Only the Good Die Young

23

Farah held a hand to her head as she recovered and ran from me to James on the stairway.

“She’s here!” she yelled. “Can you feel her?”

“No, but we’re going inside so you don’t put on a show for the neighbors.”

He took her by the upper arm and pulled her the rest of the way up the steps, toward the open sliding-glass door on the balcony. And you know I totally followed.

He shut the door behind us, and in the lamplight, I was close enough to notice the fine blond hairs standing up on his arms.

Cold out tonight, wasn’t it?

Now that I got a good look at James the pool guy, he was less attractive than ever. He’d gone from coming off as the preppy baddie in a sleazy beach movie, to a Peeping Tom, to this—an obvious blackmailer, based on what I’d seen in Farah’s head.

Scumbag. Skank. As much of an accessory to murder as Noah had been.

I was still trying to wrap my mind around that part. The kid would have been only fourteen when Elizabeth died, and Farah had ruined him for life, just because he loved her the most in his family. I could just imagine what it might’ve been like to be adopted from another country, to probably not know the language and to have a glamorous older sister like Farah, who had probably been truly close to him… although I doubted it was as close as Farah wanted to get to Gavin.

I wished Noah had been old enough and strong enough to tell her to go to hell.

James had taken a seat on one of the sleek, skeletal metallic chairs that filled the upstairs sitting room. With the wide windows and the modern furniture, it felt like a glass coffin in here.

I took my usual comfort spot in a ceiling corner, not liking those windows one bit, even though no one could see me.

James was surveying Farah, looking her up and down as she stood and shivered in her coffee-stained white nightgown.

“You’re looking a little rough,” he said.

“I told you why. Elizabeth is after me.”

He laughed, and her face reddened.

“This isn’t funny, James. I saw Elizabeth in the pool house tonight, then in my car. She was sitting right in my backseat, and when I came up your driveway, she did something to me. I don’t know what it was, but it was cold and awful, just like in the pool house.”

“Maybe you actually got probed by an alien and you just don’t remember the trip to the UFO.”

Patronizing. I hated him already.

“Stop it,” Farah said. “She made my head hurt.”

“Poor little rich girl. Here.” He patted his lap. “Come and tell me all about it.”

“You’re a jerk.”

“Why’s that?” James crooked his finger at her, adding to his invitation. “I just want to make you forget about your bad dreams.”

Farah bunched her fists and pressed them to her temples. “You’re not listening! These aren’t dreams. She’s real, and she’s outside.”

As he laughed again, I wondered if it was worth listening to the rest of the conversation or if I should go ahead and make another empathy run into Farah. As usual, her fear had juiced me, and now that I’d discovered how Elizabeth had been killed, I was keen to learn more about what Gavin had done to protect Farah from her dad around four years ago, if I could judge by how many candles had been on Noah’s birthday cake.

I had my suspicions about what’d happened. But I needed confirmation.

I gave James and Farah a little more time, though, because I might get something interesting out of this.

He just kept laughing, and she kept getting more unhinged.

“Shut up!” she screamed at him. “Just shut. Up!”

“Farah,” he said, his humor disappearing. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“God, Gavin says you’re too observant, that you’re always hanging around the pool like you’re watching and listening to us, but you sure are deaf, dumb, and blind now.”

I doubted Gavin had any idea that James was so observant that he watched Wendy in her bedroom window. But what Farah had just said made another lightbulb go off in me.

Gavin thought James was observant, right? So that would explain why the pool guy had shown up in Gavin’s second dream, lingering by the pool while I had climbed out of it. He’d been a natural part of the surreal dreamscape, but obviously Gavin had no idea how important the guy really was in the scheme of things. Or did he actually have a deep-seated discomfort with James, even while he had no clue about what the pool guy really knew?

James propped one ankle over his knee, hanging his arm on the back of his chair. “If I bother Gavin so much, then why doesn’t he just fire me?”

