Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

There had to be a way to do this haunting without affecting the innocent people in a killer’s family.

Amanda Lee seemed to catch on to that thought, too. “We’ve got a higher purpose, Jensen. There will be hard choices, and this is only one of them.” She swallowed. “For whatever you can do for Jon, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

Silence dominated, and she obviously felt it was a good time to leave, because she gave me one last, pleading glance, then left the casita.

And her story really gnawed at me, too, because if I had the chance to punish the evil man who’d killed me , I would’ve hoped that there was some righteous friend out there who cared enough about me to put things in place and set the world straight.

I mean, isn’t there a saying about that?

All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to stand by and do nothing .

I’d read something like that before I’d died, and I’d admired it. It sounded noble to a girl who’d blamed her parents’ deaths on a cruel, unfair force of nature. A girl who hadn’t known exactly what she believed after she’d dropped out of college and waited tables so she could save up for the community college classes that she told herself she’d take someday.

But it didn’t mean half as much to me as it meant now.

I wandered away from the battery, feeling stronger, then stood in front of the computer, which blipped every so often from my presence. Amanda Lee had apparently sensed that I would want to do some research after our talk, and that’s why she’d turned on the machine.

First, I manipulated the screen to show me more about poltergeists, and I found a page that claimed that ghosts could cause high emotion in agents so that they got stressed enough to unleash all that psychokinetic energy. But, again, that would mean focusing negative energy on Wendy.

No, thanks. But Amanda Lee had a point—if Gavin pulled any experts into this haunting, they might do a little too much investigating and find out that this wasn’t just about a poltergeist, and I didn’t want to implicate Jon and Amanda Lee for trying to catch a killer.

But I did like Amanda Lee’s idea of the poltergeist favoring certain people in the family and focusing all the bad energy on just one.

The deserving one.

As I went from computer page to page, inspiration came out of nowhere.

I thought of that short story everyone read in high school, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I thought of how I could be that heart, unseen but still thumping and pumping so only the guilty murderer could hear it in his own head, driving him insane enough for him to yell out a confession one day.

And maybe I could do all this subtle haunting away from the rest of the family while planting enough clues to make anyone think that Wendy could be the center of the activity.

Ugh—I didn’t like the idea of framing her and giving her that reputation. But maybe there’d be another option.

Since I had no one around to teach me how to be a real ghost, I looked up hauntings, because how could I be Gavin’s telltale heart if I had no idea how to beat?

Any way about it, I would start with subtle scares, working my way up to the ones that would urge Gavin to confess.

Subtle. That would be key. I could worm my way into Gavin’s psyche and not depend on Wendy so much.

Feeling better, I initiated a new search on the computer, this time about Elizabeth Dalton—every personal detail I could dig up from postmurder interviews with anonymous friends. The jokes she liked to tell. The charities she supported. Even the type of perfume she wore and the way she would laugh. Things people missed about her.

Then I went on to research the probable killer himself and his relationship to her, finding links for the news about their engagement—an event that seemed to capture more than a few society column headlines.

There were pictures that I could barely look at: blond, tanned, beautiful Elizabeth on Gavin’s arm at society functions. He seemed rougher than she was in some way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, because there he was, wearing a tux and seeming polished.

It was his eyes, really. A tough man who held everything in except when he was looking at the woman he loved.

And in these photos, he was looking down at Elizabeth as if she were the most precious thing in creation and he would do anything for her.

Was there an air of possession there, too?

My chest area went tight. Was this the way a killer watched his future prey? Had my murderer been tracking me in the same way, hiding his bloodlust from anyone who might’ve been looking?

I didn’t want to think that, maybe, it’d been one of my party friends who’d found me alone in the woods that night.

God, no way.

The mere thought gave me the creeps, so I went back to Gavin.

Had he been thinking about sliding a blade into Elizabeth time and again when these pictures were taken? Had some kind of fatal obsession been brewing in him?

I switched to another page, but thoughts of my killer kept coming back, so I just gave in to them, closing my eyes in an effort to remember what had happened that night.

Yet nothing struck me. That dark wall was still there in my head, blocking all memory… .

I heard the computer make a whimpering sound, and I opened my eyes again. I’d sucked electricity from the device, so I waited until it recovered, then went on with my research.

There were links referring to the nasty breakup between Gavin and Elizabeth, but that’s all I could find—there were no details about why they’d parted ways, just references to the apparent bad feelings between fiancé and fiancée.

Well, hadn’t Amanda Lee said that the family had tried to keep a lot of this under wraps?

The same rule seemed to go for the coverage of Elizabeth’s murder.

Sure, there were lurid articles filled with a few facts I already knew: how the cops thought Elizabeth had been attacked—and strangled as well as stabbed, I noted now. How she’d been killed in the middle of nowhere. How her body had been dismantled and dumped. But here, too, it seemed like the Edgetts’ money had won the day, because the articles soon turned from fact to speculation. Some “insiders” even theorized that Elizabeth had led a double life—a socialite one moment, a trampy skank meeting men in remote parking lots that led to walking trails the next, a spurned woman looking for pleasure in the night from someone new when she’d met the wrong Mr. Goodbar. There were even more comments from Elizabeth’s anonymous “friends” about Gavin and his possible part in the murder.

Gavin was possessive, they said. He had still been calling Elizabeth after their breakup, even after she’d found someone else to love—a reference to Jon, I guessed.

I couldn’t blame those friends for staying undercover when there was a killer running around who could easily track them down and wipe them out. And I suspected one of those unknown friends might’ve been Jon before he’d left the country.

I pictured him, with his gray hair and wrinkles around his eyes, in the photo Amanda Lee had shown me. Weighed down, I continued my fact-finding, but the rest of the articles were more of the same: bad news. News that the cops had shut the files on Elizabeth’s case down, the killer uncaught. Unofficially, she’d been the victim of a random crime.

But there was one article from a tabloid that caught my eye. Here, some of Elizabeth’s friends seemed to be coming out of the woodwork after the police investigation had closed. Were they trying to find anonymous justice on their own at this point?

One unnamed friend reported that Elizabeth had been getting threatening phone calls. She didn’t know whom they were from, but she suspected an ex-boyfriend.