Along Came a Demon (2 page)

At least she knew she was dead. Sometimes they don’t.

“
I’ve seen you walking the neighborhood and thought I recognized you. I saw your picture in a newspaper when I lived in New Jersey, when you helped the police with the Telford murder. It said you’re a psychic detective. I thought, how neat, a psychic, and she lives near me.”

Ah, the Telford case, my little piece of notoriety. It involved a meat packer named - wait for it - Mark Butcher, a 1965 Mustang Shelby Fastback, a panicked seventeen-year-old and a clever, panicked father who did not want his boy in the hands of evil law enforcement; a smart county sheriff who stewed over the case for six months before making a call to his old friend Mike Warren, and little old me.

When I work with other PDs, like Clarion they try to keep me under the radar, but a resident of tiny Telford, New Jersey, thought she knew what I did for the police. She told her brother, the editor-cum-reporter-cum-everything else of the Telford Times. He got a picture of me and wrote a story. I’m glad the national newspapers didn’t pick it up.

So Lindy lived in New Jersey and just happened to read the article. People like to debate fate and coincidence. I don’t believe in fate, and coincidence can be a huge pain in the butt as far as I’m concerned.

“
One, I’m not a detective. Two, I’m not a psychic. I don’t disagree when people call me that because they’d have a harder time with me if they knew what I really do. I see the departed. I can talk to them,” I told Lindy.

“
So you’re a medium?”

“
Not really. Mediums can sense a presence and if they’re lucky communicate with it, but I see you as a flesh and blood person. Mediums don’t have person-to-person conversations with the departed as we’re having.”

“
Oh.” Her gaze drifted from me for a moment. She looked lost, then distraught, as her hands came up to catch hanks of her long hair and pull them. “Then you can’t help me.”

But damn me, I was going to try. I couldn’t cope with a nude spirit camped out in my backyard. “I might be able to, if you tell me what you need.”

She crossed her wrists, wrapping the ends of her hair around her throat. “My little boy … I have to know what happened to Lawrence.”

I frowned. The paper did not mention a child. But there could be a reason, something the police were not sharing with the public.

“
He didn’t leave with the police officers?”

She shook her head wildly. “No! He wasn’t in the apartment. I couldn’t feel him.”

“
Feel him?”

“
I always felt him there. It was a little harder when he played outside. I had to stretch my senses farther.”

“
You mean you sense his physical presence?”

“
Of course. Can’t all parents?”

Not that I knew of. I had vague memories of my foster parents yelling through my bedroom door, “Tiffany, you stop right this minute,” and not understanding how they knew what I was doing when they couldn’t see me. Later in life, I learned it’s intuition possessed by most parents, not an uncanny talent. Lindy meant something other than intuition.

Okay, skip it. Not important right now.

“
Lawrence? He would be Lawrence… ?” The paper said she was single, but he could have his father’s name.

“
Lawrence Marchant.”

“
Okay. Do you have family or friends he could have gone to?”

She shook her head. “No. Nobody. We were all alone.”

“
Then he’s probably in the state’s care.” I tried to give her a reassuring smile. “They’ll make sure he has a good home.”

I almost choked on the words. I was in and out of their shelters and went through five foster-families, till my latest foster-father made life impossible. I should have gone to my caseworker, but I just wanted out of there, fast. There are a lot of good people at Child and Family Services, but it’s a state bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive caseloads can wear down most well-intentioned people. I figure I did them a favor by cutting through the red tape and leaving Utah.

“
Do you think so? Perhaps they took him before I woke. Can you find out?”

I halfheartedly nodded. “If it’s what you need, to know where he is, it shouldn’t be hard.”

Then I had to ask. “Lindy, what happened to you?”

She let her hair loose and wrung her hands together.

Until I became accustomed to it, seeing the faces of the dead was an alarming experience, because they are stuck with the expression they wore when they died. Lindy went through the physical motions of pulling on her hair and wringing her hands, as if distressed, but her expression didn’t alter.

“
I was taking a bath and I know I locked the front and back doors. A man came in the bathroom and went behind me. I couldn’t even scream. I wanted to, but I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I gripped the sides of the tub and tried to haul myself up, and he touched me on the forehead. I barely felt it. But then it was like a … a jolt through my body. It took my breath away. I went under the water, just for a second, came back up and I still couldn’t breathe. That’s all I remember till I woke again.”

I stepped closer. “What do you recall next?”

Her eyes slid away as she concentrated on a memory which could already be fading. “People there. Police. In the bathroom.” Her gaze darted back to me and her tone turned indignant. “It was so embarrassing! One of the officers picked up my thong and said he wondered if his girlfriend would like one. The detective said he’d get one for his wife, but it would cut off her circulation - not that it would matter because her crotch atrophied years ago. I was stark naked in my bathtub and they joked about my underwear! And then the other officer said he’d heard on good authority if you - “

I cut in. I didn’t need that much information. I kept my voice and expression neutral, although I wanted to grin at the mental picture her words evoked. “Making jokes at a crime scene is a coping mechanism. A kind of barrier they put between them and the reality of what they see and have to deal with. Your underwear was an excuse, a distraction if you like.”

She stared at the ground and I hoped she hadn’t lost her train of thought. But she continued: “I tried to cover myself with my hands as I got out of the tub. I yelled at them, but they took no notice, as if they didn’t hear me. I tried to wrap a towel around but I couldn’t seem to pick it up. I was … I froze. I couldn’t understand what was happening. And then… .”

She brought her hands up to cover her eyes.

