The Wedding Gift (21 page)

Mark liked to read and not
just comic books either. He read whole real books without even
being told to or anything. He wanted to make movies too - horror
movies mostly, like Wes Craven. I didn’t think that would ever
happen because Mark didn’t have a dime to his name, so film school
was not an option, but he and Jess weren’t worried about
it.

They had a plan. They would
both work like dogs and live like, well dogs I guess, and save up
enough money for two years to head out to California. Once they got
there, Jess would work as a waitress at some real fancy place and
Mark would get a job as an assistant to a producer. One day he
would make a short film, and the rest would be history as they say.
I never did think Mark was good enough for Jessie, him being poor
and kind of strange, at least by Dalton standards, but I will say
this for him, he sure did love her. He never stopped looking at her
like he couldn’t believe she was his, not even after all these
years, and that part of Mark …well it made me love him
too.

I sat down on the bed and
looked up at Jess who was now awake enough to come over and kill me
and then murder me later for waking her up. I decided to head her
off at the pass and jumped right into the story that Donny had told
me yesterday. While I was talking, Mark came back into the room and
leaned on the arm of their foldout couch and whistled real
low.

He said
“
Geez, Leeann, that is the best ghost
story I ever heard. I swear girl, there’s a movie in
this
.”

Jess gave him a punch and
told him to shut up. She said that I was her best friend and I
didn’t tell the damn story to make him the next M. Night Shyamalan.
She told him that there wasn’t going to be any stupid ass movie
about my personal problems. I was feeling somewhat touched by her
defending me until she up and said that I had “
so many personal problems that she figured he’d best think in
terms of a series instead
.”

He got as sulky as Mark
gets, which isn’t very, and said he had better get on to work then.
Mark worked two jobs: during the weekend he was out at the lumber
yard and, during the week, he changed oil at the Jiffy Lube. I felt
bad that I had violated my promise to Donny by telling Jessie and
now Mark but, to be strictly honest, there was never any way that I
wasn’t going to tell Jessie, and she would have told Mark, so it
wasn’t my fault really.

As soon as Mark left,
Jessie threw on a pair of shorts with the t-shirt she had slept in
and said I could buy her breakfast as she thought better on a full
stomach.

I realized I was starving
too. I hadn’t eaten a thing since I took two bites of the salad
Maria had made for me the day before. My stomach felt funny this
morning and I wondered if all the stress of the past few weeks
wasn’t going to make me the youngest ulcer patient in
history.

Jess told me that now I was
becoming a hypochondriac on top of everything else. We got into the
Humvee and went on over to ‘The Coffee Pot’ but, when we pulled
into the lot, we could see that everyone else in Dalton had decided
to have breakfast there too. Even my daddy’s pickup was in the lot,
so we motored on over to Gatley, which is the next town over from
Dalton, about fifteen miles south of us.

We went inside the Gatley
Café and this fat snooty waitress looked us both up and down with a
nasty expression on her ugly face. Me and Jessie was in our Daisy
Dukes, and neither of us had bothered to brush our hair (or teeth,
I’m sad to say) but, still, this wasn’t exactly the ‘Four Seasons’
in Dallas, so she didn’t need to be such a witch.

Like always, Jessie had to
order the trucker’s breakfast - four eggs and about ten pounds of
bacon. I don’t know where she put it because she weighed about
ninety pounds wringing wet. After thinking I was starving, my
stomach still didn’t feel good enough to try more than white toast
and tea. Jessie tucked into her breakfast and started firing
questions at me at the same time. To be strictly honest, Jess ate
like a pig. Mama said it wasn’t her fault on account of her mother
being the way she was (she meant drunk ninety percent of the time),
and her daddy being gone all the time. Normally it didn’t bother
me, but like I said, this morning my stomach was shot.

So to get her to stop
talking, I repeated Donny’s entire story and told her about what
happened to me on the balcony, and also my dream that wasn’t a
dream, and then how afterward I had heard that awful laughter in
the bathroom. I also told her that now I knew it hadn’t been Muffin
laughing at me back at Mama and Daddy’s house. I said that somehow
Robina had come there, that she must have known about me coming to
live at Willets’ House.

Jessie said that she
thought I was right about that. She said that either I was dumb as
hair like usual or that Robina must be one hell of a powerful ghost
since, as far as she knew, ghosts couldn’t manifest anywhere but
the place where they had died. Because of her stupid theories, she
said she was a little doubtful about Robina being able to follow
Charlie and Donny out into the tree like that.

Then, and doesn’t this beat
all, she told me that I had messed up last night. Jessie thought
that the force I felt trying to pull me out of my body was Robina
and that she had been trying to show me something; that I should
have followed the tugs out of the bedroom.

Well I told her that, no
shit, it was Robina, but that I already knew what she wanted to do
with me, and that was kill me dead …so excuse me for resisting.
Jessie was finally done with her eggs, thank God, so she could talk
without me having to watch her masticate. She said that I was wrong
about Robina. She asked me why, if Robina had wanted to kill me,
then why didn’t she just push me off the balcony when she had the
chance? Jessie told me ghosts were ghosts because they had some
kind of regrets or unfinished business, maybe both, and, in
Robina’s case, it was probably worse than most, because in life she
had gone so crazy that she had killed her own children. Jessie said
that Robina was obviously trying to show me something important
and, if I got the chance next time, I should let go and
follow.

I asked her why I should
try to help a ghost that killed everyone she came across and Jess
said that wasn’t true as far as either of us knew. That yes, she
had killed Charlie, but hadn’t Donny said that first she was
calling him Roger?

I said yes, but then at
some point she realized it wasn’t Roger and killed him anyway, as
well as trying to kill Donny.

