This is Your Afterlife (13 page)

“Nope!” I grin back.

Jimmy gives his brother a chest bump. “Dude!”

Oblivious to Jimmy's greeting, Dan says, “Thanks for performing the séance. I know you were against it at first.”

“We got Jimmy back, that's the main thing.” I squeeze his arm. He jumps back a little as if I burned him.

“Hmm, that's interesting,” Jimmy says, pointing at Dan and me.

I throw him a quizzical look. “What? Why are you looking so goofy?”

“Seems death makes things look so much clearer.” He pauses dramatically. “Dan's got the hots for you.”

* * *

On Monday afternoon, an Aimee Barton mini-me, who I presume is her preteen sister, answers her front door. She looks me up and down. Her top lip curls in disdain at the sight of my clothes, which are devoid of logos or labels, but she eventually decides I may enter her home.

Aimee herself looks like she wants to bury herself under her duvet for, like, ever. She'd skipped classes today. Knees drawn up to her chest, she rocks back and forth. Jimmy and I sit opposite her in a bedroom. Or should I call it a boudoir? It's every Barbie-loving girl's dream. I'm guessing she had it decorated like this when she was six. The pink walls are a few tones below those of the Malibu Dream House, but the lace-canopied bed is romantic and fit for a homecoming queen.

I clear my throat. “I'm sorry to drop in like this, but Jim...I mean, Dan asked me to check on you.”

“Dan?” she stares at me blankly.

“He would have come by, but he's helping his mom and dad with a few things.”

Jimmy speaks up. “They're picking out my casket.”

He'd told me earlier he has no intention of attending his funeral. The last thing he wanted was to see his parents cry over his grave. It would break him in two, he said.

I try not to look at him, and focus on Aimee instead. She really is a mess.

“I can't believe he's gone. I just can't believe he's gone,” she moans.

“When did you last see him?” I try to sound more like a curious friend rather than a self-styled paranormal investigator.

Aimee blots at the river of tears. She's careful not to smudge her cat-eye liner, but two blobs of black goo pool at the inner corners. Her voice cracks. “Last weekend. It was so romantic. He told me he loved me.”

Jimmy coughs. I raise an eyebrow at him.

“Romantic?” I mouth when Aimee's not looking. Since when are break-ups considered romantic?

“That's not how
I
remember it,” he says darkly. His memory hasn't exactly been reliable, I note. “I told her I loved her and that I always would.”

Aha. The standard lead-in to
“It's not you, it's me. I want to date other people.”

“We made plans for the weekend,” she continues. A secret smile lifts one corner of her mouth. “Jimmy and me, we had this ritual.”

“Sunday breakfast at the diner,” he says in a flat tone. “I tried to tell her I wouldn't be there, but she kept badgering me.”

“Sunday breakfast at the diner?” I say out loud.

Aimee snaps out of a dream-like state. Suspicion sneaks into her gaze. “That's right. How did you know?”

“Who doesn't know? I...I've seen you guys there. In your own little world. You wouldn't have noticed me.” God, I'm getting scarily good at spinning little white lies.

“Oh.” She blushes. “Yeah, whenever we got together, the whole world just disappeared.”

She really is a hopeless romantic. Her chin wobbles as she tries to raise a brave smile. I move next to her and put an arm around her slight body.

“And now he's gone!” she wails and stares up at the canopy. “Jimmy, why did you have to leave me? How could you?”

I sit back a little from her and give Jimmy a questioning look. Something about her behavior seems way, way over the top.

Jimmy purses his lips. He brushes the top of her head tenderly. “She's taking this really hard.”

Aimee shivers visibly at his touch. She rubs goose bumps from her bare arms. “Are you cold? I'm cold.”

“No.” I watch Jimmy move away, and the bumps on Aimee's skin vanish.

She sniffles. “So, um, I forgot. Why are you here again?”

I wonder if she's doped out of her skull. “I'm a friend of Dan's, and he...he mentioned that you needed a friend.”

“That's sweet of him.” She slides a finger over a framed photo of herself and Jimmy. “I've got other friends, just so you know.”

“And where are they now?” Jimmy asks.

