Even if a cop tracked Amy down, what could he do? She certainly hadn’t murdered April Destino. April had done that to herself.
Amy didn’t think she had much to worry about. Not on that score, anyway. But before tonight she hadn’t been worried about April Destino, or Doug Douglas, or any of the ghosts from her past. Now, facing a row of cheap paperbacks filled with crazy, impossible ideas, she had to admit that there was something about being involved with April that frightened her, even if April was dead.
The idea that she had unfinished business with a dead woman circled Amy’s thoughts like a buzzard closing in on fresh carrion. Spooky stories had always frightened her. The man with the hook hand, the hitchhiking ghost, the woman with the golden arm—she still shivered just thinking of those stories. They stirred completely irrational fears, but these were fears that she could overcome.
Just as she would overcome her fear of April. Doug Douglas was another matter entirely. He wasn’t dead. He was very much alive. She had seen raw hatred burning in his eyes. Fearing Doug was not irrational. Doug was unstable. Hell, Doug was loony.
She wasn’t accomplishing anything by standing here. The old yearbook was on the third shelf from the bottom, nestled among April’s reincarnation books, just as Doug had promised. Amy pulled it free and turned to page 131. A map—this one with a key taped to it—slipped from between the pages and fell to the floor, but Amy hardly noticed it. Her gaze had locked on one of twenty or thirty portraits on the page.
Peyton, Amelia. Yearbook Editor. I want it all!
But Amy couldn’t see her portrait. A heavy black circle eclipsed it, and there was a message above the circle.
I’ll always be with you.
Love, April
“No you won’t.” Amy glared at all the silly books about reincarnation and ghosts and psychic phenomenon. “You’re dead in the ground, April. You been boxed and buried and I’m closing your account.”
Amy bent low and collected the map and the key. She was tired of thinking, tired of being scared. She returned to the bedroom. Dumped the nightstand drawer onto the dead whore’s bed. Most of the lipsticks didn’t have caps. Amy hated sloppy women. She batted the lipsticks aside, leaving bloody streaks on the bedspread.
Amy’s fingers brushed cool metal. The pistol small and silver. She didn’t know much about guns, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure the thing out, check that it was loaded.
She replaced the yearbook. Her anger receded, making room for fear, and she nearly replaced the gun. Maybe it was part of April’s plan. Maybe April wanted her to have the gun. Maybe— No. April really was playing with her mind, and that was going to stop right now. Amy was going to keep the gun. Playtime was over. Spooky stories, all forgotten. This was the real world.
In the real world, April Destino was dead. And Doug Douglas was insane.
And Amy Peyton, for the first time in well over an hour, was in control.
* * *
Amy exited the trailer park and turned onto the old highway. The shadows were deep and the road was narrow—there wasn’t much development this far from town—but Amy felt secure behind the sturdy steering wheel of her Mercedes. She tried to concentrate on the things she would say to Doug, but shouldn’t seem to plan the confrontation. Excitement was burning a hole straight through her. Maybe things were going to get a little more dangerous, a little scarier. The idea didn’t frighten Amy. She had disassembled her fear rather than giving in to it. She had channeled her anger, just as the pop psych books advised. That empowered her. That, and the gun. She was ready for anything.
Amy passed through town—Mercedes tires hissing cool and quiet over the empty road, waxed hood reflecting streetlights and the dull dead neon glow that spilled from the windows of closed businesses. She almost laughed at the idea of Doug Douglas trying to pull her strings. She intended to scare him with the gun. She would do a good job of it. And then Doug, being Doug, would cave. She’d get the film and some answers. About the nature of a man’s fear, and about April Destino.
Amy ran a red light. Annoyed at herself, she shook her head. Farrah Fawcett curls tickled her eyebrows and she brushed them away. This was no time for stupid mistakes. She had made her stupid mistake of the night by giving her attorney’s card to the lot manager, and she wasn’t going to make another.
She tried to concentrate on the big steering wheel, on the road and on the rhythm of the shifting gears, but her thoughts returned to April Destino, playing with the edges of the idea that maybe there were more surprises in store. Maybe April had only been toying with her tonight. Maybe she had only wanted to prove that she wasn’t such a sad little loser. Or maybe April was playing her like a puppet, driving her forward, driving her into a dangerous— Christ! The man stood frozen in the middle of the road, twenty feet from the Mercedes’ front bumper, staring at the headlights with the uncomprehending expression of a trapped animal. Amy mashed the brake pedal and simultaneously twisted the wheel. She tried to gear down but her foot slipped off the clutch and the engine died with a jolt. The car slipped into a slow spin. Icy headlight beams revealed the frightened whites of the man’s eyes and then the car spun sideways and he was swallowed by the darkness.
The Mercedes shuddered to a stop, its diesel engine quiet except for a few idle pings. Amy glanced through the driver’s side window and saw the yellow divider line running under her door, bisecting the big German car.
Unbelievable. She had almost lost it. If traffic had been heavy, if this had happened at any time other than four o’clock in the morning, she might very well have been hit from both sides while the car spun.
