“There’s no way we can take you to your mom until we figure out who you are,” I said. “We have to report your death to the police and we can’t do that unless we have . . . until you show us your . . . I mean where your . . . if there’s anything . . . ”
I had gotten off to a strong start, but the longer I talked the worse it got. My words took a wrong turn at the corner of Awkward and Embarrassing and jittered to a stop somewhere between Stutter and Tourette's.
The girl cocked her head to one side as if trying to decipher a foreign language and then her eyes brightened. “Oh,” she said. “You want to see my bones.”
That sounded way more ghoulish when someone finally said it out loud.
“We don’t want to see your bones,” I said emphatically, “but we have to so we can show the police where you are and they can start an investigation.”
“Okay,” the girl said, as if the request was the most normal thing in the world. “Follow me.”
We watched as she glided off toward the merrily tinkling trout stream that ran parallel to the trail. In the light of day the girl’s spirit was so transparent, she almost looked like a little wisp of fog floating over the landscape.
Tori and I both stared at the prominent “Stay on the Path” sign at the edge of the clearing for a minute, shrugged, and set off after our ghostly tour guide.
The stream was small enough that we both hopped over without missing a step. The bank sloped gently upward on the far side, ending at the tree line. The instant we moved into the cover of the forest, the temperature dropped a few degrees and a different kind of stillness settled around us.
For me, at least, there is no quiet so utterly peaceful as the deep woods. It’s a space that manages to be both alive with activity and utterly deserted at the same time. The soft soil naturally muted our footsteps, but Tori and I had both been taught by our mothers to walk quietly in nature. My mom is a birdwatcher and Gemma is an amateur photographer; both hobbies require a degree of stealth.
As we followed the nameless girl who walked -- or really glided -- farther into the trees, the birds continued to sing, the squirrels played in the branches over our heads, and I even caught sight of a deer far off to one side peering at us warily.
Can you say surreal?
After about five minutes, the girl came to a stop beside a fallen hickory so far gone into decay it was covered by a thick patch of lush ferns. What was left of the trunk still looked solid enough now, but in another year or so the felled tree would be just another lump of soft mulch on the forest floor. Mother Nature is the great-grandma of all-efficient recyclers. She uses every death as potential nourishment for new life.
“I’m in there,” the girl said simply, pointing to the exposed roots of the moldering tree.
Tori and I both walked around to the back of the hickory. You couldn’t tell from the front, but the trunk was hollowed out down to the mass of roots. I leaned over and peered inside, but I couldn’t see anything.
Tori took out her phone and switched the flashlight app on. When she shined the beam into the interior, a yellowed skull looked back at us.
“How did she get in there?” I said in a low voice.
“I was under the tree,” the girl said helpfully. “Then it fell down. So now I’m inside.”
“Loose translation,” Tori said, “the killer buried her at the base of the tree, which continued to grow. When the tree fell over, the skeleton was tangled up in the roots.”
“Right,” I agreed, “that makes sense, but how are we going to sell the cops on the idea that we stumbled on a skeleton inside a hollowed-out tree trunk?”
“We use iPhone-ography,” Tori said triumphantly.
“Excuse me?”
“I enter contests online with photos I take on my iPhone,” she said. “And that’s exactly the kind of thing I’d take a picture of for the ‘Signs of Decay’ contest this month.”
She pointed at an uneven row of mushrooms growing along the top of the hickory’s trunk.
“Watch this,” Tori said, maneuvering to get an angle with her phone’s camera. Even though it was broad daylight, she forced the flash to fire.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“If anybody asks me,” Tori said, “I’m going to say I was using a fill flash to compensate for sunlight behind the mushrooms that would make my picture dark. But the real reason I used the flash was so we could see this.”
She held out her phone. When I looked at the screen, she pinched the image to enlarge it. The skull practically glowed in the dark.
“Good one,” I said admiringly. “Gemma would be proud of you. So what’s the story?”
Did I mention Tori is always in charge of the alibis? She’s the fast thinker.
“We wandered off the path, totally breaking the rules because I’m dying to win the photo contest, which I am, by the way,” she explained. “I took some pictures of the mushrooms and when we got back to the trail, I sat down to look at them, and I saw the skull.”
This would be why we’ve always been able to get away with pretty much anything. Tori keeps her stories simple and just close enough to the truth that we’re not so much lying as slightly bending the facts.
“That should work,” I said. “But we have to wait a while before we go to the sheriff. Those picture files will have a date and time stamp.”
Now it was her turn to be proud of me. “Listen to you, all in secret agent mode!” she said. “Double O Jinksy.”
From the other side of the hickory, the girl said plaintively, “Excuse me for interrupting, but what about me? What am I going to do now?”
How could I tell her that she was never actually going to do anything again?
Tori and I both looked at the girl and then at one another. I saw it coming in Tori’s eyes before she even said a word. Both of my hands went up to fend off the bad idea barreling straight at me.
“No,” I said firmly. “She is not coming home with us.”
The girl spoke again before Tori could start wheedling to convince me.
