“Natural clairvoyance? Come on, Grandie. Until Jimmy came along, I was spiritually blind. You said I’d need special glasses to see ghosts!”
“Everyone has the gift to some degree. Even your friend Aimee.” She gives me a knowing look, making me wonder just how many times she snooped around without me noticing. “But people like you and me, we were born with access to a much higher spiritual level. You had the key all along. It was just a matter of fitting it into the lock and turning. Your tarot readings were actually beginning to open you up to this world. Did you sense that?”
“I...I got a couple of visions the past few readings.” Dumbfounded, I say, “Did Jimmy have to die just so I could develop clairvoyance? It’s all my fault?”
“His death was written in the stars. But it needed someone special on the earth plane to bring the truth out, and bring him peace. Jimmy was the perfect project for you, don’t you think?” She shakes her head. “That poor boy was terribly confused when I found him wandering around. I believe that unfortunate head injury knocked him senseless. It takes some time for physical pain to subside after you die. But look how well he adjusted with you by his side!”
My heart flops as I think about that first night of his afterlife. “Poor guy got stuck with a rookie!”
“I knew you could help him, if only because you were a familiar face. I wanted you to develop the skills I knew you had. The skills I should have nurtured in you when I was alive. Reading tarot is wonderful, but you’re meant for even greater things.”
“Like talking to dead people,” I say wryly. “Where is Jimmy now?”
She doesn’t take her eyes off me. “You’ll see him soon.”
“What about all the other dead people? There’s got to be millions of them roaming around. And why does heaven look exactly like Camberwell Forest?”
“We’re not in heaven,” she says breezily, then she catches my look of horror. “And, relax, this isn’t hell.”
“Thank God for that.” Deep down I knew hell wouldn’t be quite so picturesque or temperate.
“Think of it as a waiting room between life and death. Limbo. Some people stay here a long time.”
“Wait, you shouldn’t be on some waiting list. You’re practically a saint!”
“I’m not a saint, and I’m no angel either.” She squeezes my shoulder.
“You belong up in heaven, frolicking on big white clouds. This is insane. I want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
She laughs. “That won’t be necessary. I’m free to go. If I want to. No one forced me to loiter here. Like I said, I made the choice to say because I wanted to finish what I started before I died.”
“Grandie, you’re crazy. Don’t you want to move on, see Grandpa Fred? All your friends and family?”
“Of course. I can do that now that you don’t need me anymore.” She looks at me pointedly over fine gold-rimmed glasses. Funny that she even needs those things in her post-life existence. “It’s time to move along.”
I frown. “Does this mean you’re taking me to upstairs heaven now? We have full access?”
Her eyes widen. “Good grief, no. Not you.”
Not me? Fear cleaves into my chest like a butcher’s knife. I can’t bring myself to say the other “H” word aloud. Who knows? I could be fending off the flames of he...the other place in a nanosecond. “Where do I belong?”
“Here. On earth,” she says. “I don’t want to sound cliché, but it’s not your time. There’s still a lot of life in you. See, what’s happening now is you’re having a near-death experience. Mara put cacao powder in the... What did she call it?”
“Boeuf bourguignon...” I say faintly. Oh, God. I told her about my chocolate allergy in the diner.
“She knew what effect it would have on you.”
I clutch my chest in disbelief, not sure if I’m imagining a heart throbbing inside my rib cage. “I’m...I’m still alive?”
Grandie presses her hand to my shoulder and warmth radiates from her touch. “Very much so, and you’re the only one who can bring about justice for Jimmy. You’re the only one who knows the truth about Mara now. You will live to tell the tale.”
“But she’ll just deny it!” I protest. “My word against hers and all that.”
A bright white light floods the parking lot. More powerful than a thousand suns. But it’s not scorching us. I just want to bathe in it all day. The Light becomes silvery, glimmery. Heavenly.
Grandie fixes me with a bittersweet smile. “Keira... Isn’t it beautiful?”
A jag of pain stabs into my heart. “No. It’s too soon. We’ve just found each other.”