“The phone's been ringing nonstop,” she adds.

I glance at the silent iPhone sitting on her nightstand. I've not heard a phone elsewhere in the house since we arrived.

She catches my look and sets her jaw. “But they know I'd rather be alone.”

“She
hates
being alone,” Jimmy says, flicking at a frill on the canopy. “She has to have an entourage around her 24/7.”

Aimee freezes. Pointing upwards, she whispers, “Did you see that? The canopy moved by itself.”

Jimmy clamps the frill with both palms. He grimaces.

“Uh, no, I didn't see that,” I stammer.

“It totally moved.” She stands.

“Must've been the breeze,” I suggest. And when I say
“suggest,”
I mean that in a Jedi master way, planting the thought in her mind.

“There is no breeze,” she points out, completely dissing my mind trick. A fresh batch of tears hovers on her lower lids. “Do you believe in spirits, Keira?”

I nearly burst out laughing. “Um, yeah, I do.”

“Jimmy's here. I can feel him.” Wildly, she roams around her room, stabbing at the air with her hands. He flattens himself against a wall. “Jimmy? I knew you wouldn't be able to stay away from me!”

“Are you clairvoyant? Psychic?” I ask her with more than an ounce of curiosity.

“Sometimes I'll just be thinking about my friend Debbie and five minutes later she calls,” she says, squinting as if that would help her see the unseen. “She tells me I'm spooky.”

I sit her back down on the bed. “Aimee, I believe you. About feeling Jimmy's presence, that is.”

“Oh,” she says, reddening. “You won't tell anyone, will you? It'd be all over school in minutes and my life would be over!”

“Of course I won't. You can trust me,” I say soothingly.

“She looks so lonely. I don't want her to go on thinking she's a nutjob.” Jimmy moves to brush a lock of her hair, then changes his mind and folds his arms. “Would it be so bad if you told her you can see me? It'll make her feel a whole lot better.”

I shake my head a tiny fraction. Aimee's right. The kids at school won't hesitate to spread the news if they find out I can communicate with the dead. And that would put me at a disadvantage. Imagine if Jimmy's killer—if Jimmy was murdered—targets
me
because they think I can point the finger at them for the crime?

No, there is another way to handle this.

“Aimee...if Jimmy were here now, what would you say to him?”

She stares at me so long without blinking that I wonder if she's somehow turned to stone.

Jimmy waves a hand in front of her eyes. “I've never seen her sit still for this long. Ever.”

“Aimee?” I lightly tap her on the arm. “I know how much you loved him, despite the break-up.”

Instead of going all soft and gooey with emotion, Aimee's brown eyes blaze. She straightens her spine and plasters on an expression of indignation. “We
did not
break up. Who told you that? Dan?”

Jimmy throws his hands in the air. “Aimee, we broke up. You asked me to not to tell anyone until you were ready for people to know.”

“You weren't ready to tell anyone. Not even your closest friends,” I say.
The close friends who aren't here to console you
.

The fire goes out of her eyes. She drops her head and stares at the light-pink carpet. “No one knew. How could you know that?”

“It doesn't matter,” I hedge, reluctant to tell her Jimmy's madly gesticulating in front of us, and equally reluctant to implicate Dan. “You know how active the gossip mill is at our school. God, it's like someone's planted bugs around the place, I swear.”

Aimee's skin blanches and she whispers, “I've wondered that myself. The private stuff that gets out...”

“We're safe here now. Unless your little sister is spying on us.”

“I wouldn't put it past her, the little sneak.” A tiny grin makes dimples appear in her cheeks. She looks away for a moment, then up at the ceiling. “Jimmy, you were everything to me. I didn't think you were serious about splitting up. I thought I could convince you to come back, like the first time we broke up, after Homecoming. No one knew about that either. I had this big plan to get you to change your mind. We were meant to go to the diner and I...I was going to tell you I wanted to sleep with you for the first time.”

Jimmy reels back, gaping. “Wow!”

“It was going to be a surprise.” She stares into space before focusing on me. She isn't the least bit embarrassed about entering the way-too-much-information zone. “We fooled around in the past, but I always stopped him. I think...I think that's why he didn't want to go out with me anymore. I wouldn't put out.”