“Because I won’t let him.” Farah had almost hissed at him. “But you know that just as well as you know that you like to personally clean our pool because it gives you an excuse to be around me. At least, that’s why you say you don’t send any of your employees to do the work there.”

“I do like being around you, babe.”

Now he had the sexy voice going on. Uck.

She shook her head, hugging herself. “You said at the beginning that you had always loved me, even if you didn’t know me, and when you heard me talking about Elizabeth on the phone a few months ago, you already knew that you were going to protect my secret. So protect me now, James. I swear to God I’m telling the truth about Elizabeth coming back.”

He got out of his chair and went to her, putting his hands on her bare arms and rubbing up and down. “I have protected your secret, as well as you. I’ll protect you more than anyone ever will.”

“Will you?”

“Yeah. Even more than that lead detective you fucked so you could wrap him around your finger and persuade him that none of your family could’ve possibly murdered a woman in such cold blood.”

She gave him a wounded look.

He said, “I’m just pointing out how smart you were to cover your ass all over the place. You were good at it, too.”

“Until you overheard. You were supposed to have gone home.”

“Hey. I’m on your side.”

She went to embrace him, pressing her cheek to his chest as he pulled her close, looking bored. But she couldn’t see what a jackass he was. And she couldn’t see me watching her, noticing the emptiness in her own gaze.

Was she thinking about the lengths she went to in order to keep him happy? Or was she thinking about how Gavin had once protected her?

From one protector to another. That seemed to be her MO, and it rankled me to see her being such a victim. Or was she more of a chess player, like Amanda Lee?

James patted her back. “You don’t have anyone else who’ll understand you like I do. What other man is going to sympathize with you about what a bastard your dad is? Same with your mom, when she just stood by and let him sneak into your room at night?”

“Why do you have to talk about them?”

“We don’t.”

Manipulator. But Farah had to play along, didn’t she? She didn’t have a choice about dumping him, so why not make the most of it? Maybe she really did even have an odd, sexual connection with him, like in a Kathleen Turner movie.

They were quiet for a blessed moment, until James set Farah away at arm’s length.

“There’re some things we do need to talk about, though. You know that.”

She pushed out a sigh. “What is it this time? A hang glider? Another car? A newer house? My bank account’s going to start running low, James.”

“Secrets are expensive,” he said, tweaking her chin, acting like he was kidding.

I’d known from the get-go that he had no love for Farah. Maybe he liked her body—what red-blooded male wouldn’t?—but he liked her money more.

I could see Farah’s face going from the false security she’d just felt in his arms to betrayal. It was that fast. Didn’t James know what happened to people who betrayed her?

“Would you fight a ghost for me?” she asked.

He laughed. “Sure, Farah.”

Her smile was bitter. “You really do think I’m out of my head, don’t you? Maybe you always have.”

I was sure that my haunting had put everything in perspective for her, and she was desperate, scared.

Paranoia, the destroyer…

She was the one who was laughing now, softly. “When I came here for comfort, it didn’t take you but fifteen minutes to hold Elizabeth over my head. You couldn’t even do me the courtesy of pretending you believed I saw her outside.”

A man of little patience, the idiot said, “Maybe you should just call your therapist.”

“My therapist doesn’t know about Elizabeth. Are you insane? You wouldn’t even know about her, except you were creeping around the pool that day when I was talking on the phone.”

He didn’t ask to whom she’d been talking, so I assumed either that she’d told him about Noah’s part in the murder or that she’d lied her way around it.

“God,” she said. “I’ve been such a mess that I believed every promise you ever made to me. How pathetic is that?”

James chuffed. “What’s pathetic is that you suck the life out of everyone with your neediness.” Then he got real mean. “You’ve got to be crazy to think that I was in this for anything but what you gave me, and if that dries up…”

Farah’s chest was rising and falling. “What? Why don’t you finally say it? What happens if I don’t give you everything you’re always asking for, you greedy son of a bitch?”

His gaze traveled to a phone that was waiting on the nearby metallic bar.

