Chris Green - Only the Good Die Young

I could’ve been deeply offended that Amanda Lee had manipulated me, the only ghost she’d ever fully connected to. She’d dragged me into her mission.

But I couldn’t muster up the outrage when I understood her so well.

“You’re a real piece of work,” I said.

She was running a thumb over her wedding ring finger, like she was touching a phantom piece of shining jewelry.

“You know the reason I am what I am,” she whispered.

I looked at the fractured woman in front of me. It was all in her eyes as she stared into the distance, as if seeing her Michael standing there, always with her.

I could feel myself pulled closer to her, even if I wasn’t willing myself to move anywhere.

“Do you ever see him?” I asked.

“No.”

That was probably a good thing, because when I’d seen my Dean… Well, trouble. It had ensued.

She glanced down at her ring finger. “I’m afraid this case is making me maudlin. I was never like that before. Believe it or not, I used to be a social butterfly, happy. I used to have a lot of friends, back when I was young.”

“Before Michael died?”

“Actually, before I began…” She motioned to her eyes, but I knew she meant the second sight. “It kicked in when I was twelve, and I began to withdraw from all my friends. They didn’t understand why, and I never told them. The sight made me too different. I couldn’t relate to anyone normal anymore. But at college, I met…”

“Michael. And he didn’t care?”

She shook her head, pursing her lips, and I could tell she was on the edge of crying.

So I shut up. And since she’d explained that ring I’d seen on her finger without my having to ask her, my trust in her shot up about five degrees from zero.

“You’ll tell me everything from now on?” I asked after a decent amount of time had passed and she had gathered herself back up.

A faint smile made her gaze go soft. “As much as you need to know. A woman always has secrets. You should realize that.”

Gulp. Had she caught on to the way Gavin piqued my interest in ways he shouldn’t be poking?

No, she wouldn’t still be smiling at me if she knew.

Sniffing, dabbing at her eyes, Amanda Lee stood. “Is the air cleared between us now?”

“Sure.” I was more than willing to give this another chance. There was too much at stake for the both of us.

She seemed appreciative of that, and I was pretty certain that if she could’ve given me a sisterhood hug, she would’ve done it.

“So you had a day off from me,” she said instead.

“Just like Ferris Bueller.”

She laughed a bit.

Actually, I hadn’t seen that movie when I was alive. I’d found it on the TV after settling into the casita, curious about what’d happened in the ’eighties after I’d left it. Ferris was way cool, and surely he was still cool in this day and age.

“Anyway,” I said, “the most important thing for you to know is that I didn’t take a day off from Elizabeth’s case. I think I made progress with Gavin.”

Amanda Lee’s smile erased any of the lingering sadness. “What sort of progress?”

Ghostly whispers, orange blossom perfume, Gavin getting his gun… I spilled all of it, even the part where I pushed matters a bit too far and entered Gavin’s mind.

“I wasn’t going to do that so early,” I said. “It just…”

“Happened? If it was successful, then I would say it doesn’t matter.”

Hey—she wasn’t put off by my inexperienced phantom fumbling. Cool.

Amanda Lee strolled over to my death spot since I had floated away from it to get closer to her. As she looked down at the patch of nondescript ground, it was almost like she was standing over my real body.

I rose from the dirt. “There’s a bunch more to tell you. There’s this other ghost I met—”

She turned to me, lifting those eyebrows.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “He was a good ghost, a kid from the ’forties.”

“Really?” Fascinated now.

“Yeah. He told me all sorts of ghost tips, gave me pointers on how to empathize with humans and… Did you know that I can cause hallucinations?”

Fascination times a thousand. She looked delighted.

“That makes perfect sense,” she said. “That’s why haunted people see horrific images—because you can make them.”

“If I can get the hang of it.” I shrugged. “I went back to the Edgett mansion this morning to try some of that ghost stuff out, but Gavin wasn’t home.”

“Last night’s haunted activity chased him off?”

“Not really. He just went to work, wherever that is.”

“La Jolla. His office is on Prospect Street.”

She was all over it, as usual. “Good to know. But today, I thought that it might be smart to comb the mansion for any clues, or at least to get to know my subjects, right? So I hung around. I studied Wendy, mostly, you know, just in case I do the poltergeist thing.”

“Wise move.”

I felt like she’d stuck a gold-star sticker on my bulletin board.

“Wendy’s got some anger for sure,” I said. “So it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that she’d be frustrated enough to psychokinetically throw around some furniture in the near future—especially in Gavin’s room. She’s pissed that he’s not home enough, just like their dad, who pretty much abandoned them.”

Amanda Lee just took it all in.

“But I have to tell you,” I said, “that since I don’t have a handle on these powers yet, I also might’ve gone too far with Wendy.”

Her smile dimmed. “How so?”

“Like I mentioned, I wanted to experiment with the powers Randy told me about. I figured I shouldn’t start right out with them on Gavin. Besides, I realized that I don’t have to just use those powers for haunting—I can use them for good.”

“What did you do?” Total maternal tone now.

“I tried both on her?” It was a question, even though there was no question that I’d done it.

Amanda Lee made a tell-me-everything gesture with her fingers.

All right. “The empathy went fine with Wendy, and from the little I saw in her mind, she’s still carrying a lot of grief around about her adopted mom’s death years ago. And there seems to have been some sort of ugly incident when she was younger involving other people in the household. I’m not sure who, though, besides Gavin.”

“Describe, please.”

“In her mind, I heard him yelling down a hallway after there was a female scream.”

“Elizabeth?” Amanda Lee’s eyes had gone wide.

“I’m not sure. But it’s something to go on.”

“Maybe so.” She had narrowed her eyes and was absently pacing now, circling my death spot. “Did you say that you also tested out this hallucination power?”

“Briefly.”

I must’ve been unsettled, because my psychic mentor stopped moving around and fixed her steady gaze on me.

I went on. “Randy, the ghost I met, told me that I had to use a more intense touch, going deeper, to cause hallucinations. So I did that with Wendy. All I wanted to do was make her feel better after a bummer day.”

“And… ?”

I thought of how I’d mind-melded with the girl, feeling the sun and sand on my skin just as much as she must’ve while witnessing the hallucination I’d brought her.

“See, I knew what I wanted to do when I went into her—make her feel better, right?” I said. “But I hadn’t planned what to specifically show her. I just thought, Beach , and the details just came all on their own, without any effort from me. I experienced them just like I was her, Amanda Lee. I was there in the room, looking at the beach as Wendy, hallucinating, too.”

“Beaches aren’t hard to imagine, but I wonder if the details are coming from your own subconscious, which is still intact even as a ghost.” Amanda Lee processed all of it, just as she did with everything else, and it didn’t take her long to add, “You’re going to have to be careful going forward. When you haunt our killer, you could end up scaring yourself if you have no idea what’s coming. Mind that, Jensen.”