Ghost Haste

by ReGina Welling

  But I had to talk to someone about the hauntings, and she was the nearest option.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers, right, Molly?”

  As usual, Molly didn’t answer, but I decided to call first thing Monday for an appointment. Searching the Internet for answers to my ghost problem had only raised more questions. I needed to go to the source, talk to someone with solid experience who could put a label on what was happening in my life.

  The decision made, I set my phone on the coffee table in case anyone needed me and popped a relaxing chick flick in the DVD player. Fifteen minutes in, with the dogs cuddled up to me for warmth, two short nights caught up with me. I slid so gently into the dream it seemed like a memory until it didn’t.

  Slowly at first, disjointed images flashed and faded.

  Click. I was lying on my stomach on my grandmother’s porch. I felt the wooden slats under me, smelled the dust embedded in the wood, and over that, the freshness of misty summer rain. Drops plopped into the puddle that formed beneath the spot where the porch roof slanted against the shed. I wondered how long and how many storms it had taken for splashes of rainwater to wash away the grass and soil, leaving a shallow basin of tumbled stones.

  Click. Wild strawberries tangled in tender grass, and I picked them with red-stained fingers. Three for the bowl, one for my mouth. The dream was so real I tasted the burst of sweet juice on my tongue.

  Click. I toed back the kickstand of my bike, settled my foot on the pedal, pushed off with a running hop, and swung my leg over the seat. Peddled like crazy until the speed riffled my hair.

  Click. Still peddling, but no longer feeling the delicious sense of abandon.

  Click. Hearing the roar, seeing the red-eyed monster coming up in the little mirror mounted on the handlebars.

  Click. Steep ditch to the right. No escape there, only the inevitable fall.

  Click. Too late. The monster screamed. Or maybe that was me.

  “Everly. Wake up.”

  Amber’s voice slammed through my subconscious like a hammer on a nail.

  “What?” I peeled one eyelid back to see her face too close for my eyes to focus. The chill of her proximity plumed my breath, made me pull the knit throw up to my chin. “Back off a little. You’re giving me brain freeze.”

  “You were moaning in your sleep, and not in a good way.”

  My head felt like ten pounds of sludge in a two-pound bag. “There’s a good way?”

  “Well, duh.” Amber demonstrated a few of her best sexy moans, and my face set a record for going from cold to hot. Seeing the spreading stain of pink on my cheeks, Amber rolled her eyes.

  “You’re such a prude.”

  “I am not.” Then I amended the statement. “At least not by polite standards.”

  “By any standards. Tell me about your dream.”

  The nightmare, if you could even call it that, had already begun to fade, leaving behind little more than a jumble of impressions and emotions. “Unimportant.”

  As I tried to sort through some of the fleeting details, my phone gave off an alert tone I’d never heard before. “That’s new.”

  “What is it?” Too curious, Amber forgot herself, crowded in too close, and accidentally brushed against my arm. I flinched away from the sensations of chilled spider legs crawling across my skin.

  “Stay out of my personal space, if you don’t mind.” Touching ghosts sets off my heebie-jeebies. As soon as Amber backed off, I swiped my phone to bypass the lock screen and saw an alert message.

  “It’s the security system app.” I tapped, and a video began to play.

  “What is that?” Amber leaned in again but stayed just shy of actual contact so she could watch the dance of the strange blobs on the screen.

  Squinting, I tilted the phone back and forth. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t look like anything I recognize.” A dark shape moved around near a larger, lighter blob. “What do you think?”

  “I think the camera is out of focus. Is that in real time?”

  Not wanting to admit I’d spent more time reading about how to mount the cameras and pair them with the app than how to actually use the system, I shrugged. “The instructions mentioned something about sensitivity, and I think I set it to max. It’s probably sending out false positives. Why don’t you zip outside, take a quick look around, and if there’s nobody trying to scale the fences, I can take another run through the manual tomorrow and tweak the settings.”

  A short battle played across Amber’s features as curiosity fought against the annoyance of being asked to run an errand. Curiosity won. She wasn’t gone much more than a minute before popping back in to give the all-clear.

  “If there was anything out there before, it’s gone now.” She hovered over the seat of the wing-back chair to my left, propped her elbow halfway through the armrest, and rested her chin in her hand.

  “I thought we were friends.” Amber treated me to a thousand-yard stare.

  I cocked an eyebrow at her. “If you define friendship as forcing your company on me, then I guess we are.”

  She waved the truth away. “Whatever. Why, if we’re friends and all, did I have to hear about Winston Durham’s death from hanging around in the newsroom and not from you?”

  “Did we develop mind-to-mind communication skills, and nobody told me? Or is there the ghostly equivalent of two tin cans and a string that I’m supposed to use? I can’t tell you things when you’re not here.”

  “Ha, very funny. Except I’ve been here for ten minutes now, and you never said a word.”

  “Hey, Amber. Winston Durham’s dead. There, are you happy now?” I patted the spot beside me to let Molly know it was okay to come up for a cuddle. While Amber seethed, I made a great spectacle out of petting the dog and telling her what a good girl she was.

  “I need details,” Amber said.

