Just Kill Me (28 page)

And maybe made him into a new ghost at the body dump while she was at it?

Rick drives me all the way home to Forest Park in the tour bus.

“Shit,” he says, as we merge onto the interstate. “I'm trying not to see upsides here. The guy died. That sucks.”

“Naturally.”

“Of course, this probably means no Ghostly Journeys coming to town, if he was their contact. It'll set them back, at least.”

“Probably.”

“Won't be good for Tweed, either.”

I don't even mention that he could have left behind an imprint right on our tour route, too. I won't be going to the body dump for a while. Maybe never again.

OED
words fly through my head as I try to raze the troubles out of my brain to be replaced with strange words for bodily fluids and sex acts. It helps. A little.

When we get to Forest Park, we sit in the bus at the end of my block, just staring into space, looking at the funeral home.

“Well, weird day, little sis,” he says.

I don't want Rick to leave. I don't want to be alone.

“Wanna go to Brown Cow, get some ice cream?” I ask. “Or a bar? I could probably get in if I'm with you.”

He shakes his head. “I'd better call Edward. Offer condolences. No matter how much I can't stand the guy. He might even need me to cover a tour or two. I'll do it. Gotta put aside rivalries at times like this.”

“Right.”

When I get out I walk backward, watching him drive off, so I don't feel alone until the last second, when the lights disappear.

As soon as I'm in my room, a feeling of abject dread flows over me. Envelopes me. It penetrates every pore and saturates me. I don't want to turn around because I'm afraid I'll see something behind me. I don't want to look ahead. I don't want to close my eyes.

I get into my bed and cover every inch of my body with my sheets, like I did when I was a little kid having nightmares. I would wake up from those and think that I was safe as long as no single part of me was visible to any monster or murderer or ghoul that may be in the room. If I let one toe out from under the covers, they could get me, but if I was covered I was safe.

I do the same thing now, and I wish I had five more quilts to cover me.

And late at night, when I have to pee, I notice that the toilet seat is up in the bathroom and run right back to my bed.

Mom's boyfriend hasn't been over, as far as I know. I cannot think of a single logical explanation for the seat being up.

I've never really believed in this supernatural stuff. I don't think I do now, either. At least not intellectually. Emotionally, I believe in all of it right now. I tell myself that even if Cynthia did kill Aaron Saltis in just the right way to create a ghost, those brainwaves or whatever they are should have been stuck at the body dump, not capable of following me clear back to the suburbs to mess with my toilet, right?

But maybe this is a whole different kind of ghost.

God. I'm turning into one of those people. We get people
on the tours all the time who worry about ghosts following them home, but they always seemed so nutty that I assumed they probably also went to the grocery store and were afraid that the guy from the Lucky Charms box would follow them home.

Now I'm one of them.

I still have to pee. I stay in my room, under the covers, for a long time, until I have to go too badly to ignore it any longer. I even consider using the empty paper cup I have on my desk, but I decide that that would be going too far. I can't let myself get so freaked out that I start peeing in cups. God.

I rush into the bathroom with my eyes closed. I won't look in the mirror for anything. I keep thinking of some movie I saw when I was a kid, in which a person looked in the mirror and saw some sort of ghost looking back.

I laughed at the time.

The thought of looking in the mirror scares the hell out of me now.

In the morning, after a nearly sleepless night, I get a text from a local number I don't recognize:

u believe me yet? -edward t

T
he toilet seat is up again in the morning, and my Disney villain toys on the shelves look like they're plotting against me, but I feel a tiny bit better. Better enough to function, at least. The world doesn't seem as scary when the sun is out, and the lingering dread retreats enough that I can get up and walk to the bathroom. I can look around my room, even into mirrors. But the feeling of dread is still there.

I'm afraid the police will come for me.

I'm afraid I'll log on and find a million e-mails from people who've read stories I never wanted them to see.

I'm afraid that a woman I thought was my friend has been plotting to kill me this whole time. Maybe tonight will be the night.

A week ago I thought it was awesome that some people had already put Halloween decorations out to go with the cold wave. Now they don't seem fun anymore. The plastic skeletons
dangling from the trees look like people who've been hanged and left to rot.

I lie in bed until the sun is fully out, then text Kacey to see if she wants to go on a road trip to a town called Magwitch Park.

