Free Spirits (14 page)

With flashlights in hand, we walk down to the riverbank. Virgil is sitting on a rock. He rises when he sees us. “Evenin’,” he says.

“Hello, Virgil,” I say.

“Who are you talking to?” Rick asks. As an adult, he can neither see nor hear Virgil. For a minute I think this is pointless because he won’t be able to see or hear Juanita either, but then Rick gasps and says, “Oh my God, it’s her.”

And I remember something Abigail told me: “If he loves her, he’ll be able to see her.”

Juanita skims over the surface of the water, then swoops down to stand face to face with the man who loved her and killed her. “Rick!” she cries. “Mi corazon! Porqué? Porqué?”

Rick drops to his knees and hugs her around her legs, sobbing.

“Maybe we should back off and give them a little privacy,” Mom says.

We move back enough so we’re hidden by the trees, but we can still see. Rick and Juanita are having an intense conversation in Spanish, but I can tell it’s not an argument. There is sadness in both of their voices, pain. They’re both crying, but they’re not yelling at each other.

Virgil is standing with us, watching. “Is he the man who killed her?” he asks.

“Yes,” Abigail says.

“But he loved her,” Virgil says. “If he didn’t love her, he wouldn’t be able to see her.”

Just then Rick’s and Juanita’s arms are around each other. They kiss. I wish I could see into Juanita’s thoughts because I sure can’t understand why you’d want to kiss the man who killed you.

Adam looks down at his feet. “I wish we could give them some more privacy. This isn’t the kind of thing I like to watch, even if all I can see is him smooching a cloud of gray mist.”

It is kind of awkward to be in the middle of such a private scene, and we all seem to be trying to look away until Abigail shrieks, “Look!”

Juanita is on the riverbank, watching as Rick wades out into the water. He is in the water up to his chest, and he keeps walking until it’s up to his neck, then his head disappears into the blackness. He isn’t trying to swim. He wants to sink.

“Oh my God!” Mom screams. “You kids stay here. I’ve got to try to save him.” Mom kicks off her sandals, yanks off her skirt, and runs toward the water. I’m petrified because I know Mom isn’t that strong a swimmer and even if she were, could she rescue a guy who outweighs her by eighty pounds?

But when Mom is just knee deep in the river, the three spirits—Juanita, Virgil and the Indian brave, swoop over her head, flying over the surface of the river. They join hands over the spot where Rick sank, then disappear under the surface together. When they rise from the water, the three of them are carrying Rick’s body several inches above the surface of the water. They float gently back to land and deposit him on the riverbank. He coughs and sputters and spits out water.

Juanita leans over him and whispers something in his ear. And then she disappears in a flash of light, and a shooting star trails across the night sky.

“Her spirit is free,” Abigail says.

Mom kneels beside Rick to make sure he’s okay.Virgil touches my arm with a cold hand. “I was wondering...” he says. “I know y’all don’t need to come down here to see Juanita no more, but do you think you might come down here sometimes to visit me? And, uh, could you bring Abigail?”

“I think we could arrange that,” I say. “If that’s agreeable to you, Abigail.”

Abigail giggles. “Yes, it’s very agreeable.”

“I was thinking, Abigail,” Virgil says. “Maybe I could take you for a walk sometime. I know you can’t get out of that mirror, but I could bring you with me and maybe hold your, uh, handle.”

Abigail stifles another giggle. “I’d like that, I think.”

Adam shakes his head and grins at me. I grin back. At this pace, Abigail and Virgil are going to have an extremely long courtship. But that’s okay. They’ve got nothing but time.

In the car on the way home, I ask Rick, “If you don’t mind telling us, what did Juanita whisper to you after she pulled you out of the water?”

Rick’s voice is weak and shaky. “She told me it wasn’t time for me to die. She said I had made my peace with the dead. Now I have to make my peace with the living.”

The neon “Open” sign in the window of El Mariachi has been turned off, but we’re here for a special after-hours celebration. “Just for family,” Mr. Ramirez said.

In this case,“family” means three families: Mr.Ramirez,Javier and Isabella; Mr. and Mrs. So and Adam; and Mom, Granny and me. Abigail’s with us in her mirror, too, but Isabella said we might want to keep quiet about her. The idea of a ghost in his restaurant might be too much for Mr. Ramirez.

Our long table is full of baskets of chips and bowls of guacamole, cheese dip and salsa and bottles of Mexican soda in day-glow orange and green.

“So,” Mom asks Mr. Ramirez, “how’s business since the newspaper ran the story about Rick Boshears tampering with the food?”

“Better and better,” Mr. Ramirez says.“We had tried to spread the word that the illnesses weren’t caused by food poisoning, but I don’t think people believed it until they saw it in print.”

“Well, I still think that feller should’ve got more than a fine and community service after he confessed,”Granny says,scooping up some guacamole. “After all you young’uns found out…”

I send a thought to Granny’s head: Don’t go there. Adam, Abigail, Isabella and I had a long talk after Rick confessed to the police. We decided not to tell Isabella’s dad or Adam’s parents about Rick’s murder of Juanita. We didn’t want to scare them with how much danger we’d been in. Also, Isabella said if her dad found out about Rick killing the nice Mexican girl who loved him, she was afraid of what her dad might do.

I understand what Granny was saying, though. Rick can never be put on trial for Juanita’s murder because her body was never found. Because Rick told anyone who asked that she’d gone back to Mexico, nobody ever reported her missing. And since she was in the U.S. illegally, there were no official American documents with her name on them. It was like Rick killed somebody who didn’t even exist.

Rick tried to confess to the sheriff about what he did to Juanita, but the sheriff kept saying the same thing: “No body, no murder.” So Rick’s punishment besides a fine and community service is living with what he did. Even though the real ghost of Juanita is no longer haunting the riverbank, the ghost of her memory will haunt Rick forever.

Mr. Ramirez and Javier have come back from the kitchen with platters heaped with taquitos and tamales. They set the platters down and join us at the table.

Sometimes it’s hard to have the Sight because I hear so many bad thoughts I’d rather not know about. But tonight the Sight makes me happy because as we all sit together and pass plates, everybody’s thoughts are kind. I look at Adam in the chair next to me, and Abigail smiles up at me from the mirror in my lap.

And while I can’t see into Abigail’s thoughts, I know from her smile that they’re the same as the Sos, the Ramirezes, Mom’s, Granny, and mine: It’s good for us to be together and to live where there’s so much to share.

A native of southeastern Kentucky, Julia Watts has been writing stories since she was eight years old. Though her handwriting hasn’t improved much since then, she likes to think that her stories have.She is the award-winning author of numerous novels for adults and young adults.
Free Spirits
is the second book in the series featuring Miranda, Adam and Abigail. Right now, she’s thinking the series will be a trilogy, but she would consider writing even more books about these characters if someone asked her nicely. Her Web site is www.juliawattsbook.com, and she also welcomes readers to “friend” her on Facebook.