Unbelievable. Amy peered into the night but saw no sign of the man. She didn’t think she had hit him. NO. She hadn’t hit him; she was sure. Jesus. She wasn’t sure of anything. Beneath the heavy wig, Amy’s scalp was itchy with sweat. “Just relax,” she whispered. “Get it together.” She keyed the engine and it started right up, and that was a relief. She backed to the side of the road. Tires crunched over gravel.
The emergency brake made a comfortable ratcheting sound as she secured it. She put the car in neutral and pulled a Kleenex from the walnut box between the bucket seats. She was still shaking. A single tear had spilled from her right eye. She forced her trembling hand to her face and daubed at the tear, removing it without smearing her eye shadow. Her left eye was still brimming; she opened it wide, pressed the tissue against the white flesh of her eye, and the tear beaded into the paper.
“Okay,” Amy whispered. “Better.” She tugged at the heavy sweater, trying to get some air beneath it. The damn thing was too hot. She ended up flipping on the air conditioner. Soon the cool breeze worked through the wool. The engine idled comfortably. All was quiet on the gravel shoulder. The Mercedes’ headlights bathed the road, illuminating the wild skid marks left by the car.
Two angry question marks tattooed in burnt rubber.
There was no sign of the man. Amy hoped she hadn’t hit him. She couldn’t imagine actually killing anyone.
She hit the brights and the spectrum of light widened. Pine trees appeared to her right, overhanging the gravel shoulder, rimming the old drive-in theater. To her left, on the other side of the road, was a steep slope of dull brown earth, thick clumps of grass hanging at the crest, and above the grass the cool gleam of a chain-link fence.
The cemetery.
April was up there somewhere, buried in that dull brown soil, calling to her like the dead woman who lost her golden arm in that well-remembered ghost story.
No…it was only the wind. Shaking, Amy released the emergency brake. The Mercedes rolled forward, but Amy’s eyes were locked on the sloping wall of dirt, searching every inch of it as if she might see the end of April’s coffin jutting from the earth.
A dead pine shivered to her right, but Amy didn’t see it. The branches closed behind the man. He approached the car. The man from the road. His palms were bloody and his face was scratched because he had dived into the trees. H
e made greeting with a wet, red wave, squinting into the bright headlights.
“Help,” was the single word that spilled from his lips.
Amy saw him at the last moment. Gasping, she hit the brakes and brought the car to an instant stop.
A few more inches and she would have hit him.
“Help,” the man said again. His bleeding fingers closed over the hood ornament, as if he couldn’t understand what the big car could do to him.
Amy’s fear evaporated. She knew this guy. She shifted into neutral, set the brake, got out of the car. “Marvis?” she said. “Is that you?”
Marvis smiled as he came forward. He was soaked from head to foot, as if he’d been running through the sprinklers. Then Amy heard the sound of sprinklers tick-tick-ticking from the cemetery across the road, and she knew that was exactly what Marvis Hanks had been doing. He stepped past the headlights and for the first time saw more than her silhouette. His face became like nothing Amy had ever seen. A sound came from him that could only be described as a wail and he wobbled in a surprisingly comical way before diving back into the pine trees.
There was a short moment of silence. Then the wail resumed, and dead branches popped and cracked as Marvis Hanks hurried along the fence of the old drive-in.
Amy found herself laughing.
She slipped behind the wheel of the Mercedes and drove on.
God, it was fun being a ghost.
God, it was fun being April Destino.
4:33 A.M.
For a guy who’d blown his life savings burying a dead whore, Doug Douglas was doing better than Amy had expected. His neighborhood was solidly middle class. New cars were parked in most of the driveways; well-maintained yards with clipped grass and pruned bushes fronted split-level houses that aspired to a Spanish look but actually resembled something that a Taco Bell architect might create.
Amy double-checked the address and parked her Mercedes in the driveway. The muffled slam of the car door was like a thunderclap on the quiet street. She stood by the car for a moment, staring at the dark windows of the house, listening to the even sound of her own breathing. She was going to be okay. She was going to give Doug Douglas a lesson about the power of will and the value of a good memory, and she was going to get Doug’s film, and she was going to be okay.
She checked the address a third time. She checked the pistol and tucked it under the waistband of April’s cheerleading skirt. She tore the key from the map.
She was going to put this behind her.
The pistol was cold against her stomach.
She imagined warmth. The gentle hand of Ethan Russell resting on her belly. The passion they would share. All the wonderful places they would visit once her divorce came through. The smell of him, and the taste of him, and the pure magic of his lips. She would put this business behind her, tonight, because what lay ahead was pure perfection.
Tonight it would end. No matter the cost. No matter the risk.
* * *
Doug Douglas waited in the shadows.
Amy was here. He heard the front door open and close. He heard Amy’s footfalls on the staircase.
April hadn’t wanted this to happen. Not this way. She had wanted something different. But Doug wanted something, too. And he needed what he wanted just as badly as April needed her revenge.
April never understood that. No one understood. People always told him what to do. First his parents, then his baseball coaches, then Amy, then a string of lousy bosses, and finally April. Nobody cared what he wanted. Everyone pushed him, prodded him, made him submit.
