Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10 (44) (161 page)

“You’ve got ring on the mind,” he said and laughed.

“I guess I do,” I said. “And how are things with you in that department? How’s the old love life?”

“It’s not getting any younger. But it’s all part of the plan. I’m totally focused, Abby Craig. I’ve got three priorities right now: career, career, career. I’m like a monk with chocolate or ale or whatever monks do in those abbeys. I’m not taking anything for granted this time around. There will be plenty of time for those hotties later. Speaking of, there’s an assistant producer who drives me wild. No, I promised myself, I wouldn’t even think about such things. Next subject. So, no ghosts skulking around needing your help?”

“No, I wouldn’t exactly say that,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it one of these days.”

“No. Damn it, no! Think Sophia Loren! I want intrigue! I want mystery!”

There was silence for a moment and then David lowered his voice.

“Sometimes you have to be a diva.”

“Sure, of course. Hey, getting back to Kate, she’s coming to Bend to throw us an engagement party,” I said. “Can you make it?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. This is such a special time, isn’t it? And I don’t mean just for me. I mean for all of us. You and Ty getting married, me with a hit show again, Sista Kate working in the big city. Like the book says, ‘It was the best of times!’ Well, I gotta go.
Ciao
, Abby Craig. See you soon!”

I was about to say goodbye when he started shouting.

“Oh, my God! Sugar Man, why would you send me out looking like this? I look like a clown detective. Here, give me a brush and I’ll just do it myself.”

CHAPTER 13

I stumbled to the bathroom and was just about to sit down when I saw it.

“Jesus,” I said, jumping up.

There in the bathtub was the ghost of the crawling man. He looked worse than the first time I had seen him at Back Street. His corpse had started to rot, filling the room with a horrid odor that made me gag. Pieces of flesh from his arms and face were falling off.

I ran out to the bedroom and grabbed the baseball bat out of instinct and tiptoed back, hoping he would be gone. He wasn’t.

He was trying to speak, but his jaw appeared to be dislocated or broken and I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

Shivering, I forced myself to step closer.

“Help me,” he whispered.
“Help me, Abby.”

CHAPTER 14

The whole thing left me shaken. I had seen a lot of ghosts in my time, but for the most part they kept a respectful distance. They usually didn’t do home invasions, let alone visit me in the bathroom.

Long after he disappeared, I could still see the man when I closed my eyes. As I tossed and turned and tried to get back to sleep, I wondered what he wanted.

It must have been close to dawn when I was finally able to drift off.

***

There was a lot of static and background noises, a TV and people talking, and I could barely make out the words.

“Hit me again,” a hollow, angry voice said.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut you off, pardner.”

“That’s what she said. Now hit me.”

“Why don’t you let me pour you some coffee and you can tell me all about it.”

“Ah, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before,” the man said, his bitterness spilling over the sides. “She left me. She left me one year ago today.”

Under the dark resentment, there was a heartfelt and heartbreaking sadness that even through the crackling and hissing of the static was painful to listen to. The man began to sob softly, tearing at my insides, before fading away.

The whiteness cleared and I was back above the meadow.

The hiker was standing on a nearby cliff top, two large backpacks propped up against an old tree.

“Down there,” he said. “See them?”

I hovered in place just above the edge of the rock shelf, afraid I would fall again, and looked down. It was all the same. The flowers, the tall grass, the creek, the trail.

“I don’t—” I said.

And then I saw it.

A body, almost hidden by the grass.

A body, bloodied and bent and broken.

A dead body.

“Do you see them?” the hiker said, from somewhere behind me.

“Them? I see one body. There’s only one.”

“No. Open your eyes and look harder.”

I floated high above, scanning the ground below. There was nothing. I looked up again. A series of mountains stretched across the horizon, snow and glaciers partially covering their peaks.

I drifted farther out and away from the rock shelf where the hiker was standing.

When I looked down again, it was there.

Closer to the rock wall.

