Famous Last Words

by Katie Alender

  “What just happened to you?” he asked. “Was that a seizure?”

  “No,” I said, though I’d never actually considered that possibility. “I mean … I don’t think so. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He wasn’t going to let it drop. “You froze up completely,” he said. “It looked like a petit mal seizure —”

  “They’re not seizures,” I said, careful to keep my voice cool and calm but betrayed by the drop of sweat trailing down the side of my face. “They might be hallucinations, but they’re not seizures.”

  In spite of my desire to cut and run, I wasn’t going anywhere until the heavy, dizzy feeling passed. Wyatt seemed to sense that, and — much more gracefully this time — he put his hand on my arm and gently eased me down onto a bench behind us.

  He watched me anxiously. “What do you mean ‘they’ — this has happened more than once?”

  “Yes,” I said, too dazed to lie. “That one makes three times.”

  “What is it that actually happens?” he asked.

  I tried to find a way to explain it. “It’s like a dream, except I’m actually there.”

  “Where?” His eyes searched me, taking in every detail of my appearance, the way he always took in every detail of everything. It made me feel prickly and self-conscious.

  “Wherever the Hollywood Killer kept his victims.”

  “You’re there … with the victims.” The disbelief in his voice sent an angry chill through my body.

  “Not with them,” I said, bristling. “It’s like I am them.”

  That shut him down long enough that I could continue.

  “Like the one from The Birds,” I said, “Brianna. And Faith, with the wheelchair. And then this one, with the dinner table and the roses. But I didn’t hear the girl’s name this time. I guess it was probably Lorelei.”

  Wyatt stared at me.

  “It’s like … a vision, or a trance or something. I feel what they felt. I can even see the necklace he makes them all wear — the rose necklace. I can’t see the killer’s face, and I can’t really hear his voice … I don’t know how to explain it, only — I’m there.”

  “Willa.” Wyatt frowned. “I’m sorry. There’s got to be some other explanation.”

  “Why?” My voice was hollow and brittle. Maybe because he really did sound apologetic.

  “Because there hasn’t been a murder with a dinner table or roses,” he said. “And there are no necklaces. You must be imagining all of it.”

  No table. No roses. No necklace.

  Could I really be making it all up? The headaches, the visions, the flashes of light — could there be a tumor pressing on my brain, convincing me that all these crazy things were real? I thought of the dead body that wasn’t in the pool and the water that wasn’t in the tub and the writing that wasn’t on the walls.

  But the name Henry. Water. A necklace. The stuff the psychic said …

  “Is there anything I can do or say,” Wyatt said, “to talk you out of going to see this Fitzgeorge woman?”

  I took a shaky breath and straightened my cardigan, trying to think up a reply.

  “Right,” Wyatt said. “I didn’t think so. Then can you do me a favor?”

  I glanced down at the floor, my resolve slipping away.

  And then he said, “Let me come with you.”

  The parking lot was deserted — Wyatt insisted we wait until everybody else had gone home, so there was no risk of our being seen together.

  I was halfway to his silver Prius before a couple of thoughts tumbled into my head at once. Firstly, that maybe Wyatt was the murderer and here I was, hopping into his car. Secondly, I was still supposed to be mad at him. In fact, since the moment we met, I’d never not been mad at him.

  I stopped walking and turned to him. “Just to be clear … you’re not the killer, right? If you are, you have to tell me. Murderer’s honor.”

  He raised a single eyebrow and unlocked the car doors. “You coming or not?”

  “Yes, coming.” I opened the door and climbed in, tossing my backpack into the backseat. When I was all buckled in, I looked over at him as he plugged Leyta’s address into his GPS. “So tell me again why you offered to go with me?”

  He glanced at me before pulling out of the parking lot. “I had a feeling you’d try to take a bus or something —”

  “A cab, probably,” I said. “If I tried to take a bus, I’d end up in Kansas.”

