by E. C. Bell
I figured I had two choices. Get up, flounce out, and then change every aspect of my life that this woman knew—which was absolutely everything—and start over again. That would be exhausting, and might not even work, what with her being a cop and all. So, I decided to pick choice number two. Act like an adult for once and hear her out.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
She smiled. I think she was trying to look triumphant, but she just looked sad. “I figured fate dropped you in my lap,” she said. “Rory—a guy I was close to—died a couple of months before I met you. At first, he was just gone. You know? But then, he showed up. At my apartment.”
I stared at her, shocked. The exhaustion, the low-grade sadness that seemed to permeate her very soul suddenly made sense. She was being haunted. Of course.
“You mean his spirit,” I said.
“What?”
Jesus, now I was whispering so softly she couldn’t hear me. We deserved each other, we really did.
“His spirit showed up in your apartment,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And you can see him?” Doubtful, but I had to ask.
“No.”
“Then how do you know it’s him?”
“Because I can smell his aftershave.” She shuddered. “The apartment gets cold, and then I can smell his aftershave. He never shows up when my kids are there, thank God, but he’s there when I’m alone.” She shook her head and grabbed her cup of tepid herbal tea. Took a huge gulp and swallowed. “It used to be nice. Like I still had him with me. But now. Now, I hate going home.”
“I take it Rory didn’t die there?”
“No.” She looked at me, her eyes hard. “Why?”
“Usually spirits stay close to their place of death. Or to their bodies.” I tried to smile, but stopped when I caught a reflection of myself in the huge window behind Worth. I looked like I was having some sort of spasm. I really did. “You don’t have his ashes, do you? Because you might be able to get him to leave if you bury them.”
“No.” Her face tightened. “He wasn’t cremated. His parents took him—home. To Saskatchewan. Somewhere. They buried him there.”
“Then he probably feels he has something to tell you,” I said. “That’s another big reason for a spirit to cling to a person or a place.”
“Jesus,” Worth said. Her voice sounded full of something like awe. “You really do know this stuff, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, and sighed. “Yeah, I really do. When can I come over?”
“What?”
“If I’m going to move his spirit on, I need to meet him,” I said. “That means me coming to your place. When can I come over?”
She looked down at the table top for a long, slow moment. That was when I realized that the coffee shop had grown quiet, as though every person in the place was listening to our conversation.
“Would Saturday night be too soon?” she asked. “I gotta work every other night this week.”
I tried to remember if I had anything planned for Saturday evening but I’d left my phone in the car and wasn’t about to scamper out to get it. It would be too easy to drive away.
“Sounds good,” I said, deciding on the fly that I could move whatever else was on my schedule. Besides, getting this over with sooner rather than later was the best I could hope for. She gave me her West-end address. I wrote it down on a slightly used napkin and tucked it into my pocket. “Seven o’clock all right?”
“That’ll be fine,” she said, and then frowned. “Do you need me to pick up anything?”
I blinked. “Like what?” I finally asked.
“Oh hell, I don’t know,” she said. “I just thought maybe you needed like incense and stuff. For the process. Maybe a Ouija board? Want me to get my sister’s? So you can communicate with him?”
“You didn’t try using a Ouija board, did you?” I snapped.
“No,” she said, shaking her head far too emphatically. She was lying.
“Really?”
“Well, once. It didn’t work. My sister brought it over and we tried it out, but nothing happened.” She shook her head and laughed guiltily. “We drank a lot of wine, though, so we might not have done it right. Do you think that’s what happened? That we didn’t do it right?”
“Jesus.” Most times those boards were nothing more than a children’s game or a parlour trick, but if there was a spirit already present they could be turned into beacons for other stray spirits. Especially when drunken idiots open the lines of communication. “Get rid of it, tonight.”
She looked confused. “I think my sister took it home with her.”
“Call your sister. Tell her to burn it.”
“Really?” She looked incredulous and I didn’t blame her. To be honest, I wasn’t sure burning the thing would actually help but I wasn’t taking any chances. I was dealing with enough ghosts as it was.
“Seriously. She has to burn it or I will not help you.”
Worth’s face spasmed. “Understood.”
We were both silent a moment more, and I was relieved to hear that the noise level in the coffee shop had returned to normal.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
“You going to want something to eat?” Worth asked.
I blinked. “Now?”
“No,” she said, impatiently. “I meant Saturday night. You going to want supper or something?”
The last thing in the world I wanted was to have a meal with this woman. “No,” I said. “I won’t need to eat.”
“’Cause if you do, just let me know,” she continued as though she hadn’t heard me speak. “I’ll pick up a pizza or something.”
God. She wanted to have a meal with me.
I sighed. “No,” I said as gently as I could.
“Are you sure?” Her need was so great, it practically oozed from every pore. “Are you sure it’ll really be all right?”
“Yes.” I got up and grabbed my mostly full lukewarm coffee. A large to go, absolutely wasted. “Yes, everything will be all right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I left. When I pulled the car out of its parking spot, I could see her, still at the table, her cold herbal tea sitting before her, forgotten.
