Remember Me (14 page)

"Exactly."

"How do you know? Did God tell you just now?"

"No," he said. "I read about it in the Enquirer."

I socked him. "Peter!"

He grabbed my hand, stopping me, trying to be serious in spite of his laughter.

"I mean it, Shari. You mustn't stay here."

"But what am I supposed to do? I didn't have a rosary with me when I died.

And I hardly remember those prayers."

"The rosary and prayers are not as important as where you put your attention.

Put your attention on the light, and the light will come."

"How do I do that?"

"You just have to want to do it, that's all." He began to sit down, gesturing for me to do likewise. "It's very simple."

I sat so close to him that our knees touched. And I suddenly began to feel uneasy and was at a loss to explain why. I remembered the serenity of the light in the chapel. If Peter was going to lead me into it, I reasoned, I should be happy.

Then I thought of Jo and the party. The trance.

"You're not going to give me suggestions, are you?" I asked.

"No. The desire to be with the light must be from your side."

"But do I have to close my eyes?"

"You may close your eyes, if you wish," he said. "But it isn't necessary."

"Are you coming with me?" I asked.

"This is between you and the light. I'm just here to point you in the right direction." He smiled and reached over and patted me on the back. "Don't worry, Shari. Soon you're going to be happier than you can imagine."

"Will I know who killed me?"

He hesitated. "Does that matter?"

"Yes! I want to know who did it."

"Why?" he asked.

"What do you mean, why? If someone killed you, wouldn't you want to know who had done it?"

"Not really," he said.

"That's only because you've been dead for a while.

Believe me, if you had just been snuffed out, you'd want to know who the murderer was.

Now, tell me the truth—will I know who killed me?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"I don't," he said.

"Is there someone who does?"

Peter looked uncomfortable. "Shari, you're dead. You had a nice go of it on earth, but now it's time to move on."

"Exactly where am I moving on to? Heaven?"

"Heaven is a word the living use to describe a place. Over here, places do not exist, not as they existed for you when you were alive. Have you noticed since you've been dead that sometimes you'll be in one spot, and then suddenly you'll be in another?"

"Yeah."

He nodded. "Again, it's a question of where your attention is. Put your mind on your house, and you'll be back home. Put it on the light, and the light will be with you."

"But what about my family? They think I'm dead."

"You are dead," he said.

"Yes, I know. But they don't know what death means."

"That's not unusual."

"But it is unusual to have your family think you killed yourself when you didn't." I paused. "They all must think I was crazy."

"They don't," he said.

"They do. Did you see how many kids from school came to my funeral?" I sighed. "I bet you had ten times as many."

"Neither of us is running for student office."

"If I go into the light, can I still come back here and snoop around?"

"I don't think you'll want to do that."

"But could I?" I insisted.

"Didn't the police assign someone to investigate your death?"

"Yeah, but the guy's a drunk!"

"He's not that bad."

I stopped. "You know Garrett?"

Peter hesitated. "I've seen him around."

"Were you there when he was interrogating the group?"

He looked down. "Yes."

"What were you doing there?"

"Hanging out."

"Were you at the party?"

Peter obviously wished he had not made the slip about the lieutenant. "Some of the time,"

he replied carefully.

"Why were you at the party?"

"I like parties."

The cool air of coincidence touched me. "Were you there because you knew I was going to die?" I asked.

He glanced up, not at me but toward the north end of the cemetery, where a residential street ran alongside the sloping green lawns. Two little girls were riding their bikes on the sidewalk, laughing together. They looked like sisters.

"That's an interesting question," he said.

"Yeah, it is," I said, thoughtful. I'm not sure why, but I took his response to mean yes. I remembered Jeffs question at the party concerning destiny. "Was I meant to die that night?"

He nodded. "Nothing happens by accident. We are born with so many breaths.

When they're used up, we die.

Nothing can stop it."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

I tried to digest the concept. I couldn't say it made it any easier for me to accept what had happened. In fact, I think it depressed me further. "Are you sure about that?" I asked.

My doubt made him smile. "The girl falls off a balcony and she turns into a philosopher."

"Come on.",

"I would rather talk about baseball," he said.

"I hate baseball."

"Did you know that running head-on into that truck at sixty miles an hour didn't slow my fastball one bit?"

"Peter, please."

He saw how serious I was. "I've already told you, Shari, I can't answer these kinds of questions, not to your satisfaction. I say you were destined to die that night, and from everything I've seen since I've got over here, I know that to be true. But I also know you have free will. You are totally in charge of your destiny. You did not have to go to the party last Friday."

"But if I hadn't gone, I'd still be alive. You're contradicting yourself."

"That is the trouble with these discussions. Let me try an analogy. Say you took out a bank loan. Being a person of your word, from that point on, it's predetermined you will pay it back. But how fast you pay it back is up to you.

You can take eighty years, or eighteen. So you have both: destiny and free will.

Life is like that. And death."

"But this stupid bank foreclosed on my house!"

He smiled. "You must have exceeded your credit limit.

Don't worry, this is just an analogy. You're in debt to no one. Words explain so little. You have a chance to go into the light. That will mean much more to you than anything I can say." He touched me again on the shoulder. He had beautiful hands, large and strong, perfect for a big-league pitcher. I had only been kidding him. I had loved baseball, especially watching him play. "Do you have any other questions before we say goodbye?" he asked.

I sat upright. "You're not coming with me?"

"I can't."

"Why can't you?" I asked, and I almost choked on the words. I don't think I could have told Peter how much it had meant to me to see him again.

He looked back toward the children on the bicycles. For mortals, they would have already been out of sight, but with us, they were still crystal clear.

"I have a responsibility," he said. "There are others like you who, when they die, wander around lost and confused, unaware that they are dead."