“What’s Gavin’s number again?” he asked mockingly.

I don’t know how many times he’d used this line on her to get what he wanted, but he obviously couldn’t see that she was in unstable shape tonight after being traumatized by Elizabeth.

She sprinted toward the bar, but he was faster, beating her to the phone and holding it over his head, laughing all the while.

“You wouldn’t be able to stop me if you tried,” he said.

“Fuck you!”

“Oh, but remember? You’ve been doing that since I found out your little secret. And I have to say, the pleasure’s really wearing off.”

He was pushing Farah to her limits, and I don’t know what he thought he’d get out of this besides more anger.

As I said, Farah was not in the mood tonight. I’d broken her, and it’d been pretty easy, not to mention well deserved.

Tauntingly, he began to dial the phone, still raising it in the air, but she didn’t jump for it like a lot of women would. No, Farah calmly stared at him, and I could see the decision she made right then and there.

And when she reached to the end of the bar, where a vodka bottle was standing, I didn’t stop her from grabbing it.

“Oh, ho-ho,” James said. “What’re you gonna do with that, huh? Hit me wi—”

She’d already swung the bottle, and it crashed against his skull. It didn’t break, but it did make James drop the phone and stumble toward the bar.

“You fucking bitch.”

Then she used both hands to smash the bottle on the bar.

Liquid bled off the metal and dripped onto the shag carpet as she held up the jagged weapon and shoved it at him. Straight into his eye.

He dropped to the floor with a jolting thud, a long shard of glass sticking out of him as his other, intact eye locked onto the ceiling. Blood mingled with the vodka, running to the floor.

At first, Farah just stood there, staring some more.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done anything to stop her. But should I have? Could I have?

She began to laugh, relieved, hysterical. She laughed so hard that she sank to her knees by James and bent over, clutching her stomach.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in her mind anymore, but I had to go inside. I had to tie up all the loose ends. So I floated down out of my corner, ready to strike, but she must’ve felt me, because she yanked her head up, her gaze blazing with rage.

“You,” she said, her voice mangled. “You made me do this.”

I have to say, that pissed me off. I hated how she didn’t take responsibility for anything. I hated her right now, because I still remembered the look on Elizabeth’s face as she was being choked, the ultimate fear in her eyes as she realized that she was dying.

I was pretty sure I’d looked like that, too, when I was murdered.

Farah ticked me off so much that I did something out of my ordinary: my hand hardened, and when I reached for her side-braid, I made contact with her, pulling with everything I had. She screamed, her head rearing back, her hands reaching for her hair.

When I jerked it again, she flew off the floor, and I dragged her around the room as she’d dragged Elizabeth’s body into the tall grass that night.

Murderer, I thought as my own mind began to fritz with images of an old lady mask, an ax, a dark night in Elfin Forest…

As Farah squirmed on the floor, getting loose from my grip, my energy expanded. I liked her anger. Better than fear. More, more, more.

Lashing out at her, I made contact with her arm, and fingernail marks appeared.

She screamed again as I took another swipe, giving her more welts. Then I butted against her, and she went reeling a few feet, crashing into a metal table.

“I know what you did,” I yelled, not even pretending to be Elizabeth anymore. Not caring that communicating with her would sap me, because I was feeling strong. Feeling righteous.

I waved a hand through the air, manipulating the energy in it, and a standing battery-powered lamp sailed from one end of the room toward Farah as she struggled to get up. When it banged into her, sending her to the floor, I laughed, then summoned another skinny metallic lamp.

As its power cord pulled out of the wall, sparks zitzed and the light strobed. It caught Farah as she was rolling over.

“Stop!” she screamed.

“Stop?” I materialized to her for a blipping instant, then disappeared.

Now she was crying, clawing at the floor as she tried to get away from me.

“I’ll stop,” I said, “after you tell everyone what you’ve done.”

“Fuck you!”

“A generous soul and a rapier wit. You must be proud.”