I forgot about going back and talking to Karen. Forgot about everything except getting as far away from there as I could.
What the hell had I just agreed to?
JAMES HAD COFFEE waiting for me when I brought his car back to his apartment.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
So I did. Of course, I didn’t tell him about the ball game, which was what he was expecting. I told him about Sergeant Worth’s ghost.
“So now she wants me to go over to her place—her place, James!—and get rid of her old boyfriend. Just because Officer Tyler couldn’t keep his frigging mouth shut about my mother. And me.” I set down my cup and looked at him. “What am I going to do?”
I was hoping he’d tell me to drop it. “Just call her up and tell her that you can’t help,” I desperately hoped he’d say. “You have a job. A paying job. Leave the ghost foolishness to others.”
He didn’t, of course. He grinned like a maniac.
“Wow,” he said, and shook his head. “Wow wow wow . . . ”
“You’re not helping,” I snapped. “I couldn’t think of an easy way to let her down, so now I’m committed. What should I do?”
“I guess you should go to her place and meet this ghost,” he said. “Can I come?”
“What?” I glared at him. “No! What’s wrong with you? You can’t come.”
He looked disappointed. “Are you sure? It could be fun.”
“None of this is fun, James.”
“Some of it is.”
“No. It’s not.”
“All right. Quit yelling.”
I snapped my mouth shut when I realized he was right. I was yelling.
“Sorry,” I said. “This is just so inconvenient, you know?”
“They do seem to find you, don’t they? First, all the ghosts at the ball diamond, and now this.”
I sighed. “They sure do.”
“Maybe this is the beginning of something good for you,” he said.
I stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if the ghosts are coming to you, maybe there is an opportunity here that you’re not seeing.” He leaned forward and smiled. He still looked fairly maniacal but at least he wasn’t saying “wow” anymore. “A business opportunity, if you know what I mean.”
“What business opportunity? There are just a buttload of ghosts—”
“All right, so maybe the ghosts at the ball diamond aren’t helpful—”
“Helpful? Helpful?”
Millie barked once, from her dog bed. A warning to me that I was yelling again.
“How do you think any of this is helpful, James?” I asked, my voice still high and tight, but not quite as loud as it had been a moment before.
“Well, maybe there’s a way for you to be compensated for your time,” he said. “What if you tell Sergeant Worth she has to pay you to get rid of her dead boyfriend. Think that would work?”
That stopped me. I leaned back and stared at him.
“Are you going to start yelling again?” he asked. “Because you look like—”
“No.” I considered. “Pretty sure I’m not.”
“Good.” He smiled. “So, what do you think? Want to charge Sergeant Worth for getting rid of her dead boyfriend?”
“That might be an idea,” I said. “If I tell her I’m going to charge her, I don’t know, like a thousand dollars or something, maybe she’d let me off the hook.”
“What?” The smile faded from his face. “No. No. That’s not what I meant. I meant—”
“I know what you meant,” I said, and smiled. “But this is better. I’ll tell her that she has to pay me a thousand dollars, or I can’t help her. She won’t want to pay that much. Heck, nobody would. She’ll drop it, and I’ll be off the hook. Jesus, James, that might work. Thank you!”
He blinked. “You’re welcome, I guess.”
I stretched, and the tension in my shoulders eased. I yawned, and my jaw cracked. “I’ll give her a call in the morning, before I head out to see Bobby Kimble.”
“Who?”
“Bobby Kimble. Karen’s ex-boyfriend. I called him and set up a meet. You don’t mind if I borrow the car again, do you?”
“Sure,” he said. “Want me to come with?”
“I’d love it, James,” I said. He was much better at questioning people than I was, and I could use all the help I could get.
“Great.” He picked up our empty cups and carried them to the sink. “So, am I taking you to Jasmine’s now, or can I convince you to stay here?”
“I think you can convince me to stay.”
“Good.” He walked back to the table and took me by the hand. “Very good. That’ll give me time to grill you about the ball game.”
“Seriously?” I stood and stepped into his arms. “That’s all you can think of? The ball game?”
“No,” he said, and pulled me close. “But I can multi-task.”
He was right. He could.
THE PHONE CALL to Sergeant Worth the next morning didn’t go quite the way I’d hoped it would. I mentioned money and she said how much. I said a thousand dollars—because in the light of day it still sounded like a huge sum of money—and she said yes without a second’s thought.
“Are—are you sure?” I asked, hoping she’d back down. Hoping she’d tell me to forget it. That a thousand dollars was too much. That it was all a joke. A horrible, horrible joke.
“Absolutely,” she said. “See you Saturday.”
Then the line went dead. She’d hung up on me, and now I was really, truly committed.
“Crap,” I whispered, and dropped the receiver of the office phone. “Crap, crap, crap.”
“I told you she’d go for it!” James called from his office.
Shut up, James. Just shut up.
