The ghoulish tone of our conversation seemed odd in a place filled with such natural beauty and peaceful stillness. Did you notice how I didn’t say silence? That’s because there are plenty of sounds in nature. As I locked the car, a squirrel chattered a greeting to us from high up in a tree and nearby a woodpecker hammered out an industrious rhythm.
Sounds. Not noise. Hence “stillness.”
Even though we were there to locate the ghost of a murdered girl, I felt tension I didn’t even know I was carrying start to drain out of my system.
As we started up the gentle incline into the mountains no one would have thought we were anything other than a couple of hikers out to enjoy the day.
This excursion was a little more difficult than the one we’d taken to Weber’s Gap. No memorial stone marked the place where the remains of the girl were discovered, whom were now referring to as “Twenty-Five.”
I know. Calling her a number seemed cold to us, too, but this naming thing was getting complicated. “Twenty-Five” worked because her disappearance fit the pattern chronologically between Beth and Jane.
A downtrodden strip of grass leading off to one side of the trail signaled that we had reached our destination. The temporary path led to a dug-up area at the base of a massive hickory tree. There were also a few telltale pieces of yellow crime scene tape still clinging to the underbrush.
"This looks like the place," I said. "Now what?”
"I guess you do your thing," Tori said, making a little “go on” motion with her hand.
My thing? Oh, yeah. That helped.
"Oh, really,” I said in exasperation. “My thing? What is that exactly?”
“Whatever you did with the other two?” Tori offered weakly.
"The other two just came to me. I have no idea how to summon a ghost."
“Why don’t you just try asking?” an angry, sarcastic voice said from behind me. “Or is that too polite for you high-and-mighty living people?”
I almost jumped out of my skin.
Why the heck do they always have to do that?
I whirled around, which was a pretty good clue to Tori that we were no longer alone.
“Do we have incoming?” she asked.
“We have contact,” I answered.
Tori looked over my left shoulder and gasped. It was a third ghost, alright, but this one was nothing like Jane and Beth.
The other girls looked much as I imagined they had in life. This spirit, however, bore the marks of the cruel abuses that took her life away. She’d been hit in the head with such force that the entire left side of her skull sagged inward. A frozen river of dried blood ran down her neck and into her filthy, torn blouse. I didn’t have to be a doctor to know that no one could have survived a blow like that.
She glared at us with red-rimmed eyes and demanded sharply, "What the hell are you looking at?"
Not exactly the reception we had in mind.
“Uh, hi,” I said lamely. “I’m Jinx and this is Tori.”
“What did you do with my body?” the girl said furiously. “I want it back. Now.”
“We didn’t have anything to do with your body being taken away,” I said. “We came up here to try to help you.”
“Help me by giving me my body back!” the girl screamed.
Even though the sun was still shining brightly, the air around us turned cold and clammy, and I felt a prickly, electric sensation pulsing up my arms. The girl took a menacing step toward us. Instinctively, I put my hand up. When I did, an arc of blue light shot out from my fingertips and spread into a shield-like field that held the spirit at bay.
“Whoa!” Tori said. “Good one.”
The ghost was no longer coming toward us, but sheer fury rolled off her in palpable waves. “I want my body back” she said again. “You had no right to take it away.”
Okay. Let’s try this again.
“The police took your body away,” I said. “We aren’t the police and we don’t want to hurt you.”
“You can’t hurt me,” the girl said. “I’ve already been hurt.” As she spoke, she raised her hand and pushed her long, tangled hair aside to reveal the true devastation to her ruined head. Hurt was an understatement.
“Who did that to you?” I asked.
“He did it,” the ghost said. “He told me I was beautiful and then he turned me into this.”
“Who was he?” I pressed. “We think he hurt others like you. We want him to be punished.”
The ghost threw her head back and screamed again. “I don’t care about the others! He took everything from me. Doesn’t anybody care about me?”
“Narcissistic much?” Tori muttered.
“We care about you,” I said, lowering my hand. As I did, the blue light dimmed and the shield grew smaller. “See? I don’t want to hurt you. If I make the light go away completely will you talk to us?”
I was trying to sound like I knew what I was doing, which I didn’t, at all.
“What do you want?” The words came out in a snarl, but the spirit didn’t try to charge us again.
“I just want to know anything you remember about the person who did this to you,” I said.
“He asked me why I couldn’t be good and do as I was told like the first one,” she said.
“Do you know who the first one was?”
“Little Miss Rah Rah,” she sneered. “He showed me the pictures.”
Beth. She was a cheerleader and she remembered a camera.
“Do you know your own name?” I asked. “Can you tell us who you are?
A look of painful confusion washed over her features. “I was someone,” she said, her voice rising again. “He took me because he thought I was nobody. But I was somebody. I was!”
The wind howled as she surged forward. I brought my hand up again and this time she collided with the blue light. There was a blinding flash, and then we were alone again.
“Holy unhappy haunting, Batman,” Tori said. “That is one seriously pissed off ghost.”
