Home Improvement: Undead Edition

by Harris, Charlaine

  “Huh,” Sam said. He didn’t sound like he was automatically signing up for the Ghost Hunters Club, but he didn’t sound skeptical, either. More like he was chewing these new ideas over. That was kind of the way I felt. My world had not included this before now. “So you’re saying he—is it a guy?—could be buried anywhere.”

  “In the movies, when you find the bones, the ghost is laid,” JB said unexpectedly.

  “The murder victim was Isaiah Wechsler, and his headstone is out in the cemetery by my house,” I said.

  “But someone’s not resting easy,” JB said, sounding just as reasonable. “You know that, Sookie.”

  Suddenly I felt tired and depressed, more depressed than I’d ever been in my life. And that just wasn’t me. I’m not saying I’m Pollyanna, but this sudden misery simply wasn’t my normal style.

  “Sam,” I said, “do you think you could change to your bloodhound form? And maybe go over the yard? If there was a burial that had to do with the murder, it would be really old, and hard to scent.” I shrugged. “But it’s worth a try.”

  “This is real life,” Tara said, not exactly as if she were angry, but simply protesting that none of this should be happening.

  Real life? I almost laughed. Experiencing a ghost secondhand and looking for a corpse weren’t what I wanted from my real life. On the other hand, worse things had happened to me.

  “All right,” Sam said grudgingly. “But not tonight. It’s nowhere near the full moon, so it won’t be as easy to change. I need a full night’s sleep first.” I wouldn’t do this for anyone but her, Sam thought, feeling ashamed that he was dragging his feet.

  I could only be grateful I had such a friend.

  THE NEXT DAY I was at Tara’s house by midafternoon. Sam pulled up just as I got out of my car.

  I was startled to see JB and Tara on their way out, in workout clothes. “I got called in to substitute for another trainer,” JB explained.

  I looked at Tara, my eyebrows raised. She said, “I have to get the hell out of this house. Quiana just got here. She’s in charge of the twins.” In truth, Tara looked awful, and JB not much better. I nodded. “We’ll keep on with the plan, then,” I said, and they were out the door before I could say good-bye.

  When Sam and I went in the kitchen, Quiana was bathing Robbie, while Sara sat in her infant seat. The babysitter looked determined to do her job. Robbie was whimpering, and I picked up Sara from her infant seat and patted her back, hoping she’d stay quiet. But she didn’t. She began to cry. It looked as if Quiana needed some help for a while.

  Since there wasn’t a third baby for Sam to hold, he went to work on the hardware for the new closet doors. I walked Sara around the house, trying to make her happier, and when I went through the sunroom I helped by handing Sam whatever he needed. Sometimes being a telepath can be handy.

  “Do you feel as lousy as I do?” he asked, as both babies escalated to full Defcon Five. I chickened out and put Sara in her infant seat in the kitchen while Quiana dressed Robbie.

  “At least that lousy,” I said.

  “I wonder if hauntings are all like this.”

  “I hope I never experience another one to find out,” I said. “I wonder . . .” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I wonder if any of this would have happened if Quiana hadn’t been here. If a psychic hadn’t been around, would we have had the same experience? Would the hammer have been a haunted hammer, or just a bloody hammer?”

  Sam shrugged and laid down his tools. “Who knows?” He took a deep breath. “Come on. If I’m going to turn, I want to get it over with. Kennedy is watching the bar, but I want to get back sooner rather than later.” The atmosphere of the house was having its way with Sam.

  I followed him through the house. Quiana watched us pass through the kitchen, her face dark with unhappiness, her eyes shadowed. The babies had finally gotten quiet in their infant seats, watching their nanny clean up from the bathing ordeal. I looked into her brain to be sure that Quiana was herself and that she was alert; Robbie and Sara were safe.

  Though I’d seen Sam change before, I could never get jaded about watching a human turn into an animal. I’d overheard some college kids in the bar talking about the physics of shapeshifting, and they’d seemed to think that the transformation was impossible. So much for their impossibilities. It was happening before me: a full-sized man changed into a bloodhound. Sam liked to turn into dogs, because humans weren’t as likely to shoot him by mistake. As a true shapeshifter, he had an advantage over wereanimals, who had to transform to one thing—werewolf, of course, or weretiger, werewombat—whatever their genetic makeup was. Sam enjoyed the variety. Sam, who normally had a smooth and swift transition, was panting on the ground when I got a scare.

