Sheriff Dunleavy leaned back in his chair and looked at me, one of those long, steady looks that men do when they think they’re being all serious, but really all they’re doing is trying to figure out what box to put you in now that you have done escaped the one they thought you were supposed to fit into all nice and neat. I’ve known men like him all my life, and it’s better to just let them sit and “process things” and figure out what they’re going to say, then go on about your business and do things the way you intended to do them in the first place, rather than getting your blood pressure up fighting them over it.
“Ms. Carter, I don’t know what help you can be, but I don’t have a whole lot to go on with this case, and I don’t know anybody in this town, and Jeff, bless his heart, just ain’t as much help as I’d like for him to be. So while I’m not sure I believe you can do everything you say you can do, I think it’s gonna be a whole lot better for me to have you working with me instead of out on your own getting in my way.”
“Well, Sheriff, that’s certainly one way of looking at it, and since it gets me right to where I want to be, which is working on this case, I don’t expect I’m going to argue with you about it. Now what can you tell me that the child hasn’t been able to tell me herself?”
“I don’t know what the victim has told you—“
“Jenny,” I interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Her name is Jenny, and she is a girl. She is not ‘the victim’ or ‘the girl’ or ‘the body.’ She is Jenny, and I will remind you that she is still sitting right here and can hear every word. She is dead, and she is a ghost, but she is also still a little girl who is scared at what is going to happen next, and angry that she won’t go to the prom, or graduate high school, or get married, or have a baby, or grandbabies, or any of the things that she was supposed to do. So she will be treated with respect, and not referred to as ‘the victim.’ Do we have an understanding?” I might have slipped into my Sunday School Teacher voice, the one I used on Kacey Swicegood all those years when he was trying to be distracting while I was teaching the story of the loaves and fishes.
Sheriff Dunleavy looked appropriately chastened, although I don’t know if it was because of what I said, or if I just made him remember his own mama reading him out for talking ugly when he was a child. He nodded, then went on. “Like I was saying, I don’t know what Jenny has told you, but we know very little about this case. The…she came home from the football game, apparently went to basement for some reason, and apparently fell down the stairs.”
“You say ‘for some reason,’” I said. “Does that mean the power was on when y’all found her?”
“Well, yes ma’am, when we got the call Saturday morning the power was on and there were no blackouts the night before that got called in, so we didn’t have any reason to think the power was ever out. But that would explain her going down to the basement when there was no one else in the house.”
“What about her flashlight? Did she have a flashlight with her?” I asked. Jenny nodded for me to go on, but stayed silent.
Dunleavy looked at me, then picked up a folder from his desk and took some glossy pictures out of it. He spread the crime scene photos out on his desk and started looking through them. “I don’t see a flashlight in these pictures. The basement’s not the cleanest place I’ve ever seen, but there’s not much clutter,” he said.
“There it is,” Jenny said, pointing to one of the pictures. “On that shelf by the freezer. That’s my flashlight. But how did it get all the way over there?”
“What do you mean, sweetie,” I asked, then I saw where she was pointing. On the shelf over their big freezer, the one her daddy probably put a deer in every winter, sat a bright shiny flashlight, without a speck of dust on it. I could see in the photo how much it stood out on the shelf.
“Sheriff,” I said. “Jenny said that’s the flashlight she was carrying when she went down the steps,” I said. “We need to find out who moved it.”
“Yep, because if she had it in her hand when she was pushed, somehow I doubt it flew ten feet across the basement and just happened to land perfectly on that shelf,” Dunleavy agreed. “I’ll get Jeff to go over there and bag it, then we can bring it back over here and dust it for prints.”
“You might want to have him dust the fuse box while he’s over there,” I suggested.
“That makes sense. If Jenny’s telling you the power was out…”
“What’s the matter, Sheriff?” I asked.
“I’m talking like I believe this is all really happening, which I reckon I do, since I’m sending a deputy over to re-open a crime scene based on either the say-so of a ghost, or the say-so of a crazy woman. It’s just going to take me a minute or two to adjust to my new reality, I think.”