21
So much for the theory that all ghosts have a fairly benign afterlife and for the idea I can’t work magic outside of the shop. Tori and I came about halfway back down the trail before we stopped to eat lunch just to put some distance between us and that less-than-blithe spirit.
“At least we know that we have the order of the killings right,” Tori said, unwrapping her turkey sandwich. “First Beth, then Anger Management Girl, and then Jane.”
“Those are the killings we know of,” I pointed out as I opened a bag of chips. “There could have been others.”
“You know what I think?” Tori asked, taking two chips and munching contemplatively.
“What?”
“I think Twenty-Five was a runaway. That could be why she said she was taken because the killer thought she was a nobody. She might not have even been from this part of the country.”
That would explain a lot. Even street-smart runaways could get desperate enough for help and fall in with the wrong person.
“Maybe Jane was a runaway, too,” I suggested. “Which kind of makes it pointless to take Beth to the cemetery tonight.”
“No,” Tori said, “it doesn’t.”
“Why not?”
“They both saw the killer,” she said. “All we need is for one of them to remember something."
"You know," I answered uneasily, "I realize we’ve already talked this to death, but I’m still not so sure about that part. I mean, I know we want to solve this and help them move on, whatever that means, but is it right to ask the girls to relive what happened to them?"
Tori considered that for a minute. "Are you thinking they both went through something like what happened to Twenty-Five?”
"According to the authorities, both Beth and Jane died of blunt force trauma to the head," I said. "They must have been hurt the same way. We only saw Beth’s skull from the front. We have no idea what the damage to her head really looked like.”
"True,�
� Tori conceded. “But if she and Jane were both killed like that, why do they look so normal now? I mean ‘normal’ as in dead, but not gross dead like Twenty-Five.”
I shook my head. "I don't know, maybe because they were happier people in real life? Regardless, I'm just not sure it's right of us to ask them to relive the last horrible minutes of their lives.”
"They do both seem to be pretty fragile," Tori admitted. "According to the other ghosts at the cemetery, Jane is sad all the time and she cries a lot, and Beth winks on and off like Christmas lights."
"She just does that when she's nervous," I said defensively.
I sounded like an overprotective parent making excuses for her nervous child.
"I know," Tori said placatingly. "I wasn't criticizing her. She kind of grows on you, doesn't she?”
"Yes, she does," I said. "I mean, would it really be so bad for her to just stay with us at the store?"
There it was. I finally said it. I wanted to adopt a ghost.
"No," Tori said contemplatively, "it wouldn't be so bad. All she wants to do is sit on the couch with the cats and watch TV. It's not like she's a problem for anybody, but don't you think the choice has to be up to her? Isn't it up to us to give her options?”
That was a point I hadn't considered at all.
Beth wasn't making any choices on her own. She was just going along with whatever we said. I was the one who thought of death as an incurable condition, and yet the ghosts at the cemetery seemed to have accepted their existence, confined or not, and Aunt Fiona would probably be on the cover of the next afterlife edition of People.
Who did we think we were with all this talk of sending Beth and Jane ‘on’?
We needed to empower them to go wherever they wanted to go. Our real purpose in all this was to give them options, even in death. Now that was a goal I could get my head wrapped around.
“You know," I said, looking at Tori fondly, "sometimes you're pretty smart."
She gave me a look of doe-eyed innocence. "Who, me?"
Tori excelled at helping me work through my problems. It was one of the great blessings of our friendship. She was extending the same quality of friendship to the two dead girls, whereas I had been seeing them both as stray cats to be adopted, or worse yet, projects to be completed.
“Okay,” I said, “the cemetery it is.”
I started to bag up the remains of my lunch. The first rule of being a good steward of nature? Leave nothing but footprints.
Before I could finish, Tori put her hand on my arm. I looked up questioningly.
“Uh, Jinksy,” she said. “We’re kind of not done with this conversation. What the heck did you just do up there anyway?”
Oh. That blue light cosmic ghost-repelling shield thing? Yeah, I guess that was conversation worthy.
“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. “I think it was just the opposite of how I bring things toward me, but I really thought I could only do that inside the store with Myrtle’s help.”
“Were you trying to stop Twenty-Five?”
“Not really,” I said. “It just happened. I was afraid she was going to hurt us and I wanted to push her away. Putting my hand up was a reflex, and the next thing I know, I’m all Miss Laser Light Show.”
“It was pretty impressive,” Tori said. “And the automatic reverse thing makes sense.”
“Huh?”
“Well, if you can pull something, you ought to be able to push it, too. Isn’t that like a rule we learned in science class junior year? Something the apple guy said?”
She was talking about Sir Isaac Newton, not Steve Jobs.
Yeah, I might not have gone to college, but I read -- a lot.
It’s one of the laws of motion. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Loose translation, if I can pull, I can also push. Did that mean all my powers had a reverse mode?
That was just too much for me to think about at the moment and I said so. “TMI, Tori,” I declared. “Let’s just be glad the Push-Me / Pull-Me thing worked and that Twenty-Five left us alone.”
