Only the Good Die Young

4

I was spit out into the night in front of Amanda Lee’s main house, skimming the ground until I finally landed in her garden.

Right away, I knew I had a ghost body again when I shot upward, the thorns in the bed of roses parting my essence.

“Crap!” I said, even as my “body” knit back together. Without dwelling on fake Dean, I headed over to the light in Amanda Lee’s window. I was busting with all the information I’d found out during the Edgett visit and my side trip to purple-haze limbo.

Amanda Lee was gonna freak out when she heard what I’d been through, wasn’t she?

On my way to the window, I noticed that the sky was nearly black, without all that many stars in it—totally different from the sky I’d just been in.

Even though I couldn’t explain any of it, I came to her window, thinking that she, of all people, could maybe offer some insight.

But since she was the one who always approached me for a discussion, I mulled over how to let her know I needed to talk.

I thought of all the ghost movies I’d ever seen, where trees scratched against windows to get the attention of someone inside a house, just like a spirit was manipulating the branches.

But how could ghosts do that?

And wouldn’t it be nice if I had a master ghost to teach me these things?

I focused on what was around the window frame—a bush, which was too low to scratch at the panes. Flowers in a window box—too soft to make sounds against the glass.

Then I saw a pair of gardening shears in the box.

You think?

I’d never done shit like this before, so I did what came naturally. I concentrated, picturing the shears rising and then tapping on the window with the handle, like I was an awesome Jedi.

And… I wasn’t. At all.

The shears hadn’t gone anywhere, so I tried again.

Shouldn’t this be working if I had the electromagnetic boogaloo in the air on my side? Plus, Amanda Lee had speculated that I was made of energy, too, and now that I was back on the earth from that star place, I could feel the currents in me, keeping me together. If I could manipulate the computer and TV with my electricity, why not something more physical, too?

I stared at the shears, trying to decide how to go about this, and—

Whoa! Without concentrating too hard, I totally Jedied them, making them hover in the air.

How about that?

But when I directed the shears toward the glass, only intending to tap-tap-tap it with the plastic part, I somehow screwed up.

The shears whipped around, just as if they had a mind of their own, and zing! They were out of control.

Crash, went the blades, right through the window.

Damn, went Jensen.

Screeeeammm, went Amanda Lee inside the room.

I zipped toward the glass-sharded hole as the shears dropped back into the box.

“Sorry, Amanda Lee. It’s just me. Don’t be scared.”

A few seconds later, when she pushed the curtain aside and peered out, I offered my most all-American-girl smile and shrugged.

She tried to smile as she inspected the damage, blowing it off, but I could tell she was calling on her patience.

I said, “This was my first time manipulating something physical like that. I need to refine my technique.”

“You will.” She looked me over good, from head to toe. “You’ve got a colorful glow. What happened tonight?”

Oh, was I a shade warmer than my usual gray? Fake Dean had probably gotten something started in me before his star place floor had cracked open and swallowed me up.

“I can’t explain any glow I might have,” I said. “All I can say is that tonight was… interesting.”

“How interesting?”

I figured I should start off with the Edgetts, so I began with Noah and Wendy’s fight in the kitchen, their older sister Farah’s appearance, then built up to big brother Gavin.

Naturally, I left out the part in which he was much more attractive in real life than in a picture. That wasn’t important.

In the end, a superficial explanation wasn’t enough for Amanda Lee.

“Were you capable of intuiting anything from him?”

“Are you asking if I could touch him and read his mind or something?”

“You don’t have that capability?”

I didn’t say much about that, because earlier in the day, I’d caught only a flash from Amanda Lee’s closed mind. And it wasn’t like I’d had contact with any other humans to know if I could infiltrate their thoughts or feelings.

“I’m finding out what I’m capable of by the hour,” I said. “But I didn’t have a chance to get real close to Gavin. Just from seeing their family dynamics, though, I can tell you he’s definitely the boss of the house. He’s also more perceptive than your average bear.”

“What do you mean by that?”

I guess Amanda Lee wanted me to be more plainspoken. “It was almost like he knew I was there, watching them.” I described when he’d walked over to me at the screen door, where I’d been standing, as if he’d vibed me. “Wendy might be sensitive, too.”

Amanda Lee didn’t say anything. The curtain was draped over the back of her so I couldn’t see into her house, and I felt like she was in one world and I was in another.

But wasn’t that the truth?

