I FORCED MYSELF to go to Tara’s by nine in the morning the next day. I had to fight a deep reluctance. For the first time, the pretty little house with its neat front yard seemed gloomy. Even the sky was overcast. I tapped on the front door, opened it, and called, “Woo-hoo! I’m here!”
Quiana was already at work folding laundry, but her full mouth was turned down in a sullen pout and she only nodded when I spoke to her. JB was nowhere in sight. Of course, he could be at the fitness club already, but normally he worked in the afternoon and evening. Tara, too, didn’t show her face.
Sam trailed in right on my heels, and we got mugs of coffee in the kitchen. Quiana didn’t respond to our attempts at conversation, and she fixed a bottle for one of the twins in silence. Tara was having to supplement, apparently.
JB emerged from the bedroom looking groggy. My old friend was usually the most cheerful guy around, but this morning he had circles under his eyes and looked five years older. “Babies cried all night,” he said wearily. “I don’t know what got into them. They’re in the bed with Tara right now.” He downed his coffee in record time. Gradually he began to perk up, and when we set our mugs in the sink we all looked a little brighter.
I began to worry. This was a funny kind of day—in an ominous way.
Sam and JB went back into the little bedroom to finish cutting out the doorway. I climbed a folding stool to mount some brackets for shelving, which would be right above where the changing table would be placed. The tracks for the adjustable brackets were already up. (I had learned how to use an electric drill to mount them, and I was justly proud of myself.) I began counting holes on the tracks so the brackets would be even.
“And there you have it, a solid brace,” I said with some satisfaction. They were mounted too high for the twins to be tempted to climb on them, when they got bigger. They were designed to hold things Tara would need when she was changing the babies, and on the higher shelves would be the knickknacks people had given her: a china baby shoe with a plant in it, a cute picture frame with a photo of the twins, their baby books.
“Good job, Sook,” Sam said behind me.
I jumped, and he laughed. “You were thinking too hard to hear me come through the new closet door,” he said. “I tried to walk heavy.”
“You are evil,” I said, climbing down. “I don’t think I’ll work for you anymore.”
“Don’t tell me that,” he said. “What would I do without you?”
I grinned at him. “I expect you’d find a way to carry on. This economy, there are plenty of women who need a job, even working for a slave driver like you.”
He snorted. “You mean a pushover like me. Besides, you have your own financial interest in the bar now. Where are the shelves? I can hand’em to you.”
“JB cut them yesterday, and he was going to paint them when he got in from work last night.”
Sam shrugged. “Haven’t seen ’em.”
“Tara,” I called. “You up yet?”
“Yeah,” she called. I followed her voice to the current baby room. Tara was changing Robbie. She was smiling down at the baby, but she looked haggard.
“He wants to know where his sis is,” Tara said, freely interpreting Robbie’s googly stare. “I think JB’s got Sara.”
“I’ll track ’em down,” I offered. I stepped into the kitchen, where Quiana was at the stove cooking . . . spaghetti sauce, from the smell. “You seen JB and Sara?” I asked. She was thinking that she didn’t like the idea that someone could read her thoughts. I could hardly blame her for that. I didn’t like the fact that I could, either. I sensed more strongly than ever that there was something different about Quiana, something that chimed in with my own peculiarity. It wasn’t the time to tax her with it, though.
“They went outside,” she murmured, her bony little figure hunched over the stove like a junior witch’s. I crossed behind her to go out the back door.
“JB?” At first glance the fenced-in yard with its minute patio and lone water oak looked empty.
The shelf boards were there, and they were painted, which I was glad to see. But where was JB? And more important, where was baby Sara?
“JB!” I called again. “Where are you?” Maybe because of the high fence, there was not a bit of breeze in the backyard. The lawn furniture sat dusty and baking on the bricks. It was hot enough to make my skin prickle. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling the scents of town: asphalt, cooking, vehicles, dogs. I searched for a living brain in the area and had just found two when a subdued voice said, “Here.”
