The Good, The Bad and The Ghostly ((Paranromal Western Romance))

by Keta Diablo

  Healy stifled a yawn. "It’s the final report stating my work here is done. All you need to do is look over the findings and sign it. Nobody will see it but Nat Tremayne. We’re very discreet at the agency, Mrs. Sawyer."

  The tension around the woman’s mouth relaxed. "Oh, I don’t have to read it. I trust you, Hailey."

  "It’s Healy, and I encourage you to read it. You should never sign anything before reading the contents. My father always told me that."

  Mrs. Sawyer nodded and took the glasses hanging from a chain on her ample bosom and fitted them onto her nose. Healy watched her going over the document, her mouth silently working out the words written there.

  Healy found herself growing drowsy in the heat. She looked around the room to distract herself before she nodded off. Every surface, every wall space held a piece of bric-a-brac or painting. Healy thought about the effort involved in dusting this room. She kept her own room at the boarding house Spartan by comparison.

  Flowers, shades of pink, and lace marked this as a room decorated by a feminine hand. Unless you had the nerve to open Healy’s wardrobe, you’d never guess the gender of the inhabitant by a quick glance at her room.

  The big bay windows offered a view of the street outside the townhouse. A couple came into view, walking arm in arm. Healy’s heart dropped into her stomach.

  "It says here the ghost is pacified. How can you be certain? I may have to call on you again. What if...is something wrong, dear? You look like you’ve seen a ghost." Mrs. Sawyer dropped her glasses and looked at her with concern.

  "I’m fine. The heat...Yes, I’m sure the ghost won’t come back as long as you continue to appease it as instructed. Please continue." I only saw the ghost of my former romance, the man I thought I’d marry, walking with his new wife. They look so happy.

  "What does this word poltergeist mean?"

  "It’s a German word for a rather mischievous ghost who makes itself known by making noise, throwing things, or as in your case, moving furniture around."

  "Mischievous? You make it sound childish. I was terrified."

  The blood pounded in her ears, and Healy had to speak around a throat, tight with grief. "Yes, they can be terrifying. You were very brave. And braver still to go through with our plan for you."

  "So, this spirit is lonely and wants company?"

  "That’s correct, Mrs. Sawyer. The ghost had such happy times in this house when she was alive. All she asks is you take time every day to visit with her."

  "I’m afraid I’ll feel silly talking to a chair."

  Healy pinched the bridge of her nose. "Don’t forget the other part. You need to go out and socialize. She wants to hear all the latest news and gossip. You can leave the house. The ghost can’t."

  "I’ll try. I haven’t gotten out much since my husband died. I might be out of practice."

  Healy stood up. "It will come back to you. Now I really must be on my way."

  "Oh, wait! I have something for you. I have to fetch it from the kitchen. You wait right here."

  Healy leaned against the table. She pursed her lips and drew in short gulps of air to combat the queasiness that had come over her. Think about the case, not the couple outside.

  Sometimes the agency gave her a case where her interest in the burgeoning field of psychology came in handy. This was one of those cases. It didn’t take her long to ascertain this wasn’t a case of haunting. Mrs. Sawyer’s requests for an investigator were more a plea for companionship—a little drama in a life grown dull.

  She lifted the flap of her leather briefcase and put the signed report in. Then she picked up the planchette from the center of the table.

  The little triangle of wood set on three pins was one of her props. And that’s all it was—a prop. It gave the clients confidence to think there were instruments involved in talking to the dead. Something concrete to focus on. In theory, the spirit is able to manipulate the planchette to spell out words from letters on a board. She dropped it in the case along with her papers.

  Healy didn’t need devices to talk to the dead. She talked to them directly. She picked up her handbag with one hand and took the briefcase in the other.

  Mrs. Sawyer returned with a box wrapped in twine. "You enjoyed my shortbread so much last time you were here, I thought I’d send you home with some today."

  "Thank you. You’re very kind."