I sent a potted bunch of decorative branches through the air, toward Farah, and she lifted her arms to fend them off. Somehow I made the pot halt in midair, and it hovered in front of her as she cowered.

“Did you know,” I said, calling on my computer research, “that there’s only one recorded death from a spirit in the history of the United States? The Bell Witch.”

Farah was sobbing at the implied threat and, in the state I was in, I didn’t even stop to ask myself why more ghosts didn’t kill asshole humans.

“The Bells were a pioneer family in Tennessee,” I said, “and some say a mean old woman came back from the grave to haunt the family out of revenge. Some say the father screwed her over in a land deal, and she wasn’t about to take that.”

I jerked the pot, and Farah winced.

“But I’m not here for revenge,” I said.

“You’re here for Elizabeth.” Her voice was a squeak.

“I’m here for justice.”

As the plant continued to hover and she shrank back more, my words rang through me, catching on the remaining memories of the mask and the ax that still haunted me.

Was this justice? Or was I getting revenge on my own killer the only way I could right now, by projecting him onto Farah?

The sound of a door opening downstairs made me lose concentration, and the pot dropped in front of her. She hauled in a breath, looking around for me, not finding me. Then, when footsteps thundered up a nearby staircase and voices yelled out Farah’s name, she cried back to them, all helpless and dumb.

“Here! Oh God, I’m here. Help me!”

I whooshed back to a corner of the ceiling, not knowing what to expect now but eager to see what happened. I thought I’d heard Gavin, Wendy, and Noah in the group, but would they have Eileen the cleaner with them?

Weird thought. Wasn’t the family here because Farah had run off like a loon, not because a spirit had captured her? But still. A ghost couldn’t be too careful.

As their footsteps pounded down the hallway, Farah wiped the tears off her face. She glanced at the dead James nearby, then at the room’s entrance.

I didn’t like the heavy, resigned smile that weighed down her mouth.

“I’m still going to get away with this,” she said, and I knew she was talking to me. “You can’t stop me.”

What the hell did she mean by that? I didn’t wait around to find out, because I barged from the room, going toward the footsteps.

When I saw Gavin, Wendy, and Noah rushing toward me, I zipped down to the floor and materialized for a second. It drained me slightly, but it worked, because the trio halted right away.

“Did you see that?” Gavin said. “It’s her.”

“I know,” Wendy said, much more accepting than her older brother.

But Noah, who must’ve recovered just fine from his fainting spell, took cover behind Gavin.

“Holy shit!” he said.

“Wear your big-boy pants, Noah,” Wendy said, her voice level. “It’s just the ghost who was at our house earlier. I don’t know why she’s here when I told all her other ghost friends to get lost, but…” She addressed me. “Why are you here?”

I wanted to ask why they were here instead, but I supposed Noah knew about James and had guessed Farah would retreat here since that was what she always seemed to do when things got stressful. He probably even had access to this address.

But this was no time for chatter, even though I wanted to ask Wendy why Scott and Twyla had so easily deserted her. Maybe they’d gotten bored with nothing happening at the mansion anymore. Or maybe they thought I had this under control now. Probably the bored part.

“Wendy,” I said, knowing she could see and hear me without my having to expend any more energy than usual. “Don’t go in there, please. Farah went off the deep end, and I don’t know what she’s going to do next. She murdered Elizabeth.”

Wendy suffered another gut punch. I was really throwing them around tonight.

Noah was gaping at his supernatural sister while Gavin searched around for me with his cautious gaze. Wendy had obviously filled them in on her developed talent on the car ride over.

“Just listen to me,” I said to her. “I don’t know what Noah told you, but I saw Farah murder Elizabeth. James, the guy who does your pool, knew about it. He’s been blackmailing her for months.”

Wendy’s mouth opened, and she jerked her gaze over to Noah. Obviously, he hadn’t revealed much except for that Farah had probably run off to her so-called boyfriend’s, distressed about the night’s events.

“She killed James to shut him up,” I said. “So don’t go in there. It’s grisly, and she’s dangerous. She’s got a screw that really got loose tonight.”

