I didn't think I could pull off another materialization. I had to do something, though. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing Lee die unfairly, even if dying brought her to my side of the spirit world.
The goon with the gun had an Errol Flynn mustache and was smart enough to wear gloves. I had no doubt that Lee's fingerprints were on the gun's handgrip, and the rifle that had killed me was planted in the closet. I hovered over Lee, sniffing her hair, reading the words she had written:
The guilt is too much to bear. I'm sorry for what I did to you, Richard. You were the only one I ever loved. And that's why I couldn't let you love somebody else. Wherever you are, I'm sure you understand.
I can't pay for my sins, but at least I can keep myself from hurting anyone else.
Lee
Anyone that knew Lee could see that her handwriting was wrong. She held the pen in a different position than usual, between two fingers instead of one and her thumb. What a smart woman. A gun at her back, and still rational enough to throw some kinks into a near-perfect crime by leaving a puzzle for the handwriting experts.
"Nothing personal," said the goon. He even smelled like a lawyer, pungent with cologne and garlic and wine.
"I hope you fry in Hell," she said.
"The only place I'll be frying is on the beaches of Singapore," he said, bragging with the confidence of a sleazy crook who thought he was getting away with murder. Make that two murders. And he'd been smart enough to stick a frame on Bailey as well, if worse came to worst. That and millions of simoleons would buy him plenty of time to skip the country.
Lee put the pen down. "The police are probably watching my apartment. They've already questioned me once."
"And the pressure has driven you to suicide," the goon said. "Guilt is a real bitch, isn't it?"
She sat back and looked out the window. The sun broke through, and the shadow of a palm tree fell across her face. Her eyes were hard, set in that determined look that I knew so well. She would not give her killer the satisfaction of making her squirm.
"You know what I can't forgive you for?" she asked, as if the gunman were a wayward child. "For taking away the only things I wanted to live for. You took my Richard, and now you're taking me from the father I've always wanted to have."
"Cry me a river."
I concentrated, trying to muster some flesh. If the lawyer and Bailey DeBussey and Bailey's jar-headed lover enjoyed a life of luxury, they won. If Lee died, I failed. If I couldn't will myself into action, I lost. And eternal love wasn't something you got many second chances at.
Now that I'd cleaned out the crypt inside my sorry soul, I had no desire to let dust gather in the corners.
I flitted to the goon's ear and penetrated the canal until I was at his eardrum. Come ON, I thought, Make it happen.
What did my caseworker say? Faith. It's all about FAITH.
I was screaming inside, but I only managed a slight whisper. "Hey, you."
The lawyer cocked his head and scratched his ear.
Faith.
I looked at Lee's face and tried again, raising my voice to gnat level. "It's God, you idiot."
"Huh?" The goon glanced around, his mouth parted in confusion.
"You've been a very bad boy," I whispered. Psychic razors slashed at my essence, my batteries pulsed with the last flicker of a charge, but I kept going. "God doesn't like bad boys."
Maybe it wasn't my place to play God. Maybe they'd hold that against me later. But the administration at The Bright Place set the rules, not me. They're the ones who gave me power and a mission. And another chance.
They had taught me to hope. And, to hell with it, I was just a conduit, after all. "God's not happy with you."
The goon shook his head. His gun hand dropped to his side. He'd forgotten Lee in his surprise.
"God's going to have to kick your ass now," I whispered. Lee swung a leg out, making contact and sending the gun clattering across the floor. She exploded from her chair, delivering a flurry of chops and kicks to the poor guy's neck and stomach. The air rushed out of him as I backed away to enjoy the show.
Lee was good. Took her thirty seconds to wipe him out, and she didn't even make him bleed. He would have some nasty bruises, though. She's merciful, but not to a fault.
She tied his hands and called the police. I tried to summon myself into flesh, desperate with desire, but I was gone, done, used up. She was already out the door.
If she had heard my God imitation, she hadn't recognized my voice.
***
13.
Later, I drifted through Uhlgren's office. He was telling the District Attorney about the case. Turns out that Ron Wesmeyer's lawyer had actually worked his way through law school as a hit man. When he saw a chance to make a two-million-dollar cut, he fell back on old habits, though his ultimate plan was to filch the whole 10 mil himself.
The lawyer fingered Bailey and her boyfriend. Bailey was the mastermind of the whole setup. I guess smarts run in the family, same as looks. Too bad Bailey wasted hers, unlike her sister.
That was my only regret. Lee had finally found her family, except one of the bunch had turned rotten. Well, you can't ask for everything, especially in Los Angeles, and doubly especially around Christmas time. You can, but in my experience, you're just wasting your prayers. I guess even hope isn't unlimited.
I spent most of my remaining time hanging around Lee's place. It was a joy just watching her daily rituals, her karate routines, her laundry, her visits with her father. They were getting along great. She was going to be just fine.
I only had one more piece of unfinished business on this Earth.
***
14.
I had a beautiful funeral. I didn't know I had so many friends. It was good to see Wesmeyer by Lee's side. The priest's eulogy was so inspiring that you'd think I was up for sainthood.
