by Lissa Kasey
“Hey,” I said, stripping off the oven mitts after taking the last batch out of the oven, and getting ready to tackle him if need be.
“You gotta find her,” Jared pleaded with me. “She’s in the cemetery. I know she is. I keep dreaming of her.”
“We’re not allowed in the cemetery,” Micah said.
“Did you tell the police?” I asked. “They can get into the cemetery. But Jared, if she was there, she would have already been found.”
“No one is listening to me.” Jared tugged at his hair. “That other lady didn’t listen. I told her to put it back, now she’s dead. We need to put it back.”
“Put what back where?” The question itself made no sense to me.
“A wedding ring. It had been put in the grave. That tour guide took it out, gave it to Mary, Mary is dead. We need to get the ring and put it back.” He paced and both Micah and I stayed out of his way. “They will give me Sarah if we put it back.”
He wasn’t rational at all, and I understood. He’d been though a lot in a few days. I wasn’t sure how to help him. “Did your family arrive, Jared?” I asked. He needed handlers before he did something stupid and got himself shot by the police.
He waved his hands as if none of that mattered. “They want to organize a vigil. My mom looks at me like I did something. My own mom.” He tugged on his hair again. “I need to find Sarah. I close my eyes and I can hear her. She’s calling for me. She’s afraid. I need to bring her home.” He dropped to his knees and Micah lunged to catch him, but I held up a hand to keep him back and shook my head.
“Jared, let me call someone for you. Have you slept?”
“Can’t sleep. I have nothing but nightmares of the darkness eating her when I sleep.”
I was beginning to think that maybe it was better if he was under more extreme care for the moment. I pulled out my phone and texted Lukas.
“I never wanted any of this. We thought we would have a little fun before I’m buried in four more years of endless work, internships, and tests. It was all supposed to be fun and games. Stories. It wasn’t supposed to be real.”
I patted his back and nodded for Micah to wait by the door in case Lukas showed up. “None of this is your fault,” I assured Jared. “Sometimes bad things happen to good people.”
“Sarah needs to be safe. They can take me instead. If I can’t get the ring, they can take me instead.” He sat there rocking, repeating the same thing over and over, looking disheveled, exhausted, and so lost. I knelt beside him, keeping up the physical contact, patting or rubbing his back, squeezing his arm, and talking to him trying to keep him coherent. So far he hadn’t shown any violence toward either of us, but if he did, I’d rather he come at me than Micah.
Micah waved at me and a moment later opened the door. Lukas swept in with a couple of uniformed cops. I put my hands up and shook my head. Jared wasn’t being violent. There was no need to arrest him.
“They’re going to take him to the hospital, make sure he’s hydrated,” Lukas said and I heard his unstated ‘among other things.’ “I’ve already got people trying to find his family.” Lukas crossed the room and crouched beside Jared and me. “Hey Jared, remember me? Alex’s brother?”
Jared looked up and blinked hard like maybe he wasn’t really sure where he was. “The police detective, right? Did you find Sarah?”
“Not yet, but we’re looking. I’m a little worried about you buddy. This is Hartly and Mote,” he said, motioning to the uniformed duo. “They are going to take you to the hospital.”
“I’m not sick,” Jared protested.
“Maybe not, but I think you need some fluids. Have you been drinking water? Eating? Taking care of yourself?”
“I have to find Sarah. She’s so scared.”
“I know, buddy,” Lukas said, using his soothing good cop voice. He helped Jared to his feet. “But you can’t help her if you’re not feeling good. You have to drink water, eat, get some sleep, and let your family know where you are.”
Jared’s eyes were huge, pupils blown wide. I wondered if someone had tried to give him something to make him relax and it had backfired like it normally did with me. “Did you take anything, Jared? Like to help you sleep?”
“My mom gave me some of her Ativan.” He fidgeted, his hands trembling hard. He looked like a junky jonesing bad.
“Only one?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t remember. Feel like my skin is on fire. Like I need to rip it off to be comfortable again. But I gotta find Sarah.”
