Waking Up Dead

by Margo Bond Collins

“Can you two shut up so we can just get this over with?” Ashara said. Her voice was shaking.

  “Does this scare you?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why? It’s not like anyone’s likely to come in and find us. The owner is in jail. Well, one of them. The other one’s dead, and I don’t see her suddenly showing up if she hasn’t bothered to already.”

  “I just don’t want to get caught by anyone,” she said. “Do you know what happens to black people who get caught breaking and entering? They go to jail. All the time.”

  “We’re not going to get caught,” I said.

  “Easy for you to say,” she said. “You’re white and a ghost.”

  “Callie’s right,” Stephen said to Ashara. “And if we get caught, I’ll just say that Rick asked me to check up on things. He’ll back me on it.”

  Ashara took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. If you’re positive.”

  “I’m positive,” he said, reaching over and patting her hand.

  “Hey,” I said, “if you two are going to get all lovey and shit, I’m outta here.” I swung out through the back seat door and slipped between the houses until I got to Rick McClatchey’s back fence. I decided to go over it instead of through it. And then I slid through the back door and into the house.

  It looked a lot like it had when I had left it after Molly’s death. Hard to believe that had really only been a few days ago. It seemed like months.

  I turned back to the door and drew the lock. I was clearly getting better at manipulating physical objects, because the bolt slid back much more easily than I had anticipated it would.

  A few moments later, Ashara and Stephen stepped up onto the back deck. I waved them in through the French doors. They had to duck under the crime-scene tape that had been haphazardly applied to it--so haphazardly that it stuck to the door frame, but not the door. Good thing the door opens inward, I thought.

  “You know,” said Ashara to me, “I’m getting used to you walking through walls. I can even deal with you showing up in the middle of trees, even though it’s creepy. But watching you fly over that fence may be the most ghosty thing I’ve seen you do yet.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Levitation is just not normal. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that middle-of-the-tree business is all that great. But flying around with your hair all flowing out behind just ain’t natural.”

  I stared at her for a minute. “I’m dead, Ashara. And as far as I can tell, I’m the only ghost in town. I’m not sure there’s anything really ‘natural’ about any of this. So I’m just taking it as it comes.”

  She inclined her head. “There is that,” she agreed.

  “Can we please start doing some searching?” Stephen asked.

  “Don’t turn on any lights,” I warned.

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” Ashara said. “Did you hear the part about how I really don’t want to get caught?”

  “I’ve got a flashlight,” Stephen said, and pulled it out of his pocket. It was one of those miniature flashlights that cast a tiny circle of light.

  “Just don’t use it near any windows,” I said.

  He nodded.

  We started in the back of the house, where the McClatcheys had turned one of the bedrooms into a home office space. Stephen started with the obvious--a filing cabinet that stood in the far corner.

  “Let’s take the files to the master bedroom closet to look at them,” I suggested. “It’s huge, and no one outside will notice the flashlight if we’re in there.”

  Stephen gave me an odd look. “You seem to know an awful lot about this house,” he said. “You never did tell me how you ended up seeing Molly get killed.”

  If I’d had blood, I would have blushed. As it was, I could feel my eyes go all shifty. “I use to come over here on Thursdays,” I said.

  Stephen just looked at me, waiting for the rest of the explanation.

  I sighed. “They watched CSI. I came over here to watch it because they couldn’t see me. And because they were . . . I don’t know. Nice. Comfortable. Happy.”

  “So you came over and watched their television and enjoyed their company?” Ashara asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Even though they didn’t even know you were there?”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “Okay. That may be the creepiest thing I’ve heard yet,” Ashara said, shaking her head.

  “Yeah, well, just wait until you’re dead and people start peeing themselves when they see you,” I muttered. “You’ll start looking for some uncomplicated television-watching time, too.”

  “Hey,” said Stephen, who had been pulling files out of the file folders. “You two want to stop talking and start helping me here?” He handed a pile of folders to Ashara, along with the flashlight. “Go on into the closet and see if any of these look promising. I’ll bring some more in to you in a minute.”

  I followed Ashara into the closet, where she plopped down on the floor. She took a second to look around, though. “You’re right. This is huge.” She shook her head and started flipping through the folders, muttering to herself. “Mortgage, taxes, car loan, medical.” She looked up. “All of these seem pretty standard,” she said.

  “Go ahead and look through them anyway,” I suggested. “Sometimes things get misfiled.”

  Ashara shrugged and started opening the files. “Nope,” she said, just as Stephen walked in and handed her another stack.

  “This all looks like old college course work,” she said. “Molly’s. She must have been a packrat to have saved all this stuff.”

  We finally found what we were looking for on Stephen’s fourth trip into the closet from the study.

  “Hey!” said Ashara, loud enough to stop Stephen, who had started back into the study. “I think this is it. There are four different folders here labeled ‘genealogy.’”

  Two of the files were all about Rick McClatchey’s family--copies of old letters, old photographs, marriage certificates, a carefully mapped-out family tree. The other two were devoted to Molly’s family.