Lee put a gorgeous bouquet on my chest, white roses, bluets, and yellow lilies, all grown in her garden. The morticians had done a swell job. I looked as if I were sleeping and visions of sugarplums were dancing in my head. As the mourners filed out and got into their cars to drive to the cemetery, Lee went back to my coffin for a last look.
Faith.
It's about faith, a belief in right and wrong and justice and hope and love. Love, as in caring about something bigger than your own sorry hide, but also believing in yourself enough so that you had something to give. No, not just believing in yourself, but believing in your piece in the great puzzle, something that fits but not always to the shape you like. Somebody or something, maybe some grinning guru in a corner office of The Bright Place, had a better plan. I drew strength from those things. I could do it. I could live again, if only for a moment.
In the last pew sat Miss Titanic. She grinned, then frowned and pointed to an invisible wristwatch, then held up five fingers. Five minutes left to be dead and alive.
I spent the last of my energy incorporating myself. Lee's moist eyes widened, but she didn't scream. She's not the kind of lady that gets thrown all out of kilter over a little thing like the ghost of her dead lover. Or maybe her father had told her about my visit.
"Hiya, honey," I said, trying to be suave, which is kind of hard for a corpse.
"Richard?" she whispered.
"Yeah."
"But you're...you're..."
I nodded. "That's right."
"Oh, sweetie," she said, and more tears rolled down her pretty cheeks. I didn't think you could squeeze that much water out of a person. It made me feel good, in a strange way.
"Listen, babe, I don't have much time." I wiped her tears away, glancing behind me to make sure the priest didn't have his convictions rocked by my appearance. Only one ghost was sanctioned by the church, and that was the Holy Ghost, not Richard Steele. Fine by me. I had other temples to walk through.
The priest was occupied bottling holy water or something, so I went on with what I needed to say. "Here's the deal. I didn't say this as much as I should have. But I lo
ve you. Forever."
More tears. This time they were mine.
Ghost tears are cold, serious stuff.
Lee gripped my hands. I stammered, shivering, my earthly molecules about to disintegrate for the final time.
"I don't mind if you find another guy," I said.
When she shook her head, I squeezed her hands. "You might not feel like it for a long time, but you might someday. I'm just asking one thing."
"Anything," she said, the heartache plain in her voice.
"Save the last dance for me, will you?"
She nodded, laughing and crying at the same time.
With a last effort of will, I kissed her hard enough for her to be sure she wasn't hallucinating. My lips went numb, then my fingers, then all my borrowed flesh.
"By the way," I whispered. "Thank you for the flowers. You throw a lovely funeral."
Then I was mist, scattered on the winds of time and the universe, gone to whatever this nice bright place is.
I like to think it's heaven.
I'm an optimist, you know.
THE END
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About Scott Nicholson:
I believe we build valuable ideas together, some of them inside a book, and some outside a book. I am honored that you shared my ideas and brought them to life in your imagination. I invite you to write a brief review or tell your friends about these ideas we have shared.
I’m author of more than 30 books, including The RedChurch, Liquid Fear, Chronic Fear, The Harvest, and Speed Dating with the Dead. I collaborated with bestselling author J.R. Rain on Cursed, The Vampire Club, Bad Blood, and GhostCollege. I’ve also written the children’s books If I Were Your Monster, Too Many Witches, Ida Claire, and Duncan the Punkin, and created the graphic novels Dirt and Grave Conditions. Connect with me on Facebook, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Twitter, my blog, or my website. I am really an organic gardener, but don’t tell anyone, because they think I am a writer.
Feel free to drop me a line anytime at [email protected], or visit my Author Central page at Amazon to ask a question. If you enjoyed this book, please tell your friends and give another Nicholson title a try. If you hated it, why not try another one anyway? What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, and what does kill you is probably lurking in my next book. Read on for more.
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SHE CLIMBS A WINDING STAIR
(From the supernatural story collection Ashes. View the collection at view it at Amazon or Amazon UK)
Outside the window, a flat sweep of sea. The ocean's tongue licks the shore as if probing an old scar. Clouds hang gray and heavy, crushed together by nature's looming anger. In the distance is a tiny white sail, or it might be a forlorn whitecap, breaking too far out to make land.
I hope it is a whitecap.
Because she may come that way, from the lavender east. She may rise from the stubborn sandy fields behind the house, or seep from the silver trees beyond. She could arrive a thousand times, in a thousand different colors, from all directions above or below.
I can almost her hear now, her soft footsteps on the stairs, the whisper of her ragged lace, the mouse-quick clatter of her fingerbones on the railing.
Almost.
It's not fear that binds my limbs to this chair, for I know she's not bent on mortal vengeance. If only I could so easily repay my sins.
Rather, I dread that moment when she appears before me, when her imploring eyes stare blankly into mine, when her lost lips part in question.
She will ask me why, and, God help me, I will have no answer.
I came to Portsmouth in my position as a travel writer on assignment for a national magazine. In my career, I had learned to love no place and like them all, for it's enthusiasm that any editor likes to see in a piece. So neither the vast stone and ice beauty of the Rockies, the wet redwood cliffs of Oregon, the fiery pastels of the Southwestern deserts, the worn and welcoming curves of the Appalachians, nor the great golden plains of the Central states tugged at my heart any more or less than the rest of this fair country. Indeed, much of my impression of this land and its people came from brief conversations and framed glances on planes, trains, and the occasional cab or boat.
