Another One Bites the Dust

by Chris Marie Green

  I found Twyla sitting on the porch steps under an arch, hunched over as she scanned the palm-tree shaded property after my travel tunnel slipped closed. She was sitting up straight, very much on duty, her petticoats spread around her.

  I gestured to the property, indicating the lookiloo ghosts, like they were our biggest mystery of the day. “They’re back again?”

  “Sure. I figured, like, if you can’t beat them, make them join.” Her eyeliner made her seem extra Goth and eerie right now. She was taking her watch duty seriously. “They’ve sensed a lot of activity here, so they wandered back to check it out. Good thing they were happy-happy-joy-joy to be a part of this when I asked. It’s a good distraction for them, and we could use the extra eyes.”

  Among the lookiloos, I’d seen a couple of Native Americans and a man in a fancy pale suit and straw hat, like the ones you’d see from the turn of the century. And I’m talking about last century, like the 1900s. I kept forgetting we’d passed the twenty-first-century mark. Anyway, those two muscle-head gym rats that Randy had chased away the day before yesterday were here, too, near Amanda Lee’s pool. They’d been balancing on top of the white fence and pretending to shoot each other, just like little boys playing soldier. I wasn’t sure we could define them as helpers, although if you added, Mama’s special before that, it might work.

  “Hey,” Twyla said, staring at my wounded arm, which was glowing a faint red color, beating with every passing second. A dull pain throbbed like a slow, growing gnaw. “What trouble did you get into now?”

  “I had a run-in with Tim in his psyche. No biggie.”

  “Wait. He got his hands on you in a dream?”

  “It was more like I had a close encounter with his teeth, but it’s just a superficial injury. And it feels better every time I juice up, so it should go away soon. But I think Tim got some energy out of it.”

  “Really? Gawd. I’ve never been in a dream where someone gets me. The humans spot me in their subconscious sometimes, but I’m out of them before anything comes of it. Also, I stick to normal people when I go in, know what I mean?” Her Goth eyes got thoughtful. “Hey, what if that wound, like, made you go into another time loop and Amanda Lee couldn’t pull you out again? Who would I hang with?”

  Was she being sarcastic? I didn’t think so, and a momentary flash of pity made me smile compassionately at Twyla. She’d lost a good friend last night, and maybe she’d even done some growing up because of Cassie’s wrangling. . . .

  Then she burped, waving her hand in front of her face. “Taco Bell probably wasn’t the most bangin’ last meal I could’ve had.” Then she laughed like a hoser.

  So much for our moment. I indicated Heidi’s car in the driveway. “I see Heidi brought Nichelle here.”

  “They’re inside. There’s no way for the dickweed boyfriend to connect Nichelle to Amanda Lee, so this was the first place they came after Nichelle ran to Heidi. They both took the day off their jobs, too, so hopefully Tim won’t go to Fashion Valley looking for her. Heidi already warned the Cheesecake Factory and security to be on the scope for Tim.”

  Nichelle and Heidi both worked at the same restaurant, and calling them was a smart move on Heidi’s part. She was no dummy, what with catching on to Tim in the first place and getting the hell out of her own home this morning, where he easily could find her and Nichelle.

  Amanda Lee must’ve heard me outside, because the arched burgundy-colored door opened, and she stepped out. She was dressed in another colorful Southwestern skirt, a pale long-sleeved artist’s blouse, and chunky turquoise jewelry, but she moved like a hungover revenant.

  “Good, you’re here,” she said without much verve as she walked past Twyla. She was alert enough to notice my arm right away, though.

  Before she could ask, I waved off her oncoming question and repeated, “Superficial wound from a bite Tim gave me in his dream. Doesn’t even hurt.” Basically.

  That wasn’t good enough for her. “A wound? From a dream? Jensen, did it occur to you that you’re lacking energy because some of your power bled out of you?”

  Yup. Next subject, please?

  “How’s Nichelle?” I asked.

