Restless Spirits: Chapters 19 & 20
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Chapter Nineteen
I found Joe in the attic, leafing through a magazine he’d discovered. An old Cosmo from sometime in the 1970s, judging by the cover. “Did you know that there are thirteen ways to pleasure your man?” he asked without putting it down. “Can’t say as I knew that. ‘Course, things being what they are, I’d be happy with just the one.” He closed the magazine and looked up at me. “You came back.”
“Yup.” I joined him on the settee. “I can tell you missed me.”
He glanced down at the magazine and tossed it aside. “Needed something to keep my mind occupied so’s I didn’t lose it with worry.” He leaned in a little and said, confidentially, “I’m glad you’re back.”
I smiled. “So am I.” Boy howdy, was I. I’d only been gone a couple of hours, but it felt great to see him again. I moved in to close the gap between us.
He welcomed me into his arms. “Think I can get used to all this touching.”
“Mmm. Me too. Although,” I considered, “it’s not like I’ve really had time to get used to the not touching. And this isn’t exactly touching. It’s...sparking. I guess.”
“Believe me, when you haven’t been touched in a lifetime, it’s close enough.” An electric tingle shot through every part of whatever I was made of as he kissed me. I had to admit, it wasn’t like the real thing. It wasn’t better or worse, just...different. It definitely beat an eternity of being cut off from feeling anything.
His kiss grew hungrier, and his hands kept pace with his mouth. So did mine. I began to realize how long it had been since I’d made out with anyone, living or dead. My dating life hadn’t exactly been stellar when I was alive. As his hand brushed my breast, I pressed harder against him, moaning into his mouth.
Abruptly, he let go of me and jumped to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t... I’m taking advantage. It ain’t proper.”
“It—what? Proper? What are you talking about?”
“Touching you like that, as if you were my wife. It’s disrespectful. I shouldn’t take those kinds of liberties.”
Confused and frustrated that he was no longer touching me, I stared blankly at him as his words sunk in. “Uh...you do know that the world has changed a little since you died, right? I mean, I don’t know how much you’ve been able to keep up—”
“I’ve seen enough to know it hasn’t all been for the better.”
“Well, I can’t really argue with that. But I can’t complain about the part where it’s okay to kiss the one you love. And then some.”
“Still. I should have at least asked first.”
“Joe, really, it’s okay.” I reached for his hand and pulled him back to the couch. “This is me telling you it’s fine to take liberties. I’m all about liberty.” I took his hand and placed it on my hip, then I leaned into him, snaking my arms around his neck as I kissed him. His lips greeted mine just as eagerly as before. His hand slid up my back and held me tighter, and we were about to settle into a really fantastic make-out session when I remembered that Chris had insisted on investigating him. A pang of guilt pulled me back.
Joe blinked at me. “Okay, I’m confused.”
“Sorry. It’s just... I talked to my sister.”
“Oh, right.” He sat up straighter. “I meant to ask you how that went, but I got sidetracked.”
I smiled. “Yeah. Me too.”
He returned my smile, reaching out to stroke my hair. “So, how’d it go?”
“It...went. She already has a good lead on Sarah, and she’s going to keep digging. We figure maybe if we can learn how she died, that’ll give us some insight into how to stop her.”
Joe pulled his hand back. “You really think it’s a good idea to mess around in Sarah’s past?”
I shrugged. “I don’t see that we have much choice.”
“Right.” He shifted his position until he faced forward, his hands in his lap. “Guess not.” His brow furrowed, a clear sign of deep thought.
I hesitated, but then reached out and took his hand. “Joe, there’s something else. Please don’t be mad.”
He looked at our hands, then at me. “Don’t give me a reason to be, and I won’t.”
Well, this was going to go just great. I needed to be straight with him, though, if whatever this was between us was going to have a real chance. For however much time we would both be stuck here, anyway. I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “Chris is going to investigate you.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“It was her idea. I didn’t put her up to it. She’s a research geek, you know. This house is her hobby, and she’s never heard of you, and she won’t be happy until she knows everything there is to know about this place.” I was babbling, spewing out all of my excuses before he could get angry enough to stop listening. “She just finds it all interesting, is all. It’s not a big deal.”
Shaking his head, he pulled his hand free and stood up. “Did you ask her not to?”
I leaned back and looked up at him. I couldn’t get a good read on what he was thinking. He kept his face neutral. Carefully so. “I did, actually, not that it made a difference.” He bowed his head and turned his back to me. With a sigh, I stood up and, tentatively, put my hand on his back. “Joe, if there’s anything you want to tell me, something you’d rather I hear from you instead of her...”
He shrugged me off. “Already told you. Got nothin’ to tell.”
