“And that information might lead Gavin to you and Jon?”
“Right. So do you see why we don’t want him to even remotely suspect what’s happening?”
I nodded. She had more experience with weird phenomena than I did, so I would listen to her advice. But the part about another ghost stuck with me, and I asked, “What makes you think that other spirits might come after us?”
“It’s only speculation. Anything is possible in this world now, Jensen, and we have to think smart.”
“So you’ve never actually met bad ghosts who’d do that?”
“No. Remember how I told you that you’re the first one I connected with fully?”
“How about other psychics or mediums? Do you think they know any of those bad spirits?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” She hesitated. “I hope I haven’t scared you off.”
I actually had been thinking about what a rival ghost might do to me—would he have more power? Could he mess me up in a ghost fight?
Then I shook my head. “No. I’m not afraid.”
And I wasn’t. Instead of being scared of the possibility, I was kind of revved up. In life, I’d been thwarted in the cruelest way. But I felt like I had more control in death, and I wasn’t going to back away from a justified cause merely because of some what-ifs.
It just meant I had a lot to learn and to get used to as a ghost.
I wandered over to the battery on the nearby table, making contact with it, juicing myself to make up for the energy I’d lost tonight. “So, how are we going to go about taking you and Jon out of the haunting equation?”
She looked a little nervous, like she was about to lay something big on me. “Since there’s a teenage girl in the Edgett household, what if you acted as a poltergeist to throw any investigators off our scent? And, of course, you would have to be subtle about introducing Elizabeth into the details of Gavin’s haunting—he would have to come to the conclusion that she might be haunting him all on his own.”
I guessed I didn’t get the full thrust of her suggestion. “I remember that word, poltergeist. I saw that movie before I died.”
“Do you know what one is?” she asked. But she sounded relieved, grateful that I wasn’t backing out.
“Isn’t it a bunch of mean ghosts scaring the crap out of cute kids by coming through TVs and sending clown dolls after them?”
Amanda Lee gave me a you-poor-naive-thing smile, then said, “It’s an old German word meaning ‘noisy ghost.’ But there’s a school of thought that says a poltergeist is a psychokinetic event that usually stems from an unstable young person in a household, a female, most of the time.”
Wait. That didn’t sound so ghostly to me. “Psychokinetic event? Are you saying that poltergeists actually have nothing to do with ghosts? That it’s a person who uses her mind to throw things around a room?”
Amanda Lee offered a shrug, and the turquoise necklaces clinked together. “That’s what some think, and that’s what we would depend on for an explanation as to the activity you’d bring to the Edgett household. We would hope that any experts who might be consulted would think that it’s not a ghost causing trouble—that it’s a poltergeist generated by Wendy’s troubled energy, since it’s often centered on a puberty-aged agent who has a lot of teenage angst and sexual puzzlement inside her.”
I was trying to piece this all together. “Are there really more to poltergeists than just that?”
“I happen to believe so.”
I waited for her to explain.
“I think,” she said, “that malevolent spirits can be drawn to people who are as troubled and confused as young women in particular can be, and there’s your true poltergeist.”
Now I didn’t like where this was going. “If you’re suggesting that I harass that girl Wendy while I’m haunting Gavin, just so I can cover our tracks with a good reason for the sudden activity, you’ve got the wrong ghost.”
“I’m suggesting no such thing.” Amanda Lee seemed hurt, her gaze going sad. “I’m not asking you to harm Wendy.”
Even so, this was leaving a bad taste in my . . . you know.
I’d been so caught up in notions of giving bad people what they deserved that I’d failed to truly think about everyone around them.
Amanda Lee continued. “You might have to do one or two things to point the activity in Wendy’s direction, but sometimes poltergeists can favor the agent and intensely dislike others in the household. That’s my recommendation for how we go about this.”
“So you’re hoping that any experts they might call in would decide that Wendy is causing all our haunting, and that her bad energy is being aimed at Gavin because she’s a moody teen. I hate to tell you, though—from what I saw, it didn’t look like she hates him.”
“You never know what’s going on behind the picket fences,” Amanda Lee said. “And this is a good bet for us if we want to cover ourselves.”
She must’ve read my remaining doubts. “Sincerely, I hate this as much as you do. But when he decided to kill and defile Elizabeth Dalton, he brought pain and suffering to everyone around him. It was only a matter of time until it came back to . . .”
“Haunt all of them?”
I really looked at her, and she seemed to know it, because she lowered her gaze. She was really invested in this.
As if she’d read my mind—and maybe she had—she offered an explanation.
“I had a husband once,” she said, her voice twisted. “They said it was an accident when he died, but I knew better. He was hit by a car, and he knew the driver—it was a man he’d had a falling-out over work with. My husband was a lawyer, and the man believed that Michael had maliciously gone after him during a dispute about an inheritance. He felt robbed. And to this day, I believe he got his revenge.”
Damn. What could I say but “I’m sorry, Amanda Lee”?