  “Smooth move,” Quiana said from right behind me. I jumped about a mile. “I wish I could do that,” she added.

  “Hell in a handbasket, Quiana! Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I was making plenty of noise,” she said casually. “You were just too interested in watching.”

  I opened the back door and threw Sam’s clothes on one of the dinette chairs. “Aren’t you supposed to be with the twins?”

  She unclipped a device from the waistband of her shorts. “I got the monitor right here. They’re both asleep in their cribs. Finally.”

  Sam rolled to his feet and ambled over to me. I never knew exactly how much he understood human speech while he was in animal form, but he was looking at the house and his chest was rumbling. “I’m going to check on them,” I said. If that sounded distrustful, I didn’t care.

  The atmosphere in the house seemed somewhat easier, more peaceful. I wondered if the bad influence was wearing away—or was it because we three were out in the yard? That was a disturbing idea. I made myself put it aside, and I looked at the sleeping Robbie, hardly daring to breathe loud. The baby seemed perfectly all right. So did Sara, in her own crib. I put my hand gently on Sara’s back. The inchoate dreams of an infant flowed into my head. I thought of putting both of them in the stroller and taking them with me into the backyard, but the house was so pleasant and cool, and it was so hot outside. We had the monitor.

  I went back to the yard. Sam was scouting around, examining the space with his nose. His floppy ears were hanging forward. I’d read that this pushed the scent up to a bloodhound’s nose. Amazing. I personally thought he was very cute as a bloodhound, but that got into kind of queasy territory, so it was a thought I had to banish.

  “He’s working hard,” Quiana remarked. She’d perched on the edge of one of the yard chairs, her hands tucked between her bare knees. Her thick dark hair was twisted and secured on top of her head with a clip or two, because it was too hot for long hair. My own was piled up in much the same way.

  “You two have been friends a long time,” she said, when I didn’t respond to her last comment.

  “Yes,” I said. “A few years, now.”

  “You have a lot of friends.”

  “I have a lot of friendly acquaintances. It’s hard to have close friends, when you have a mental thing like mine.”

  “Tell me about it.” Quiana shuddered delicately.

  Frankly, I didn’t know if I wanted to be Quiana’s friend or not. There was something in her that put me off. I realized this was pretty damn ironic, since that was the way people often felt about me, but I didn’t think Quiana made me uneasy simply because she had an unusual ability. She made me anxious because for a few minutes the day before she hadn’t been alone in her skin. Someone else had been there with her.

  I turned my eyes away from the girl. I didn’t want her wondering what I was thinking about. I watched Sam instead. He was sniffing the ground with the efficiency of a vacuum cleaner.

  The lot was long and narrow, with the house leaving very little room on either side. On the north side of the house, there were maybe five feet between the air conditioner sticking out of the kitchen window and the fence that surrounded the yard from the front wall of
the house to the rear property line. Naturally, it was in that narrow strip that Sam found a promising scent. He went over it anxiously, and then he raised his head and bayed.

  I hoped all the neighbors really were at work. At least the fence blocked the view.

  Sam’s doleful bloodhound face swung toward me, and he pawed at the ground at his feet. “Awwwrrrrhr,” he said.

  I got the shovel from the tool shed. This was not going to be pretty. I was trickling with sweat after the first few shovelfuls, and I was maybe a little peeved that Quiana didn’t ask to take a turn digging. She looked down into the gradually increasing hole with an unnerving and unswerving fascination.

  I looked at Sam, who was licking one of his paws. “You better go inside and change back,” I said. “Thanks, Sam.” He started ambling toward the steps and paused, stymied. I pitched a shovelful of dirt at Quiana’s feet. “Quiana,” I said sharply, “You need to open the back door for him.”

  It was like I’d stuck a pin in her, she looked so startled. “Sure,” she said. “Sure, I’ll do it.”