  “Anyway, I thought it would be better if I drove you.”

  “But you don’t believe in psychics.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

  “And you don’t even want me to go.”

  “No,” he said again. “I don’t.”

  We stared at each other for a second before he pulled his eyes away to look at the road.

  “Then you haven’t answered me at all. Why are you doing this?” I asked. “You clearly think I’m crazy.”

  “I never said you were crazy. I said you must be imagining things. But in retrospect, maybe that was a little dismissive.”

  “Harsh might be a better word. Insensitive …”

  He gave his head a frustrated shake. “You can’t be angry with me for not believing in something I have no experience with, okay?”

  We turned down Hollywood Boulevard, which was thick with sightseers. There were costumed characters everywhere — Spider-Man, Superman, Catwoman, Elmo, the Statue of Liberty, a guy in metallic paint pretending to be a robot…. They looked weird and fake even from a distance, but people were still lining up to get their pictures taken with them.

  “There’s the Chinese Theatre,” Wyatt said as we drove by a building that looked like a pagoda. “It’s pretty famous. Have you been yet?”

  “No. I heard it’s not much to see. Movie stars have tiny feet.”

  He snorted. “All of them?”

  “Well, let’s see, Wyatt. Let me consult my list of famous people’s shoe sizes right here and —”

  “Why are you reacting that way?” he asked.

  “Why do you have to pick everything apart?” I shot back.

  He sighed and checked the mirror as he changed lanes. “Okay, forget it. I was only trying to make conversation, but I guess I shouldn’t bother.”

  I glanced over at him. He looked a little hurt. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was nice of you to try. But talking to you is so … complicated.”

  “What does ‘complicated’ mean to you?”

  “In your case?” I said. “It means you don’t know when to let things go.”

  He adjusted his air vent so it blew away from him. “Yeah, I can see that.”

  I gazed out the window as the navigation voice instructed us to turn left in two hundred feet. We’d passed from the crowded, garish boulevard into a residential neighborhood where the tiny houses were small and crumbling. Each one was unique, but they all shared the qualities of age and neglect: chipping paint, cracked windows, limp curtains, drooping chain-link fences.

  “I don’t like letting go of things,” Wyatt said in a thoughtful voice. I realized he’d been thinking of my words this whole time. “Not until I understand them.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “What’s the number on that duplex?” he suddenly asked.

  I craned my neck to see it. “Fifteen-oh-one.”

  “Then we’re here,” he said, pulling into a spot in front of a decrepit building. “Let’s go find out what the future holds.”

  Leyta Fitzgeorge was about thirty, tall, and wispy thin, with long waves of mouse-brown hair. She wore a forest green polo shirt that said GAME WORLD with a pair of khaki pants.

  “Sorry about the shirt,” she said. “I know it detracts from the mystique and all. I have to leave for work pretty soon.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m Willa, and this is my … classmate, Wyatt.”

  “You work at Game World?” Wyatt asked.

  She nodded. “I can match any customer with their
perfect game. I’ve never had a return.”

  Wyatt scoffed.

  She took out her phone. “Want to call my manager and ask?”

  “No,” he said, looking a little shocked by the suggestion.

  Leyta’s teeny apartment was clean and pleasant. The carpet was old and worn in places but free of stains. The pictures on the walls were posters of paintings in cheap plastic frames. The only one I recognized was Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The air was scented with traces of cinnamon.

  “Sit, please,” she said, pointing us toward a blue velour recliner in front of a small table. On the other side were two folding chairs. Those four pieces of furniture pretty much filled the living room.

  “Thanks for meeting with me,” I said, sitting on one of the folding chairs.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “You need it, I can tell.”

  “You can tell?” Wyatt said, his voice painted with skepticism. “Really? How?”

  I turned to him. “Do you mind? This is my appointment.”

  “It’s okay.” Leyta waved a hand in his direction. “Let him talk. That’s his flow. His journey.”