The traffic on I-55 slows down, then speeds up, then slows, and speeds up again as I ride along in Kacey's car. Traffic moves in mysterious ways. I kind of prefer it when it's slow and the interstate is jammed; Kacey drives like a maniac when she has enough room.

I've only told her that we're looking for clues about Marjorie Kay Stone, who ran the Finders of Magwitch Park company, who had some information about the ghosts I research for the tours. I didn't let on about how high the stakes were. She's excited enough.

“I feel like I should've brought my dog and some Scooby Snacks,” she says as she tailgates a guy with a John Deere bumper sticker. “Maybe a proton pack.”

“I'd kind of feel better if we had a proton pack.”

Then she opens the glove compartment and says, “Well, we do have a sort of Scooby Snack, I guess. Dig around in the tampon box.”

The tampon box in the glove compartment seems like a normal one at first, but she tells me to take the tampons out, and there's a baggie of weed beneath them.

“I don't know,” I say. “Doesn't this stuff make you paranoid?”

“Maybe a little.”

“I'm paranoid enough these days.”

“So let me get this shit straight,” says Kacey as she passes a semi. “If ‘straight' is a word I can use without, like, offending you.”

“Go nuts.”

“So Zoey saw a picture of you kissing a customer.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But she still never sent you a picture of herself at all? Or called you so you could hear her voice?”

“Nope.”

“So you still don't even know for sure that she wasn't some dirty old man?”

I don't even answer. After Kacey passes a slow-moving Hyundai, she pats me on the knee and says, “Honey, she probably had at least five other long-distance girlfriends the whole time.”

I let that hang in the air and try not to feel like an idiot for letting things get so far out of hand with Zoey. I fail. As usual.

“Maybe. I'm just afraid she'll start spreading my stories around. They're fucking dark, some of them.”

“She couldn't do it without attracting attention to herself, and that's obviously the last thing she wants. Or he. Whatever. I'd say you're in the clear.”

We finally pull off the interstate and into Magwitch Park, an hour or so from home. It's out beyond where the suburban trains go, but still considered a commuter town, I think; half the people who live there probably work in the city and spend fifteen or twenty hours per week just driving back and forth.

As we drive around toward the little downtown area, I can tell that Magwitch Park is an old town, not like the suburban strip malls towns and retail wastelands that grew out of nowhere in the late twentieth century. Not one house looks less than a hundred years old, and most of them look much older than that. Almost all of them need a new coat of paint, and quite a few have settled unevenly into their foundations, so now they're leaning a bit, ready to crumble into one another. Some have rooms and wings that were clearly added on years after the main structure was built; they jut out at odd angles like cancerous growths and goiters.

I swear, the central core of some of the houses, near the train station, even look too old to be in the Chicago area. The oldest house in Chicago proper is from the 1830s, and nothing on the outskirts is that much older. The Magwitch Park houses look too old to be real. It's like we've driven through a time warp or a portal or something, and now we're in some whole other dimension, not the edges of Chicagoland.

They
all
look haunted.

Weeds poke through the brick sidewalks, and a pale little kid with hair so blonde it looks white stands on a porch in his diaper, staring at nothing and looking creepy as fuck.

I direct Kacey to the address where Marjorie Kay Stone's house was, and we find a vacant, overgrown lot, not unlike the one at the body dump. The houses on this street are huge. This space among them where Marjorie's place used to be is like a missing tooth in a mouth full of cracked ones. Only the foundation and basement are still there, a big pit in the ground.

In the area that used to be the backyard, a dried-up pond and a bush that looks like it was maybe once trimmed to look like a dolphin are all that stand as evidence that anyone interesting had ever been there.

We hop into the pit that used to be the basement and I wander around while Kacey smokes up, but it's not much more than a pit in the ground with scorched brick walls. There aren't any manuscript pages tucked into the cracks or anything. I guess I didn't expect there to be.

There's nothing spooky about the place at all.

If Cyn punched Marjorie Kay Stone in the brain, anything she left behind is gone.

Thanks a lot, laws of thermodynamics. The only dead body around here is probably Ricardo's hamster somewhere in the backyard.

There are no answers in Magwitch Park. Only an odd
moment when I think I see Morticia looking out the window of a house as we drive by.