“Welcome to my world, Sheriff. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of room on the crazy train.”
“Lila Grace, did you just make an Ozzy Osbourne reference?” Sheriff Dunleavy asked me.
“I’m hardcore, Sheriff,” I replied. “Didn’t they tell you I worship the devil and bite the heads off live bats?”
“Oh, people tried to warn me, alright, but believe me, their warnings could not hold a candle to the reality,” he said.
“I’m so glad I could help,” I said with a smile, then returned my attention to the crime scene photos. Sheriff Dunleavy called Jeff on the radio while I perused the photos and sent him over to the Miller house to collect the flashlight and dust the fuse box. He also instructed the young officer to take pictures of the stairs, regardless of the fact that a dozen people had trooped through their in the days since Jenny’s death.
The scene in the photos was pretty normal for a basement, even as peculiar as a house with a basement was for Lockhart, South Carolina. The only reason I could think they would have it is the slope the house sat on made for a whole lot of usable space along the back of the house, so somebody put walls around it and called it a basement. There were some shelves with the kind of junk people usually put on their garage or crawlspace – old sports equipment, lawn furniture that’s out of season or too worn out for use except when the in-laws come over and every single chair that can come out into the yard already has a behind in it, some old cans of paint, a seed spreader, a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, and a dead teenage girl.
Jenny stood looking over my shoulder, silent after telling us about the flashlight. I didn’t say anything to the child, just let her look. Sometimes the dead need to see themselves lying there to really understand their new place in the world, or lack thereof. I looked up at the girl, and her face was sad, but determined.
“Are you alright, sweetie?” I asked after a minute.
“I’m fine. It just took me a minute to get my head wrapped around the fact that was me laying there. Did my mama or my daddy find me?”
I looked at Sheriff Dunleavy, then when he didn’t answer I remembered that he couldn’t hear the girl. “Who found her, Sheriff? Was it her mother or her father?”
The sheriff opened another manila folder on his desk and pulled out a pink sheet of a multi-part form. “It says here that the father discovered the…found her.” He caught himself before he called her “the body,” and I appreciated it.
“That’s good,” Jenny said. “Mama wouldn’t have been able to handle that. I mean, I’m sure it was bad for Daddy, too. But Mama would have just been tore all to pieces.”
“I’m sure she was that anyhow, darling,” I said. “A parent ain’t supposed to have to bury their child. It’s about the worst thing I can imagine.”
“You never had any kids, did you Ms. Carter?” Jenny asked, all of the melancholy of death forgotten in the irrepressible curiosity of the teenager.
“No, honey, I never married. I guess children just weren’t in the cards for me,” I said. I pushed all thoughts of a young man with glasses and a trim beard driving out of town in a fast car to the back of my head. This was not the time to dwell on old hurts or regrets. This was the time to find out who pushed that child down a flight of stairs.
“I can’t see anything out of place or unusual, Jenny,” I said, motioning to the pictures. “Can you?”
She leaned in closer, her body passing through my shoulder. I felt all the hair on my right arm stand up in goosebumps at her touch, like a goose didn’t just walk over my grave, but stopped and decided to tap dance on it for a little while. After several long seconds, she straightened up, and I rubbed some warmth back into my arm.
“No ma’am, I don’t see anything different. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the basement, though, so I might not know it if I saw it.” She looked disappointed, like she had been hoping the killer wrote his name in the dust at her feet or something.
“She didn’t see anything else out of place, Sheriff,” I reported. “What else do you have that we can look at?”
“I don’t have any more photos, unless you want to look at the autopsy?” He looked from my face to over my right shoulder, where Jenny stood. I thought for a moment that the good Sheriff could see her, then I remembered that I looked up at her whenever I talked to her, so he could easily figure out where she was from watching me.