I circled the water oak close to the west corner of the yard to find JB sitting on the ground. I closed my eyes in relief when I saw that he was holding Sara, who was making those cute little baby noises and waving her arms.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, trying to sound gentle and relaxed.
JB had let his hair grow, and he pulled it back with a ponytail holder. If you had to compare him to a movie star—yes, he was that handsome—he was pretty much in the fair-haired Jason Lewis mold. Physically. “There’s something angry and sad in the house,” he said, sounding way more serious and troubled than I’d ever heard him. “When we opened the wall and touched the hammer, it got out.”
If I hadn’t had such a strange life, I might have laughed. I might have tried to convince JB it was his imagination. But my friend was anything but imaginative, and he’d never shown a taste for the dark side before. JB had always been sunny, optimistic, and generally along for the ride.
“So, when did you . . . notice this?” I said.
Sam had approached us quietly. Now he knelt by JB. With a finger, he stroked the line of Sara’s plump little cheek.
“I noticed it last night,” JB said. “It was walking around the house.”
“Did Tara see it, too?” Sam asked. He didn’t look directly at JB. The sun set his strawberry-blond hair on fire as he knelt in the yard.
“No, she didn’t.” JB shook his head. “But I know it’s there. Don’t tell me I’m making it up or that I’m dreaming or something. That’s bullshit.”
“I believe you,” I said.
“I believe you, too,” Sam said.
“Good,” said JB, looking down at his daughter. “Then let’s find out how to get rid of it.”
“Who’m I gonna call for that?” I wondered out loud.
“Ghostbusters,” Sam said automatically. Then he looked embarrassed.
“Me,” said a new voice, and we all rotated to look at Quiana. She still had the spoon in her hand, and it was dripping red.
There was what you might call a significant pause.
“I know stuff,” she said, sounding pretty unhappy about it. “I get pictures in my head.”
The pause extended to an uncomfortable length. I had to say something. She was already full of regret at revealing herself, and I could see that clearly, anyway. “How long have you been psychic?” I asked, which was like saying, Do you come here often? But I was clean out of ideas.
“Since I was little,” she said. “But with my parents, you know, I knew not to say anything after the first time . . . they got spooked.”
That was probably an understatement, and I could completely sympathize with Quiana. I’d had the same problem. Having a little girl living with you who could read your mind had been tough on both my mother and my father, and consequently tough on me.
“How does it happen?” I said, since Sam and JB were still floundering through their thoughts. “I mean, do you get clear pictures? What triggers them?”
She shrugged, but I could tell she was relieved that I was taking her seriously. “It’s touch, mostly. I mean, I don’t have visions when I’m driving or anything like that.”
“That’s so interesting,” I said, and I was totally sincere. It was kind of neat to know someone else who was completely human but also wasn’t normal.
She felt the same way.
“So when you touch the babies,” JB said abruptly, “what do you
see?”
“They’re little,” Quiana said with surprising gentleness. “I ain’t going to see nothing with them this little.”
Since that wasn’t true, I had to applaud her for keeping her mouth shut. And I was grateful that she didn’t spell out whatever she had seen in her own head, that I didn’t have to see it with her. If anything was worse than reading people’s minds, it would be knowing their future—especially when there wasn’t anything you could do about it.
“Can you . . . You can’t change anything?” I asked. “When you see something that’s going to happen?”
“I cannot,” she said, with absolute finality. “I don’t have a bit of responsibility. But people make decisions, and that can change what I’ve seen.” Quiana’s golden skin flushed as we all stared at her.
“Right now,” said Sam, getting from the bigger picture to the smaller, “do you think you can help us with the problems in this house?”
Quiana looked down. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to try,” she said. “When I figure out what to do.” She looked at each of us questioningly. None of us had a helpful idea, at least not at the moment.
