He frowned, coughed, then nodded to Clare again. Yep, I’m ready to go on. Think I hafta tell ya, though, that me and Albert Lord and Buddy Jemmings were friends as kids, and since Al witnessed O’Kelley murderin’ Bob Ford, we talked about it a lot and he told that story often. I knowed that Buddy lived to a ripe ol’ age. The ghost paused to scratch his head under his hat. His spirit dropped by, like, ta see me afore he crossed over. Anyways, Buddy talked to those who like to keep tracka old stories, so ya think about that. Chaz’s chest went in and out as if he breathed. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. And, yah, I’m ramblin’ acuz I’m scared to my boot toes about crossin’ over myself.
“I promise it’s not painful,” Clare said soberly, at least not as far as she knew, for the ghost. “And I have never seen a spirit go to hell.” Of course she’d only helped six phantoms leave the gray dimension and head to whatever awaited, but she hadn’t lied.
Chaz literally brightened. He shuffled his feet, hard to do since he floated about a foot above the ground. Good to know, ma’am, Chaz said. I warn’t a bad man, but I warn’t much of a good ’un, either. Selfish, mostly.
“All right,” Clare said. “What happens is that I walk into you.” She experienced bits and pieces of their lives. “And you, um, see where you need to go.”
She handed the sheathed knife to Zach, then held out her hands. “So let’s do this, all right?”
More fidgeting. I guess. He raised his hands slowly and she grasped them. Cold, but not too bad. She hurriedly stepped into the apparition, flashed on his deliberate and cherished solitary life, his love for the land more than anything else, an exceedingly brief vision of the two boys he’d talked about—Albert and Buddy, then Chaz gasped. It’s beautiful! Just like my spread but . . . but . . . MORE!
Her vision turned sepia as Chaz poofed away.
Clare wobbled on her feet and Zach’s warm arm went around her. Through chattering teeth, she said, “V-v-ver-y cold night, to-night.”
“I am going to destroy that monster. It doesn’t get to hurt people, living or dead, anymore.” His voice seethed with anger and heat pumped off him, lifting her numbness.
“Did you really shoot it?”
“At it, into it, didn’t look like it had any effect, but I didn’t know that beforehand. But we got new data on the perp—perpetrator of crimes.” He urged her a few steps toward the truck, then paused.
Parked behind them was a truck that even Clare recognized. She sighed. “It’s the elder Pais, isn’t it?”
“Yep,” Zach confirmed, as the man opened his door and shut it with a slam and strode to them. “I didn’t see when he pulled up.”
“Neither did I,” said Clare. For a minute, embarrassment filtered through her at how she might have looked as she’d helped Chaz move on. She shook off the feeling. However crazy she appeared, she’d become a ghost seer and would have to become accustomed to looking strange—as soon as possible.
Pais tipped the cowboy hat back on his head. “You folks havin’ any trouble?”
“No trouble at all,” Zach said.
“Funny, I heard shots.” He squinted through the night toward where their fight—no doubt invisible—had taken place. “When I drove up I heard shots and saw you shootin’ at nothin’.”
She didn’t trust his friendly aw-shucks manner one little bit.
“That’s right,” Zach said, copying the man’s manner. “Nothin’ to worry about. No trouble.”
Just as if they hadn’t fought a ghost. The cold space, the wound within her ached. All of her ached. She shivered.
“Now if you don’t mind, Clare is cold and I want her in the truck.”
“Sorry, ma’am.” Pais tipped his hat to her. “Sure, you go to your truck. But you, Zach Slade, come back and we’ll check out those shots.”
As if there’d be anything to see in the moonlit dark. Just an empty meadow. Clare didn’t think any of the bullets had hit the fenceposts.
Since Zach didn’t have his cane, they limped together to the vehicle and Zach opened the door. She climbed onto the seat. Zach leaned down and tucked the knife into the correct compartment of her purse.