  I watched her go over to the door, and it seemed to me she stumbled a little, was a bit shaky on her feet. Her mind was blurry, foggy, with strong impressions coming from God knows where. After Sam was in the house, I resumed digging. The faster I went, the sooner we’d know if Sam had found an old turkey carcass or human remains.

  After another five minutes I had to pause. Quiana had returned to her place at the edge of the hole. Her stance was rigid and her eyes were fixed on the upturned earth.

  I heard a couple of slamming car doors. JB and Tara had returned. I felt a surprising amount of relief.

  I was leaning on my shovel when they all came into the backyard—all the adults, that is. The twins were still sleeping. Sam had resumed his human form, and he was in his cutoff jeans again. His Hawaiian shirt looked cool with its loose drape around his torso. I envied him. My tank top felt wet and clingy.

  JB and Tara were still wearing their workout clothes, so they were as sweaty as I was, but they both looked more relaxed.

  “So, there something in there?” Tara asked, peering down at the hole I’d made.

  “Sam thinks so,” I replied. “JB, you want to shovel for a while?”

  “Sure, Sook,” he said amiably, and he grabbed the shovel. I sank to my haunches and watched him work.

  Sam squatted by me. He never wavered in his expectant posture.

  And with a terrible predictability, the shovel hit something that scraped instead of crunched. Without being told, JB started to scratch at the dirt with the shovel blade instead of sinking it in.

  We didn’t need the monitor to hear the babies begin to wail.

  Quiana tore herself away to go in to them. Tara seemed relieved to leave it to her.

  JB uncovered a femur.

  We regarded the bone in silence.

  “Well, we got us a body,” Sam said. “Now we need to know who it belonged to.”

  “How are we gonna explain what we were doing?” Tara asked.

  “We could say you were going to plant some beans,” I said. “I know it’s late for beans, but a cop would believe that.” I left unspoken the fact that Andy would believe that if we said it was JB’s idea. “We can say we were digging the holes for the runner poles.”

  “So they’ll come get the bones out, and then what? Will things get better in our house?” Tara’s eyes were bright with anger. “Will we stop being miserable? What about the babies? I think we have to find out who this guy was.”

  “It’s not Isaiah Wechsler, and we know Albert lived, and we know Carter was sent away after the murder. So who could this be?” I looked around, hoping someone would look as though he had had a revelation, but everyone looked blank.

  JB, shovel in hand, was standing by the crouching Sam. They were silently regarding the hole that was a grave. Sam was scowling.

  “Tara, we can’t ignore this,” I said, as gently as I could. I was fighting a rising wave of irritation.

  “I know that,” she snapped. “I never said we could, Sookie. But I got to figure out what’s best for me and my family.”

  Quiana had been gone a handful of minutes by now. I could still hear the babies crying. Why hadn’t she found out what was wrong and fixed it?

  The normally placid JB nudged Sam to make him move away from the grave. Sam’s jaw set in a way I knew meant he was barely holding on to his temper.

  I didn’t trust any emotion I felt.

  Tara was angry with me, which wasn’t normal. Sam and JB were glaring at each other. The anger in the air was affecting all of us. I made myself run into the house to find out why the babies were weeping. Tara should be doing this! I followed the sobs to their little room.

  Quiana was sitting in the rocking chair crammed in beside the cribs, and she was crying, too.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Snap out of it.”

  Her tear-stained face looked at me with resentment written all over it. “I have a right to grieve for what I’ve lost. Only my brother knows the real me,” she said bitterly.

  Uh-oh.

  “Quiana,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot calmer and a lot more nervous, “you don’t have a brother.”

  “Of course I do.” But she looked confused.

  “You’re being haunted,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. I didn’t want to say the word possessed, but it was definitely hovering in the air.

  “Sure, that’s right, blame me because I’m the one who’s different,” she snarled in a complete emotional about-face.

  I flinched, but I had to pass her to get to the babies, whose cries had redoubled. I decided to take a chance. “You want to go outside?” I said. Then I made a guess. “You can see your bones.” I watched her carefully, since I had no idea what she’d do next.

