The Ferryman

by John E. Siers

  And all ghosts—at least the malevolent kind—are afraid of dragons, she thought. I may not have found any ghosts here, but I think I’ve found something else. Now if I could just find somebody at SAD who’ll believe me.

  “…and maybe that’s a good thing,” she went on. “Otherwise, our regular Shooters might be living in a paranormal nightmare. Anyway, it’s not been a problem so far, but the whole point of this study is to find out how much activity is out there—especially in and around LEI field operations.

  “OK…so you haven’t seen any obvious activity, but maybe there’s some things you haven’t noticed. There are a few indicators that we look for, so I still have a bunch of questions to ask.” She turned to her laptop and brought up what was obviously a prepared questionnaire.

  “Do you ever find things out of place…you know, something you swear you put somewhere, but now you find it someplace else?”

  “Gotta say no to that one,” Lisa answered with a grin. “Mark is really fussy about that—I won’t quite say anal-retentive, but he would have noticed right away if stuff like that started happening.”

  “Rule of Order,” Mark insisted. “Order exists when there’s a place for everything…”

  “And everything is in its place,” Lisa finished. “See what I mean?”

  “OK…nothing out of place. Check,” Waters made a mark on the screen. “Next question…”

  “So what do you think? Is the place haunted?”

  Lisa feigned a shiver as she cuddled up next to Mark in bed—his bed this time, a bit cozier than her own apartment’s slumber-party playground. Her grin told him she wasn’t really worried about it.

  Waters’ interview had taken almost three hours. Toward the end, she’d closed the computer and asked them questions that sounded more like personal curiosity than official LEI business—questions about the two of them, their backgrounds, and their present relationship. Mark thought the questions were almost too personal in some cases, but it was hard to take offense with the woman’s cheerful, exuberant personality—especially when she seemed to regard the two of them with reverential awe.

  “Hmmm…well, I’m still something of an agnostic, but she sure gave me something to think about,” he admitted. “She seemed to be pretty knowledgeable on the subject.”

  “So do those people on the paranormal reality shows on the video channels.” She snorted. “But in the end, they never really prove anything. The whole point is to make you think something strange is going on, then they expect you to take their explanation as gospel. Never saw one of them that was worth the time to watch it.”

  “True…but she works for LEI. Believe me, there’s no organization on Earth that’s more pragmatic and profit driven. If they’ve got her on salary and are paying her to do what she did here today, then somebody at the topmost level not only believes in what she’s talking about, but also thinks there’s money to be made from it.”

  “So maybe there are a few ghosts hanging around here.” Lisa sounded like the prospect excited her. “You know, I probably wouldn’t mind meeting one of those ‘benevolent spirits’ she mentioned.”

  “Yeah…” He chuckled. “Who knows, maybe Granny is still wandering around here somewhere. I wouldn’t mind that at all.”

  “Actually,” she admitted, “I was kind of hoping for Lacrisha.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Family Affair

  Mark thought they’d finished with all the natural disaster contracts for a while, but he was wrong. There was one more to deal with, and this one had…complications.

  “Mr. Wilson, I have three people listed on the contract, so why am I looking at four?” Mark nodded pointedly at the seven-year-old girl seated next to her mother.

  “This is Emma, our daughter,” Joe Wilson explained. “At first we thought there was an alternative, but…well, we need to take her with us.”

  “I know who she is,” Mark told him. “We research our clients. She wasn’t here three days ago when you signed the contract, so I assumed you had found a place for her somewhere.”

  “Well, yes, but that didn’t work out, so we brought her along. She’s only seven, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. You’re already going to take care of the three of us…”

  They were a family of four, all wanting to be terminated together—or rather Joe Wilson, his wife Sarah, and teenage son Bobby wanted it. Mark was fairly sure little Emma Wilson had no idea what was going on, but now her parents were saying they wanted to take her life with theirs.

  Under the law, they had the right to do so, but they hadn’t put it in the contract. Mark wasn’t going to let them get away with it.

  “We need to talk…and I think it best if we do it without Emma in the room.”

  The little girl looked distressed, and he hastened to reassure her.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, honey…Lisa, why don’t you take Emma to the cafeteria and see if you can find something for her—a soda, maybe some ice cream…”

  “Sure.” Lisa had been part of the meeting—which they’d held in the conference room because of the number of people—and now she got up from her chair. “C’mon, Emma…let’s go see if we can find something yummy.”

  She led the little girl to the door with a smile that changed to a bleak look as she glanced back at Mark and shook her head. We are not going to kill this child!

  “Does she have any idea what’s supposed to happen here?” Mark asked after Lisa left with Emma.

  “We…we told her we’re all going to heaven,” Sarah Wilson replied.

  “It’s not in the contract, and we don’t do anyone for free.” Mark decided to simply take the cold, hard business approach.

  “Contract says you have to terminate us, here, today…by hanging, as we agreed,” Joe insisted. “If you don’t do Emma as well, what’s going to happen to her?”

