Who By Water (Voices of the Dead Book 1)

by Victoria Raschke

  “Go where?”

  “I don’t know. There are still mysteries, Jolene. But I think it’s somewhere good. I’ve wanted to go for a long time.”

  “That’s why Helena left in such a hurry?”

  “Maybe.”

  “She seemed quite blasé about being dead. But she wasn’t one to have regrets in life either.”

  “Jay, I need to go. I love you. And please think about what I said.”

  “I will think about it. But I’m not making any promises on the getting-married thing. That scares me more than anything you’ve said.”

  “Jolene.”

  “Sorry. I love you. I never thought I’d get to say that to you again.”

  “I know.”

  Jo hugged him. At first it was like hugging a statue in December. Then, for a brief moment, there was warmth between them, and it felt the way hugging him had when she was a child.

  She sighed and he was gone. No popping sound, no chill wind, nothing to signal that he had been there and now he was not.

  Jo’s phone buzzed in her pocket. It was a text from Faron.

  “Are you lost?”

  He didn’t need to be party to any of this. It wasn’t something that affected the Wiley men. She texted him back. “I ran into an old friend.”

  Chapter 8

  “How much do you really know about her?” Leo shifted in his chair. It was unusual, to say the least, for his niece to call him. She’d made peace with who her father, his brother, had been. But she’d also washed her hands of it all.

  “What do you mean? I’ve known her since I was 20.” The annoyance in Vesna’s voice wasn’t about the question.

  “As you mentioned, but why now?” People were either born different or they were not. They didn’t usually pick something up later, unless they were possessed or cursed.

  “She was at the museum. The murder? When I saw her that night her aura was different.” Vesna let out a heavy sigh.

  He knew it. She could see auras, and she’d lied to him that morning at the cemetery when they buried his brother. No point in calling her out now that she’d confessed.

  “How was it different?”

  “Silver and part of it floats above her head.”

  “And you’ve never noticed this about your best friend before?” He scratched the stubble on his face and shifted again on the chair. The furniture in the Ljubljana rectory had not been made for people like him.

  “No. Her aura has always been strong, purple with bright red flashes like lightning. But not silvered, and nothing like the flag that’s waving over her head now.”

  “And you didn’t tell her?”

  Vesna paused a few beats. “No.”

  “And why, my dear niece, not?” He chuckled, mostly to himself.

  “What am I supposed to say? ‘I come from a long line of Witchfinders who would have thrown holy water on you and burned you at the stake, but we’re different now?’ I doubt she would have found that very reassuring. She thinks she’s about to join her mom in the madhouse.” Vesna was quiet. He could feel her frustration. A world she wanted no part of was knocking down her door.

  “What do you know about her mother?” Clairvoyants who weren’t complete fakes generally came from a long line of family seers. Both types tended to attract trouble.

  “Not much. Her father died when she was little and her mom lost it. Jo grew up with her aunt. I think her mom’s been in and out of institutions. She hasn’t seen or spoken to her in years.”

  “But she’s still alive?” He stood and walked to the window.

  “As far as I know. Why?”

  “Not sure yet. Maybe it’s inherited. I’ll have to do some digging.” He hated to call Lichtenberg, but it might be necessary. “Tell her to call me.”

  “I will, but you should know she’s not about church, big or small C.” His niece hesitated. “And, she’s, she’s your type.”

  He bristled. “And what type would that be, Vesna?”

  “Badly broken and mended. Fucking stubborn. Red flashes in her aura, just like Berta.”

  “That was a long time ago. I took my vows. You needn’t worry about your witchy friend stealing me away from them.”

  He slid his phone back into his pocket and looked out onto the narrow cobbled street. A pack of students on bikes whizzed through the passage and turned out of sight. A grandmother with a scarf tied over her gray curls waddled her way toward him, heavy shopping bags in each hand. Leo had not heard Berta’s name in years. The mention of it made him feel more guilt than longing.

  Chapter 9

  She was sitting on the banks of the Little Tennessee River on a red picnic blanket, eating the last of her peanut butter and blackberry jam sandwich. Her baby cousin Michael slept in a bassinet next to her. Aunt Jackie was asleep or reading a book, on a folding chaise lounge behind her. Mom and Dad were paddling around on the river in a canoe, just out of sight.

  Jo felt the sun on her back. She felt the weight of her braids, warm and heavy and a little scratchy against her skin. Her mother had braided her hair that morning, with two fat green lengths of grosgrain ribbon, just because. Most days she just brushed the tangles out of Jo’s hair, then gathered it up and held it in one hand while she snapped on an elastic band with two blue plastic beads to lock the ponytail into place. Making braids took more time and a lot more combing, but even when it pulled and hurt, Jo tried not to cry. It always seemed like a special day when her mother braided her hair.

  She heard a voice, faint at first, then louder, and then it was her mother’s voice. She heard her mother screaming, something about the canoe, something about John, where is John? She saw her mother climbing up the bank with her wet sundress clinging to her skin, the dark circles of her nipples showing through the thin fabric. Aunt Jackie was jumping up to run to her and her foot got caught in the chair as she stood and she toppled over onto the picnic blanket next to Jo. When she got up again with a rug burn on her cheek, she ran to her sister.

