Only the Good Die Young

16

Immediately afterward, I started beating myself up for the cruel trick I’d pulled on Amanda Lee out of sheer frustration. She wasn’t a bad person, after all—just misguided, unwilling to listen to reason. Bullheaded.

But I was a little like that, too, and I feared we’d be butting heads from here on out, even if we were trying to get to the same goal.

Even so, what good would it do to dwell on her when Gavin was inside the mansion, maybe even falling asleep? I didn’t want to lose any momentum with him, so I headed back there to see if I could prod him even closer to revealing the absolute truth about him and Elizabeth.

If he hadn’t provided the truth already.

But would I be able to do that before Amanda Lee could return? With the empathy option off the table, maybe I should exercise some patience and charge up on some power lines, going back to Gavin in an hour or two to see if he’d fallen asleep then. Or it might be time for some full-on hallucination therapy instead. After all, I’d been able to perform those car accident mirages on Amanda Lee while she’d been blocking my empathy, so why wouldn’t the same technique work on him?

Sorting through my choices, I took a seat on the power lines outside the mansion, where fancy cars wound over the curvy road below me. The early-afternoon sun relaxed in the sky as electricity fed me like it was junk food, giving me a rush.

Just as I was getting way pumped, I felt a change in the lines, a shift in energy, and I looked around to see what was going on.

I startled when I saw Twyla a few yards away, her back propped against the power pole as she lay lengthwise on the wires. Her dark petticoats draped down, and she was winding her long black, straight hair around a finger. The other half of her hair was as light and teased out as ever.

“What’re you doing here?” I asked.

“Just popped in to say hi. I totally guessed where you were, too, because it had to be in, like, one of three places. Your death spot, here, or Amanda Lee’s. And what do you know? I was right and you’re predictable. Bravo, dipstick.”

Whatever. “What’s your cause?”

She fixed her eyelined sight on the red tile-roofed mansion, exhaling. “Okay. Honestly, I was bored. And I thought of how your haunting might be going. And just thinking of you made me more bored. But the whole haunting a murderer thing is actually, like, bitchin’. So I came.”

A hitchhiker ghost. Rad. “I thought you more experienced ghosts pooh-poohed the idea of getting involved with humans.”

“Sweetie, smart ghosts don’t get involved with human problems. We didn’t say anything about not enjoying a good show.”

“Forget it. You’re not going to watch me haunt.”

“Pretty please with sugar on top? Like, how entertaining would that be? It’s like seeing a retarded little girl at her first ballet recital stumbling through The Nutcracker.”

She was really something.

“You know,” I said, “besides your dismaying attitude, the last thing I need is for a ghost to cock-block my serious business.”

She laughed.

“Twyla, I’m not fooling around. I’m trying to find out if the man who lives here took the life of a woman. Why would that amuse you?”

Twyla’s dark-lipsticked mouth straightened into a line and she stopped playing with her hair.

Then she said, “I just wanted to see how you, like, went about this serious stuff.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “It’s so easy to forget that things matter, you know? Because out here, we’ve seen it all. And there’s no end to it, just the hope that there’ll be something more interesting that comes along to create a spark in us.”

I didn’t dare interrupt her. I wasn’t sure Twyla had many soul-searching moments.

She shifted, poised over the wires like I was. “I haven’t really met a new ghost in years. Your kind is usually really, like, shy, and they either stay away or they find a group to dig in with. Ghost cliques, you know?”

I surveyed her half-Goth, half-Val appearance. “Which clique were you in back in the day?”

She swung her legs. “I don’t know, really. I was one of those kids in high school who changed who I was all the time, and I thought, after school ended, I would settle into an ID. But no.”

“How old were you when you died?” I’d never found out that detail.

“Nineteen, a few months after I said bye-bye to high school.”

Whoa. I’d thought she was older. Maybe it was the raccoon eyes, or how Randy had talked about her going clubbing on the night she’d passed on.

She continued. “Through senior year, I was the ultimate Val. I mean, can’t you tell?”

She pointed at her Lauper hair, then her clothes. She looked a little sad, her dark mouth turning down at the corners.

