Only the Good Die Young

20

Amanda Lee was expecting us.

I didn’t ask her if she’d gotten a vision about us coming over before she’d gone outside and sat on her porch swing, which had a circle of salt around it to protect her. But since she’d removed all that makeup and was wearing a large turquoise cross around her neck, as well as a very-Amanda-Lee silk blouse and skirt that smelled of potpourri, I suspected that she hadn’t gotten out of her Alicia Dantès clothes and into these for nothing.

When she saw us approach, she stood, locking in on me.

“You’re safe.” She sounded like she’d been hoping and praying for me all night, maybe even keeping vigil for me, sitting under the porch light and hearing the night breathe around her.

“Safe enough.” Why tell her about how unsafe I’d been a short time before? “These are my friends. They wanted to meet you while I took a break.”

When she glanced around, I realized that she couldn’t see them like she could see me.

Next to me, Louis said, “Looks like you’re her special ghost, Miss Jensen. She’s a medium for the spirits who connect with her, but she’s not a true seer like McGlinn.”

It was like Amanda Lee was half-blind as she addressed the group. “It’s good to meet you. Who is everyone?”

I introduced Louis, Scott, and Twyla, describing them to her: the dignified World War II factory worker, the Bye Bye Birdie dude, and Schizoid Valley Girl.

All the while, Twyla hung out by my side, giving Amanda Lee the Sherlock eye.

“She’s so boho,” she whispered after I’d finished with the niceties. “Total wannabe Stevie Nicks, you know?”

I nudged Twyla, even though my elbow only buzzed against her essence.

Amanda Lee raised her brow. “Just because I can’t see you doesn’t mean I can’t hear bits and pieces. Unlike the others, you’re more static than anything.”

“Oops,” Twyla said, shutting up.

I got down to brass tacks with Amanda Lee. “Did you have any visits from the dark spirit?”

“No. It’s been a quiet night. Too quiet. I couldn’t stop thinking of what you were doing.”

“It all worked out.” I’d almost been annihilated, but no biggie. “Even when the cleaner came, I got out of the mansion, thanks to these guys. I lost some energy, but they were there to help me out.”

“Thank goodness.”

Scott had started poking around the porch, inspecting the aloe plants and sweet peas like they would tell him more about Amanda Lee’s personality. Twyla and Louis began nosing around, too. Obviously, studying a human’s life keenly interested them, especially when there’d been verbal contact.

“Do you know of an Eileen Perez?” I asked Amanda Lee. “She’s the one who came over to clean the mansion.”

“I don’t. But it sounds as if she did a good enough job so that you can’t get back into it.”

“Actually, I didn’t try to reenter. But I’ll do that after I visit my death spot for an energy boost.”

Amanda Lee’s eyes couldn’t have been wider.

“Yeah, I just told you that I’m going back.”

“I’ve already said you don’t have to—”

I held up my hands. “It’s not over till it’s over.”

There was a conviction in my voice that even caught the other ghosts’ attention. It sure as hell caught mine, because I’d never felt strongly about much before in life.

From the expression on Amanda Lee’s face, I realized something: even if we came at things from different angles, she had begun to respect me. I wasn’t her tool anymore.

Louis looked over at me from where he was checking out a colorful birdhouse, grinning. Nothing got past this guy.

Then he said, “Tell her about Gavin’s dream. She’ll be able to interpret it, right?”

Amanda Lee must’ve heard at least part of what he said, because she scooted forward on the swing, stopping its mournful creaking. Revitalized.

So I told her about the dream red sky and the swimming pool, about me in the white bathing suit, walking into the study to find Gavin reading a book. Then about the desert, the spider, the two girls in the air machines, and the final image of blindfolded Elizabeth.

Amanda Lee didn’t say anything for a while, just leaned back in her porch swing and let it sway back and forth as she touched the cross around her neck. The swing’s chains moaned again as Louis and Scott gathered near me, done with scrutinizing the porch.

But Twyla actually walked up the first step for a better look at Amanda Lee, who turned her face to her, feeling her coolness. Unflustered, she didn’t say anything about the ghost eyeballing her.

“I only wish I were a better detective,” Amanda Lee said softly, looking at me again. “Then I would understand what all these images mean when we put them together.”