“Please don’t leave me here,” the ghost said, her voice cracking. “I’ve been alone so long. You’re the first people I’ve talked to who have answered me since I woke up in this place.”
God. This is how strays of all kinds get adopted on the spot. It’s bad enough when a dog or a cat gives you the please-don’t-leave-me eyes. But how do you turn down the the spirit of a murdered teenager turned middle-aged haunt? There’s no walking away from that kind of sadness and living with yourself afterwards.
The sigh I let out was equal parts resignation and genuine sympathy. “Okay,” I said, “you can come with us . . . ”
Looking back on that moment now, I realize I should have said, “try to come with us” because there was a lot about this whole situation I hadn’t thought through yet. At the time, however, there was only one thing that made me stop in mid-sentence, and in retrospect, it was the least of our worries. What the heck was I supposed to call this girl? We already had one Jane Doe.
“Grace,” Tori said, understanding my hesitation and filling in the gap. “We’ll call her Grace.”
“Why Grace?” I asked.
“Because once she was lost,” Tori answered softly, “and now she’s found.”
Are you starting to understand why Tori is my best friend?
“What do you think?” I asked the dead girl. “Do you like the name Grace?”
The girl nodded. “It’s pretty.” Then she said uncertainly. “I think I was pretty once, too.”
“Oh, honey,” Tori said, “you still are. It’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna make this right for you.”
Make it right? She was murdered and buried in an unmarked grave in the woods for 30 years. Is making that right even remotely possible? Probably not, but I was with Tori. We had to try for Grace -- the same way we had to try for Jane. We were all they had now.
12
The sun was so bright when we emerged from the
trees, we had to stand at the edge of the forest blinking our eyes until our vision adjusted. Maybe it was the effect of the blinding light, but that was when my brain kicked in with a lot of really important questions that should have already occurred to me.
I turned toward our spectral companion. “Grace,” I asked, “why did you appear to us at the clearing this morning?”
“I heard you,” she said. “You were louder than the others.”
“The others?”
Grace nodded. “The people who walk on the trail all the time,” she answered. “When I hear them laughing and talking, I come to the edge of the trees and listen. If the people stay in the clearing a long time, I go over and try to make them hear me.”
“But somehow Tori and I were different?”
She nodded. “Yes. You were shouting, so I came straight to the clearing.”
Now it was my turn to be confused. Tori and I hadn’t been shouting. In fact, on our walk up the mountain, we’d talked about how everyone else in town was probably still in church. We agreed that being on the mountain alone on such a beautiful, quiet day felt more like a sanctuary than any church building we’d ever been to.
“We weren’t shouting,” I told Grace. “We were just talking in our normal voice. What exactly did you hear?”
The girl seemed to consider what I’d said carefully before she answered. “You weren’t shouting with your voices,” she said hesitantly. “The pictures you saw in your head were shouting.”
She must have been referring to the vision I had when I stumbled. That’s what she heard?
“Do you have any idea why you might have been able to hear what I was seeing?” I asked.
Grace nodded. “I think it was because when you fell you touched the place where that other girl was found,” she said. “You know, the one people remember?”
Tori and I both shook our heads. Murdered, thrown away, and forgotten. Was it any wonder Grace’s spirit wasn’t at rest.
“Were you watching when they found her?” Tori asked.
“Yes,” Grace said. “I hoped maybe if I went down there the policemen would find me, too, but they didn’t search far enough into the woods. Besides, I was still under the tree then so they couldn’t have seen me anyway.
As much as I hated to ask her the next part, I really didn’t have much choice. She might be the only witness we’d ever find.
“Did you see who left the other girl on the trail?”
“No,” Grace said, “but I felt him.” A ripple went through her form, and Tori and I both shivered at the cold draft that washed over us in its wake. “He scared me,” Grace continued. “It seemed like maybe I should know him.”
She was still trembling, so I couched the next words very softly, “Do you think he was the same man who hurt you?” I asked.
A terrified look filled the hazy outlines of Grace’s face and she wavered in and out of sight. “I don’t want to remember,” she said. “Please don’t make me remember.”
“Hey,” I soothed, “it’s okay. I’m sorry. You don’t have to remember. It’s okay.”
Grace was letting off little gasping sounds, but slowly her form stabilized.
“Better?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I need to ask you one more question,” I said. “It’s not scary, but it is important. Is that alright?”
“Yes,” Grace said uncertainly. “I’ll try.”
I chose my words carefully. “Other than coming from the tree into the clearing,” I asked, “have you ever tried to leave this place?”
Confusion washed over her face again, but she remained steadily visible.
“No. I’m not even sure I ever thought about leaving,” she admitted. “It just seemed like this was where I was supposed to be until somebody found me, like they found that other girl.”
Beside me I felt Tori’s hand on my arm. “Are you thinking about the others at the graveyard?” she whispered.
Grace didn’t give me a chance to answer Tori. Instead, she blurted out all in a frightened rush, “I don’t want to go to a graveyard! Please don’t make me go to some place like that.”
