by Etta Faire
“Were they written on Camp Dead Lake stationery and stuck to the wall with a fake hook?” Jackson asked by my side.
I was almost to the Shop-Quik nearest my house. “Okay, we were already planning on finding the movie online. Maybe watching it will help you sort out your memories.”
She laughed. “If you’re headed to Blockbuster, let me save you the time. Some low-budget horror movies made it big enough to get into stores, but we were rarely one of them. I don’t know how you’re going to find it.”
Jackson and I looked at each other.
“We’ll explain the internet later,” Jackson said. “But suffice it to say, we’ll probably be watching it tonight.”
I was kind of glad she hadn’t remembered much. I was driving, and there was no way to take notes on any of it. I pulled into the small Shop-Quik parking lot, right next to the pink Cadillac that I recognized immediately. It belonged to my good friend Shelby Winehouse.
I got out and looked around for her, almost not even recognizing her standing at the check-out counter inside. Her pink hair had been pulled back into a ponytail so her light brown roots were showing, and she was wearing dark blue scrubs with a badge hanging from her neck. I usually only saw her in rockabilly dresses or a waitress uniform.
I hadn’t seen her since my weird story time puppet show a few weeks ago, and I had so many things I wanted to ask her about. How her kids were doing, how school was going.
She bounced out, eating a yogurt. She looked healthy, though, despite the bags around her eyes.
I coughed when she walked by me.
“Carly,” she said, looking up, startled, like I was the last person she expected to see. We hugged, and I noticed her back felt bonier than usual.
She wasn’t eating right, I told myself. Then, I yelled at the mom voice in my head to shut up. I didn’t have a snack in my pocket.
She looked my outfit over. “Where are you going? Did somebody die?” she asked.
“Long story,” I said. I tried not to feel self-conscious about my outfit that obviously looked a little funeral-y. I smoothed down my slacks. “I had to ask Caleb Bowman for a favor, and I guess I overdressed for it.”
A couple of blackbirds flew over our heads, landing on the roof of the Shop-Quik. I noticed them. Shelby didn’t. I tried to remember if I’d put on Rosalie’s bird repellant this morning.
“Why on earth did you have to ask Caleb Bowman for a favor?” She looked at the keys dangling from her hand, then at her watch. I could tell she was in a hurry.
“It was nothing,” I said, kicking myself for bringing it up. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about that. “He has one of those creepy scrapbooks I was telling you about, and I was trying to get it back.”
“The one with the photo of the grouse pin?” she asked. She pointed to her badge as she walked closer to her car. There, next to the grainy picture of her nursing school photo, was a tiny, severed fuzzy white foot attached to her lanyard.
I didn’t ask why she was accessorizing with a dead bird’s foot. I already knew the answer.
Last year, Shelby’s fiancé left her the grouse foot pin when he went missing. We took it to mean he was coming back. And she was wearing it now, probably to remind herself of that.
“Dead bird feet look good on you,” I said.
A couple more birds flew close to us, then up to the roof. I tried not to glance up at them.
“You look happy, and that’s all that matters,” I added.
“I am happy,” she said. “Poor, but happy. I’ve had to cut my hours a lot at the diner.” She dug her white no-slip, nursing shoe into the cracks of the sidewalk. “Business hasn’t picked up like we were hoping after the bird attacks. People are still afraid… On account of the fact your bird attack happened there.”
I nodded. “Both of my attacks happened there.”
She went on, oblivious to the birds currently watching us. “Lenny doesn’t know what he’s gonna do, so I volunteered to take fewer shifts so Mrs. CarMichael wouldn’t lose her hours. She needs them more than I do. My parents pay for most my stuff and I’m just so busy with school and the kids…”
She looked up at the sky, but didn’t seem to notice the birds. “I never thought I’d be in this place in my thirties, having my parents pay for most of my stuff, living with them.”