“You don’t need me anymore, sweetie.”
As soon as the words leave her mouth, a stinging sensation in my thigh makes me double over. Then there’s heat. Intense heat. Followed by a cold blast that seems to reach every corner of my body.
“Grandie?” I squeak, holding my chest. Torrents of air rush in and out of my lungs. “What’s happening to me?”
She walks backward, a broad smile stretching across her face. Where is she going?
“Don’t be afraid, Keira. You’ll be okay. Dan’s looking out for you.”
“Dan?” Every second that passes, I feel heavier, like I’m falling to earth.
“He’s a sensitive one, isn’t he? I’ve been watching over him, too. He’ll be all right. But you have to help him through the next few months. Just as I’ll look after Jimmy.”
The Light ripples like a pond. I shield my eyes as a purple silhouette emerges and sharpens. Jimmy staggers. He’s confused. Distraught.
“Where am I?” he asks. The bewilderment in his voice makes my heart crack.
“Jimmy!” I cry and run toward him. He brushes past me like I’m not there.
He stalls in front of my grandmother, brow wrinkled as he addresses her. “What happened? Who are you?”
“Why is he ignoring me?” I ask Grandie.
Her lips don’t move, but I can hear her clear as a bell. “As far as he’s concerned, you’re on a different plane. One for the living. This experience has been a way of showing you how he was killed. You’re not meant to interact. But now that you know the truth, Keira, you must act.”
“I have to prove Mara killed him,” I say. “But how? It’s not like there are fingerprints...or a gun powder residue or anything obvious like that.”
“Remember the keys,” Grandie intones while Jimmy himself wrings water from his shirt and looks utterly disoriented.
I frown. “What keys?”
“You have the gift, Keira. You always have. Just tap into it. Let it grow, and never be ashamed of it or try to hide it. Listen to the messages that come to you.” Her voice becomes faint. Both she and Jimmy shimmer. Their bodies flicker opaque and transparent.
“Please don’t leave me!” I sob.
Air rushes into my lungs again, and a loud thrumming sound deafens me.
“Keira, live. Live for me.”
The Light behind Grandie pulsates. There’s life there. Love and joy, too. I run toward it, but when I get within a foot of my grandmother, an invisible force blocks me. Like a celestial velvet rope keeping the riff-raff out of an exclusive club.
“Will I see you again? You know I’ve been bumbling around like an amateur without your help.” Suddenly I’m desperate to ask her everything I should have when she was alive. “Should I keep using crystals? Holy water? What about the cards?”
“You are doing just fine without props, Keira. Everything you need is inside you. I will check on you from time to time. Maybe when you least expect it.” She winks, then grows serious. “Your mother needs you, and so does Jimmy’s family. You can go to them now. The Light has healed you somewhat. Dan is doing the rest.”
Dan.
Intense, sensitive, passionate Dan.
A vision of his blue eyes stirs up something raw inside me. My heart always loved him. I want nothing more than to return to Dan. Communicating with the dead is one thing.
But it doesn’t matter one bit if I can’t tell Dan how I really feel about him.
Chapter Twenty-three
“Dan!” It’s the first word out of my lips. Chased by a hacking cough that scorches my throat. I swallow hard. Agony. Weakly, I open my eyes. He’s so close he’s a blur. But his scent and the feel of his warm hands are vivid. Comforting. I glance at the EpiPen on the floor next to a lone, dirty sock. “You saved me.”
“When I saw you... Jesus, you weren’t breathing! You were shaking. You had these huge bumps all over...” He tucks a lock of hair behind my ear, and I lean my cheek into his palm. “Chocolate did this to you?”
I run a hand over the remnants of those itchy welts. Not so itchy now. A memory of the Light flashes in my mind. It really did have a healing effect. Still, there’s an ache in my heart when I think of Grandie and our very brief time together in the other realm. Then I remember something else.
“No. Yes! Mara did this to me.” I crawl onto my hands and knees before using his rock-like shoulders to haul myself up. He gives me a glass of water and I swallow it down in one hit. “But then I had a vision. I saw her kill Jimmy.”
