Vesna’s cat Cleopatra climbed up onto the back of the couch and gave Jo a gentle head-butt before clambering down into her lap to knead her thigh. Then Cleopatra stopped, looked up at Jo with doleful yellow eyes and curled up to sleep. Jo patted the cat’s smooth orange fur while Antony, a handsome tuxedo cat, sat at her feet and stared at her – or rather, at the air above her head.
Maybe she shouldn’t say anything more. Maybe she was just disoriented by the sudden awfulness of Helena’s death, and maybe it would pass. But maybe she really was losing her shit. Vesna knew about her mom, and that might be enough to make her worry Jo was headed down the same path.
“So. Spill. What’s going on with you? You look like you’ve seen a–”
Jo interrupted her. “Please don’t say ‘ghost’.” She sighed.
“Okay. Then what’s wrong?”
“I did see a ghost. Or I dreamed one or two. I’m not sure. Anyway, I think this whole thing with Helena has me thrown for a loop.” Jo picked up Cleopatra and snuggled her like a baby. She hadn’t been in love with Helena, but in her way she cared for her. Helena was vibrant and alive. She’d made Jo feel that way, too.
“What do you mean you don’t know if you dreamed it?” Vesna reached out to rub Cleopatra’s belly. The cat purred loudly.
“I mean that not an hour ago I was awake, sitting on the futon, while Helena drank tea at my table.”
“Maybe it’s the drugs they gave you last night?” Vesna look hopeful and skeptical at the same time.
“No. I don’t think so. I had a similar dream about my father, and he told me there would be others who’d know how to find me.” Cleopatra wriggled her way out of Jo’s arms and flounced off with her tail in the air. “But – it could just be the drugs, and how awful it was to see Helena like that.” An image of Helena’s head cocked at that impossible angle rose unbidden as she spoke, and her stomach clenched.
Vesna leaned in closer. “What did Helena say exactly?”
“She wasn’t very exact, but she said she’d ‘woken up’ and known that she needed to speak with me. She said I’d been easy to find because now that she’s dead, or as she put it, not alive, she sees I have some kind of silvery aura or something.” Jo picked up her mug and took a sip of tea.
“Oh.” Vesna’s voice was quiet. She looked worried.
“I know. It’s crazy, right?” She set the mug down.
Vesna looked down at her hands folded in her lap and paused for a long moment. She looked back up at Jo. “I don’t think you’re crazy or drugged, but I do think you need to see someone.”
“What? Like a shrink?”
“No. Like a priest.”
“Why?” She was confused. Vesna was about as religious as she was, which was about zero.
“I think they – these visions – might be demons.” Vesna seemed surprised by the words coming out of her mouth. “Or something.”
She stared at Vesna open-mouthed. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.” Vesna sat up a little straighter, sounded more certain about what she had to say. “This could be something really bad, and I think you should see Brother Kos. He’s my uncle and he… knows about this kind of thing.”
“Vee – I just. It’s not my thing.” Jo sat up straight, too.
“I know. But I think you should go. If nothing else, he’ll be a good counselor – a disinterested third party – to help you deal with your grief.” Vesna relaxed a little.
“I’m not sure how disinterested a priest is going to be when I tell him my female ‘lover’ was murdered and, oh, by the way, she was also schtupping my son.” She punctuated that with a sarcastic laugh.
“What?” From the look in Vesna’s eyes, this revelation was more astounding than the ghost story.
“I guess you weren’t there when Faron and Gregor had their chat about it last night?”
“No. As soon as we got you to bed, Gregor shooed me off to my flat. I called Faron, and Gregor came over after Faron arrived.” Vesna was stammering. “She was sleeping with Faron?”
“Gregor said she is, was, a collector. Apparently Faron and I were a set.” Jo looked down at Antony, still at her feet staring at her. “According to Gregor, Faron was completely mortified. As you can imagine.”
“That’s just a bit too gross,” Vesna said, hastening to add, “Not that either of you are gross. Just, well. Who does that?”
“Helena. Apparently.”
Back in her own flat, Jo began to regret telling Vesna. The religiosity had surprised her. Was Vesna worried about both her sanity and her soul?
Maybe she was crazy. Maybe seeing a dead body snapped something. But it wasn’t like she’d never seen a dead body before. Do crazy people suspect that they’re crazy? Wasn’t that what crazy people aways asked themselves in movies?
She wanted to stop thinking, and there were only two ways she could get out of her own head. Well three, if she counted sex, but she’d already told Milo not to come over. Her alternatives were long aimless walks and manic level cleaning binges. The flat was pristine: too much clutter or dust in her place made her fidgety.
She decided to clean the shop. Those drop cloths had protected everything from ambient paint spray, but they were probably dusty. She scooped up her keys, slid her feet back into her clogs, and headed back downstairs. The sun had just set, but it was already chilly in the stairwell. She went back to grab a jacket.
At the door to the shop, her cell buzzed in her sweater pocket. It was Faron.
“I thought you were going to text me?”
