The Ghost and the Goth (10 page)

We are most intrigued by the partial of your book,
The Dead Don’t Speak.
We like the illicit romance between the psychiatrist and the afflicted boy’s mother as well as the mystery of whether the boy, young Billy, is truly haunted or just mentally ill. Did his father commit suicide or was he killed by the same spirits that now haunt his son? We also think you have an excellent platform, as a psychiatrist who has treated many of these kinds of cases.

Please send a complete manuscript at your earliest convenience.

Regards,
Roger Fillmore
Senior Acquisitions Editor

Oh, my God. Unbelievable. Miller was turning his life into a book. No wonder he was pushing so hard for Killian to be put away. He needed to write the end. Not to mention the freedom to openly mack on Killian’s mom. Ew!

I reached over to flick aside the letter and read the chapters beneath, but then I heard Miller’s voice getting closer.

“I’ll just collect my bag and be on my way now. I have other patients waiting,” Miller said stiffly. Evidently, Killian’s mom had put him in his place, at least for now.

With a little effort, I managed to push the publisher’s letter and the first chapter or so under the couch. Then I was out of time.

Miller stalked through the kitchen and into the living room, stopping dead when he saw his spilled bag. “What—?”

Then he turned and saw my display. Two manila folders represented eyes, and a third held the place of a nose. Then, five composition notebooks, with their black-and-white covers, formed a menacing—as menacing as one can be with paper products—scowl. All in all, it was a big giant frowny face made out of his stuff in the middle of the living room carpeting.

Miller’s face went white, and I laughed.

“J-J-Julia,” he sputtered.

“What is it?” She appeared in the living room doorway with a frown. Then she caught a glimpse of my work. Her mouth fell open, and her knees sagged, forcing her to cling to the wall.

I winced. This wasn’t supposed to be a strike against her.

“Did you do this?” Miller demanded.

“Idiot,” I said to him. “When did she have time? She went with you, remember?”

But Mrs. Killian wasn’t thinking that clearly. “It’s Danny,” she said, looking faint. “He always pulled tricks like this, moving things around. Once I found my kitchen timer in the freezer. He swore he didn’t do it, but …” She sank to her knees and started to cry.

“Don’t be silly,” he snapped. “Your husband is dead. He’s gone on to a better place. He’s not fiddling with notebooks and sending you messages. If you didn’t do it, then it’s that boy.” He glared in the direction of Killian’s room as though he could see through walls.

“Oh, yeah, because after you doped him up, he slipped past you in the hallway, did this, and then sneaked back in without you even noticing.” I rolled my eyes.

Julia lifted her chin and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You gave him a sedative, Max.”

“This is ridiculous.” He snatched up his bag and began cramming the contents back inside. “Ghosts are part of people’s imagination, designed to comfort them in times of loss. Period. End of story.” But his hands shook when he bent down to scoop up the folders and notebooks from my frowny face.

“Oh, Max, don’t spoil the ending for us,” I taunted. “You’ve still got to write it.”

He rushed toward the kitchen, nearly knocking over Killian’s mom in the process. “What about our next appointment?” she asked between sobs.

“I’ll call you,” he said curtly.

Then the back door slammed, and Mrs. Killian’s shoulders slumped even further, shaking with her crying.

“You should listen to your son,” I told her. “He’s telling the truth.” The high of my first successful communication was wearing off a little in light of her weeping. Actually, I was feeling a little light-headed and woozy, sort of like this morning when …

I looked down and found I could see through my arms folded over my chest. In fact, I could see all the way through to the bookcase behind me.

Aw, crap.

“D
id you know about this?” My mother’s voice intruded on a dream in which a large animated eggplant named Bob teetered on the edge of a cliff with thoughts of suicide and Parmesan.

I woke slowly, without opening my eyes. My eyelids felt gummy and stuck to my eyeballs, my head throbbed worse than it had yesterday, and my back ached from sleeping for hours without moving. I could feel the sunshine beaming in through the open blinds, warmer and brighter than yesterday. It had to be morning again.

“William, I’m speaking to you. Wake up!” Her voice held an unusual edge.

I peeled my eyelids up and squinted at her. She stood at the foot of my now-lopsided bed, a fistful of papers in her hand. “What are you talking about?” I mumbled.

“This.” She stalked forward and held the papers, fanned out in her hand, in front of my face.

The top one appeared to be a letter to Dr. Miller about a book… .

I sat up straighter, ignoring the various aches and pains. “He was writing a book about us? Where did you find this? Did he give this—”

“No, no.” She shook her head. “I found it yesterday under the couch when I was cleaning after that stunt you pulled.”

The cleaning part made sense. My mom always cleaned when she was upset. The year my dad died, she wore out three vacuum cleaners. As for the rest … “What are you talking about?”

She shuffled the papers together in her hands and gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, don’t try that on me. I’ve been your mother too long, and besides, your father used to pull the same tricks before you. Moving things around when I wasn’t looking and claiming to know nothing about it.”

