Amazing Grace--A Southern Gothic Paranormal Mystery

by John G. Hartness

  I turned to her, my eyebrows up. “What is it, sweetie?” I asked, trying not to let on to Clyde that I was talking to a ghost. He didn’t believe in what I did, and didn’t look too fondly on my talking to dead people around him.

  “That’s Shelly’s car. Oh my god, it’s Shelly!” The dead girl collapsed weeping to the ground, more upset about her friend’s death than I’d seen her about her own.

  “Sheriff,” I said quietly. “We have a problem.”

  “What’s wrong, Ms. Carter?”

  “That car belongs to Jenny Miller’s best friend Shelly. She was the last person to see Jenny alive, and now she’s probably the drowned child in the driver’s seat of that car.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the sheriff said under his breath. “Pardon my language, Ms. Carter.”

  “Hell, I was just thinking the same thing myself, Sheriff,” I said, splitting my focus between the car slowly rolling backward up the boat landing and the sobbing teenage ghost at my feet.

  Sheriff Dunleavy motioned his deputies to push the lookie-loos farther back and went over himself to break up an argument between Deputy Jeff and the newspaperman Gene Graham, who had indeed shown up with a big old Nikon camera slung around his neck like a hillbilly Jimmy Olsen. Cracker was waving his arms and starting to wind himself up into a whole tirade about the First Amendment and freedom of the press when I walked up.

  “Gene,” I said, my voice cracking through the muggy air like a whip. The stout little man’s head whipped around like he was back in my Sunday School class and I’d caught him trying to get a reflection up Renee Hardin’s skirt in his patent leather dress shoes again. That boy never would believe me when I told him patent leather didn’t reflect, no matter how much you polished it. He was a little scamp, but it did mean he always had polished shoes for church, so I let it go.

  “Ms. Lila, what are you doing here, and on the other side of the tape, too?” Gene asked.

  “The sheriff has done told you he can’t answer no questions, Gene. Now you need to put that camera back in your car and go interview Arthur Black about how his peaches are coming in after the cold snap we had in April. As soon as the sheriff has something he can tell you, he’ll call you and give you an exclusive.” I didn’t bother to point out that since he owned the only newspaper in town, he always had an exclusive. Ever since that mess with the Smith woman happened, Cracker liked to think he was a big-time newspaperman. He had one story picked up by the Associated Press, and it went straight to his head, I swear.

  “Now, Ms. Lila, I can’t do that. This is the biggest news to happen in Lockhart this week, and I have to cover it. I need to report on it, and I can’t do that without taking some pictures.”

  “That is not going to happen, Mr. Graham, and if you point that camera anywhere near that vehicle without my permission, I swear on my mother’s grave you’ll find it at the bottom of the lake,” Sheriff Dunleavy growled.

  Gene bowed up again, and I could just about see these too men getting ready to whip things out and start measuring, so I leaned into Gene and whispered, “We think it’s Shelly Thomas’s car, but we can’t have nothing getting out about it until we see if she’s in there and then notify the next of kin. You wouldn’t want that child’s mama reading about it in the newspaper before we get a chance to break the news to her, would you?”

  Gene’s face went ghost-white, and he took a step back from the yellow police tape. He stood there for a minute, then took a deep breath and wiped his eyes. “No, Lila Grace, that would be awful. I see what you mean. I can go…cover some other stories and wait for word from the sheriff that he has information. Y’all know where to find me.” He turned and waddled off back to his truck and peeled out of the parking lot. I started walking back to the car, and Sheriff Dunleavy followed close behind.

  “What was that all about, Ms. Carter?” he asked.

  “Gene played baseball with Shelly’s daddy in high school. They fell out when Shelly’s daddy stole Cracker’s girlfriend.”

  “Why would that make Graham back off the story?”

  “Gene’s girlfriend married Shelly’s daddy and had three little girls. The oldest one is about sixteen, and I’m afraid we’re about to find her in the driver’s seat of that car.”