  An awkward moment followed when Mrs. Sawyer tried to hand the box to Healy, who already had her hands full. With some shuffling around, the handbag was switched to join the briefcase in one hand, and then Healy curled her fingers around the twine of the box with her free hand.

  Thus encumbered, Healy made her way out to the street. The rhythmic, hollow sound of horse hooves on cobblestones filled her ears as she made her way down the residential streets lined with townhouses. Normally, she found the sound soothing. Today it brought her no comfort.

  So it was true. John and Melanie had moved to St. Louis. Just as she’d almost managed to put him out of her mind, now she’d have to worry about running into him. And here she had moved from her small town in Missouri for the sole purpose of avoiding him. Healy chose to live in the comfortable anonymity of a large city so she wouldn’t have to confront her past. She made a new life for herself. In her new life she was alone but able to support herself. She lived within her means. It was easy. She did little beyond work. Not much money required. She’d been content.

  Now he was here.

  To be honest it wasn’t John so much she wanted to avoid, seeing him and Melanie living the life she thought she’d have. She’d put that notion behind her when she left her hometown.

  She rounded the corner onto busy Chestnut Street, stepping back when a streetcar clattered by. As it passed, it became apparent a grisly accident had occurred. Dragged behind the streetcar, a man bumped against the hard surface of the road. His lifeless body swung from side to side like a sack of rags. The body flipped over on its side as he neared her. The face was scraped raw and he’d been nearly cut in half under the wheels.

  Healy grimaced. "Damnation. I forgot to put on my glasses."

  Before the car passed, the unfortunate victim turned to her, staring at her with his dead eyes. She jumped in surprise. Seeing the dead didn’t surprise her, but they didn’t usually notice her unless she was addressing them. Strange.

  She tried to rearrange her burdens so she could get her glasses out of her handbag, but she couldn’t manage the simple act. She’d have to soldier on through the ghost-riddled streets of downtown St. Louis.

  Chapter Three

  Healy had been born a sensitive—there was talk the gift ran in her family. In her early years, this gift didn’t trouble her much unless she became emotionally upset, in which case she lost her filters and the dead appeared the same as the living. Only their dead eyes betrayed them. Her adolescent years were a storm of emotions and ghosts, both feeding off each other, leaving her a fragile wreck of a girl.

  She knew she had a reputation as being an odd person. Soon she stopped socializing all together, locking herself in her room where she felt safe. Books became her friends and she lived in fantasy worlds for the remainder of her teenage years.

  In her large family, the assumption she’d become the eccentric maiden aunt who would stay at home and take care of her parents in their declining years started to take shape. With each passing year she shut herself away from the world.

  That’s the life Healy imagined for herself as well. Until that one fateful day when her father’s new law clerk, John Howland, came to dinner.

  While her parents and five siblings sat around the table making polite conversation with Mr. Howland, Healy went through the motions of eating, taking small bites once in a while, but mainly pushing the food around her plate. She was looking down at her plate, imagining herself in a world with knights and damsels, when she sensed someone watching her.

  When she looked up, the eyes of John Howland were on her. She looked directly at his fa
ce for the first time. Throughout the introductions and the meal, she had kept her eyes downcast. Men always made a fuss over her three sisters. Healy didn’t bother with visiting gentlemen anymore.

  But looking at him now she found he had an arresting face. Not exactly handsome in the usual sense, but interesting. His eyes were light blue, like ice, but there was warmth in them directed at her now. He had high, wide cheekbones and a long mouth.

  He watched her so intently, she wondered what she’d done wrong to attract his attention. She ran her hand over her face, checking for stray food. He cast a slight smile in her direction, his eyes boring into hers.

  After dinner, Healy excused herself and fled to the sanctuary of her room. The young man’s attention left her flustered; her skin vacillated between hot and cold sweat.