I glare at Jimmy in disgust.

“No! What kind of a creep do you think I am?” he roars. “Sleeping with her wouldn't have changed things. At all. She knows the real reason why we broke up.”

Cripes, there's no way I'm going to paraphrase
that
for Aimee. I don't want to completely crush the girl. Instead, I tell her, “Jimmy wasn't the kind of guy who'd do that.”

“What would you know?” she sneers.

“I know he was a decent guy.”
Maybe too good for you.

Through clenched teeth, she spits out, “He thought I was cheating on him.”

“What?” I throw a look at Jimmy. He confirms it with a curt nod.

“Someone sent him an anonymous text saying they saw me kissing some guy from Holden High during the game.”

I breathe in sharply. Mr. Anonymous strikes again. Or Ms. Anon. “Who would do that?”

“I don't know, but it was a lie!” she yells, and even Jimmy jumps, startled. In a smaller voice, she repeats. “A friggin' lie. I tried to tell him, but he wouldn't listen.”

“Oh, Jimmy...” I murmur.

She swipes at the tears rolling down her model-like cheekbones. “If I could just make him see how much I loved him and that I would never,
ever
cheat on him... God, I could just
kill
the person who did this to us!”

“I'm sorry, Aimee. I really am.” Jimmy puts a comforting arm around her shoulder and kisses her hair. Aimee doesn't react.

Sitting down at her dresser, she stares at her reflection and draws her long honey-blonde hair into a messy bun. “I'd like to be alone now.”

Twisting my hands, I start walking to the door like the floor's on fire. “Okay.”

Jimmy makes a move toward Aimee. His hand hovers over her hair. “Just give me a minute with her, all right?”

As if sensing he's near, she turns her head. “And, Jimmy, if you really are here, it hurt when you told me you didn't trust me. Really hurt. I don't ever want to see you again. Dead or alive.”

His hand drops. Without another word, he spins on his heel and charges through the closed door. I'm sure he would have loved to give it a satisfying slam instead.

Monday nights, it seems, are prime times for tarot readings. My fourth hotline caller wants to know if Buster, her twenty-year-old Pomeranian, is the reincarnation of her high school sweetheart who was killed in a car wreck. First of all, ewww. Second of all, Sophia gives no indication of the dog's past lives. What I
do
get is a clear picture of where Jimmy's SUV is parked—in the deep shadows of giant redwoods lining Big River Way at Emerson, a town on the other side of the ridge. It's a few miles from the waterhole. The vision stays with me for a good ten seconds, and I want nothing more than to hang up and go. But the caller insists on giving me a long list of behaviors that Buster and the late Thomas uncannily share. In the meantime, a car pulls into my driveway.

Deputy Charlie.

Through the window, I spy Jimmy out on the porch watching Charlie head for the door.

Jimmy emerges into my room after Buster/Thomas's girlfriend ends her call. “Charlie's in the kitchen with your mom. He brought her candy.”

“Ghirardelli Caramel Squares?” I groan as he nods. Mom's weakness. She has permanent cravings for them, but doesn't eat them around me because of my chocolate allergy. She manages to eat a helluva lot of the stuff. I know because it's not hard to miss the piles of caramel-soiled foil wrappers that find their way into the trash. “That creep! What's he trying to pull?”

“Your mom seemed okay with it.”

“What have they been talking about?” I tiptoe to my bedroom door and press my ear against it.

“Dating.”

“Each other?”

“By the looks of things, they already are,” Jimmy says. “I'm hoping maybe they'll turn the conversation to me.”

“Amen to that.” I'm not sure why the deputy's increasing presence in my mom's life grates me so much. Maybe it's because I'm waiting for him to prove he's good enough for her.

“Ever occur to you that you could squeeze info about my case out of him if you stay on his good side?” Jimmy asks.

“I don't need to suck up to anybody,” I say smugly. “I just had a vision. I know where your car is.”

“You do?” He straightens. When I tell him what I saw, his expression grows cloudy. “What's it doing there? Is it okay? If there's one single scratch on that thing—”

“I didn't get
that
close a look. But we should head out there as soon as we can.”