Only the Good Die Young

11

After a few minutes, Amanda Lee let her hand fall away from her chest.

She was still shaking. “I’m going to guess that you know.”

I wanted answers too much to fly off the handle. “You were friends with Elizabeth?”

She sent me a lowered glance, like she was trying to puzzle out just how much I’d gleaned from my empathy. There was a bit of accusation there, too, but she wouldn’t dare chide me for accidentally going where I shouldn’t have gone with her.

Instead, she merely rubbed her arms, probably still cold from my empathy. “I should have been sure about what I was doing. Should have waited for a vision or feeling to tell me that this exercise wouldn’t get out of control. I knew you were trustworthy, but that obviously wasn’t enough. I was too eager. You’re important to me, and I wanted to see that you were going to be okay during intense hallucinations.”

“This isn’t an explanation I’m hearing.” My tone was so even-keeled that I barely realized it was my own.

She was still quaking. So was her voice. “I was going to tell you everything.” Then she swallowed. “Eventually.”

My laugh was cutting, electric blades. “You’re just going to talk in circles, aren’t you?”

“I…” She let out a beaten sigh. “You have to understand. I was so afraid you’d leave me. I didn’t want you to think that I was too close to this case, that I lacked perspective.” Her gaze was devastated. “You’re the only one I have in all this, Jensen.”

The only ghost.

The only friend?

“Jon,” I said. “He doesn’t exist. You don’t have a friend who asked you to look into Elizabeth’s murder for him.”

She shook her head.

My ghost-heart began to crack, especially as she stayed on her knees, just like she was about to beg me to understand.

I thought of that photograph Jon had been in. The dignified older man, the way he’d been standing next to Elizabeth.

“But I saw that picture of him with her,” I said.

“He was her last cousin, and he passed away two years ago. They were at a wedding, and I found the picture in her private effects after she died. She… left what she had at my house. There was no one else to claim her belongings.”

Something I’d heard in Amanda Lee’s thoughts rushed back to me.

“‘Someday they’ll all know,’” I repeated. “That’s what Elizabeth told you once. What does that even mean?”

Amanda Lee turned her face up to me again, and in the moonlight, I could see in her the greatest pain a person could have. Heartbreak.

It took me a second. Maybe two. Then…

Oh.

Her eyes got misty. “We met online. A book readers’ club. She loved mysteries, so did I, and we started up a friendship. I’ve told you I’m not one to get out much. I always find myself lying to people about my abilities because they never understand them—they’re always a joke. ‘Can you tell me my future?’ ‘Can you use your divine powers to tell us who Jack the Ripper was?’ It never stops.” Her voice had gone too hoarse, so she had to take a moment. Then, “It’s so much easier to keep to the house, to the computer, where you don’t feel that you have as much responsibility to another person as you would if you met face-to-face.”

Her smile wobbled. “But Liz was such a force of nature, so easy to talk to and so persuasive, that I wanted to come out of my shell. I told myself, just this once, I would give friendship a try. And we met for coffee nearby. Much to my surprise, coffee turned into dinner. And it went from there.”

My head was swimming with questions, most of which were probably too indelicate to ask.

So I played dumb. “You’re telling me that you’re out to get justice for your best friend, then.”

Amanda Lee gave me a look that could’ve been pity for my naïveté.

See, when I was alive, I didn’t know anyone who was a homosexual. They were people on TV who protested against politicians because of their stance on AIDS. They were the focus of jokes in movies and from kids who lisped and minced around for a laugh.

Amanda Lee was right—I was knocked for a loop.

“You come from a different time,” she said, no doubt vibing what I was thinking. “I told you that I withheld the truth about knowing Liz because I didn’t want you to think I was too close to this case. But I also wasn’t sure what you would think of me after you found out that we were…”

She couldn’t even say it.

“Someday they’ll all know.”

Was she more afraid of what I would’ve thought about her relationship with Elizabeth, or was she more fearful of saying it out loud?

“You and Elizabeth never told anyone?” I asked.

“No. Neither of us was ready to come out. This was a first for us.”

She was still gauging how I was taking the news. Truthfully, I was still digesting it.

“Were you afraid of how other people would treat you?” I asked.

“I was.” Amanda Lee wiped a hand over her face. “Lord knows why. I don’t have a family left who would care. And my neighbors? Hardly. I wasn’t ready to admit who I was. Liz was closer to that point, though. She wanted to reveal everything to the world.”

