Early Grave: Grant Wolves Book 1

by Lori Drake

  There was nothing else of note on his bank statement. She checked his credit cards just to be sure, but found nothing there either.

  With those avenues exhausted, she decided to pay a visit to the restaurant where he’d had dinner. The car ride over, once more in silence, convinced her that she absolutely needed to take the car in for service. The windshield wipers came on and wouldn’t turn off. All sorts of lights on the dash started blinking off and on. At one point the horn sounded and the guy in front of her flipped her the bird. She called the dealership and made an appointment to take it in, hoping that it didn’t simply die on her in the meantime. The way her week was going, it felt like a real possibility.

  At the restaurant, she showed his picture around a bit and managed to track down a waitress who remembered him. Once the waitress got over the shock of finding out he was dead she told Joey that Chris had dined alone—a fact she remembered because he was attractive and he’d engaged her in conversation, flirted lightly and left a nice tip.

  Joey puzzled over this information as she left the establishment. Had Chris been stood up, or had there been a date at all? Why would he tell her he had a date if he didn’t? The more digging she did, the more questions she unearthed.

  It vexed her, since what she really wanted was answers.

  15

  Joey debated Cheryl and Emma’s dinner invitation but, after two days of being largely on her own, company sounded pretty fantastic. She caught the first whiff of dinner on her way to the door and any lingering reservations evaporated. By the time Cheryl opened it, she was practically licking her chops.

  “Oh god, I’m already drooling and I haven’t even seen the food.”

  Grinning, Cheryl drew her inside and gave her a warm hug. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Thanks for inviting me, now excuse me while I go hollow out a leg.”

  They laughed together. It felt good to laugh. For a moment, however fleeting, Joey was able to shrug off the malaise that had clung to her so persistently throughout the day.

  “What have you been up to?” Cheryl asked, passing the salad once they’d settled around the coffee table. Cheryl liked sitting on the floor, for whatever reason. After six years of friendship, Joey was used to it. As long as there was wine, she’d sit in far more uncomfortable positions. For example, at her parents’ dining table.

  “Um, not much. This and that,” Joey said, trying to keep things vague while she filled her plate with goodies.

  “Oh? Like what?” Cheryl asked.

  “A lot of sitting around the house.” It was true, at least. She didn’t like to lie to her friends, but it was hard to explain why she felt a driving need to investigate Chris’s death herself, rather than leave it to the police.

  Cheryl gave her a thoughtful look. “Sounds boring.”

  “You’d think so,” Joey said, seizing the opportunity to redirect the conversation. “But between my brother’s stupid pranks and the electrical being on the fritz, it’s been… eventful.”

  “Do tell.”

  Joey poked at a piece of glistening arugula with her fork. “Ben stayed over the other night and did something to the art in the living room. I don’t know if he hid weights in them or what, but they will not stay level. I swear, I spent the better part of an hour trying to fix them before I gave up. He swears he didn’t do anything but I don’t believe it for a second.”

  Cheryl laughed at the tale, but across the table Emma tilted her head and studied Joey, green eyes thoughtful behind chunky plastic frames.

  “You said you’d been having electrical problems too? I hope it’s nothing serious,” Emma said, soft spoken as ever.

  “Not serious enough for the electric company to rush right over. I’ve got an appointment scheduled for next Tuesday. In the meantime, I need to buy stock in light bulbs and surge protectors.” Joey smirked and shook her head, but made a mental note to stop at the store on the way home.

  “Wow, it’s bad enough to burn out bulbs?” Cheryl said, eyes wide.

  Joey nodded and cut into her steak, finding it to be a perfect medium rare. For a vegan, Emma made a killer steak when the occasion called for it.

  “Did the room seem cold to you?” Emma’s question interrupted Joey’s thoughts.

  “Hmm?”

  “At home, when the light bulbs burned out.”

  Joey thought about it a moment, then shook her head. “No, not that I noticed. Why?