Another dead body, its head caved in.

“I see it,” I said, looking back at the man on the cliff.

He nodded and for the first time I noticed that there was something wrong with the lower half of his face. It was twisted and grotesque.

I stared back down at all the beauty and the horror below me, and then I saw it.

Movement. The slightest trace of a twitch on the fingers of his left hand.

CHAPTER 15

I woke up gasping.

One of the men was still alive. But judging from the gaping wound to his head, he couldn’t have much longer to live.

I wondered how long he had been like that. If the injury didn’t kill him, he would surely die from dehydration or exposure out there.

Out there.

Suddenly I knew where this place was. Those mountains. I knew them.

I closed my eyes and tried to recapture the image. It started to come back.

I was staring directly across at Broken Top. The crumbling mountain was framed by South Sister directly on the left and Mt. Bachelor to the right. There was some snow, but not a lot. It wasn’t winter. Like the wildflowers in the meadow suggested, it was summer.

But something was off. Like holding numbers or words up to a mirror. It felt backwards.

From town the mountains were in reverse order, with South Sister on the right and Bachelor on the left. It took me a moment to realize that in the vision I was seeing the mountains from the other side. The wilderness side.

I opened my eyes again.

There was someone dying out there and I knew roughly where. But when? Which summer?

The dreams seemed to all take place in the past or in the future. Had this already happened? Or was it still out there?

Judging from the way the men were dressed, it was present day, give or take a few decades. They didn’t look like they were from the 1920s or from far in the future, since they still wore backpacks and not jetpacks.

I stumbled out to the living room and opened up my laptop, typing in “Death Three Sisters Wilderness.”

I eliminated the ones going back more than thirty years, which still left me with more than a few possibilities. But one by one, I was able to rule out all the victims either because of gender, age, or the location of the accident.

The back of my throat was like sandpaper and my mouth tasted like smoke and burned bark. I grabbed a LaCroix from the back of the fridge, downing half the can in one long gulp. The air in the house was stale and smoky. The forest fire smelled like it was getting worse.

I went back to the laptop and replaced the word death in my search with “missing hikers” and hit refresh.

A lot of stories came up but none were current and everyone had been accounted for. I was quickly starting to get the idea that I was dealing with a future event.

I realized that the hiker in my dream, the one who was leading me out there, was the ghost I had seen at Back Street and again in my bathtub. He was consumed with urgency as if this was happening now. But I knew that ghosts struggle with the concept of time. Sometimes they’re trapped in an event and forced to relive it over and over again, making everything seem like the present.

Still, I had to make sure.

I looked up the number, took a deep breath, and dialed.

“Good morning, Deschutes National Forest Ranger Station. This is Edward speaking. How may I help you?”

“Hello,” I said, wishing I had thought it through a little before calling. “I, ah, was wondering if you have any reports of missing hikers out in, ah, the Three Sisters area.”

There was a pause.

“Hold on,” the man said, followed by another moment of silence.

“Miss, do you wish to report someone missing?”

“No, I just wanted to know if someone’s already been reported missing.”

“No, there are currently no reports of overdue people in that area.”

“Okay,” I said. “And if someone were out there, hurt, how would you know? I mean, how can you be sure no one is missing?”

“Well, normally we wouldn’t be sure but with the fire, we’ve had to be very thorough. Everyone who filled out a trailhead permit has been accounted for. In addition, rangers and volunteers have walked the trails and checked all the campsites in the area. We’re pretty sure no one’s out there.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “But not everyone fills out a permit, right?”

“Well, they’re supposed to. The only people who wouldn’t have them are thru hikers and they would have filled out their permits where they started their trip.”

“Thru hikers?”

“Yes, people on the Pacific Crest Trail.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Miss, if you don’t mind me saying so, your questions are a little suspicious. Are you sure you don’t know more than you’re letting on?”

“No, no,” I said, before quickly hanging up.