So the Outer Banks held no particular place in my heart as I ferried across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke. To the north was the historic Hatteras Lighthouse, the tallest in the country, which was currently being moved from its eroding base at a cost of millions. I thought at the time that perhaps I could swing up to Hatteras and cover the work for a separate article. But assignments always came before freelance articles, because a bankable check feeds a person much better than a possibility does.
So on to bleak Portsmouth for me. At Ocracoke, I met the man who was chartered to take me to Portsmouth. As I boarded his tiny boat with my backpack and two bags, my laptop and camera wrapped against the salt air, he gave me several looks askance.
"How long you going to stay?" he asked, his wrinkled face as weathered as the hull of his boat.
"Three days, though I'm getting paid for seven," I said. "Why?"
"You don't look like the type that roughs it much, you don't mind me saying." His eyes were quick under the bill of his cap, darting from me to the open inlet to the sky and then to the cluttered dock.
"I'll manage," I said, not at all pleased with this old salt's assessment of me. True, I was more at home in a three-star hotel than under a tent, but I did hike a little and tried to be only typically overweight for a middle-aged American.
The man nodded at the sea, in the distance toward where I imagined Portsmouthlay waiting. "She can be harsh, if she's of a mind," he said. Then he pushed up the throttle and steered the boat from the dock in a gurgle and haze of oily smoke.
We went without speaking for some minutes, me hanging on the bow as the waves buffeted us and Ocracoke diminished to our rear. Then he shouted over the noise of the engine, "Hope you brought your bug repellent."
"Why?" I said, the small droplets of ocean spray making a sticky film on my face.
"Bugs'll eat you alive," he said.
"Maybe I can borrow some at the ranger station," I said.
The man laughed, his head ducking like a sea turtle's. "Ain't no rangers there. Not this time of year."
"What do you mean?"
"Hurricane season. That, and federal cuts. Government got no business on that island no way. Places like that ought to be left alone."
My information must have been wrong. Portsmouth was now administered by the National Parks Service, since the last residents had left thirty years before. An editorial assistant had assured me that at least two rangers would be on duty throughout the course of my stay. They had offices with battery-operated shortwave radio and emergency supplies. That was the only reason I had agreed to take an assignment to such a desolate place.
Not for the first time, I silently cursed the carelessness of editorial assistants. "The forecasts are for clear weather," I said, not letting the boatman know that I cared one way or another.
"You should be all right," he said. "Least as far as the weather's concerned. Still, they blow up quick sometimes."
I looked around at the great blue sea. The horizon was empty on all sides, a far cry from the past glories of this area's navigational history. In my research, I had learned that this inlet was one of the first great shipping routes in the South. Decades before the Revolutionary War, ships would come to the shallow neck and offload their goods to smaller boats. Those boats then distributed the cargo to towns across the mainland shore. Spurred by this industry, Portsmouth had grown up from the bleak gray-white sands.
"A lot of shipwrecks below?" I asked, more to keep the old man talking than to fill any gaps in my background knowledge.
"Hells of them," he said. "Got everything from old three-mast schooners to a few iron freighters. Some of them hippie divers from Wood's Hole said they saw a German U-boat down t
here, but they was probably just smoking something funny."
"So the bottom's not too deep here?"
"Depends. The way the sand shifts here from one year to the next, could be fifteen feet, could be a hundred. That's why the big boys don't come through here no more."
And that's why Portsmouth had died. As the inlet became shallower, ships no longer wanted to risk getting stranded or else breaking up on the barrier reefs. The town had tried to adapt to its misfortune, and was once an outpost for ship rescue teams near the end of the 19th century. More than a few of the town's oarsmen were lost in futile rescue or salvage attempts.
Then ships began avoiding the area entirely, and the town residents left, family by family. The population dwindled from its height of 700 to a few dozen in the 1950s. The stubborn Portsmouth natives continued to cling to their home soil despite the lack of electricity, no steady food supply, irregular mail service, and a dearth of doctors and teachers. But even the hardiest finally relented and moved across the sound to a safer and less harsh existence, leaving behind a ghost town, the buildings virtually intact.
"There she is," the boatman said, and I squinted against the sparkling water. The thin strand came slowly into view. The beach was beautiful but bleak, a scattering of gulls the only movement besides the softly swaying seagrass. Low dunes rolled away from the flat white sands.
"Used to be a lot of wrecks right along this stretch," the boatman said.
"I read that they'd go out in hurricanes to rescue shipwrecked crews," I said.
"Brave folks, they was," he said, nodding. "'Course, you'd have to be brave to set down roots in that soil, or else crazy. My people came from here, but they left around the First World War, when the getting was good. They's still lots of them on the island, though."
I was confused. "I thought the town was abandoned, except for the rangers."
He gave his dolphin-squeak of laughter. "Them that's under the sand, I mean. In the cemeteries. Got left where they was buried."
The Dead Love Longer: A Novella Page 7
