by Linda Welch
She dropped her hands and looked me in the eyes. “They were talking about the dead woman in the tub and I realized they meant me.
“They left after a while, taking me with them. I mean … I watched them take my body, but I was still there! Then I was all alone. And then I remembered you. So I came to see you.”
“How did you manage that, Lindy?”
“I walked here. It isn’t far. Although it did seem to take a real long time.”
Two days. She took two days to reach me.
I didn’t explain how her leaving the apartment was, as far as I knew, an oddity. “I’ll see what I can do. But it could take time and I can’t have you waiting in my yard.”
“I won’t be a bother,” she said quickly.
I had to be blunt. “Well, you are a bother when every time I look out of the window see you staring in.”
She glanced at the yard. “I don’t want to go back to the apartment. Can I stay here if I keep out of your way? If I keep out of sight?”
I closed my eyes and puffed out a quick breath. I didn’t want her here, but I couldn’t make her leave if she didn’t want to. Compromise would work better.
The rest of the lot stretches behind the house. I have an honest-to-god orchard back there with a pear, a couple of plums, a Bing cherry and four apple trees. Grapevines smother the back wall. The harvest is nothing special as the high altitude means a short growing season, but my neighbors are glad to come in and pick their own, and in return I get a few jams, jellies and relishes. Hoping Lindy could follow, I walked toward the orchard. “Why don’t you hang out with the apple trees for now? But when I find your son, I want you gone from here, Lindy. That’s the deal.”
She came after me. “But where will I - “
“I don’t know,” I cut in. “But not here.”
I’m not unsympathetic, far from it, but there have to be boundaries between the living and the dead. Their place of departure is typically their boundary, but in Lindy’s case, with her ability to move about, I had to outline those boundaries for her. My backyard would not to be the place she lingered till she passed over.
“By the way,” I added as she wandered toward the fruit trees, “the man in your apartment, what did he look like?”
She half-turned back. “I don’t remember very well. He moved so fast, he was a blur. I think he had long yellow hair. Oh, and his eyes seemed to glint. I don’t mean how a person’s eyes can gleam in lamplight, they … oh, I don’t know. They just looked strange.”
I headed for the backdoor leading to the kitchen, acorns from the scrub oak crunching underfoot. I made a face - another oddity. The one thing the dead never forget is the face of their killer.
“Well?”
I poured more coffee. “It’s her all right.”
“And?”
“A man was in her apartment. I think he killed her, but I don’t know how. She doesn’t know herself. All she’s interested in is her little boy.” I frowned at Jack, wondering if I skipped over some of the newspaper article. “The paper didn’t mention a child, did it?”
“If it had, I would have told you.”
I got up from the table. “I’m gonna talk to Mike.”
Jack went to the window in the backdoor, from where he could see Lindy. “She’s a looker. Wouldn’t mind wrapping myself around that.”
“Now that I’d like to see,” said Mel.
“Yeah, Jack,” I chimed in as I headed for the stairs. “And why don’t you pass me the newspaper while you’re at it.”
I gave Mel a conspiratorial look. We girls have to stick together. Jack glared at both of us. “I suppose you think you’re funny.”
“Well … yeah.”
Dead people. They slay me.
Chapter Two
Showered, clad in Levis, white long-sleeved sweater and white surgical-style tennis shoes, I headed for the door, grabbing up my green corduroy jacket as I passed through the hall.
The windows of my navy-blue Subaru Forrester were thick with frost. I knew I should have put it in the garage last night. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Five minutes later, I turned off Beecher onto Second Street and headed downtown.
My cell rang. It was Colin. “Hi Tiff.”