She shivered as he turned and took his time walking back, then watched as he talked to Pais, argued about something and Zach refused . . . he touched his back so perhaps it was showing Pais his gun.
Then they began looking through the meadow. Zach would like his cane.
A noise, not a whimper, broke from her lips. He took the danger on himself, just naturally. Those broad shoulders shouldn’t carry her burdens. And she sure didn’t want the evil ghost coming for him. Her fight . . . first. She wiggled around until her fingers and toes stopped tingling and she could move well, hopped back out of the truck and strode over to where he picked up his cane and examined the battered stick.
“Looks like something chawed on that,” Pais said.
The ex-sheriff was right. The cane had deep gouges, big splinters angled out from the staff, and the bottom was gone.
“Huh,” Zach said.
“Huh,” Clare echoed.
He frowned at her.
“I just needed to get warm.” Though from now on, she’d consider toting around a thermos of hot coffee, or protein, chicken soup, perhaps. “How can I help?” she asked, too cheerfully. “I don’t know what bullets look like.” She tilted her head. “I wouldn’t think you could find them.” She stared at Pais with a guileless smile. “I’m not sure why you’re looking.”
His expression clouded, but he jutted a chin. “Just wanted to see that no animals got hurt.”
Clare exaggeratedly looked around the empty landscape. “Well, chipmunks maybe. Rabbits? Maybe a coyote? No cows or sheep, for sure.”
She thought the man grumbled under his breath. After letting fifteen seconds pass, she said, “Are we going to stand around here for long?” She widened her eyes and looked at Pais.
“No trouble here,” Zach added softly.
“Yeah, yeah.” Pais took off his hat and thumped it against his leg, like Clare had seen his grandson do.
Sticking his hat back on his head and adjusting it, Pais said, “You folks have a good evening.”
“Same to you!” Clare caroled. She slipped her arm around Zach’s waist and they stood and watched as Pais strode to his truck, sending a few glances back at them, then got in, stared at them, and finally drove away.
“He’s suspicious,” Zach said. He gave her the cane to carry as he put his hand on her shoulder and they proceeded slowly back to their vehicle.
“So what? I told him the truth up front this morning. Not our fault he doesn’t believe it,” Clare said belligerently. “There’s nothing to see. Chaz Green moved on. The Other left. The evil apparition is banished for now.” Memory flooded her and she recalled Enzo was lost. “Oh.” Though she hadn’t wanted to sob, that word came perilously close to being one.
“‘Oh’ what?” Zach asked.
Clare filled him in on the conversations she’d had with the evil revenant and what it had said about savoring Enzo. What the Other had said.
Zach appeared alarmed, and they hobbled faster. When they got to the truck, he looked at his cane before throwing it behind the seat. “Good thing I packed a heavy duty extendable metal cane that I can use for hiking.”
She nodded and kissed his cheek. By the time he’d circled the truck and levered into the driver’s side, she was studying the knife. He reached for it, and she withdrew it beyond his grasp.
“Clare—” he warned.
“My weapon,” she said. Turning it over, she scrutinized the silk that had two long rips and several smaller ones. “The sooner we get back to the hotel and I mend these, the better.”
“You can fix the sheath?”
“I always carry a small sewing kit in my luggage.”
“Of course.”
The empty hole inside her that the evil ghost had given her last night, and that had torn a little wider, froze instantly, and still throbbed all the way back to the hotel.
As they turned into Creede, Clare said, “I don’t like having to do this at the hotel. It might be full.”
Zach grunted. “People could be out at bars and restaurants, or the repertory theater.”
“I looked earlier today. There isn’t any show at the repertory theater tonight.”
“No choice. We don’t know any other place.” Zach sounded frustrated.
“I could run up and get my kit and we could drive and I could sew in the truck . . .”
A short, seething silence. “We don’t know what the ghost could do to a truck. I don’t think I’d want to find out whether that storm and razor thing could take out a windshield. Especially if we’re in the cab.”