  She wanted to put the whole incident behind her, but Mr. Howland persisted in visiting. And even though she kept waiting for him to discover her more interesting sisters, he continued to focus all his attention on her. It was making her ill.

  Then one day Father called her to his office. "Healy, my dear, John Howland has asked my permission to go out walking with you. What do you say to that, girl?"

  "I say John Howland has peculiar taste."

  Her father laughed. "Don’t sell yourself short. How often do I tell my children that?"

  "I’m not selling myself at all. I’m a realist. I’ve never been the kind of girl to turn men’s heads."

  "Apparently Mr. Howland thinks otherwise."

  "Why is he going through you instead of asking me directly?"

  "It’s proper he ask me first, especially given our working relationship. Besides you’ve made yourself scarce. I think you’re driving that young man mad. Go out walking with him."

  Of all the people she knew, Healy respected her father the most. Wise and patient, he never treated her like an oddity. Out of deference to Father, she agreed to go out walking with Mr. Howland.

  The first time he took her walking around the town square, anxiety tied her tongue in knots. She trained her eyes down, afraid to look up from her feet in case she met one of the ghostly horrors moving about the world. She thought John—the name he wanted her to call him—would never ask her out again. He might as well take a spin around the square with a cigar store Indian; she was so wooden and silent.

  But he did ask her out again. And again. He even took her out for dinner. In his genteel company, she found her tongue again. They delighted in finding they were both avid readers and enjoyed the same kinds of books. When John spoke he had a habit of gesturing with his hands.

  Odd what attracts you to one person. She loved to watch his long, tapered fingers in motion. He had beautiful hands, manicured and hairless. Hands made for doing elegant things, like playing the piano.

  While talking, she confessed to him how she had longed to go to college but fear of being away from her home stifled her ambitions (but she had the sense not to tell him it was fear of seeing the dead). He told her he didn’t find her lacking in education, adding she was the most intelligent woman he’d met.

  One evening while sitting on the porch swing of her house he surprised her by calling her beautiful. Healy had never considered herself beautiful. She thought her wide-set eyes were too big, too blue. She never wore colors that accentuated her eyes, which she considered freakish.

  The next time they went out for a stroll in the park John asked her if he could kiss her. Many times in her imagination Healy conjured up kisses, but she had no idea how nice it would feel to have a man’s lips on her. The kiss was so light and soft it was like having a butterfly land and flutter its wings on her mouth.

  They went on like this for eight weeks. Healy opened her heart to this gentle man who made her look at herself in a new light. Being with John made the ghosts shrink back into the shadows. Love filled her heart, driving the darkness away. They could talk for hours. He listened as well as he conversed.

  But the kissing was the thing she longed for the most. He always asked her first, and it was always the same gentle pressure of lips grazing lips. In those days she walked around with such a wide smile on her face, her family hardly recognized her. She was sure she and John would be engaged soon.

  For the first time she saw herself as a wife. She looked at houses with a different eye, deciding which style she’d best like to set up a home in. Before, when her sisters talked about the wedding dress they longed for, Healy left the room, uninterested in such talk.

  Now a vision of a pearl-luster silk dress, with beading, French lace on the bodice and pleating on the bustle formed in her head.

  But then came the time John stopped calling on her. The agony in her heart became unbearable. Pride wouldn’t allow her to ask her father questions. She sensed the shades gathering around her again.

  The torment ended when John sent her a note asking if he could call on her that evening. She clutched the note to her heart. Then she dressed up in her finest day dress of gray silk tulle with purple piping.

  When she heard his footfalls on the wooden boards of the front porch, her heart almost burst.

  She flung open the door to him. Something in his eyes made her want to weep. She knew she wasn’t going to get her wedding gown.

  Chapter Four

  Healy prepared for a horror show. Her fingers sought the clasp of her handbag, but the box encumbered her. The twine bit into her flesh through her thin cotton gloves. She tried to stop somewhere she could put her items down but the crowd behind her on the busy street pushed her forward.

