Amazing Grace--A Southern Gothic Paranormal Mystery Page 2

  “You want to work with the police department?”

  “Not work with, per se. I would simply like to be able to bring you information from time to time and know that it will be treated with respect and not dismissed out of hand because of where it came from.”

  “And where does your information come from, Ms. Carter?”

  “From the dead, Sheriff. I thought we had covered that. I am a medium. I converse with the spirits of those who have passed on. They tell me things. Sometimes I need to pass those things along to you. I need to know whether or not you will believe what I tell you, or if I will need to pursue other avenues to satisfy the spirits.”

  Sheriff Dunleavy’s eyes went cold, and he leaned forward in his chair, putting his elbows on the desk. I thought for a moment I saw a hint of an old tattoo poking out from under his short sleeve dress shirt, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe the tip of an anchor? Was our new sheriff a Navy man? Rural South Carolina typically produced more Army men and Marines. Not many of our boys on boats.

  His stern voice brought me out of my reverie. “Ms. Carter, I don’t know what kind of relationship you had with Sheriff Thomas, but this is my office now, and we will run things by the book. I will take any information you bring to me seriously, and I will investigate every lead in every case, but I will not have a civilian going around town on her own sticking her nose into police business. Are we clear?”

  I looked up into the corner where Sheriff Johnny stood with his arms across his chest. He was grinning fit to beat the band, and I chuckled a little. I tried to hold it in, but I couldn’t.

  Sheriff Dunleavy’s face and forehead flashed red, and I saw a little bead of sweat pop out at his temple. “Is something funny, Ms. Carter?”

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff. It’s just that Sheriff Johnny is standing over in the corner behind you laughing his dead fool butt off.”

  “What?” Dunleavy’s head whirled around; then he turned back to me, scowling.

  “I’m sorry, but he’s there. He’s amused because this is very much like the first time I sat in this office and talked to him about a murder. He yelled at me, called me a crazy person, and told me if I ever stuck my nose back in police business that he would have me arrested and shipped off to Bull Street for a psych evaluation.” I pointed at the corner where Sheriff Johnny was standing.

  “So, he’s in the corner of my office, just hanging out? What does he want?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t asked him yet. I figured since it’s your office now, I should deal with the current occupant before trying to communicate with any prior tenants that might be lingering past their expiration date, if you will.”

  “Well, ask him,” Sheriff Dunleavy said, leaning back in his chair and folding his muscular arms across his broad chest. He did cut a fine figure of a man, if a little more serious than I usually liked them. If I were a few years younger, I might have set my cap for him. As it was, I wondered if he might make a good match for Jane down at the children’s desk in the library.

  I turned to Sheriff Johnny and said, “What do you want, Johnny? Why aren’t you back where you belong, watching soaps with Linda or doing whatever y’all do in the Great Beyond?” I’m sure Sheriff Dunleavy was disappointed that my conversing with the dead didn’t seem much different than me conversing with the living, but that’s how my life has always been.

  Sheriff Johnny opened his mouth once or twice, but no sound came out. This happens with spirits after they’ve crossed over and come back—sometimes they forget how to talk. I had faith in the sheriff, though. He hadn’t been dead more than four or five months. He should still be able to converse relatively easily.

  “Go on, Johnny, spit it out. We ain’t got all day, now.”

  Johnny opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, looking like nothing more than a sunfish laying on the banks of a pond after it’s been pulled in. I reckon he was gonna be one of the ones that couldn’t talk, after all. After a couple more tries, he just shook his head and walked up to the desk. He pointed to the middle of the desk, then made some gestures like there was something under the middle of it. Then he turned around and walked out through the back wall of the room.

  “Wait, Johnny, I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me!” I stood up and hollered as the ghost vanished. “Dammit. Excuse me,” I said as I sat back down.

  “What happened?” the sheriff asked.