“Then let’s take them one by one,” I said.

She was game. “All right. A swimming pool could signify the need for a mental recess—that Gavin is taking a moment to try and understand his feelings.”

“That’s a good thing,” I said. “The haunting is making him sort himself out. Maybe he’ll be easier to access from this point on.”

Or maybe not. But pessimism would get me nowhere.

Louis asked, “How about that pool man who appeared in the dream?”

Amanda Lee addressed the location of his voice. “That’s a new element. One I don’t have a ready answer for.”

He rested on a step, and Scott followed his example, engaged in the conversation, too. Twyla was meandering closer to Amanda Lee, and I had the feeling that she was actually checking out the chunky turquoise cross necklace on my part-time ally. What a fashion victim.

“Could the pool man be a keeper of Gavin’s emotions?” Louis asked. “Could it be that he somehow maintains order for Gavin’s feelings in his mind?”

When I gave Louis a check-you-out look, he seemed humble. Then he offered something like an apology for being so smart.

“I like learning,” he said casually. “I couldn’t get enough education in life, so I spend a lot of time in libraries looking over shoulders at books and, these days, computers. Lord knows I have the time to fill.”

When this was all over, I was dying to have a talk with Louis about why he was so mild when he could do just about any damned thing he wanted to as a ghost. He’d existed awhile, through Civil Rights and everything. But it could be that earth-shattering stuff like that didn’t get to beings like us.

“Maybe,” I said, going on, “in Gavin’s psyche, the pool man plays the part you mentioned, Louis. But why do I get the feeling there’s something more to him in general?”

Amanda Lee said, “It’s because of the way the pool man was lingering under Wendy’s window that morning you visited her.”

Twyla took a detour from her Amanda Lee surveillance and wrinkled her nose. “Grody. From what Jen told us before, it sounds like pool boy is a barf bag.”

“Anyway,” I said, moving on to Amanda Lee again. “How about the desert imagery? What do you make of that?”

“Isolation, loss, misfortune.”

Louis chimed in once more. “That’s where this Gavin fellow has been wandering all this time in his head. A figurative desert. But what about the spider that showed up?”

“Spiders,” Amanda Lee said, clearly hearing Louis now, “are powerful forces that can protect. Would it make sense that the spider is attempting to discourage the dreamer from continuing any more destructive behavior?”

“Like mur-ders,” Twyla singsonged, but I didn’t think Amanda Lee heard her. Or maybe she’d already learned to ignore shit like this very fast.

“However,” Louis said to Amanda Lee, “a spider creates webs…”

Scott volunteered his view. “And webs trap things. Or people.”

Did I have a crack team or what?

“A spider,” Amanda Lee said, “might symbolize trapped memories for the dreamer. If we take into account the fact that Liz appeared later in the dream, I’d venture to guess that he’s caged with the recollection of her, and it’s a constant punishment for what he did.”

I’d told the others about my doubts regarding Gavin’s guilt and Amanda Lee’s belief in it, so I looked first to Louis for a reaction. He didn’t have one. Neither did Scott. It seemed all of them were deep in thinking mode—even Twyla, who’d just sat on the porch with her petticoats spread around her, her chin in her hand.

Louis finally said, “That bird, though… it killed the spider.”

My turn. “Based on the original dream, we figured the bird was a protector.”

“Or a shadow of guilt,” added Amanda Lee.

Louis leaned an elbow on the top step. “It seems to me that the bird killed the spider to protect that little girl, who was brought down by the spider’s web.”

“Amanda Lee thought she was an expression of Gavin’s repressed feminine side,” I said.

“His anima?”

Amanda Lee seemed like she hadn’t heard him correctly, but then she asked me a question that confirmed she had. “Louis said that, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Has he studied Jungian psychology and dream analysis?”

Louis’s smile told all. With the amount of time he hung out in libraries, he probably knew everything by now.

“I’d say so,” I said to Amanda Lee as Twyla turned to Scott and made a finger-shoved-down-the-throat gesture. He only laughed, like he was used to Louis’s turbo brain.

