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

by Sally Berneathy

  Sandy shook her head. "No, I don't think it was her blood. She didn't seem to be injured."

  "Do you think he raped her?"

  "I don't know. I waited until she came out of the shower, then I tried to talk to her. She sat on the edge of her bed and started to cry, completely hysterical. I asked her if she and Kimball had been doing drugs. I knew the two of them had tried marijuana, but most of us had. I didn't consider that any big deal. It wouldn't have caused her behavior that night, but I thought something else might."

  Amanda realized she was holding her breath, waiting to hear about Dianne. "What did she say? Was she on drugs?"

  "She admitted they'd tried something early in the evening that made her really high, but she swore she was completely sober. I believed her. She was really out of it, but she didn't seem to be stoned. I asked her if Roland hurt her. She shook her head and kept crying. Said she never wanted him to see him again as long as she lived. That was pretty strong, coming from her. Dianne wasn't one of those girls who had big break up scenes. If she and Kimball had an argument, she'd shrug it off, say it'd be okay, and it always was. She never said they were breaking up until that night. I knew it was serious." Sandy drained her tea and set the empty glass back on the coffee table.

  "But she never said why they were breaking up?"

  "Never. When I pushed her on it, she asked me to pray with her. Dianne had never been super-religious. She went to church once in a while, but in all the years I'd known her, she never asked me pray with her until that night."

  "What did she pray about?"

  "Forgiveness. She begged God to forgive her, then she cried some more and said she knew He never would."

  "Forgive her?"

  "Yeah. Whatever happened that night, she felt guilty about it. She finally calmed down enough to go to bed, but I woke several times and heard her sobbing. Then she got up about four, took the yellow sundress down to the common room and burned it in the fireplace."

  "Wow." Amanda realized she was sitting on the edge of the sofa, gripping her glass of tea as if trying to crush it. She took a sip and set it on the coffee table, then leaned back, trying not to appear overly anxious.

  "Yeah," Sandy said, "that was my reaction. She never talked about it again, but from then on, she went to church every time the doors opened, and she had bad dreams. Cried in her sleep almost every night, and sometimes she talked."

  "Yes?" Amanda leaned forward, anticipating the words…death, murder. "What did she say?"

  "Dianne was a good person. Whatever happened, she had nothing to do with it. That man is the devil incarnate." Sandy straightened, set her jaw. "Over and over, she begged somebody to stop. One night, I'll never forget, she sat bolt upright in bed and shouted, He's dead! You killed him!"

  Amanda shivered and looked at Charley. He shrugged. "So Dianne wasn't his first murder. Doesn't surprise me."

  Amanda supposed it shouldn't surprise her, but somehow it did. How many people had the mayor of Silver Creek killed?

  "Did you tell the police about this after Dianne was shot?" she asked.

  Sandy shook her head. "No. There didn't seem any point in telling a story that would put Dianne in a bad light…drugs, blood on her dress. It didn't seem important since they said she was killed by a transient."

  "But now you're not sure?"

  Sandy bit her lip and again shook her head. "I don't know. Greg called before you got here and said you thought maybe Kimball had something to do with her death."

  Amanda shifted uncomfortably on the comfortable sofa. Even though Kimball had all but admitted to Dianne's murder, she felt uneasy at the thought of coming right out and saying he'd done it.

  "Tell her!" Charley ordered. "Sandy, he killed her!"

  "Do you know of any reason Kimball would want to get rid of Dianne?" she asked.

  "Maybe."

  That got Amanda's attention. "Really? What?"

  "After that night in college, Dianne went to church regularly, and she tried to help people. I think she was trying to atone for whatever happened. Then just before she died, she started talking about how one could never be forgiven for their sins if they didn't confess." She paused, drew in a deep breath. "I think she was going to confess about that night, maybe about Kimball murdering somebody. I think he killed her to keep her quiet."

  ***

  Amanda set some new speed records as she rode home from Sandy's house. Every headlight coming toward her could be driven by Kimball or the creepy man at the high school. Every tree along the roadside could hide someone aiming a gun at her.

  Dianne and Kimball had taken drugs that night in college, and someone had died, likely been murdered by Kimball while Dianne watched and begged him to stop. She'd been close enough to get blood all over her yellow sundress, close enough to see the entire incident, and Kimball had killed her to keep her quiet about it.

  That knowledge emphasized his threat to her, made very real the possibility that he could and would kill her. Not like she'd be his first victim. He had experience at this murder thing.

  It was dark when she got back to the Randolphs' house. The family sat in the living room, reading and studying. Amanda waved to let them know she was home, then went straight to her room.

  "Did you see anybody following me?" she asked, pulling off her motorcycle gear.

  "No. Was I supposed to be looking for somebody?"

  "Uh, yeah! You keep saying you're here to help me. Warning me if somebody's trying to kill me would be a good start." She went over to stand beside the window, staring out into the darkness. The first evening she'd been there, the night was soothing with its soft breezes and relaxing sounds. Now it was frightening with the darkness cloaking secrets, emitting sounds she couldn't identify. In the warm, cozy bedroom, she shivered.