  “I don’t rightly know,” I grumbled. I reached down to the floor and picked up my purse. I stood up and extended my hand. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Sheriff Dunleavy. It’s obvious that you don’t believe in my gift, so I will take my leave.”

  The sheriff stayed seated. “What happened, Ms. Carter?”

  “I don’t know, Sheriff. That’s what’s so damn frustrating about dealing with dead people. They tell you half what you need to know, then wander off and go back to being dead. It’s worse than dating, I swear to God.”

  “What did he do?” Sheriff Dunleavy’s voice was calm, but he was working to keep it that way. I could tell by the way his knuckles went white around the arm of his chair.

  “He kept pointing to the middle of your desk, like there was something under there he wanted you to know about, but he’s apparently not one of the spirits that can still talk, so it was a little hard to understand him,” I replied.

  “Sonofabitch!” Dunleavy sat up straight, then dropped out of his chair onto one knee and yanked out the center drawer of his desk. I sat back down in my chair as he felt around the bottom of the drawer, then got down on his hands and knees and vanished behind his desk. He emerged a moment later with a brown envelope clutched in his fist. “Got it!”

  He sat back in his chair and ripped open the top of the envelope. A small brass key fell out onto his calendar desk blotter, and he pounced on it like a kitten playing with a junebug.

  “What’s that, Sheriff?”

  “This is the key to Sheriff Thomas’s file cabinet, Ms. Carter. He had one copy on him when he…”

  “Died is the word you’re looking for, Sheriff. Remember, I still get to talk to people after they die, so it’s not quite the hardship for me that it is for most people.”

  “Yes, well, he had one copy on him when he died, but those keys were lost after the autopsy. And I’ve had no access to any old case files, or even his current case files, since I got here last week.”

  “Until now,” I said.

  “Until now,” he agreed.

  “When the sheriff’s ghost told me where to find it.”

  “When you used some resources unavailable to most people to assist me in finding it,” the sheriff agreed, nodding in unison with me.

  “So we have an understanding?” I asked, standing and holding out my hand.

  Sheriff Dunleavy stood up and shook my hand. “Ms. Carter, I’m not sure what we’ve got, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never understand a minute of it.”

  Chapter 2

  It took a week and a half, but I soon found out just how right Sheriff Dunleavy was. I was bringing in tomatoes when I first saw the poor dear, sitting on the steps to my back porch with her head in her hands. Not literally, of course. Even the dead have some sense of propriety.

  I walked past her at first, giving her a glance to make sure she was really dead and not just some misguided cheerleader from the high school selling candy for the prom, or magazine subscriptions for the winter formal, or seed packets for the study abroad program. I’ve disappointed so many of those children for so many years, it’s almost like a game now. They come up with new and even more interesting ways to get me to part with my money, and I come up with different ways to say “no.” But no, this wasn’t a living child here to be disappointed by an old woman on a fixed income. This child was dead; all her disappointments were now behind her.

  I laid out the tomatoes on top of the washing machine on a dishtowel I’d put down that morning just for that reason and went into the kitchen. I washed my hands and face, put m
y gardening gloves on the windowsill over the sink, and went back out to the porch. I sat down in the rocker my nephew Jason and his second wife gave me for Christmas one year and looked at the child sitting on my steps.

  “Well, come on, sweetie. Let’s have it. What’s got you coming to see the crazy old woman that talks to dead people? Except you being dead, that is?”

  The girl spun around on the step and stared at me, her mouth hanging open. I laughed so hard I almost spilled tea all over myself, but managed to get myself together before I really made a mess. “Oh my good Lord,” I said. “If you could see the look on your face, child! If you was still alive, I’d tell you to close that thing before flies got in it, but I reckon that ain’t much of a problem now, is it?”

  “Y-you can see me?” the child asked. “You can hear me?”

  “Of course I can see and hear you, sweetheart. Ain’t that the whole reason you and your little girlfriends toilet papered my front yard two Halloweens ago?” It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a ghost blush, but it was still a rare enough occurrence to make me grin.

