Not Quite Alive

by Lyla Payne

  In the meantime, maybe I can swindle a few clues out of them for a change, so I can get closer to figuring out what happened to Frank, and what it has to do with me, on my own.

  Amelia calls Brick during the five minutes it takes us to get back to the house, and he says Birdie can meet me at the federal building in an hour. Which means that even though my belly is grumbling, there’s no point in getting out of the car. There will be traffic getting into Charleston at this time of day, so I sit and watch my cousin until she gets safely into the house, and then back out of the driveway and head into town. I’ll just have to hold out until I get to Travis’s later tonight.

  There’s a faint smell in the car today. It’s not the typical moldy pizza scent that I’ve started to suspect might need to be exorcised by a priest. It’s more like a salty, dingy trace of Anne Bonny.

  Her ghost isn’t in the backseat, or sitting shotgun next to me, but it’s nice to think that even though we had to distance our family from her bloodline in order to save Jack and Millie, she’s still with me. I’d like to think she’ll show up from time to time to remind me how all of this started, and that I’m not alone. The Carlotta entries are doing the same thing for me—there are generations of women in my family, on both sides, who were strong and played the hands life dealt them with smarts and savvy.

  The drive does take longer than a midday trip, and I park outside the federal building with only about ten minutes to spare. Not long enough to put some food in my belly, that’s for sure. I’m also more afraid of Birdie than Brick at this point, so keeping her waiting holds little appeal.

  On the way through the metal detector in the building’s lobby, my mind has already forgotten about food. It’s moved on to assessing how I’m going to get something out of this meeting for myself, rather than just give the FBI whatever reaction they may or may not be looking for from me. It’s going to be hard, especially because Birdie will probably be giving me the death eyes the entire time for talking too much. She’ll have to get over it. Her own investigator hasn’t found a thing to help my case.

  She greets me right outside the elevator on the second floor, her face tight with concern. “You’re here.”

  I spread my hands in answer, as if to say, this is what you get. She frowns and gives me a slight shake of the head, her silent response to my silent dismissal. We walk into the FBI office without speaking aloud, communicating in the way that only women who understand each other can manage.

  Agent Warren and Agent Chaney are both waiting for us near the front desk, and after they fall all over themselves shaking Birdie’s hand, they lead us back to the same posh interrogation room—conference room, whatever—that they put us in the other day.

  This time, of course, there’s no one to divide and conquer. Both the good cop and the bad cop—it’s still hard to tell which is which—stay in the room. Chaney’s holding on to a folder this time, and the tops of a couple of plastic baggies marked ‘evidence’ hang over the edges.

  “Ladies, I know it’s late, so we’ll get right to it. We’ve had the contents analyzed and most of them seem innocuous, but there was this letter that we thought you might be able to help us out with.” Reading Warren’s tone is hard, bordering on impossible, and the fact that he’s looking down and not at my face doesn’t help.

  Then I realize that Chaney’s watching me, and try harder to keep my expression neutral at that piece of paper, safely encased in slippery plastic. It’s harder to remember to put on a poker face while I read the letter that was found on my dead father.

  The good news is, there’s probably no normal way to react to such a thing. I stop worrying so much about my face and concentrate, putting my thumb on the edge of the baggie to keep it still and leaning forward to block the glare from the fluorescent lights overhead.

  There’s no salutation. It just begins, and it doesn’t take long to see what’s strange about it—the words read more like a journal entry or advice column than a letter.

  If the ghosts have taught me anything over the years, it’s that most people aren’t ready for death when it comes to call. Maybe there’s a reason that the spirits who have visited me are not old, not yet prepared for—or craving—that sweet release from the pain and loneliness that so often accompany old age. They’ve been young, or at least still leaning that direction, and still desperately clinging to something or someone, almost always the latter, that makes it impossible for them to simply turn around and go.

  I’ve taken advantage of them when I shouldn’t have, and there are days when I feel badly about that. The Fournier blood runs thick in my veins, but somehow, on each pass, it seems to have skipped my heart. For generations, the people in my family have felt an irresistible pull toward these ghosts. To help them, to understand them, but I’ve mostly used them for my own personal gain.

  There’s nothing that can be done about it now that they’ve come for me, too. My mother, my grandmother, the generations of women that came before them, they all warned me with whispers in my ears, voices from the long-gone past, that they would come. They have been a shadow monster all of my life. They’ve lurked in the closet and underneath the bed, ready to climb out and get me. Snuff me out because I was born with a gene that skips some and gives to others, one that’s odd and hard to understand. Impossible, maybe, unless it is simply the way life has always been.

  Or perhaps that is not even the reason they’ve been hunting me. Perhaps we’ve never known but only assumed, since the two halves of the whole have not come together, have not spoken, in more than two hundred years. This could all be one big misunderstanding.

  I don’t think that’s the case. It could be because I was raised by a woman who believed, with all her heart, that our duties would cost us our lives. How it cost her life, in the end.

