Forever Road (Peri Jean Mace Paranormal Mysteries)

by Catie Rhodes

  “Please listen to me.” Dean’s voice rose. “I’m so sick of people being afraid to let me tell them what happened, how I fucked up, how I’m a failure.”

  “Fine. Tell me that stuff.” I took out my cigarettes and lit one up. Between the nicotine and my spinning head, maybe I’d pass out and miss his confession.

  ***

  “About a year ago, I was working a murder case. A bad one. People kept turning up dead, but my partner and I couldn’t figure out how it all connected.

  “In the middle of it all, my marriage to my childhood sweetheart was imploding. She had been cheating on me, so I cheated on her. I stayed out at bars all night and came to work too hung over to think. My partner picked up the slack.

  “Eva Cassidy. That was my partner. She was a little, tiny woman—kind of like you—and so brave. She figured out who the killer was but found him while she was checking out another lead. He shot her in the chest three times. About five minutes before that happened, she left a message on my cellphone asking me to come back her up.” Dean looked into my eyes. “The rip of it all was the very psychic who offered us help in the beginning turned out to be the murderer.”

  “And every time you see me, you think about this guy.” And how he killed Eva while you weren’t doing what you were supposed to be doing. I kept the second part to myself. Not one of us is without fault.

  Dean nodded, his normally bright blue eyes dark and full of storm clouds.

  “I am so sorry. Working for Sheriff Fatass and listening to him bitch about me has to make it that much worse,” I said. “Is…this incident what happened to your leg?”

  Dean pressed his lips together. His face turned such a complete red it extended to the tips of his ears.

  “Yes, that’s what happened to my leg.” He spat out the words. “There’s some physical therapy and other treatments I could take that might make it hurt less, but I haven’t bothered.”

  “Why not?” As always, I thought in terms of money. “Doesn’t the county offer good insurance?”

  “My carelessness got my partner killed and me hurt.” Dean curled his lip into a sneer. “She’ll never walk in the sun again. Never see her children again. I deserve to remember her every day of my life.”

  “You can’t feel that way. It wasn’t your fault—”

  “It was!” Dean slammed his fist down on the concrete picnic table and flinched from the impact. “Eva worked the case by herself because I couldn’t get my shit together. She wouldn’t have been out there by herself if I had been doing my job.”

  “And that’s why you want to see Rae’s murder solved?” I needed to understand this part of Dean so we could quit running in circles. “So you can know you got the bad guys?”

  “Nothing that noble. Turns out, I’m still a selfish shithead.” Dean’s nose and cheeks were red. Tears swam in his eyes. “I got into some big trouble over my part in Eva’s shooting. I wasn’t asked to resign the East Baton Rouge Parish’s Sheriff’s Department, but it was made known I needed to. So there I was, in my late thirties and jobless. Cop work is the only job I’ve ever known. If I can’t solve Rae’s murder and make Sheriff Joey look good, he’ll find a reason to get rid of me.”

  I walked around the table and gave him a hug. He tensed at first, pulling away from me, but leaned into me after a moment.

  “What was that for?”

  “You looked like you needed it.” I sat back down on my side of the table.

  “Joey just hired me because I knew Hannah from way back. I used to work security detail for sporting events and met her and Carson. She told me she was moving back home, back to Gaslight City, and her uncle, the Sheriff, had a position open. She told him about me, and my homicide experience caught his interest.

  “I came here, applied for the job, and he hired me on the spot. Sheriff Holze doesn’t like involving the State Police in his homicide investigations. He figured with my experience he’d never have to again. I figured the most I’d see is the very occasional rage murder or drug deal gone bad—”

  “For what it’s worth,” I broke in, “that usually is all we have.”

  “I know.” Dean smiled. “I checked. Then, Rae’s murder came up almost right off the bat. Chase doing it would have tied it all up in a neat bow. I’d only have to see you checking me out in the mornings when I’m jogging, and you being,” he swallowed hard, “what you are would never touch me.”

