A Hard Day’s Fright (15 page)

Ready to run after him if he bolted, I stepped closer. “You look like hell, Will,” I said.

“Feel like hell, too,” he said. He didn’t look surprised to see me. In fact, he didn’t look anything but lost and miserable. He swiped the cuff of his sweater under his nose before he turned to face me.

“I went over to the center to look for you. Where have you been?”

There was a couple days’ growth of beard on his face and he scraped a hand over it. “Thought I was really going to make it this time.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t try again.”

“I dunno.” He shifted from foot to foot. “Can’t remember where I’ve been. Or what I’ve been doing. Can’t remember much of anything. I woke up this morning behind some downtown bank and my face hurt like the devil.” He touched a finger to the raw, swollen skin of his right cheek. “Don’t even remember who I was fighting with, but I guess I lost, huh? And then I walked by one of those buildings with the newsstand on the first floor. And I saw this morning’s paper. And the picture of Janice.” His cheeks went ashen, and I knew I had to keep him focused or I’d lose him.

I dared to step closer. “Do you remember when you left the rehab center on Saturday? Where did you go, Will? And why did you leave?”

His shoulders trembled. He shook his head.

“I’ll bet if you try hard, you can remember. Maybe someone came and got you? Asked you to do something?”

Will twitched. “You mean something like kill Janice?”

I guess Will and I had something in common after all. He wasn’t one to beat around the bush, either. “It wouldn’t be your fault,” I said, and hoped what I was trying to make sound like quiet reassurance would work its magic. “Not if that person made you do it. Not if he took advantage of you.”

His head moved faster, back and forth. “I didn’t kill her. No. Not me. Not this time.”

My breath caught behind the ball of anticipation that made it hard to breathe. I forced out the words, nice and slow. “Are you telling me—”

“Not telling you anything.” Will’s face twisted. His cheeks flushed as muddy red as that wound on his face. He paced over to a marble headstone with a lamb carved on top of it, and his voice was choked and angry. I swear, he wasn’t talking to me. I don’t think he even remembered I was there. Will was talking to himself. To his demons. And his voice rose and echoed against the gravestones all around us.

“I’m not telling anybody anything,” he yelled. “I never have. I never have, that’s what I said. And still, Janice is dead. And Bobby’s dead. And Lucy…” His eyes cleared and he froze, and aimed a laser look in my direction. “You know Lucy’s dead, too, don’t you?”

“I do know that.” I took another step in his direction, but as soon as I did, he started up again. He stomped out the distance between the lamb gravestone and the bush he’d been hiding behind to watch the funeral service, and I scrambled for a way to calm him down and keep him talking. No easy thing considering he was sobbing now. He swallowed gulps of air and moaned.

“How do you know Lucy is dead, Will?” I asked him. “Did someone tell you? Or did you—”

He stopped, as still as the statue that watched us from a nearby monument. He didn’t look my way. Will looked down at the grass at his feet, then up to the dome of blue sky over our heads. He balled his hands into fists and flexed his fingers, and balled them up again, and he pounded them against his own chest. “I know, I know, I know,” he wailed. “But I’m not telling. I’m not going to tell. I’m not ever going to tell.”

I was so busy wondering what on earth I could do to calm him down, I didn’t realize we weren’t alone until Ella stepped up beside me.

“Hello, Will,” she said.

With the cuff of his sweater, Will wiped away the tears on his cheeks. He gasped for breath, choked, coughed.

Ella’s expression didn’t give away a thing, and even as I watched her take a step closer to him, I wondered. Was she disappointed to see what the years had done to Will? Repulsed by him? Had she already called cemetery security and asked them to hightail it over there and toss the guy out onto the street?

“I’m glad you came,” she said, and since
glad
was something I hadn’t even considered, I could only watch and go on wondering. “Janice would have liked that.”

“She’s dead.” His voice, so blistering just moments before, was no more than a whisper. His shoulders were stooped. He hung his head. “She doesn’t know nothing. Janice is dead.”

“I like to think that the dead still watch us.”

That sure wasn’t me who spoke. I knew the dead
did
watch us, and thinking about it was enough to give me a major case of the willies.

“Do you believe that, Will?” Ella tipped her head, watching him, and when he didn’t move and he didn’t say a thing, she smiled. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, don’t we? It’s late.” It wasn’t, and since she looked at her watch, she should have known this. “I’ve got work to do at home this evening and I know I won’t have time to make dinner. I was just going to head over to the Academy Tavern for a burger. You want to come along?”