  “I guess you should have thought of that, Joe. For the record, the contract says ‘most expedient method’—I suggested hanging, but I could just as easily shoot you. Also for the record, I don’t have to do anything until the three of you imprint the contract again to prove you’ve passed the waiting period.”

  “Then give me the contract and let us imprint it,” he demanded. “Then you take care of us and Emma’s your problem…”

  “Joe…” Sarah’s voice sounded distressed.

  “No, I mean it,” Joe insisted. “Contract says anything we bring in here becomes the property of Charon’s Ferry. I guess that includes Emma…unless you want to amend the contract to add her to the list. I’ll sign off on it, and that will solve everybody’s problem.”

  “Not happening, Joe…” Mark stared at him coldly. “You’ll have to come up with something better than that.”

  Should never have let them through the door in the first place, he told himself. When the Wilsons had shown up with the girl, he’d queried them at the entrance. Joe had told him there’d been a ‘slight change of plans,’ and he just needed to meet with Mark to discuss it. Mark had assumed he’d meant they were calling off the deal entirely and hoped to get some of their money back…so he’d let them in.

  And what did the Marines teach you about the word ‘assume’…?

  “I’ll need to talk this over with Lisa,” he told them. “I’m going to have her bring Emma back in here. All of you stay here—there’s coffee, tea, and soda on the sideboard.”

  “They’ve got no place to go, no way out—and now they’ve got us in a bind,” Mark grumbled. “They’re here; they’re ready to go. If we don’t snuff them, they’ll go after us for breach of contract. Any jury in California will give them 10 million in a heartbeat.”

  The Wilsons were destitute. They’d been burned out in the quake-spawned gas line rupture, and the insurance company was calling it damage due to earthquake—for which they had no coverage. Mark often wondered why so many people in California carried no earthquake insurance. Big ones only came around every now and then, but seismic detectors showed qua
kes too small to be felt just about every day.

  The one that had hit the Wilsons’ neighborhood hadn’t been small, and they weren’t the only ones whose homes had been destroyed, but they’d “borrowed” almost all the money from Bobby’s college fund to remodel the house that had gone up in smoke. Then Joe had lost his job at a local investment firm as a result of a market downturn that also put a serious dent in his 401k—against which he had also taken loans for the remodeling project.

  And now they were truly homeless. They’d moved out of a small apartment in the valley where they’d gone after the burn-out and spent all the money they had left on the Ferry contract. They had paid in advance for a three-day stay in the cheapest local hotel and kept a little cash for food during the waiting period. When they’d walked through the door this morning, they were penniless.

  “How can they even think about killing that sweet little girl?” Lisa wanted to know. “For that matter, how does a family get to the point where they want to check out like that—all of them together?”

  “If I was married and had kids,” she fumed, “I’d be living under a freeway overpass, collecting aluminum cans and stealing copper wire from construction sites to keep my family alive. These people had enough money to start over—from the very bottom, maybe not too much better than that overpass, but they could have survived and maybe someday rebuilt. Instead, they’re here. What the hell happened to them?”

  “It looks like Preacher Joe Johnston happened,” Mark told her. “NorthStar says they were fundamentalist Christians to begin with—not radical, but pretty devout. When they got burned out, the only place they could find to live that they could afford was down in the valley, and his was the nearest church they could find.”

  “Oh, hell no!” Lisa rolled her eyes. “Preacher Joe and the Church of the Holy Death!”

  The Reverend Joseph Johnston was well known in the area for his somewhat unorthodox preaching. He told his congregation—every Sunday, with revival-style fervor—that life was merely a temporary hell inflicted upon all of us while we tried to find the way to heaven.

  More importantly, he proclaimed, there was no need to search for the way, no need to wait. Jesus himself had shown us the way to heaven—by dying on the cross. All that was required was the courage to end our lives, and we would find ourselves at the gates of paradise. But we were weak, he said, and we remained on Earth, living in sin. Death would end our sinning, and God would welcome us into a new, forever happy eternity.

  Johnston was so fervent a suicide advocate that a local media pundit told viewers the reverend said his prayers on a mat every night—Islam style, except that instead of bowing toward Mecca, he bowed toward Charon’s Ferry. Mark had not been amused.

  True, the Ferry did get a few clients from Johnston’s congregation, but most of his followers did it to themselves, in defiance of the anti-suicide law. Of course they left their entire estate to Johnston’s church in those cases. The law made a sole exception for seizure of estate funds—anything left to a duly registered, non-profit, charitable institution couldn’t be touched. Reverend Johnston was careful to maintain his church’s status in that regard.

  “I wish he would take his own advice,” Lisa muttered. “If he showed up here, I’d probably do him for free.”

  “He won’t.” Mark snorted. “A reporter asked him why he didn’t practice what he preached, and he insisted that he couldn’t—because God had sent him to help others find the way, and he had to do God’s will before he could rest.”

  “So what are we going to do now?”

  “If it weren’t for the little girl, the three of them would already be in the tank, and I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” he admitted. “But she changes everything. I think we just give them their money back and cancel the contract. They can still sue us, but they’d have to prove there was a contract in the first place.”