  I turned my face away from Dean, wanting to put my hands over my ears. I didn’t. Instead, I heard myself talking about things I needed to keep quiet. It horrified me, but for some reason I couldn’t stop. “It drives me crazy. All my life, people disliked me for this thing I couldn’t help. Your boss is a perfect example. Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to be this way. People either think I’m something unholy or mentally ill.”

  Dean reached across the table and put his hand over mine, twining his warm, strong fingers into mine.

  “Not me. See, I’m a pretty good cop. After Sheriff Joey gave me the lowdown about you, I asked around.” He gestured at the silent houses around us. “Nobody thinks you’re a fake. Some call you crazy, which means they’ve seen you do something that makes them damn uncomfortable. But it also means you’re not a fake.”

  “It sucked not being able to write me off as a lying charlatan?” I bit my lip to hold back my smile. Dean dealt in absolutes, in facts. No facts existed to help him put me in a neat little category.

  “Oh, it sucks. It sucked worse when I started caring whether you running around like you’re on a detective show would get you in hot water.”

  Dean’s lapel mic crackled. He answered, speaking mostly in numbers. When he stopped speaking, his face was closed. I knew he was finished pouring his heart out to me. We gathered our garbage and walked to our cars.

  “Give me the address of Dara’s apartment. At least I’ll know where you went if you go missing.” Dean shoved his notebook at me, and I copied the address.

  He leaned forward and brushed my cheek with a kiss. My cheek tingled where he kissed it, and his clean scent lingered. Warmth spread over me as my heart fluttered. I closed the distance between us and kissed him. Really kissed him. He tasted as good as he looked. His arms slid around my waist and pulled me onto my tiptoes. His radio crackled again. We both groaned and pulled apart.

  “Call me,” he said and got into his cruiser.

  ***

  The aroma of warm sugar greeted me at the door. After seeing Memaw lying in the hospital bed, it stunned me to see her working hard in the kitchen. She stood with her back to me scooping perfect tablespoons of cookie batter out of a huge mixing bowl and dropping them onto a cookie sheet. A row of pies lined the kitchen counter.

  “That looks good,” I said. “It smells even better.”

  “The church is having a bake sale. I promised to provide a few things.” Memaw’s idea of “a few things” went above and beyond the norm.

  “Why don’t you sit down? I’ll finish all that.”

  “This is precisely why I didn’t want you to know I’m dying of cancer. I knew you would act exactly like you’re acting right now.” Memaw turned to face me, her arms crossed over her chest and a dour look on her face.

  So she wanted to talk about the thousand-pound gorilla in the room. It surprised me considering we’d spent my whole life pretending I didn’t see ghosts.

  “If you make yourself sick, we won’t have as much time together.” I laid my grievance on the table. Why not?

  “I’m already sick. What is time together if I can’t enjoy it?”

  Both the picture I found of young Memaw and the conversation I’d had with Dr. Longstreet tormented me. So much lay between us, unmentioned. In the face of losing her forever, I wanted to know who I was.

  “Good point. I’ll add to it. What good is time together if all we do is keep secrets from each other?” I risked driving a wedge between us, but time was short. If I didn’t do this now, I might never work up the nerve again.
/>   “Oh hell. I just didn’t want to see you upset.” She widened her eyes. “Just like you are right now.”

  “I’m not just talking about the cancer. I’m talking about the way we dance around what I am. Dr. Longstreet told me you insisted on it. I want to know why that is.”

  Memaw did a double take but didn’t try to pretend she didn’t understand. “Honey, try to understand. I survived this kind of thing long before the day you told everybody how you knew where Hannah’s daddy hid her Christmas presents.”

  “What do you mean?” In my naiveté, I thought she wanted to talk about my grandfather’s premature death and my father’s murder. Boy, was I wrong.

  Memaw took a pan of cookies from the oven and set them aside. She motioned me to follow her to the table. We both sat down. Forget butterflies in my stomach. Dinosaurs could have been stomping around in there. I wondered if Pandora felt this way right before she realized she’d fucked up.

  “This conversation is long overdue, and it’s all my fault.” Memaw hung her head, blinking rapidly. “I hope you can hear what I have to say without hating me. For a long time, you were too young to hear it. After you got old enough, things seemed so hard for you. I just…I don’t know.”