Marie:
Meeting Bobby Kimble
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, James and I drove up the driveway to the farm just outside Edmonton where Bobby Kimble—Karen’s boyfriend from high school—lived. The house looked old, like it had been there forever. Next to it was a newer bungalow, and next to that was a garage. A garage like a mechanic would use.
James shut off the car, and we heard banging and crashing from within the garage.
I looked at James. “Think it’s safe?”
James laughed. “Not all garages are dangerous, you know.”
I thought back to the garage where I’d escaped from the drug gang. Felt like that had happened a million years ago. But still, I jumped with every metallic bang.
“Sometimes they are,” I muttered. James’s face stilled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes they are. Want me to go in? You can wait here if you’d rather.”
“No, no,” I said. Just having him tell me I could opt out made me feel brave enough to face whatever was going on in that building. In control. “I’ll come with you. I want to meet this guy.”
Bobby Kimble was hammering a dent out of the door panel of a big old three-quarter ton truck that had obviously seen a lot more actual work than any of the trucks roaming around the streets of Edmonton. The years had been pretty good to him. His hair was mostly grey, of course, but he was really built—all muscle under his blue jeans and lumberjack-looking shirt. He either worked hard every day or he worked out. A lot.
He swung the rubber mallet with precision. The muscles of his arm flexed like rope under his skin.
“Hey!” I cried. I caught him just as he hammered the side of the truck again so he didn’t hear me. Of course.
“Bobby,” James said in a quiet moment between mallet strikes, and Kimble jumped and turned, holding the mallet like a weapon for the briefest moment, his face hard. Then he smiled at me and set the mallet aside.
“I take it you’re Marie?” he asked. He held out his hand, and when I took it, I could feel the callouses. He shook my hand once, perfunctorily, then dropped it and looked at James. “And you are?”
“James Lavall,” James said and pointed at the truck. “What did you hit?”
“Oh, it wasn’t me. One of the grandkids took it to the back creek. Smacked a tree.” He shrugged and smiled. “What’re you gonna do though. Kids.”
“Yeah.” James smiled like he knew exactly what he was talking about, even though he had nothing to do with kids unless he came over to Jasmine’s house and hung around with hers. “Doesn’t look too bad.”
“That’s after an hour,” Kimble said. “You shoulda seen it before.”
Both he and James laughed. I almost felt like joining in, just to be part of the conversation, but before I could more than titter nervously Bobby stopped laughing and turned to me.
“You wanted to ask me about Karen,” he said. “What, are the cops actually gonna reopen her case?”
“Something like that,” I said. I didn’t want to lie to the guy, but I also didn’t want him to get all hung up on the idea that the cops were actually reopening old missing persons cases. “I just wanted to ask you a little bit about what happened. According to Karen’s parents, you two were going to get married. What happened?”
Kimble looked around. “I thought we were going to get married, too,” he finally said, his voice low. “We’d dated through high school, and I figured it was a done deal, you know. So, I asked her to marry me the night we graduated. After the dance.
“We’d gone back to her house, to change for the grad party. I figured that’d be the best time to ask her. You know, so she could tell all her friends. Show ’em the ring. All that crap girls like to do.”
His face closed, and he looked around the garage again, like he was expecting someone or something to leap out at him. “But it didn’t go quite the way I expected.”
“Why?” I asked.
“She tur
ned me down. Flat,” he said. “Said she hadn’t decided whether she was ever going to settle down. She wanted to travel, she said. See the world.”
“That must’ve hurt,” I said as gently as I could. I didn’t want him to stop speaking. Not if he was about to confess to anything.
“It did,” he said. “No doubt about it. And for a minute, I thought she was kidding me. You know, like a nasty joke. So I said, ‘Well, we gotta get going on having our kids, don’t ya think?’”
“What did she say?”
“She said she wasn’t ever going to have kids,” he said. His face spasmed at the memory, as though it hurt him as much now as it had forty years before.
I glanced at James, wondering if he was putting Kimble at the top of the “probably killed Karen” list the way I was, but all I saw on his face was sympathy. Seeing that look gave me pause, I must say.
He and I had never talked about whether either of us wanted kids. Not once.
True, life had kind of been full of “Oh God, I think I’m going to die” moments for us, generally speaking. But, even when life had slowed down and we’d grown closer, we had never talked about kids.
Maybe we needed to.
“That’s when I knew she wasn’t kidding around,” Kimble said. “So, I stuck the ring in my pocket and headed out to the grad party by myself.”
“What happened to her?”
“That night? She stayed home and watched a movie. Didn’t even tell her parents what she’d done. And then, she got that job, and decided to turn it into a career. At least, that’s what her mother said.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what kind of career she was gonna have, working at that coffee place. But she seemed happy enough, I suppose.”
“So, you saw her again?”
“Once. To get all my stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“A box of stuff I’d given her over the years. She gave it all back. Said she didn’t feel right keeping it when we weren’t gonna be together anymore.”
“You still have it?”
“Nah,” he snorted. “I burnt it. Box and all.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d already met Freida by that time. I didn’t want to upset her. Still don’t. She’s a good old gal. Wonderful mother and grandmother—and a good hand on the farm.”