Amanda Lee had been ashamed of being in love with another woman. And now she was ashamed of that shame.

How awful. I was still wary of her and her lies, but I felt sorry for her, too.

Even in my frustration with Amanda Lee, I made an attempt to make her feel better about Elizabeth, at least. “It sounds like she loved you a lot.”

She pressed her lips together, nodding. The soft part of me wanted to put my hand on her again, to comfort her, but I knew I would just make her cold.

When she was ready to talk again, she said, “Liz didn’t even care that I was older than she was. And she accepted everything about me—my shut-in tendencies, my out-of-the-ordinary abilities. But it seems those psychic talents didn’t help her in the end. They didn’t show me what would happen that night.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said flatly.

Her eyes were red now as she fixed a gaze on me. “Oh, I know very well whose fault it was. And when Liz told him that she’d broken up with him to be with another woman, he flew off the handle. He ultimately showed her well and good that he wouldn’t ever stand for being cast aside, especially in this way. His manhood couldn’t take it.”

“Gavin confronted you and said that?”

“No. Liz didn’t tell him who I was, but she said he took the breakup hard. And it wasn’t long afterward that she was dead.”

I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t seen sure proof of a murderer in him yet, but I was beginning to think that I didn’t want him to be guilty as much as she did.

She hadn’t even gotten any readings off him as evidence. So what the hell should I believe?

All I knew was that losing someone you loved changed your life in a lot of ways you would never expect. It changed how you thought, how you acted, how you made decisions. It bent those choices around until you wouldn’t have recognized the way you were acting anymore.

She bowed her head, shaking it. “I’m sorry for the way I went about this. But I couldn’t take the chance of alienating you. You were my only hope, and finding justice for Liz means too damned much. It means everything.”

“I know. She’s a priority.” Even more than catching my own killer. I paused. “And what about your husband, Michael? Did he ever exist?”

Amanda Lee paused, gave me another shameful glance, then shook her head again.

Shit. Where did the lies end?

“But,” I said, “I saw you with a wedding ring that night I looked in your room… .”

“It wasn’t from a wedding.” Her words choked off until she found them again. “There was no marriage for me and Liz. I never even had the chance to give her something that showed we were bound together, no matter what.”

I was speechless.

Amanda Lee rushed on. “I needed to give you a reason for my being so motivated in this case, and I was willing to go as far as I had to. If that included a made-up friend or a husband who’d had a tragic death, so be it.”

That was the last straw, and frustration powered me to the other side of the room, away from her. I felt like a churning ball of bad energy.

“So the truth is that you put salt around your house to keep me out, not just a bunch of generic spirits. You kept those bulletin boards a secret. Then you lied about Jon, Michael, and Elizabeth, too. You used me as a tool. So how can I know that you’re not setting me up to do harm to the Edgett household with more of your lies? How can I ever trust you again?”

Quietly, the proud woman in front of me on the ground began to weep. “I… never wanted you to… turn away from me… .”

I trembled, deeply affected, feeling my own anguish in her.

And I couldn’t stand to watch it.

“Damn you,” I said, my voice sounding funny. Could ghosts cry?

When she looked at me again, it was with a sense of profound regret. She was making this so hard.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I want to help Elizabeth, but I don’t know if I’m doing it for the right reasons now. Because here’s the thing—you don’t want justice, Amanda Lee. You want vengeance. I’ll do one but not the other.”

Even as I said it, I wondered if that was true. When it came time to confront my killer, would I be singing the same song?

As if Amanda Lee hadn’t heard everything else I’d said, she grasped the edge of the bench, pulling herself to her feet. “Please don’t give up on Liz. You can give up on me all you want, but not her.”

What else could I say? I was invested more than I’d ever imagined I could be.

“I’m not abandoning her,” I said, already on my way to the door. “But I can’t stay here, either.”

I was still smarting so bad that I couldn’t help delivering a little pain to her.

“You know,” I said, “for a time, I thought you were the only one I could depend on, too.”

And before I could definitely see if ghosts had tears in them, I slipped under the door, hearing Amanda Lee softly crying again.

God help me, but I hovered outside, knowing it would be smart to go, but wanting to stay out of a sense of… I don’t know. Loyalty? Good-heartedness? Duty?

But there was something my friend Suze used to say, and even though she’d been talking about guys, it was more relevant than ever for me.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

And it sure as hell wasn’t going to happen a third time.

• • •

Once again, after being betrayed by Amanda Lee, I had no idea where to go. But I was getting good at bouncing back from her misguided moves and finding my own way around the world.