He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either, not even when Ella wrapped her arm through Will’s. Side by side, they walked over to where her car was parked.

“Where’s my mom going with that weird guy?” I glanced to my left to see that Ariel had been watching, too. She made a face. “You’re not going to let her get into the car with him, are you? Are you nuts, Pepper? He’s dirty and crummy. He’s disgusting.” She darted forward, eager to follow Ella and stop her.

I clamped a hand on her shoulder to keep her in place. “He’s not disgusting,” I said. “He’s an old friend.”

R
emind me next time one of the not-so-dearly departed needs my help…it’s not a good idea to get involved with a ghost stuck in a place that requires an admission charge.

With Ella gone, I knew nobody would miss me, so I dug the last of my dollar bills out of my purse, cut out of work early, and hopped on the rapid.

The Indians had an evening game scheduled, the rapid was heading downtown, and I found one of the last empty seats, but lucky for me, the guy sitting next to me got off at the next stop. Just as soon as he did, Lucy materialized in the seat next to me out of the nowhere ghosts go when they aren’t hanging around complicating my life.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about.” Yes, I had my cell out and up to my ear. Better that than having people stare at me the way the mourners leaving the funeral gaped at Ella and Will when they walked to her car together. “I had a talk with Darren.”

She didn’t look surprised. But then, I imagine once you’ve been kidnapped and murdered, everything else is pretty small potatoes in the taken-by-surprise department.

“Does he miss me?” Lucy asked.

I was not in the mood for teenaged drama. “Why did you break up with him?”

Lucy pressed her golden lips together.

“Fine.” I slapped my hand down on my lap. “If that’s the way you want to be, let’s see how successful you are at finding your own body. Especially since you’re stuck on this train.”

When the woman in the seat in front of me looked over her shoulder, her eyes wide and her mouth open, I realized the hand I’d slapped onto my lap was the one holding the phone. I quickly lifted it back up to my ear.

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” I growled into the phone. “Find your own body of evidence. Let’s see you do that when you’re stuck here on the train in rush hour.”

Apparently, this satisfied her, because the woman spun back around. I lowered my voice and turned in my seat so I was facing Lucy.

“Why did you break up with him?” I asked her again, this time right into the phone, and in barely more than a whisper.

She tossed her head. “What difference does that make? It can’t possibly have anything to do with my death. I was—”

“Murdered. Yeah. I know.” I beat her to the drama punch and Lucy didn’t like it. No one pouts as well as a teenaged girl. “He’s sleazy.”

I expected an eye roll. What I got instead was a sidelong look that told me Lucy wasn’t all that surprised to hear this news.

“What?” I inched closer. We weren’t touching, but I could feel the icy aura that enveloped her. The chill hit me in little waves that sent goose bumps up my arms. “You’re not surprised to hear me say that Darren is a scumbag. Is that what you’re telling me? Does that mean him being sleazy, does that have something to do with why you broke up with him?”

She clicked her tongue. “What difference does it make? Darren didn’t kill me.”

“How do you know?”

“He got off the rapid before me with the rest of them.”

“But he was mad at you. Because you broke up with him.”

She shook her head. “Darren? He wasn’t mad. In fact, I think he was relieved. See, I was the one who was mad. Darren…Well…” She drew in a breath. Or at least she would have if she were alive and breathing. “Darren was stealing tests,” she said. “Don’t ask me for details, I never did figure out how he was doing it or how he got away with it for so long. But he did. See, Darren wanted a bigger allowance, and Mr. Andrews wouldn’t give it to him. He said Darren had to learn the value of hard work, that he had to realize that most people didn’t get everything just handed to them. So Darren got ahold of those tests and started his own little business. History tests. Math tests. English tests. He’d sell the questions, he’d sell the answers. It was how he got enough money to buy that fancy car of his.”

I remembered the Mustang. “And so…”

“So…that’s it. That’s all there is to it.”

I didn’t think so. There had to be more to any answer that came out that fast—and that definitive. “That still doesn’t explain why you broke up with him.”

Lucy’s big blue eyes filled with tears. Her lower lip trembled. When she looked me over, she said, “You just don’t get it, do you? I guess a girl who looks like you never would. In your whole life, you’ve probably never had trouble getting a boyfriend.”