As for Amanda Lee, she seemed like she’d love to take on another ghost pet, and my hackles rose, not because I felt like I was being replaced but… well, would Amanda Lee make plans for him, just like she’d done for me?

She asked me, “Does Louis know everything about the first dream?”

“We’ve talked about it before.” At McGlinn’s party.

He said, “Not that I’m adding much to the conversation right now. Honestly, I’d like to spend some time thinking all this through, Miss Amanda Lee, before I volunteer more theories.”

“I would love to hear them, Louis. And please, it’s Amanda Lee.”

“Won’t do any good to ask him to call you that,” I said, smiling at Louis, who only shrugged.

Twyla was still gagging, but Scott was ignoring her now.

Who wasn’t? “I have a theory, and you’re not going to like it, Amanda Lee. It’s about that part of the dream when Elizabeth appeared in that bloody blindfold shaking her head.”

“Ooo!” Twyla raised her hand, wanting desperately to be constructive. “I know this one. Elizabeth’s, like, the statue of justice.”

I could tell Amanda Lee still couldn’t hear her as much as she could Louis, and I repeated what Twyla had said, then added my two cents.

“That’s a good thought, but I think Gavin’s dream was trying to tell me something through Elizabeth. She’s saying that we’re not seeing everything we should be seeing, and she was shaking her head because we’re on the wrong track with all our theories.”

Of course, Amanda Lee didn’t agree. “But what about all the blood you’ve seen in his subconscious? All the guilt and darkness and fire… ?”

Louis came to a slow stand. “Not to belabor the point, but I could be applying myself to this with a little elbow grease.”

“There’s a computer in the casita where you could look up dream analysis and come up with more ideas,” I said. “Amanda Lee could fill you in on anything you might be missing.”

He glanced at her. “May I?”

“Be my guest.”

As he whooshed over to the small house, I kind of felt like he’d indeed taken my place. But Amanda Lee was watching me with a look that said she wasn’t going to use Louis like she’d used me.

She’d learned something tonight. I just hoped the lesson stuck.

Twyla was halfway down the steps now, near where Scott had already stood up, too.

“Why does Louis get to have the fun?” she asked.

“Don’t be a brat,” Scott said, sticking his hands in his jeans pockets. Then he sent me a sideswipe smile. “But I’m wondering the same thing. I wanna be in on this, too.”

“What?” I asked. “Solving the mystery?”

Before Twyla could go, “Duh!” Scott laughed.

“Face it,” he said, “you need some help. You don’t know how to get into that mansion anymore, so you won’t have easy access to your suspect.”

“And you’ll help… how?”

Twyla fluttered the rest of the way down the steps, just like she anticipated what Scott was thinking. And she looked ecstatic about it.

Scott said, “We can do a little booing of our own so you can lure Gavin or anyone else you want to question to wherever you need them to be.”

Amanda Lee was leaning toward the conversation, like she was listening to a garbled radio transmission. I didn’t take the time to translate for her.

“You want to play good cop, bad cop?” I asked Scott, already loving the idea.

“Why not? My dad was one, so I know how the game goes.”

“I can do it, too,” Twyla said. “I’m, like, a major Remington Steele. And guess what. While Louis is doing his thing in that tiny house over there, your fellow ghost budders can make sure no one interrupts your time with haunting tonight. We’ll be useful to the max!”

I glanced at Amanda Lee, then at my ghost friends—or “ghost budders,” as Twyla had said.

To me, even with their gray tones, they were so lively and full of… well, spirit. I hadn’t realized until now how cold and sad human life could be, how soulless, just like most of the Edgett family.

I spoke to Scott and Twyla. “Okay, you two. But you have to promise that you’ll leave the actual haunting to me. I need to see all the pieces of Gavin’s mind firsthand so I can figure out the big picture. Deal?”

Twyla raised her hand to high-five me, and when I gave in, our hands only met charged air. But that didn’t take away from anyone’s enthusiasm. Even Amanda Lee seemed to know that we were ready and raring to go, and she looked scared and excited at the same time.

I mean, the dark spirit was still out there, and we were going to where it’d last been seen and everything. But tonight I was going to do one of two things to end this case with the help of the ghost budders.

Finally haunt a confession out of Gavin Edgett.

Or prove his innocence once and for all.