  “I’m sorry about that. We didn’t think about…”

  “About how hard it would be for an old woman to get all that toilet paper out of the trees and the grass? Of course you didn’t. That’s what being a teenager is all about. And don’t think you invented anything new, honey. I’ve been getting TP’d on Halloween since your mama was a young’un. It’s a lot easier to take care of than you think. You just take a lighter to it, it burns right out before any part of the tree catches, easy-peasy. Now, what brings you to my front porch looking all distraught? And who are you, firstly? Ever since I quit teaching Sunday School at the A.R.P. Church, I don’t know as many of you young people as I used to.”

  “We’re Baptists anyway,” the girl said.

  “Well, I forgive you,” I replied. The poor child looked terribly confused, which just made me laugh again, which just made her look even more confused. “Anyway, honey, you were going to tell me who you were?” I prodded.

  “My name’s Jenny Miller, and I reckon you can see I’m dead.”

  “I noticed that first thing. How did you die and how long ago?”

  “About three days ago, I guess. Time is strange now, and I don’t have to sleep, so it’s a little odd. But they had my funeral today, and I think it was a Friday when I died, so it feels like about three days.”

  “Well, let me go get the paper, and we can see if you’re in the obituaries. That can tell us quite a bit.” I went into the house and pulled out the last three days’ worth of The Herald and carried them out to the porch.

  I opened the first newspaper, Saturday’s edition with high school football on the front page, and a big picture of a smiling blond girl on the back page of Section A. I compared the photo with the ghost on my steps, and sure enough, it was a match. “Yes, honey, you died on Friday night after cheering our Bulldogs to a victory over Dorman in overtime. It says here that you fell down the stairs in your house and broke your neck. But I suppose that isn’t what happened, was it?”

  The pretty blond ghost looked up at me, her eyes brimming. “No, ma’am. I didn’t fall. I was pushed. Somebody pushed me down the stairs and broke my neck, and now I’m stuck here until I get justice!” Her words built and built on each other until she was almost shouting. I felt the power roll off of her, full of anger and pain. I knew if I didn’t find a way to send her to her rest, she could turn into a powerful poltergeist. This child needed to move on, and fast.

  “Okay, sweetie, just calm down,” I said, putting my tea down and using the same tones I used to use to calm spooked horses when I was little. “Now tell me what you remember, and we’ll work from there.”

  “I don’t remember anything,” she said, her voice shaky and thready. “That’s the problem. I remember leaving the game with Shelly, and then nothing.”

  “How did you get home?” I asked. I knew if I could get her to realize that the memories were there, that it would all work out.

  “Shelly drove us. She got her license last month, and this was the first game her mom had let her drive to.”

  “Alright. Did Shelly come in with you, or did she drop you off in the driveway?”

  “Neither one. She just stopped on the street in front of my house, and I got out. I walked up the steps to the front porch, unlocked the front door, turned around to wave goodnight to Shelly, and went inside.”

  “Then what?” I kept my voice low, not wanting to break her out of the almost-trance she had slipped into as she walked back through the night in her memory.

  “I reached over to turn on the lights, but nothing happened. I remember thinking that was strange because the porch light was working fine, but then I remembered Daddy had installed one of them fancy battery backups on the porch light so we’d have some kind of light when the power went out. It was dark as could be, but there was a little bit of light coming in the door from the porch light, and that streetlight the power company put up in the front yard shines in through the living room window something fierce, so I could see plenty.”

  “What did you see, honey?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I mean, nothing unusual. It just looked like my house, you know? Only dark. I went to the kitchen and got a flashlight out of the drawer beside the sink where Mama keeps all the hurricane stuff, and I went to the basement to look at the fuse box.”

  “Only you never made it down to the basement,” I added.