I didn’t tell Wendy why. The last thing I needed was a million questions about hallucinations and how I could be so callous as to haunt the shit out of Farah.

I realized that Wendy wasn’t listening to me anymore, and I swung around to see why.

Farah was standing in the hallway with the broken bottle in hand, a trickle of red coming from her temple where a lamp had hit her. Blood caked the long shard that she had obviously pulled out of James’s eye.

Noah clutched the back of Gavin’s shirt as his older brother stepped forward.

“Farah?” Gavin asked.

She was going to avoid punishment for Elizabeth’s murder, all right. I had a feeling that she meant to take her own life on her own terms.

I looked back at Wendy. “I think she’s about to kill herself. You can stop it, get her to confess, come clean so Elizabeth’s loved ones can have closure. Just work with me.”

I didn’t want her alive, but this wasn’t my call.

Wendy didn’t take much convincing. “What do you want me to do?”

“Do what anyone would do to convince her to live,” I said.

“She won’t listen to me, not ever.”

Gavin had backed Noah against the wall, keeping him safe and covered, and I realized that there was only one person Farah respected and admired above everyone else. One person she would listen to, if he knew just what to say. And he had taken Wendy’s hand and pulled her back to the wall, too.

“What’s going on, Wen?” Gavin asked with both his siblings behind him as Farah swayed on her feet.

“The ghost says Farah’s about to kill herself,” Wendy whispered. “And the ghost knows why.”

I had an idea, and it was a long shot, so I went to Gavin and pressed hard against his cheek, praying that he wouldn’t shut me out of him.

He didn’t, and I sent him a quick hallucination.

Farah standing in her long nightgown, gripping the broken bottle like a knife.

As she looks at us, she raises the shard toward her wrist.

“I killed Elizabeth for you, Gavin.”

Before we can stop her, she slices from the base of her hand up, opening her skin, blood pouring out. Then she lifts the glass to her throat and yanks it over her neck… .

I pulled out of him, hovering near his ear, whispering, “You’ve got to stop this. Tell her not to do it. If she confesses, everything will be okay. Hurry.”

He’d been through too much to doubt me. So he walked away from the wall while still using his arms to bar his siblings.

“Farah, we thought you might be here, with James. Noah knew the address.”

“James is dead.” Farah drifted toward the stair railing, leaning over it to look at the first floor, which was all cold, hardwood. “He tried to hurt me.”

All the Edgetts had gone pale at the news. Noah tried to break away from Gavin, but he pushed his younger brother back.

“Why don’t you give me the bottle?” he said to Farah. “You don’t need it anymore if James is gone. He can’t hurt you now.”

“He was going to tell everyone,” Farah said. “I couldn’t let him. There can’t be any witnesses or eavesdroppers left behind.”

Noah finally broke away from Gavin, and he rushed over to Farah before his brother could stop him.

“Don’t do this… ,” he said, reaching out for her.

But she reached out for him first, bringing the shard up to his throat.

Slow-motion shock—a little like a dream—took over. Wendy was screaming. Gavin was frozen. Farah was ready to cut her beloved brother’s throat, leaving no witnesses behind.

“All for one and one for all,” I heard her whisper to him.

I wouldn’t let her take any collateral damage with her, and I got a really crazy idea that had to work, even if it would drain me more than anything a ghost could ever do.

I whispered to Gavin, “I know what to say to stop her because I saw what happened that night. Let me in!”

And possession was that easy, just as Twyla told me it’d be, because, in his panic, Gavin was open to me.

I slipped in, praying this would work.

His body jerked as I filled it. At the same time, I had access to everything about him, including his memories.

First, I saw what I’d seen in him during empathy, but it was all so clear now: Elizabeth punching him, accidentally scratching herself in the process, drawing blood on her skin as she shouted, “You’ve got to let me go! I don’t love you. Can’t you get that?”

Then, in another flickering second, I knew without a doubt what he’d done to protect Farah four years ago.

