First Grave on the Right (7 page)

“Every other weekend and holidays.”

“Are they, you know, everywhere?”

“Is a frog’s ass watertight?” I asked, leaning back in my chair and lifting my feet to rest them, dusty hiking boots and all, on the desk.

I crossed my ankles and steepled my fingers and glared to emphasize my impatience while I waited, impatiently, for Garrett to make a decision. To believe or not to believe.

I called this part “the dawning”—the part where people begin to wonder if I really can see the departed. Oh, they still have doubts. Most people rack their brains, trying to come up with an explanation, any explanation, of how I do what I do.

And as I lived and breathed, Garrett Swopes was struggling to come up with that very thing. After all, dead people don’t walk around trying to solve their own murders. Ghosts don’t exist. None of what I claimed was possible.

The dawning was like a relish fork in the road, and the proverbial traveler had to take one prong or the other. Unfortunately, the prong that led to Charley-sees-dead-people was much sharper than the safer, more travel-worn Charley-is-psychotic prong. Nobody wants to look like a fool. Nine times out of ten, that reason alone keeps people from allowing themselves to believe.

Garrett stared back at me a few seconds, then refocused on my fingers. I could almost see the wheels spinning in his head. After several moments more, I began to think those wheels needed a good oiling.

“But how did you know where to find Ms. Ellery’s body?” he asked at last.

“I’m not explaining it again, Swopes.”

“Seriously—”

“No.”

After another long pause, he asked, “You’ve been doing this since you were five?”

I snorted. “I’ve been able to see the departed since I was born. It just took my dad five years to really believe me. But when I told him where to find a missing girl’s body, he realized what an asset I’d be.”

“The Johnson girl,” he said.

I tried not to wince. The memory was not one of my favorites. In fact, if someone were to ask, I’d have a hard time choosing a lesser favorite. On the day of the Johnson Girl Fiasco, as I called it, Denise veered right onto the travel-worn prong, choosing not to believe me and vowing never to talk about it again. It was also the day that I recognized the abnormality of what I do. And that some people—people very close to me—would despise me for it. Of course, my stepmother slapping me senseless in front of dozens of onlookers didn’t ingratiate me to the incident either.

“Are you okay?” Sussman asked.

I’d almost forgotten they were there. I nodded discreetly.

“You know,” Elizabeth said, “I think he’s really trying to be open-minded.”

My expression turned into a dubious scowl. It was mean. She was only trying to help.

“Are they here now?” Garrett asked.

I sighed, not particularly craving his antagonism. But he’d asked. “Yes.”

He took out his notebook. “Can you ask Ms. Ellery when her birthday is?”

“No.”

Elizabeth walked forward. “It’s June twentieth.”

I looked at her. “He knows when your birthday is. He just wants to see if I do.”

“No?” he asked. He seemed disappointed, like he wanted me to tell him, wanted to believe. For about five minutes, anyway. It was the fair-weather believers I had to watch out for. They had a nasty habit of sucker-punching me in the gut when I least expected it.

“Just tell him,” Elizabeth said.

“You don’t understand,” I told her. “People like him never believe, not fully. He’ll always have doubts. He’ll always quiz me, drill me for information he already has just to see if I fuck up.” I looked back at Garrett. “So fuck him.”

“Elizabeth,” Sussman said, “maybe we should just—”

“No!” she yelled, and I jumped, catching Garrett’s full attention. “Just tell him.” She rushed toward my desk, leaned over it. “He needs to get over himself and just believe you. He doesn’t know what he’ll be missing. He’ll go through life with this one-dimensional view of the world he lives in. He’ll have no sense of direction, no hope that the people he’s loved and lost will go to a better place. That they’ll be okay.”

I realized Elizabeth was no longer talking about Garrett. She was talking about herself.

I stood and walked around to her. “Elizabeth, what’s wrong?”

She almost cried. I could see tears shimmering in her pale eyes. “There’s so much I want to tell my sister, but she’s just like him … just like me. I would never have believed you either.” Her shoulders deflated, and she leveled a guilty gaze on me. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, I wouldn’t have. Not in a million years. And neither will she.”

A relieved smile spread across my face. Was that all? I’d come across this problem countless times. “Elizabeth,” I said, “of all the problems we have right now, that is the only one with a simple fix.”

Garrett watched our exchange—or rather my exchange—but to his credit, his expression remained passive. I’d often considered how ridiculous I must look to the living, talking to myself, gesturing wildly, hugging air. But I didn’t always have a choice. If Garrett refused to leave, he’d just have to deal with my world. I would not modify my behavior to appease his delicate sense of propriety in my own office.

Elizabeth sniffed. “What do you mean? What fix?”

“You leave a note.”

“A note?”

“Sure. I do it all the time. It saves me so much explaining,” I said with an encompassing wave of my hand. “You dictate a note to me, I type it—and predate it to before your death, naturally—and then it’s miraculously found among your possessions. Kind of like an if-anything-should-happen-to-me note. You tell her everything you want her to know, and we just pretend you’d typed it before you died. I even have a guy who can forge your signature to seal the deal, if you’d like.”

“Who?” Garrett asked.

I glowered at him in warning. What I did with the departed was none of his business.

A pretty look of astonishment came over Elizabeth’s face. “That’s brilliant. I’m a lawyer. I’m more organized than the Dewey decimal system. She’d totally fall for it.”

“Of course she’ll fall for it,” I said, patting her back.

“Can I write one to my wife?” Sussman asked.

“Sure.”

Then we all looked at Barber, expecting him to have someone to write to as well. “I only have my mom. She knows how I feel about her,” he said, and I wondered if I should be happy about that or sad because his mother was all he had.