He looks at me in a daze.
“Dan. Mara killed your brother.” My fingers close around his arm. Something intangible fractures inside of him. “Is she still in the house? I’ve got to find her.”
“I saw her drive away, and then I came to find you. But there’s no way in hell you’re going after her alone if she’s a killer.”
“There’s no if,” I growl, banging the glass down on Jimmy’s nightstand.
Dogs in the neighborhood howl in protest as a siren echoes in the distance. Dan turns toward the sound. He throws something around my shoulders. Jimmy’s blue-and-gold letterman jacket. It doesn’t quite have the same comforting smell or warmth that Dan’s jacket had that night we went to the waterfall.
“I called the paramedics,” he explains.
“We’ll tell them it was false alarm and get out of here.” I wobble as I move to the door, but force my legs to carry me.
Dan grabs my elbow and gives me a fierce look. “You nearly died. At least let ’em check you over.”
Roughly, I draw him to my chest and kiss him deep and hard. Our heartbeats hammer in time, but it’s not long before a strong, confident voice inside my head joins the chorus. It’s not Grandie’s voice. It’s mine. Telling me where Mara has gone not only to remember Jimmy but to join him in death. I’m not letting her go without confessing.
Then she can go jump for all I care.
In a husky whisper, I say, “No need. I’m alive and kicking butt. We need to get to the waterfall.”
Everything starts and ends there.
* * *
Dan helps me up the last few stairs to the top of the waterfall. Mara stands on the granite edge, head bent toward the water. She doesn’t move or acknowledge our presence. It’s like she’s under a spell. Hypnotized.
Dan clamps my hand so hard it’s like he’s trying to fuse his flesh with mine. “You should let me grab her. She’s already tried to kill you once today.”
“And she failed.” Grimly, I extricate myself from him. “It’s okay, Dan. I think I can get through to her.”
“You think?” His blue eyes plead with me. “Keira...let me back you up.”
My heart flips. I want to tell him right then that I love him for caring. I stand on tiptoes so our lips almost meet. We hover there for a moment, both of us hesitant. A crow squawks, and I abruptly crash onto flat feet as the bird flaps its ebony wings. Is it trying to tell me something? Like, hurry up?
I press my palm against Dan’s warm cheek and I smile reassuringly. “I’ve got this. I just want to see where her head’s at before we rush her. Wait here till I give you a sign.”
Blotting out the concern on Dan’s face, I carefully make my way over the slippery ground and stand beside her, willing myself to stay calm. Hysteria isn’t going to help diffuse the situation.
Besides, she’s motionless and unblinking. Unless she has jungle-cat reflexes, I can’t see her lunging at me for a second attempt on my life. Her hands clutch something so tightly I’m afraid her thin bones will splinter and break through her skin.
I set my phone to record mode. I pray it’ll pick up our voices over the noise of the waterfall. “Hey, Mara, what are you doing here?”
She looks at me with surprise. “You’re alive.”
“No thanks to you,” I say before catching myself. I don’t want to provoke her, because clearly she’s disturbed. “Mara, I thought we were friends.”
“I mustn’t have put in enough cacao,” she says, her eyes glazed.
“I’m not going to offer any recipe suggestions,” I say in a flinty tone.
She twitches. “A couple of Christmases ago, I told my mom how much I missed Dad. So she hired a private detective to find him. When he couldn’t track him down, she hired another. And another. All of them said it wasn’t their fault he didn’t want to be found.
“One night, we watched one of those shows where people talk to a real, live psychic on TV.” She laughs mirthlessly. “Mom didn’t believe them, but I kept turning it over in my mind. What if...? You know?”
“So I found a ‘real, live psychic’ in Emerson. He didn’t ask me any questions. He just held a photo of my dad. I walked out of there with an address. And a warning about...expectations.” Mara shakes her head, eyes narrowed. “Dad was exactly where the psychic said. In a homeless shelter. Out of his head on drugs, alcohol, or whatever makes a man forget he has a daughter.”
