The Lingering Dead

by J N Duncan

Jackie downed more of her coffee. “Fuck you.” They all snickered at her, and Jackie reluctantly smirked in return.

  They were halfway through their food when Laurel returned from her initial foray into the town. “I really don’t like this place.”

  Jackie swallowed her mouthful of Danish. “Found something?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s the problem. None of the spirits I could get to talk had anything to say. A couple were looking for someone but they weren’t sure who. None of them had any inkling of moving on. I didn’t really press any of the ones I found, because I just wanted to get a feeling for what was going on, but I got the disturbing sense that they have no idea why they’re here.”

  They all looked perplexed at Laurel, except Jackie, who had no idea what the significance of Laurel’s findings were. “I take it this is unusual?”

  “Certainly strange,” Cynthia said.

  “We’ll need to talk to as many as we can,” Nick said. “If they are all like that, then we likely have someone around here that is influencing them.”

  “Why would someone want to do that?” Jackie wondered.

  Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Ghosts linger for a purpose. If they don’t have one, they move on. So, on the surface this makes little sense.”

  “What about the curse?” Cynthia asked. “Could someone have done that to this town?”

  “Wait. What?” Jackie blinked in disbelief. “You’re taking that whole thing seriously?”

  Laurel absently tapped at her lip, lost in thought. “A powerful witch might be able to do something like that.”

  “Seriously?” Jackie stared at her. “Curses are real?”

  “Oh, definitely,” Cynthia replied. “But this would be something special. Your average witch doesn’t play around with the dead. I’ll have to make a couple of calls to some friends and see what they have to say on it.”

  Jackie shook her head. “This is beyond me. I don’t know the first thing about handling a situation like this.”

  “We handle it like any other case would be handled,” Nick said. “We ask questions, dig a little deeper, and do some research.”

  “This isn’t like any other case,” Jackie insisted. “I don’t know what the hell to do with stuff like this.”

  “Bullshit,” Shelby said. “And it’s not all on you, babe. We’re a team, remember? We all have our areas of expertise here. Make use of them.”

  Jackie sagged back against the seat. She could apply the only experience she had, which was leading a team of field agents in an effort to solve a crime and catch a criminal. It couldn’t be that different, right? “OK, so we go talk to the ghosts. Cynthia, contact your witch people. I’ll get Hauser to run us a quick criminal history on the area and see if anything pops. Nick, Shelby, and Laur, canvas the town for as many ghosts as you can find, and I’ll go have a word with the local law and see if they have any insight into this.”

  Shelby shuddered. “Listen to her being all leaderlike. Gives me goose bumps.”

  “Shel,” Nick said, clearly as exasperated by her as Jackie felt, “leave it be.”

  “And the sheriff being all protective of his lady,” she said, smiling through the last bite of her pie. “It makes me all fuzzy inside.”

  Jackie dug a twenty out of her wallet and slapped it down on the table. “Such a bitch. Move, Nick, before I do something stupid and get my ass kicked.” Nick stood up to let her out. Shelby snickered away while Cynthia tried very hard to hide the smirk on her face. “Everyone go deal with your shit. We’ll meet back here in a couple of hours and compare notes.”

  Jackie could see Nick’s hand wavering by her arm, ready to calm and console, but she wanted nothing to do with any of them at the moment. Jackie pushed passed him and headed for the door, dialing in Hauser’s number and realizing too late that she had not bothered to ask if anyone knew where the local law was located.

  Hauser was just what she needed after getting her nerves Shelby-fied once again. “Hauser! You wouldn’t believe how good it is to hear your voice.”

  “Jack! How’s my favorite agent in hiding?”

  “Seen better days, that’s for sure,” she said, climbing into the SUV. “I passed along some info to McManus this morning about a place—”

  “Thatcher’s Mill?” he cut in. “Yeah, got that earlier this morning. So, how’s the new gig? Got something interesting going on already?”