Alona. I flopped my head back on the pillow. It had to be. She was the only one who’d been here yesterday, at least as far as I knew. “What trick did you find yesterday?” I asked cautiously.

She rolled her eyes. “Are there any others more obvious? Dr. Miller’s papers spread all over the room and that frowny face made from the folders and notebooks. He was quite frightened.” She stared down at the papers in her hands, her mouth tightening in displeasure. “A scare he richly deserved in my opinion.”

“Oh,” I said. “That trick.” Wow. It must have taken a huge amount of energy from her to move all of that around without me nearby. The dead can touch things in our realm briefly—hence all the ghost stories about pictures falling off walls, doors slamming, lights turning off or on—but only with intense concentration, and it really drains them.

My mom perched on the side of my bed, bracing her feet against the floor to keep from sliding off. “That was you, wasn’t it?” she asked hesitantly. “You found out about the book somehow and wanted to punish him? You called a friend to come in while we were upstairs. Joonie, maybe. The back door was unlocked the whole time, I checked.”

She sounded so hopeful, the way she had it all worked out without any ghosts or supernatural elements involved. My father’s words to me when I was six echoed in my head.
She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to understand, Will. It scares her.
He’d drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, while we waited for my mother to join us in the car. She was crying in the bathroom. I’d just ruined a rare night out for us in a restaurant by announcing that Grandma Reilly said not to order the fish because it looked old. Grandma Reilly, my mother’s mother, had died six months earlier of a heart attack.
It’s a curse, sport, and I’m sorry that I’ve passed it on to you. Do the best you can to live a normal life, and try not to let it hurt the ones you love. That’s all I can say.

Except my father had screwed up on that one. I didn’t know how my mother would have reacted to hearing that her husband spoke to the dead, but I was willing to bet that she would have preferred that to him
being
dead. Still, he was my dad, and he was gone, so I did my best to abide by what he wanted.

“Yeah,” I told my mother. “It was me.”

She exhaled loudly in relief. “I thought so. Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on? Why all this staging and drama?”

Good question. Alona could have just told me what she’d discovered. When I woke up from the drugs that I’d allowed Miller to administer even over her protests. Okay, fair enough. Maybe she had reason to question my potential for follow-through on something like this. That still didn’t explain her sudden compassion for someone else’s problems, which was the true mystery.

“I didn’t think you’d believe me if I didn’t have proof,” I said to my mother. A reasonable enough explanation, if not the truth.

She sighed. “You’ll put me in an early grave yet. Next time, just tell me.”

“Okay, okay.”

She stood up and started for my door.

“What are you going to do about Dr. Miller?”

She looked weary suddenly. “I don’t know. You’re not going back there. I guess I need to report him to someone, and get a recommendation for another doctor.” Except Miller had been the most affordable option out there and the only one with an immediate opening for a new client on a regular basis. Now, maybe we knew why that was.

What an asshole.
I wished I could have seen his face when he got a load of Alona’s handiwork. That was actually a fairly clever move on her part for one so newly dead. I was beginning to suspect that she hid a fairly sizable intelligence beneath her pretty face and bitchy attitude. Granted, it was an intelligence directed mostly toward popularity contests, backstabbing, and self-promotion, but intelligence just the same. Her move against Miller, whether for my benefit or her own amusement, had given me the reprieve I needed. It would take a few weeks, maybe even a month, to line up another psychiatrist, barring any more major incidents like the one yesterday, and I had a plan, maybe, to handle those, if Alona would agree. I felt pretty sure I could come up with an incentive to make that happen.

I shoved back the covers and got out of bed, feeling better than I had since before my dad died.

My mother’s mouth fell open. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“School. You talked to Brewster so I could get back in, right?” I crossed the room to rifle through the laundry on the chair and the pieces that had spilled over onto the floor, thanks to Alona, searching for a clean T-shirt and boxers.

“William, you don’t have to prove anything—” she began gently.

“Mom, I’m fine. I can do this.” I did a quick sniff test under the arms of my favorite black T-shirt. It said in plain block letters across the front, there is no spoon. No one else got it, but it worked for me, reminding me that reality was always up for question.

“What about Marcie? Your music?” She frowned. “Brewster gave you an in-school suspension for the rest of this week.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I have a plan.” Technically, I had bribery, and a dead homecoming queen who wanted my help. Close enough.

I doubled back to kiss my startled mother on the cheek and then headed for the shower.

Alona Dare died during zero hour on the Henderson Street yellow centerline, just twenty feet or so from the edge of school property. Zero hour was notoriously easy to skip, particularly if you put in the effort to show up in the first place, as Alona had that day.

Rumors continued to fly about why she’d come to school only to leave again, in such a hurry that she didn’t bother to look both ways. Some people said she never looked where she was going, expecting everyone and everything to get out of her way. So, it wasn’t so much an accident as her arrogance that had done her in. I suspected those people were seeking to make sense of the world by turning her into a cautionary tale, the lesson being, Look both ways. And don’t be such a bitch.