  Amanda Lee noticed my blatant attempt at topic switching, and she let it go. “She’s asleep now that she’s in a safe place. What about Tim? What was going on with him when you left his house?”

  “He’s being watched carefully. I thought it’d be wise to give Louis some backup, so I went to Flaherty’s Pub because I knew Randy would still be there.” Even if it was closed. Good old party boy Randy. “He and Louis are going to stop Tim if he tries to leave the house and sets out to find Nichelle. Louis and I also talked about using peaceful hallucinations to calm him, so that should keep him from getting antsy.”

  Twyla said, “In the short run.”

  Like we needed the reminder.

  Amanda Lee slowly went toward the porch swing and took a seat. “Nichelle did call Tim once to tell him she wasn’t at work or at Heidi’s and that he shouldn’t try to track her down. She hung up before he could start talking back, and then turned off her phone altogether.”

  “That’s good and bad. Letting him know not to bother with those two locations was savvy, but hanging up on him could’ve made him angrier than he already is.”

  “Unless he’s ghost-medicated with a hallucination,” Amanda Lee said, her hand on her temple. She took in a long breath, then blew it out. “I knew he was going to take a big step toward his ultimate fate very soon. I should have known it would happen last night.”

  Was Amanda Lee talking about more than the vague suspicions we already had about Tim?

  “Did your psychic vibes show you something concrete about him?” I asked, floating over to her.

  “Nothing firm but, yes.”

  “A vision came to you before you got the news about Cassie?”

  When Amanda Lee trained her tired gray eyes on me, I had my answer.

  “So Cassie wasn’t the only reason you’d been drinking,” I said.

  From the steps, Twyla peered over her shoulder, then faced back front, no doubt still listening.

  “I only wanted the images to go away,” Amanda Lee said. “They get to be too much sometimes.”

  “I can believe that.” I hesitated to ask, but did, anyway. “What exactly did you see?”

  “Tim, with his hands covered in blood. He was standing right in front of my closet, as real as the night itself, as I started to get ready for bed. After I noticed him, he went inside, and when I finally looked for him in there, he was gone. That was when I felt for certain that he wasn’t a ghost who’d just entered your dimension or even a figment that my worried conscience had conjured up.”

  “It was a prescient warning,” I said.

  “Yes. To think, if you and Louis hadn’t been at Tim’s house, he could’ve truly hurt Nichelle. Or worse.”

  I took the route Louis would’ve. Optimism. “But now Nichelle is all the wiser to him.”

  Amanda Lee gazed at me like she wanted to catch my positivity by the tail and ride it. “She was in tears—angry ones—after Heidi called me and then brought her over here. Nichelle says she’s never going back to him.”

  When Amanda Lee rested a veined hand against her forehead again, my sympathy stretched toward her. She was the same age as Suze, the same age as I would’ve been these days, and her sensitivity had taken its toll more than the years had.

  “So many crimes to solve,” she said. “Past and future. How are we going to get to them all?”

  “Don’t think about it now, Amanda Lee.”

  “I haven’t forgotten about the others,” she said.

  She was talking about the murder victims she’d tried to contact before she’d gotten to me, the dead-and-gone people who might’ve been able to help her in solving Elizabeth Dalton’s case, except she hadn’t been successful in linking to them.

  Their fates had bothered me, too. Were they somewhere in Boo World? Could they be brough
t to peace if we found them and helped them with their tethers, just as we were trying to do for me?

  Sometimes questions can haunt, too.

  “I wonder how many Valium pills are still in the bottle,” she said, laughing a little. “It’s been a while since I took any.”

  Twyla turned all the way around from her spot on the steps. “Cassie used to tell me about downers. She used to take that shit in life, and it did her more harm than good.” She got a guilty cast to her essence. “Also, I tried some bad stuff when I was alive. It’s, like, not the road to go down for Amanda Lee, Jen.”

  I’d done my share of toking, so I wasn’t one to talk about recreational helpers. But Twyla was right.

  Amanda Lee was giving me an ashen smile. “You wouldn’t happen to have any hallucinations on tap, just like you’d give to Tim, would you?”