“Then I went to a Cure concert and… you know how it is. The music crept into me, and I thought I had found it. My purpose. Unfortunately, this was what I got.” She gestured to her Goth side. “Now I’m a schizoid forever because of a fucking hair dryer.”

“You’re not alone,” I said. “Ever since I met Amanda Lee, I’ve been pulled in two.”

“So don’t be around her anymore. Duh.”

I laughed. Twyla made it sound so simple.

The lines hummed beneath us, and Twyla lifted her face to the sky, like she could feel the sun or something. Now that I thought about it, there was energy there. Back during my wastoid days, I used to watch documentaries on PBS, and I remembered one that showed societies that used the sun’s rays to cook food.

Duh.

“So, what’s on the agenda?” Twyla asked.

“With the haunting? I’m still working it out.” What Amanda Lee had said about possession pinched at me.

“Have you ever taken over a human body?”

She looked at me like what I’d just said had made her visit very worthwhile indeed.

“Maybe I’ve possessed someone,” she said. “Are you thinking of it?”

“No. It sounds terrible.”

It almost sounded like we were talking about having sex for the first time.

“It’s only terrible,” she said, “if you do it on an unwilling human.”

I got my mind out of the gutter and said, “Randy told me that only demons possess the unwilling.”

Twyla rolled her eyes. “Okay, Gawd. Like you guys know everything.” Then she glanced around, like we were in a crowd or something, and whispered, “I’ve totally done it.”

“And… ?”

“And it was tubular! I could touch and be touched…” She went kind of dreamy before her expression faded. “Bummer is that you can’t stay in them for long, and when you get out of their bodies, you can’t function for a time. Possession takes every ounce of energy you have.”

“Did you go into a time loop because of it?”

“No. Another ghost was there to help me—it was Cassie from our party? She saved my bacon.”

I remembered the ’seventies housewife, and I nodded for Twyla to go on.

“Well, you know how Cassie’s megamotherly,” she said. “She had three kids who were at school the day she slit the old wrists. Usually, she’s depressed as hell, but she likes me well enough. So when I came out of the human’s body that night, she made sure I got to a nearby TV set.” She laughed. “The thing nearly exploded because of all the amps I was sucking from it!”

“Sounds like you weren’t so bored that time,” I said.

“No, but Cassie, like, said that if I ever did it again, she wouldn’t be around. So now I just like to go into dreams and be touched that way, like I said before.”

I wondered if Twyla had had a boyfriend when she died… or if she’d never had one and she regretted it, longed for what she’d missed.

“How did you do it?” I asked. “Possess, I mean?”

Twyla definitely wasn’t bored now. “You first pick someone who’s going to make it easy to let you in. Mine was a teenage girl who lived in my old neighborhood and listened to Black Sabbath all the time. I did it not long after I died.”

“You were curious.”

“Aren’t we all? I knew she was a metalhead wannabe, into the occult, stuff like that. So I, like, made contact one night, showing off my dark side in particular. It didn’t take me but a few days to talk her into trying out the let-me-be-you stuff. She was totally up for an adventure. From what I’d heard, I knew I had, oh, probably about an hour inside her, so we planned to go to her friend’s house, where I could be around people. I mentioned it to Cassie, and she’d never tried it, so she came along with us to watch.”

“How did you get inside the girl?”

“Like I said, easy.” Twyla looked annoyed by the question. “Like, you just slip in. It’s as simple as walking through a doorway, nimrod.”

“It’s simple because she was letting you in.”

“Yes, Jen, you’re really catching on fast.”

An eye roll and a sneer. I was moving up the ranks of approval, all right.

Now, I don’t know why I was so interested in the possession thing in the first place, but I had to say that, while Twyla had been talking, a bad idea had been taking shape in my mind, and it was fully formed now.

I kept thinking of Wendy, who watched ghost shows and didn’t seem to be that afraid of me. In time, how valuable would a willing host be to me in that mansion for opening the drawers and closets I wanted to get into during my investigation? Perish the thought, right?

Twyla was back to swinging her legs, her petticoats fluffing. “So?”

“So what?”

“Let’s go inside that mansion,” she said, waggling her eyebrows.