  And there, in the middle of the second file, was what I had been hoping we would find. The birth certificate of James Powell, father of Molly McClatchey, nee Mary Powell. In the space for the mother’s name was Mary Powell.

  And in the space for the father’s name was the name I’d been hoping to see.

  Graham Howard.

  One of the Howard brothers suspected of killing Mary’s older brother Jimmy Powell and disposing of his body.

  “I knew it!” I said triumphantly.

  “You did?” Stephen asked.

  “Well, yeah. You’re surprised?” Ashara asked. “I thought we all knew that’s what we were looking for.”

  “You two have got to start letting me in on the whole womanly thought process business if we’re going to keep doing this detective stuff. I need to be in the loop.”

  “You’re in the loop,” I said. “You knew everything we knew.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that I came to the same conclusions. So you’ve got to start discussing that part of this stuff with me. Okay?”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Didn’t mean to keep you in the dark.”

  He nodded and settled onto the floor next to Ashara.

  “So what does this tell us now?” he asked.

  I sat down on the floor next to them. “Okay. Jimmy comes back from the war in the forties and hooks up with the Howard brothers. They go in together and rob a bank in Atlanta--far enough away so that they won’t be immediate suspects. We already know that his little sister was wild. She starts messing around with Graham Howard. At that point, I’m guessing that either Jimmy found out about Mary and Graham or that Jimmy just got greedy.”

  “Or both,” interjected Ashara.

  “Or both,” I agreed.

  “So Jimmy takes the money and hides it away from the Howards,” Stephen said, continuing the story. “Then he and the Howards get into it and Jimmy
ends up dead.”

  “Almost certainly,” I agreed. “If he’d been alive, he would have come back for the money at some point.”

  “And somehow the money ends up in a safe deposit box in Mary Powell’s name,” Ashara said.

  “Yeah. I’m a little fuzzy on that part. It’s impossible to know which Mary Powell put it there,” I said.

  “Not totally impossible,” Ashara said. “I wasn’t looking for that sort of information when I checked to see who owned the box, but I can find out when it was first rented out. That will at least give us a timeline.”

  “Does it really matter?” Stephen asked.

  “Probably not,” I said, “but I’m curious. Did Jimmy’s mother know about the money? Did she put it away for her children? Or because she was ashamed? And if she was ashamed, why didn’t she turn it over to the authorities?”

  “I’ll check it out tomorrow,” Ashara said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Anyway,” said Stephen, “we know that the money got put there. And sat there for we don’t know how long.”

  “Pretty much untouched,” I said. “The newspaper articles said that fifty thousand dollars went missing. That’s not all that far off my guess about how much was in that safe deposit box.”

  “Okay,” said Stephen. “Fast forward to last week. For some reason, Clifford Howard comes in and kills Molly McClatchey.”

  “And then,” I said, “searches Rick McClatchey’s house and takes a key out of a box on his dresser--almost certainly the safe deposit key. Then he goes into the bank and hands the key off to Jeffrey McClatchey, who switches the money out of Mary Powell’s box into his briefcase. Then he splits the cash with Howell.”

  We all sat on the closet floor, staring at each other.

  “If Jeffrey was already on the signature card for the safe deposit box,” Stephen asked, “then why did Howard have to kill Molly?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “And another question,” said Stephen. “How did Molly end up back in Abramsville? Didn’t her father move to Atlanta?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he did. Good question.”

  “Wait,” said Ashara. “I think I saw that a minute ago.” She started flipping through files.

  Stephen and I stared at her in confusion.

  “Here it is!” she said, waving the file labeled “Mortgage.” She opened it up. “When Rick and Molly got married, Molly sold the house that she’d been living in. And here’s the deed to that house, which lists the owners as first Mary Powell, who passed it to James Powell, who left it to his daughter when he died six years ago.”

  “So she moved here because she inherited the house?” I asked.

  “And probably because she could get a job teaching at the college,” Stephen said. “She said once that one of the things she liked about Abramsville was that she and Rick could live well here without having to make a whole lot of money--she even mentioned that she had been able to survive pretty happily on an adjunct’s salary before she met Rick.”

  “Which she would have done pretty quickly, since she was a music teacher and he owned a musical instrument repair shop,” I said.

  Stephen and Ashara nodded.

  “But none of this explains why they killed her,” I said. “Even if we went to the police with everything we have, we still don’t have anything to connect Clifford Howard and Jeffrey McClatchey to the murder.”

  “I don’t know,” said Stephen. “The money’s a pretty good motive.”

  Ashara shook her head. “Callie’s right. It’s still not enough.”

  We sat there, wracking our brains, coming up with nothing.

  There’s no telling how long we would have spent in Rick and Molly McClatchey’s closet if we hadn’t heard the sound of someone coming in the front door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We all froze, our eyes wide.

  “Wait here,” I whispered. “I’ll go see who it is.” And hope to hell whoever it is can’t see me, I added silently.

  I crept down the hall on tip-toe. Never mind the fact that my feet weren’t actually touching the floor. Creeping felt like the right thing to do.