“Things are going to look up,” I said, like I knew what “up” looked like. I was in my thirties too, living in the house I inherited from my ex, working minimum wage while I solved ghosts’ cold cases.
She looked at her watch again. “I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta rush,” she said, giving me one last hug. “I’m late for class. I’m always late for everything now. We’ll catch up soon.”
I ran inside without too much of a goodbye, my hand mindlessly reaching for the back of my neck to check to see if the bird repellant was there. It had a very distinctive feel to it, like vaseline only slimier. It was there. I had remembered to put it on, thank God.
They’re only birds, I reminded myself. There had always been birds in life, and there would always be birds. I needed to calm down.
But that was easier said than done when those birds were always following you, and had attacked you twice.
I looked outside as Shelby drove off. The flock of birds followed her.
“Looks like you narrowly escaped another bird attack,” my ex said when I got back to my car with my popcorn and soda.
“Oooh,” Mandy replied. “Sounds like your life jumbles into a horror movie, too.”
She did not know the half of it. But this time, I wondered who the birds were really following.
Chapter 4
Sorting Out Murder
Rex greeted me as soon as I got home, nuzzling his nose into my hand, throwing me the “I’m hungry and hopeful you’ll fix that problem” look that he knew I couldn’t resist.
I checked the clock. It was close enough to dinner time for me to fudge the numbers. I put his food in the microwave and grabbed my notebook.
I finally got a good look at Mandy as she hovered around my living room. Her high-waisted, acid-washed “mom jeans” matched her jacket. She was shorter than I thought she was when I saw her in the backseat of my car, petite yet stocky.
She ran her hand over my velvet curtains and along the blood-crimson settee, like she could actually feel them. “This is an amazing house,” she kept saying.
Jackson looked over at me. He crossed his arms so every pock mark in his leather elbow patches was in full display. “Thank you, Mandy,” he said. “This house is an original. My great grandfather designed it.”
I rolled my eyes. “She likes it because it looks like it belongs in a horror movie,” I said. I went back in the kitchen, grabbed Rex’s bowl from the microwave, and set it on the floor so he could wolf it down in three bites, then sniff the floorboards until I gave him an extra treat. It was our little dance, and we both had our parts down.
Mandy hovered into the kitchen next. “And that dog. He’s so familiar. Reminds me of a stray that used to hang around the set while we were here in Landover.” She turned to Rex. “That was probably your great grandpa, too, huh?”
I did not bother to tell her it was probably the same dog. She was a ghost, so she obviously believed in paranormal oddities happening in life, but she probably would not have believed that one. I barely believed it myself. But, for some reason, my dog did not seem to age or die.
I sat down in the dining room in front of my laptop and pulled my phone from my purse.
“First things first,” I said, swiping the screen, bringing up the photo I’d taken at the bar. “Do you know anyone named Crazy Hank? Is he one of the people in this photo?”
“He might have been a local,” Jackson added.
She shook her head. “I don’t remember anyone named Hank.”
“Do you remember anyone in the photo?” I asked.
She squinted at my phone. “A lot of these people are part of the crew,” she said. “Th
ere’s my husband, Graham.” She pointed to a man about 40 with thinning wisps of brownish red hair. He was in a long jacket of sorts, standing in the middle of the group by the two young women. She pointed to a shorter, dark-haired man with a bushy mustache on Graham’s other side. “That’s Ned. Ned Reinhart. He was the director. Also, a friend from college.” Then she pointed to the longer-haired blonde girl. “That’s Olivia. Our daughter… Or, was it my daughter in the movie? Oh, dear…”
“Are any of these people Ruth or Barry?”
She stared at the photo for a good ten seconds before shaking her head no.
I grabbed my notebook and started a suspect list, writing Ned Reinhart, Graham Smalls, Ruth and Barry Locke onto separate lines.
Then, I yanked open my laptop.
“Happy birthday, by the way,” I said, as I typed in Camp Dead Lake into my browser.