  “Just curious,” Emma said and shrugged.

  “That’s an oddly specific question.” Cheryl eyed her wife across the table, toying with the stem of her wine glass.

  “Ehhh…” Emma dithered a bit, shifting on her cushion. She scrunched up her face, clearly uncomfortable. When she spoke again, it was even more hesitantly. “Have you noticed any other oddities? Things out of place at home, odd sounds, temperature drops, anything?”

  “Oh.” Joey had a pretty good idea where this was going now. “I don’t know, maybe. The car’s been acting weird too.”

  “Weird how?” Cheryl asked, a concerned frown on her face as she sat back on her heels. In contrast, Emma leaned forward, focused and intent, her eyes locked on Joey. Something about the way she looked at Joey compelled her to go on.

  “The radio’s on the fritz, lights flashing on the dashboard…”

  “More electrical stuff,” Emma observed. Her head tilted. “Have you considered that maybe Chris might still be around?”

  Joey swallowed, bit her lip and looked down at her plate. When she looked up again, they were both regarding her expectantly. Had she considered it? The thought had crossed her mind, but she’d dismissed it. Still, one thought kept coming back to her.

  “I saw him, the day of the funeral,” Joey said. “I mean, I thought I saw him, but it was just my mind playing tricks on me. A grief-fueled delusion, you know?”

  “There’s a lot of documentation of hauntings in the historical record,” Emma said, pushing her glasses up her nose like the nerd she was. “A lot of it’s been debunked, but some things are difficult to disprove. Personally, I’m a believer. Someone with unfinished business who’s still tied to a place or a person, they might linger.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Joey said, shaking her head emphatically. Still, with everything that had happened, her conviction was slipping. “There must be another explanation. What would possibly be so important to him that he wouldn’t, I don’t know, go into the light or whatever?”

  Cheryl arched a manicured brow. “Well, putting aside the fact that he died suddenly and violently, I can think of something.”

  “What?”

  “You, Joey. God, you’re such an idiot,” Cheryl said. Emma cleared her throat and gave Cheryl a look, but Cheryl just rolled her eyes. “Well, it’s true.”

  Joey couldn’t help but bristle. Her best friend had just called her an idiot, and didn’t even seem to be teasing her about it.

  “I’m not an idiot. I know I was important to Chris. He was important to me too.”

  Cheryl huffed, set her fork down and got to her feet. She walked out of the room without another word, disappearing into her office. Joey turned her eyes back to Emma but her friend wouldn’t meet her gaze. A few minutes passed in silence, until Cheryl returned with one of her many photo boxes. She had dozens of them, full of prints from various events she’d photographed over the years. It was only a fraction of her portfolio; the rest was digital.

  Joey looked on in confusion, and lingering irritation, as her friend started pulling photos out of the box and setting them on the table. All of them were of Chris. Many of them were candid or off the cuff.

  “Wow. Stalker much?” she commented, glancing from photos to photographer. Cheryl rolled her eyes and continued sifting through the box, pulling out ones she wanted Joey to see. Joey had avoided lingering over photos of Chris since he died. It brought too many emotions to the surface, and they were barely submerged as it was.

  But there he was, in costume for so
me event or another. She remembered the outfit, the routine, but not what that particular event had been. In another, he sat on the floor at the foot of Cheryl and Emma’s couch—just a foot or so from where Emma was sitting now. Joey was curled up on the floor beside him, her head resting on his leg. That one she did remember, or at least she remembered plenty of nights like that, time spent with friends. Her eyes started to prickle with unshed tears, but she managed to keep them in check, biting the inside of one lip to give herself something else to focus on.

  Cheryl kept going until there were more than a dozen photos of Chris, and sometimes Joey, piled on the table. She pushed the stack toward Joey. “Look, and tell me what you see.”

  Joey swept the pile off the table into her hands and went through them one by one, brow furrowed. “I see… Chris?” She glanced up at Cheryl.