Getting them? No. It was keeping them that seemed to be my problem.

Rather than explain and risk getting into the whole thing—Joel, my ex-fiancé, and Dan, the paranormal researcher who’d left the country after we worked together to solve a case, and Quinn, of course—I glommed on to what I saw as the subtext of her comment. I studied Lucy’s gorgeous, golden hair, those long, shapely legs shown to perfection by her miniskirt, that cute figure. “You had trouble getting boyfriends? No way!”

“Looks aren’t everything. But then, you probably know that, too. I might have been cute, but I never knew when to keep my mouth shut. I had opinions. And I didn’t keep them to myself. Back when I was growing up…well, that wasn’t the way a girl was supposed to act, and when guys realized there was more to me than just my looks…” She shrugged like it was no big deal, but I knew it was.

I have a hard-and-fast rule about dealing with the dead: I never let them know what I’m thinking. At least when it comes to my love life. It keeps things simpler and it keeps them from butting their ectoplasmic noses in places they don’t belong. I violated the rule and lowered my guard—just this one time. But then, I figured I owed it to the girl who’d never had a chance to get as old—or as wise—as me. “I had a guy walk out on me,” I confessed. “Because I told him I talk to the dead.”

“And he didn’t believe you.” Lucy shook her head in disgust. “I get it. I mean, I don’t get how he could be so horrible, but I’ve seen it a thousand times. A girl speaks her mind, a boy can’t handle it. Gosh, that’s too bad, Pepper. I mean it.” She sighed a sigh that didn’t ripple the air between us. “I thought things would be different by now. I thought that’s what the sixties were all about—all of us, men and women, young and old—finding our ways and our own true voices. That summer I died, I could feel the first quiverings of it in the air. Free love. Free speech. Free thought. Finally, I felt like I was going to fit in. Like I could speak up and guys wouldn’t look at me like I had two heads. But I never had the chance to enjoy the freedom. I wasn’t alive to be part of it. That’s what the poem was all about, you know? Girl, crimson and golden, awake to the dawn. Alive to the pulse. The vibration. The beat.”

Maybe that’s what Lucy believed. Personally, I think Patrick Monroe was thinking of a whole different pulse and vibration when he wrote those words.

But I was getting philosophical. And toeing the edge of more than mildly disturbing when I thought of what Patrick Monroe must have been thinking of when he penned that poem.

“So what does you having trouble keeping a boyfriend have to do with Darren?” I asked her. “Unless you spoke your mind about something and he dumped you for it?” I knew that couldn’t be possible since Lucy was the one who broke up with him. Besides, that was too much like what had happened to me and Quinn. I shivered at the thought.

Lucy’s cheeks flushed. “Just the opposite,” she admitted. “I found out he was selling test answers and I…” She glanced away. She folded her fingers together and clutched them in her lap. “We were just friends back when I first found out. We hung around in a group. Me and Darren and Bobby and Janice and Will. We’d go for Cokes after school, hang out at dances. You know, that kind of thing. But I’d had a secret crush on Darren since back in middle school. He liked me. As a friend. But I really wasn’t Darren’s type. He liked…” She gave me a sidelong look. “You know…” I had to lean closer to hear her when she whispered, “The bad girls. The loose girls. You know, like Janice.”

This was news, though I can’t say I was surprised. There was something about the bleached hair and the beehive that practically screamed,
Come and get it!

Lucy was probably thinking the same thing. She lifted one shoulder to brush off the thought and got back on track. “I told Darren…well, you’re going to think less of me.”

She waited for me to deny this, and when all I did was wait for her to explain why she was suddenly chewing on her lower lip, she blurted it out. “I told Darren I was going to report him to the principal if he didn’t go out with me.”

“You blackmailed him into dating you?” All right, I’d never been that desperate. I’d never even been desperate enough to think of being that desperate. This did not seem the time to mention it, so I bit back a lecture that was all about self-respect and just said, “So why break up with him?”

“Because when I told him I was going to report him, Darren swore he was going to change his ways. He said I’d shown him the light, that what he was doing was stupid and that he was grateful to me for giving him another chance. He said he’d never do it again. We dated all that spring before I died, and we dated into the summer. And all that time, I thought he was being true to his word. And then…well, there was the whole Janice thing. You know…” She stared down at her lap. “I think he was dating her, too. Behind my back.”