Colin is a nice guy. I met him at the court house, me on the way in, he on the way out after paying a speeding fine. We collided in the entrance, kind of rebounded, and looked each other up and down. I guess he liked what he saw as much as I did, because he apologized and invited me for coffee. That was three months ago. Colin is a gangling six-four, with fine, pale-blond hair and lazy blue-gray eyes. During my teen years, we called eyes like Col’s “go-to-bed-eyes.” I didn’t get to that piece of furniture till our eighth date, with a little urging from me. Our relationship had progressed to the “next level” and, well, I was a happy camper.
My bones loosened a little and my voice dropped an octave. “Hi, Colin.”
“Did you have a good time last night?”
“I had a great time.” A nice meal at a good restaurant. A few drinks. Back to his house. His nice empty house. Just him and me. I call that a good night.
I got lost in the memory a little and almost drove through Gillian as she leaped in the road. I swerved to miss her, glowering and wagging my finger. She hunched her little shoulders and backed up to the bushes from which she’d emerged.
I avoided her mother like the plague. Gillian cropped up in the conversation every time I bumped into her mom, even after three years. Listening to a mother reminisce about her dead child is really uncomfortable when the little blighter jumps in front of your car almost every time you drive past her house.
On her way to school, Gillian had just left her front yard when some jackass plowed into her, then went on his way, leaving her dead in the street. He was still alive and she still waited to pass over.
“Tiff?”
“Uh? Oh, sorry. I was avoiding a jaywalker.”
“So, when are we gonna explore the sheets in your bed?”
Never. “Um. I’d feel sort of uncomfortable, you know, with my aunt being here.” When I met Colin, I made the mistake of telling him I lived alone, so I invented an elderly, recently bereaved aunt moving in with me. The few times Col picked me up from my house, Aunty was napping, but she was a light sleeper. I know, a pretty lame story, one which Colin would see through in a nanosecond if I let him in the house, but at the time I happened to be looking at a poster for elderly care.
“I can understand that. But she isn’t there every minute of the day, is she?”
I got a familiar sinking feeling. “Pretty much. She’s getting on in years, Col. She doesn’t get out often.”
He forced a chuckle. “You sure you don’t have a husband hidden away?”
No, just two nosy roommates. The first time I invited a boyfriend back to what was then my new home, there we were getting down and dirty in my bedroom, when I saw Jack and Mel watching us over his shoulder. Killed the moment for me. Their prying had finished two prior relationships. Now it was his place or a motel, or not at all. No, we can’t spend the night, an evening, an afternoon, a few hours on the bed, couch, rug in front of the fire. I didn’t even dare let anyone visit for a couple of hours lest he turn amorous. Sooner rather than later, they got suspicious. They thought I was hiding something. Which I was.
As I drove past the McClusky place, the window started to fog up and I wiped at it with a piece of paper towel I kept in the car for that purpose. I therefore had an unobstructed view of Frank McClusky as he chased a small, hysterically yipping Pomeranian around the garden, while Daisy McClusky trundled after them, calling to her dog and wondering what on earth had gotten into it. I once had a conversation with Frank, during which I tried to explain how his behavior distressed his wife, but he only said how much he hated the dog while he was alive.
I told Colin I had to go as talking to him made me think about last night, and getting all gooey while driving was one hell of a distraction. He accepted this as
a valid reason to end our call.
Frank and Daisy were victims of a home invasion. Frank made a break for it and was shot to death in his front yard. The felons were doing life, but they were young men. Daisy had to put up with Frank terrorizing her pooch until the men or the dog died, whichever came first.
I know people who insist the dead are all around us, although they can’t tell me why the deceased linger, if there is a purpose to it, or why some remain and some pass on. I see only those who died a violent and unnatural death. They are victims of hit-and-run, innocent bystanders caught in crossfire, or the murdered, and they do not leave until their killer dies; which means there are an awful lot of them in the world just waiting for their killer to pass away, so they can move onto wherever the dead go.
Sometimes, when they finally have the opportunity, they stay here anyway. They can become so entrenched in their lifeless existence it becomes their reality. I found out the hard way. Had I bought the house a year later, I would have sensed a presence, but my ability was new and, I think, weaker back then in that respect.