  “So Gene doesn’t want to upset his old girlfriend, I get it.”

  “That man doesn’t want to break the heart of the only girl he ever fell in love with, Sheriff. He never got married, never had kids. He and the Thomases became real close after they got married, and Gene is godfather to all three girls. He would no more hurt that family than he would sell his newspaper to a Yankee.”

  The car was all the way up on dry land now, and Clyde was lowering the end of the rollback to pull the car up onto the wrecker. Sheriff Dunleavy waved him to a stop and walked around the car. I followed close behind, looking where he looked, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “What do you see, Sheriff?” I asked.

  “Not much,” he said, his eyes scanning the car as we did a slow lap around the outside. “There’s nothing to indicate that she wasn’t driving or operating the car under her own power when it went into the lake. We won’t know more until we get it back to the garage, but all the windows are intact, and I can’t see any scratch marks around the keyholes to indicate forced entry.”

  He paused at the driver’s door, peering inside. “Is that Shelly?”

  I looked in the window and nodded. Shelly Thomas was sitting up behind the wheel, pretty as you please in a cute pink top and blue jeans. Her seatbelt held her upright, and there was no air bag deployed, so it didn’t look like she’d been in a wreck. I couldn’t see too much through the windows, all streaked with silt and lake muck, but I couldn’t see any injuries on her. She just looked like a pretty teenaged girl out for a drive.

  The sheriff motioned the EMTs over to the car and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. I stepped back out of the way as they rolled a stretcher over to the side of the car and opened the door. Water poured out onto the ground, and everybody stepped back.

  Clyde walked up to me with a sheet in his hands. “Take a corner, Lila Grace,” he said, holding out the white fabric to me.

  “What are we doing, Clyde,” I asked, then a lightbulb went off as I watched him walk away from me as far as he could while we each had one corner of the sheet, and he lifted his hand above his head. I did the same, and we held that old ragged sheet up like a curtain as the EMTs and Sheriff Dunleavy got the girl out of the car and onto the stretcher. They zipped her up in a body bag and covered her with another sheet before one of them nodded to Clyde and we let the makeshift privacy screen down.

  I walked over to Clyde and helped him fold the sheet. “That was sweet of you, Clyde,” I said.

  “People deserve not to have everybody in the world gawking at them when they’re laying there dead, Lila Grace,” he said. “I started carrying this in my car some fifteen years ago, when that kid ran his car into the bridge railing down on Old Pinkney Road.”

  “I remember that wreck,” I said. I didn’t bother telling Clyde that I had talked with that poor boy several times before he got satisfied enough that his mama would be fine without him and he was able to move on.

  “There was a bunch of people at that one, like there is today, and that boy was all tore up. His head was about split plumb in two, and I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair to him that all them people that didn’t even know him were looking at him like that. So now I try to give people a little dignity in death. It’s the least I can do.”

  “It matters more than you think, Clyde,” I said.

  “I reckon if anybody would know, it’d be you,” he said, then turned and put the sheet in the cab of his truck. I stood there flabbergasted. I’d had a lot of people say a lot of things about my gifts before, but never had anybody just accepted them for what they were like Clyde. I swear, that little old man was a true onion. He had more layers than anybody would ever suspect.

&
nbsp; I looked to Sheriff Dunleavy to ask him what our next move was, but caught sight of Jenny as I turned my head, and the look on her face stopped me in my tracks.

  Chapter 7

  I walked over to the ghost and tried to speak to her without it being obvious to the dozen people standing behind the police cordon just a few yards away that I was talking to empty air. It’s not an easy task, but it’s one that I have somewhat mastered over the years.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie? You look like somebody just ran over your dog.” I realized as soon as the words crossed my lips that it wasn’t the most polite way of talking to a dead child who just found out that her best friend is dead, too. But there aren’t any instruction manuals for my kind of life, and I couldn’t take it back, so I just had to roll with it.