She turned her head to the side, so I stopped typing and explained. “The sheriff told me your sister calls every year on your birthday to ask for updates on your case. She called today.”
Mandy pulled on one of her bangles and hovered closer to me. “Lilith. I knew Lilith wouldn’t forget about me. Did my kids call too? And my husband?”
“I’m sure they all did. The sheriff just didn’t mention it.”
She nodded. “Lilith probably remembers my birthday because our birthdays are so close it’s hard not to. Hers is in less than two weeks. I was almost three years older than her exactly.”
Instead of searching for the movie, I went to Facebook instead.
It was time to introduce Mandy to the internet.
I remembered Caleb calling the woman on the phone “Ms. Gunther,” so I typed that into the search bar as I talked. “We’re going to figure this out, and then, in two weeks, we’re going to give Lilith a call to wish her a happy birthday and to give her the best birthday present ever. We’re going to tell her we solved your case.”
I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that, but my words seemed to perk Mandy up a little. She smiled, and I could see the crinkles around her eyes.
Mandy hovered behind me. She and Jackson were both looking over my shoulder as I clicked on Lilith’s profile. Fortunately, there weren’t a lot of Lilith Gunthers.
A photo of an older woman with family all around her came up. Mandy pointed to it. “That’s her,” she said over and over. She snapped her fingers. “Just like that, you can find her?”
“Welcome to the internet,” Jackson said. “You can find anything here, even horrible low-budget, B-movies from thirty years ago…”
Mandy glared at him.
“Not saying that yours was one of those,” he added.
Lilith’s profile was not set to private, so I could see most of the photos and posts. She’d done a tribute to Mandy today, on Mandy’s birthday. There was an old photo of the two sisters from high school together in the late 1950s with lop-sided, curled short blonde hair.
“We had to wear curlers all night to get that look,” she said, pointing at the photo. “I always wanted to be one of those girls who went to the salon to sit under a dryer, reading a magazine while their hair dried perfectly. But our parents didn’t have money. Haircuts at home. Curlers all night.”
Lilith’s cover photo was of some sort of family reunion. Lilith was obviously the older woman in the middle, her hair still blonde and teased with hairspray. She and an older man who had to be her husband were both surrounded by teenagers and people in their 40s and 50s.
Looking at the picture made me think about my own family, or lack thereof. I was already in my 30s. Shelby had five kids by now…
But I couldn’t bring a child into my life yet. I had a curse to solve and a shifter war to stop.
Lilith’s teenage picture almost morphed into the one below it where she was in her 70s with her grandchildren. A reminder of how quickly time passed if you let curses and wars get in your way.
Mandy was still talking behind me. “At least I get to see what I would have looked like. What things would have been like for me. I look good for 70s. She does, I mean.” Mandy’s voice trailed off as she pointed to my laptop. “What my life would have been like if it hadn’t been cut short…”
I clicked away and went to look up the movie next, typing the search terms “Camp Dead Lake 1987” into my laptop, in case there were several Camp Dead Lakes.
Mandy watched my every move. “Can you look up my husband next and my kids?” she asked.
“One thing at a time,” Jackson said to our client. “There’s plenty of time for all of this later. We’ve got a murder to figure out first.”
I saw the movie right away, thank goodness, because I was ready to change out of my itchy turtleneck.
The cover photo for Camp Dead Lake was of two young women in bikinis sunbathing on a small row boat while a boy fished. A huge hook rose up out of the water behind them. I checked the photo on my phone. All three of them were in the group shot from the bar.
“That’s not the concept we agreed on,” Mandy said, pointing to the cover when I brought it up. Her voice was tight and severe. “We were supposed to do a shadowy figure with a hook while everyone was sitting around a campfire.” She looked at me, hands on her hips. “They changed it. They were always changing things when they weren’t supposed to.”
My neckline felt scratchy again. Mandy seemed very particular about the movie.