  "Whose blood was on that yellow sundress?" she wondered, and didn't realize she'd spoken aloud until Charley answered.

  "Whoever Kimball murdered that night."

  Couldn't even talk to herself anymore. Never a moment's privacy.

  "The man's evil," Charley continued. "He deserved to be blackmailed."

  Amanda scowled and started to berate Charley, but a movement of shadows among the trees caught her attention. She pressed closer to the window in order to see past the light in the room but saw nothing more. Had she really seen movement, or was she being paranoid, so worried that Kimball was coming after her that she was seeing threats in an innocent man hanging around the school yard and shadows in the trees?

  She could ask Charley to flit outside and look around. But then she'd have to admit she was scared, and that wasn't going to happen.

  She turned away from the window, away from the view of the moonlit trees outside, and sat in the wooden chair of Charley's old desk.

  What was the matter with her? She wasn't going to let some control-freak, power-hungry tyrant creep her out. Nor was she going to let him murder her, not when there were still Cokes to be drunk and motorcycles to be ridden.

  "I think we have enough to talk to that obnoxious Detective Daggett again. Tell him what we learned about Dianne and the incident in college. He can check the records for unsolved murders on that night."

  "Really? Would that be the same detective who thought you were nuts that night you told him I wasn't dead and I'd been visiting you, and then you talked about psychic visions? All of a sudden, you want to talk to that jerk? Why? You scared, Amanda?"

  "Absolutely not!" That was a lie, and both of them knew it. "I just think I'm not very good at this do-it-yourself murder investigation stuff. I need a little help."

  "We're making progress! This is no time to wimp out."

  "That's easy for you to say! You're already dead. You have nothing to lose!"

  "Yeah, I do, actually. What if I'm stuck here until I help you solve my murder? This in-between business isn't a lot of fun. Sure, it's nice to be able to fly and go through walls, and my knee doesn't hurt anymore. But I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't ride motorcycle
s, I have to wear the same clothes every day. Don't you care if I make it to the other side?"

  "Not really." Except she did want him to go away from her. "What else can I do if I don't talk to the cops? We kind of know what happened, but I don't know where to go from here. I'm fresh out of ideas."

  "Fortunately, I'm not. We can set a trap. You told Kimball we've got his murder weapon in a safe deposit box. So we buy an unregistered gun from one of my old buddies, then tell Kimball we're going to give him back his gun, you meet him wearing a wire, hand him the fake gun, and we get him to confess."

  Amanda's eyes widened. "Buy an unregistered gun? Wear a wire? That's insane!"

  "I know some guys—"

  "I have no doubt you know some guys who could fix me right up with an illegal weapon, but I really don't think I want to go there."

  "You got a better idea?"

  "Yeah. You leave so I can go to bed. Let me sleep on this."

  Charley shrugged and disappeared. Knowing him, he was probably still watching. She flipped off the light before changing clothes and felt compelled to look out the window one more time. With the room dark, she'd be able to see outside better, assure herself that no one was out there.

  She moved directly in front of the window.

  There!

  She distinctly saw the shadowy shape of a man walking among the trees, moving away from the house. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and a cold chill skittered down her spine.

  "Charley!"

  He appeared so quickly, she wondered how far away he'd been, but the possibility of his spying on her while she undressed was the least of her worries at the moment.

  "Go outside and see if there's somebody in the yard." She pointed toward the shadow. "Hurry! He's leaving."

  Charley ran through the window.

  Fingers clutching the sill, heart pounding double-time, Amanda watched as he disappeared through the trees. Please come back and tell me I'm being silly, she urged mentally. Come back and laugh at me. Any of that was preferable to thinking someone was really out there, spying on her. Seeing the man at the high school football field was creepy, but it was daylight and he could be an innocent pervert. This was scary.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Charley returned, frowning.

  Amanda held her breath.

  "I couldn't get close enough to see who it was, but there was a man out there."

  "Lost," Amanda whispered hopefully. "Maybe he was wandering around lost. Did he look lost?"

  "Yeah, like we were lost when Kimball caught us. He's watching you. You're in big trouble. We need to go tomorrow and get that gun for you."

  At that moment, Amanda didn't feel like getting a gun. She felt like running away and hiding. "No. Tomorrow we go talk to the cops. I'll tell that damned Detective Daggett what I found out about Dianne, and I'll tell him somebody's following me. Surely that will get his attention."

  "You better hope he doesn't decide to arrest you as long as you're there."

  "You better hope that, too, since, if I go to jail, you to jail, too." As soon as she spoke the words, Amanda realized that was a double-edged threat. Going to prison would be bad enough. Being trapped in prison with Charley would be even worse. "But just in case, you might be thinking about who would sell us a gun."

  Chapter Seventeen

  "You've been drying that same plate for a good five minutes," Irene said.