She sighed. “You’re right.”
“Did the Other say anything about you blooding the knife? It must be a good weapon now, able to kill the ghost.”
“It may be good enough,” Clare said. “But we need the ghost’s name, its core identity.” She thought, though, she could test that theory of Zach’s . . .
“We haven’t gone after it with the full power of the knife behind us,” Zach said.
She paused, distressed by his choice of words, then decided to speak. “Zach, this fight is mine.”
“We’re a team.”
“That’s right and I am captain.” She paused. “No, the Other didn’t say anything about the knife but to scold me because I tore the sheath.”
“Huh. Probably should consider it like a gun, then,” Zach said. “Carry it only if you’ll use it, and if you use it, don’t screw around. Take both sheaths off and fight with it.”
Her breath caught, but she nodded her head. “We’ll figure out a good knot that I can yank and have it open.” She bit her lower lip. “If I need to carry it around, the sheath is a liability.” She breathed deeply. “Obviously that hasn’t bothered anyone before me. If the metal sheath isn’t good enough to protect me—us—people—from ghosts—”
“The metal sheath, and the knife itself, is unusual enough to attract attention.”
“Then I will figure out something else.” Her voice nearly broke, so she took another little breath. “Maybe a tube, a leather tube. After all, it isn’t as if I won’t have the rest of my life.” She stopped to scrub the bitterness from her tone. “If I survive this.”
“Coming up on the hotel.” Zach pulled in front and parked. Parking was difficult during the day, but easy at night.
Clare grimaced. “I’d rather not fight the ghost in a hotel full of occupants.”
“Too bad,” Zach said succinctly, turning off the engine and out of the door before Clare could say anything else.
As usual, he came around to her door and opened it. She got out, smelled something odd, stopped and sniffed.
“What?” asked Zach.
She frowned.
He angled his head and drew in a hefty breath. His nose wrinkled like hers. “Dust and old clothes and a metallic odor.” His nostrils flared. “And . . . wet mold.”
She hadn’t scented that until he said it. “Yes. The ghost, I think. It’s not up in the canyons.” Her inner sore spot pulsed with a harder ache. “Over by the cemetery, I think.”
“Logical.”
“Yes, but it’s closer.”
“Still gotta do this.” Zach shut her door, took the few strides to the hotel door and opened it for her.
“Yes, it may still be upset from our previous . . . contretemps . . . tonight.”
Zach snorted, his eyes gleamed and he smiled. “Really, Clare? Contretemps?”
She flushed a little. “What would you call it?” She took the stairs fast, pulling out the ribbon in her purse that held the key, sticking it in the lock and jiggling it, opening the door.
Zach’s voice shot up the stairs. “Confrontations.”
“Oh,” she muttered. She’d continued to move fast, flinging her coat off, letting it land on the floor. Yanking her empty suitcase up, she threw it on the bed, unzipped it, then unzipped the pocket that held her sewing kit. She opened the needle and thread packet up, praying that she already had a needle threaded. As far as she was concerned, color didn’t matter as much as haste right now.
Closing the door behind him, Zach said, “Scuffles.”
She spared him a glance. “Scuffles.”
“Yeah, doesn’t seem like either one of them hurt either of you.”
Her glance became a glare, and she tossed the kit aside. “Linda Boucher died.”
His mouth flattened and he said with heavy irony, “I think the ghost had taken care of that little item beforehand. A good rock flung at the skull.”
“Ugh.” She refused to imagine that any further than the first image that had popped into her head.
Zach hung up his coat and hers, opened his suitcase, and retrieved a tube of metal that he extended into a sturdy cane. She jerked the sheathed knife from her purse, heard another little rip, and winced. With shaky fingers, she undid the knot, opened the sheath, tossed the knife on the bed. Zach scooped it up.
“My fight!” she growled, as she took a few precious seconds to study the cloth, pulled it inside out . . . better for mending . . . but she wanted to keep the darn patterns on the front as aligned as possible.