I said, “I’m hoping that the funny feeling in the house will sort of wear away, myself. Sam opened the wall, we’ve found the hammer, so we know Albert did kill Isaiah. Surely that should set it all to rest.”
JB said, “Is that the way it works?” He didn’t seem to have a doubt in the world that I would know the answer.
“Friend, I don’t know,” I said. “If it doesn’t work that way, maybe we should call the Catholic priest.” One came to Bon Temps’s little church from a nearby town.
“But this isn’t a demon that needs to be exorcised,” Quiana said, outraged. “It’s not a devil. It’s just real unhappy.”
“It has to go be unhappy somewhere else,” JB said. “This is our house. These are our babies. They can’t go on crying all the time.”
As if he’d pressed a cue button, we could hear Robbie start to wail in the house. We all sighed simultaneously, which would have been funny if we’d had a clue what to do. But further conversation didn’t trigger any plan, so we figured we might as well go back to the job that had brought us there.
Sam and I picked up the painted shelves and went inside to put them up. Quiana followed, and she returned to the stove to stir the spaghetti sauce, her face tense with distress, her brain concentrating on fighting the unhappiness that flowed through the house like invisible water.
Sam brought in the paint. While I painted the doorframe, the men put up the drywall to close up where the old closet door had been. Once that was done, Sam very carefully painted the new wall on the old babies’ room side while I painted the interior of the closet from the new babies’ room side. It was odd to hear his brushstrokes just a few millimeters away from mine. We were working on the same thing, but invisible to each other.
It didn’t take long to finish my task. JB planned to put up two hanger rods for the twins’ tiny clothes, and shelving above them, but he’d left a few minutes before to run errands before going to work. JB had been moving slowly. When he’d gotten into his car he’d sat for a moment, his head resting on the steering wheel. But before he’d reached the corner he was smiling, and I felt my shoulders relax with relief.
After cleaning his brushes and drop cloths, Sam left for Merlotte’s. It was my day off and I needed to take care of some bills. I could hardly wait to get out of the house. I offered to take Tara with me while I drove around town, and to my surprise she agreed to go. She sat quietly in the car the whole time, and I couldn’t tell if she was depressed or exhausted, or maybe both. She grew more talkative the longer we were away.
“We can’t leave our house,” she said. “I can’t afford to buy another one, and we can’t live with JB’s folks. Besides, no one would buy it unless we can make it a regular home again.”
Since I hadn’t been in the house as long as Tara, I recovered my spirits more quickly. “Maybe we’re just being silly, Tara. Maybe we’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”
“Or a haunting out of a hammer,” she said, and we both managed to laugh.
We returned to eat Quiana’s spaghetti and garlic bread in a much more grounded frame of mind. I can’t tell you how cheered I was by our little excursion . . . or how bleak I felt after we’d been back in the house only ten minutes. The exhausted babies slept for a while, and lunch was at least tolerable, but always at the back of our conversation was the feeling that any moment one of us would burst into tears.
There wasn’t a mind I could read to get any information on what was happening in this house. There wasn’t an action I could take, a deed I could perform, that could help. I had a few friends who were witches, but Amelia Broadway, the only one I trusted, was in Europe for a month. I felt oddly stymied.
LATER THAT EVENING, we met back in the living room, even Sam and JB. No one had arranged it—it was like we were all drawn back to the house by whatever unhappy thing we’d disturbed.
Tara had slipcovered the love seat and couch recently, and she’d hung some pretty pictures of the Thomas Kinkade school: lots of cute cottages with flowers, or lofty trees with the sun grazing the tops. This was the kind of house Tara wanted: peaceful, bright, happy.
The house on Magnolia Street was not like that any longer.
Tara was holding Sara, and JB was holding Robbie. Both babies were fussy—again, still—which upped the tension in the room. Tara, uncharacteristically, had decided to turn away from reality. She was blaming JB for the misery in the house.