I saw a man—Dad—outside the door of Wendy’s room one night after a lot of nights when Gavin had caught him giving his littlest sister the same looks he’d given Farah when she was younger. Gavin hadn’t known about the abuse then, not until Farah had spilled her secret to him after seeing Dad watching Wendy, too.

I saw Gavin taking his father by the scruff of his shirt and pulling him toward a glass-doored balcony in the hallway, opening the door, pushing him against the railing.

“Farah told me,” he said. “It’d better not be true.”

Dad refused to answer, fighting back instead and, just like that, Gavin lost his grip on him, and Dad was falling, falling.

Then he was on the ground, facedown in a pool of blood, and Farah had come up behind Gavin, witnessing the whole thing.

“Thank you,” she’d said, burying her face in his arm. “I knew you’d make him pay one day.”

No one else had ever been the wiser. Farah had talked Gavin into a plan for the sake of Wendy and Noah, and their money had bought them the luxury of “sending” Dad overseas on a series of business trips. Justice had been served.

Elizabeth clearly hadn’t been Farah’s first experience with killing. And I was pretty sure that Wendy had heard the skirmish in that hallway when she was a little girl, based on what I’d seen in her own empathy images.

As I pulled back from the memory, we heaved in a breath while I got used to having a heavy human body again with a truly beating heart, skin, blood. A voice.

“Farah!” I said, the world going back to normal speed. I sounded just like Gavin. “You don’t want to do this. I don’t blame you for what you did with Elizabeth.”

That got her attention.

I’d had him speak softly, with more emotion than I’d ever heard him use with his sister. There’d been too much guilt about what he’d done to Dad. He could barely look at her afterward, and with the way she’d always tried to thank him with her affection—it was the only way she knew to express gratitude—he’d distanced himself.

As her gaze softened while she looked at him, still holding the shard to a trembling Noah’s neck, I had Gavin take a step closer.

“You only wanted to make her pay for hurting me,” he said. “And I understand. I love you for that.”

I felt Gavin cringe inside. He was repelled by this Farah, saddened by what she was now.

Farah’s eyes filled up, and her smile was tragic.

“Elizabeth took away your pride,” she said. “So I wanted to take her out of your life, just like you did with Dad for me and Wendy.”

I heard a breath being sucked in behind us and knew it was a shaken, baffled Wendy.

But our focus was all on Farah, who wasn’t asking how Gavin could possibly know the details of what happened with Elizabeth so he could talk about it now.

I could see when she became suspicious, though. I could see in her eyes when, again, reality caught up to her.

She turned to Noah, still clutching the bottle to his cheek.

“For months, I’ve had to live under the thumb of someone who knew what went on that night. But I’m not going to live through that again. Do you understand, Noah? You were there, too. You helped me hide what I did, and you’re just as guilty as I am.”

I heard Wendy sob, felt Gavin’s heart shudder at the news.

“Do you love me enough to set me free?” she asked.

Noah shook his head. But even if he didn’t understand what she was asking him to do, I sure did. No witnesses, she’d said. No complications.

When she prepared to slice his neck, I forced Gavin to run toward them.

Yet Noah, who’d loved his sister so much that he’d committed a crime for her, reacted first.

He took her by the wrist and tried to wrestle the bottle out of her grasp. But in the struggle, she leaned over the rail and—

As they went over it, Wendy screamed, and I shot out of Gavin’s body at his shock. We both slumped to the floor, but at least he had enough strength to crawl toward the railing, calling Farah’s and Noah’s names.

As for me? I couldn’t go anywhere. My essence was fluttering hard, and I didn’t even have the energy to call for my ghostly friends to come and help me.

Instead, I was starting to relive my death again.

Running through the woods, got to get away.

Not running fast enough—

The old lady mask… the ax…

I felt it all playing out in front of me, felt me disappearing into that time loop.

But just as the present started to get lost in the looped past, I felt a pair of warm hands on me, and my world shut down altogether.