Lukas looked at the two uniforms. “Get a bus over asap. He’s having a reaction to medication.” The same sort of reaction it gave me. Only I’d ended up seizing, and nearly choking on my own vomit from the stuff.
Jared’s trembling got worse and he could barely stand. I held him up and prayed that he’d be okay. “Maybe some water would help,” I said. “If he’s dehydrated, the stuff will have concentrated in his system.” I was more than a little angry with his mother, a woman I had never met, for giving him a benzo without knowing the risks. Had they taken him to the hospital at all? Didn’t mental health issues run in the family? Wouldn’t it have been smart then to take him for monitoring rather than give him someone else’s meds?
Micah got him a glass of water and handed it to me. I tried to get Jared to drink some, but he couldn’t really get it down. That worried me a lot.
He struggled for air, which had the cops panicking, but it wasn’t a physical shut down of his lungs. This was a panic attack of the epic, medically induced kind. Micah took the water back. I sighed and wrapped my arms tight around Jared.
“Hey, buddy, just focus on me, okay? Breathe. Listen to my voice.” I rubbed his back and kept in his line of sight. “You’re safe. Everything is going to be okay.” Lukas kept everyone back likely because he’d dealt with my panic attacks a dozen or so times. Telling Jared to breathe, and counting, seemed to help. Saying his name over and over, startled small breaths from him. He fought the panic so long I thought he’d pass out from lack of air, but finally he sucked in a ragged deep breath.
“Like that. Good. Breathe. It’s going to be okay,” I said.
“Sarah…” Jared wheezed.
“We’ll find her,” I said, not worried about the words being true or not. He wouldn’t remember them in a few hours anyway. In his face, with his blown pupils, blood drained skin, and wide eyes, I saw myself. After a thousand nightmares, dozens of drugs, and endless days of being told I was insane. The human brain had a wonderful capacity for forgetting pain. Sometimes a memory of it would flare, but never enough to quite be the same as that first time. And that was a blessing, I thought as the EMTs arrived.
I let them take over Jared’s care and made my way to where Micah stood, apart from the craziness going on in his living room, arms wrapped around himself like he was trying to keep his own body from exploding into panic. I tucked him into my embrace, his face against my collarbone, and body curled into mine, shielding him from unpleasant memories as best I could.
I wondered if he was thinking of Tim, and how he’d been treated when Micah had gone missing. Or if the scattered memories of his time in the ether rose up. My gut churned with the thought of his pain. Funny how quickly I’d latched on to him. I hoped it didn’t scare him away. I was kind of attached now.
The cops and EMTs left. Lukas stood beside the door, looking tired.
“There’s no ring,” Lukas said. “I don’t know where he got the idea, but there is no ring.”
I tilted my head to process what he was saying. Jared thought he could get Sarah back if he returned some ring that Marc and Mary had taken from the grave. But if there was no ring… “Was something taken from the grave?”
“The family says no,” Lukas said.
I wondered about that. Had they been there? Searched the grave, which by my understanding was full of old bones and ash? Somehow I didn’t think so. Maybe they hadn’t buried whomever with anything important. Or maybe they were
hiding something.
“Stop,” Lukas said. “I can see it on your face. Stop analyzing this. It’s not some paranormal mystery. It’s a missing girl.”
“And two dead tour guides,” I pointed out. “What if Jared is sensitive?”
“What if he is?” Lukas said. “What does that change? Will finding some magical ring, if it even exists, bring Sarah back? Back from where? Think about this logically, Alex.”
“And when logic fails, what is left?” I asked. “You’re the one who said I shouldn’t distrust what I see.”
“But what did you see? A shadow in the cemetery? How does that help us bring Sarah back? Or answer for the death of two people?” Lukas sighed. “I don’t want you to go down this path.”
“I’m already down this path,” I defended. “Not by choice. A girl is missing. Everyone thinks Jared did something, but you have him on camera with date stamps.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t do something to her. We always suspect the significant other first. It’s how life works.”
And wasn’t that a shitty fact of life? “But you haven’t found her body.”