  “Yes, Willa,” Wyatt said, leaning back and folding his arms. “Let me flow on my journey, please.”

  I gave him a dirty look and then turned my attention back to the psychic.

  “So,” she said. “You said you have questions about the future … but that’s not completely true, is it?”

  “You don’t have to be a psychic to deduce that,” Wyatt said. “She’s a terrible liar.”

  “Wyatt, buddy,” Leyta said, “shut your flow for a minute. Okay, Willa. You don’t want to talk future. You want to talk past. Things that are done that can’t be undone.”

  “Right,” I said. “I need to know about the murders.”

  She sat back and frowned at me. Like, big-time frowned. “Honey, what are you into?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just have questions —”

  She held up her hand and clucked her tongue. “You don’t have questions. You may not realize it, but what you have is answers. And that’s not all you have.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. What about the murders? Why come to me?”

  “Because you talked to the police,” Wyatt said.

  Leyta ignored him and kept her gaze on me. “Why don’t you tell me what you know?”

  “The necklace,” I said. “I know there was one. I’ve seen it in my … my visions. And I know about Henry. And water.”

  Her expression didn’t change, but there was a shift in her energy. All of a sudden, she was very interested. “Is there a smell? Acrid, like somebody spilled a whole bottle of vinegar?”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry. I never noticed that.”

  “And what about Henry?” she asked.

  “There’s a phrase.” I glanced at Wyatt. I hadn’t told him this part. “It goes, ‘This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No,” she said, closing her eyes. “Not specifically. I feel that it’s right, but I don’t know what it means.”

  “It’s not from any of the movie scenes the killer used,” Wyatt said. His words were know-it-all, but his tone was subdued — for the moment.

  Leyta folded her hands in her lap. “So what are you hoping I’ll do for you?”

  “Help me make it stop,” I said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

  She looked at me with an expression I didn’t care for. Too sympathetic. Like she had bad news. “I can imagine.”

  “Why me?” I asked. “What does it have to do with me?”

  “Sounds like somebody’s trying to tell you something,” she said. “Trying hard.”

  “But I don’t want to hear it.” There was a break in my voice, and I realized I was leaning far forward. I forced myself to sit back and take a long breath. “I don’t care what it means — I just want it to stop.”

  “Things come to us in life.” Leyta waved her hands around in what was supposed to be an illustration of the flow, I guess. “Good things, bad things. Sometimes we get what we want, sometimes we don’t. The important thing about being alive is, what do you do when you can’t have what you want? That’s what determines what kind of person you are.”

  Wait, so … was she a psychic or a guidance counselor?

  “But what do I do? Can you help? I’ll pay you whatever you ask. You could come to my house and —”

  “Willa,” she said, shaking her head slowly, “just keep listening.”

  “That’s it?” Wyatt sounded like he was trying to keep from losing his temper. “You let her come all the way here to give her a bunch of mysterious, vague non-advice? And then you tell her you can’t even help? Some psychic.”

  She replied sharply, without removing her eyes from mine. “As Willa well knows,” she said, “spirits are capable of many things. But there are also many things they’re not capable of. These visions you have — you feel what the girls felt, but you can’t see a face, correct?”

  When I nodded, she went on. “What you have to understand is that a spirit presence doesn’t operate like you or me. We’re a mess of thoughts and feelings. A spirit is more like … an instinct. Its whole purpose is to drive at something, to convey an idea or a concept.”

  “Like who the killer is?” I asked.

  She sat back and raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps. We can only guess.”

  “How do I get the … the spirit to tell me what it wants?” I asked.

  “Let me put it this way,” Leyta said. “Tell me what it feels like to be in love.”

  I swallowed hard. First I thought of Aiden, then I thought of Reed. I glanced at Wyatt and felt myself blushing. He was blushing, too.

  Leyta rolled her eyes. “Okay, nix that. I forgot you’re a teenager. Tell me what it feels like to be angry. Really try.”