  “That’s right,” the pretty little ghost agreed. “On account of some sumbitch shoving me down the stairs as soon as I got the door open good. I remember feeling two hands on my back, then I went forward, and I remember a big flash when I hit my head…then…I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything else. I woke up the next morning to the sound of my mama screaming, and I was looking down at my own body, lying there at the bottom of the stairs…” Her words trailed off into sobs, and I wanted to put my arm around her and try to give the poor child some comfort, but I knew my arm would just pass right through her. I’d done it before with other spirits, and it never went well. It just made the ghost more upset and left me feeling a little bit embarrassed.

  “Okay, sweetheart, it’s okay,” I said in a soothing tone. “Let’s go inside and have a seat while you try to think of anything else you remember from that night. You’re doing real good, better than anybody would expect.” I stood up, and she followed me into the house.

  She stopped by the washing machine and looked at the tomatoes all spread out waiting to be washed and canned. “Did you just pick these?” she asked. “I love fresh tomatoes!” She reached out for one, but couldn’t touch them. Her tomato days were over, unfortunately. She looked up at me, stricken.

  “I’m sorry, honey. You can’t touch things anymore.”

  “I know. I just forget sometimes, you know?”

  I did know. I’d seen it for years with other ghosts I had dealt with. Sometimes a very powerful spirit can move things around them, but that kind of poltergeist energy is real hard to sustain, and it makes a ghost become thin and wispy, and before long, it fades away entirely. I don’t know if the spirit moves on or just…fades.

  That was something I didn’t dwell on too much. It was more for the ladies in my Sunday School class, and I tried not to ask too many heavy theological questions around that bunch. They just let me start coming back to Sunday School about six months ago, so I didn’t want to push my luck. I led the teenager’s ghost into the house to see if we could come up with any other clues about her untimely demise.

  Chapter 3

  I wasn’t too surprised to see Sheriff Johnny sitting in my living room when I walked in with Jenny in tow. The girl stopped, though, and when I sat down in my favorite chair, I noticed that she was still standing in the open French door frame between my dining room and den.

  “Well, come on in, sweetie. He ain’t gonna arrest you. Not now, anyhow.” I smiled at her to let her know I was only joking and waved her into the room.
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  She came into the room and sat on the couch. I’ve never understood how ghosts can sit on furniture, but they can’t turn a doorknob or handle other objects. Most of ‘em can’t, anyway. But for some reason, they can all sit on a chair or couch just like they still walked around breathing.

  “Now, honey, let’s start with what Sheriff Johnny here likes to call the real police work.” I nodded to Johnny, and he smiled at me. He looked like he was only half paying attention to what we were talking about, but I knew he was listening a lot more to what me and that child said than he was listening to another In the Heat of the Night rerun. I mean, I like Carroll O’Conner as much as the next woman, but back-to-back episodes five days a week is a little much. But Sheriff Johnny has got hooked on it since he showed up at my door the morning after his funeral, all mute and confused and lost.

  Some ghosts can talk, some can’t. I’ve never known what makes one of them able to communicate over another one, and it ain’t like I’ve been dead to ask anybody. But Sheriff Johnny was one of them that couldn’t speak, so he had to resort to bad sign language and gestures to get his point across. The two of us spent many an afternoon in recent months watching YouTube videos on sign language, and we got to a place where we could communicate with one another pretty good.

  I reached over to the antique chest of drawers I got out of Miss Ellen Ferguson’s house when she passed, and I dug around in the top drawer until I found an ink pen and a little yellow notepad. I leaned forward to Jenny and asked, “Now who do you think would want to hurt you, sweetheart?”

  “I can’t think of nobody, ma’am. And I mean it, too. Carla Combs was mad at me for getting homecoming queen, but she got over it when she beat me for class president. Matt Ridinger was mad at me because I beat him out for Salutatorian, but then his scholarship to Duke came through and he stopped caring about stuff around here. So, I can’t think of anybody that would want to kill me.”