After talking to so many dead people, you would think I’d become hardened to it, but although I learned to keep my feelings to myself, their sad stories still get to me. After a while they come to terms with what happened to them, and become resigned - although I did meet a couple with a serious case of self-denial. But people like Lindy who have only just passed over - I feel so damned awful for them, for what they go through, not only losing their lives, but the frustration, disbelief and fear they experience as they come to realize they are no longer among the living.

She dropped her hands and looked me in the eyes. “They were talking about the dead woman in the tub and I realized they meant me.

“
They left after a while, taking me with them. I mean … I watched them take my body, but
I
was still there! Then I was all alone. And then I remembered you. So I came to see you.”

“
How did you manage that, Lindy?”

“
I walked here. It isn’t far. Although it did seem to take a real long time.”

Two days. She took two days to reach me.

I didn’t explain how her leaving the apartment was, as far as I knew, an oddity. “I’ll see what I can do. But it could take time and I can’t have you waiting in my yard.”

“
I won’t be a bother,” she said quickly.

I had to be blunt. “Well, you are a bother when every time I look out of the window see you staring in.”

She glanced at the yard. “I don’t want to go back to the apartment. Can I stay here if I keep out of your way? If I keep out of sight?”

I closed my eyes and puffed out a quick breath. I didn’t want her here, but I couldn’t make her leave if she didn’t want to. Compromise would work better.

The rest of the lot stretches behind the house. I have an honest-to-god orchard back there with a pear, a couple of plums, a Bing cherry and four apple trees. Grapevines smother the back wall. The harvest is nothing special as the high altitude means a short growing season, but my neighbors are glad to come in and pick their own, and in return I get a few jams, jellies and relishes. Hoping Lindy could follow, I walked toward the orchard. “Why don’t you hang out with the apple trees for now? But when I find your son, I want you gone from here, Lindy. That’s the deal.”

She came after me. “But where will I - “

“
I don’t know,” I cut in. “But not here.”

I’m not unsympathetic, far from it, but there have to be boundaries between the living and the dead. Their place of departure is typically their boundary, but in Lindy’s case, with her ability to move about, I had to outline those boundaries for her. My backyard would
not
to be the place she lingered till she passed over.

“
By the way,” I added as she wandered toward the fruit trees, “the man in your apartment, what did he look like?”

She half-turned back. “I don’t remember very well. He moved so fast, he was a blur. I think he had long yellow hair. Oh, and his eyes seemed to glint. I don’t mean how a person’s eyes can gleam in lamplight, they … oh, I don’t know. They just looked strange.”

I headed for the backdoor leading to the kitchen, acorns from the scrub oak crunching underfoot. I made a face - another oddity. The one thing the dead
never
forget is the face of their killer.

“
Well?”

I poured more coffee. “It’s her all right.”

“
And?”

“
A man was in her apartment. I think he killed her, but I don’t know how. She doesn’t know herself. All she’s interested in is her little boy.” I frowned at Jack, wondering if I skipped over some of the newspaper article. “The paper
didn’t
mention a child, did it?”

“
If it had, I would have told you.”

I got up from the table. “I’m gonna talk to Mike.”

Jack went to the window in the backdoor, from where he could see Lindy. “She’s a looker. Wouldn’t mind wrapping myself around that.”

“
Now that I’d like to see,” said Mel.

“
Yeah, Jack,” I chimed in as I headed for the stairs. “And why don’t you pass me the newspaper while you’re at it.”

I gave Mel a conspiratorial look. We girls have to stick together. Jack glared at both of us. “I suppose you think you’re funny.”

“
Well … yeah.”

Dead people. They slay me.

Chapter T
wo

Showered, clad in Levis, white long-sleeved sweater and white surgical-style tennis shoes, I headed for the door, grabbing up my green corduroy jacket as I passed through the hall.

The windows of my navy-blue Subaru Forrester were thick with frost. I knew I should have put it in the garage last night. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Five minutes later, I turned off Beecher onto Second Street and headed downtown.

My cell rang. It was Colin. “Hi Tiff.”

Colin is a nice guy. I met him at the court house, me on the way in, he on the way out after paying a speeding fine. We collided in the entrance, kind of rebounded, and looked each other up and down. I guess he liked what he saw as much as I did, because he apologized and invited me for coffee. That was three months ago. Colin is a gangling six-four, with fine, pale-blond hair and lazy blue-gray eyes. During my teen years, we called eyes like Col’s “go-to-bed-eyes.” I didn’t get to that piece of furniture till our eighth date, with a little urging from me. Our relationship had progressed to the “next level” and, well, I was a happy camper.

My bones loosened a little and my voice dropped an octave. “Hi, Colin.”

“
Did you have a good time last night?”

“
I had a great time.” A nice meal at a good restaurant. A few drinks. Back to his house. His nice
empty
house. Just him and me. I call that a good night.

I got lost in the memory a little and almost drove through Gillian as she leaped in the road. I swerved to miss her, glowering and wagging my finger. She hunched her little shoulders and backed up to the bushes from which she’d emerged.

I avoided her mother like the plague. Gillian cropped up in the conversation every time I bumped into her mom, even after three years. Listening to a mother reminisce about her dead child is really uncomfortable when the little blighter jumps in front of your car almost every time you drive past her house.

On her way to school, Gillian had just left her front yard when some jackass plowed into her, then went on his way, leaving her dead in the street. He was still alive and she still waited to pass over.

“
Tiff?”

“
Uh? Oh, sorry. I was avoiding a jaywalker.”

“
So, when are we gonna explore the sheets in
your
bed?”