  There was someone else behind Quiana’s face, someone both anguished and angry. All I could think about was getting her out of the room.

  And then Quiana got up and left the room, her face blank. She wasn’t even walking like herself.

  I scooped up Sara, who was shrieking like a banshee.

  “Sara,” I said. “Please stop crying.” To my amazement, she did. The baby looked up at me, her face red and tearful, panting with exhaustion. “Let’s get your brother,” I said, since Robbie’s wails continued unabated. “We’ll make him happy, too.” Robbie also responded to my touch, and in a moment I was walking slowly holding the two babies. It was awkward and terrifying.

  What would have happened if Quiana had been utterly overrun by the ghost while she was here alone with the twins?

  Now that the bones had been uncovered, the emotional miasma in the house was intensifying, without any doubt. It was a struggle to get out of the house, aside from the difficulty of carrying two children. Though I wanted to leave more than anything, I stopped in the kitchen to put them in their child seats. I opened the back door and passed Sara to JB. I went down the back steps with Robbie, moving very carefully. Sam, Tara, and Quiana were in the corner of the yard farthest from the bones, and JB and I joined them there.

  In sharp contrast to the lighthearted meeting we’d had when we were planning the renovation, our conference in the backyard was grim. The late-afternoon sun slanted across the bricks of the patio, and the heat of them radiated upward. Even the heat was preferable to the haunted house.

  We waited. Nothing happened. Finally, Tara sat in a lawn chair and started feeding Sara after JB fetched her nursing shawl. Robbie made squeaky noises until it was his turn. They, at least, were content.

  Sam said, “I dug some more, and I think it’s a complete skeleton. We don’t know whose bones, whose ghost, or why it’s angry.”

  An accurate and depressing summary.

  “The only neat stories are the ones made up,” Tara said.

  Quiana, who seemed to be herself at the moment, sat slumped forward, her elbows on her knees. She said, “There’s a reason all this is happening. There’s a reason the haunt
ing started when the hammer came out of the wall. There’s a reason there’s a body buried in the backyard. We just have to figure it out. And I’m the psychic. And it’s trying to live through me. So I got to try to take care of this.”

  I looked at Quiana with some respect. What she was saying made sense.

  “It’s tied to the hammer,” Quiana said.

  “So, okay, if we want to know what happened so we can fix it,” I said, “and since I can read minds, and since the ghost can get into Quiana’s mind . . . I’m wondering if maybe Quiana and I can do something with the bones and find out who the spirit—the ghost—is.”

  Quiana nodded. “Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s get this bitch settled.” She reached over to the old patio table and took the hammer.

  We stood, full of purpose.

  JB and Sam shot out of their chairs. Sam said, “You don’t need to do this, Sookie.”

  Wild horses couldn’t have held me back from this experience. I stepped away from Sam and took Quiana’s left hand, bony and strong and cold. We went over to the excavated skeleton. Its skull gaped up at us from its grave. Quiana was holding the hammer in her free hand. Then she gasped and jerked, and suddenly I was holding the hand of someone completely different.

  And I was seeing what Quiana saw, but not through Quiana’s eyes. I was seeing . . . faces. A round-faced woman working over a kitchen table. I recognized what she was doing; she was making piecrust. She was looking up, bewildered and sad. Mama. A burly man bending over something on a tool bench, with the same air of worry about him. Father. And looking at a boy—older than me, but still a boy with an open, honest, freckled face, a face that was serious and full of doubt. Albert. I would have done anything to remove the anxiety from their faces, anything to silence the cruel words that had caused that unhappiness.

  Words spoken by that devil, Isaiah Wechsler.

  Part of me could still be only Sookie, and that part felt the growing resolution, the horrible resolve, as the entity in Quiana played out his plan.

  The night, the darkness, only streetlights in the distance where town lay. (That almost threw me out of Quiana’s mind. Since when had Magnolia Street been out of town?) Running silently across the short distance between the windows, from my window to his, and his was open in the warm night . . . through it quietly enough not to wake him Father’s hammer in my hand and . . . then he raised his hand, oh . . . oh, no. In the moonlight the blood looked black.