She fumbled with her phone, typing with one thumb while trying to open the door. “I’m sorry. Forgot.”
“You OK? Want me to stay tonight?”
“No. I’m good. Cleaning in the shop.”
“Maybe you should try a walk instead.”
“Ha ha.”
She got the door open, and the paint smell was still strong enough to change her mind about the cleaning.
She texted Faron again, “Maybe you’re right. Meet for pizza later?”
“Sure. Trta?”
“Sounds good. 8? 8:30?”
“8:30. Zombie Church stuff.”
“Gotcha.”
Faron was involved in the Trans-universal Zombie Church of the Blissful Ringing. They’d sprung up when the former Prime Minister referred to those opposing privatization as “a bunch of socialist zombies.” Jo helped at their free food events, but Faron was more involved in the logistics. She was glad he had a fire in his belly about something.
She set off, planning to walk around Trnovo via the river. Then she’d head north, make a big box to come back along the edge of Tivoli, cutting back through the center and crossing the river to get to Trta. She didn’t like walking through the park by herself after dark. She always felt safe in Ljubljana but didn’t see much point in being careless. Despite these intentions, she walked straight toward the Roman house excavation.
It was after dark on Sunday, so of course the museum annex was closed. But the area was also cordoned off with blue and white police tape, and a guard had been posted. The uniformed officer at the gate wouldn’t tell her anything
For a few beats after the officer asked her to move along, she stood looking into the darkness beyond the locked gate Maybe there was something she missed. This was where it started, where something had reached out from her past and flicked whatever switch was attached to the faulty wiring her mother had passed down to her. Again the image of Helena, her cream-colored dress twisted around her on the mosaic floor, her eyes open wide and empty, played behind Jo’s eyes. In that moment she thought it would probably never stop.
The officer coughed. “Miss, please. You need to leave the area.”
She walked back out onto the street where the air seemed less dense, and backtracked to the river to sit for awhile before meeting F
aron. One of her favorite places in Ljubljana was the concrete steps down to the river on the university side. Despite not believing in much of anything, this felt like a holy place to her. The river was lined with willows for shade. After dark, the steps were full of teenagers and students, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and occasionally making out.
Jo chose a spot where the concrete ended, away from a small group of people who looked about Faron’s age. Ljubljana felt like a young city when university classes began in October. That was the vibrancy that pulled her in when she’d first arrived. Now it sometimes made her feel old, but it still made the city hum. For the most part, she didn’t feel her age. She was wiser and more settled in her early forties than she would have imagined at 18, but she was nothing like what she’d thought 40-somethings were supposed to be. Most of the time that felt like a good thing.
A light crosswind blew over the current of the river making hash marks on the surface. The dark water shimmered and sparkled under the street lighting. The breeze blew her hair around her face and the long, draping willow branches holding onto the last of their yellowing leaves rustled above her. The castle sat squat on the hill that dominated the opposite side of the river, ringed in up-lights to draw attention to its medieval lines. Voices of passersby drifted down from the street behind and above her, and voices from the opposite bank carried across the water. The chill from the concrete made her butt cold. She wished she’d grabbed a heavier jacket. The one she’d chosen wasn’t enough to keep her warm when she stopped walking.
She started to get up to kill some time walking the opposite direction from the pizza restaurant when she heard her name.
She turned around, but she didn’t see anyone. The students closest to her were leaned back, smoking cigarettes and looking out at the water. She turned to check behind the tree next to her, but nothing. Then she felt it, the same bone-numbing cold she’d felt when the Helena-thing had touched her.
“Jay.” The voice with the soft Appalachian lilt and twang was the voice that used to call her in to supper from the woods.
Her father sat next to her, wet and bruised as he’d been before, though the water dripping from his clothes didn’t dampen hers. She didn’t want to turn her head to see him fully. She didn’t want to confirm her own loss of reality. He put his hand on top of her hand on the edge of the concrete step. It was cold, but not as cold as Helena’s had been.
“Dad, I know you’re not really here. I know this isn’t really happening.” Right. Then why the hell had she said that out loud?
“Jay, I know this is hard. But it is real. And I need you to listen to me.”
“Okay, Make Believe Dad-thing.”
“Jolene Abigail, don’t be sarcastic. I’ve been trying to get your attention for a while.”
Shit. That was real, all right. “I’m sorry. Let’s say I do believe you. Can anyone else see you or will they just think I’m a crazy person talking to myself?”
“They’ll see a shadow, a shade of a person.”
“So darkness is good for you?”
“I’ve been a shade for a longtime, Jay. Helena could only make you see her because you were alone.”
“What? Why?” Maybe she’d just hang out with people all the time? The part of her that valued every moment of solitude revolted at that idea.
“It takes energy to manifest, even in the presence of someone like you. Newly dead don’t have much control over that. Most of the time they don’t even realize they’re dead. They just get frustrated trying to talk to people and wind up slamming doors and breaking things.”
“Poltergeist?”
“Kind of.”