  There’s not much about my life that’s cause for regret, but not being there to pass the knowledge along to my daughter—the kind that could save her life—is one of them. She’s on her own now, I expect, but I have to hope that what I have given her will be enough. Well, that and the fact that she’s my daughter—which means somewhere in that blood of hers, she understands that Fourniers can’t trust anyone. Even each other.

  There wasn’t much I could tell the FBI about the letter. They had plenty of questions about the ghost stuff, but they’ve clearly been talking to people in Heron Creek and were expecting some of the answers. Birdie gave me a shrug, so I confessed that I see ghosts—an ability inherited from my father.

  I have no clue whether or not they believed me, but really, what does it matter? They gave each other looks and thanked us for our time, and neither Birdie nor I could figure out why exactly they’d wanted me to come in the first place.

  All the way home, the words Frank wrote play on a loop in my head. They’re not addressed to me, or to anyone. There’s nothing to indicate it’s a letter at all, and not some kind of pre-death musing that Frank penned once he realized that whoever was coming for him was closing in fast.

  Nevertheless, I feel as if it is a letter, and that it was meant for my eyes. Like he knew he would die, and that he wouldn’t have time to talk to me first, but there was something he needed to tell me. The thought sends a shiver down my spine, followed fast by frustration.

  I don’t understand what he was trying to say.

  Did he want me to know someone was after him? That’s obvious given what happened, but who? He seems to suggest it’s family, but even though he left the tree with his other papers, I’m not sure where on earth to start.

  I press a hand to my chest, trying to calm my heart rate, but it’s still hummingbird-fast when I knock on Travis’s door a little while later. My stomach is also protesting the lack of dinner, even with everything else going on, and I hope he’s in the mood to eat sooner rather than later.

  “Hey,” he greets my knock a moment later, his hair oddly out of place.

  In fact, his entire casual attire—jeans and a worn T-shir
t instead of his typical suit and tie—along with his tousled hair and the smear of what might be powdered sugar next to his mouth, puts me in a mood. I need the people in my life to remain the way I understand them, and this is not Travis.

  So as not to sound deranged, I stick to a simple, “Hey,” as I step past him into the foyer. I’ve never been inside Travis’s rental house, and even though he lives in a less desirable part of town—literally on the “wrong” side of the unused railroad tracks—the place is tidy and smells of antiseptic.

  That fact doesn’t surprise me, since Travis is a bit anal in all aspects of his life, as far as I can tell.

  “You hungry?” he asks, as though reading my mind.

  “Yes.” In that moment, gratitude rushes through me with such force that it brings tears to my eyes. All of my irritation evaporates, leaving an unappealing cocktail of exhaustion, confusion, and fear in its wake.

  “Okay, well…um…” Travis sputters, clearly at a loss as to how to handle upset-for-no-reason Gracie. We’re not that close, after all, but maybe that will change. “Come sit down, and I’ll pop it in.”

  There’s no pizza delivery in Heron Creek. I could have picked up a large from the gas station, but my head wasn’t all the way working. Travis is prepared with a couple of frozen options like a good bachelor, though, and unwraps a pepperoni and a meat trio while I settle in at his small kitchen table. It’s more of a breakfast nook, actually, because the kitchen is small. Tiny. The linoleum on the floor is cheap and peeling in places, while the formica countertops are dingy and cracked.

  Everything is meticulously clean, but the entire place reeks of single dude all the same. That’s something I understand—something expected—and it puts me further at ease.

  I run my fingers over a pile of file folders on the table top. “Are these the files?”

  “What I’ve gotten so far, yes.” He closes the oven door, pops the top off two cheap beers from the fridge, then sits in the chair across from me.

  “Where did you get them?”

  He shrugs, looking uncomfortable. “I may have burned a few bridges here and there, but I still have connections. The feds got on to Frank a decade or so ago, so just about every database in the country has files on him. They’re not too hard to come by.”

  “Why didn’t you just pull them through the Heron Creek system, then?” I ask.

  “With the FBI in town asking questions, I figured it would raise too many red flags. They’ve backed Will into enough of a corner as it is, don’t you think?”

  I nod, my throat scratchy. It’s nice that Travis wants to protect Will, too. “Good point. So, is there anything interesting in there?”

  “Well, I haven’t looked through them carefully. These are open case files for different heists around the country that have been attributed to Frank, so I figured we could comb through them and see if any other names come up consistently.”

  “You mean like cohorts? A gang?” I frown. “Frank always made it sound like it was just him and the ghosts.”

  “Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not.” Travis shrugs as he sets the top file down in front of him and flips it open. “But if we’re going to test the theory that maybe his shady dealings finally caught up with him, then we have to check out this angle. Unless there’s some reason we shouldn’t?”

  His gray eyes are steady on my face, looking beyond my expression. As if he suspects I’m holding something back. Keeping something from him. In truth, I suppose I am—the Carlotta entries, for one, though I’m not sure what bearing they would have on our current train of investigation. The piece of evidence the feds showed me earlier tonight seems more pertinent. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to share, and of course I’ve only got my memory to rely on, but if Travis is really going to help me figure this out, he needs all of the pieces.