“Maybe it’s in a tomb we didn’t notice was opened? It’s not like we can go and start opening them all.”
I remembered back to the daytime tour and what Micah said about most of the tombs being sealed. It wasn’t like that was something easy to do, to open a sealed tomb and reseal it. “But the cops would have noticed if something was tampered with, right?”
“This is not your problem,” Lukas reiterated.
“Stop,” Micah whispered. His hands gripped my shirt but he hadn’t pulled his face away from my collarbone. “Stop, please. Don’t fight.”
I hugged him and kissed the top of his head, purposely looking away from Lukas to try to hide my irritation.
“Look,” Lukas said and paused, seeming to think for a minute, “keep your distance from this, okay? I don’t know what this is. Or why it’s happening. But I really don’t want either of you hurt. Okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed. I didn’t want Micah hurt.
“Has anyone gone into the cemetery?” Micah asked. “Maybe it’s not paranormal.” He looked at me. “Maybe Jared really hears her and she’s stuck in there. The walls are high and if the gate is locked, she would have no way to get out.”
Lukas frowned. “I don’t know…”
“Common sense would say that someone should at least check instead of everyone calling Jared crazy,” Micah said. “I think the two of you should be the last to call anyone crazy.” He pulled away from me and stalked to the door to tug on his shoes. He was really taking this not being afraid of life thing seriously.
“We have patrols doing drive-bys,” Lukas defended.
“And how are cops in cars going to hear a girl crying from inside a cemetery?” Micah asked. “If people reported hearing her would the cops claim it was some ghost bullshit and ignore it?” Lukas’s expression said that Micah hit that nail on the head. I grabbed my shoes too. If he was going, so was I.
“This is silly,” Lukas said.
We both looked at him and he threw his hands up in defeat. “Fine. Fucking fine. We can walk around the outside of it and if we hear something, I’ll call someone in to unlock it. And if we hear absolutely nothing then I get to tell you both ‘I told you so’ and ‘stay the fuck out of police business.’”
Chapter 23
It was almost nine by the time we got the Uber to the cemetery. Lukas had suggested he go get his car, but Micah wasn’t willing to wait. And since Micah wasn’t willing to wait, neither was I.
We walked along the perimeter, no one else around and the street stretching empty as far as I could see. Micah put his fingertips to the wall and trailed them over the stone, walking ahead of us and listening hard. Each time Lukas said something, Micah shushed him. I was actually enjoying how much that annoyed my brother, but followed the two of them silently.
The waning full moon was beginning to edge between the clouds, and everything was silent. No birds or bugs that I could tell, which seemed odd. I didn’t really feel anything unusual, just the humid night air and worry for Micah. And I wondered about Jared and a possible ring. It seemed like something out of a movie. Silly almost.
On the ride over I’d Googled the most recent burial in St. Louis Number One. It had been a woman who had passed. She’d been fairly old, in her nineties, and long widowed. Nothing about her obituary screamed of spooky rituals or Hoodoo—the real word according to Micah for what Marc and Mary had practiced—paranormal vibes. She sounded like someone’s grandmother, ordinary, though somewhat long-lived, and normal.
“Normal is relative,” Micah had pointed out. “And being someone’s grandmother doesn’t mean she wasn’t some sort of practitioner. Lots of practitioners are people’s mothers or grandmothers.”
“True,” I agreed. “However, I’m more inclined to think it was something the other tour guides did.”
“I wonder if Abigail knows anything,” Micah said.
“Who?”
“I think you met her briefly,” Micah said. “The same day you met Marc and Mary. They were usually together. Though Abigail is much younger than them. Abigail is Mary’s niece. Though I don’t think they were close. More a business relationship. I remember Abigail telling me once that Mary took her in as a teen and she had been working for her ever since.”
“She’s already been questioned by the police,” Lukas said. “Claims she knows nothing.” Only his comment made me look at him because it sounded detached, careful, like he knew more than he was sharing.
“Claims? But maybe was on video near the cemetery?” I deduced.