Submit. He hated that word. He wouldn’t hear it tonight. Tonight, everything would go his way. He was calling the shots.
Calling the shots. Funny, thinking that, with a gun in his hand.
* * *
Amy glanced at the note scrawled on the bottom of the map. It directed her to a room under the main part of the house, a room that adjoined the garage.
Some people might call such a room a basement.
Amy Peyton wasn’t going to let a simple word frighten her. She wasn’t April Destino. She wasn’t weak. Doug Douglas was the one who was weak. Amy was here to remind him of that. She was here to remind him of Todd Gould’s party, and Todd Gould’s basement, and the things that had happened there on a cold night in the winter of 1976. She was here to put Doug in touch with the hard-bodied eighteen-year-old he had once been.
She was sure that easily manipulated coward still lurked under all that flab. Tonight she would shut his mouth once and for all. She thought she had done that job in 1976. She hadn’t. But it would happen, tonight, any moment now.
She smoothed the sweater over the pistol, thinking it through. There had to be something Doug was afraid of losing, even if it was only his miserable life. She smiled. Life. That would be enough. For anyone.
Amy opened the door to the room that adjoined the garage.
And with that one simple action, everything went wrong.
* * *
The fluorescent tube flickered above, threatening to go out, but even in the dim light he could see that it was her. She stood in the doorway, a beautiful girl in a cheerleader’s sweater. A sizzle of dying light revealed frosted curls resting on blue wool. But it was her eyes that trapped him. The hard iron irises caught the flickering light and held it, and he realized that someone had clamped a vise around his heart.
She stepped into the room, one hand on the door, one hand close to her belly. The Six Million Dollar Man backed away instinctively. For the first time he realized that he was well beyond fear. He was terrified.
“Let me wake up, April. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”
She smiled, moving into shadow, but her eyes were still hard and bright and unyielding. “I’ll admit that this isn’t what I expected. But I’m not here to play I games.”
“You mean I’m not dreaming?”
“Do I look like a dream?” She glanced around. “C’mon. I know you’re not alone. Olly olly oxen free! Let’s get everyone out in the open.”
Something inside Steve crumbled. “You promised that we’d be together, and I didn’t believe you,” he said, trying to sound calm and controlled. “I couldn’t, because I was so scared. When you died, I thought I’d screwed everything up because I couldn’t I believe. I thought I’d be all alone. But now you’re here….”
He stepped toward her. He had to explain. Because he knew now that what he had done was insane.
“Don’t be crazy!” She was reading his mind, and her anger was as palpable as a knife. “You know what’s going on. You’re not scaring me.”
“Calm down, April.” He took another step forward, angling toward the door, and she reacted instinctively, backing away from the door, into the darkest corner of the room.
* * *
Amy’s legs weren’t working right. Everything was wrong. This wasn’t Doug’s house. But it had to be. It didn’t make sense any other way.
But it wasn’t Doug’s house. Amy could see that. It was Steve Austin’s house. His pictures hung on the wall. Even in the dim light, she could see pictures of Steve on the baseball field in high school, posing with Bat Bautista and Doug. Other pictures showed Steve in uniform. And there was a diploma with his name on it.
And he was coming closer, and she couldn’t move. Her strength was slipping away.
She couldn’t allow that to happen. She reached under the sweater. Her fingers closed over the gun.
An icy buzz sounded above her, and the light brightened suddenly. For the first time she saw past Steve Austin’s shoulder, past the La-Z-Boy chair, into the shadows that draped the far side of the room.
Amy couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t. But she had to breathe, because she had to
scream. April was screaming, and Steve knew that she had seen that thing propped in the far corner. He held out his hands. Open, conciliatory. “I didn’t understand. I didn’t know that you could come back to me. I wanted to believe, but you know how m
y head works. A + B = C. Simple, right? I thought I had to be with her to be with you.” He sighed. “You’ve got to try to understand that I love you. I only felt sorry for her. She was so sad. That woman you became. The dreamweaver. She was so alone…she was like your ghost.”
He wanted to touch her more than anything because touching her would prove that she was indeed real. But she wedged herself into the cement corner, pulling away from him, and her mouth remained an open red scream.
“No,” Steve begged. “Don’t be upset. I didn’t understand.” Again, he held out his hand. “I can explain. It’s not as crazy as it looks.”
But he knew that it was. His big hands pawed the air. He was afraid to touch her, afraid to do anything that might be wrong. He watched his fingers dancing in midair, unsure, his hands damned by pink fingernails rimmed with little halfmoons of black dirt. Graveyard dirt.
“She died and I couldn’t sleep. I thought that without her I couldn’t have you anymore. So I went to the graveyard…and I got her…and then I brought her here….”
* * *
Doug moved from his hiding place in the garage. Things weren’t going right. Amy was screaming, and Austin was babbling some crazy stuff that Doug couldn’t quite make out.
He had told April. He had told her that it wouldn’t work. Christ, she hadn’t even wanted him to be here. At least that was what she’d said. But with April you could never be sure. Just like with her suicide. Doug had wondered if she’d really go through with it. She had talked about it for so long; he had to admit that he’d been really surprised when she actually did it.
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