In a dull tone, she continues, “My father still didn’t want me. The psychic was right.”
Part of me feels sorry for her. But I quash that sympathy right away. I’m not going to buy into her sob story, not if she’s trying to milk it as an excuse for her crimes. “So when you figured I could use my gift to find out who killed Jimmy, you had to bump me off?”
Would she have another crack at silencing me, and this time in a less subtle way? Warily, I glance at the falls, then at Dan.
Mara shrugs off the accusation and closes her eyes as if to block out my existence. “I really loved coming up here with Jimmy.”
What was once a beautiful escape from school will now forever be remembered as a grisly murder scene. While Mara’s eyes are still shut, I motion for Dan to come closer, behind Mara. With trembling hands, he videos us on his phone. Smart guy. Judging by his white-knuckled grip, I guess he’d rather use put those hands around her neck her instead.
Mara turns to me. A faint jingling alerts me to the keys in her hand. I shudder under her gaze. “When we were kids, we would ride our bikes all the way out here. Just the two of us. I thought we’d do that for the rest of our lives.”
It’s hard to hold back a retort. I can’t. “Then why did you kill him?”
The tears break through the barrier of lashes. Mara shakes her head. “You know what I hate about bad guys in movies? I hate that they explain their motivations in a long, uninterrupted, self-indulgent monologue, giving a blow-by-blow of how they committed their crimes and why. All it does is buy the so-called hero time to plan a counterattack. That’s not my style.”
I’d like nothing more than to punch her lights out. But that’s not my style, either. At least she acknowledges she’s the villain around here. But can I get her to say the words “I killed Jimmy Hawkins”?
“Jimmy’s family deserves to know the truth. From you.”
Myriad emotions contort Mara’s face. Fear. Bitterness. Guilt.
“I’ve loved that family since I was three years old, when we moved next door. They’ll hate me. I just...I just couldn’t bear it.”
“Do you think it’ll be easy for them to go on without Jimmy? Isn’t that worse?”
She collapses sideways on the ground and sobs. “All I want is for Jimmy to come back.”
At first, my revulsion over what she did to Jimmy and to me melts like snow under a blazing sun. I cast another
dizzying glance at the water tumbling over the rocks below.
Wasn’t so long ago that I admired Mara for quietly commanding respect while leading the Bugle team. People often describe her as being capable.
Now I realize she’s capable all right—of murder. I ease us away from the edge, trying to take away another opportunity for her to kill me, too.
Hoarsely, I say, “You can’t bring him back, Mara. You can’t undo what you did.”
In a desperate tone, she says, “It was an accident. It really was! Jimmy fell!”
The vision I experienced told me there was much more to it than that. I had to get her to admit exactly what happened. “The initial fall might have been an accident. And he might have survived. But then you pushed him down the waterfall and ran. Just like you ran from me after you fed me chocolate. You knew I was allergic.”
“You don’t have anything on me,” she cries.
For a terrifying few seconds, I allow a thought to cling to my brain—that she really could finish me off so I can’t prove she murdered Jimmy. If I let her.
“You could confess. To the police,” I say. Mara shakes her head and stares down at the water. She still hasn’t noticed Dan practically breathing down her neck. In a gentle tone, I continue, “Think of what a relief it’ll be when the truth is out there, not just for you, but for the Hawkins family. You love them, don’t you? Give them some peace.”
She refuses to look at me.
Dan and I exchange an emotional look. He nods encouragingly.
Behind him, Jimmy materializes. He shuffles a deck of cards with his large, ghostly hands. Very special, antique cards.
Where the hell has he been? And what’s he doing with Sophia?
“Who’s Sophia?” Jimmy asks.
My jaw goes slack. He can read my mind?
“Yeah, I can.” A smile spreads across his face. “Guess I picked up another skill.”
Mara sniffles. I throw her a wary glance. I’d love to know how, why, when and where Jimmy’s new talent for telepathy kicked in. Can he read all my thoughts?
This is Your Afterlife Page 18