  On TV, cheesy soap opera music always started when somebody made a statement like that. I hunched in my seat, as though that might protect me from the bad stuff. Hearing Memaw’s secrets would change the way I saw things, maybe for the worse. Living in a house built of secrets had its comforts. My insistence on the truth might come back to haunt me. But it was too late to hit the undo button, besides life doesn’t have one.

  “My mother could do what you do—see ghosts.” Memaw let out a deep breath she must have been holding. When she spoke again, she did it in short, disconnected bursts. “So could my brother, Cecil. My twin sister, Ruth, not so much. She was like Daddy, though. So it didn’t matter.”

  Cold, hurtful shock drowned out any coherent thought. Tears welled in my eyes. A lifetime of being the outsider flashed through my memories. Seeing ghosts was a family trait like our dark eyes and high cheekbones. Surely, it would have helped me to know. Was this why we never went around Memaw’s family? So I’d never learn how to be what I am?

  “Why didn’t you tell me? It would have helped me feel normal to know them.” My chin trembled, and I turned away so Memaw couldn’t see the tears flooding my eyes. The loss of not knowing these people tore at me.

  “Maybe it would have.” Memaw’s eyes filled with tears, too. “But, then, they’d have made you like them.”

  “They are like me.”

  “No ma’am. They are most certainly not like you.” Memaw’s words came out strong and forceful. “You’re kind, honest, and compassionate. My family is…nothing you want to know or to know you.”

  “So you think what I am is bad?” I twisted my fingers together on the tabletop. No surprise there. The shunning, the sideways glances, the whispering. All proof I was defective.

  “I’m going about this wrong. The same way I’ve done since that awful day when you were eight.” Memaw crossed her arms over herself and looked at the ceiling. A tear slid down her cheek. “Let’s start from some kind of beginning.”

  ***

  “My mother could do what you do. See the ghosts. Feel their emotions. She came from a family of—I guess you’d call them psychics. They called it Knowing. They called seeing the ghosts Seeing. Those words you could say in public without drawing too much attention.

  “Daddy came from a family of traveling con artists. There is no other way to put it. None of them ever did an honest day’s work. They always had an angle, a scam.” For the first time, she looked at me straight on, a gleam in her eye. “Rae got it honest, darlin’.

  “Daddy and Momma were the perfect pair. They’d go into a town and convince a new widow they knew where her late husband hid a fortune. Momma knew how to manipulate her gifts. She could pick up just enough about the deceased to make it believable. Or Momma might somehow know the deceased’s family had murdered them. Then, the blackmail would start. And everybody wants Uncle Elmer to send them a message from beyond the grave.”

  I laughed at that in spite of myself.

  Memaw shook her head, and the sad look in her eyes hurt my heart. “It might sound funny, but it was a hard way to grow up. We never stayed in one place for long. People inevitably figured out they were being scammed, and they’d run us out of town. I hated it. I ran away at seventeen, and I’ve never seen them since.”

  “I guess I understand why you never told me.” But I still wished I had known. A lifetime of feeling like a freak had a tendency to suck the joy out of life.

  “If the incident with Hannah Kessler—the one that ended with you in a mental hospital— had never happened, I might have told you.” Memaw raised her eyebrows. “If for no other reason, I’d have told you about my family to warn you about them. But after that, I was scared. You see, people—especially people facing something that can’t possibly be real but obviously is—can be dangerous. I learned that when I was young, too.” Her chest hitched with a silent sob, but she got a hold of herself to continue.

  “My parents had a change of life baby, a little boy they named Raymond. He was born when I was about fifteen. Cute as a button, he was. I might have spoiled him a little.” Memaw spoke in a quiet voice, the tiniest of smiles curving her lips. “We were living in a town outside Dallas. The jig, as my daddy used to say, was about up. We went to bed early, planning to slip out before sunrise the next morning. Some locals set the house on fire. Everybody got out except for Raymond. The police didn’t do much after some important people whispered in their ears. So, you see, I know what people can do to other people.”

