Kindred Spirits (13 page)

You took Charlie T’s
life just the same as if you had shot him, too. I understand that you took my
life by accident and Mildred’s out of anger, but I cannot understand why you
took the life of that innocent child, knowing that the sheriff would believe
you over him just because you were white and he was colored. That is what I
have never been able to forgive.

But that could change.
Charlie T is dead now, but even in death his spirit knows no peace.

He is a restless
spirit, drifting between the world of the living and the dead, homeless and
unable to rest until his problems in the world of the living are solved.
Charlie T has gone down in history as a murderer a fact which he feels has hurt
his son and his grandchildren and may even hurt his grandchildren’s future
children. Until Charlie T is proven innocent, he will never be at peace. And Harold,
neither will you.

I know that your crime
has gnawed at your conscience every day since you committed it. I know this
because you are not a bad man. You committed a horrible act out of anger,
ambition, and fear, but you are not a bad man. Harold, unless you tell the
truth about what happened, you will never know peace, in this world or the
next. Since your time in this world is short, this is something you should
consider.

There
will be no price to pay for your honesty. You will not live long enough to see
the inside of a prison cell. and if you make the truth known, you will have my
complete forgiveness.

Mildred even says that
she will forgive you, too, which is quite something, since she’s not the
forgiving kind, and since you killed her on purpose. But most importantly, you
will be giving Charlie T what he so sorely lacks’peace in the knowledge that
history will not look upon him as a killer.

My dearest Harold, you
know what the right thing is. Please do it. I am asking this out of love.

Yours,

Helen

The whole time I was
reading, I kept expecting Mr. Buchanan to stop me, but he just lay there
listening like he was hypnotized. Now, when I look up, I see tears in his eyes.
“Are you okay?” I ask.

He shakes his head for a
second and mutters, “No,” then louder says, “No!  I don’t know if this was
something you kids made up for a joke, and then maybe your granny did some
conjuring to make the handwriting look like Helen’s...and the perfume to smell
like Helen’s.” He wipes away a tear. “I don’t know how you did it or why you
did it, but I do know it’s cruel to torment a dying man.”

“But the letter is real,”
I say softly, trying to sound kind. “She wanted me to give it to you.”

Mr. Buchanan isn’t
listening to me. He’s pushing the call button beside his bed and saying,
“Nurse, there are children in here disturbing me.”

I look at Adam ,and Adam looks
at me. And we run. We don’t stop for breath until we’re outside and off
hospital property.

“Whew.” Adam leans
against a tree, gasping. “My dad would kill me if he ever knew about that.”

“Well,”
I say, rubbing out the sharp pain in my side, “I don’t think Mr. Buchanan will
say anything to him about it. I don’t think he wants to be put in a position
where somebody might ask him questions.” Adam lets out a little gasp, then
covers his eyes and moans, “Oh, no!”

“What?”

“The letter...we forgot it. It’s in Mr.
Buchanan’s room.”

“So?”

“So...we’ll need it,
right? It’s evidence.”

I throw up my hands.
“Evidence of what? That Miranda, that crazy witch girl, thinks ghosts dictate
letters to her? Adam, we have no evidence. We have nothing that would prove
anything to anybody. We might as well just quit.”

Adam jumps in front of
where I’m walking. “Quit? But we know who did it!”

“Knowing doesn’t make a
difference. We’ve got to have proof. And to normal people, proof that comes
from psychic phenomena and voices from the grave just doesn’t cut it.”

There’s nothing else to
say. Dejected, we walk through town and to Adam’s house. Even though it’s
chilly, Mrs. So is sitting on the porch. When she see us, she stands up. She
does not look happy.

“Uh..hi, Mom,” Adam says.

She folds her hands over
her chest. “Don’t you, hi mom’ me, Adam So. I know what you’ve been up to.”

“You...you do?”

I just stand there not
sure if I should try to defend Adam or make a run for it.

“Do you know who I just
got off the phone with?” Mrs. So says.

Adam looks down at the
ground and mumbles, “No, ma’am,” but looking into his mind, I see he thinks it
was his father, calling because he found out we were bothering Mr. Buchanan.