“I don’t think will be necessary,” I said. I had no interest in seeing pictures of this sweet child all cut up, and wouldn’t be able to get any information that way anyway. I was no kind of doctor. All I’d get from seeing pictures of an autopsy would be nauseated.
“Good,” Sheriff Dunleavy said. “The findings were consistent with a fall down the steps, but the coroner was surprised to see that there were no bruises on the knees or hands. That made him think that she might have been pushed, because a person falling would naturally put their hands out to break their fall.”
“And most people who fall down the steps don’t land on their head,” I said.
“That’s right,” the sheriff agreed. “If it had been a normal fall, her legs and the rest of her would have been all bruised up. She wasn’t, just her head and a broken neck. Then when I saw you at the scene, I knew life was about to get a whole lot more complicated.”
“I am sorry about that, Sheriff. I would very much like for your life to be as simple as possible. Because when your life is simple, it means that my life is boring. And I like a boring life. I like to go to church on Sunday and on Wednesday nights. I like to go to the farmer’s market on Saturday and buy my vegetables. I like to read the newspaper every morning while I eat my oatmeal with strawberries cut up in it and just a little bit of brown sugar to make me feel decadent. I like boring, Sheriff. So I truly am sorry that I am complicating your life, but this poor child showed up on my doorstep crying her poor dead eyes out, and I couldn’t very well turn her away.”
“No, I reckon you couldn’t, at that. Well, right now I’ve got Jeff going out to pick up the flashlight, so do you have any supernatural advice as to our next step?”
I didn’t get the chance to answer, because as soon as I opened my mouth to speak, the woman who was painting her nails at the reception desk when we walked by rushed in, her mouth open wide. “Sheriff, you got to come quick,” she panted.
“What’s wrong, Ethel?” the sheriff asked.
“We just got a 911 call come in. There’s another dead girl.”
I’m gonna start a new feature on this here website, entitled “Evolution.” This will tie into my Writer’s Journey podcast, except here writers will be able to talk about where a story came from.
So if you’re a writer with a published book or short story, self-published or otherwise, you can send me an essay, no more than 1,000 words (500-800 is preferable) about where a story came from.
Please email the essay, along with a bio, photo, buy links, and cover image (don’t make those photos huge!) to john AT johnhartness.com. I’ll start running these every Friday, so go ahead and shoot me content
PS – your buy links will be so much easier if you use Books2Read.com – they compile all your buy links into one universal link, so no matter how people want to buy your crap, they don’t have to dig through a ton of links.
This is intended for professional writers, or people working towards becoming professional writers. As such, I will enact some quality control. If your essay is a pile of error-riddled crap, I won’t run it. If your cover looks like it was created by an epileptic three-year-old, I won’t run the essay. If you are a dick, I won’t run the essay. Have a nice day. 🙂
People sometimes ask me how I’m so productive, how I manage to turn out a novella every month, plus run a publishing company, and do a couple of podcasts each month, and attend an average of 1.5 conventions each month, and do all the other shit I do.
The answer is – productivity through mental illness.
No joke, no bullshit, I am mentally ill and that is how I get so much shit done.
When I am able to do anything at all.
I self-diagnosed myself with depression when I was a teenager. I didn’t go see a doctor, or talk to a therapist, or do anything healthy to deal with it for almost thirty years. Last year, after dealing with depression for years, and after realizing that it wasn’t just depression, but I also had episodes of super-manic activity that were often equally damaging to my life, I self-diagnosed with Bipolar II disorder. This is not the bipolar that leads to throwing things in tantrums, or driving across multiple states wearing a diaper to murder the spouse of your astronaut lover. That’s Bipolar I.
This is the bipolar that vacillates more slowly, sometimes having month-long or multiple months-long episodes of depression, alternating with equally long episodes of mania. The depressive episodes are marked by hypersomnolence (sleeping all the time), lack of enjoyment in things you generally enjoy, lack of energy, and general malaise. The manic episodes are marked by lack of sleep, irritability, judgmental tendencies, waspishness, and hyperproductivity.