“He watches Ghost Hunters too often,” she said, for maybe the tenth time. “I’ve lived here for four years and I’ve never felt a thing wrong!”
“Tara, there’s something wrong now,” I said, as quietly as I could. “You know there is. Quiana knows there is. We all know there is.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Tara said impatiently, and she jiggled Sara so hard that Sara started crying. Tara looked shocked, and for a moment I read her impulse to hand Sara to someone else, anyone. Instead, she took a deep breath and rocked Sara with exaggerated gentleness. (She was terrified of turning into her mother. I think that says it all about Mama Thornton.)
Quiana stood, and there was something desperately brave about the way she went into the sunroom and approached the closet. Her thick black hair pulled back in a band, her thin shoulders squared, her golden face determined. With great courage, Quiana stepped into the space where the hammer had been stowed for so long.
I rose hastily, covering the few steps without a thought. I stood outside the closet looking in. Quiana turned a muddy white and her eyes rolled up. I sort of expected her to fall to the floor and convulse, but she stayed on her feet. Her small hands shot out in my direction. Without thinking, I grabbed them. They were freezing cold. I felt a charge of stinging electricity passing from her to me, and I made my own little shocked noise.
“Sookie?” Sam was just about to put his hand on my shoulder when I stopped him with a sharp shake of my head. I could just see us forming a chain of shaking, grunting victims of whatever had entered Quiana Wong. I could see a shape in her brain, something that wasn’t Quiana. Someone else inhabited her for a few awful seconds.
And then it was over. I had my arms around Quiana and her head on my shoulder. I was patting her a little desperately, saying, “Hey, you okay? You need to go to the hospital?”
Quiana straightened, shaking her head as if she had cobwebs caught in her hair. She said, “Step back so I can get out of this fucking closet.”
I did so very promptly.
“What happened?” Sam said. The hairs on his arms were standing on end.
Quiana was understandably freaked, but she was also excited. Her skin glowed with it. I’d never seen her look so lively.
The babies were as quiet and big-eyed as fawns when a predator is near. JB looked scared and Tara looked angry, both pretty typical reactions.
By an exchange of half-finished
sentences, we agreed to adjourn to the backyard. Though it was hot, the heat was better than whatever had been in the closet.
Tara brought all of us sweating cans of soda from the refrigerator, and we sat in the darkness, the area lit only by the light coming from the house windows. I wondered what the neighbors would think of our silent, somber party if they could see over Tara’s fence.
“So, what was it?” I asked Quiana when she looked a little more collected.
“It was a ghost,” she said promptly.
“So it must have been the boy Isaiah,” I said. “Since he was the murder victim. But why would his ghost be in this house? He was killed next door, right? Andy and Halleigh haven’t had any problems, because Andy would have told me.” (On purpose or by accident—Andy was a clear broadcaster.)
“There weren’t any bones or anything,” Tara objected. “Just the hammer.” Quiana leaned over to take one of the twins from Tara, and Tara hesitated before letting Quiana take the baby. I could feel Quiana’s sadness, but she didn’t blame Tara. “Shouldn’t there be remains of a body if there’s a ghost here?”
“Ghosts don’t have to be where their physical remains are laid,” Quiana said, her voice weary. “They’re stuck where the emotion . . . grabbed them up.”
“Huh?” Tara said.
“It’s the strong emotion that imprints them on the place,” Quiana told us. “It’s the trauma.”
Now that she’d decided to tell us she was a psychic, Quiana was just full of information.
“What kind of trauma?” JB said.
“Usually the death trauma,” Quiana said, a little impatiently. “If a person dies real scared, real angry, he leaves his imprint on the space where that emotion took over. Or sometimes the person gets fixed on an object that played a part in the traumatic event. Like a bloody hammer? And after he dies, that’s where his ghost manifests. In this case, the hammer and the closet are the objects.”
Home Improvement: Undead Edition Page 2