  Twyla frowned.

  I looked at Amanda Lee, with her reddened eyes. I couldn’t stop her from taking a pill, but I could control a hallucination.

  “Any requests?” I asked.

  As she smiled in relief, Twyla kept watching us. I responded before she could bitch at me.

  “I’m giving her just one.”

  She shrugged, going back to guarding.

  Amanda Lee was already prepared. She stared ahead, like she was imagining a picture in her head, then folded her hands in her skirted lap. “When I was a girl living in our Greek Revival home, we had a lawn that swept down a hill. It was massive and emerald green, like an ocean that ruffled in a spring breeze. I would sit on the porch and watch it . . .”

  I was already all over it, lifting my hand to touch Amanda Lee’s face softly.

  We’re on a porch where tall columns hold up the sloping roof of our house. A spring wind brushes through the bright Southern sky, the smell of grass and hay soothing us. From next door, where a paddock spreads, a neighbor’s horse runs free, its hooves drumming on the ground.

  In front of us lies a sea of green ruffles, blades of grass whistling in the wind, making us think that life could always be this easy if we just let it flow. . . .

  I backed out of Amanda Lee with a mild pop, bobbing in front of her, looking into her hazy eyes. Her smile was docile, grateful.

  “That’s what I needed,” she said. “Now I can handle what today brings.”

  I saw in Amanda Lee what I must’ve been like after taking a drag off a joint, sitting for hours in the same chair in my apartment, letting the world go by and not letting it hurt me.

  One time, I thought. This was all I would give Amanda Lee.

  “I already called Ruben, just after I heard from Heidi,” she said contentedly, sinking down in her swing. It creaked as it swayed. “He already had some information that a cop friend gave him about Tim’s background, but he wants to come over, anyway. Nichelle should be informed about it. He isn’t sure that she’s aware of his past.”

  Why was I getting an unsettling vibe about this info Ruben was bringing? “Why didn’t he give it to you over the phone?”

  “He wanted to talk to Nichelle face-to-face, probably to make certain she understands everything about the man she chose to be with. Besides, I invited him over for breakfast. I believe he likes to be coddled when he’s under the weather.”

  My dad was like that, too. Maybe a lot of men were. “I have a little news for Ruben when he gets here. It’s about my bracelets. I was at my death spot yesterday and I saw an image showing that I was wearing them when I died. Can Ruben do any of those CSI tests on them to see if they have DNA or whatever from the killer?”

  “We’ll ask him. I’m sure he’ll have a way to accomplish that.” She locked her sleepy gaze on me. “If you were wearing them when you died, then . . .”

  “Then it was the killer that placed the bracelets in the car. I didn’t take them off and put them there.”

  In back of us, Twyla made a shivery sound. “That’s heinous.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. Tim wasn’t the only cruel game player I was dealing with.

  Amanda Lee breathed in deeply, like she was still in Virginia, smelling the fresh air as a girl, surrounded by clusters of leafy trees instead of the California mountains. Maybe she needed to cool out after that sick piece of news I’d just given her.

  “Jensen,” she said. “Are you ever going to discuss Tim’s dream with me?”

  “Yeah.” Louis and I had already dissected the imagery while we’d been observing Tim this morning, but I was sure Amanda Lee would have her own takes on the symbolism.

  So I told her about encountering the abyss, the chessboard with the white team that had claw marks on their casings, plus the blood-coated members of the red side who all wore my ghostly hallucination face. I told her about the white mother queen, the forklift, the red queen who’d ended up in a scarlet puddle over the chessboard. Then there was the part where Tim had bitten me, wallowing in my bloody taste.

  “So I came out of the dream with this,” I said, pointing at my arm.

  “We’ll have to keep our eye on that. Twyla, does there happen to be anything like a ghost doctor in your dimension?”

  Twyla let out a massive laugh that Amanda Lee probably couldn’t hear.