"And you help them?"

1 try.

"Do you need another helper?"

My offer startled him. He shook his head. "You cannot stay here, Shari. You must go on."

"But why? What's the hurry?" It might be kind of fun, I thought, helping out other novice ghosts like myself. I would definitely advise them to stay away from morgues. "I'm not getting any older," I said.

"That makes no difference. You are supposed to go on."

"Who says? Don't I have free will?"

"Yes, but ... "

"Then I decided to stay. And my decision must be destined."

"How so?" he asked.

"Because I just made it. Look, I want to find out who killed me. I want to clear my name."

"You can't clear your name. Even if you did figure out who killed you, you wouldn't be able to communicate the information to the living."

I had forgotten about that. "Is there no way to get through to them?"

"No," he said.

"Are you sure?"

He shook his head again. "Shari, you've got to leave it to the police. They're better equipped to deal with the situation."

"I told you, Garrett's a drunk."

"Yes, but he has an advantage over you. He's alive."

"I would think dead people would make better spies,"

I said, remembering how my mother had twice seemed to hear me, in the kitchen immediately after the hospital had called and, even more distinctly, in her bedroom when I had tried to comfort her. There must be a thread that connects us to the living, I thought. There had to be a way to talk to them.

"Why are you so anxious to get rid of me?" I asked.

"I'm not anxious to get rid of you."

"Do you have a girlfriend over here? Some big-bosomed wench from the Middle Ages, maybe? I bet she doesn't know about women's liberation. I'd like to meet her."

He wasn't laughing. "It's dangerous for you to stay."

I stopped my teasing. "Why?"

He was watching me. "You know why."

Sitting on the grass in the bright sun with a friend by my side, it might have been possible to forget the creature on the balcony. But I was never going to forget I knew. "What was it?"

"The Shadow," he said.

"The what?"

He closed his eyes and lowered his head. The thing scared him. "It's the most awful thing."

"Is it like a devil?"

"It can't be.... " He opened his eyes, staring down at the grass. I had never seen him this way before. He was as pale as a ghost, and that was no joke. "Yes, it's like that. It's evil."

"If it's evil, why did God make it?"

"I don't know."

"Is there just one of them?"

He turned toward me. "Listen, Shari, you mustn't give it the chance to catch up with you.

You must leave here."

"What would it do to me?"

"Imprison you."

"How?" I asked.

"I can't explain. That's just what it does."

"Can't you protect me from it?"

"No," he said.

"How do you protect yourself from it?"

"I avoid it. And that's not easy."

"But wouldn't the two of us be safer together?"

He went to argue with me some more when he suddenly stopped. I didn't know what was happening. He closed his eyes as he had done before. It was almost as if he were meditating.

Only this time his face didn't brighten. I let him be.

When he finally did open his eyes, he looked down at his open left hand. He had been a southpaw; he had pitched left-handed. He had been so good.

"I didn't know," he said.

"You didn't know what?"

"That you were going to die that night."

"You didn't see who did it?"

"No. I left the party a few minutes before it happened."

"Oh," I said.

"You won't go on?"

The Shadow had scared me more than death itself, but there was Jimmy still grieving alone and a murderer walking free. Plus there was Peter. He continued to study his open palm. I thought to put my hand in it and tell him that I wanted his company as much as I wanted my name cleared.

But I didn't. It was not to be, I guessed. A lot of things aren't.

"No," I said.

He closed his hand into a fist and gently pounded the grass beside his knee, bending back not a single blade of grass.

"You're making a mistake," he said.

"We'll see."

He raised his head, and I was relieved to see him smile. He was giving up, at least for now. He offered me his hand. "I guess we're partners again," he said, referring to the days when we were lab partners in biology.

"There is no wench from the Middle Ages?"

"No such luck."

CHAPTER

IX

V VE DIDN'T LEAVE the cemetery right away. We had to decide how we were going to conduct our investigation. I started out by asking Peter if he could read people's minds.

He thought it was a weird question.

"Of course not," he said. "I'm not psychic."

"I was just asking. I figured it would make our work a lot easier if you could."

"I can't."

"All right," I said. "So what should we do now?"

"Who at the party do you feel was capable of murder?"

"No one."

"We're off to a great start," he said.

"But if I had to choose someone, it would be Amanda."

"Why? She seems like a nice, soft-spoken girl."

"She's too soft-spoken. I haven't trusted her from the day she started going out with my brother."

He chuckled. "Do I detect a hint of jealousy here?"

"No. Well, maybe. But I think that girl's hiding something."

"When did you start thinking that?" he asked.

"I've always thought that."

"But if she is the one, then she only just killed you a few days ago. What could she have been hiding before?"

"I don't know," I said.

"We should review where Garrett had everybody when you went over the balcony."

"All right." Something struck me. "How come I didn't see you in the condo when he was doing his questioning?"

"You're easy to hide from," he said.

"I am?"

"You've always been that way." He thought a moment.

"Wasn't Amanda supposed to be in the bathroom when you died?"

"Yeah," I agreed reluctantly. "When your brother came into Beth's bedroom, I was still on the balcony. Wait! What if she came out of the bathroom after Jeff left, shoved me off the balcony, and then reentered the bathroom before Beth came into the bedroom?"

"She would have had to have moved extremely quickly."

"But it's possible," I said.

"It's unlikely. Beth said she left the living room less than a minute after Jeff.

Besides, you haven't given me a single reason why Amanda would have wanted you dead."

"Let's look at Dan, then. Amanda said he was fooling around with Beth in the Jacuzzi. He had a motive to knock me off."

"A slim one," Peter said. "Dan only had to break up with you if he wanted to date Beth.