Not Quite Alive

by Lyla Payne

  “That’s what she said. She doesn’t think it’s abnormal, but I don’t know. I was thinking that maybe I could still look into it for you. See if there’s anything out there on ghosts like Lucy, and if we can use it to help this Mallory person find her body.”

  My chest warms at her concern, not to mention that I would definitely like to have this whole Lucy situation closed as soon as possible so that my focus can stay on Frank’s murder. And possibly my impending arrest for it, along with theft and possession and whatever else they come up with before the day finally arrives.

  I don’t know if there’s even anything to find, but as always, it feels good to have her on my side. Not only that, but I don’t see how her researching this particular tidbit of information could possibly get her arrested. Or fired.

  As hard as I try, I can’t imagine Daria firing anyone.

  “Thanks. Let me know what you find.”

  “Will do. It’s been a slow couple of weeks as far as Daria assignments, so I’ve got time.” She takes a couple bites of her salad, wolfing half of it down in the process. “So, what else is new? You hiding an ankle monitor under your pants?”

  She snorts at my fake belly laugh, spitting a chunk of carrot out in the process, which only makes her laugh harder.

  I wrinkle my nose. “Dude, being pregnant is so gross.”

  “Well, the baby part isn’t gross, but it does have a lot of gross side effects,” she agrees. “I stunk Will all the way out of the bedroom the other night.”

  “TMI, Melanie Massie. TMI.” I brush the potato chip crumbs off my hands. “As far as what’s new, I’m going to visit Beau this weekend.”

  “Oh, that’s great!”

  We need to hustle to pick up the kids, so we finish our lunches and clear the table. Soon we’re gathered in the library for story time, which goes off without a hitch since Millie’s in charge. She casts the same kind of spell over the kids as she does over everyone else in her life, and they listen, rapt, while she reads a story about a baby who hates his stuffed koala.

  Well, all except a kid who looks like she’s only been walking for about five minutes, but to be fair, her attention span is probably about as long as a fly’s.

  Millie’s finishing up when my phone buzzes with an email notification, and my entire body perks up at the sight of Clara Larsen’s name in the “from” field. It’s a new Carlotta translation.

  Melanie peers over my shoulder. “You want me to take Marcie home so you can read?”

  It’s tempting to say yes, to close myself in the archives room where no one will bother me for the rest of the day, but I don’t want to do that to Marcella. “Thanks, but I promised her ice cream.”

  Mel shakes her head. “Only you would promise a kid ice cream in the middle of winter.”

  “Hey, not having to care about the results of her sugar high is one of the perks of being a non-parent.”

  “True enough. Okay, well, I’ll leave you to it. Grant and I are going home for quiet time.”

  “Godspeed, my friend.”

  Mel gives me a mock salute and heads toward the front door. Marcella wanders over with a stack of books that she wants to check out, so after Amelia does that for her, the two of us step out into the cold afternoon.

  I look down at her perfect, round face, unable to stop a smile at the sight of those blue Boone eyes staring back at me. “You sure you want ice cream? We could always get broccoli instead.”

  “No! Don’t be silly, Gracie.”

  “Me? You’re the silly one, not wanting broccoli to warm up your belly. But okay.”

  We end up in a booth at the diner, a strawberry milkshake in front of me and two scoops of vanilla topped with chocolate sauce and sprinkles in front of her. The two of us slurp happily for a while, then the kid gets this thoughtful look on her face.

  “Mommy doesn’t like Uncle Leo’s new friend,” she informs me in the matter-of-fact voice every four-year-old has perfected.

  “Oh?” I ask, not wanting to be accused of pumping a kid for information but curious as shit about what she might say next. “What do you think?”

  Marcella shrugs, swiping her messy black bangs off her forehead with the back of her hand. She leaves an adorable smear of ice cream in her wake. “She doesn’t talk to me much.”