Jess thought about that for
a minute, but like always she had an answer for everything.
“
Okay, Leeann, think about it ... she said
Roger, didn’t I kill you? And then something about what he had done
to her, right? So obviously Roger Willets messed up that poor
woman’s life and now she hates all men. Those two were just in the
wrong place, and you did tell me they were trying to steal a
picture. Maybe she just lost it there for a
minute
.”

I snorted like a little pig
laughing at that lame-brained idea. I told Jess that I ‘lost’ it
myself sometimes but that I had never killed anyone over it, and
that the theory was bogus anyway because Charlie and Donny weren’t
even men then, just young kids.

That made her mad, and she
told me I was being a judgmental asshole and that she personally
thought anyone who had to be married into that family would
probably go crazy eventually. She raised her eyebrows at me and
said that if I just wanted to shoot all her theories down that was
fine with her; she didn’t have to live in “
horror mansion
,” I did, and if I
didn’t like her ideas or want her help, that was good. Could I just
run her back home so that she could go back to bed,
please?

I started telling her that
I was sorry, that I did want her help, that I would listen to any
theory that she had, no matter how crackpot (I grinned when I said
it though). I said she was my best friend in the world, and I
couldn’t get through this without her.

The thing with Jess is she
has a temper, but her heart is bigger than Texas, so she blows hot
and is over it in about one minute. She grinned and told me okay,
okay, she guessed I was pathetic enough, and of course she would
help me. Her plan, she said, was that we needed to find out
everything we could about Robina and her life before the murders,
like did she act different right before, what might have set her
off; how was her marriage - things like that - so we could try to
communicate better with her when we had the séance. Yes, Jessie
explained, as soon as we had more information, we would haul out
her prized Ouija board and make contact with Robina and then send
her on into the light.

I told her that it was
worth a shot but I thought Robina wasn’t going to be that easy to
get rid of and, I said, I wished we could have a full blown
exorcism. Jess perked right up at that idea and said there was no
good reason we couldn’t do both … just to make sure. Jessie loved
the movie ‘The Exorcist’.

I told her about how George
had reacted when I told him what had happened to me and how he had
treated me like I was losing it and, worse, had refused my request
for Father Moray. That pissed off Jessie again. She called George a
fat asshole and then she said “
Hey, I have
an idea. Let’s not get rid of Robina just yet. Hell, Leeann, she’s
just bound to kill off asshole George any time now - after all,
he’s a Willets and a man - then you can just sell that damn house
and get on with your life
.”

That cracked us both up. I
told her that George wasn’t that bad and that he was my husband and
the only one I was likely to ever have so, if she didn’t mind, I
would still like to try to get rid of Robina. Jess pretended that
she thought I was making a mistake but said, what the hell, if
that’s what I wanted, we’d ghost bust Robina.

I told her it could be
worse: just imagine if the ghost was Miz Bethany; how would we ever
get rid of her? Jessie said she didn’t think that one would have
been a problem … that we could have just lured her shade into the
shoe department at Neiman’s and left her there to torture shoppers
forever.

Shit, this got us both
laughing till we cried, and we were doing dead Miz Bethany
imitations when that rude waitress came over and told us to pipe
down and were we done? She said she had people waiting for the
table. We looked around. I guess the people waiting were dead like
Robina because we were the only ones left in the
restaurant.

She pissed me off so, to
get even when she brought the check, I asked her if she took credit
cards. I was just being contrary as I had plenty of cash. Truly I
just wanted to put her in her place. She nodded with this nasty
look on her face, so I handed her my black Amex.

She looked at it like it
was a dead roach and said they only took MasterCard and Visa.
Jessie was laughing at me now and told me to stop acting like Miz
Willets, which I guess I had been, but still that waitress was a
cow.

To make her feel bad for
how she had acted, I handed her a twenty-dollar bill and told her
to keep the change. That was a hell of a tip for a nine-dollar
breakfast, but all she did was pocket it and shake her head
sneering at me.

Chapter
28

When we got into the
Humvee, Jess told me that the waitress probably thought we were
strippers and I was paying her out of last night’s tips. Jessie
could always make me laugh at myself. I cheered up and asked her
where we should go to continue planning how to get rid of
Robina?

Jess said
“
Where else, Lake Injun
”. I said hell yeah, and turned the Humvee toward it. Jess lit
up a J and offered it to me but my stomach still felt funny so I
passed.

I did feel happier, though,
so I decided to spill my guts to Jessie about what happened between
Donny and me the day before. She stayed quiet while I talked, right
up until I said how it was a good thing I was on antibiotics, huh?
She looked at me like I was loaded, which I wasn’t (that would have
been her that was loaded actually), and asked me what the hell I
was talking about.

I reminded her of how she
had told me a nurse had told her that you couldn’t get pregnant on
antibiotics. She started laughing and snorting then, and said that
I was lucky I was so pretty because my brains sure as hell wouldn’t
get me very far.

That pissed me off, and I
asked her what the hell she meant by that.

She told me then.
“
Hell, Leeann, do you remember last year
when Mark and I had that scare?
”

I told her I did, and she
said that she had gone to the school nurse to ask her if she could
be pregnant even though she was on the pill and the nurse had told
her, no, not unless she had been on antibiotics which made the pill
ineffective sometimes. A couple days later she got her period, but
it had scared her, so she had passed on the warning to me, but
obviously I had misheard her. Then Jess, who can be really
dramatic, said “
Okay, lets recap:
yesterday in broad daylight you screwed the hell out of Donny
Readle in front of God and anyone who might have driven by, right?
And for birth control you used antibiotics, and he didn’t use a
condom. Am I missing anything here?
”