  Holding out, I tortured a few moments more. “Only if you promise not to give me a hard time over the circumstances.”

  “Cross my heart and hope to…” She followed through on the action but came up short at the word die. “Um … well, you get the idea. It’s a dumb saying anyway.”

  So I told her everything.

  “He’d better not show up here. This is my turf.”

  Amber wasn’t the only one with a thousand-yard stare. “I believe it’s mine, thank you very much.”

  “Whatever.”

  We might have gotten into it, but the ringtone I set up for tenants jingled from my phone. I boosted Molly off my lap and checked the caller ID before answering.

  “Clyde Stone. I wonder what’s wrong now,” I sighed. My least favorite tenant, Clyde complained about everything.

  Every. Little. Thing.

  “Good evening, Clyde. What can I do for you?” I only added you cantankerous fart in my head because I wanted to keep my job.

  “It’s supposed to snow.” He sounded shaky. Whether from age or from an excess of his drink of choice, a very cheap vodka, it was hard to tell.

  “Yes, I know.” The third big storm of the year promised to be the worst of the bunch. The weather app on my phone had been sending out alerts every few hours with new and worsening predictions. I didn’t need Mr. Stone to do the same.

  “Well,” he sputtered in my ear. “What do you plan to do about it?”

  Since I hadn’t developed any superpower that would let me fly into the sun and change the weather patterns, I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. So, I stuttered. “I … uh.”

  “About the generator. It hasn’t been tested since the last storm.”

  Living in a town on the outer edge of the power grid had its challenges. Mooselick River went dark at least a couple of times a year. More if the winter was as bad as this one. Since he rented mostly to the elderly and the younger, baby-making set, Leo Hansen, my boss and Clyde’s landlord, made sure each unit had a working generator for back-up power.

  “That wasn’t much more than a couple of weeks ago. I’m sure the system w
ill work just fine.” But even as I offered reassurance, I went to get my boots and pull them on. Things would play out one of two ways. I could ignore Clyde’s pointed comment and field several more calls before giving in and going over there. Or I could stop the cycle before it started. It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to test the generator.

  “Why don’t I just come give it a check for you, though. Then you won’t worry so much.”

  “Hurry up then. I have better things to do than sit up all night waiting on the likes of you.”

  Apparently, five minutes was Clyde’s definition of all night since when I got there, the house was dark, and it looked like he had gone to bed. This wasn’t the first time he’d done something similar.

  A few minutes ahead of my estimate, I was back home and snuggled down to finish the movie I’d slept through earlier. I hit play just as the phone rang again.

  “Oh, Clyde,” I said to no one. “You’re pushing my buttons.”

  But it was my mother this time.

  “I wanted to call and let you know we’re leaving in the morning. There’s a storm coming, so we decided to get on the road early.” She didn’t bother with hello but launched right into the reason for the call.

  “You couldn’t just stay with David’s folks until it’s passed? Blue’s fine here with me, and the school board will delay the re-opening of the term if we get even half the snow predicted.”

  “Your father didn’t want to wait. We’ll be just fine. By all reports, it’s a slow-moving storm, so as long as we leave early enough in the morning, we’ll manage to stay two or three hours ahead of it. We should be back in Mooselick River before noon.”

  “Keep me updated on your progress, or I’ll worry.” She agreed, and just before we ended the call, I remembered the question I wanted to ask. “Oh, do you remember that box of office stuff I had the day I moved in here?”

  A short pause.

  “I’m not giving back the plant. I practically raised it from the dead, so it’s mine.”

  I rolled my eyes even though I figured she’d use her mom vision and know I did. “I don’t want the plant back, you can have it with my blessing, but do you remember there was a yellow envelope in the box?”

  “Sure. I left it on the countertop near the stove. Why? Is something wrong?”

  Better to keep her in the dark for now since I had no idea what was in the envelope. “No. I just remembered it and wondered where it went. I’ll check with Jacy. She probably put it away for safe-keeping and then forgot to tell me where.”

  Or, I’d just hunt the thing down myself. How hard could it be to find one errant envelope?

  In a house the size of mine, maybe not so easy, but then, I’d settled mostly into the downstairs rooms, so the place seemed smaller to me than it actually was until the heating bills came in.

  Since there was no sense in turning the movie back on, I began my search in the kitchen. Another quick look through the drawers and cabinets turned up nothing more interesting than an extra wire for the cheese slicer and, inexplicably, the missing candlestick from the game of Clue.

  One room down, far too many to go.

  With that cheery thought in my head, I called it a night and hoped I wouldn’t see Winston’s corpse in my dreams.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THREE TEXTS CAME in while I watched the dogs race around under white sky the next morning—one from my mother, one from Patrea, and one from Alicia.

  —Left an hour later than planned. No snow yet. All good.

  —Have you heard about Durham? Call me when you finally deign to crawl out of bed.

  —More progress today. A nice man named Joe is helping me understand what’s happening. Aunt Denise got a flight out and arrived early this morning. For the first time since the attack, I think he’s going to be okay.