After a couple of meetings with a psychologist and some testing, my personal diagnosis was confirmed, and added to – ADHD along with Bipolar II. So I went on drugs. I take one pill every morning, and the idea is just to keep my shit regulated, to knock the tops off the highs and the bottoms off the lows. As I said to my GP, who is the one I talk to now about my meds, I’m not currently under psychiatric care (although given the fact that I don’t think I need it, I probably do), I just want to keep life on a range between a 3 and a 9, instead of a 1 to a 12.
The drugs I’m on haven’t done much to mitigate the current manic episode, I still don’t often sleep more than five hours each night, but I am less irritable, so that’s something. What the drugs have done is really helped with the depressive episodes. I had a pretty rough depressive episode in November, then another in January. December was okay, and February was pretty level. I was still able to work during November and January, and that’s probably mostly thanks to the drugs. In the past, when I had a depressive incident, I didn’t write at all, and that’s no good for someone with as many deadlines as I have, and someone who lives month-to-month from the fruits of their writing. A period last summer of no writing made for a couple of very tight months in the early fall.
About halfway through February, I felt the restlessness start to pick up, and I knew I was coming into a manic time. So I upped my daily word count, and I’m now writing as fast as I can to take advantage of the illness. That’s my current coping mechanism – when I’m feeling manic, I write as much as I can as fast as I can, that way I have stuff stored up for when I come down. It helps me stay productive, and keep getting paid, which the people that hold my mortgage appreciate. It’s just another part of living with a mental illness – learning the coping mechanisms.
I owe a lot to a couple of people in particular for their part in me getting help. Wil Wheaton released a video about his depression and anxiety that was really influential, and Jim C. Hines wrote a blog post about his fears of going on medication, which mirrored my own, and his positive experiences. Those two things really pushed me to get help, which lets me continue to bring people the stories that they hopefully love. So if you don’t feel right, find someone to talk to. If you can’t afford a doctor, try a clinic. If there isn’t a clinic around, ask around for a patient minister. If you don’t like church, call a hotline. Or phone a friend. There have been too many statistics. You don’t need to be one.
Words from Gail Z. Martin, founder of #HoldOnToTheLight –
#AlwaysKeepFighting #AKF showed the reach media stars have when they talk about issues, and I wondered what would happen if genre authors opened a similar conversation. I recruited my usual partners in crime—John Hartness, Misty Massey, Jaym Gates, Jean Marie Ward, Emily Leverett and my husband, Larry N. Martin—as the steering committee, and we started asking our colleagues and author friends to join us.
The result? More than 100 science fiction, fantasy, horror, paranormal romance and speculative fiction authors are part of #HoldOnToTheLight—and the outreach grows every day.
I had the good fortune to sit down at Mysticon with my buddy Rod Belcher, who writes as R.S. Belcher, and talk about his evolution as a writer, how he got his book deal, how he landed a agent, and what he loves about the writing life. He’s a great guy, a funny guy, and a helluva writer. Here’s the interview in its entirety, also available on iTunes and pretty much wherever you get podcasts from.
It ain’t easy knocking on the door of a house that’s grieving, especially when you know it’s a child that’s passed. The Miller house looked like about any other house in one of them new planned neighborhoods, called Evergreen Acres, with all the streets named after trees. Of course, not a one of the trees they named a street after is an evergreen, so the Millers lived on Maple Lane. I shook my head at how dumb some developers can be as I pulled up on the street outside their house.
There were a few cars in the driveway and on the side of the road, but not too many. It was the day after the funeral, and most of the family from out of town had already gone, leaving the poor child’s mama and daddy to start trying to put their lives back together. And here I was to tear it apart again.
Reverend Aaron Turner answered the door, a scowl making his face look even more sour than usual. The Baptist preacher always looked like somebody shoved a lemon in his mouth and clamped his jaw shut, or maybe stuck that lemon someplace a little further south. But whenever he saw me, his face scrunched up like he just took a bite of something rotten and didn’t have nowhere to spit it out. I was not going to be able to talk to the parents with him in the house. I’d be surprised if I got into the house at all, given the good reverend’s dim view of me and my gifts. The kindest thing he’d ever called me was a fraud, and it went decidedly downhill from there.
