Black Opal (12 page)

I couldn’t see what had Dean so upset until I stood next to him. Trey hung at the back of the empty stall, a rope knotted around his neck. He had looped the rope over an exposed beam, and his feet hung less than an inch from the floor, his toes nearly touching it. I gasped and stumbled backward, covering my mouth in horror. The overpowering odor back here made my hastily eaten breakfast rebel. I gagged, and Dean snapped out of his stupor.

“Not in here.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me toward a door marked exit.

“It’s okay.” I tugged my arm out of his hand. “I won’t ralph in here.”

Another gust of wind blasted through an open window in the stall and set the dead man swinging again. I realized the metallic clink was the cuff of his denim jacket brushing the brass button on his jeans. The creak was the rope moving. Unable to help myself, I took a good look at Trey. His eyes bugged out of his face, and his skin had turned black. I thought I’d never forget those two details.

A white slip of paper was pinned to his jacket. Curiosity outweighing my horror, I leaned forward, trying to make out the words. I read aloud, “I can’t stand it anymore. I am sorry.”

A suicide note?
What couldn’t Trey stand? And what was he sorry for?
I backed away from the corpse, wondering where his ghost was, if it was doing whatever ghosts did to make themselves appear to me. My chest tightened at the thought. I didn’t need to see another ghost, especially not with Dean standing next to me.

The horses shuffled in their stalls and made high-pitched sounds. I peered into every dark corner, expecting to see Trey’s ghost. Animals might not be able to speak, but they weren’t dumb. They sensed something wrong.

I peeked into an open doorway at the end of the hall and found what looked to be a combination office and bedroom. Trey must have lived here. Papers were scattered over the desk. I tiptoed forward.

“Don’t go in there,” Dean said.

“I’m not touching anything. This is my only chance to satisfy my nosiness. Besides, after that show you put on yesterday, St. Namadie Parish Sheriff’s Office won’t be sharing info with you.”

Dean grunted and followed me into the office. Together, we looked at the mess.

“These are the letters Shayne wrote him,” Dean said. “He showed them to me years ago, when I was still married.”

“So…he started reading them and got depressed?”

“I don’t know. The note said he was sorry. Maybe, after her body was dug up, he knew it was only a matter of time before his connection to that coin came out.”

“But what about his alibi?”

Dean shook his head and shrugged. “We need to get the sheriff out here. He needs to see this.” He grabbed my hand.

We turned to leave the sad little office, and I bleated. Standing in the doorway were Trey—a much younger and more handsome Trey—and Shayne. Next to me, Dean let out a yelp of shock.
So he sees them, too. How the hell? Crud, crap, and shit
. Questions about why and how crowded my thoughts, but I pushed them away to focus on the worst part of it all. This was the thing Dean hated about me. I couldn’t even look at him. I just yanked him toward the ghosts and led him through them.

My bravado earned me a blast of their indignation to my solar plexus. It spread through me and knotted my muscles. I lowered my head and bulldozed forward. Once we reached the fresh air outside the barn, my muscles loosened.

Dean and I faced each other. His breath came in gasps. His tanned skin had gone ashen, and a sheen of sweat stood out on his face. He jerked his arm out of my hand and put his hands on his knees and stared at the ground. I crossed my arms over my chest and braced myself for his reaction.

“You see that all the time?” He raised his head to stare at me. His hands trembled as he took them off his knees. Self-doubt stuck its sharp claws into me and drew blood.

“I’m sorry you saw them.”
Sorry? Dammit, dammit, just dammit.
I couldn’t help being this way. If I could, I’d get rid of my connection to the spirit world. I tried to think of logical reasons this might have happened.
Is Dean’s seeing the ghosts a side of effect of what happened to me six months ago? Maybe his connection to Shayne made me a conduit.

Dean stared at me, his face still so pale I thought he might pass out. “I just can’t believe you live with it.”

“It’s worse since that night six months ago.” I shifted foot to foot. Dean and I never discussed my cousin’s murder or the way it got solved. He carried his own demons from the experience. Me, I knew talking it to death wouldn’t change a damn thing.

“I hope I never see one of them again.” Dean said the words to himself more than to me. I jerked as though slapped. It was possible the longer he hung around me, the more likely he’d see something else horrible. I hung my head and tried to pull it together. Dean put his hand on my back, and I shrugged away from his touch.