  “Where’s Shelly?” Jenny asked, glowing tears rolling down her face. This was a new one on me. I’d seen ghosts angry, and sad, and even seen a couple of them scared of what was coming next, but I’d never seen one cry before. But here she was, sobbing just like you’d expect a girl whose best friend’s car just got pulled out of a lake to do. Her tears weren’t solid, of course, but they were part of her, a little tiny piece of Jenny’s soul cascading down her cheeks, cutting little trails of faintly glowing light across her shimmering visage.

  “What do you mean, where’s Shelly?” I asked. I didn’t want to come off as crass and say that she was on the stretcher being loaded into the back of the ambulance, where do you think she is, you idiot, but that’s kinda what I was thinking.

  “I don’t see her. I could see Sheriff Johnny, and I’ve seen a couple of other ghosts as I’ve been walking through town since I…since we first met. But I don’t see Shelly. Where is she?”

  I looked around. The child had a good point. I didn’t see Shelly, either. Far as I could tell, Jenny was the only ghost at John D. Long Lake, and I was powerful glad of that. I didn’t relish the idea of telling Shelly that she was dead, especially if it had happened as recently as I expected it had. And worse than that, I sure didn’t want to run into the poor Smith children if they happened to be lingering all these years. I didn’t expect them to, not after all this time, but you never know. Some people have powerful attachments to places, and some people have powerful reasons for wanting to see justice done. None of that is normal for little kids, but there’s no hard and fast rules about the afterlife.

  “I don’t see her, sweetie. Maybe she’s not here.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be here? Where would she be?” Jenny was starting to get more upset, and her sadness was turning to anger, which was starting to stir up the rocks and dust around her feet. I stepped back and took a look around. We hadn’t drawn much attention yet—everybody was still focused on the macabre ceremony of loading poor Shelly’s body into the ambulance—but that ritual was almost complete, and we would be the most interesting thing by far in a minute or so.

  “Jenny, I need you to calm down,” I said in my reassuring teacher voice. It’s different from the steely tone I used on Cracker earlier, but it still got through to the distraught child. A couple of pebbles dropped to the ground as she stopped rocking back and forth and focused on me.

  “That’s good,” I said, keeping my voice low and calm. “Not everybody stays around after their bodies die, not even people who are killed or have a good reason to stay. It may be that Shelly didn’t have any great desire to see justice done for herself, or maybe she was just okay with moving on.”

  “But…then why am I still here?” She looked up at me, more tears flowing down her face. She was calmer now, but the pain in her voice was heartbreaking.

  “I don’t know, darlin’,” I said. “I have no idea what makes one person linger and one person pass on to the other side. If I did, I’d be able to help people move on a lot faster, I think.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do with me? Help me move on?”

  “That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?” I asked. “You don’t want to stick around Lockhart dead forever, do you? I want to find out who killed you, so he or she doesn’t hurt anybody else, but I also want you to be able to go to your rest.”

  “You mean Heaven,” the girl said with the firm conviction of a Protestant teenager who’s never questioned her faith for even one second.

  I had no such convictions anymore, unfortunately. “I mean whatever you think I mean, honey. I think it’s probably a little different for everybody, and I’m pretty sure there’s not a lot of harps involved, but I know that whatever’s on the other side waiting for you, it’s a damn sight better than walking around talking to an old woman who’s going to get locked up in a room with padded walls if she keeps standing on the boat landing talking to thin air.”

  Jenny smiled and sniffed. She was a cute little thing, even dead and weepy. “Thank you, Ms. Lila. I still don’t know why Shelly wouldn’t want to stick around and find her killer, but I reckon we can take care of that for her.”

  “I expect we can,” I agreed. “Now let’s go see if the sheriff has any ideas on how we can do that.”

  I walked back over to the car, where Sheriff Dunleavy had just raised the hood. I stuck my head under there beside him and said, “I think that’s the engine, Sheriff.”

  “Thank you, Lila Grace. I’m no mechanic, but I think you’re right.”

  “Is there anything in the engine that will tell us who killed this child?” I asked.

  “Not that I can see,” he replied.