  “It’s ... weird,” she replied. “Running a case with no actual crime is just odd. I’m out of my element.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find someone to kick the crap out of.” He laughed in her ear. “Only a matter of time.”

  She watched Shelby and Nick walk out of the diner. Wasn’t that the truth? “Yeah. Anyway.”

  “Well, speaking of no crime, Thatcher’s Mill is one strange place,” Hauser said.

  Jackie’s heart skipped a beat. “You got something already?”

  “I ran a quick background on the place after McManus called. Just your typical check, common data, that sort of thing.”

  “OK, and?”

  “You’re in the safest town in the world, from what I can tell.”

  “What? This place is crawling with ghosts. I find that hard to believe.”

  “Well, they didn’t get there by getting killed by anyone,” he said. “The place has no record of violent crime, like ever.”

  “What do you mean, none? How far back did you go?”

  “Far back as records are digitized,” he replied. “There isn’t a single record of a homicide or assault or even disturbing the peace for as far back as you want to look. I even did a quick newspaper search and not a thing.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Either you’re surrounded by the nicest people on the planet, or someone is neglecting to keep very good records.”

  “Huh,” Jackie said, stunned for a moment. One person didn’t not keep records for decades. That required a chain of events and willful complicity by a number of people. A number of people had clearly died in this town, and if what she had learned was actually true, the deaths were not all by natural causes. “OK, my curiosity is piqued. This is something I can deal with. Can you give me an address for the local law here?”

  “Coming right up, Jack,” Hauser said. “By the way, we all miss you around here.”

  Jackie smiled. “I miss you guys, too.”

  The local police station was two blocks away in a one-story, red brick building. It did not look big enough to hold a single jail cell. A lone police car was parked along the street out front. The glass front door was emblazoned with bright red letters THATCHER’S MILL POLICE DEPT. and when Jackie stepped in, she tripped a dangling bell overhead, signaling everyone that she had arrived. A reception desk sat immediately to the right, behind which was a plump, heavily mascaraed woman in her fifties, looking more ready for the town picnic in her bright, flowery dress than for doing anything related to law enforcement.

  The rest of the reception area was lined with several chairs and a wooden bench, upon which sat a young, see-through woman. The general, faint but pervasive sense of Deadworld in this town disguised the fact that she was sitting right there. There had to be a way to focus that ability better. The last thing Jackie needed was to be surprised by a ghost at every turn. Jackie stared at the young woman, who sat arrow-straight with her hands folded neatly in her lap, like she was waiting to be called for something. After a few seconds of staring, her eyes slowly turned to focus on Jackie.

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist said with appropriately feigned politeness.

  The woman, or perhaps she was a teen, Jackie could not tell for sure, stared in silence at Jackie for several more seconds before returning her blank stare to somewhere across the room.

  “Excuse me. May I help you with something?”

  Jackie cleared her throat and faced the receptionist, feeling that the ghost’s gaze had most certainly returned to her. “Yeah, I’d like to speak with the chie
f or officer in charge, if I may.”

  She gave Jackie a casual look-over. “Can I ask what this is pertaining to?”

  Jackie’s hand itched to reach for the badge. No authority whatsoever now. She was just Jackie Rutledge, Director of Special Investigations, Inc. It did not have the same ring to it.

  “I’m a researcher from the University of Chicago, doing a project on ghosts, and—”

  “Oh!” She looked at Jackie with wide-eyed surprise and then shook her head. “We don’t have any ghosts around here. That’s just a bunch of folklore phooey and nonsense drummed up to get tourists through here.”

  Jackie shrugged and put on her best fake smile. “That may very well be the case, but I was actually wanting to ask the chief about something more law-enforcement related.”

  The woman heaved a sigh. “Ah, well then. Chief Carson can probably answer that. Is there a problem?”