  Cheryl dropped back down onto her cushion and set the photo box aside. “Look harder.”

  “Cher—” Emma began.

  “No,” Cheryl said. “She needs to know.”

  Emma sighed, but resumed sitting quietly while Joey flipped through the pictures.

  “You really don’t see it, do you?” Cheryl asked, but not unkindly.

  Joey bit her tongue and sifted through the pictures some more. One of them in particular caught her attention and she studied it longer than the others. It was a picture of her and Chris, dancing. This wasn’t a professional event. It was a family affair: Jon and Sara’s wedding. She remembered the day well, if not this particular moment, or at least from this particular vantage. In the photo, Joey was looking off at something out of frame, but Chris was looking at her. There was something in that look—a sort of tenderness she had never seen in him before. Well, outside of a dance routine anyway. That was performance. Acting. This was something else.

  “You think Chris… had non-brotherly feelings toward me?” she said, looking up again.

  “Honey, Chris was in love with you. Capital I, capital L,” Cheryl said.

  Frowning, Joey looked from Cheryl to Emma, then down at the pictures again. “That’s impossible. You can’t tell that just from a few pictures. I’m not even in all of these.”

  “No,” Cheryl replied. “You’re not, but every single one has one thing in common: he was looking at you. Pictures don’t lie. Well, except when they’re photoshopped but I don’t sit around doctoring photos of my friends to orchestrate outrageous circumstances after their untimely deaths.”

  Joey grimaced over her friend’s bluntness, but it was who she was. She’d never known Cheryl to mince words; it was one of the traits Joey valued. Rather than dwell on it, she studied the photographs a bit more. The more she looked, the more she could see what her friend meant. Cheryl’s lens had captured all sorts of emotions. Not just tenderness and admiration, but longing as well. How had she been so blind? She thought she’d known everything about him, but more and more she was starting to wonder just how many secrets he’d kept from her.

  She turned the images face-down and set them on the table beside her plate. Her vision went watery as she looked between Cheryl and Emma, betrayal bitter on her tongue. There was no hint of sudden revelation on Emma’s face. If anything, she looked guilty. Anger flared, and Joey pushed to her feet.

  “You knew, both of you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What would you have done, if you’d known?” Cheryl said.

  “I—I don’t know,” Joey said, struggling to maintain what was left of her composure and failing. Tears slid down her cheeks.

  “Would it have changed how you felt about him?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. It would have been nice to have a choice!” Joey dashed the tears from her cheeks with icy fingers.

  “Either way, it would’ve made things pretty awkward, wouldn’t it? Your living situation, your working relationship…”

  “I guess.”

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Cheryl said, standing. “And it’s probably why he didn’t tell you either. You two had a good thing going. I don’t think he would’ve wanted to give that up, even if it meant having to settle for being your almost-everything instead of your everything.”

  Cheryl spread her arms, offering a hug, but Joey raised a warding hand and shook her head. “No. Right now, I can’t even… I’m going home.”

  Joey thought about Cheryl’s words a lot that night. She thought about it in the car on the way home, and later as she cracked open the half-empty bottle of Chris’s favorite bourbon. She thought about it as she curled up on her bed with the pictures Cheryl had let her take home, sifting through them and occasionally swigging directly from the bottle in the hopes that the burning alcohol might numb the pain. She thought about it until she finally fell asleep and, for at least a few peaceful hours, thought no more.

  Chris lay on the floor in the living room again. It seemed to be his go-to place when he was reassembling the pieces of himself that his tormentor burned away. There were still a lot of holes, particularly where the burning was concerned. He felt like other pieces of him were missing too, but he wasn’t sure what they were.