“You shouldn’t be the sorry one. And that’s my point in all this. None of us victims should ever be sorry. We shouldn’t have to wish that scores were settled and life should be fairer than it is.”
I felt close to her, even though I was feet away. Both of us were on the outside, isolated from what was right. “Can I ask what happened to the man who killed Michael?”
Amanda Lee finally looked up. “I didn’t have a ghost to help me back then, so he got away with the ‘accident.’ And no matter what the police said, I knew he was guilty. I felt it with every chill in my bones and every vision that kept me up at night. He died without ever paying for what he did.” Her words wobbled. “So when my good friend Jon—”
Her voice broke before she put it back together.
“When he went through the same thing with Elizabeth, I understood completely. And I wasn’t going to allow what happened to me to happen to him when I could do something to ease his pain. You see, Elizabeth’s murderer is still alive and Michael’s isn’t.”
So it was almost like she was living through Jon.
She stared at the computer. “I’m the one who told Jon to go out of the country while I took care of this. There’s no reason for him to go through the process of seeking a reckoning. You see, he’s . . . frail.” She paused, then said, “And I’m not anymore.”
I was quiet, thinking of a response to that. Pain. Jon had it. Amanda Lee had it. I had it. But I didn’t want there to be more than there needed to be.
There had to be a way to do this haunting without affecting the innocent people in a killer’s family.
Amanda Lee seemed to catch on to that thought, too. “We’ve got a higher purpose, Jensen. There will be hard choices, and this is only one of them.” She swallowed. “For whatever you can do for Jon, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
Silence dominated, and she obviously felt it was a good time to leave, because she gave me one last, pleading glance, then left the casita.
And her story really gnawed at me, too, because if I had the chance to punish the evil man who’d killed me, I would’ve hope
d that there was some righteous friend out there who cared enough about me to put things in place and set the world straight.
I mean, isn’t there a saying about that?
All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to stand by and do nothing.
I’d read something like that before I’d died, and I’d admired it. It sounded noble to a girl who’d blamed her parents’ deaths on a cruel, unfair force of nature. A girl who hadn’t known exactly what she believed after she’d dropped out of college and waited tables so she could save up for the community college classes that she told herself she’d take someday.
But it didn’t mean half as much to me as it meant now.
I wandered away from the battery, feeling stronger, then stood in front of the computer, which blipped every so often from my presence. Amanda Lee had apparently sensed that I would want to do some research after our talk, and that’s why she’d turned on the machine.
First, I manipulated the screen to show me more about poltergeists, and I found a page that claimed that ghosts could cause high emotion in agents so that they got stressed enough to unleash all that psychokinetic energy. But, again, that would mean focusing negative energy on Wendy.
No, thanks. But Amanda Lee had a point—if Gavin pulled any experts into this haunting, they might do a little too much investigating and find out that this wasn’t just about a poltergeist, and I didn’t want to implicate Jon and Amanda Lee for trying to catch a killer.
But I did like Amanda Lee’s idea of the poltergeist favoring certain people in the family and focusing all the bad energy on just one.
The deserving one.
As I went from computer page to page, inspiration came out of nowhere.
I thought of that short story everyone read in high school, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I thought of how I could be that heart, unseen but still thumping and pumping so only the guilty murderer could hear it in his own head, driving him insane enough for him to yell out a confession one day.
And maybe I could do all this subtle haunting away from the rest of the family while planting enough clues to make anyone think that Wendy could be the center of the activity.
Ugh—I didn’t like the idea of framing her and giving her that reputation. But maybe there’d be another option.
Since I had no one around to teach me how to be a real ghost, I looked up hauntings, because how could I be Gavin’s telltale heart if I had no idea how to beat?
Any way about it, I would start with subtle scares, working my way up to the ones that would urge Gavin to confess.
Subtle. That would be key. I could worm my way into Gavin’s psyche and not depend on Wendy so much.
Feeling better, I initiated a new search on the computer, this time about Elizabeth Dalton—every personal detail I could dig up from postmurder interviews with anonymous friends. The jokes she liked to tell. The charities she supported. Even the type of perfume she wore and the way she would laugh. Things people missed about her.
Then I went on to research the probable killer himself and his relationship to her, finding links for the news about their engagement—an event that seemed to capture more than a few society column headlines.
There were pictures that I could barely look at: blond, tanned, beautiful Elizabeth on Gavin’s arm at society functions. He seemed rougher than she was in some way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, because there he was, wearing a tux and seeming polished.
It was his eyes, really. A tough man who held everything in except when he was looking at the woman he loved.
And in these photos, he was looking down at Elizabeth as if she were the most precious thing in creation and he would do anything for her.
Was there an air of possession there, too?
My chest area went tight. Was this the way a killer watched his future prey? Had my murderer been tracking me in the same way, hiding his bloodlust from anyone who might’ve been looking?
I didn’t want to think that, maybe, it’d been one of my party friends who’d found me alone in the woods that night.
God, no way.
The mere thought gave me the creeps, so I went back to Gavin.