“Reverend,” I said, so polite that butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. I held out the white Pyrex dish with blue flowers on it. “I brought a chicken pot pie. Figured these folks might be tired of broccoli and green bean casseroles by now.”
“That’s mighty kind of you, Ms. Carter. I’ll be sure to pass it along, with your condolences of course.” He stepped back and made to close to the door on me, but he had to hold the dish with both hands on account of the bottom being too hot for him to manage it one-handed. That made him slow getting the door closed in my face, and I pushed my way just across the threshold and held the door open with my foot.
“I don’t mind coming in for a minute to pay my respects. My circle wanted me to say something to Mrs. Miller on our behalf.” I wondered if it was a worse sin lying to a preacher than just lying in general, because the women in my church circle group didn’t have a damn thing to do with me being there, and had no idea I was using their names in vain. They wouldn’t have cared about that, but the lying to a preacher thing would have given Tot Good a little pause, at least.
“That won’t be necessary,” Reverend Turner insisted through gritted teeth. The man did not want me in that house, particularly right then. I started to wonder if there was more to his insistence than just his general dislike for me and his completely unfounded opinion that I sold my soul to the devil.
“Who’s at the door, Aaron?” The voice coming from within the house was familiar, but I couldn’t put a name to it. That was odd, since I’d known most everybody in town for years.
The little bit of light coming from within the house was blotted out by the big frame of Sheriff Dunleavy stepping into the doorway between the parlor and the foyer. “Ms. Carter? How are you doing?” the sheriff asked, walking over to me, a grin splitting his face. I trusted his intentions about like I trusted a crying crocodile. A smiling lawman is never honest about his intentions. I liked my police like I liked my undertakers – solemn and grim.
“I’m fine, Sheriff. I just brought this chicken pot pie and my respects to the Millers. I heard about Jenny and just felt awful about it.” I pushed past Reverend Turner and shook the sheriff’s hand. “Are you here officially, or just being a sympathetic ear?”
“I’m here in an official capacity, I hate to say,” Dunleavy said. “There were a couple of strange things that came up in the autopsy that I need to go over with Mr. And Mrs. Miller.”
“What kind of strange things, Sheriff?” I asked. I knew it wasn’t my business, and a big-city cop would never tell me squat, but I had a little hope that my hokey charm would soften Dunleavy up a touch.
No such luck. “I’m sorry, Ms. Carter. I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. I’ve said too much already. If you’ll excuse me,” he stepped past me toward the door and nodded to Turner. “Reverend.”
“Sheriff,” the preacher nodded back in that silent acknowledgment men do. Sheriff Dunleavy continued out the door and down the steps. I didn’t see what car he got into, but it must have been his personal one. I would have noticed a police cruiser in the driveway, even if I missed Reverend Turner’s big old black Lincoln Town Car with the Clergy sticker on his bumper. The man was just a little ostentatious for my tastes, with his perfectly creased pants and his big shiny car. I could tolerate fancy or judgmental, but I didn’t do good when one package wrapped up both irritating traits. And Turner was fit to bursting at the seams with both.
“You need to leave, Ms. Carter. This family has been through enough without your interference and crazy stories,” the preacher said in a low voice. He practically hissed at me, the bald-headed little snot. I thought, not for the first time, that Reverend Turner probably got beat up a lot in school. Not because the other children were terribly cruel, which they could be, but because he was such a little bastard.
“You’re right, Reverend.” I said, sugar practically dripping off my tongue. “These fine folks have lost everything that matters to them right now. I should leave them alone to their grief. My name is on the bottom of the Pyrex, so they can return it whenever they’re done. But don’t you go putting that dish in the refrigerator while it’s still hot. It’ll cool down too fast and explode.”
