Not Quite Gone (A Lowcountry Mystery)

by Lyla Payne

  “I’m going to go find Jenna,” Sean tells me, wiping sweat from his brow. “She’s always on the grounds doing one thing or another. You’ll like her.”

  “Okay.”

  I get out of my car, feeling restless, and wander back down the drive toward one of the biggest oak trees I’ve ever seen. Amelia and I took pictures with it years ago, when we were maybe twelve, our thin arms nowhere near long enough to reach all the way around the ginormous trunk. Grams thought our love of trees was as ridiculous as our love for animals, but she had relented and taken the photos anyway. They were probably still stashed among the piles and piles of memories we hadn’t mustered up the courage to dig through yet since Gramps died.

  A young girl sitting on the opposite side of the tree, tucked into the trunk with her knees against her chest, startles me. She gives me a sad smile, but it’s not until I notice the noose around her neck, the knotted rope trailing along the dusty ground, that it occurs to me that she’s not really there.

  I mean, she’s there. But I don’t think anyone else can see her.

  A part of me wants to ignore her. Pretend I don’t see her, hope she didn’t notice my brief moment of surprise, and move on with my day. The rest of me knows it won’t work, and more than that, I’m no longer sure I want it to.

  “Hi,” I whisper, crouching down beside her. The tree is more than large enough to hide me from view from the house, so as long as Sean doesn’t hear me talking to thin air I shouldn’t make a fool of myself on my first day.

  At least not in this capacity.

  The girl—maybe not that young, now that I’m closer to her—looks surprised at my soft greeting. Her smile wavers but doesn’t grow any happier. There are bruises and raw scrapes under the thick rope that make me wince, and she watches my reaction. I’d guess her age at around twelve or thirteen, maybe a few years older but definitely not younger, and her clothes are pretty modern and nondescript. She’s definitely not from the same period as the house, or even from the last time the family lived in this property, almost a century ago now.

  It’s confusing, her being here. Out of place. More than the fact that she’s dead, it’s that she’s not…old. Not historical. She’s a dead child, one that might have died two weeks ago for all I can tell, and a chill zips down my spine.

  Maybe I don’t want to do this. I can damn well bet that I don’t want to know what happened to her.

  “Graciela?” Sean calls in his brash Yankee accent.

  Oh heavens to Betsy, I’ve started referring to Northerners as Yankees. I’m well and truly rooted in this strange, beautiful, haunted place.

  The kid disappears at the sound of Sean’s voice, in a puff of cold air that makes my lungs feel like they’ve developed ice crystals in the space of a breath. I shake my head, wondering for the thousandth time since I returned to Heron Creek if my imagination is getting the better of me.

  I stand up, brushing bits of dirt and debris from the back of my skirt and stepping around the tree. “Over here.”

  The woman with Sean could possibly be his exact opposite. She’s short and of Asian descent, her sleek black hair raked into a loose ponytail. A heavy, leather tool belt hangs off her slim hips, threatening to slip loose, and her tanned legs are mostly exposed in her teeny jean shorts. The T-shirt she’s wearing has so many holes in it that I’m wondering if I should avert my gaze. The words across the front say You’d Be More Interesting If You Were Dead.

  That makes me snort. She has no idea.

  “Nice shirt. I’m Graciela Harper.”

  “Jenna. Thanks.”

  “Well, I guess the two of you don’t need me.” Sean shrugs, stuffing his big hands in his pockets. “I’ll leave you to it. Graciela, here’s my card if you have any questions.”

  He hands it over, then saunters back to his car, whistling.

  “He’s hot, right?” Jenna comments. “Totally gay, of course, which is a major bummer.”

  “Huh. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  “He doesn’t really advertise. Plus, he’s happily married.” She peers at me with a disconcertingly intense look that slides down to my hand. “You’re not married?”

  “No.” I bite my tongue to keep from telling her it’s none of her business, both because she’s sort of in charge of me today and because she doesn’t seem to really understand how to hold a conversation. From one awkward person to another, I salute that. “Are you?”