  It’s hard to imagine anyone not being charmed by this little girl. The thought that Victoria’s heart is that hard makes me feel better about my own distaste for the woman, although it’s hard to imagine Lindsay disliking anyone more than me.

  “Does she talk to Mommy?”

  “Not really.” Marcella licks her spoon. “Did you know I have a new cousin? He’s just a baby, but I can’t meet him.” She makes a face. “I want to see him. I like babies.”

  This train of conversation intrigues me far more than the previous one—it’s not like Marcella has a wide social circle, so either Leo or Lindsay told her about their brother Trent’s new baby. Which means they talk about her Uncle Trent. Do they talk about other family members? Does Marcella know why she never gets to see them?

  I’m about to break my self-imposed rule of not interrogating her when Leo strides into the diner, looking sweaty in a pair of Nike pants and a hoodie, his hair tousled.

  “Oh, look! My niece ordered me ice cream!” he exclaims, plopping down in the booth next to Marcie and tugging her ice cream dish over in front of him.

  “Uncle Leo, don’t eat my ice cream!” she shrieks, horror written all over her face.

  “Jeez, okay, okay. I didn’t even know you liked ice cream.” Leo winks at me. “You girls have a nice afternoon?”

  “Yep,” I confirm, half-happy that he’s here, since it means I can escape to read that journal entry, and half-annoyed, since it means I won’t be learning anything new about the Boone family drama today. “And if you’re good, I’m going to take off. I have some reading to do.”

  “Nerd.”

  “You caught me.” I grin at him. “We running later?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, okay? Lindsay’s working late, so I’ve got Marcella until bedtime tonight.”

  “Deal,” I tell him, then rearrange my face into a serious glower. “No canceling. I still need to work off all that gravy I consumed over Christmas.”

  “Seriously. I think there might be a gravy shortage on the whole Southeastern seaboard now.”

  I whack him on the shoulder, which makes Marcella giggle. My own smile stays firmly in place as I drive home, blessedly alone in my car, and pull into the driveway. Cade Walters gives me a wave from his porch, and as I slide my key into the lock and grab the mail from the box, it crosses my mind that perhaps there’s more to the guy than there seems to be. Why is he always out there, watching? Is snooping a family trait, or a family business?

  My brain knows that his grandmother, Mrs. Walters, was under Mama Lottie’s influence when she kidnapped Amelia and almost let her die of dehydration, but the mere sight of that house fills me with fear and anger. It’s probably transferring to Cade for no reason, that’s all.

  The house is quiet, and the comforting, unidentifiable scent of home wraps around me as I drop my purse and curl up in Gramps’s old chair, tugging his favorite blanket over my knees. The email attachment is waiting on my laptop, and soon I’m sucked into the world of yet another Carlotta.

  New Orleans, Louisiana, 1871

  Freedom is a strange thing.

  It’s something my mother talked about from the experience of having lost it. But for me, it was a story. A concept, not a way to live. But since President Lincoln freed the slaves of this country, and the war came and went, I find myself understanding the sweetness—and the fear—that comes with such a thing.

  If only my mother were here to show me how to use the years I have left in a way that would make her proud. It’s been months, and I’m still working for the same family who owned us all those years. The ones who bought her from the pirates who brought her here. B
ut they pay me now, and I can go home to my own rooms at night. It’s not much, but I’ve been saving.

  Part of me wants to return to France. It’s laughable to say it that way, as I’ve never been to the country. Never even been outside of Louisiana. But the way my mother talked of it…the place feels like home. As if it’s been calling to me all of these years, a whisper in the moments before I slip away into dreams, the way a mother’s lips linger on a child’s forehead each night.

  It would be the wrong decision, and I know it. Ever since my tenth birthday, when the spirit of a man who ran away from the plantation and got flogged to death showed up in our cabin, my mother talked about how New Orleans was the best place for me. She said people here understand things that people in France do not, that they accept what they can’t see and let odd be as odd does. Heck, there’s plenty of folks down in the Quarter who celebrate the things I can do, though Mama never wanted that sort of life for me.