I went upstairs to change into my pajamas, leaving her ranting by my computer. Her husband wasn’t the only one who seemed more interested in the film than in Mandy’s death. Even Mandy herself seemed more interested in it.
Chapter 5
Popcorn and a Movie
My stomach rumbled with the smell of extra buttery microwave popcorn filling the house. This was not my best choice for dinner, but when your fridge is full of condiments and frozen pizza, it’s not the worst choice either.
I turned the lights down then snuggled onto the couch under my throw blanket with my bag of popcorn and my notebook.
I chuckled at the fact I was about to watch a cheesy 80s horror flick in my haunted house with a couple of my ghost friends, and that the weirdest part about it was my movie choice.
I pushed play, and a shiver instantly went up my spine as the music came on. It was the kind of music with shrieks of violin mixed with ominous low tones from some sort of a synthesizer that made you know bad things were about to happen, and probably more than once.
Mandy looked exactly the same. She was one of the first people on the screen, driving a brown station wagon down the road around Landover Lake with a young woman in the passenger’s seat who was obviously supposed to be her daughter. She was the girl with the Bon Jovi hairstyle.
The lake seemed different than it did today. A little more relaxed. Houses weren’t pristine and mansion-like with round-the-clock gardeners pruning something.
I tried to stay focused. I had a job to do, and that job wasn’t staring at the lake and the houses in the background, noticing how different everything looked 30 years ago.
The women pulled up to the camp, and Mandy got out of the car. “Camp Red Lake,” Mandy said on the TV. “It even smells the same. Like dirt mixed with sweaty socks.” She took a long inhale and smiled.
The girl rolled her eyes but got out of the station wagon while Mandy continued in oblivious mom fashion. She pulled her daughter in for a side hug. “I cannot believe it was twenty years ago when I was your age, just graduating high school and starting my first job here with all of my friends, same as you. You are going to have the time of your life, or die trying. C’mon. Let me show you around.”
The girl groaned but walked with her mom. The music picked up to let us know someone or something was watching them.
I gripped my throw blanket tighter. The Mandy in real-life pointed at the screen, hovering close to the television. I could tell my ex was annoyed, which was the only reason I didn’t mind the hovering. Anything that annoyed my ex was okay in my book.
“
Sit down,” he told her from his spot on the couch next to me. “You may be a faded ghost, but you’re not transparent enough to watch a movie through.”
Mandy didn’t hear him. She nodded like she was remembering things now. I could tell this was going to be a lot like watching sports with Justin. I always got extra play-by-plays that I did not want.
“Okay, so that woman, my co-star right there, that was Somer. Somer Hawkins. She wasn’t my daughter. I got that mixed up before. But she and Olivia were around the same age, and both just as cute. Olivia has a bit part in this movie too. I’ll point her out to you as soon as she comes up. She and Frederick came over to the lake and helped out when they could around their classes. Frederick was my son.”
She laughed, her mom laugh fading out at the end. “It is all coming back to me. I knew it would.”
Reluctantly, I took my notebook out and scribbled in what she was saying, even though I wasn’t sure any of it was true yet. “Good. We’ll see if the blue notes you remember are in the movie, too, or if they were a part of your actual life.”
On the screen, the women walked around camp, Mandy pointing out places to her daughter with something following them the entire time.
A man in his 40s and a young boy who looked like a Duran Duran reject popped out of the bushes. The older man had the curved part of a hanger poking out of his long-sleeved shirt where a hand should have been. Mandy and her daughter jumped and screamed.
“Ken, you have not changed,” Mandy said. She turned to her daughter. “He used to be my boyfriend back when I was too young to know what a mistake looked like.” She snatched the hook from Ken’s hand. “That is not funny.”
She tossed the hook into the bushes, and the camera closed in on it.
They met up with the other counselors, Somer’s friends from high school. Mandy told them to wear sunscreen and life jackets, and to be careful with the boat motor, especially around the kids.