“I know that, Lila Grace. What do you take me for, a moron?”
I didn’t answer that, I just turned and left the house. After all, my mama always said if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say nothing at all.
“What are you doing?” Jenny asked as I walked down the steps on the front porch. “Why are you leaving? Talk to me, dammit!”
I tried very hard to keep my voice low and not move my lips much as I walked to the car. There was a steady trickle of people walking up to the front door, most of them carrying Pyrex, but a few with KFC buckets and one or two even carrying grocery bags with paper plates and the like.
“I am leaving because it will not do us any good to get in a fight with a preacher on your front porch. I can come back this evening when he is leading his choir practice, and have a much better chance of talking to your mama and daddy without causing a scene.”
“Well, where are we going now?” She asked, fading through the passenger door of my truck and settling into the seat. She turned half around, reaching for the seatbelt, then laughed a little. “I guess I don’t have to worry about seatlbelts now, do I?”
“No, honey, I think you’re beyond those problems. And since the only lawman in town who can see you is Sheriff Johnny, you’re probably safe from getting a ticket, too. Speaking of lawmen, we’re going to see Sheriff Dunleavy to ask him what was squirelly in your autopsy. Could be he has some information that might be useful to us, and we certainly have some that he should find interesting.”
I pulled the pickup out onto the street and drove around the block, then headed toward the sheriff’s office. There was a familiar white Prius sitting in the Sheriff’s parking lot, and now I knew what Dunleavy’s car looked like. I could count the number of hybrids in Unionville on one hand and have a thumb to spare, so it wouldn’t be any trouble seeing the Sheriff coming from a mile away, even if he wasn’t in his official vehicle.
I walked through the front door, wincing at the loud electronic beeeeeep that accompanied me. Sheriff Johnny had a bell on a metal arm over the door, like in an old hardware store, and it was still unnerving to me the new technological sound that came with the new high-tech lawman.
“Come on in, Ms. Carter,” Sheriff Dunleavy called from his office. “I didn’t expect it would take you very long to get here.”
“Well, then you might just be sheriff enough to take care of this county,” I said. I walked into his office and paused at the door. The “lawyer chair” had been replaced, and a new chair with arms sat in its place. I sat down in the new chair, testing the soft leather. There was no wobble, and it sat just a little high, putting the occupant almost at eye level with the person sitting behind a desk. Obviously this new sheriff didn’t think he needed any help intimidating people. That in itself was a little bit intimidating.
“The old chair had one leg shorter than the other. Imagine that,” the sheriff said, sitting down behind his desk. He motioned to a Styrofoam cup on the front edge of his desk. “I fixed you an ice water.”
I picked up the cup and took a sip. It was very cold. “Thank you, Sheriff. You have been expecting me.”
“You seem like somebody who takes an interest in things that aren’t quite ordinary,” he said with a mild smile.
“That sounds an awful lot like a polite way of calling me a busybody, Sheriff,” I replied, fixing my own smile firmly on my face. It seemed like we were going to sit here and play the “bless your heart” game for a little while, where we made snide little comments hidden in well-mannered sentences before finally abandoning our pretenses and getting down to business.
But the Sheriff had a surprise in store for me. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his desk, and stared right at me. “I’ve asked around about you. Seems like most everybody here believes you can do what you say you can do. Even Reverend Turner, who thinks you’re in league with the devil, believes you can talk to the dead. Your own pastor, Dr. Reese, speaks very highly of your gifts and your willingness to help people. So either you’ve managed to fool an entire town, or you really do have some power to talk to dead folks.”
“Like I said when we first met, Sheriff, everybody around here talks to dead people. The only difference with me is that they talk back.” I leaned forward in my chair and looked him in the eye as I spoke.
“Well, exactly what are the dead telling you today?” he asked.
“They’re telling me that Jenny Miller didn’t fall down those stairs,” I replied.
“Do they know who killed her?”
“No, they don’t.”
“Then what good are they?”