Other people whispered about suicide, pointing to her boyfriend, Chris Zebrowski, who was already tangling tongues with Misty Evans, Alona’s best friend. A subset of this same group claimed to have witnessed a private showdown between Misty and Alona that left Alona running from the building.

Either way, the result was the same. Alona was dead, Chris and Misty were publicly hooking up an indecently short amount of time after Alona’s funeral, and the population of Groundsboro High had something to gossip and whisper about for at least another few weeks.

I pulled the Dodge over to the side of the road on Henderson, next to the tennis courts, flipped the hazard lights on, and waited. Alona hadn’t committed suicide, I knew that. The girl had enough arrogance and self-esteem to choke a horse. She had, however, died a violent and unnatural death, which probably meant she was still tied to the exact place of her death. In this case, the middle of Henderson Street. Even though the bloodstains had long been scrubbed away, something of Alona likely remained, calling her back here over and over again at the time of her death. As a bonus, I’d only have to wait a few minutes to see if I was right.

Cars en route to the high school went by, people staring out the windows at me as they passed. Whatever. By now, they’d probably heard about what happened yesterday, and they were probably staring as much for that as for me sitting here. Still, I rolled down my window and pulled my cell phone from my front pocket and held it in my hand to give me the air of authenticity. Waiting in my broken-down car for a tow, that’s me.

“Hey, Will Kill.”

I looked up automatically, responding to that stupid nickname someone in the first tier had tagged me with.

Ben Rogers hung his head out the open window of his Land Rover. “Classes are held inside the building, freak.”

I smiled tightly, my cheeks hurting with the effort. “Really? Thanks a lot.”
Dickwad.
For the millionth time, I wondered what Lily had found so fascinating about him and his kind.

Someone behind Rogers, waiting to turn into the school parking lot, laid on the horn.

Looking disgruntled at my lack of reaction, Ben pulled his head back in and accelerated abruptly, his tires screeching when he rounded the corner into the parking lot.

“God, I hate it when he does that.” Alona’s voice suddenly sounded next to my ear, and I jumped. “What does he think this is,
The Dukes of Hazzard
? He is so not Johnny Knoxville.”

I turned to find her in my passenger seat. She stretched her arms over her head with a big yawn, seemingly unconcerned at her sudden and unexpected arrival.

“What are you doing in here?” I demanded. “You died
out there
.” I jerked my thumb back toward the road.

She lowered her arms and glared at me. “Thank you, Mr. Obvious. How should I know? Yesterday, whenever I disappeared, I kept waking up in your room. Like that wasn’t a pain in the ass.” She rolled her eyes. “I had to keep walking everywhere. Also? You snore.”

I gaped at her. “What are you talking about?”

She ignored me. “What are
you
doing here, anyway?” she asked with a frown. “I thought you’d be tugging at your chains in the crazy house by now.”

I held my breath and counted to five before responding. This was just who Alona was. She didn’t mean to be demeaning and … actually, yeah, she did. “You helped me, I came to say thanks,” I said through gritted teeth.

She frowned again. “You mean scaring off the chin-rubber?”

I raised my eyebrows, confused, until she furrowed her brow and nodded in mock thoughtfulness while her hand came up to support her chin, the top two fingers tapping just below her lower lip.

Startled by her cleverness once again, I shook my head with a reluctant smile. “Chin-rubber, yeah.”

She nodded. “He’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

I grimaced. “We found the papers about his book. You left those for us?”

“He’s skeevy.” She lifted a shoulder. “Figured you might want to know about it.”

“Thanks,” I said cautiously. So, she’d actually done me a favor? Maybe she wasn’t quite as bad as she seemed.
Maybe
.

She heaved a deep sigh. “Yeah, you’re welcome, I guess.” Her head drooping, she slumped down in her seat and stretched her long legs out in front of her.

I cleared my throat, trying to drag my eyes away from the sight. What can I say? I’m a leg man. “What’s the matter?”

“Aside from the obvious?” She threw her hands up in the air. “I don’t know. I thought I had it figured out yesterday.”

“Had what figured out?”

“The afterlife. What I’m supposed to do to … move on, find the light, whatever.” She waved her hands dramatically.

“And that is?” It didn’t bode well for my plan if she’d found her own way to fix her situation. I’d have no value to her then, and Alona Dare did not do favors. At least, I wouldn’t have thought so until today.

A horn honked and Alona automatically looked up, a smile starting to form and her hand lifting to wave … until she realized they couldn’t see her. The smile disappeared and her hand fell back to her lap. “This bites,” she muttered.

“What did you figure out?” I asked, reminding myself to be patient.

She turned toward me, tucking one leg underneath her. “Okay, so I thought about what you said and ...” She stopped, frowning. “Aren’t you worried about what people will think, seeing you out here talking to yourself?”

“Actually, I—”

She held up a hand. “Wait, never mind. I mean, they already think you’re crazy. Talking to yourself might be one of the more normal things you’d do.”