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on. I’m totally dying for action here.”

I held up a finger. “I’ve worked too hard on this case already for you to go in there and ‘have fun’ or whatever you had in mind.”

“A case. How official. Just listen to you—a regular Magnum, PI, except his mustache was prettier.”

I held a hand to my facial area. “I don’t have a must—”

“Psych!”

Twyla was laughing so hard that she fell off the wire. She recovered fast, though, flying upward to hover in front of me.

“Jen, you know I’m going in there with or without you.”

What could I do? Was this a time when I should be calling for elder ghosts like Louis or Randy so they could get Twyla under control?

She must’ve felt my vibes. “I’ll be good. I really, really promise.”

She seemed genuine. But I’d been about zero for fifty in the judgment category lately with Amanda Lee, and I didn’t want to be naive here, too.

“Just a peek?” Twyla said. Then she held three fingers to her temple in a Girl Scout salute. “On my honor, I do, like, realize how important this is to you, and I will not be a pain in your ass. I just want a look around, that’s all.”

I hesitated, then free-fell off the wire, charged up enough now to feel confident in my haunting abilities. “Okay. But if you screw around, I’m calling Cassie.”

Ding-ding-ding! I’d hit it, because Twyla looked like I’d twisted her ear. I had some leverage with this Cassie thing.

She waited for me to zoom toward the mansion’s chimney, then trailed me.

“I swear to God,” she said from behind me. “I can even help you. I can be your shotgun rider.”

So she’d watched a few Westerns. “Save it for Old Seth, Twyla. I don’t need help.”

With that, I plunged down the chimney, knowing she was right on my tail, and when we emerged into the luxurious sitting room, she found her so-called footing and gasped, looking around.

“This is bangin’!”

“Would you shut up?” I whispered.

“God, they can’t hear us. Are you kidding me?”

I gave her the I’m-telling-Cassie look and she zipped her lip. But she didn’t keep it zipped for as long as I would’ve liked.

When she spied the grand staircase, she squealed. “Oh my Ga-od! I’ve been in mansions before, but… A Gone With the Wind staircase. Be still, my heart.”

She slipped up and over the marble railing, sitting for a moment, then letting out a “Yee-haw!” and ghost-riding up to the second floor.

I was almost ready to tell her to get back down here when Gavin sauntered out of the upstairs left-hand hallway and began to descend the steps.

Lying stomach down on the railing, Twyla lifted her head, pointing to him, then making a lustful face.

Jesus.

When he was on his way to the downstairs right hallway, she spoke up.

“What a hunk!” she said, sliding back down, her petticoats huffing until she dismounted at the bottom. “No wonder you’re on this case. I’d, like, really enjoy sliding inside his head. That’s the one whose dreams you saw?”

“Yeah, but do you remember those dreams when Randy described them to you?”

Her mouth made an O shape.

Dragons, blood, a plastic mask with red tears. Very sexy.

Even so, I could feel that life force of his trailing behind him as he came out of the hallway and into the foyer, car keys in hand. He looked exhausted.

“He’s leaving,” Twyla said.

“Probably for work.” I saw from his wet hair that he’d showered. Had he popped a few antisleeping pills, too?

I followed him out the door with Twyla behind me, then waited for him to come out from the garage in his car and ride down the driveway. Even those few minutes made Twyla slightly restless. She kept fluffing her hair, like she was craving a mirror so she could correct her final cosmetic mistakes.

“So what’s next?” she asked.

“I track him to wherever he’s going, watch him, look for an opportunity to get what I need.”

“Ugh.” She got squirrely.

I sighed. “Bored now?”

“Totally. You know, I think I’m gonna dash. Nothing much is going on here, and the beach is close. Surfers, right?”

Thank God for ghost ADD. She’d lost interest because there were probably a million more hunks in wet suits nearby. Maybe one would fall asleep on the beach and she could dream-dig, getting those touches she adored.

“Later,” I said.

She jerked her chin at me, smiled, then flew off, just before Gavin’s Jaguar roared out from the side of the house where the garage was, then down the driveway.

I took off after him, a ghost in the daylight.

A nightmare waiting to happen.