  “Hmmm…never thought of that.” She smiled for the first time. “We have to be the only business in the world that does a legal contract and doesn’t give a copy to the customer.”

  “But I’m still worried about Emma.” Her smile changed to a frown. “They were willing to kill her, and if we don’t agree to do it, they don’t seem to care what happened to her.”

  “That was Joe playing hard-ass,” he assured her. “I’m sure Emma’s mom has a different view of the whole thing. What we have to do is make sure they don’t do something stupid—like head up the coast highway and drive the car off a cliff.”

  Lisa had taken Emma to the cafeteria once again, leaving Mark to talk with Joe, Sarah, and Bobby.

  “You’re old enough to do this on your own, Bobby,” Mark began, “and you’re not responsible for your sister, so for the moment, let me just talk to your parents.

  “Now…let’s start with a cold, hard fact. There’s no way we’re going to terminate Emma. I don’t like killing a perfectly healthy child, and since you didn’t put it in the contract, I don’t have to. If you’d brought her here three days ago and asked us to include her, there would have been no contract at all. I would have refused to sign any of you.

  “If I brought her three days ago, you wouldn’t have had a choice,” Joe protested. “You would have had to sign us up—I know the law.”

  “No…you don’t. There would have been no contract, because I wouldn’t have given you a break on the fees the way I did then. You wouldn’t have been able to afford a contract for two of you, let alone four. You’ve paid only half the price we would normally charge for three—because I thought you were really in bad shape and needed a break.”

  “So that’s what it comes down to,” Wilson snarled. “Money…you’re going to take our money and still deny us the service we need.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m going to do something I’ve never done in the history of Charon’s Ferry. I’m going to give you your money back—including the application fee. Now pay attention, because the next thing I say is particularly important.

  “You need to step up and be a man. You have a family to take care of, and suicide is not the answer, for them or for you. You need to find a job and go to work, earn an honest living. What’s the matter? Your last job didn’t work out? Fine…there are lots of other jobs out there, and frankly, I don’t care if you get a job shoveling chicken shit for minimum wage—as long as you bring home a paycheck and take care of your family. That money I’m giving back will hold you over for a while…”

  “What? How long? Maybe two or three months?” Joe demanded. “That chicken-shit job isn’t going to pay the rent, let alone provide us with food.”

  “Well, see, there’s your problem, Joe. Your brain is living in Beverly Hills when you need to be thinking more like Reseda or Van Nuys. The money I’m giving back to you will last you more like two years if you get over the idea that you’re no longer a high-flying investment broker. Find a place to live that an honest shoveler of chicken shit can afford—people actually live that way, you know.”

  “But Reverend Johnston says…”

  “Do not mention Preacher Joe’s name in my presence!” Mark snarled. “If he walked in that door tomorrow, I would happily put a bullet in his brain for free—but he won’t, because he’s too busy getting rich off suckers like you. He’d be disappointed with you anyway, because you paid a fee to me instead of leaving it all to him and jumping off a bridge.”

  “But…I don’t see how I can do it. You’re talking about a family of four…”

  “Three,” Mark replied, turning to Bobby. “You’re seventeen years old. The best thing you can do for your family right now is to not be a burden. Go join the Army, or the Navy, or the Marines—join the Coast Guard, if you like; I don’t care. You can sign up tomorrow, with parental permission. Do something useful instead of taking a quick drop on the end of a rope. You won’t make enough to send any money to Mom and Dad, but they won’t have to feed, clothe, and shelter you, either.”

  “As for you…” he turned to Sarah, “you have a l
ovely seven-year-old daughter to take care of. If you can spare time from that, you can consider a job to help support the three of you. Yeah…I know…spoiled rich girl never had to work a day in her life. Try flipping burgers for a while—it’ll give you a new perspective on life.

  “Now…the four of you are going to walk out of here with money enough to keep going while you find a new place to live, get work, do what you need to do to survive, and—hopefully—thrive, eventually. But I’m going to do one more thing for you.” He reached into his desk drawer and came up with a business card.

  “Call this lady. Her name’s Eunice Mercer, and she makes her living helping people like you. She’ll be shocked that I sent you—especially if you tell her that I had you under contract and gave you your money back. Tell her I said she owes me a few. You might mention the Lacrisha Jones grant.”

  “Anyway, she can help you find a job, a place to live, all that stuff. What I hope she will not do is send you back here. I never want to see you people again.”

  “Well…that’s the second time I deliberately turned down a contract,” Mark mused as they watched the Wilsons depart. “I just sent three people packing who should have ended up in the tank—and that’s the first time I ever gave someone a refund.”

  “We don’t need the money,” Lisa told him. “The important thing is, we saved little Emma’s life…or at least I hope we did.”

  “Yeah…jury’s still out on that one, but if they contact Eunice, I’ll give good odds they’ll make it. Anyway, there was no other way. I was almost tempted to snuff the three of them and just…keep Emma with us.”

  “I know,” she said. “So was I…but how would we have ever explained it to her? This is the best way, but…”

  He heard the note of regret in her voice and reached out to take her hand. She shook off the mood and smiled at him.