  “Ha! No way. I’m only twenty.”

  “You’re only twenty?” My eyes pop open so wide I almost lose a contact. “How did you get this job?”

  “I’m precocious. Some might say it’s a stereotype, except my intelligence isn’t in the area of math or science so that really doesn’t work.” She shrugs. “Would you like to see the house?”

  Jenna takes huge strides for such a little person, getting ahead of me quickly so that I have to jog to catch up. I’m still trying to work out how someone who’s still in college manages to land a head position at one of the more unique historic sites in the country.

  “Are you done with school?” I probe.

  She shoots me a weird look. “I’m twenty, remember. How could I be done with school?”

  “I don’t know. You’re precocious?” I mimic her, falling into the strange cadence of her presence with ease.

  “Not quite that much. I’m in graduate school. At the College of Charleston, for convenience.”

  We fall silent as we trek up to the house. My flats struggle where her worn Chucks glide, and I make a mental note to adopt her dress code, not Sean’s. If anyone asks, I’ll play dumb.

  The house is as I remember it, a pretty picture on the outside and an abandoned tomb on the inside. I only get a glimpse as she skirts the main property in favor of the outbuildings off to the side. One is a cashier’s office and gift shop, one is restrooms, and the others are listed as off-limits to visitors. A few tourists swat bees at rickety picnic tables under dingy canopies that struggle to keep the sun off their faces. Guides—ones not dressed in period clothing, lucky for them—drone on about the facts and logistics of the rice plantations, owning slaves, and a smattering of details about the Draytons who lived on the property.

  The house was built by a third son, John Drayton, who likely knew he would never inherit Magnolia, in the mid-1700s, and it’s been in the family ever since. Like most well-to-do’s, he also maintained property in town.

  “Okay, this is my office,” Jenna explains, pushing open a door. “I’m hardly ever inside and there’s plenty of room for you to set up and go through all the materials Cordelia had delivered. They’ve been preserved, of course, and we’ve made sure to adjust the temperature and environment appropriately in here. She sent over a cleaning crew and all the necessary materials.”

  The space is bright, with sunlight streaming through the large windows, and contains nothing but two large oak desks, two adjustable office chairs, and one wall of bookshelves. On the outside, the buildings are single stories, long and thin—sort of like trailer homes but immobile—but despite the less-than-grand structure, it will be perfectly suitable for my work, which sits in countless sealed containers on and around one of the desks.

  My feet move toward them, pulled by history and possibility while my brain sort of freaks out about how much information there is to go through.

  I turn toward Jenna, unsure what to think. She nods, a serious expression on her pretty face. “It’s a lot, I know. I don’t envy you. I work with my hands most of the time, and it feels good to see things emerge from underneath years of dirt and paint changes.”

  “You’re the preservationist.” She nods at my assessment. “Is it hard for you not to want to restore this place? Bring it back to its former glory and all that?”

  Jenna rolls her eyes. “Are you bats? This house is perfect. No matter what I were to do, it would never be as grand as it was three hundred years ago. It’s not meant to be. It doesn’t really belong here, in our world. It belongs back th
en, and this way, we don’t have to try to make it fit somewhere it’s uncomfortable.”

  Her words mesmerize me. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard someone talk about history with the same kind of passion that flows in my blood. The reminder that I’m not alone in my love for the past opens a small ache in my chest, makes me miss interacting with people in my field. It had made me feel alive, spending whole evenings debating the tiniest of details and potential effects of one person’s life on the world around them.

  “You probably think that’s dumb, for me to talk about a house like it has feelings, but I don’t care. It’s alive to me.”

  “I don’t think it’s dumb. I think it’s awesome.” I give her a smile, trying to brush away my nostalgia. “I’ve always felt that way about this place, too.”

  “Oh, good.”