“And you put up with that?” It came out too judgmental,  but then, I had trouble not speaking my mind, too. Lucky for me—and my investigation—Lucy didn’t hold it against me.

“Then I found out that Darren had been lying to me. I caught him selling test answers to one of the football players who was in summer school. That’s when I had it out with him. I told him I didn’t want to see him anymore.”

I remembered what Ella had said about seeing Janice and Darren together at the Beatles concert, and about how Janice had looked pushy and insistent. “And Janice cornered Darren at the Beatles concert because once you were out of the way, she wanted him all to herself.”

Lucy shrugged. “I can’t say. I only know that once I found out he lied to me, I didn’t care if I ever had another date ever again in my whole life.” She gulped. “I guess that’s pretty much what happened, isn’t it? I told Darren I’d had it with him. That I never wanted to see him again.”

“And if he thought that meeting you had scheduled with the principal was about him…” For the first time since I’d gotten involved in this quagmire of an investigation, I felt my hopes rise. “He might have wanted to shut you up.”

“Yeah, sure he might have. But he didn’t. He couldn’t have. He was with Bobby and Janice and Will. They were all going to his house to listen to albums. If Darren left and was gone long enough to kill me, somebody would have noticed, don’t you think?”

Yeah, there was that.

How I hate it when ghosts are right!

I
was sitting at Ella’s kitchen table, sorting through the stacks of old Garden View employee newsletters she’d brought home from the office to shred (and yes, recycle). Bad enough that I was bored out of my mind. Worse, because something was up. And I hated not knowing what it was.

I glanced over to where Ella was busy removing staples and tapping old newsletters into too-neat piles. Her head was down, her eyes were focused on her work, the saggy skin under her chin shimmied as she went through the motions: Grab a newsletter. Pull the staple. Set the pages aside.

I looked the other way at Ariel, who was sitting on the other side of me, doing the same thing. Her head was down, too. Her eyes were focused on her work. The muscles in her jaw were pulled so tight, I swear before the night was over, I was going to hear the
ping
when they snapped.

The two of them hadn’t spoken two words to each other since I’d gotten to Ella’s thirty minutes earlier. They’d barely spoken to me.

Maybe I was curious. Or just plain uncomfortable. Either way, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“So…” I looked from one of them to the other. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.” They answered in unison and glared across the table at each other, then silently fell back into the grabbing, pulling, setting aside routine.

This reminded me of the Ella-Ariel relationship of old. And that was not a good thing.

I found myself in the uncomfortable position of peacemaker. It might have been a whole lot easier if I knew what was going on.

Determined to get them talking so I could find out, I settled for the most obvious subject. It was Friday night, the school week was over. “Any plans for this weekend?” I asked Ariel.

Innocent question, yes?

Which says something about how surprised I was when she punched the nearest pile of newsletters, hopped to her feet, and stomped to the kitchen sink. She poured a glass of water, drank one sip of it, then tossed the rest away with so much oomph most of the water ended up not down the drain, but on the floor. She didn’t bother to clean it up. Instead, she stomped back the other way.

“Some
people have things planned for this weekend,” she said, completely ignoring me and focusing on her mother. “But then
, some
people don’t live in a dictatorship.”

“Now, honey.” This comment came from Ella, of course. She clasped her hands together on a stack of newsletters and tried for a smile, but since it wobbled around the edges, I knew this wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion. “Some people,” she said, so much more sweetly than Ariel had, “have to learn to live by the rules.”

Ariel dropped back in her chair. She shoved the nearest pile of newsletters aside. “This recycling stuff is stupid,” she grumbled.

“I’ll second that.” I was going for funny, but neither of them laughed. It was exactly the opening I needed.

“You two…” I looked from one of them to the other, suddenly sounding so much like Ella when she’s trying to be sensible, it made me a little queasy. “You two are obviously not getting along. And I need to know why.”

“She doesn’t trust me,” Ariel blurted out.

“She’ll thank me for it later when she calms down and realizes it’s for her own good.” Ella’s words washed over her daughter’s.

And I was left just as confused as ever. I tried a no-nonsense look again, and when that got me nowhere, I knew it was time to change the subject. A little end run, and with any luck, I’d get them back to where we started before they ever realized it—and I’d get some answers, too. As I’d seen in the past weeks, nothing could get these two going like talking about my investigation.