  “Has anything been tampered with, like on the TV shows? Brake line cut, anything like that?”

  He pointed to a square thing sitting on top of another thing. “That’s the master cylinder. It looks fine. I can’t see where anything was tampered with there.”

  “Does that have anything to do with the brake lines?” I asked.

  “You don’t know anything about cars, do you, Lila Grace?”

  “I know where the gas goes in, I know to change the oil in my truck every five thousand miles, and I know to change my tires every three years. Anything past that, I ask Clyde. His nephew Brownie runs a service station and takes care of all my automotive needs.”

  “Then why do you keep asking me about the brake lines?” the sheriff asked.

  “On the TV shows, whenever two people poke their heads under the hood of a car that somebody died in, they always come out and say that the brake lines were cut. I just wanted to see if that happens in real life, too.”

  “You watch too much NCIS, Lila Grace.”

  “That may be, Sheriff, but I can’t help it. That Mark Harmon is just adorable. I like the New Orleans one, too. The LA show is okay, but I don’t like those actors as much. They’re too pretty.”

  “Well, nobody cut any brake lines on this car,” the sheriff said, straightening up. I followed suit, and he slammed the hood down, motioning for Clyde to load the car onto his wrecker. “In fact, as far as I can see here, the car was in perfect working order before it went into the lake.”

  “So why did it go into the lake?” I asked.

  “Well, somebody wanted it to go into the lake. That’s why they drove it in there.”

  “I reckon what we have to do next is find out who.”

  “Yeah, that’s not the worst thing we have to do next.” I looked at the sheriff, and his face was grim.

  “Oh,” I said, my voice soft. “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “Do you have any particular connection with the family?”

  “No,” I said. “I know them, but only to speak in the grocery store. We don’t go to church together, so I never had Shelly in any of my Sunday School or Vacation Bible School classes.”

  “Then you’d better leave this to me. I don’t suppose she’s…” He waved a hand around in the air.

  “No, she’s nowhere to be seen, Sheriff. I think she has already moved on.”

  “Pity,” he said. “Maybe she could tell us something about the bastard that did this. Pardon my French.”

  “Bastard isn’
t French, Sheriff. Merde is French, and I won’t bruise if you cuss around me.”

  “Just the same, I’ll try to keep it clean. Feels like cussing in front of my mama. Just ain’t natural.”

  “I’m pretty sure your mama knows those words, too, Sheriff.”

  “Oh, I can guarantee you she does. My daddy was a Marine. She’s heard them all.”

  “Was a Marine? It was my understanding that you’re always a Marine.”

  “He passed two years ago. That’s the only way you stop being a Marine, Ms. Carter. You stop being.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Sheriff. The loss of a parent is a hard thing to get over, no matter when it comes.”

  “I reckon the loss of a child is, too,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go make this the worst day of a couple parents’ lives.”

  “I’ll meet you at the station in the morning, and we can talk about the fingerprints on that flashlight in Jenny’s basement and look for connections between these girls’ deaths.” I watched him walk to his car and throw his hat on passenger seat. I did not envy the big man his duties this afternoon.

  “Do you think the same person that killed me killed Shelly?” Jenny asked. I didn’t hear her come up, but she only made noise if she tried to, or spoke.

  “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that two best friends in a town of less than ten thousand people wound up dead within five days of each other. Do you?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Then let’s go back to your house. I need to talk to your mama and daddy. Without that son of a bitch preacher of yours looming over us.”

  Chapter 8

  Thirty minutes later, I was back on the porch of the Miller house. Jenny stood next to me, and I wasn’t real sure who was more nervous, her or me. I raised my hand to knock on the screen door, then put it down. I repeated the process two more times before I decided to just bite the bullet and knock.

  A man in his mid-forties came to the door, well-dressed despite looking like he hadn’t slept in several days. He stood on the other side of the screen in a polo shirt and khakis, the uniform of the Southern middle-class father. I heard a choked sob from Jenny, but when I glanced in her direction, she was gone. Looked like I was on my own for this one.