Had to be Dawson.

  She took one of her mismatched crystal stem glasses from the cabinet, retrieved an open bottle of white wine from the refrigerator and poured herself a generous serving.

  Before leaving the kitchen, she slid a carving knife from the wooden block. Not that she was nervous, but, hey, you never knew when you might need to carve a roast.

  Or something.

  This wasn't the best neighborhood in the city, but she'd never been frightened in the two years she'd lived here.

  One night a couple of months ago two men had come to the door looking for Charley. They'd wakened her at one o'clock a.m. after she'd battled insomnia until midnight. Then, when she told them Charley no longer lived there, they became belligerent. Rather than scaring her, they'd aroused her anger.

  She grabbed a hammer she'd been using to hang a picture. Brandishing it above her head while shouting her opinion of rude people running around in the middle of the night, disturbing women trying to sleep, she chased them down the stairs and into their car, then halfway down the block before she came to her senses and went back to bed.

  She wasn't usually skittish.

  Tonight, though, something felt strange. Not really scary, she assured herself, just wrong.

  Good grief. One little tumble down a mountain and she lost her nerve.

  Refusing to give in to such vague nonsense, she marched into the bedroom, flipped on the light and looked around.

  No one there.

  Of course not.

  Maybe the head injury had scrambled her brains and made her paranoid.

  She set her wine on the dresser, strode over to the closet, hesitated, then yanked open the door, half-expecting to see a felon crouching inside.

  Have to be a skinny, midget felon, she thought, studying the crush of clothes and boxes in the small closet.

  As long as she was in the vicinity of all those boxes, she might as well find that gun that damned Detective Daggett was so hot for. And once she found it, she could keep it on a night stand next to the knife. Surely this uneasy feeling would vanish when she was thus well-armed. She could even find that hammer that had inspired the fear of God and Woman in those rude men who'd wakened her in the middle of the night.

  She tossed the knife onto the brightly colored quilt she used for a bedspread. Reaching into the closet, she grabbed one of the cardboard boxes and hauled it out, set it on the floor, then frowned. Granted, she didn't pay much attention to the storage boxes, but she would have sworn the top box had been a computer paper carton containing sweaters instead of a sturdy liquor box marked Christmas decorations.

  Prickles darted up her spine.

  She peered into the closet more closely.

  Some of the clothes Charley had left behind were now in the middle of the rack rather than shoved to one side.

  Against her will, her heart-rate accelerated.

  Refusing to give in to her paranoia, she hauled out more boxes until she reached the one in the back of the closet, the one she knew contained the gun Charley gave her.

  Turning the box upside down, she dumped the contents on the floor. A chipped crystal paperweight, some old CDs, a worn wallet, a tangle of ear buds and miscellaneous wires, USB ports, adaptors…a wide variety of paraphernalia…but no gun.

  So she was mistaken about which box she'd put it in.

  No. The striped kitchen towel in which she'd wrapped it lay among the odds and ends.

  "I know who took it."

  Amanda shrieked and shot to her feet, heart pounding loudly in her ears, wishing she'd found the gun and a few bullets or at least hadn't tossed aside the kitchen knife.

  For an instant, her brain refused to register what her eyes saw.

  Charley stood on the far side of the room.

  Chapter Six
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  For an instant, Amanda felt only annoyance. Charley had managed to get into her apartment after she'd changed the locks.

  But Charley was…dead.

  The accident. Head injury. Hallucinations.

  Amanda closed her eyes firmly then opened them again.

  He was still there.

  "Yeah, it's really me," he said.

  He didn't sound dead. His voice was normal, if a bit less arrogant than usual, but definitely not sepulchral.

  She turned away and began tossing things back into the box. If she was going to have hallucinations, why couldn't it be George Clooney or an anonymous knight in shining armor? Even the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus would be preferable to Charley.