CHAPTER 16

Kate rolled her suitcase into her old bedroom and walked around the house, looking at everything while I went to the kitchen, served some warm lemon cake, and pulled out a couple of bags of Earl Grey.

“It’s so good to be back,” she said. “The place looks great. But what’s with all the Audrey Hepburn?”

“I dunno,” I said. “David’s latest obsession. He was watching some biography and flipped out. Are you sure you don’t want any dinner? I made some linguini with Alfredo sauce, just in case. It’s good cold, but it would only take a minute to warm up.”

“No,” she said. “The cake will hit the spot.”

I slid the plate over to her.

“You look great,” I said. “I love the new hair.”

It was cut in a long bob that touched her shoulders in an edgy angle. And with the tight, expensive-looking jeans, white button shirt, and pair of Frye boots, she looked like a sophisticated urban cowboy coming home to the ranch.

“You’re the one who looks great,” she said.

I laughed. My hair was pulled up in a ponytail. I was in shorts, a tank top, and flip flops. Plus I had a huge bruise on my calf that kept getting bigger and darker from when I ran into the walk-in freezer at work two days earlier.

 “You’re being kind,” I said. “It’s pretty obvious that we’re not really sisters.”

 I poured hot water into mugs and put the half and half in front of her.

 “Well, maybe you’re a bit pale, but you’ve got this glow, Abby. It must be love. Nice ring, by the way.”

I held it out and smiled.

“Hope that didn’t bug you too much,” she said, taking a sip. “Ty wanted us to help pick it out. I don’t know how I would have felt about people knowing before I did.”

“I thought it was very sweet. I didn’t mind at all that you and David knew before me.”

Kate laughed.

“What?”

She paused, looking at me.

“Well, it was a few more people than just the two of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, David tweeted it out before Ty actually proposed. I think he’s got something like seventy-thousand followers.”

“Wait, what?”

Kate laughed some more and grabbed her phone, playing with it for a minute before handing it to me.

“Take a look.”

The screen read, “#HitchingPost. Montana gonna pop the big Q 2nite. Hope my BFF says yes.”

“That David,” I said, not sure if I should hold a grudge.

“Oh, he’s just excited.”

I scrolled down and saw that there were follow ups.

“She said YES. I’m so happy! I can already see myself crying at the wedding. That’s me wearing Burberry.”

I gave her back the phone.

She finished eating and stretched.

“Great cake,” she said.

I smiled.

“So how’s the story going?”

“Good,” she said. “I think I have what I need. It’ll take me a week or so to write. I’m going to work from here but I’ll make sure to mix some pleasure with business. How about you? How’s the restaurant going?”

“It’s hard, but I like it,” I said. “The boss man yells a lot, but he has a good heart. I’m getting really good at Eggs Benedict.”

Her phone rang.

“I gotta take this,” she said, standing. “But I’ll only be a minute.”

She stepped into the living room and I cleared the plates and rinsed them off. I thought about the vision and wondered again what it meant. It was a mystery. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. But I knew that was wishful thinking.

Kate came back, wearing a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I grabbed the mugs and we stepped outside, standing under the patio cover and watching the drizzle turn into a light rain.

“It’s really beautiful out here,” she said. “The flowers are spectacular. And are those herbs and vegetables over there against the fence?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s my chef’s garden.”

“Nice,” she said, taking a sip.

“I got us a movie at Redbox. One of those rom-coms you like.”

“That’s love.”

“I’m glad you noticed.”

“Okay, let’s talk about the engagement party, Oh, before I forget, Ben wants to come.”

“Cool. You know, I saw him the other day. But from a distance. I still haven’t heard from him.”

“I’m sure he’s been busy.”

I nodded. I could understand busy, but I couldn’t help but feel that there was more to his silence. I was pretty sure Kate still didn’t know. I was the only other person in the world who knew he had intentionally killed Nathaniel. At the very least, the thought of talking to me had to be awkward for him.