  “No, no,” Jackie reassured. “It’s just part of the research we’re doing. Thatcher’s Mill has some very peculiar crime rates compared to the surrounding areas, and with all the stories of ghosts around here, my team wanted to check it out.”

  “You have a team?” Her brow wrinkled in confusion.

  Jackie resisted the urge to roll her eyes. This was going so well. “Look, I don’t want to waste the chief’s time any more than I have to. I swear this won’t take long.”

  A door on the far side of the room behind the receptionist swung open. “Goddamn, Elinore. She’d be done asking her questions by now if you’d just hollered at me in the first place.”

  “Sorry, Chief,” she said, attempting to look like she was actually doing something. “I figured you might be busy.”

  He shook his head. “Busy listening to you gab.” He walked around her desk and put out his hand, a twisted, smarmy smile on his face. “Chief Carson. What can I do for you, Ms. Rutledge? Something about the Mill’s crime rates?”

  Jackie took the hand, pasty and clammy, in hers. He had to be in his fifties, given the thinned out strands of hair slicked back over his scalp and the paunch overhanging his belt. The pencil-thin mustache over his lip looked like it had been drawn on with makeup.

  “Jackie Rutledge. And I’m glad to meet the local law for a town with the lowest crime rate in the world. You must be proud.”

  Carson’s hand dropped away, and the leering smile vanished. “Who’d you say you were with, Ms. Rutledge?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I’m leading a research team from the University of Chicago on incidents of paranormal activity in this region. Thatcher’s Mill seems to have more than its share of ghost stories, but little in the way of crimes to account for their source. Our research put your town on the top of our list. So”—she waved her hand across the room, turning to see if the young woman was still sitting on the bench. She still sat there, staring straight through her—“we’re here, trying to make sense of our data.”

  It sounded like good bullshit. She was going to have to get everyone on the same page about just what the hell they were doing in the town. Conflicting stories would only make these folk more suspicious.

  Carson thrust his hands into his pockets. “And what data is that?”

  “From what we could find, there hasn’t been a homicide in this town as far back as we can look up records, not even an assault,” Jackie said, carefully watching his face for reactions. “That just seems to defy the odds, so I was hoping you might be able to clue me in as to what the story is here.”

  “Story?” His mouth worked in silence for a moment, making the mustache look like a worm crawling across his face. “No story, really. We’re just peaceful folk around here, and I run a tight ship. Folk here know the law and like to keep things ... peaceful.”

  “What about the chief before you?” Jackie asked. “He ran things just as tightly as you do?”

  He laughed, his belly jiggling atop his belt. “If anything, Ms. Rutledge, my father ran things tighter than I do now, and his father before him.”

  That explained the conspiracy of cover-up, if there indeed was one. “So, there hasn’t ever been an actual murder in this town as far back as you know of?”

  “That’s right,” he said, taking a step closer to her, pushing the edges of her personal space. “We’re good folk here, who look after each other and mind their own business.”

  Jackie stood her ground and smiled with no fake friendliness this time. “If I didn’t know better, Chief Carson, I’d say you were warning me off.”

  The wormy smile broadened into a gap-toothed grin. “Just saying, Ms. Rutledge. Folk don’t take much to having strangers digging into their business. Your—team is it?—is likely better off moving on to the next town and not wasting your time.”

  “I see,” Jackie said. Smarmy little shit. “Well, I’ll take your advice up with my team and see what they have to say. We wouldn’t want to be upsetting the fine folk of Thatcher’s Mill.”

  “You seem like a smart girl, Ms. Rutledge. I’m sure they’ll listen.”

  And why don’t you just say, “Get the hell out of my town,” you pasty coward? “Thanks for your time, Chief. Have a good day.”

  Jackie spun on her heel and stepped toward the door, catching the young woman sitting on the bench out of the corner of her eye. She had not moved, but her shadowed, lifeless eyes followed her out.