  "Oh." Amanda put the plate into the cabinet and reached for another wet one. Herbert had left for work, Paula and Penny had gone to school, and Amanda stood in the sunny kitchen, drying the breakfast dishes while Irene washed. However, her mind was far away, formulating what she could say to Jake Daggett to make him believe her and help her.

  She'd phoned him as soon as she got up and scheduled a meeting for that afternoon. He'd seemed a little surprised to hear from her, and she couldn't decide if that meant he was surprised she'd put herself in a position to be arrested so easily or if it meant Charley's murder was a cold case, and he was surprised she'd bring it up again. Neither possibility made her eager for the meeting, but she could think of no alternatives.

  Sandy's story of what happened with Dianne brought home to her how dangerous Kimball was, and the man outside her window convinced her she could be next on his list of dead people. Between the two events, she'd had terrible dreams all night.

  "Everything okay?" Irene asked. "You've been a little preoccupied the last couple of days."

  A part of Amanda wanted to do something she'd never done in her life—tell this kind woman everything, dump all her problems on Irene's comfortable shoulders, accept the sympathy and caring she knew would be forthcoming.

  She would not, of course, do that. If nothing else, she knew Irene would worry about her, and she didn't want to upset her mother-in-law.

  "Everything's fine," she said, forcing a smile.

  "Paula told me you've been talking to Charley at night. I think that's a good thing, a healing thing. We all have to cope with grief in our own way."

  Grief? Terror and anger more closely described her feelings, though she would certainly be grief-stricken if she got sent to prison for killing Charley or if Kimball murdered her.

  "I have a surprise for you that should put a smile on your face." Irene beamed, her pale eyes twinkling. The sunlight streaming through the window over the sink sparkled on her silver curls. The image alone put the promised smile on Amanda's face.

  "More pecan pie?"

  Irene laughed. "We can do that. But my surprise is that your mama's coming for lunch."

  The handful of flatware Amanda was drying slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. "What?" She leaned over and hastily retrieved knives, forks and spoons. "My mother? Here? How? Why?"

  "She's worried about you, so I invited her down for lunch." Irene took the flatware from Amanda's paralyzed hands and tossed them back into the soapy dishwater.

  "You called my mother?" Though calling her visiting daughter-in-law's mother was probably a perfectly normal thing to do, Amanda felt somehow, irrationally, betrayed.

  Irene's brow wrinkled. "Your mother called me this morning."

  "Oh. I—I'm just a little surprised. My mother—well, she doesn't usually worry about me." And she was pretty adamant that she didn't want to come to Silver Creek. Amanda could not see her uptight mother having lunch in this comfortable old farm house, eating ham sandwiches and pecan pie, drinking sweet tea from a fruit jar.

  Irene reached over to give her a quick, one-armed hug. "Of course your mother worries about you. She may not say it, but mothers always worry about their kids. You'll understand one day when you're a mother."

  This was going to be interesting, and probably not in a good way. Not bad enough she had to worry about being murdered by Kimball or arrested by Daggett, now she had to deal with her mother. What was the woman up to? Surely her father hadn't told her mother about the trespassing incident. Usually she could count on her father to keep her more erratic behavior from her mother in the interest of not upsetting her.

  Amanda could only hope her mother wasn't going to make a scene and say something unintentionally cruel to Irene. Beverly Caulfield had impeccable manners and would never do something like that deliberately. But she had always lived in a rarefied atmosphere, out of touch with the rest of the world.

  At least Amanda wouldn't have long to wait and worry and stress about that event.

  ***

  Beverly Caulfield arrived just before noon, parking her white Mercedes on the dirt between Amanda's bike and Irene's car.

  From the living room window, Amanda watched in delight as her mother, every hair in place, wearing a beige silk blouse, tan linen slacks and beige heels with red soles teetered across the patches of dirt and scruffy grass in the yard. Her lips were tightly clenched, but she came gamely up the wooden steps and across the porch.

  Amanda stepped in front of the screen door and pushed it open before her mother could search in vain for the d
oorbell. "Come in, Mother. Irene's putting the finishing touches on lunch."

  Beverly patted her immaculate hair and smiled tightly, her gaze taking in Amanda's jeans and tee-shirt. "Hello, Amanda. You're looking…relaxed."

  Amanda returned the smile. Relaxed was definitely not a word she'd use to describe herself, but she knew her mother was only referring to her clothing, nothing below the surface. "I hope you're hungry," she said. "Irene's been cooking all morning."

  "It smells wonderful."

  At that moment Irene came through the door from the kitchen, pulling off her apron. "This must be Amanda's mother." She crossed the room, beaming, unaware of a smudge of flour on the back of her blue cotton dress, and took Beverly Caulfield's hand between both of hers. "It's so nice to finally meet you. Amanda's told me so much about you." Huh? "Come in and sit down. I'll bet you're hot after that drive. Let me get you a nice cold glass of iced tea."