  As usual, he wasn’t sure how much time he’d lost. The last thing he remembered before she finally overcame his will was causing mischief in the car while Joey was on her way to Cheryl and Emma’s loft. His ability to affect the physical world was definitely improving, but he still couldn’t manage to pick anything up or get inside something to haunt it. He’d been hesitant to mess with the car, not only because it was his baby but also because messing with a car’s electrical system while it was being driven seemed downright dangerous. Regardless, he had to convince Joey that he was still around, had to convince her that Dean wasn’t some sort of con artist. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  The better he became at affecting the physical world, the more hope started to swell inside him. He thought it even made it easier to resist when she called him back. But he couldn’t resist forever, so he went—and paid dearly for his act of defiance. Now he was back, and once he felt stable enough he rose from the floor and started moving through the apartment in search of Joey. A thought would take him to her, but he forgot about that sometimes. Old habits, like physically having to look for someone, were hard to break.

  He found her in her bedroom, which made sense since the clock on the nightstand told him it was almost 4 a.m. What didn’t make sense was that the light was on, she was fully clothed, and she was cradling a liquor bottle against her chest like a teddy bear. It was somehow amusing and cause for concern at the same time. The conflicting emotions swirled within him, vying for dominance.

  He drifted closer. As he did, the photos on the bed came into focus. Pictures of the two of them? No. Pictures of him. He didn’t give them a lot of thought. She had his attention, as she always had. Some things, not even death could change. Clearly, she’d had a rough night. He couldn’t help but wonder what he’d missed, but in the end she had to grieve in her own way. There wasn’t anything he could do about that, so he focused on what he could do instead.

  Marshaling his will, he managed to catch the edge of the light afghan at the foot of the bed and draw it up over her. It wasn’t done with any precision, but it was done. He didn’t bother trying to move the bottle, but he did turn off the light—or, rather, burned out the light bulb. Then he sat on the edge of the bed beside her, looking toward the window. It was creepy to watch someone sleep, no matter what the romance novels said.

  She had dark, sheer curtains in the room, a rich eggplant color with a pattern of interlocking circles that only showed when light shone through them. Tonight, they were opaque. That otherworldly fog obscured the waning moon entirely.

  The absence of the moon’s pull struck him most at night. Maybe that was one of the holes in himself that he couldn’t seem to fill. An empty, moon-shaped hole that made him want to lift his voice in a mournful howl. That would have sounded pretty silly, wouldn’t it? Or would, if there were anyone else around to hear it.

&nb
sp; “If a ghost howls in the woods…”

  Joey stirred behind him, shifting fitfully in her sleep.

  “Chris,” she mumbled, still asleep.

  At least that’s what it sounded like to him. He turned toward her.

  “Shhh,” he said softly, reaching for her arm where it poked out from beneath the haphazardly draped blanket. He closed his eyes and lowered his hand until he felt the solidness of her arm under his fingers. It was strange to touch her, yet not feel the warmth of her skin. Instead, all he got was the impression of something solid, but soft. His mind filled in the rest as he rubbed her arm gently, soothingly.

  Memories flickered through his mind, vivid flashes of countless occasions when it’d fallen to him to comfort or soothe her—or her him. Competitions they’d lost, wounded pride, broken hearts, all of life’s little bumps and bruises. It had been a long time since she’d come to him in the night seeking solace after a nightmare. That had gotten complicated when they were teenagers and he couldn’t quite control certain reactions to her warm body in the night. But it had happened, if rarely, since then. Those nights were some of his most cherished memories, of falling asleep with her in his arms. Now, they were like a dagger to his ghostly heart.

  “I was such a fucking coward.”

  She sighed in her sleep and settled down while he sat there thinking about the years they’d had together and the future that had been stolen. Sitting there, he lamented the path not taken. Many paths not taken, actually. For all that he had tried to live his life without them, he had a lot of regrets.

  When Joey stirred again, the clock said ten-thirty. She woke with a soft snort followed by a groan as she rubbed her eyes and rolled over to peer at the clock. The time had gotten away from them both, apparently.