“So. Why are you here exactly? I mean how did you get to Ljubljana from East Tennessee?”
“That’s harder to explain. Energy travels differently than mass is probably the best I can do.”
“Okay. Next question. Why can I miraculously see dead people at 43 when this has never happened to me before?”
“Short version is that we all thought it skipped you.”
“What skipped me?”
“The gift, the curse. Your mother’s people have been able to speak with the dead for generations. The women anyway.”
“No one mentioned this to me before.”
“No. They wouldn’t have. Jackie wanted to take you away then and there when we thought it skipped you, so you could have some sort of normal life.”
“Is that why no one objected when she took me to live in Chattanooga after you… died?”
“Probably. But I’m guessing your mother wasn’t in any state to object anyway.”
“No. She pretty much lost her shit.”
“I know. And I’m sorry for that.”
“Why are you sorry?” She turned to look him in the face for the first time. Despite the battering he’d taken in the river, the sorrow was obvious and deep.
“She couldn’t see me. She was always a little too close to unhinged, and me drowning put her over the edge and interfered with the gift. Not being able to communicate with me just made it worse.”
“Jesus. That’s awful.”
“Yes. I should have been a better steward for your mother.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Wiley women with the gift marry a man who can be a stable provider and keep them grounded, though they always keep their family name. I didn’t know what your mother could do until she was pregnant with you. I was young and foolish and not the best choice to be your mother’s steward, but by then it was too late for your grandma to run me off.” Her father looked out over the silent river.
“Jackie has failed to mention any of this.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“So why now? I mean, if it didn’t skip me.”
“I don’t know. But I’m worried for you. You haven’t had anyone to guide you.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I can’t do much. I didn’t have the gift.”
“But you know about it and you were mom’s steward, or whatever.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Vesna wants me to go see her uncle who is a priest. She thinks you might be a demon.”
“I’m not.”
“I don’t remember much from my few stints in vacation Bible school, but isn’t that exactly what a demon would say?”
“Probably. Maybe you should go see him.”
“Really? What if he wants to perform an exorcism in my apartment?”
“Yes, really. Go. Whatever this is, this presence, it’s old and it’s of this place. Maybe he’ll know what it is and what to do.”
She nodded. Helena said the same thing about a presence.
“You should call Jackie. And you should probably get married.”
“I’ll call her tomorrow. And no, I’m not getting married. I don’t need a magical, mystical chaperone.”
“It’s not a chaperone. It’s a sacred bond, Jay. It’s a bane.”
“No. That is some completely backwards nonsense.”
“Surely one of those men—”
“Wait, how much of my life have you seen? What do you know?”
“Less than you’re thinking, but enough to know you have a lot of people in your life.”
“I really don’t want to have this conversation with my father, even if you are dead. I’ll go see Brother Kos. I am not getting married. It’s ridiculous and sexist.”
“You need a guide, and a steward.”
“Maybe it takes a village to be my steward.”
“Jay…”
“I’m serious. You’ve already said I’m an outlier, not appearing to have this gift for 43 years. I could be unusual in other ways.”
“Go see the priest.”
“I will.” She turned to him again. “Question. How could H
elena ‘know’ where I was after she died, and why did she say I was all silvery?”
“Only people who knew you in life can appear to you when they are dead. Initially anyway. They would only feel the need to come to you if they had unfinished business or died traumatically. People who can speak with the dead have an aura. Sensitive living people can sometimes see it. The dead with problems are drawn to it.”
“All dead people? All dead people know where I am?”
“If they come across you, yes, they will recognize you. But only the dead with a connection to you are able to speak to you while your gift is new, or when you’re young. I’ve always thought that was an impressive safety feature. I’m not sure how that will work with you. You’re older but you haven’t developed your gift.”
“This is still too much to absorb.”
“I think you’ll be able to absorb it, but you should be careful. I’m not so sure this is really something new with you. Maybe it was there all along, but you repressed it somehow. Other dead may be able to get to you already.”
“Great. I can talk with my dead father and get haunted by people I know – and maybe people I don’t know – and I still have to worry about my cheese sliding off my cracker because the first two things don’t equal crazy by themselves.”
“I said it is a gift or a curse.”
“You did.” She looked out over the river, so different than the one she’d grown up on. “Can you tell me what this thing is that I need to be worried about? This presence?” Not words she ever thought would fall out of her mouth.
“I don’t know, Jay. I’m hardly all-seeing. It’s powerful and it’s interested in you.”
“How do you know that much?”
“I’ve been keeping my eye on you. I figured that was the reason for me sticking around this long.”
“That’s comforting. And creepy.” She shifted her hand and laced her warm fingers through his cold ones.
He stood to leave. “I have to go.”
Jo stood, too. It was strange, looking her father in the eye. She remembered him as so tall. “Why? Can I just call you or summon you or something?”
“No. This was the reason I couldn’t cross, I think. I had to stay so I could tell you what you can do. Now that you know, I feel it’s time to go.”
Who By Water (Voices of the Dead Book 1) Page 8