“I’ll go up to the house and tell Mom and Maddy not to come down here. You call 911.” Dean hurried past me.

When he got out of sight, I took a few shuddering breaths.
Don’t you dare cry, Peri
. It wouldn’t solve anything. Besides, I couldn’t spend the rest of my life being such a damn baby over this. It was my cross to bear. Shoving my resolve into place, I reached into my pocket for my cell phone and touched warm metal.
No. Not again.
I knew what I’d see even before I pulled my hand out of the pocket. Sure enough, Fayette’s necklace dangled from my fingertips. Remembering the black opal folklore Julienne mentioned, I let out a disgusted groan.
This necklace again. What the hell is this thing? Could it cause Dean to see his sister’s ghost?
I couldn’t even begin to imagine, I realized, and shoved the necklace back in my pocket.

Wishing I was home, I closed my eyes and clicked my heels together three times. Nothing happened.

12

Trey’s death caused a bigger upheaval than the discovery of Shayne’s remains. Julienne melted down. She and Dean and Madeleine holed up in the library making phone calls. This time, I didn’t bother giving her back the necklace. Why make things worse?

I wandered Dean’s family home, the weird necklace swinging on my chest, tingling where it touched skin. I bet if I stopped in front of one of the black-spotted mirrors and pulled it out of my t-shirt, veins of electric color would be flashing through it.

The weird little thing found me everywhere I went, somehow moving itself place to place. It was magic, a magic I didn’t understand, didn’t know how to learn. The necklace and its magic represented the thing Dean didn’t like about me, the reason my mother rejected me.

The necklace should have scared me, dammit. But it didn’t. It felt right hanging around my neck. Every once in a while, I caressed it, reveling in the warmth of the little shocks bolting through my fingers.

In a musty corner of the old house, I found a hallway lined with paintings covered by old sheets. I peeked at a few and immediately saw why they hung in an unused part of the house. Not every artist of yesteryear was all that great. Or maybe the people were uglier.

I knelt to look at an accent table, and the hallway grew icy. Vapor steamed out of my mouth, and dread scratched at my raw nerves. I stood too quickly and overbalanced. As I tried to right myself without messing something up, Shayne appeared next to me.

“What do you want?” I said. “You won’t show me how to help you. I can’t solve your murder if you don’t do that. Why don’t you just move on?”

She disappeared.
Thank goodness.
It was too easy, but I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I continued on my path, once opening a door to peek inside at the plastic-protected furniture. I walked inside the room, drawn by an antique cheval, which, for some reason, was uncovered. Those always caught my attention.

I stared at myself in the dust-hazed old glass, pulling the magic necklace outside my t-shirt and watching the colors move in it. The sight mesmerized me. When I refocused, the person on the opposite side of the mirror was no longer me. It was the necklace’s original owner, Julienne’s grandmother, Fayette. She looked exactly as she did in the painting in Julienne’s suite. I stumbled backward, and the woman’s ghost stepped out of the mirror and winked at me.

Fear set my heart galloping. Its hard thumps blurred my vision, jarring Fayette’s ghost. My knees buckled, and my back bumped a dresser, dislodging a dusty silver dresser set, which crashed to the floor. Fayette’s lips curved into a smile. I heard her laugh in my head. Cold sweat broke out over my body.

“You want to see? We’ll show you.” The voice was all around me and nowhere at the same time. I moaned, unable to speak, my chest aching with fear. It was the first time I’d heard a ghost speak in other than a word here and there in whispers. As though called, the whispers started. Fayette and I were no longer alone.

###

While I stood frozen in terror, the room filled with every kind of ghost imaginable. Some wore clothes I associated with movies like
Gone with the Wind
. Others wore even older styles of clothing, things I’d seen in history books about the Revolutionary War. A few of the ghosts were African American and wore ragged clothes I associated with slaves. Shayne and Fayette planned this attack, brought friends. I made a silent promise to never verbally antagonize a ghost again.

I fought my way to the door, struggling to escape the icy hands grabbing and pulling at me. Pathetic mewling sounds came from my throat as I fought against the ghosts. Nobody could hear me scream in this forgotten corner of the house. What if the ghosts decided to keep me now I could hear them? Finally, they released me.