Finally, she spoke. “So that’s all you got from him. Superficial impressions.”

“Pretty much. I was about to go into the mansion when…” All right. How should I explain the Dean part?

Here went nothing. “I think I ran into the angel of death tonight.”

Maybe I should’ve finessed that a little more, because Amanda Lee literally reared back, her hand to her chest.

“He obviously didn’t get me,” I said, trying to chill her out.

“Why would you think it was an angel of death?”

“For one thing, he was hoping I’d go into a light.” I described the lotus pool, the purple, the stars, the nonexistent floor that’d still managed to hold me up. I even told her about how I’d felt human again, flesh and blood.

A little too much of both, really.

Still, I didn’t inform her of the effect he’d had on me. Between fake Dean and Gavin, she was going to think I was some kind of undependable horndog or something.

Even so, I was actually enjoying the possibilities of what I could do; I was feeling my supernatural power more and more as each night passed. And I was coming to realize that Amanda Lee was right—I really could make a difference.

I had the ability to settle scores now.

As a person, I hadn’t done much of anything in life. Who knew that dying would bring such opportunity?

After I told Amanda Lee about how the angel had assumed Dean’s appearance, she graduated to looking absolutely horrified.

“That’s how he was going to lure you into the light?” she asked. “By pretending he was the boy you loved?”

“See, that’s the thing.” I shook my ghost head. “This angel, or what-have-you, was honest about not being Dean. I mean, he seemed tickled that I was responding to how he looked and everything, but he kept going back and forth with actually acting like him. I think he was getting his jollies by toying with me.”

Amanda Lee frowned. I was coming to learn that her frowns were more serious than the others I’d encountered in life. She frowned only when something struck her as pretty bad.

A second later, she was back to normal, smiling at me like a cool mom. “The most important thing is that you got away from him.”

“Yeah,” I said, making like it was no biggie. “I managed. He finally got frustrated with how I wasn’t giving in to him and… Well, he might’ve actually just dismissed me out of sheer irritation. But whatever works to my benefit, you know?”

“And he couldn’t force you into the light.” Was there a thread of respect winding through her words?

Excellent.

“That was my impression.” I paused. “Truthfully, I can’t tell you much more about that star place. If it’s above or below us, or if it’s a plane that comes and goes in the blink of an eye.”

She fixed that clear gaze on me. “No matter what it is, I’m happy that you’re back here, safe.”

Just as I thought that maybe Amanda Lee would invite me in for the equivalent of ghost biscuits and tea, she gestured toward her front door.

“To the casita?” she asked.

All right.

She stepped away from the window, the curtain dropping back over it. A tiny breeze blew through the hole in the glass, ruffling the material.

I had to be more careful. Not spaz out so much with things like, oh, gardening shears and some such.

After I flew around the house, I saw Amanda Lee standing outside, below the glow of her porch lamp on her pink sweet pea–lined walkway.

When she caught sight of me, she began strolling toward my casita.

“While you were gone, I did more thinking.”

Was she going to tell me that she’d been overreacting earlier when she mentioned that she and her friend Jon wanted Elizabeth’s killer to pay an eye for an eye?

Nope.

“So… about haunting a confession out of him.” She was talking about Gavin, but just didn’t want to give a name to the guy she believed was a killer. “I think I know a good way to go about that.”

“By seeing if he’s guilty first. We already agreed on that.”

“Certainly.” She pushed open the casita door and I followed her in. “You shouldn’t doubt that this will be a genuinely righteous haunting. But before now, I wasn’t certain about the details of driving him to a confession.”

This woman was a hard-core general, by God.

She went over to the computer, turning it on, and I felt the needling buzz from it.

“Despite the hour,” she said, “I called Jon in England to talk, and he mentioned something worrisome. He wanted to know if there was any way we might end up being connected to this haunting.”

“You and Jon?”

“Yes. We can’t afford for anyone to know we would be behind a confession from the killer. In fact, we need that confession to seem as unforced by human influence as possible. The haunting has to seem natural, with no ties to Jon or me whatsoever.”

I prepared to ask “Why?” again, but Amanda Lee raised an eyebrow.

“You’re thinking like a human who doesn’t know spirits exist. If you were the killer, and you came to a point where you realized that a ghost was after you and haunting you because of a crime you committed, what would you do? And don’t allow anything to inhibit your imagination.”