  Chapter 8

  Nick slapped down a ten-dollar bill on the counter. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Pratt.” He took another sip from the cream soda made by the drug store’s old-fashioned soda fountain. “I haven’t had a soda this good in years.” He turned and walked away, while the elderly gentleman, wearing an apron with his name inscribed on the front, swiped the bill up off of the counter.

  “It’s a two-dollar drink, Mr. Anderson,” he said.

  “Keep the change, worth every penny.” Nick stepped through the jingling door and stood beneath the awning, watching a light rain soak the pavement. That was now the third person to lie about the ghosts of Thatcher’s Mill, every one of which had hurried away from his presence. The ghosts had been more than wary. They had wanted nothing to do with him.

  He pulled out his cell and hit the button for Shelby, while surveying the street. The diner on the corner across from him catered to a handful of locals. To his right, a dairy truck rolled by on the main highway, water spraying up from its tires. To the left, Thatcher’s Mill Road stretched off to the east, leading to the edge of the town some four blocks away. There, a drive, shrouded in a stand of oak and maple, wound up the hill, where a plume of smoke dissipated into the low rolling gloom of the sky from a brick chimney barely visible across the tops of the trees.

  “Any luck, babe?” Shelby asked.

  “I haven’t been able to get a single spirit to stick around long enough to chat,” he replied. “And I just got lied to about them for the third time in three tries. Something is very off with this place.”

  Her sarcastic bark of laughter rang in his ear. “Gee, you think? Same problem here. I just about decked the cranky old fuck at the hardware store. I swear, if I hear one more person call me ‘Missy’ again, I’ll scream.”

  Nick slurped down the last of his cream soda, dropped it in the trash can outside the door, and began to walk east. What was so familiar about this town? He had done more than just pass through here so many years ago. Every corner and building gave him a twinge of déjà vu. He had roamed these streets, lingered in this little town for more than his usual night before moving along the path in his quest for Drake.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just trying to remember why I was here a century ago. It’s all a blur, but I stopped here when I was on Drake’s trail.”

  “You stopped in a thousand little backwater towns,” she said. “How are you supposed to remember every damn one of them?”

  “I know, but there was something else here. I stayed here, maybe for only a day or two
longer than usual, but there was a reason. I just can’t remember what it was, damn it all.”

  “You’re just getting old, babe.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Don’t get morose on me, cowboy,” Shelby snapped back. “I hate when you brood. Don’t worry. Jackie will come around. Just give her some time.”

  Nick sighed. “I wasn’t even thinking about that.” Not actively at least, but thanks for bringing that up.

  “You should be,” she said. “Give her space, but don’t let her go. She needs you.”

  “Yes, Mother Meddlesome. Now how about butting out for a while and focusing on the task at hand. I’ll be back at the diner in ten minutes.”

  “OK, I’m almost there. Cyn and Jackie are already waiting.”

  “Good,” Nick said. “You all can plan our wedding.” He clicked off before she could reply and shoved the phone back into his pocket. Getting the last word in with her was one of the small pleasures in life.

  But it was a poison pill, of course, as the thought brought up actual images in his head of being married to the small, feisty woman who rode into town on her own personal baggage train. The notes of their piano duet echoed in his mind, and that continually fleeting look of almost happiness on her face, when her eyes opened from their perpetual gloom and lit up with the spark of life, a spark he had ignited. If only there weren’t so many things in the way that kept it from catching fire and coming to life.

  Nick stopped at the end of the road, where two brick posts marked the edge of the drive winding up the hill. A metal placard on one read simply THATCHER’S MILL. He closed his eyes against the spattering rain and caught the faint whiff of smoke drifting down upon the wind. It was a town where the dead fled and the living wanted nothing to do with him. Just like ...

  His eyes snapped open. She wanted nothing to do with him. Over a hundred years ago, on this very hill, in that very house hidden among the trees, a young woman had wanted nothing to do with him. Yes, he remembered now. Thatcher’s Mill flooded up from the depths of Nick’s memory.