“Okay.”
He looked back at me. “Really?”
I shook my head. “No, not really. Why can’t you talk to me, Joe?”
“I can talk to you just fine.”
I laughed. It came out more bitter than I meant it to. “Fine. You have the ability. Why don’t you want to, then? Do you know how much that hurts?”
He turned back to me. “I don’t mean to hurt you.”
“Then don’t! I’m not asking for your deepest, darkest secrets. Just give me something. I don’t need to know how you died, but I want to know how you lived. Who are you, Joe? What kind of man were you in life? What’s your favorite color? What kind of music did you like? What did you do for a living? What did you do for fun?”
“What difference does any of that make now?”
“Because it made you who you are! And I want to know how you got to be this awesome guy I fell in love with! So sue me!” Whoa, did I just say love? He stared at me and I stared back, refusing to take it back. Not that I wanted to. God help me, that really was how I felt.
For a long, agonizing moment, his expression was unreadable. Then he screwed up his face and hung his head. “No, you were right. I can’t.” I could hear a struggle in his voice. “I...” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I was a farmhand,” he said at last, lifting his gaze to meet mine. “Used to be a farm here, before all these houses got built. I already told you about my daughter. We lived here, and I worked night and day to earn our keep. That’s it. That was my life. Nothing else to it. Happy now?”
I frowned, folding my arms. There had to be more to it to justify all his evasiveness, but I decided not to push it just now. “Was that so hard?”
He shrugged. “Guess not. But it’s...it’s hard for me to talk about, is all.”
I nodded. “I get that. I’m sorry I pushed.”
“Nah, you were right. You deserve to know something about me. It’s not that I don’t want you to. It’s... I--”
“Shh.” I put a finger on his lips. “I know plenty about you. I know you’re sweet, and kind, not to mention gorgeous”—that got a shy grin out of him. Adorable!— “and a good friend. And a great kisser.” Now, I grinned. “And you were a loving husband and father.” I reached up to stroke his hair. “You’re one in a million, Joe.”
He cupped my cheek in his hand. “Look who’s talking,” he said, and kissed me. Neither of us pulled away that time.
Chapter Twenty
In deference to our Irish grandmother, Chris held a good old-fashioned Irish wake, complete with booze and an open casket and, if it turned out anything like my mom’s wake, a drunken brawl that ended with the police showing up. Good times.
I didn’t have any trouble getting to her place for it. After an entire day spent alone with Joe in the attic, it was all I could do not to float right up through the ceiling. Walking out the front door was a piece of cake. The only hard part was tearing myself away from Joe. I popped into the middle of Chris’s living room next to the buffet table, and immediately regretted going to the trouble. The food looked so good. Grandma, Aunt Judy, and all of their friends had cooked every kind of casserole known to man, and also fried up at least three chickens. Somebody had brought buffalo wings, and on a separate table, spread around my high school graduation picture, someone had arranged a sushi spread in my honor. Sushi! Man, what I wouldn’t give just then to eat that dragon roll. Just looking at all the food I’d never taste again made me want to get drunk and burst into tears. Of course, I couldn’t do that, either. Well, at least not the getting drunk part.
Speaking of which, I spotted Gus over by my casket, next to which stood an easel holding a blow-up of my author portrait. Gus was practically lying on the casket, crying into his beer and looking like he was about to throw himself on my overly made-up corpse. I went to check out what he had to say, which was a mistake that will scar me for the rest of my afterlife.
It started out okay. “You’re so pretty,” he was saying when I popped up beside him, which is something a gal never gets tired of hearing. But it went downhill from there. “And you’re smart, and funny... I read all of your novels, even though I never told anybody, because they’re, you know, chick lit, but I collected them all and I keep one under my pillow. I can’t believe you’re gone. I had so many chances to tell you how I felt about you, and I was such a coward...”
Whoa there, Gus, buddy. I had no idea. And thank God for that. I decided to get out of there before I witnessed him getting any creepier with my corpse. I turned to go and stepped right through my father.
Dad?
Chris didn’t tell me he was coming. Maybe she thought I’d take it as a given, what with him being my father and all, but I was genuinely surprised he’d bothered. It wasn’t like he’d shown up to anything when I was living. Not since before Mom’s accident, anyway. I stood there a moment, stunned, and then gathered myself together and turned to face him. He patted Gus on the shoulder and steered him toward some Paranormal Institute members, then shoved his hands in his pockets and just stood there, staring at his dead daughter’s corpse, his face an unreadable mask.