  She turns as though to leave and I take a deep breath, the face of the dead girl still lingering in the back of my mind. “Hey, Jenna? How long have you worked here?”

  “A little over a year. Why?”

  “I don’t know how to ask this without sounding weird so I’m just going to do it. Have you ever had any sort of…paranormal experience here?”

  “Oh, sure. Everyone has. Even the people who won’t admit it.”

  “Like what?” My eyes are locked on hers. Searching for truth.

  “Nothing scary, just your typical haunting-type things. Noises. Footsteps. Lights flickering. Lots of people see an older male apparition on the top of the back staircase. I think it’s John. He loved this place.” She shrugs, then squints at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, you know. I live in the lowcountry. I just like to be prepared.” My flippant tone sounds a bit fake, even to my ears, but Jenna barely knows me.

  It doesn’t stop her from shooting me a mischievous grin. “Sure, sugar pie. Sure. We’re going to be spending a lot of time together and you’re going to be logging plenty of hours. I’m sure you’ll tell me the real reason sooner or later.”

  With that, she slips out of the building. I watch her take those giant steps of hers back toward the house, her tool belt knocking against her hips, and I can’t help but smile. Even though there’s a five-year difference between us, and Jenna practically radiates happiness and innocence, I have a funny sense that the two of us will get along just fine.

  In fact, everything feels pretty fine right now, despite the mountain of work behind me.

  “Guess there’s no time like the present to dig in,” I mutter to myself as I turn toward the waiting pile. “Holy smokes!”

  The sight of the same preteen girl sitting on the edge of the desk, feet dangling, nearly knocks me on my butt. She’s got a smell to her that I didn’t notice outside, a peculiar combination of cigar smoke and potpourri that adds to the mystery. The noose still rings her neck but she seems not to notice it.

  “Well, we meet again. If you’re going to hang around, we’re going to set some ground rules. Number one? Don’t startle me.”

  She gives me a serious nod, which takes me by surprise. Most of my ghosts don’t worry about my wishes on, well, any aspect of their haunting me. Maybe it’s because she’s so young.

  “How old are you?”

  She thinks for a moment, toying with the long, dirty blond braid hanging over one bare shoulder. She’s wearing a red sundress and beat-up sandals, all of which looks like it might have been handed down. Then again, I have no idea how long she’s been dead, so maybe they’ve gotten ratty over the years.

  Not likely. No one would have buried his or her daughter in that casual a getup.

  Her hands go up, palms facing me with all ten fingers splayed. Our eyes meet and a chill goes down my spine. After a moment, she drops her left hand and folds down the thumb on her right.

  “Fourteen?”

  The girl nods.

  “Yikes. That’s a rough enough age without dying, too.” My eyes stray to the noose around her neck. The sight of it, looped around her like a shackle of some sort, makes my stomach hurt. I don’t know anything about what happens after we die, except that apparently some folks find a way to hang around and bother the living. What if the whole Christian belief system is real, there’s a heaven and a hell and a purgatory, and this girl is being punished, forced to walk the Earth with the reminder of her death squeezing her throat because she took her own life.

  She catches me staring and frowns, shaking her head.

  “Did you kill yourself?” I whisper, needing to know. Wishing I didn’t have to.

  Her head shakes harder and harder until her braid whips her in the face and she stops. Those eyes, infinite shades darker than her hair, light on fire as they stare into mine.

  My heart stops. “No?”

  If she didn’t hang herself that means someone else did it for her. Which means this pretty little girl was murdered, and chances are she’s here to ask me for justice.

  Son of a biscuit eater. I wonder if I can bill Cordelia Drayton for all the extra hours it’s going to take me to accomplish that task.

  Chapter Three

  To my great surprise—and confusion—the dead girl doesn’t follow me home. The only ghost dogging my daily steps around Heron Creek is good old Henry Woodward, who’s been with me for the better part of four months now with no sign that he’s anxious to help me help him move along. I haven’t given up, exactly, but with so much going on in my life that’s, well, alive, he’s kind of taken a backseat. It helps that his presence has become familiar. He doesn’t startle me, and honestly, I occasionally enjoy talking to someone who doesn’t talk back.