  Aunt Jackie sat her sister on the edge of the picnic blanket. She shooed Jo off and picked up the bassinet to move the baby onto the grass. She pulled the blanket up around her sister Mary’s shoulders and turned to Jo, putting her hands on either side of Jo’s eight-year-old face.

  “Run. Run to Mrs. Plemens’ house and tell her to call the rescue squad.”

  Jo didn’t stop to put her sandals on. Every stone and twig cut into her bare feet as she ran the quarter mile to the nearest house. She banged on Mrs. Plemens’ door until she answered.

  “Child. What are you…”

  Everything came out in a rush, but Mrs. Plemens heard enough to pick up the heavy black phone and dial the rescue squad. It took an eternity for the dial to turn back after each number.

  Why did an emergency number have so many nines in it?

  By the time the rescue squad arrived Mrs. Plemens had walked Jo back down to the river. Her mother was on the blanket, still and so quiet. Jo tried to look in her eyes, but they looked far away, in a place Jo didn’t want to go. Mrs. Plemens pulled her away, holding her hand so tightly Jo thought her fingers might break, or melt together into one big finger. They all stood there for a long time. Aunt Jackie paced the riverbank calling out Jo’s father’s name. The rescue squad went out in two metal boats with outboard motors and zoomed up and down the banks.

  Mr. Plemens arrived with his rifle and fired it over the river. Mrs. Plemens explained that it would make a body rise to the surface. Then one of the rescue squad volunteers started arguing with Mr. Plemens, and told him to take his rifle and superstitions and go home.

  The sun sank lower and lower. One rescue boat came slowly back up the river and beached near where Jo stood, her hand still squeezed by Mrs. Plemens. There was a lump in the boat and the lump was covered with a faded blue tarpaulin. One of the men in the boat got
out and went to Aunt Jackie to take her back to the boat. He lifted the edge of the tarp and Aunt Jackie nodded, then turned her head away, crying.

  Jo wiggled her hand out of Mrs. Plemens’ grasp and was at the boat before anyone could stop her. She pulled up the tarp and saw her father’s wet face. His lips were blue and his skin was pale, despite the sun he’d gotten all summer. There was nothing of her father there in the motionless body. Jo didn’t cry at first. Later in life she had concluded that she didn’t cry then because, at eight, she was too young to process what death actually meant.

  Her mother stood up and came to the boat to stand next to Jo. She started saying “John” over and over again, until she was screaming it at the top of her lungs. It was like she was trying to call her father back into his body from wherever he had gone. Jo was afraid then, and she started to cry. Aunt Jackie had Michael on her hip, and she pulled Jo in and held her close. Jo hid her face in the cotton of her aunt’s sundress. Jackie’s skin smelled like Coppertone and the fabric of the dress carried the scent of the river from when she walked into the water calling her father’s name.

  A voice whispered in Jo’s ear. “Don’t let them in.”

  Jo woke up in her bed, in her apartment, in the middle of a city thousands of miles away from Tennessee and many years from that August day. Her face was wet with tears and the scent of coconut oil lingered. She picked up her phone.

  It was three o’clock in the morning in Ljubljana. In Chattanooga, Aunt Jackie would still be up. Jo found her aunt’s name in her favorites list, tapped, and waited for her request to bounce off a satellite and connect to her aunt’s phone.

  Jackie answered on the second ring. “Jo? Are you okay? What time is it there?”

  “It’s early. I’m okay, but we really need to talk.”

  Jo relayed the events of the past two days. She included color commentary on the various stages of questioning her sanity. Jackie didn’t say a word for the half hour it took Jo to tell the whole story.

  “Are you still there?” Jo was sitting up in bed, leaning against the wall. She thought about turning on the lamp next to the bed, but preferred the dark blue of night.

  “I am so sorry.”

  “Dad said the same thing.”

  “I just never thought… I’m just so sorry.”

  “I appreciate that you were protecting me and I appreciate everything you did. I’m past needing an apology though. I need some help. How do I turn this off?”

  “Turn it off?”

  “Yeah. If it suddenly turned on, there must be an off switch.”

  The line was silent for long enough for Jo to ask again if her aunt was still there.

  “Jolene, honey, there’s no off button.”

  Jo closed her eyes and tipped her head back to the wall behind her. She knew that was what Jackie would say. She also knew this gift was the reason her mother had lost the plot. How many Wiley women had it taken? Why was it coming for her now?

  “So I can’t turn it off, then what do I need to do now? I don’t want my apartment crawling with dead people.” And I don’t want to end up twisting my hair out in a Slovenian mental hospital. The image flashed through Jo’s mind of her mother sitting in front of a puzzle with all of the pieces turned over to the blank side. That was the last time she’d seen her mother, and she’d been drugged into docility because she fought like a demon when anyone suggested she wasn’t hearing real voices. At least some of that made sense now.

  Jackie was speaking. “I think your friend and your father are right. I think you should go see this priest.”

  “What if he thinks I’m some kind of witch and wants to burn me at the stake in Mestni trg?”