I waited for him to say something. I played the whole scene over in my mind before he even had a chance to speak. He would say how much he loved me, how sorry he was he’d never been there for me, how wrong he had been to blame me and put all of that on the shoulders of a ten-year-old girl. It would be one of those perfect moments that would happen in one of my novels, where he’d pour out everything he could never bring himself to say when I was alive, unaware that I could hear, and then we’d both find a way to forgive each other. But it would be bittersweet, because he’d have to carry on without knowing I’d forgiven him.
But in reality, he just stood there. Chris came over to stand next to him, and he put his arm around her like he’d never put his arm around me. She leaned against him, and he squeezed her shoulders.
“She looked like your mother,” he said. Then he let go of Chris and walked away.
I watched him go, staring in dumbstruck wonder. That was it? That was our big final moment? Man. Even at my own wake, he couldn’t resist one more opportunity to rub it in. Unbelievable.
Chris also watched him go. I could tell by the look on her face that she felt as disappointed in him as I did. She knocked back her watered down Michael Collins and turned back to my casket. “I’m so sorry about that, Ronnie.”
I shrugged. “Forget it.”
“Ack!” She jumped. With her hand over her heart, she turned to where I stood beside my giant picture. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Sorry.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I wish you hadn’t seen that. I wish...”
“I said forget it.” Seriously, screw that guy. “I’m just surprised he came. I guess that’s something.”
“It’s hardly enough.”
She was ready to shower me with sympathy, but I was over it. I was over him. It felt good, deciding I didn’t care what my dad thought of me anymore. Great, even. It was a catharsis I’d never been able to achieve when I was living. I looked at Chris’s emo face, and at the appropriately sad faces of all of the guests, and had to suppress a sudden urge to giggle. This shindig needed some levity. Concentrating, I reached down, picked up several strands of my own hair, and lifted them into the air. Chris’s eyes grew huge. She slapped the lock of hair back down and smoothed it into place. “Stop that! People will see!”
“So? It’ll give them something to talk about other than the untimely tragedy of my death.” I picked up my dead arm and waved it like a puppet. “Helloooo! I can hear all of you, helloooo! Tell me how smart and young and pretty I was!”
“Stop it!” She took my arm away from me and laid it gently back in place, then looked around to make sure nobody heard or saw anything. “Okay, bedroom. Now.”
I popped into her bedroom before she even made it to the hall. I was getting good at this stuff. She came in, shut the door, careful that it didn’t make any sound, and flipped on the light. Then she went straight to her computer and fired it up. “I can’t believe you actually came.”
“Like I could resist coming to my own wake. There sure are a lot of people here. I don’t even know half of them.”
“Those would be grandma and grandpa’s and my friends. This wake is more for our benefit, you know.”
Wow, she was right. I was totally a crasher, screwing up her therapeutic attempt at closure. “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe I should go.”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Besides, I need to talk to you.” She pulled up the Internet as she took a seat at her desk. “I found a web site somebody put together about the house. It's amateurish, but somehow, they got a hold of a lot of info I’ve never seen. Of course, I don’t know how reliable any of it is. But there’s stuff about the Collier family, and a child murder.”
“You found out about Sarah’s murder?”
Chris shook her head. “Not Sarah. That other little girl. You said she was blonde, right?”
“Right.”
For a minute, Chris sat there and chewed her bottom lip. She always did that when she was trying to decide something.
“What is it?” I asked.
“This Joe guy,” she said. “How close have you gotten to him?”
I flashed back to the happy discovery that ghost clothing could come off with enough concentration and determination. I caught myself grinning as I said, “Pretty close. Why?”
Chris was quiet for a moment—a much too long moment in which I began to feel my happy new relationship glow fade. Then, before I had to smack her in the head and tell her to spill it already, she went on, all business like. “The little girl’s name was Clarice Bentley. She was found brutally murdered just a few days after her sixth birthday.”
My hand flew to my mouth. That news didn’t help my sinking feeling. I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “What does that have to do with Joe?”
Her mouth set in a grim line, she pulled up a web page. “Her father was a handyman for the family who lived on that property prior to the Baird house being built.” As she spoke, a scanned image loaded and resolved itself on the screen. It was old, sepia-tinted and mottled with age, torn and creased as if it had been handled a lot over the decades. In it sat a working-class man in his Sunday best, his face solemn, as faces in pictures from that era tended to be. In his lap he held a pre-school age girl with blonde ringlets in a simple white dress. I knew them both.
“Farmhand,” I said over the lump that had lodged itself in my throat.
“What?”
“He was a farmhand, not a handyman.”
Chris blinked up at me. “Is there a difference?”
I shrugged absently as I leaned in for a closer look at the photo. The little girl—Clarice—broke convention by smiling from ear to ear, the kind of infectious little-kid grin that lights up the faces of everybody in the room. I even caught myself smiling automatically in response. I could see barely hidden traces of an amused smirk in the corners of Joe’s eyes and mouth, as though it was all he could do to keep a straight face in the presence of his daughter’s unabashed glee.