She’d never really asked me to strategize in major supernatural terms before. “Since Gavin has money, he can afford just about anything, so…”

Amanda Lee jumped in. “What if he got ahold of someone who could send other ghosts to stop the one that’s haunting him?”

I just stared at her, and the lyrics from a Kinks song ran through my head. Paranoia, the destroyer…

“It’s just a theory,” she said, “but not out of the question. An open-minded individual could very well defend himself against a haunting. Another ghost—a stronger one—could even get information out of you that a human wouldn’t be able to.”

“And that information might lead Gavin to you and Jon?”

“Right. So do you see why we don’t want him to even remotely suspect what’s happening?”

I nodded. She had more experience with weird phenomena than I did, so I would listen to her advice. But the part about another ghost stuck with me, and I asked, “What makes you think that other spirits might come after us?”

“It’s only speculation. Anything is possible in this world now, Jensen, and we have to think smart.”

“So you’ve never actually met bad ghosts who’d do that?”

“No. Remember how I told you that you’re the first one I connected with fully?”

“How about other psychics or mediums? Do you think they know any of those bad spirits?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” She hesitated. “I hope I haven’t scared you off.”

I actually had been thinking about what a rival ghost might do to me—would he have more power? Could he mess me up in a ghost fight?

Then I shook my head. “No. I’m not afraid.”

And I wasn’t. Instead of being scared of the possibility, I was kind of revved up. In life, I’d been thwarted in the cruelest way. But I felt like I had more control in death, and I wasn’t going to back away from a justified cause merely because of some what-ifs.

It just meant I had a lot to learn and to get used to as a ghost.

I wandered over to the battery on the nearby table, making contact with it, juicing myself to make up for the energy I’d lost tonight. “So, how are we going to go about taking you and Jon out of the haunting equation?”

She looked a little nervous, like she was about to lay something big on me. “Since there’s a teenage girl in the Edgett household, what if you acted as a poltergeist to throw any investigators off our scent? And, of course, you would have to be subtle about introducing Elizabeth into the details of Gavin’s haunting—he would have to come to the conclusion that she might be haunting him all on his own.”

I guessed I didn’t get the full thrust of her suggestion. “I remember that word, poltergeist. I saw that movie before I died.”

“Do you know what one is?” she asked. But she sounded relieved, grateful that I wasn’t backing out.

“Isn’t it a bunch of mean ghosts scaring the crap out of cute kids by coming through TVs and sending clown dolls after them?”

Amanda Lee gave me a you-poor-naive-thing smile, then said, “It’s an old German word meaning ‘noisy ghost.’ But there’s a school of thought that says a poltergeist is a psychokinetic event that usually stems from an unstable young person in a household, a female, most of the time.”

Wait. That didn’t sound so ghostly to me. “Psychokinetic event? Are you saying that poltergeists actually have nothing to do with ghosts? That it’s a person who uses her mind to throw things around a room?”

Amanda Lee offered a shrug, and the turquoise necklaces clinked together. “That’s what some think, and that’s what we would depend on for an explanation as to the activity you’d bring to the Edgett household. We would hope that any experts who might be consulted would think that it’s not a ghost causing trouble—that it’s a poltergeist generated by Wendy’s troubled energy, since it’s often centered on a puberty-aged agent who has a lot of teenage angst and sexual puzzlement inside her.”

I was trying to piece this all together. “Are there really more to poltergeists than just that?”

“I happen to believe so.”

I waited for her to explain.

“I think,” she said, “that malevolent spirits can be drawn to people who are as troubled and confused as young women in particular can be, and there’s your true poltergeist.”

Now I didn’t like where this was going. “If you’re suggesting that I harass that girl Wendy while I’m haunting Gavin, just so I can cover our tracks with a good reason for the sudden activity, you’ve got the wrong ghost.”

“I’m suggesting no such thing.” Amanda Lee seemed hurt, her gaze going sad. “I’m not asking you to harm Wendy.”

Even so, this was leaving a bad taste in my… you know.

I’d been so caught up in notions of giving bad people what they deserved that I’d failed to truly think about everyone around them.

Amanda Lee continued. “You might have to do one or two things to point the activity in Wendy’s direction, but sometimes poltergeists can favor the agent and intensely dislike others in the household. That’s my recommendation for how we go about this.”

“So you’re hoping that any experts they might call in would decide that Wendy is causing all our haunting, and that her bad energy is being aimed at Gavin because she’s a moody teen. I hate to tell you, though—from what I saw, it didn’t look like she hates him.”