I was furious when I discovered Jack and Mel in my home. Realtors are supposed to disclose a crime on the property they are marketing, and mine told me the previous owner, an elderly man, died in the house, but of natural causes. No mention of a double murder. I tried the psychic ability thing, said I detected a presence in the house, and got the usual weird look. They insisted the only death was of the previous owner, and unfortunately, my research backed that up. So I was stuck. The house was already mine. I had no legal reason to opt out. My only recourse was to sell the place.
But Jack and Mel were so damned pathetically grateful to have someone to talk to, who could tell them about the outside world and past and current events, I somehow never got to moving out.
They were pathetically grateful at the time. Their true nature came to the surface once they felt sure of me: sarcastic, abrasive, overbearing, demanding. But now they are more than roommates, they are family, the only family I have.
The departed lose their memories over time, so neither of my new buddies could tell me much, apart from where their earthly remains lay. In my basement, under a foot of concrete and three feet of dirt. It didn’t bother me because I realized a long time ago that dead bodies are just cast off containers for what a person really was. More research turned up one Jackson Trewellyn, twenty-eight when he disappeared in the mountains above Clarion while hiking alone in 1986. Melissa Trent disappeared in 1990. Divers found her car on the bottom of Long Meadow Lake as they searched for the body of a man pulled under by the nasty little currents in there. Mel was a student at River Valley University, on her way home from her part-time evening job. She never made it. Mel is not wet, so she didn’t die in the lake. Mel and Jack died in my house.
The previous owner, Frederick Coleman, died at seventy-one. He was a powerful old guy and surprised everyone who knew him when his heart gave out. I found his obituary in the library, photocopied it and showed it to Jack and Mel, and sure enough, he did them in. So, my roommates can leave anytime they want. They just don’t want to.
I should have reported the murders to the police, but what would that have accomplished? For a start, they would have dug up my basement. Mel and Jack had no grieving family to notify. And Coleman’s family did not need the stigma and grief of knowing he was a murderer.
Jack and Mel could have gone on their way when Coleman died, had I not moved in the house and instantly became their best pal. If I ever move out, maybe they will too. But with me to talk to, they feel very much a part of the real world.
I returned to my hometown of Clarion, Utah, with its population of 82,000, hoping to see less of the dead than in San Francisco. I found two of them on my street and two more in my house.
Just my luck.
I haven’t always seen dead people. I’d have looked sideways at anyone who told me they did, until eleven years ago. And of course, I was in a real public place, a popular little sidewalk cafe crowded with people on a Saturday afternoon when it happened. I finished my iced chai, and noticed a woman near the door of the cafe as I fished in my pocket for change. She stood in the heat of the sun and it burned, but she wore a gray plastic raincoat with the hood over her hair, and black rubber boots peeked from beneath her long black skirt. Another loony, but I envied her for her pale skin and the fact she didn’t sweat. I sat under a big umbrella and I know my face shone pink from the heat.
I laid two dollars and some change on the table, got to my feet and walked past her, and noticed her tears. They streamed down her face, and she held her hands clenched tightly at chest level, obviously in some distress.
I went on by, but I turned my head and caught her eyes, and she stared right at me.
I couldn’t help myself. I stopped and turned to her. “Are you okay?”
She looked fixedly back at me and shook her head. I guessed she was saying “no.” Then I saw the big red patch on her chest just above her clenched hands, where the raincoat fell open.
She’d been shot, or stabbed.
“Oh my god!” I spun around and found every person outside the cafe looking at me.
“Someone call 9-1-1!” I yelled.
I turned back to the woman. “Don’t worry, help is on the way.” I stepped nearer to her. “Let’s get you out of the sun.”
It registered I didn’t hear any movement behind me. I looked back over my shoulder. They still watched me, and as I looked from face to face, each dropped their eyes or turned their head the other way, or became interested in their lunch.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. “Did someone call emergency services?” I asked.