“They’re dead, Sheriff, they aren’t Batman.”
He let out a deep echoing laugh and leaned back. “I like you, Lila Grace. Can I call you Lila Grace?”
“I wish you would, Sheriff.”
“You know why I like you?”
“Because I can help you solve murders?”
“No, because you ain’t scared of nothing! You have got bigger juevos than any man I’ve ever met. I respect that.”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, Sheriff,” I said. “There’s plenty of things I’m scared of. I’m scared of spiders, they give me the willies. I’m scared that the life I lead isn’t good enough to get me to Heaven, and when I walk up to the pearly gates, Saint Peter is going to laugh in my face and send me down to the other place. I’m scared that I really am crazy and just hallucinating all these dead people, and you, and driving around town, and I’m really down in Columbia on Bull Street tied to bed in a pair of Depends that ain’t been changed in two days with everybody ignoring my screaming because they’re tired of listening to this old woman’s mouth. I’m scared of sunspots, because I watch too much PBS. I’m scared of the government, because I watch too much C-Span. I’m scared of getting cancer from watching too much TV, and I’m scared that I won’t be smart enough, or strong enough, or good enough to find who murdered the beautiful little girl that’s sitting in your other chair right now unable to be seen or heard by anybody in the world but me, and that she will wander this earth forever instead of going to Heaven to see her Granny again like she deserves.”
I leaned back and took a drink of water. “So there are plenty of things that scare me, Sheriff. Just none of them scare me as much as letting this little girl down.”
The reception to this reading at Mysticon last weekend was great, so I guess I’ll keep on scribbling on it. Y’all know we love comments, right? And remember, this is strictly first-draft stuff, so there will probably be spelling errors and plenty of proof that I don’t really know where the commas go.
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.
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 for being named 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.”
I looked over at Johnny, who wiggled his fingers in the air for a few seconds. I nodded, and turned back to Jenny. “What about any of the other girls on the cheerleading squad? I asked. “Did any of the girls on the bottom of the pyramid want to be on the top? Or vice versa, or whatever girls get made at each other about nowadays.”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, nothing like that. I was captain of the squad, but I didn’t make up any of the routines or decide anything about who got featured or anything like that. And I was on the bottom of the pyramid, because I had strong enough legs to hold up some of those little heifers.” The corner of one lip turned up a little sneer, and that was the thing I’d been waiting for – the hint of mean girl to come out.
It took me back, and not to somewhere I liked going. I went right back to seventh grade gym class and playing dodge ball. All the teams were picked except me and little Mikey Miller, who had braces on both legs and a lisp. Karen Taylor and Laura Anne Mays were arguing over who got “the gimp,” and who got stuck with “Crazy Gracie,” as I was called until my junior year of high school.
But Jenny’s sneer was gone as soon as it came over her, and she looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate to call them names, that’s what Miss Hope called us all. We were her little heifers, and she was our Mama Moo-Cow. I think she got picked on in school because she was a big girl.” Well, I’ll be. Maybe this child really was as nice as she was acting. That was going to make it even harder to figure out who wanted to kill her.
Sheriff Johnny caught my eye, and I turned to see him wiggling his fingers to beat the band. “Slow down, Johnny. You know I ain’t watched them videos as many times as you have.” It was true, too. Sometimes I left the sign language videos running on a loop so Johnny could practice while I went to church, or the grocery store, or just out to piddle around in my garden. He’d gotten downright good at that stuff, and when he got excited, like he was now, sometimes he was too much for me to keep up with.
He stopped, then started again. I watched his wispy hands closely, glad he wasn’t too pale today for me to see all the details. Sometimes Johnny would get wispy in the middle of the day, only to grow sharper and more distinct as night fell.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny was wondering if there was anybody that had a disagreement with your parents? Anybody that they argued with a bunch?”