“Well,
I don’t know who I was on the phone with either because he didn’t tell me his
name,” Mrs. So says. “I said hello, and this strange voice said,’ Tell your son
to stop asking so many questions, and then he hung up. Adam, you told me you
had stopped playing detective!”

“I know, Mom.” Adam seems
to be finding his Converse high-tops very interesting, since he’s not looked up
from them. “But we were so close to figuring it out.”

Mrs. So puts her hands on
her son’s shoulders, forcing him to look up at her. “Adam, your father’s and my
job is to keep you safe. That’s why we asked you to stop, and that’s why you’re
stopping now. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And as punishment for
disobeying your father and me, there will be no movies, no video games, and no
TV for a full month.”

Adam winces but says,
“Yes, ma’am.”

“Also, after school you
must either come directly home or go to your father’s office at the hospital.
Obviously, you need to stay where we can keep an eye on you.” And then she
turns to me. “Miranda, I considered waiting to talk to Adam until after you had
gone home, but I wanted you to know that you should plan on seeing less of him
for the next month. And also, that your detective work has come to an end. I
want you to be safe, too, you know.” She reaches out and strokes my hair like
I’m her daughter.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“Thank you.” I know that we’ve worried her, and I feel bad.

“Well, Adam,” Mrs. So
says. “Tell Miranda bye. Since you can’t watch movies or play video games, you
might as well do some work for me around the house until it’s time to start
your homework.”

“Sheesh,”
Adam says, once Mrs. So is inside. “She’s going to enjoy this.” He’s trying to
sound like he thinks it’s funny, but he really sounds like he might cry. “So,”
he says, “I guess our little adventure is over, huh?” “I guess so.” And then I
wave and turn away, so he won’t see that I really am about to cry.

“I just feel so guilty,”
I say, sitting up in bed and hugging my knees to my chest. “Guilty because it
was partly my fault we weren’t able to help Charlie T...guilty because we let
Helen Jameson down’”

“You didn’t let Helen
Jameson down.” Abigail looks up from playing the Gameboy Adam loaned her. “You
did exactly what she wanted you to. You gave the letter to Harold Buchanan, and
since you had no control over how he would respond to it, it’s silly to feel
guilty. The living waste far too much time feeling guilty. You’ll be happy to
know that there’s no such thing as guilt in the afterlife.”

“Well, there’s enough in
this life to make up for it.” I flop back on my bed and stare at the ceiling.
“I wish we could go back in time and see if we could figure things out another
way’”

“Wishes like that are
even more useless than guilt,” Abigail says, not looking up from her video
game. “You know, these little space creatures really are quite difficult to
kill. There! Got one!” She looks up at me and smiles. “Please don’t forget to
thank Adam for lending me this marvelous machine. I can’t remember when I’ve
had such fun.”

“Well, I’m glad one of us
is having a good time.”

Abigail raises an eyebrow
at me. “Honestly, Miranda, you can be downright depressing at times. What you
need is a good night’s sleep. Why don’t you go downstairs and make yourself a
glass of warm milk? It always used to make me sleepy. You really shouldn’t stay
up ‘til all hours on a school night, fretting about something you can’t control.”

I look at the clock
12:18. “You’re right. Maybe some warm milk would help me relax. It always seems
to put baby goats right to sleep.”

I tiptoe downstairs and
open the refrigerator. The light from the fridge gives the dark kitchen an
eerie blue glow. Just as I reach for the milk I hear two sounds that turn my
blood to ice water. A crash and a scream. And they both came from my room.

Without even closing the
refrigerator, I run up the stairs. When I step into my room, Abigail, who looks
pale even for a ghost, says, “Watch where you step. Broken glass is
everywhere.”

Then I see the reason for
the broken glass. The window is shattered, and in the middle of the floor is a
rock a little larger than a baseball. “Somebody threw it at the window,”
Abigail says. “It went right through my head.”

I want to examine the
rock more closely, but I’m afraid to walk across the floor barefoot.

“Can you hand me the
rock?” I ask Abigail.