  “I can’t imagine that will be his first reaction.”

  “You don’t watch the news much, do you?”

  “No. But he is your friend’s family. I doubt she’d send you to him if she thought he was the Witchfinder General or something.”

  “True.” Even if Vesna’s question made her unsure which of them was reality-challenged.

  “I can try to come next week. It’ll take me a couple days to move money around and get a ticket.”

  “I don’t think you need to come. We have all this modern technology at our fingertips. Surely we can do dead whisperer training via Skype?”

  “Dead whisperer? Did you come up with that all by yourself?”

  “Yes. Just now, with some help from my favorite TV trope. Sleep-deprived and nightmare-addled must be my happy creative place.”

  Jackie laughed. “At least you still have your sense of humor. You’re probably going to need it. And you need some sleep. Go see this Brother Kos tomorrow if you can. If your father and this Helena person are showing up to warn you, it’s probably serious.”

  “Thanks. It’s not like I was worried already or anything.”

  “Women in our family have been doing this for a long time. You’ll be fine. You just need some training and some protection.”

  “You aren’t going to start in on the getting married thing are you.”

  “Am I married?”

  “No. Why didn’t I think to mention that to Dad?”

  “Because he’s still your father. He never knew what to think of me, so it probably wouldn’t have done much good.”

  “Okay. I’m going to try to sleep. I’ve got work in the morning. Well, in a few hours. I’ll try to sneak away for a bit this afternoon before we open. It’ll be early for you.”

  “Maybe you should take tomorrow off.”

  “And do what?”

  “Rest. Grieve.” In her head Jo heard the unspoken “like a normal person.”

  “I really will go crazy if I sit up here all day doing nothing.”

  Jackie sighed heavily. “Your mother’s illness isn’t because of the gift.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I find that hard to believe.”

  “I know you well enough to know you’ll believe what you want, but I will tell you this. Mary was always fragile. She always danced too close to the edge. John’s strong will was the last string that kept her from coming untethered.”

  “That’s not very comforting.”

  “It should be. Honey, you’re tied down like no one else I know.”

  Tied down did not fit at all with the image Jo had of herself. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll let you figure that one out yourself. Get some sleep.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Jolene.”

  Jo still missed dial tones. The sound of a dial tone rounded off a conversation more conclusively than nothing.

  She set an alarm for 8 and lay back down. She hugged a pillow to herself and tried not to think about what Jackie had said. Tied down. Instead, she thought of Helena’s brother. She wondered if sleep was eluding Matjaž, too. She had a message to deliver. She stared out the window, wondering how her life had gotten so far outside the lines in such a short time. Her upstairs neighbor’s laundry was still hanging on the line. The sheets were pale blue in the faint light that penetrated the interior of the courtyard. She watched them flutter until she finally fell asleep.

  Interrupted sleep made Jo later than she would have liked, but she was still ahead of her usual schedule. She needed to set herself a challenge, a small one of the culinary kind; anything to keep from brooding on this mess. While she showered she made a mental inventory of the shop’s pantry and decided on twice-baked soufflés with custard cream as the day’s chocolate item. She went over the recipe in her head while she dressed and put together a quick breakfast. She finished her coffee and two bites of toast and headed downstairs.

  Bikini Kill blasted through the house speakers when Jo opened the door of the shop. Someone had beaten her to work. Maja was in the kitchen slicing bread for sandwiches. Jo was engulfed in the heady scent of vanilla.

 
“Someone’s feeling her 90s this morning. Were you even born yet?”

  Maja raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Yes.”

  “Why are you here so early?” Jo put her apron on and glanced at the prep list Maja put together. She peeked in the oven at the source of the vanilla fog that permeated the shop. Vanilla and candied shallot tartlets.

  Maja looked up at her. “Why are you here at all? I assumed you’d take a day or two off. I thought it was just going to be me and Fred and I wanted to get a jump on things.”

  “How’d you get in?” She really should have given Maja a key already.

  “Vesna let me in when she went for her run.”

  “To answer your question, I’m here because I don’t do the idle hands thing very well.” And because alone in her apartment, she might wind up in another convo with Helena or her father. Her bandwidth for that was tapped.

  “Makes sense, I guess. Menu look okay?” Maja pointed at the prep list with the tip of her bread knife.

  “It does. Nice work. One change if you haven’t already started. I was going to make twice-baked chocolate soufflés.”

  “Nope. Haven’t started.” Maja drew a line through the Nutella scones. “There’s some candied orange peel, you could add that to the soufflés.”

  “Orange with chocolate is an abomination I refuse to perpetuate.” Jo shuddered a little bit. The thought of that combination was the culinary equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.

  “Didn’t know you felt so strongly about it. We still need another scone. Orange and something?”

  Jo poked through the pantry and found a bag of dried cranberries. They were hard to get here, so Jackie always included some in her care packages and they always found their way to the shop. “Let’s do orange cranberry.”

  Maja nodded.

  Jo assembled the ingredients for the soufflés and started the egg whites in the stand mixer. They would fall, but that was part of the plan. Before they went out they’d get warmed again and topped with a pour of custard.