  “The FBI asked me to come in tonight and look over a piece of evidence they found on Frank’s body,” I start, speaking slowly.

  “Oh?” His eyebrows shoot up, and his gaze is sharper than it was even a moment before. “What was it?”

  “I’m not sure. A letter, maybe, or some kind of weird manifesto.” I gather my thoughts together. “It was a confession about his life, and about seeing ghosts. The main gist of it was that he’d always known people were coming for him, and they were finally catching up.”

  I swallow, trying to remember more. There doesn’t seem to be any point in telling Travis that the letter—or whatever it is—only mentions Frank’s regrets about his lack of communication with his daughter, not his son. We know Frank knew about Travis because of the tree…so why didn’t he try to contact him the way he did me?

  It’s a question for another time.

  “What do you mean, catching up with him?”

  “I don’t know. Just that—these mysterious, threatening shadows killed his mother, and previous generations tried to warn him they were coming for him, too, but he didn’t really believe until it was too late. Or something.” I shake my head. “It sounded like rambling, to be honest.”

  It also sounds more than a little like the paranoia that runs rampant through both of the Carlotta pieces that have been translated, but I don’t see how they could be connected, not so many years apart. Maybe the takeaway—the legacy, as Frank called it—is merely a family penchant for mental illness and paranoia. That, I could definitely believe.

  “Hmm. What do you make of it?” Travis asks carefully, as if trying to suss out my opinion before he gives me his own.

  “Who knows? The FBI had clearly already talked to someone in Heron Creek and asked about the whole ghost-seeing business, so at least that didn’t catch them off guard. They probably think it’s a bunch of nonsense, even if it does prove that Frank was scared of something before he died.”

  “And he’s indicating that it was someone he knew,” Travis muses. “Maybe family.”“I guess that explains why they’re so interested in the two of us.”

  I level him with a suspicious gaze, wondering now why he hasn’t brought up the chat he must have had with the FBI. I don’t mind sharing, but why should I be the only one? “Will said the FBI asked you a bunch of questions about that time you brought Daria and me in to take a look at the tape from the hospital. Back when you were trying to pretend you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I add, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

  Travis gives me a tight smile. “They did. I did the best I could without lying. Told them I didn’t think you were alone with the tape, but I couldn’t remember which of us put it in the machine or pulled it out. That should provide enough reasonable doubt to keep you out of jail, at least for now.”

  My stomach hurts. “Do you really not remember, or are you thinking I had something to do with that drug theft after all?”

  It’s wrong to accuse him, maybe, but he’s not Will. He’s not Amelia or Mel or even Beau—how do I know what Travis really thinks? Whether he’s on my side or he’s using me to try to get information for his own investigation before tossing me to the wolves?

  The injured expression on his face works to make me feel badly, but it doesn’t quite do the job. “Sorry. I’m just asking.”

  “I didn’t think you had anything to do with it then, and I don’t believe it now.” His voice is calm, steady. “I think someone is setting you up. The question is why?”

  His reassurance closes my throat until all I can do is nod. I pluck a second file off the pile, and we’re both immersed when the timer goes off. Travis reacts first and gets up to pull out and cut the pizza. The aroma of melted cheese and greasy meat fills the kitchen and my stomach growls, enticing me to grab a slice and burn the roof of my mouth as soon as he sets it down between us.

  “Ow.”

  “Slow down,” he advises, dodging when I reach over to swat his arm.

  “Let’s just read through these, hmm? Do you have any paper so I can take notes?”

  “Sure.” Travis reaches back toward the counter and
grabs a pad of paper that’s by the phone, then tears off a sheet for himself before sliding it over to me. He hands out pens next, and for a long time—hours—the only sounds in the kitchen are chewing, the rustle of files, and the scribbling of pens against paper. The pages detail Frank’s exploits over the years—some the feds are sure should be attributed to him and a few they only suspect, along with mentions in each one of possible other persons of interest.

  After we finish with the last of the files and pile them in the center of the table, we stretch and compare notes. Between the two sheets of paper filled with chicken scratch, we come up with a list of four names. There are more than four people listed as possible cohorts, friends, or lovers who might be able to give us more insight into Frank’s life, but none who are mentioned as regularly or with as much detail. We’re hoping that one of them might have an idea about what—or who—had him so scared.

  One of them, I recognize. My mother’s old friend Shana Fox, who has always, always proved more trouble than she’s worth.

  When we split up the list, each of us choosing two names to track down, I make sure she’s on mine. At least I’ll have a bit of a head start. We have a past, which should mean she’s willing to trust me, but with Shana, it could go either way. Hopefully I’ll catch her on a good day.

  Or maybe she’s forgotten by now that the last time we met, we nearly came to blows before both being forcibly escorted from my mother’s funeral.

  My eyes feel gritty after all of the reading, a faint headache starting at the base of my skull after hours of tense concentration. But we’re not done here.

  “Try to contact Lucy.”

  “Now?”

  “If you don’t have other plans,” I tell him, too tired to care how sarcastic I sound. “It’s past my bedtime and I hate leaving Amelia alone for longer than I have to.”