“He didn’t tell me what happened to her.” I reached toward the screen, letting my fingers hover, untouching, just above his face. “Oh, Joe. I’m so sorry.” That sick feeling in my stomach was replaced by a sharp ache, and I wanted to blink back to him immediately and do whatever I could to comfort old wounds.
“There’s more, Ronnie,” Chris said, gently. I didn’t reprimand her for calling me Ronnie. I knew she was trying to soften a blow. I forced myself to straighten up and away from the picture, and waited. “So, there used to be a farmhouse where the Baird’s built their house,” she said.
“Let me guess: a three-story Victorian.”
“Yup. There’s your third-floor mystery solved.” She scrolled down the screen a little more. “Anyway, Joe and Clarice lived there with Joe’s employers, in a little suite of rooms on the top floor. The house burned down about a week after Clarice’s murder while the Colliers were in town on business with their two sons. Both Joe and Sarah were nowhere to be found.”
I swore under my breath as I pictured the burned man from my visions. How could I have been so stupid?
“There’s more to the story,” said Chris. “Do you want to hear it?”
I really didn’t. But I swallowed and said, “Yeah. Go ahead.”
“After combing through the ruins, they only found one set of remains.”
“Joe’s,” I guessed.
“Yeah. Officially, the fire was labeled a freak accident due to negligence, and Joe was given a posthumous pass on account of being a grieving father. Sarah’s disappearance was blamed on Clarice’s murderer, and neither case was officially closed.”
I sighed, hating where this was going. “What about unofficially?”
Chris started to answer, then paused. “Honey, are you sure?”
I nodded. “I have to know.”
She looked up at me, her eyes full of sympathy. “After he retired, the sheriff on the case made a few drunken confessions to his replacement. Turns out he was Mrs. Collier’s cousin, and he filed the reports according to her wishes after she refused to believe the alternative. That Joe deliberately set the fire in a suicidal fit of masochism after he snapped and killed both girls.”
I laughed bitterly. I was with Mrs. Collier. The alternative wasn’t possible. I said so.
Chris sighed. “I’m sorry, Ron, but how well do you know this guy, really? I mean, you haven’t even been...” She hesitated and swallowed, as if the word for what I was choked her. Then she continued, “…been gone a week yet. You said he doesn’t like to talk about himself. You have no clue what he’s really like, or what he was capable of before he died.”
“No. I know he’s a good man. Caring. Decent. The kind of guy you just don’t find these days. And he adored his daughter. There was no way he’d harm her.”
Chris looked at me, long and hard. “Please tell me you aren’t in love with him.”
I didn’t say anything.
She reached for my hand, stopping just short of grabbing it. “Ron, you have to think clearly on this. It explains his evasiveness. It also explains Sarah’s rage.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t explain why it’s not Clarice playing puppets with our souls. When I saw her apparition, she was happy. As happy as the little girl in that picture.” I nodded at the screen. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
She pressed her lips together. “Maybe. Unless he didn’t kill Clarice. What if her death caused him to snap, and he took it out on Sarah?”
Chris was right. That explained everything. I wished I still had the ability to throw up.
There was a knock on the door, and Aunt Judy popped her head in. “Chrissy? Is everything okay?”
Chris looked from me to her, and forced a smile. “Yeah, fine. I just needed a few minutes.”
Aunt Judy smiled sadly and nodded. “Take as much time as you need, dear.” She shut the door, leaving us alone with the elephant in the room.
“I’m so, so sorry, Ron.”
I nodded. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say.
“At least now we know the key to stopping Sarah. We just have to figure out how to work it.”
I swallowed. “I guess that’s up to me.”
“It doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to go back there.”
“I do. I have to talk to him. I need to hear it from him.”
Standing, Chris sighed. She knew it was useless to argue. “Just be careful with this guy, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied.
Chris stood up. “I should get back out there. Are, uh, are you coming?”
“No. The novelty’s kind of worn off. Mind if I stay here and write a while?” I was way too wrecked to type a single word, but it was a good excuse to buy myself time to figure things out.
“Sure.” She pulled up the file that held my novel. “Take as long as you need. This wake won’t be over for hours.” She started to leave, but paused with her hand on the door. “The service is tomorrow, at one. We’re burying you next to Mom.”
“That’ll be nice,” I said.
With that, she left. I sat there and let it all sink in.
On the one hand, he might be a tragic victim of circumstance.
On the other hand, he might have murdered a child.
My whole heart wanted to believe that the first thing was true.
So why was it so easy to buy the second?
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