  I think she would be scared to think about me crossing the ocean, back to the place she came from before she followed her great-grandfather’s footsteps straight to Africa. Before she was stolen. She told me there was nothing left for us in France, not now that her parents were surely gone and she wasn’t sure whom we could trust.

  My mother was paranoid, no doubt about it, but considering the ill luck that shaped the second half of her life, I could never blame her for such a thing. Whatever troubles lived inside her head, she earned them fair and square, but I do wish there was a way to understand what made her so afraid of taking me home.

  Mama didn’t see the ghosts. Even so, she believed me from the moment the first one arrived, and always tried to help me deal with their demands. She told me stories about her mama, her grandmother, and the spirits they helped. My favorite one is how Joan of Arc herself came to visit my grandmother to ask for help.

  My mother taught me to read and write, clean and pray, and she always talked about history. She was smart and strong, and she deserved better than what she got out of life.

  I feel honor-bound to make something more out of mine, truth be told. Like maybe I should sell my few things, take the money I’ve saved, and travel north where women like me have more opportunities.

  All I know for sure is that no matter how my soul longs to return to France, I cannot do that to my mother. It would make her spirit restless with worry. Even if there’s nothing and no one to fear there, she always promised me there was. That people would hate me because of what I can do. That they would hunt me.

  I think soon, I will travel north. Start over.

  I’ve been hunted enough for one life.

  The most recent entry is still on my mind when I meet Leo for a run the following afternoon. Last night, Amelia and I hashed it out and then researched the crap out of the history on the Internet. As far as we could figure, the diary-writer’s mother—whose entry is missing—must have been one of the last people sold into slavery in the United States. She would have come into the country in the eighteen fifties, and if she hadn’t been unlucky enough to get snagged by pirates, she likely wouldn’t have made it in at all.

  But maybe, if the things the previous Carlottas were saying about life in France were true, it had been a stroke of perverse luck. At least for her daughter, who saw ghosts.

  Were the Fourniers who possessed the gene, gift, or whatever really being tracked and eliminated through the years? Or were they paranoid, like the latest Carlotta suggests in her entry?

  I have no idea how I would corroborate such a thing, but there are still plenty more snippets of the past to explore in those journals. The speed at which they’re coming is making me impatient now, but I can hardly ask my busy friend to deliver the translations any faster.

  “I’d offer you a penny for your thoughts, but I’m broke and I know you’ll give them away for free if I wait,” Leo comments, casting a sidelong glance my direction.

  His face is half-obscured behind the white cloud of my breath, and it takes some effort to form a response at the height of our run. “I was just musing about the distant past. Business as usual.”

  “More Frank history?”

  “Yeah, Clara sent another one yesterday. It’s all very intriguing, but I’m ready for answers.”

  “Well, if anyone can get the dead to talk, it’s you.”

  “Ha…ha…” I puff out, then give up on conversation until we slow to a jog, then a walk. I flop down onto a bench and set my hands on top of my head. It’s just one of those days where running hurts. “I talked to one of Frank’s partners in crime,” I say, after explaining how Travis and I split up a list of potential sources. “He just got out of jail, so he wasn’t much help, but the last thing Frank said to him was that he was worried his past was catching up with him.”

  One of Leo’s dark eyebrows arches up as he takes a drink from his water bottle. “Didn’t you say that note or whatever the FBI found said something similar?”

  I nod, glad that I’d texted him about that meeting so I didn’t have to rehash it again “Yeah. Pretty vague stuff. Something about how he’d always been told that what he could do would get him killed, but he’d only just started to believe that it was true.”

  “It sounds like you’re not going to find any answers in his criminal past.”