Had he been thinking about sliding a blade into Elizabeth time and again when these pictures were taken? Had some kind of fatal obsession been brewing in him?
I switched to another page, but thoughts of my killer kept coming back, so I just gave in to them, closing my eyes in an effort to remember what had happened that night.
Yet nothing struck me. That dark wall was still there in my head, blocking all memory. . . .
I heard the computer make a whimpering sound, and I opened my eyes again. I’d sucked electricity from the device, so I waited until it recovered, then went on with my research.
There were links referring to the nasty breakup between Gavin and Elizabeth, but that’s all I could find—there were no details about why they’d parted ways, just references to the apparent bad feelings between fiancé and fiancée.
Well, hadn’t Amanda Lee said that the family had tried to keep a lot of this under wraps?
The same rule seemed to go for the coverage of Elizabeth’s murder.
Sure, there were lurid articles filled with a few facts I already knew: how the cops thought Elizabeth had been attacked—and strangled as well as stabbed, I noted now. How she’d been killed in the middle of nowhere. How her body had been dismantled and dumped. But here, too, it seemed like the Edgetts’ money had won the day, because the articles soon turned from fact to speculation. Some “insiders” even theorized that Elizabeth had led a double life—a socialite one moment, a trampy skank meeting men in remote parking lots that led to walking trails the next, a spurned woman looking for pleasure in the night from someone new when she’d met the wrong Mr. Goodbar. There were even more comments from Elizabeth’s anonymous “friends” about Gavin and his possible part in the murder.
Gavin was possessive, they said. He had still been calling Elizabeth after their breakup, even after she’d found someone else to love—a reference to Jon, I guessed.
I couldn’t blame those friends for staying undercover when there was a killer running around who could easily track them down and wipe them out. And I suspected one of those unknown friends might’ve been Jon before he’d left the country.
I pictured him, with his gray hair and wrinkles around his eyes, in the photo Amanda Lee had shown me. Weighed down, I continued my fact-finding, but the rest of the articles were more of the same: bad news. News that the cops had shut the files on Elizabeth’s case down, the killer uncaught. Unofficially, she’d been the victim of a random crime.
But there was one article from a tabloid that caught my eye. Here, some of Elizabeth’s friends seemed to be coming out of the woodwork after the police investigation had closed. Were they trying to find anonymous justice on their own at this point?
One unnamed friend reported that Elizabeth had been getting threatening phone calls. She didn’t know whom they were from, but she suspected an ex-boyfriend.
Another said that Elizabeth had bought a gun the week before.
But just when I thought I was getting somewhere, the article ended, and again, it reminded me of my own disappearance.
No more articles after I’d become old news. No one left to keep searching.
Both me and Elizabeth, the forgotten.
Thank God it didn’t have to be that way from now on.
5
Fully recharged by my batteries as well as my research, I went back to the Edgett mansion.
I hadn’t exactly accomplished my mission there earlier in the night, thanks to fake Dean, and every energized cell of me needed to get inside that building, to find out more about Gavin Edgett and the crimes he very well might’ve committed.
And if he had committed them . . . Let’s just say that he deserved to be driven to the level of insanity that would make him shout out his guilt.
When I swept up to the mansion using the same route I’d
used before, it was the darkest part of night. The witching hour lent dead silence to the pool’s blue glow while it competed with the outside security lights around the property.
I did a flyby over the red tile roof and palm trees, then went in to do my business.
Because of my research, I knew even more now about the Edgetts’ Italian Renaissance mansion. Twenty-seven rooms, including six bedrooms, a basement and an attic, and even a wine storage room that’d been used during Prohibition.
Like I said before, money. Lots of it. Enough to cover up a crime and then some.
It wasn’t hard to find a way inside—I just made like Santa and slipped down one of the chimneys, feeling lucky that it wasn’t closed off.
So far, so good.
Mostly, it was dark inside, except for a few dim lights here and there, and I traveled around the house, getting a feel for it: all cream colors, chandeliers, curved staircases, and marble floors. I even indulged myself—can you blame me?—by floating over to one of those wicked seats that Cleopatra would’ve been right at home on while stretched out, eating grapes plucked from trays.
I sighed and shaped myself to the piece of furniture for a few minutes, and when that got old, I meandered down a hallway, into what looked like a game room, with a big wall that resembled a slab of rock with handles poking out of it. Gym equipment was all over the place, too, but it was computerized, like something superhumans from a sci-fi movie would use.
I suspected that Gavin spent more time in this room than anyone, judging by his broad shoulders and solid arms. Or maybe he’d always been strong—enough to grab a woman, drag her to a dark, deserted place, and choke and stab her without getting much of a fight in return.
I got a little grim then. After Amanda Lee had pulled me out of my time loop, she’d told me about what she’d seen during my last moments in Elfin Forest when I’d been confronted by my own killer.
And that hadn’t turned out so well.
I was ready to check out the upper floor, seeking out Gavin’s room, so I went up the grand staircase, hovering in the right-hand hallway.
Only the Good Die Young Page 6