  To not have her protective glasses on, on the one hand, and having the upset caused by John on the other, was a catastrophe. Over the intervening years after losing John, Healy had learned to control her power to see the dead. Now she only saw them when she wanted to. Unless she lost control of her emotions.

  On the advice of one of her colleagues at the agency, she had special glasses made from the darkest glass available, the lenses as black as obsidian. They didn’t block everything out, but the darkness softened the ghastly images.

  If only the glasses were dark enough to block out the image of John, strolling arm and arm with his new wife.

  Hurrying now down Chestnut, she mapped out in her head all the places she needed to avoid. Don’t look down the alley near 8th street. Woman with her throat slit.

  Except in not looking in the direction of the alley, Healy saw the two children huddled together in a doorway. She thought they were sister and brother, the way the older-looking child held the little boy as if trying to comfort him. Probably died of hunger and exposure, she surmised.

  Her throat tightened. Children were the worst. Before she could look away, both children lifted their chins. Two pairs of dead eyes were trained on her.

  With her heart racing, Healy moved fast to 9th street. In the middle of the block between Chestnut and Pine Street rose the six-story building which housed Psychic Specters Investigations.

  The great Mississippi River, to which this town owed its prosperity, was a short walk away, but far enough the stench from the riverfront didn’t reach. Still, even though there was no breeze to carry it, Healy had the smell of rot in her nostrils. The chemise worn to protect her skin from the corset had become soaked with sweat, so the two garments together conspired to chafe her raw under her arms. The layers of underclothes over the chemise and corset consisting of a corset cover and two petticoats, trapped the heat in, making movement difficult.

  The building loomed before her now, covered in ornamentation meant to look like a Greek temple, but to Healy it resembled a mausoleum. The wrought iron sunbursts over the arched windows on the first floor like disapproving eyes, challenged her right to enter. I belong here, she wanted to shout.

  A youth with his cap pulled low on his head rushed past her and knocked her off balance. Healy banged her elbow painfully against the wrought iron railing. He was a real boy, not a ghost boy.

  Feeling feverish between the heat of the day and the internal turmo
il of her emotions, Healy pushed open the main doors to the building with her shoulder. A blast of cooler air hit her from the lobby. White marble covered the floors and walls of the grand lobby. Fluted Greek columns studded the large space. She wanted to press her face against the cool marble walls.

  Healy closed her eyes and took a deep breath, steeling herself before stepping deeper into the lobby. She opened her eyes and as she expected, a man hung suspended by his neck from a phantom beam in the middle of the lobby. He was left over from a building that stood in this spot in an earlier time.

  To get to the staircase leading up to the office, she would have to walk past him. She skirted along the wall. Something brushed across her cheek, causing her to jump. She swatted at her cheek with the back of her wrist, pushing aside the frond from a potted palm.

  Then she saw him, arms limp at his sides, and head to one side. As she got level with him, the body on the end of the rope swung around so he was facing her. His neck was stretched unnaturally, and his tongue hung out of his mouth, black and swollen.

  Healy should be used to seeing ghosts by now but she liked to see them on her terms. Not when they made themselves part of the scenery.

  She tried not to look, but before she turned away, the dead man’s eyes flew open. He stared straight at her. Unlike the ghosts she passed in the street, this one radiated something base and evil.

  For the third time today, a ghost looked back at her. That had never happened before. Healy steadied herself by resting her back against a column and then pushed on. When she was past the ghoulish sight, she moved up the stairs to the third floor as fast as she could without the use of her hands to steady herself. The sound of her boot heels echoing in the empty lobby rang out loud and obtrusive.

  At the end of the hall the emblem of Psychic Specters Investigations stood out on the frosted glass pane of the door, welcoming her. The emblem was a triangle—almost an inverted heart-shape. At its base was an eye. Above the eye was a hole surrounded by a sunburst. The exact image as the planchette in her bag.