  My heart squeezes at the confirmation of my own thoughts, the ones I haven’t wanted to admit could be true. “I’m still holding out hope. I don’t think Travis has gotten ahold of his guys yet. Besides, Shana’s my other contact, and she hasn’t called me back.”

  “Ah, yes, the elusive Shana…” Leo wiggles his fingers at me, reminding me of the weird choreographer in Bring It On. This gives the term ‘spirit fingers’ a whole new meaning. “I hope she comes to visit. After hearing what happened at your mother’s funeral, I’d like to meet her.”

  “Ugh. Trust me, you would not like to meet Shana.” I pause, rethinking. “Maybe you would. I don’t think there’s ever been a guy who wasn’t glad to meet her, come to think of it.”

  “Ew. I don’t really go in for the cougar thing. I don’t think.”

  As usual, I don’t know how Leo and I got on to a certain topic of conversation, but it doesn’t matter. Everything ebbs and flows before naturally steering back on course.

  “I think you need to accept that what Henry was trying to tell you is true, Bugs.”

  “That I killed Frank? Do you think it was some kind of fugue state?” I tease.

  “I’m serious. If it doesn’t have anything to do with the stolen drugs, or with the criminals he knew, then maybe it does have something to do with you. Or what you can do.”

  What he’s suggesting reminds me of the journals, and the paranoia running rife within them. I don’t want to consider the possibility that my family has been nuts for centuries. I’m equally unwilling to entertain the notion that something about that same family—or me—got Frank killed.

  “I need to rule out everything else first. And we don’t know for sure that it had nothing to do with the drugs,” I point out. “That’s still a mystery. One with my fingerprints somehow all over it.”

  “True enough. You know, we should go down to the hospital and check out their security system, see if they can tell us who had access to the room and the tapes.” He frowns. “I’m sure the cops have been there already, but I think that’s the sort of thing you might want to double check for yourself, right?

  “That’s a good idea. We could run by on my lunch break later this week.”

  “Maybe this weekend. I’m swamped at the high school. They talked me into subbing because Allie Bates just had her baby.”

  “Really?” The thought of Leo bossing around a bunch of teenagers makes me smile. He’s barely progressed past being one, at least in my mind. “Oh, I can’t this weekend. I’m flying up to D.C. right after work on Saturday to see Beau.”

  A weird expression flutters over his handsome features, gone before I can begin to interpret it.
“Oh, that will be nice for you guys. I don’t think we should wait until next week to go by the hospital though, do you? Maybe after you get off work tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, we can do that.”

  In silent agreement, we get up from the bench at the same time, take a few minutes to shake out some creaks and twinges, then head back toward my house at a more measured pace. It’s Heron Creek, a town of less than 2500 people, which means that—in a normal world, at least—Leo shouldn’t have to walk me back to my door after our runs. But he always does.

  Given the odd amount of danger that’s found its way to my door over the past several months, I’m not about to tell him to stop.

  It turns out that I’ve got double protection this evening—Will’s car is parked in my driveway when we amble up from town. Cade gives us a salute from his front porch, where he’s sitting with a steaming mug of something that’s probably delicious.

  “That guy is strange,” Leo comments under his breath as he walks me up to the porch. Apparently he’s going to come in to see whatever it is Will is here about.

  Call me crazy, but I have a feeling it’s not only a social visit. A little bit of sadness filters through me at the knowledge that he hasn’t been over for anything purely social since he took the job in the police department. Only a little, though, because the work is good for him, and for Mel and the kids, and that’s what’s most important.

  “He’s not any stranger than anyone else in town,” I comment, my mind already inside the house. Both of our observations are true. “He’d probably fit in, if he ever left the house.”

  Leo wrinkles his nose. “I guess the stereotype of writers who wear their pajamas all the time and never leave the house are true.”

  “At least in this case.”

  When I open the front door, the smell of chicken and rice wafts out, making my stomach growl. Leo’s growls louder, and I give him a raised eyebrow. “You want to stay for dinner?”