“Maybe,” Lukas shrugged. “She did have access like the rest of them did.” He wouldn’t look at either of us or answer any questions during the rest of the drive.
At the cemetery I wondered about some of the legends I’d read while researching Micah’s garden monster. “What about wraiths?” I asked Micah in a half-whisper. “Could a wraith have taken Sarah?” Did he believe in cryptids? Or simply that something spooky haunted his garden? Maybe he was humoring me and all my paranormal research by letting me put weird stuff in his garden.
He glanced my way and shrugged. Curiosity about the unknown did not make someone an expert, I was beginning to understand that. “I think legends are a way for humans to explain to each other the unexplainable. How much truth there is in them, is unknown, but someone at some point experienced things that created the legends. And legends only become legends through repetition. Does that mean it happened a lot? Possibly, or it was a really good story that people didn’t mind repeating.”
“More likely a way to scare people into staying out of trouble,” Lukas grumbled.
“Like modern police work?” I asked him. “Because how many people fear the police now instead of trusting them?”
He glared at me.
“I know it’s not your fault. Stating a fact.” And being back at the cemetery made me mad with the reminder that I’d almost been shot after falling down and hitting my head. “Ruling through fear has never meant the betterment of societies.” I knew that from experience while working in the Middle East. People hated and feared us, though we were supposedly ‘protecting’ them. In truth, we were there because of a war propagated over oil reserves and money. Some of the soldiers were die hard believers that we were protecting our country by destroying other people’s lives. But I’d known many who knew the truth, though by the time I’d realized it, I’d already been halfway through my second tour.
Life did have a way of changing us. Not better or worse. Different. I looked at Micah who was walking close to the wall, hand tracing the white concrete, face tense with concentration. He felt something. I knew that from the set of his shoulders and his focus on the wall. And I knew it gave him a war of emotions as to what to feel about this sensitivity that he’d developed after his disappearance. Did that mean he wasn’t still Micah? I didn’t think so.
“You okay?” I asked him.
“Cold,” he said. He glanced my way. “Are you hot?” Like when we’d been standing in Mary’s entryway.
“No,” I told him. I didn’t feel much at all right then. “I mean nothing that the weather can’t account for.” The evening was warm and soupy. The scent of rain on the wind and the buzz of cicadas dancing through the night like a frenzy of earthen melody reminding us the city was seconds away from nature.
He frowned, but continued walking, hand on the wall, feet carrying him toward the main entrance. We rounded the corner to the gate and I had to glance twice at the door, which was closed, because it looked like it was encased in dancing shadows even though there was no moving light nearby.
Micah shivered. Was he feeling those creepy crawlies again? He went to the door and turned the knob, I think expecting as Lukas and I likely did, that the door would be locked, only it wasn’t. The knob turned and the door creaked open.
“No,” Lukas said, shaking his head. “I fucking hate this town and all the vandals. Let me call it in. It’s supposed to be locked.”
Micah barely spared him a glance before shoving the door out of the way and heading inside. I frowned, and followed.
“Alex,” Lukas hissed.
“What are you going to do? Arrest us? I’m not letting him go in there alone. Do you know anyone who knows this cemetery better than him? He probably has some of the names on the graves memorized,” I pointed out.
“Most of them,” Micah said.
I followed Micah while I could hear Lukas talking on the phone to dispatch, but the sound of his voice faded away. Micah veered straight toward the grave that had been open. I followed and strained to hear anything other than our footsteps and breathing. The cicadas had gone oddly silent the second we stepped inside. Too far away perhaps? There weren’t really any trees or anything other than stone and concrete inside the cemetery. Nothing for them to eat, but I thought we might hear crickets or something. Even the wind seemed to have died down. Creepy.
Was Sarah still here somewhere? The grave still had a red curtain around it and was cordoned off with yellow police tape. No one had been by to clean up the blood. It was dry and still tickled my nose with an old metallic scent. The animals and body were gone, but the entire area still felt eerie with an underlying vibe I couldn’t really pin down.