“No, ma’am,” the girl said. “I mean, they got in little squabbles with Todd Ferguson about stuff at the church, and Mama didn’t shop at the Farmer’s Market no more since she caught that Riley girl putting her thumb on the scale when she was weighing her cucumbers, but nothing to come to no fights, or nothing like that. Daddy didn’t even owe nobody money, except the bank. And they ain’t usually the ones to go around pushing people down steps, are they?”
‘No, honey, I reckon they ain’t. Bankers are usually more sneaky than that.” Johnny was wiggling his fingers at me again, but I turned my head and ignored him. He hates that. Makes him madder than a frog on a frying pan to be ignored, but sometimes I had to use it like a mute button. Johnny had a bad habit of forgetting that he wasn’t Sheriff mo more. On account of being dead and all.
I stood up and walked to the kitchen. “You want something to drink, honey? I got sweet tea, and ice water. Oh, shoot, I’m sorry.” Sometimes I forget they ain’t ever gonna drink nothing again, especially the ones that can talk. I fixed myself some sweet tea in an old Tupperware tumbler and walked back into the den.
“I’m sorry about that, honey,” I said.
“It’s okay,” the girl said. “I ain’t quite used to it myself, yet. Being dead, I mean.” She got a pensive look on her face. “Do you know…why I’m still here? Does this mean I can’t go to Heaven?” She looked like she was going to cry, the poor thing. I knew better, cause ghosts can’t cry, but it’s still a good idea to keep the supernatural visitors on as even a keel as you can manage, emotionally speaking. When a ghost loses control of their emotions, things have a bad habit of flying around the room, and I had some nice Depression Glass piece in my china cabinet that I didn’t want to see get broken.
“I don’t know why you’re here, honey, but I’ve got an idea,” I said. “It seems like the people who don’t move on are either scared of what they’re going to find when they pass from this world, or there’s something unfinished keeping them here. Sheriff Johnny hangs around this old town because he ain’t convinced that the new Sheriff can take care of his people, so he tries to keep an eye on things. Miss Leila Dover doesn’t think her husband JR can take care of himself without her, not realizing that he took care of himself and her the last five years when her Alzheimer’s got so bad. And you got murdered, only nobody knows it, so ain’t nobody looking for your killer. So you want justice. I reckon when y’all get your outstanding issues resolved, so to speak, y’all will all move on to the land of harp music and fluffy clouds.”
“Are you sure?” The child looked scared to death, which I reckon was not a real good turn of phrase for her anymore.
“I ain’t sure of much, sweetie. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifty-seven years on this earth, it’s that we don’t know half of what we think we know, and we understand less than half of that. But I know this – if you were a good person, then you’ll end up Heaven. It don’t matter if you toilet papered an old lady’s house on Halloween, or skipped Sunday School more times than you went. It matters how you acted towards others, and whether or not you are really sorry for any harm you might have caused. I am not your preacher, and I am not here to cast judgement. But if I had to guess, I would think that once we figure out who pushed you down them stairs, you can move on to the next world and see anybody that’s waiting for you on the other side.”
“Like my Granny?” She said, smiling.
I remembered that child’s grandmother the second she said it. Vera Prustley was a foot-washing Baptist, as we called them. She was as devout a woman as any I’d ever known. Didn’t truck with playing cards or music on Sunday, but wasn’t rude about her religion, either. I didn’t know her too well, but she always had a friendly nod for me when we would pass in the grocery store, even when I was on the outs with my own church family. She had passed about six years ago, right about the time this child would have been in middle school. That’s about the time when children really start to understand death and grieving, so her Granny’s death was something she would have carried with her.
“Yes, darling,” I replied. “I think your Granny is almost certainly waiting to see you again. So let’s try to figure out where to go from here so you can go see Miss Vera again, and your killer can go straight to jail.”
Sheriff Johnny waved his arms so wildly I turned back to him. “Yes, Johnny?”
He wiggled his fingers at me, and I gave him a little smile. “I agree, Sheriff,” I said.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny says your killer don’t need to go to jail, we need to send his sorry behind right to Hell.”
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I had the good fortune to sit down at 