“You never know what’s going on behind the picket fences,” Amanda Lee said. “And this is a good bet for us if we want to cover ourselves.”

She must’ve read my remaining doubts. “Sincerely, I hate this as much as you do. But when he decided to kill and defile Elizabeth Dalton, he brought pain and suffering to everyone around him. It was only a matter of time until it came back to…”

“Haunt all of them?”

I really looked at her, and she seemed to know it, because she lowered her gaze. She was really invested in this.

As if she’d read my mind—and maybe she had—she offered an explanation.

“I had a husband once,” she said, her voice twisted. “They said it was an accident when he died, but I knew better. He was hit by a car, and he knew the driver—it was a man he’d had a falling-out over work with. My husband was a lawyer, and the man believed that Michael had maliciously gone after him during a dispute about an inheritance. He felt robbed. And to this day, I believe he got his revenge.”

Damn. What could I say but “I’m sorry, Amanda Lee”?

“You shouldn’t be the sorry one. And that’s my point in all this. None of us victims should ever be sorry. We shouldn’t have to wish that scores were settled and life should be fairer than it is.”

I felt close to her, even though I was feet away. Both of us were on the outside, isolated from what was right. “Can I ask what happened to the man who killed Michael?”

Amanda Lee finally looked up. “I didn’t have a ghost to help me back then, so he got away with the ‘accident.’ And no matter what the police said, I knew he was guilty. I felt it with every chill in my bones and every vision that kept me up at night. He died without ever paying for what he did.” Her words wobbled. “So when my good friend Jon—”

Her voice broke before she put it back together.

“When he went through the same thing with Elizabeth, I understood completely. And I wasn’t going to allow what happened to me to happen to him when I could do something to ease his pain. You see, Elizabeth’s murderer is still alive and Michael’s isn’t.”

So it was almost like she was living through Jon.

She stared at the computer. “I’m the one who told Jon to go out of the country while I took care of this. There’s no reason for him to go through the process of seeking a reckoning. You see, he’s… frail.” She paused, then said, “And I’m not anymore.”

I was quiet, thinking of a response to that. Pain. Jon had it. Amanda Lee had it. I had it. But I didn’t want there to be more than there needed to be.

There had to be a way to do this haunting without affecting the innocent people in a killer’s family.

Amanda Lee seemed to catch on to that thought, too. “We’ve got a higher purpose, Jensen. There will be hard choices, and this is only one of them.” She swallowed. “For whatever you can do for Jon, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

Silence dominated, and she obviously felt it was a good time to leave, because she gave me one last, pleading glance, then left the casita.

And her story really gnawed at me, too, because if I had the chance to punish the evil man who’d killed me, I would’ve hoped that there was some righteous friend out there who cared enough about me to put things in place and set the world straight.

I mean, isn’t there a saying about that?

All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to stand by and do nothing.

I’d read something like that before I’d died, and I’d admired it. It sounded noble to a girl who’d blamed her parents’ deaths on a cruel, unfair force of nature. A girl who hadn’t known exactly what she believed after she’d dropped out of college and waited tables so she could save up for the community college classes that she told herself she’d take someday.

But it didn’t mean half as much to me as it meant now.

I wandered away from the battery, feeling stronger, then stood in front of the computer, which blipped every so often from my presence. Amanda Lee had apparently sensed that I would want to do some research after our talk, and that’s why she’d turned on the machine.

First, I manipulated the screen to show me more about poltergeists, and I found a page that claimed that ghosts could cause high emotion in agents so that they got stressed enough to unleash all that psychokinetic energy. But, again, that would mean focusing negative energy on Wendy.

No, thanks. But Amanda Lee had a point—if Gavin pulled any experts into this haunting, they might do a little too much investigating and find out that this wasn’t just about a poltergeist, and I didn’t want to implicate Jon and Amanda Lee for trying to catch a killer.

But I did like Amanda Lee’s idea of the poltergeist favoring certain people in the family and focusing all the bad energy on just one.

The deserving one.

As I went from computer page to page, inspiration came out of nowhere.

I thought of that short story everyone read in high school, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I thought of how I could be that heart, unseen but still thumping and pumping so only the guilty murderer could hear it in his own head, driving him insane enough for him to yell out a confession one day.

And maybe I could do all this subtle haunting away from the rest of the family while planting enough clues to make anyone think that Wendy could be the center of the activity.