  I glanced at Wyatt again, and noticed how careful he was not to look at me. “You feel something heavy,” I said. “Pushing down on you. Pushing you toward the edge of something. Helpless and … hot and …”

  I ran out of words.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Now think of trying to convey that idea to someone who doesn’t speak your language, who can’t even see you. What would you do, if you were a ghost?”

  “Hold someone down in the pool so they can’t breathe?” I asked. “But the spirit can write. It writes on the walls. So why won’t it just write down its story?”

  “Well, you didn’t tell a story just now, did you?” She shrugged. “You didn’t say to me, ‘Wyatt said this and it ticked me off and then I said this … and it made me so angry.’ ”

  Her point was beginning to sink in, even though it still felt a little soupy around the edges.

  “If I thought I could help, I’d go to your house right now. But nothing’s gonna show itself to me. These messages are for you, Willa. The ghost itself might not even understand what’s going on. It’s driven by a need to convey something. And you’re the one it’s telling it to. Not me. Not your parents. You.”

  I buried my face in my hands.

  Wyatt’s voice came faintly from my right. “Lucky you.”

  “Do you mind if I speak to Willa for a moment?” Leyta asked. “Alone?”

  “It’s up to Willa,” Wyatt replied.

  Even though Wyatt could be a total pain, there was something reassuring about having him there. Weirdly, I felt I could trust him. “It’s all right,” I said. “He can stay.”

  Leyta nodded, then leaned forward and took my hands in hers. “How long ago did you start messing with stuff you shouldn’t have been messing with?”

  Her question seemed to vibrate through the air. Wyatt tensed in his chair, and I felt my shoulders slump.

  I swallowed hard. “Two years in May.”

  “What are you talking about?” Wyatt asked. “Drugs?”

  Leyta’s scrawny fingers, wrapped around min
e, were surprisingly strong. Her pale brown eyes didn’t waver from my face. “You tried it once, and then you kept doing it, right? You kept pushing and searching.”

  “I had to,” I whispered.

  The hardness left her face. She sighed. “I know.”

  “But I quit,” I said. “Last week.”

  It was as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

  “Headaches, yes?” she asked.

  I tried to ignore Wyatt’s eyes boring into me and said, “Yes.”

  “They’re bad, right? You get them every day? What about flashes — do you see flashes? Like light, but hazy?”

  I nodded.

  “There are voices? Whispers?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “And it all started when you first tried to make contact, right?” She sighed and sat back, shaking her head. “Who taught you how to do it?”

  “A book,” I said. “By Walter … somebody.”

  “Sawamura,” she said. “Walter Sawamura. Which book? He’s written dozens.”

  I wanted desperately to pretend I didn’t know, but I said, “Contact with the Spirit Realm.”

  She nodded, tapping her fingers on the armrests. “That book was published in 1983. Do you know what was published in 1984?”

  I shook my head.

  “A letter from Walter Sawamura to everyone who’d bought that book, begging them to send their copies back to him. Some things don’t belong in the hands of those who aren’t strong enough to control them. He refunded the money out of his own pocket, because he knew he’d made a huge mistake. He lost thousands of dollars. But a few copies slipped through. And I guess you found one.”

  I nodded.

  “Listen to me,” Leyta said. “Go home, take that book, and — you have a moldavite ring, I suppose?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, thinking of the green-stoned ring in the black suede pouch.

  “Put the ring in a ziplock baggie full of salt. Put that bag and the book in a shoe box. Put something made of real silver in the box. Duct-tape it shut and bury it. Twelve inches deep at least. Don’t ever dig it up.”

  “Um … okay,” I said. “And that’ll get rid of the ghost?”

  Her face fell. “No. But it’ll close the door on the energies and spirit forces that are hitchhiking on your aura. It should take care of most of the headaches, the dizzy spells, the flashes….”