  “But that was back in the 1950s, right? That wouldn’t have happened in the 1990s.” I understood the horror of Memaw’s loss. But she was an educated woman. She knew things like that didn’t—couldn’t—happen anymore. Nothing stayed off the grid.

  “Things might seem like they change, but they don’t. There’s a lot you have forgotten…or never realized.” Memaw watched me with her eyes narrowed and her brows drawn.

  “Can’t you tell me? It’s all over now. I’m a grown woman.” My voice shook with the rest of my body. I couldn’t stop shivering.

  “Remember this: It’ll never be over. One thing I realized back then is I have enemies in this town. And it’s people I don’t have a damn clue what I did to piss them off.”

  “But they sent me away for seeing ghosts.” My voice warbled with unshed tears. “And you knew nothing was wrong with me. How could you let that happen?”

  Memaw and I stood at the same time and stared at each other across the table. She held her hands out to me. “No, baby, it wasn’t that way at all.”

  “What way was it, then?” Memories of a stark white room and bright lights tore open all the scars I’d sealed and buried. Panic lodged in my throat. Voices from more than twenty years ago, voices I had done everything I knew to forget, said things like, “Schizophrenic…should be institutionalized for life…severe break with reality.”

  Memaw lips moved, but I couldn’t hear her words. Those old voices from the mental hospital and the roar of my own paranoia were too loud. Without meaning to, I shouted, “What?”

  Memaw grabbed my hands and squeezed hard.

  My veneer of control snapped back into place. I put my face in my hands and muttered, “I’m sorry for yelling at you.”

  “No. I’m the one who’s sorry.” Her face had turned gray, her lips nearly white. “Your being taken to the mental hospital for testing happened before I knew what was going on.”

  Memaw stared at me for a long moment before I understood what she wanted. She wanted confirmation I believed her, that I didn’t consider her my enemy. I nodded, and so did she. We sat back down, facing each other across the scarred old table.

  “When the whole mess broke, the school called Barbie because she was your mother and—supposedly—in charge of you
.” Memaw’s mouth twisted with bitterness she’d evidently held onto these twenty years. “According to Jolene Fischer, Barbie signed the papers for the psychological testing without a word of argument. She didn’t even call to tell me what was going on…and I guess she didn’t have any obligation to. Jolene called the high school and pulled me out of class to let me know.”

  My mouth had gone dry as dirt. I reached for a glass of tea Memaw had left on the table. Hand shaking, I almost knocked the glass over. Quick as a flash, Memaw reached out to steady the glass. I put my hands in my lap and didn’t reach for it again.

  “I knew Barbie would be working, so I went down to Mickey’s Five-and-Dime—remember that place?—and confronted her.” Memaw frowned and said her next words through clenched teeth. “She said without your daddy alive, she didn’t know what to do with you.”

  Memaw looked at the table, her lips trembling. Her fingers twitched as she lived through it again.

  “Well, what happened?” Some sick part of me needed to know what Memaw’s response to my ne’er do well mother had been.

  “I slapped her right across the face, is what happened.” Memaw’s mouth curled into a little smile. “They kicked me out of Mickey’s for life, and I told them they could kiss me where the sun don’t shine.”

  Laughter—the laughter of relief something unpleasant was over with no lasting injury—quivered and bubbled to the surface. A second later, our laughter filled the kitchen.

  “Then, I made Barbie get in the car with me, and we drove down to that hospital and signed you out.” Memaw raised her eyebrows at me, still smiling. “I think it insulted her tender sensibilities.”

  “I thought I remembered hearing you hollering.” Hazy memories of a nurse, her face pinched in worry, found me and I shook them away.

  “Oh, I did holler.” Memaw snorted. “On the way there, we’d stopped to get Wilton Bruce—Hooty’s daddy, the judge—and he threatened them with every legal this ’n that he could think of. I’m not sure how they heard him over my shouting, but I think he made more difference than I did.”

  That Memaw came to my rescue wholeheartedly helped my feelings somewhat, but her secrecy about the paranormal sixth sense running in her family, my family, bothered me. My gut told me to let it go.