Ugh—I didn’t like the idea of framing her and giving her that reputation. But maybe there’d be another option.

Since I had no one around to teach me how to be a real ghost, I looked up hauntings, because how could I be Gavin’s telltale heart if I had no idea how to beat?

Any way about it, I would start with subtle scares, working my way up to the ones that would urge Gavin to confess.

Subtle. That would be key. I could worm my way into Gavin’s psyche and not depend on Wendy so much.

Feeling better, I initiated a new search on the computer, this time about Elizabeth Dalton—every personal detail I could dig up from postmurder interviews with anonymous friends. The jokes she liked to tell. The charities she supported. Even the type of perfume she wore and the way she would laugh. Things people missed about her.

Then I went on to research the probable killer himself and his relationship to her, finding links for the news about their engagement—an event that seemed to capture more than a few society column headlines.

There were pictures that I could barely look at: blond, tanned, beautiful Elizabeth on Gavin’s arm at society functions. He seemed rougher than she was in some way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, because there he was, wearing a tux and seeming polished.

It was his eyes, really. A tough man who held everything in except when he was looking at the woman he loved.

And in these photos, he was looking down at Elizabeth as if she were the most precious thing in creation and he would do anything for her.

Was there an air of possession there, too?

My chest area went tight. Was this the way a killer watched his future prey? Had my murderer been tracking me in the same way, hiding his bloodlust from anyone who might’ve been looking?

I didn’t want to think that, maybe, it’d been one of my party friends who’d found me alone in the woods that night.

God, no way.

The mere thought gave me the creeps, so I went back to Gavin.

Had he been thinking about sliding a blade into Elizabeth time and again when these pictures were taken? Had some kind of fatal obsession been brewing in him?

I switched to another page, but thoughts of my killer kept coming back, so I just gave in to them, closing my eyes in an effort to remember what had happened that night.

Yet nothing struck me. That dark wall was still there in my head, blocking all memory… .

I heard the computer make a whimpering sound, and I opened my eyes again. I’d sucked electricity from the device, so I waited until it recovered, then went on with my research.

There were links referring to the nasty breakup between Gavin and Elizabeth, but that’s all I could find—there were no details about why they’d parted ways, just references to the apparent bad feelings between fiancé and fiancée.

Well, hadn’t Amanda Lee said that the family had tried to keep a lot of this under wraps?

The same rule seemed to go for the coverage of Elizabeth’s murder.

Sure, there were lurid articles filled with a few facts I already knew: how the cops thought Elizabeth had been attacked—and strangled as well as stabbed, I noted now. How she’d been killed in the middle of nowhere. How her body had been dismantled and dumped. But here, too, it seemed like the Edgetts’ money had won the day, because the articles soon turned from fact to speculation. Some “insiders” even theorized that Elizabeth had led a double life—a socialite one moment, a trampy skank meeting men in remote parking lots that led to walking trails the next, a spurned woman looking for pleasure in the night from someone new when she’d met the wrong Mr. Goodbar. There were even more comments from Elizabeth’s anonymous “friends” about Gavin and his possible part in the murder.

Gavin was possessive, they said. He had still been calling Elizabeth after their breakup, even after she’d found someone else to love—a reference to Jon, I guessed.

I couldn’t blame those friends for staying undercover when there was a killer running around who could easily track them down and wipe them out. And I suspected one of those unknown friends might’ve been Jon before he’d left the country.

I pictured him, with his gray hair and wrinkles around his eyes, in the photo Amanda Lee had shown me. Weighed down, I continued my fact-finding, but the rest of the articles were more of the same: bad news. News that the cops had shut the files on Elizabeth’s case down, the killer uncaught. Unofficially, she’d been the victim of a random crime.

But there was one article from a tabloid that caught my eye. Here, some of Elizabeth’s friends seemed to be coming out of the woodwork after the police investigation had closed. Were they trying to find anonymous justice on their own at this point?

One unnamed friend reported that Elizabeth had been getting threatening phone calls. She didn’t know whom they were from, but she suspected an ex-boyfriend.

Another said that Elizabeth had bought a gun the week before.

But just when I thought I was getting somewhere, the article ended, and again, it reminded me of my own disappearance.

No more articles after I’d become old news. No one left to keep searching.

Both me and Elizabeth, the forgotten.

Thank God it didn’t have to be that way from now on.