I did the sitting-on-the-power-lines thing again, just like the last time we’d hit a personal snag. Amanda Lee’s revelations had drained me. So had the hallucinations—something I’d discovered tonight only after I slightly sputtered halfway through the travel tunnel I’d created after I’d scrammed away from her home.

This sucked so bad, hanging out on power lines, bored silly. I mean, just imagine an existence where your thoughts are active all the time and you never can fall asleep, even if you’re sapped. And it wasn’t just Amanda Lee’s confessions that were whirling through my thoughts right now, but complete irony, too.

Funny, how I’d goaded a confession out of someone tonight, and it hadn’t been Gavin Edgett. Maybe I should at least be happy that my skills were improving.

And maybe there was another positive to come out of all this. I’d never stood up to anyone like I had with Amanda Lee. During my wasted early-twenties life, I’d floated along just as surely as I was doing as a ghost. But after tonight, I wasn’t going to play like that anymore. I had to start truly living sometime.

And you know what? I was going to begin by getting to the bottom of Elizabeth’s and my stories on my own terms.

Feeling a little better, I lay on the lines all night, restoring myself, weaning myself off them at dawn with an idea about how to go about my missions.

Sailor Randy had given me good spiritual advice last time. He was more of a mentor than Amanda Lee could be, and I needed his input if I was going to go alone down a road that might very well send me into a time loop, aka the ghost version of a coma.

But where could I find him?

Where had he said he searched for his girlfriend’s letter during the light of day? Near downtown, by the water, on some rocks, right? And that narrowed a search down pretty well.

It didn’t take me long to find him balancing on a bank of dark rocks as the sun climbed over the rigging on the Star of India, a windjammer ship that’d been home-ported near the embarcadero longer than even when I was a kid.

Randy, his form just as black-and-white-TV-worthy as ever, was poking among the rocks near a seafood restaurant that sat on a dock over the water as I landed a few feet away from him.

“Need some help?” I asked.

When he glanced at me, he smiled, exposing his crooked teeth. His sailor hat was askew, just like last time, his cracked voice still goofy.

“Why, it’s the new ghost,” he slurred. “Jen-Jen.”

If I was stuck with that nickname for all eternity or however long it took to break my tether, I’d die all over again.

“Just Jen,” I said.

“You’re lookin’ a little grayer ’n’ usual.”

Oh yeah. “I had a bit of an… incident yesterday.”

“Ya gotta watch what ya get into out there. Know what I mean?”

He went back to searching.

“You having any luck with your girlfriend’s letter?” I asked.

“Nah. I swear I dropped it along here, though.”

He tripped over a rock, and I sucked in a pseudobreath, reaching out to catch him. But he righted himself before he got to my hands, and all I felt was that fuzzy sensation of ghost-near-ghost.

“Ooopsh,” he said, shrugging. “Hate when that happens.”

“Do you ever…” I motioned to the rocks. “You know. Fall and die, just like you actually did in life?”

He laughed. “Nah, I’m not an imprint, so I don’t hafta relive that nightmare over ’n’ over.”

I started to join his fruitless quest, poking under rocks. “I’m sure you get a lot of energy from being around your death spot, though.”

“It helps. Besides, I like to be on the rocks—espeshly if it involves a good drink.”

I wanted to laugh. Randy was a crack-up, but I was still sore in my essence from what’d happened with Amanda Lee.

Randy might’ve been a drunk, but he was perceptive, and he sat on the rocks and leveled a look at me as, above us nearby, an early plane flew overhead to land at the airport.

When it’d passed, he narrowed his gaze. “Ya got troubles?”

I sat down, too, thankful he’d opened that door. “I’m not even sure where to start.”

“Oh. One of those stories.” He looked bored already.

Right. Drunk ADD.

I tried to make it short but sweet. “You know how I told you I was murdered?”

“Yup.”

I went for it, filling him in on how Amanda Lee had persuaded me to haunt Gavin, then lied to me about her real reasons for roping me in.

“So those are my issues right now,” I said in conclusion.

“Hmm,” Randy said.

The water kept licking at the rocks as the sun rolled higher in the sky. Boats were starting to cut through the water in the bay. Nearby, on the Star of India, I thought I saw a gray ghostly figure on deck: a teen who waved to us.

Randy waved back, just like he’d forgotten I’d told him a story and was waiting for a decent response. Meanwhile, I just smiled and gave the other ghost a bit of a wave, too.