  “Millie! I’m going over to the police station to meet Daria! Do you want anything for lunch?”

  “For goodness’ sakes, stop shouting.” She emerges from the stacks of books and sneezes as dust motes twirl through the beams of sunlight streaming through the library’s windows. “Someone needs to dust.”

  “Um, yeah, I believe that’s your job.”

  “Nope. Uh-uh.” She cocks her head, hands on her hips. The pose accentuates her growing belly, which is becoming quite impressive at a rapid pace. “You said if I covered for you while you went out to Drayton the other day that you’d dust for two weeks. So I’ll make sure to have the Pledge and a fresh rag ready when you get back from your lunchtime excursion.”

  “I was hoping you would forget about that. I mean, you forget to brush your teeth and pay your cell phone bill and blame it on pregnancy brain, but this you remember.”

  She shrugs, trying and failing to look innocent. “I may or may not have left myself a note.”

  “Great. Now you decide to be proactive,” I mutter, slinging my purse over my shoulder. “You didn’t answer me about lunch, although that’s obviously a dumb question. I should have asked what you want to eat, not if you want to eat. Fatty.”

  Millie glowers, tossing a pen at my face.

  “Hey! You could poke out an eye!”

  “You’d deserve it. I would like the summer salad from the diner and a basket of garlic fries from The Bar.”

  “Good Lord. We’re going to have to fumigate this place.”

  “Just go. You’re annoying me.”

  “Fine.” I stop, batting my eyelashes at her. “Do you want me to say hi to Dylan for you?”

  Her cheeks get red, like little apples. “No. Why? I mean…you can if you want.”

  I laugh, happy to see her flustered. Or anything but irritated and sad. “I’ll play it by ear. Don’t worry. I’m very suave and in tune with proper social etiquette at all times.”

  She groans but doesn’t pursue the subject further. There’s confusion in her green gaze, the kind of conflict that, were she healthy, I would tease her about. She’s not exactly worse—she’s seeing her therapist and we’re communicating pretty well—but it’s impossible to shake the feeling that there’s something she’s not telling me. Maybe more than one something. The look she gets sometimes, as though life in general isn’t worth it, wraps me in suffocating worry.

>   “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Have fun with this Daria character. I’m a little sorry not to meet her.”

  I snort. “You should be. She’s pretty interesting. Maybe next time.”

  The day is overcast and muggy, but the temperature has dropped to somewhere in the seventies. People are out and about with smiles on their faces, which for the first time in months, aren’t dripping with sweat. I stride past the burned remnants of Sonny and Shears, trying not to think about how I almost died in there just weeks ago. The diner and Westies are both bustling, which means if I’m going to get back in an hour with our lunches in tow—and to fail in that mission would not be good based on my cousin’s obsession with food lately—I need to put a little skip in my step.

  I met Daria—a local, self-professed medium who has the endorsement of an online psychic directory that I sincerely hope never to be included in—a week or so ago. She was supposed to make me feel more comfortable in my new role as undead liaison, but in truth, meeting with her just exposed all the sides of this ghost business that remain mysterious to me. My cousin and I already know that curses can last generations, that the dead can reach out and affect the paths of the living. It worries me that it could happen again. That one of my ghosts could insert his or herself into my life, or my family’s lives, in a more real—and destructive—way.

  All the spirits I’ve met, at least thus far, have been nice. I mean, I wouldn’t invite them all over for hair-braiding and margaritas, but even though they often startle me, they don’t frighten me. But who knows what else lurks in the space between this world and whatever’s next?

  Before dark images of devils and demons can claw all the sense out of my head, I’m at the police station. One of the Ryan twins grabs me when I step through the door, pinning my arms to my sides and squeezing me until I screech in actual discomfort.