  “She says no,” I said to Amanda Lee. I coasted onto the swing next to her. “You know, earlier, I was feeling like I created something awful in Tim. I kept thinking that I’m the one who brought the lightning to Frankenstein’s monster.”

  Amanda Lee gave a heavy sigh like those I remembered from my friends after a room was already enclosed by the fog of pot.

  “We can argue all night about whether people like him are born this way or made,” she said. “Nature versus nurture. Don’t take either one upon yourself.”

  She sent me a smile that told me I was only doing my best to help others, and I accepted it.

  “So,” I said, moving on, “what do you think about that abyss in the dream?”

  She rested her arm on the back of the swing. “It had to be another reference to the subconscious. That’s one interpretation down.”

  I stole a glance at Twyla, who was fascinated with seeing Amanda Lee as mellow as this.

  “He sure is big on the subconscious symbolism,” I said.

  She was off and running, but in a far less General-like way. “Then there’s the chess game. Usually that imagery would mean our little monster is utterly focused on something in his life, and it’s shutting out everything else around him.”

  “Like he’s focused on Nichelle?” Since all the red pieces had been brunette, that might make sense. She’d been a part of his game.

  “That could be,” she said. “What’s interesting, though, is that generally, if your king piece is under attack, it could mean you’re being stifled by a female presence in your life.”

  “Again, that brings Nichelle to mind. But Tim’s king wasn’t under attack.”

  “Not when you got there. He might have fought that battle before you arrived, based on the claw marks on his casings. Then you saw how he got rid of that mother queen without much consideration. He wasn’t about to be stifled by any woman on that board.”

  “Especially the red one . . .” She’d had the worst of it, becoming that pool of blood.

  Twyla was tapping her booted foot on the steps, like she was itching to turn around and engage with us but knew that she had the responsibility of keeping watch for not only a surprise visit from that dark spirit, but Tim, too.

  Amanda Lee sighed. “He certainly did control that board.”

  “Is it significant that he was dressed in white?”

  “I believe so. He’s a good guy in this. Don’t they say that all villains are heroes in their own story?”

  Good point. “One more thing—the chessboards I’ve always seen had black pieces against white, not red.”

  “Blood. He dreams in blood.”

  I discovered I’d been floating off the swing, and I brought myself down. “Do you really think he would’ve gone through with strangling Nichelle
if we hadn’t stopped him?”

  “She seems to think so.” Amanda Lee glanced in back of her, at the shaded window.

  I shivered off a chill, then said, “How about that forklift in the dream? At first, it seems like a connection to Tim’s warehouse job, but Louis thought it might have something to do with needing help clearing out the junk from Tim’s psyche instead.”

  “He’d already done that by jettisoning his mother.”

  “Maybe he needed to get rid of me, too.” Yikes. “And maybe he needed to do it with all those pieces that had my anonymous face with brunette hair, so that’s why he started doing away with that team.”

  “He also might have been combining you, Nichelle, and the other brunettes he covets, especially since you’d been controlling him during that hallucination, just like Nichelle mentally and emotionally controls him every day. That’s why he grouped you together.”

  Twyla lost her discipline, and she stood, turning around to us. “How about the ick factor in that dream? You skipped over that.”

  Amanda Lee’s arm fell from the back of the swing. “Is that Twyla? I can hear her as if she’s on a radio that’s not quite working.”

  Twyla started talking like someone who was trying to communicate with a person who didn’t speak English. Of course, when you yell at them, we all know that they automatically understand you more.

  “I said, there was a part of the dream where he totally came on to the red queen. Did he do the nasty to her or something?”

  Amanda Lee evidently did hear that. “We’ve seen a thread of seduction in both of Tim’s dreams. It’s his fantasies being mixed in with the surreal. In his first dream, he was going to make love to the neighbor in the bathing suit. In this dream, he sexually came on to her again, but he got further this time.” She paused. “I’ve seen pictures of his mother online, and she used to be a brunette.”

  Ick, indeed.

  “Why did Tim wig out after he nastied the red queen?” Twyla yelled.

  “Because he was being judged by the others,” I said.