  Over breakfast, I responded to all of them while Amber gave me her version of the morning news. My parents could learn about Winston’s death once they were home, no sense adding worry to their trip, and I told Patrea I’d heard, and I’d talk to her after work.

  She wasn’t going to be happy about my part in finding the body. Mostly because I hadn’t called her right after it happened. But I’d needed some time to process, and since there was nothing she could do, I wanted to let her have her last night of vacation with Chris unmarred with my problems.

  As expected, there was media speculation about Winston’s death, but the incoming storm gave him competition for the biggest news story of the day. Shock of shocks, my name wasn’t mentioned, nor was Reva’s. I suspect Officer Bassett kept our names away from the press, and for that, I owed her a basket of muffins or something.

  “According to the reports, the police don’t have a suspect at this time,” Amber said as I stirred honey into my coffee. “So, I guess you’re off the hook.”

  “I was on the hook?”

  “Duh. You found the body, and also because of Paul. Who, by the way, was not listed as missing or as a person of interest, only unable to be reached at this time. That’s telling, isn’t it?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well.” Amber hover-paced from the stove to the sink. “Reva says he took off, but no one has reported him missing. Don’t you think that’s interesting? I think it means someone knows where he is. Either the skank or his family.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “I can’t honestly say if Reva’s telling the truth or not. I mean, she hid her relationship with Paul from me for months.” Her betrayal still burned a little, even though I’d left my feelings for him behind. “She’s quite the little actress.”

  Amber nodded. “And you said she had to use the key to get into the storage unit, which means whoever killed the lawyer had a key, too.”

  “Or Winston did. Paul might have given him one.”

  “Maybe. What kind of lock was it?”

  I frowned. “I don’t know. It looked like a regular lock to me. Does it matter?” Rising, I took my cereal bowl to the sink.

  Whipping around, Amber looked at me like I’d lost my marbles. “Of course, it does. If it came from the storage place, they usually only give out two keys, and it’s part of the agreement not to make more. But if Paul bought the lock, it could have come with more, or he had some made. You should ask Reva when you see her again.”

  “The way we left things, I’d be surprised if I do.”

  Amber quirked a brow. “She’s sponging off you, is she not? Trust me, you’ll hear from her.”

  I hated to admit it, but Amber was probably right. I also didn’t let her goad me into another retelling of the entire incident. I’d spent the previous evening going over and over it with her.

  “Check back with me later, and see if your prediction was right. For now, I have to get to work, and I honestly need a break from talk of murder.”

  One of my job duties involved picking up some of the rent checks on the first—or, in this case, the third—of the month. At first, rent day had been my least favorite part of the job. But when I realized those tenants who never mailed or dropped off their payments were older people who hardly ever had visitors, I began to look forward to the day as much as they did.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Crabtree. I hope you won’t mind, but I’ve brought you a little present,” I said to my first tenant of the day. Mrs. Crabtree lived on the bottom floor of an older house that, despite Leo having updated the heating system and trying to button up the place with new windows and doors, still had some drafty spots. Among the multitude of Catherine Willowby’s things, I’d found a brand-new pair of warm slippers and a handmade quilt that, with the placement of some loops and buttons, could be turned into a toasty cover-up.

  “Isn’t that just something.” The elderly lady turned pink with pleasure, and I stayed for half an hour while she talked about people I’d never met, and speculated on how much snow would come before nightfall.

  She limped as she walked me to the door, and then stood looking up at the pewter-and-white s
ky while I stepped out onto the porch.

  “The last time I saw clouds like this was the blizzard of ‘82. You remember that?”

  I had to admit I didn’t.

  “My knee’s been playing me up since half-past six. Them weather people on the TV don’t know their elbows from a hole in the ground. You’d think they’d have enough sense to look out the window and see what’s what. You’d better get a wiggle on and finish up your rounds before noon if you don’t want to get caught in a white-out.” Her prediction left me a couple of hours to finish up, but I wasn’t worried.

  Halfway to my next stop, I got a text from my mom proving Mrs. Crabtree’s knee never lied.

  —Forecast wrong. Starting to snow earlier than anticipated. We’re being careful, but might be a little later than planned. Still okay, though.

  —Where are you now?

  She named a point a few miles shy of halfway, so a bit more than three hours driving in good weather and some of that through mountainous territory. I took a deep breath to push back the worry, then moved on to the next tenant, and then the next.

  Grammie Dupree always said that if you had a list of chores to do, you should make the worst one the first one. Grammie Dupree didn’t have to deal with Clyde Stone. I saved him for last.

  He met me at the door and waved the rent check in my face.

  “It’s about time you showed up to check the generator. You want me to pay, you’ll take care of business first.”

  Maintaining eye contact the entire time, I snaked the fluttering check out of his hand, folded it in half, and stuck it in my pocket.

  He dropped his eyes before I did. The best way to stop a bully is to stand up to him. There's a fine line between respecting your elders and letting someone walk all over you.

  "Please," he said. "Would you check the generator?"

  “Of course.”

  Clyde stepped back to let me in and followed me through the house to the power panel. He didn't have a lot of furniture, and what he did have looked ancient. The house echoed around him, and as much as I didn't like him most of the time, I felt sorry for Clyde.