“Trust me,” Tori said shuddering, “this is me being glad, very glad.”
We finished packing up the remains of our lunch and walked back to the car pretty much in silence, letting the peaceful landscape take the edge off our encounter with Twenty-Five. I was fairly sure we could help Beth and Jane, but I wasn’t sure about this latest ghost. What level of justice could possibly make up for what she had gone through?
File that question away for future reference. We’re not done with it.
On the way back home, I spotted a sign for the Briar Hollow Family Campground. “Hey! That’s where Beth was the night she disappeared,” I said. “Let’s have a look around.”
Pulling off the back-country road, I guided the Prius down a dirt lane for about a mile and a half. The campground was exactly what I would have expected to find; a temporary community of recreational vehicles of varying sizes, interspersed with tents, all occupying assigned and numbered spaces. In the center, however, stood a massive building that had been constructed to resemble a vintage barn.
"That must be where the party was held," I said.
Just then, an older man wearing an beat up, disheveled hat waved us to a stop.
When I rolled the window down, he barked, “Campers only. No Lookie Loos.Turn around and get out.”
“I am so sorry, sir,” I said, putting on my best manners. “I’m new in town and my friend and I were just exploring the countryside. We didn’t mean to break the rules.”
He regarded me with keenly suspicious eyes. “New in town?” he rasped. “Doing what?”
“My aunt, Fiona Ryan, ran a store on the courthouse square,” I said. “She left it to me.”
To my utter astonishment, the old coot threw his head back and let out a cackling rattle of laughter. “Fiona Ryan’s niece. Now that’s rich.”
“Excuse me?” I said, a little ice creeping into my tone of voice.
“There was no love lost between me and that crazy aunt of yours,” he snapped. “Now get the hell off my land and don’t come back.”
“Not a problem,” I said, rolling the window up and putting the car in reverse. I spun the tires a little, which is not easy to do in a Prius, because the exit called for a display of attitude.
“What the heck was his problem?” Tori asked, peering in the rearview mirror.
“I have no idea,” I said. “But if Aunt Fiona didn’t like him, neither do I.”
Maybe not the most mature statement I made that day, but true all the same.
22
Right up to the moment she floated out of the door of the apartment behind Tori and me that night, Beth was coming up with ideas about why she shouldn’t accompany us to the graveyard. On the stairs, I had finally heard enough.
I stopped and turned toward her. “You really don’t have to come,” I said, making sure the words sounded as kind as I intended them to be. “I know this is scary for you.”
That’s when an odd thing happened. Beth’s form grew brighter and more solid, the same way it had when we told her she could come home with us. The girl cocked her head a little to one side and asked slowly, “What did you say?”
I repeated, “I know this is scary for you.”
“You do?” she said, a little note of wonder in her words. “And you’re not mad at me?”
Where the heck did that come from?
“Of course I’m not mad at you,” I said. “Everybody gets scared sometimes.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll come.”
Tori looked at me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged. What the heck did I know about teenagers and their moods?
I parked the car off to one side of the graveyard where it couldn’t be seen from the road and the three of us approached the iron gate. “Beth, you wait here,” I said.
Beth nodded, her eyes wide and luminous in her pale face. I opened the gate and stepped inside, only to be
instantly greeted by the ghost of Colonel Beau Longworth.
“Good evening, Miss Jinx,” he said, sweeping off his hat and offering me a courtly bow.
“Hi, Beau,” I said. “How are you?”
“Dear lady,” he said, smiling rakishly, “in my present state, I fear I am always the same. Quite dead.”
Well, at least he had a good perspective on it.
Tori, who was standing with one foot outside the cemetery and the other inside, said, “Hi, Beau.”
Longworth turned toward her. “Why are you standing there, Miss Tori? Please, come in.”
“I need her to be where she is, Beau,” I said, launching into an explanation of why we’d come to the graveyard that night.
The old soldier listened patiently, shaking his head sadly as I told him about Beth. “I fear this town harbors a cowardly black-hearted killer,” he said.
That about summed it up.
“I think so, too,” I agreed. “Beth is afraid to come into the graveyard for fear she will become trapped here like the rest of you.”
“A wise precaution on the part of the young lady,” he said. “We do, however, have something of a problem. It is quite rare for Miss Jane to leave the vicinity of her grave. I’m not sure she’ll join us here for this conversation.”
That I hadn’t counted on.
“Will you come with me to talk to her?”
“It would be my honor,” he said.
I started to tell Tori we’d be back as soon we could, but the young football player had already cornered her. He was eagerly asking about the latest sports news. Tori obligingly called up the headlines on her phone and started reading a story to him about the NFL draft. She glanced up, saw me looking at her, and nodded her understanding about where I was going.
As Colonel Longworth and I strolled toward Jane’s grave, I nodded at the two ladies in gingham we’d seen on our last visit. They raised their hands in greeting before going on with their conversation.
“Things seem a little quiet tonight,” I observed.
“The moon is in its waning phase,” Beau said. “We are at our best under its full rays.”
Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) Page 13