I hurried down the hallway, my heart leaping into my throat with every beat. Rounding a sharp corner, I came face-to-face with all of them. Dead arms reached for me. Mouths opened to display blackened teeth and emit moans I knew would make up the soundtrack to later nightmares. I backed up, only to be pushed away from a ghost I’d bumped into. I turned to face the one who’d pushed me, and it was Shayne. The familiar face did nothing to comfort me.

“In there.” Dean’s sister gestured at a closed door, her voice echoing inside my head. Wild horror clawed at my sanity. Hearing them speak scared me more than any other dealings I’d ever had with the spirits. Feeling a flash of impatience from Shayne, I turned my attention to the door.

It bore inches of dust and cobwebs. No way did I want to go in there. They might trap me in there.
Forget this shit.
I ran in another direction, only to find another cadre of ghosts waiting for me. I carefully backed away from them, lamenting my foolish curiosity about this house.

Shayne gestured at the door again. I didn’t see any way out of doing her bidding. Tentatively, I reached out and tried to turn the doorknob. It was locked. Relief flooded through me. Now I wouldn’t have to go into some unknown, dark, and dirty place. But my relief was short lived.

Shayne motioned at our ghostly audience. Fayette, still wearing her pageboy haircut and flapper dress, pushed her way through the crowd. She dropped a skeleton key at my feet and winked at me again.

Seeing no other option, I picked up the key and used it. The door opened like magic, as though the lock had been recently oiled. The hinges didn’t even squeal. A stairwell ascended to parts unknown of this huge, weird house. I glanced at the ghosts surrounding me, and they pressed forward, again reaching their cold, blue fingered hands toward me. I fled up the stairs, my footsteps dislodging thick dust on the stairs. The door shut by itself, cutting me off from not only my spectral fan club but the rest of the world.

###

Nobody had been up here in some time.

The stairs ended in a tiny room furnished with a dilapidated chair bleeding stuffing out of rips in its upholstery and a little round table. With a little spiffing up, the duo would have cost a fortune at Silver Dreams Antiques back in Gaslight City. I studied the room, trying to figure out my job up here.

On the table sat a half-full bottle of whiskey and an empty glass. Neither had been touched any time in the recent past. Dust obscured the bottle’s label. An equally dust-covered book sat next to the chair. I brushed off a thick layer of dust from the book on the table. Tiny motes flew into the air, sparkling in the weak sunlight streaming through the attic window. My nose gave a warning tickle, and I braced for the sneeze. It hit with force, and I sneezed several times in rapid succession, bumping the table on which the book sat in the process. It tumbled to the floor, knocking the rest of the dust off and sending a card sized paper flying over the floor.

“Great,” I hissed, kneeling to pick up my mess. With the dust knocked off, I saw the book wasn’t really a book but a bound report of some sort. I glanced at the first few pages and realized it was Shayne’s pet project,
Cajuns: The Disappearing Culture
. Because I hadn’t had the chance to look through the book in the glass display case, I leafed through the pages, reading a paragraph here and there. Interesting stuff, but I couldn’t believe Shayne had me chased into this room to see it.

The piece of paper that had flown across the room caught my eye, and I bent to pick it up. It was a picture showing a gorgeous, smiling Shayne next to Trey. On the the back, inscribed in decidedly male handwriting, was written “I will love you forever.”
How sweet.
I thought I might go into sugar shock.

Still not wanting to sit in the nasty chair, I leaned against the wall, which was no less nasty. This little room had obviously been Shayne’s secret hideout. She came up here and drank illicit whiskey and mooned over her boyfriend. And now both of them were dead. A shiver passed through me.

“I still have no idea what you expect me to find up here,” I said aloud.

Shayne materialized in a corner of the room, her form flickering in and out of my vision. Other shadows roiled in the room’s corners. I didn’t look too closely at those. Shayne knelt next to an overturned crate and moved her hands around the bottom of it. Cringing, I joined her on the dirty floor.

I lifted the edge of the crate and found a dusty plastic makeup case, the kind I remember storing my own makeup in when I was in high school and college. Shayne vanished, taking the other shadowy figures with her.
Good.
At least I could concentrate.