Not one person glanced my way. I couldn’t understand it. I know a lot of people in big cities tend to mind their business, which is why the police often have difficulty finding witnesses to a crime, but this lady stood right in front of them and they ignored her. They ignored me.
“What is wrong with you people?” I yelled.
I had never been angrier in my life. I took a couple of steps to the door of the cafe and stuck my head inside. “Hey! Someone call an ambulance. You got a wounded woman out here!”
Several customers looked up, startled, and two waiters went for the phone on the host’s desk. I wasn’t in there more than five seconds, but when I backed out, people at two of the sidewalk tables were walking away and those at another got to their feet. I glared at a couple stupid enough to meet my eyes, and one tall guy stood so fast his knees hit the table and shunted it a foot, making the umbrella tilt.
I was going to raise hell when this got over, but the woman needed my help, since nobody else seemed inclined.
When I stood in front of her again, she started moving her hands and fingers in an odd way. She was signing, which meant she was mute. I didn’t know sign language.
I put my hands to her shoulders and spoke gently. “I think you should sit down.”
My left hand went through her shoulder and hit the wall behind her, the brick grazing my knuckles.
My brain stopped working properly. My hand, wrist and part of my forearm were inside her body. I just stuck my arm through someone. There should be blood. She should be screaming. I should be screaming. She must be in shock and I wasn’t far behind her. I heard a siren. The paramedics were a block away. I couldn’t pull my arm free because then her blood would come gushing out, wouldn’t it? My arm plugged the gigantic hole I made in her body.
Inches from her white face, I saw the tears on it were static, like strings of clear wax pasted to her skin.
Although my knuckles burned where they hit the wall, I didn’t feel anything else other than hot Californian air. I felt nothing of substance, nothing at all. My right hand shook as I put my palm to her cheek and it started to sink in her flesh.
I guess I couldn’t process any more because I blacked out. I came to in the ambulance, thinking, I fainted? Wow! So this is what it feels like. Laying still, my eyes closed, I thought about the reason I pas
sed out. I knew I didn’t imagine the insubstantial weeping woman. The cafe staff called emergency services for a wounded woman and instead carted off a loony, the same loony who yelled at their customers and talked to thin air. This loony had better keep her mouth shut if she wanted out of the emergency room.
I didn’t argue when the doctor diagnosed sun stroke.
I returned to the cafe a week later. She still stood to the right of the entrance, her hands clenched at her chest, tears streaking her sad face.
He faced her ten feet away, and she cried because she was going to die and couldn’t call for help. She didn’t know him, just a guy who popped up in front of her as she sheltered from a fierce downpour. He didn’t look like he hated her, or killing her would bring him satisfaction. He just stared, and stared, and for an instant she thought he was only trying to scare her. Then he pulled the trigger.
That just came to me, the way it often does now when I see a shade for the first time. But that initial experience knocked me to my knees.
I found articles about the murder in the library. Nineteen-year-old May Wentworth worked as an assistant teacher at a private school for the deaf and blind and lived with her grandmother. They never found her killer. I learned to sign. I “talked” to her, but I couldn’t help her. I looked for her killer everyplace I went. His face became an imprint in my memory.
I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve wished meeting May Wentworth was an isolated incident, but it seemed I couldn’t turn a corner without seeing dead people. I packed up and came back to Utah.
It’s universal, I suppose: when you’re in trouble you go running home. I don’t know why I thought familiar surroundings and re-immersion in a culture I was once desperate to escape would make life easier. Perhaps it was the homing instinct. Clarion was my home. My foster homes, the foster-parents and the other kids meant nothing to me, but the city itself, the population, I understood the people and their mentality. I was older, and could see life was seldom black and white, and the gray areas in between were an acceptable compromise. I knew what to expect from life in Clarion. I felt safe, and I would not see many violently slain people in my little old hometown. Or so I thought.