“Thass John Campbell,” Randy said. “Poor kid was a stowaway. Fell from the mainmast and crushed his legs, then died a few days later. Ouch.”

I nodded, wondering if I’d have to repeat my story to Mr. ADD to refresh his memory and get more than a “hmm” out of him.

Evidently not, because he took up where I’d left off. “Ya really stepped into it, didn’t ya?”

“With Amanda Lee? I suppose I did.”

“I wouldn’t wanna be you, Just Jen. A fake wrangler on your tail is bad enough. But you’re askin’ for a lot of pain by gettin’ involved with human stuff, ain’t ya?”

I didn’t love his tone. Or maybe I was just chafed from the whole Amanda Lee thing and I wanted to be a rag to someone.

“Dude,” I said. “I came here for advice. Do you actually have any for me?”

He sobered. “Yeah, I do. Stay out of it.”

“But my tether… You told me that I’d be stuck on this plane until I resolved what was tying me here.”

“I didn’t tell ya to stick your nose in every death out there, did I?”

He gave no indication of being morally offended by my going after someone who could possibly be innocent in a killing. Had Randy lived so long that he was immune to what went on in the world outside of his girlfriend’s letter and getting eternally wasted?

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You don’t care about any of them?”

“Humans?” He seemed thoughtful. “Sure I care. I care that they keep my bars stocked. I care that they leave me alone and let me keep lookin’ for my gal’s letter.”

Damn. I’d expected for him to come out of this conversation appalled, not me.

“Hey, now,” he said, “you’re new. You’ll forget about most of it in time. You’ll find other ways of not bein’ bored.”

I faced front, wrapping my so-called arms around my bent legs. A salty breeze blew through me.

“Ya mad?” he asked.

“Not mad. Just… astounded.”

“’Cause I don’t sound… human?”

There it was again—the reminder that I was thinking too much like one of them, that I hadn’t even begun to let go.

Silence chomped the buzzing space between us.

But then I realized that this was dumb. I had a seasoned ghost by my side, and I wasn’t grilling him about so many things I needed to know. Besides, it wasn’t so much the fact that he’d said those things to me that hurt. It was the fact that, if Randy was any kind of example, one day I wouldn’t care much about anything going on around me, either.

Would that be the day I really became a ghost?

“You didn’t tell me about going into people’s heads while they were asleep,” I said, moving on to a new topic. But I still sort of sounded like a rag.

Randy perked up, not minding the bitchy part. “Have ya been practicing goin’ into humans?”

“Yeah. And I found out about dream-digging, no thanks to you.”

“Dream-diggin’.”

“That’s what I’m going to call it. Going into their dreams when they’re sleeping. You know?”

He frowned. “I coulda sworn I told ya all about that.”

“Nope.”

“Ah, well. A fella can’t get everything out durin’ a couple o’ drinks.” He lifted an eyebrow. “How’d it go?”

I shrugged. “Pretty well. It was trippy, seeing all the things in this human’s head.”

“You were scared as a sinner in a cyclone, huh?”

Before I could deny or confirm, he said, “First time I did it, I had no idea what was happenin’. I was tryin’ for a hallucinazion.”

There he went, mangling that last word again, just like the other night.

“What did you see in your human?” I asked.

“Giraffe ballerinas, mostly.”

“Really?” How would Amanda Lee interpret that?

But I wasn’t going to think about her.

“No lies,” Randy said, holding up his hands. “I was touchin’ a fella who worked at the zoo. Passed out clean on the sidewalk downtown. He’d been manhandlin’ his gal and—”

“You wanted to boo him. I know.”

I barely smiled at Randy as he returned the gesture, but much more effervescently.

“I jus’ hate when humans sleep,” he said. “No ghost likes to be ignored.”

“Is that why ghosts wake people up at night? So they can get a charge from their screams?”

“You’re catchin’ on, new ghost.”

When he got up to restart his search for the letter, I joined him. We were silent until he spoke again.

“Maybe you could use a little pickup. How about ya come with me today, and I’ll show ya what real ghosts do to stay active?”

I had so much on my plate, so many clues to hunt down, but I needed Randy. Needed way more advice, more interaction with my kind.

“Will we meet others like us?” I asked.

“Will we ever!”

With that lopsided grin, he conjured a travel tunnel. It burst into the air like an open mouth, and he waved me toward it.

After just a slight hesitation—still so much to do out here, so much to investigate—I nonetheless jumped in.

In for a penny…

… in for a pound of Boo World.