She glides right over the
broken glass, picks up the rock, and places it in my hand. It’s then I notice
that it’s not just a rock. A piece of paper has been tied to it with thick
twine. I pull out the paper, unfold it, and read the words that have been typed
on it:

STOP
ASKING SO MANY QUESTIONS. I feel like I’m going to be sick.

“What’s going on?”

I turn around to see Mom
in her blue kimono and Granny right behind her in her high-necked black gown.

There’s no point in
lying. “Somebody threw a rock at my window.  It went right through Abigail’s
head.”

Mom gasps. “Well, it was
lucky it was Abigail standing by the window and not you. A rock that big
could’ve knocked you out cold.”

“Or killed you deader
than a mackerel,” Granny adds.

Mom shoots Granny an
annoyed glance. “Thank you, Mother. That was comforting.” Then her eyes are on
the paper in my hand. “Show me that note.”

I hand it to her.

“So this is about the
snooping around you’ve been doing about the Jameson place,” she says.

It’s not a question, so I
don’t answer her.

“I told you to quit that,
Miranda,” Granny says. “I told you it was dangerous.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “And
you were right.”

Mom runs her hand over
the note. “A young man wrote this...a boy, really, somebody close to your age,
Miranda. And he was the one who tied it to the rock and threw it, too. Here,
Mother, see what you can sense about this.”

Granny closes her eyes
and runs her hand over the note, too. “You’re right, Sarah. It was a boy that
wrote the note and throwed the rock. But he was doing it on somebody else’s
orders...somebody older and more powerful.”

“They’re good,” Abigail
says.

“I know,” I whisper.

“So,” Mom says, “I suppose I should call
the sheriff’s office.”

“Sarah,
sometimes you ain’t got the sense God give a goose,” Granny says. “Since when
has anybody in the sheriff’s office believed a word anybody in this family
said? The sheriff we got now and his daddy before him both thought you and me
murdered our husbands with magic but covered it up so we wouldn’t get caught.
The sheriff’d say we broke the window ourselves while we was trying to cast some
spell to conjure the devil.”

“You’re right,” Mom
sighs. “But Miranda, I want you to promise me that to stay safe, you’ll follow
the advice on this note. Somebody wants you to stop asking questions, and this
somebody is willing to hurt you to make you stop.”

“I...I’ve already
stopped,” I say.

“Okay,” Mom says, and I
can tell she sees I’m telling the truth. “Well, why don’t you spend the rest of
the night in my room? I can do a better job cleaning up all this glass when I
can see it in daylight.”

“And I reckon I might
stay up a little longer and look into some ways to protect Miranda from whoever
it is that’s out to get her.”

“Okay, Mother,” Mom says,
rolling her eyes.

“Roll your eyes all you want, Missy,” Granny says. “But I
can do a dang sight better than the Wilder Sheriff’s Department keeping this
house safe.”

At breakfast Granny
presents me with a little cheesecloth bag attached to a silk cord. Whatever is
inside the bag smells horrible’ like rotting cabbage and onions.

“Wear that bag around
your neck,” Granny says. “It’ll keep you safe.”

“Why?” I say, holding my
nose. “Because I’ll stink so bad nobody’ll get close enough to hurt me?”

Granny
ignores me and hands me a second bag. “This one’s for your little Oriental
friend. He needs protection, too.”

On my way to school I
take the bag from around my neck and stuff it, along with Adam’s, inside my
backpack. Even though my backpack is zipped shut, I can still smell the stinky
herbs.

Before home room, I walk
up to Adam at his locker and say, “Hey, my granny made you a present.”

I toss him the bag. As
soon as the smell hits him, he crinkles his nose and sticks his tongue out.
“Eww! It smells like when my mom makes kimchee.”

“Well, according to
Granny, it’s for your protection. I have one, too. I guess Granny got a little
worried after somebody threw a rock through my window last night.”

“What?” Adam’s eyebrows
shoot up in surprise.

“The rock went straight
through Abigail’s head. There was a note attached to it that said the same
thing the guy who called your house said on the phone.”

“Whoa.” Adam looks at the
bag. “Maybe I should wear this thing after all. So...do you think that since we
have stopped asking questions whoever it is will stop bothering us?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m not
worried. But I have to admit it sort of bothers me...giving the bad guys what
they want.”