“I’m glad,” I told him. “I wish more people took the time to make their feelings known.”

“Yeah. I’ve hated her guts since I was ten. There’s really not much else to put in a letter.”

I tried to hide the shock I felt.

He noticed anyway. “Oh, trust me, the feeling’s mutual.”

“Okay, two notes, then.”

“Hey,” Elizabeth said, suddenly thoughtful, “what day is the first day of summer?”

“Planning on sticking around that long?” I asked.

She lifted her shoulders, referenced Garrett with a nod of her head, then wriggled her perfectly arched brows.

“Ah.” I tried not to laugh. “It’s June twentieth, or sometimes—”

Garrett gasped, and Elizabeth crossed her arms and smiled, smugness radiating off her in waves.

“You’re right,” Garrett said. “Elizabeth Ellery’s birthday is June twentieth.”

I leveled a mortified glare on her. “You tricked me.”

“Lawyer,” she volleyed, as if that explained it all.

Yeah, I liked her a lot. I strolled back to my chair and plopped down with my usual fanfare.

“She tricked me,” I said to Garrett.

He grinned. But his grin was different. It had changed, and I realized why.

“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no,” I said, wagging a finger at him. “Don’t even start with that crap.”

“What crap?” he asked, all innocence and awe.

“The crap where you look at me like I have all the answers to every question in the known universe. I don’t. I can’t see into the future. I can’t read your past. I damn sure can’t read your palm, whatever the hell that’s about. I can’t—”

“But you’re psychic, right?”

“Dude,” I said, leaning over the desk, “I’m about as psychic as a carrot.”

“But—”

“No
buts
!” I had serious issues with the
p-s
word. We’d never really bonded. I threw my hands over my ears and started humming to myself.

“That’s mature.”

He was right. I stuck out my tongue anyway, then put my hands down. “Listen, even I have more questions than answers. I’m fairly certain my abilities are more closely related to schizophrenia than to anything supernatural. Ask anyone. If I were edible, I’d be a fruitcake.”

“Schizophrenia,” he said doubtfully.

“I hear voices in my head. How much more schizophrenic does it get?”

“But you just said—”

I held up an index finger to stop him. Though a middle one would have been more to the point, I had to explain before I lost the ground I’d just gained. “Look, when people are in the position you’re in now, when they’re almost to the point of believing in what I can do, they pull out all the stops. They quiz me, ask me stupid questions, want to know where the next earthquake will hit or what the winning lottery numbers will be. Seriously, have you ever read the headline ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’? I’m not psychic. I don’t even know if such a thing exists.”

“Tell him what you are,” Elizabeth chimed in excitedly while Garrett flipped through his notepad.

I flashed her a desperate shut-up-or-die look. It didn’t work. Probably because she was already dead.

“Seriously,” she said, “just tell him. He’s starting to believe you now. He’ll think it’s cool.”

“No, he won’t,” I whispered through my teeth, forgetting that I was the only living person in the room who could hear her.

“A person sensitive to things beyond the natural range of perception.” Garrett looked up at me. “The definition of psychic.”

“Oh, well, okay. Maybe,” I said. “But I still hate the word. And its implications.”

“Fair enough,” he said with a shrug. “And I won’t what?”

“Think it’s cool.”

“What? Your abilities?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

Then what? I guess if he really wanted to know, I’d hit him with the whole enchilada dinner. I was on a roll, after all. Why stop now? Not even my dad or Uncle Bob really knew the extent of what I was. I’d never needed to tell them. They believed me, and that was good enough. But since I really didn’t care what Garrett thought of me …

“Fine,” I said with a challenging edge to my voice. “I’ll tell you everything. If I do, will you leave?”

After a pause, he agreed with an almost imperceptible nod.

“I’m a … I’m kind of a … I’m sort of like a … well, damn.” I gritted my teeth and just blurted it out: “I’m a grim reaper. Well,
the
grim reaper, actually.”

There. I’d said it. I laid it all out on the table, cleared the air, bared my soul, all the while vowing that no cliché be left unturned. But he didn’t flinch. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t shoot out of his chair or stalk out the door. In fact, he didn’t move at all. Not an inch. I wondered if he was still breathing; then it dawned on me. This was his poker face. His gray eyes stayed locked on mine as I waited for his reaction, but he wasn’t going to give me one. I had to admit, his poker face was pretty good. I had no idea what he was thinking.

“I think he believes you,” Elizabeth said as she bent over and looked at him before glancing back at me.

So she would have no choice but to see the doubt in every line of my face, I formed my expression carefully.

“How does that work?” Garrett asked at last.

I refocused my attention on him. “You said you would leave.”

“If,” he countered, “you told me everything.”

Dammit. “Okay, how does it work? Hell, I don’t know. It just does.”

“I mean, what do you do?”

“Oh. I help people cross.”

“Cross?”

“Um, to the other side?” I said, wondering just how clueless he was.

“How?”

Geez, he was persistent. “Excuse me.” I jumped up, scooted the office-furniture version of a love seat forward, then sat back down. The lawyers had eased closer, wanting to hear every word of the story as well. “Can you guys sit down? You’re making me nervous hovering like that.”

“Oh, sure,” they said, and all three squeezed into the seat. I fought back a chuckle.

“How?” Garrett repeated.

Back to the third degree. A long breath slipped through my lips as I considered everything I’d been telling him. This stuff could be used as ammunition against me. It had happened before, by people I’d trusted much more than Garrett. Still, we’d come this far.

“Basically,” I said, exaggerating my reluctance in the tone of my voice, “I try to help them figure out why they didn’t cross. Then I lead them to the light.”