I actually hadn’t thought about taking Grace to the cemetery before that moment, but it wasn’t a completely bad idea. Well, scratch that, at the moment it was a bad idea because she was so upset, but the company of other spirits might help her in the long run, and if she and Jane talked, they might jog each other’s memories.
Of course, there were two problems. The spooks at the cemetery were trapped inside the fence, so for all we knew, Grace wasn’t going to be able to come with us at all if she was in some way bound to the forest.
If she could come with us, then the whole confinement thing must be tied to the cemetery, which meant if we did take her there she might get trapped inside. That would be a pretty awful thing to do to her even if she would have company.
I watched as Tori assured Grace we had no intention of dumping her off at a graveyard, but I could tell Tori and I were on the same page about the matter of Grace’s mobility or lack thereof.
As soon as Tori was able to convince Grace that she would be staying with us, the girl brightened up -- literally. It was almost as if the energy of the first excitement she had felt in decades lent a new stability to her form. She appeared almost solid as she drifted eagerly ahead of us on the path.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Tori whispered to me when we were fairly certain we wouldn’t be overheard.
“Yeah,” I said. “This might be a really short trip for Grace if she runs into the kind of barrier that keeps the resident ghosts at the graveyard.”
As it turns out, there was no need to worry about Grace’s mobility. She was getting more mobile by the minute. She floated right down to the parking lot where she waited patiently for us since she didn’t know which car was mine. Even though we hadn’t seen anyone on the trail, there were four other cars and a pick-up in the small lot.
When I pointed to my candy-apple red Prius Grace gasped. “Is that what you drive?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling at her reaction. “It’s a hybrid.”
“What’s a hybrid?” Grace asked, circling the car curiously.
“Part of the time it runs on electricity stored in a big battery in the trunk,” I said. “It gets really good gas mileage.”
“Cool,” Grace said. “I drove my Uncle Mike’s old green Chevy Vega.”
Okay. Now her situation was just getting pathetic. The only car she drove before she died was a used Chevy Vega? Who has luck that bad?
Before I could even unlock the doors, Grace was already sitting in the backseat of the Prius waiting for us.
“Guess getting around isn’t going to be an issue after all,” Tori whispered. “She’s totally up for a road trip.”
“Uh, yeah,” I agreed, “but now we’ve got another mystery. Why are the others under house arrest at the cemetery? Is it just the unfinished business thing or is there more to the story?”
“Maybe because they have actual graves?” Tori suggested. “Maybe that keeps them tied to that one spot.”
“But what about ghosts that hang out in houses?” I asked. “They’re not bound to their graves on a short leash.”
“You got me,” Tori said. “That’s another question for the ‘Ask Aunt Fiona’ list.”
I rolled my eyes. Aunt Fiona was not exactly proving to be a reliable -- or for that matter an accessible -- reference source.
When I got behind the wheel and pushed the start button, Grace leaned forward from the backseat and stared at the digital dashboard. “Cool,” she said again. “It looks like something off of Star Trek, but where’s the cassette player?”
She definitely had some catching up to do.
We stopped at the store to drop Grace off before going to the Sheriff’s Department to file a report. Technically, she could have come with us. In fact, from what I could tell, she could actually go anywhere she liked, but Grace was proving to
have something of an obedient streak. Instinctively I knew that when she was alive, she was the kind of girl who never gave her mother any sort of trouble, which made it all the more difficult to understand how she wound up murdered and buried in a forest.
On the drive into town, when I suggested that Grace wait for us at the shop while we went to the Sheriff’s office, she hadn’t protested at all. I think she was too grateful that we hadn’t left her alone in the woods to risk being difficult.
I didn’t voice my real concern about having her ride shotgun on the trip to the Sheriff’s Department because, frankly, it was a pretty selfish concern on my part. I was afraid if she was involved in the process of “discovering” her own body, Grace would talk too much, and to some degree, I’d have to answer her. I really wasn’t ready to be branded as the new local nut job that talked to thin air.
The idea of leaving Grace alone so soon after her earlier upset did make me feel guilty, however, until she followed us upstairs to my apartment and let out a happy squeal at the sight of my cats.
“Oh!” she exclaimed happily. “You have kitties. And they’re all so beautiful! What are their names?”
As she made a beeline for the cat-covered couch, I identified the cast of players for her. The poor thing was clearly a fellow feline lover who had been deprived of furry companionship for too long. As Tori and I watched, the girl sat down on the couch, and just as Aunt Fiona had done two days earlier, Grace started petting Zeke with one hand while rubbing Yule’s tummy with the other.
“You can touch them?” Tori asked in a shocked tone. “How does that work?”
“Cats aren’t like other animals,” Grace said, as if she were intoning a principle law of the universe.
From the look Winston gave me, it was clear he thought I should know that already.
“So you’re going to be okay here by yourself?” I asked.
Grace looked at me and actually smiled. Then I realized what I’d said.
“Sorry,” I said. “Guess you’ve got the alone thing down by now.”
“Thank you for bringing me here,” Grace said. “I’ll be fine. And I’m not by myself now.”
Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) Page 7