“Unless you want me to try and mend that, I’ll stand guard.” He moved around the bed toward the balcony door, took the step that kept him between the door and the window.
“Do you sew?” she asked, turning on the light on the wall over the bed and sitting beneath it, her back now to Zach and the outer wall.
“No.” A beat of silence. “Black thread?”
“I’m thinking of it as yin and yang,” Clare said, taking the first few stitches at one of the rips that didn’t have a circle with lines in it. “I think I’ve seen these patterns before, series of broken and unbroken lines. Each different, though I can’t recall when.”
“Probably something woo-woo, and you weren’t into that.”
“Probably.”
She set the stitches, focusing on the cloth. Not the time to go fast now. If those circles were protection, better that they were mended as perfectly as she could.
Ten minutes passed before she felt the ghost zooming their way. “It’s coming, Zach,” she said. It would probably come through the window . . . from behind her. She twitched, her needle caught a thread, pulled it, nearly across the whole tube. Darn it! A tiny sigh escaped her as she saw it didn’t disturb any of the circles. She was doing okay with keeping them aligned and together with the tiniest of stitches. She had no clue what would happen if the six lines in the circle became five or four because she’d turned the material under, if a broken line became a solid one.
The wind whistled out on the balcony, rattled the windows so that the lace curtains shivered as if they were wraiths themselves. Rain poured on the roof.
“Come on in, monster, we are waiting for you,” Zach taunted in a low and vicious voice.
Complete quiet . . . at least outside. Inside Clare could hear the raised voices of the couple next door in the Commodore room, the Jackpot beyond, and even some across the hall.
Fingers trembling, Clare bent her head and concentrated on her sewing, in and out, small stitches, as perfect as she could make them, but the nape of her neck prickled. Whispering, not knowing how much of regular speech the ghost could hear or comprehend, she said, “Ask it about Enzo. What it said about sin.”
SIN, the ghost battered against the window. Clare whisked her head around for a glance. More than the shades, more than the curtains, showed white. The snowstorm looked a little like the lace.
The DOG’S sin!
TWENTY-TWO
“WHAT SIN?” ZACH persisted. Clare continued to sew. She was coming to the end of the longest tear in the tube. Did she dare switch out thread to white and try to repair the tiny lines? Hurriedly she knotted off the black thread, concentrated only on threading the needle with white, not on the conversation happening behind her.
And Zach did hear the monstrous spirit. She could tell from the flatness of his voice. Not because of her, but because of Enzo. Enzo heard and suffered, and she and Zach both felt that.
“Betrayal?” Zach asked casually.
BETRAAAYYYAAALLL! It shrieked through her brain and she had to pause in her mending to see, to watch. Zach rocked back on his heels, set his cane.
“Enzo betrayed no one!” Clare snapped. She steadied her hands. Her fingers had finally remembered sewing and she began trying to weave minuscule threads of the characters of one pattern together.
He betrayed! He was with the child.
“What?” Zach demanded.
He was with the child. He left his true companion for the child! the ghost spat . . . sleet hit the window, the door, slashed through the room. Clare hunched over the silk, then straightened as the words sank in.
She said, aloud and mind-to-mind, I do not think that was betrayal.
You hurt with the hurt of betrayal. I FELT you. He is mine now.
Clare put aside the silk. No. I don’t accept that as betrayal!
Shrieking pummeled her ears, whipped through the room. Only I make that judgment. Only me.
“Give him back!” Clare yelled.
Zach made a slashing gesture. Clare bit her lip so no more shouts spewed from her. The hotel had quieted as if people were listening.
No! And no, and no! The phantom shrieked with the wind. The last “no” sounded accented . . . Spanish or something.
“What’s your name? Tell me your name,” Zach commanded.
Em— NO! You no catch ME. You no bind ME!
Ghost Killer Page 20