  I could hear whoever it was moving through the living room. When I got to the end of the hall, I eased my head around the corner to see if I could tell what the person was doing.

  I came face to face with Jeffrey McClatchey.

  It’s a good thing he couldn’t see me--or hear me, for that matter--because I let out a little yelp. He moved through me, then stopped and looked behind him as if trying to figure out why he’d just stepped through a cold spot. If I’d had real skin, it would have had chill bumps all over it. Brrr.

  He headed down the hall toward the home office room.

  “It’s Jeffrey McClatchey!” I yelled out. Hey, he couldn’t hear me, but Ashara and Stephen sure could. “Turn out the flashlight, be very still, and I’ll see if I can distract him!”

  I didn’t hear any response at all. When I followed McClatchey into the office, I glanced into the bedroom and saw nothing out of place. The closet door was partly shut and the room was totally dark.

  McClatchey had his own flashlight, and when he flashed it around the room, I groaned aloud in dismay. Stephen hadn’t been particularly neat in his search. All the file drawers were open and it was clear that a lot of the files were missing.

  “What the fuck?” muttered McClatchey. He walked over to the cabinet and fingered some of the files left behind. His eyes narrowed and he shook his head. “That son of a bitch,” he said aloud.

  I wondered which son of a bitch he meant. Seemed to me there were several involved in this business. Howard seemed the most likely choice, though. Maybe McClatchey thought that Howard had come in and taken important files before McClatchey could get to them.

  Or maybe he thought that his brother Rick had moved them. Or had someone come in and move them. At any rate, the fact that they were missing seemed to irritate him.

  I found that comforting and happy-making. I think he deserved all the irritation he could possibly get.

  And I was about to get the chance to try to add to his irritation, I saw, because he was beginning to search other places, either for the missing files or for some other item he felt he needed.

  He started with the desk in the office. And as long as he stayed away from the closet in the master bedroom, I was happy to let him search. If he found what he was looking for, it might actually help answer some of the questions we still had.

  He didn’t so much sort through the desk drawers as dump their contents on the floor and kick them around. Whatever he was looking for wasn’t there, though, if his curses were anything to go by.

  Next he moved to the bookshelves and started flipping through the books. He’d take one off the shelf, flip through the pages, turn it spine-side-up, and then shake it to see if anything fell out. When nothing did, he tossed it onto the floor.

  It took him about fifteen minutes to go through all the books. At one point, he took a picture of Molly and Rick off the shelf and looked at it, then muttered “Fucking nigger whore,” and tossed it on the ground.

  That’s when I decided to start screwing with his mind even if he didn’t head toward the closet.

  I started with the door. It seems to be easier for me to move things that are designed with moving parts--locks, doors, those sorts of things. Much easier than, say, picking up the picture he’d just tossed on the ground and throwing it in his face--even though that’s really what I wanted to do.

  I gathered all my concentration and shoved at the door.

  It slammed shut with a bang. I really am getting better at this sort of stuff, I thought.

  McClatchey jumped and screamed. I giggled. He spun around and stared at the shut door. Slowly, he walked over to it and ever so carefully opened it. He poked his head out into the hallway. “Hello?” he said.

  Silence.

  He flashed his light into the
hallway and across to the master bedroom.

  Silence.

  After a long, still moment, he turned back around and went back to his search. He checked the closet in the office, pulling open storage boxes and tossing their contents onto the floor. Finally, he found a small wooden box. He opened it. Inside was a bundle of what looked like old letters, tied together with a light blue ribbon that was fraying along the edges.

  “Finally,” he muttered, and shoved the letters the back into the box.

  By this point, I had given him five or six minutes to calm down.

  So I slammed the door again.

  This time he froze with his back to the door.

  It was almost a full minute before he turned around ever so slowly and looked at the door, his eyes huge.

  “Whoever is out there, this isn’t funny!” he said. “This is my brother’s house and I have the right to be here. You do not. If you don’t leave now, I’m calling the police.”

  Now that’s not a bad idea, I thought.

  “Hey, Ashara, Stephen!” I called out. “I’m going to keep him trapped in this room. Y’all get out of here. Take the folders with you. When you get to your car, call 911 and report strange lights flashing in the McClatchey house. As big as this case is, the police ought to come running.”

  Jeffrey McClatchey moved toward the door and reached out for the doorknob. This time I pushed on it with every ounce of physical and mental strength I had. The door opened an inch and then ripped itself out of McClatchey’s hand, slamming shut again. McClatchey actually whimpered.

  I heard a slight scuffle as Ashara and Stephen slipped past the office and down the hall. Apparently, so did McClatchey.

  “I’m calling the police right now!” he yelled.

  “Yeah, right,” I said aloud.

  I could hear the back door open as my friends left. McClatchey, assuming that whoever had held the door shut was now gone, tried to open it again.

  I didn’t let him. Just for fun. And because he was a sick, nasty man who deserved to be haunted. In fact, I thought, if we can’t get him put in jail, I might just decide to move in with him and make his life a living hell. I smiled at the thought.

  I held the door shut on him until I saw police lights in front of the house flashing off the office window.