What the Dead Want (13 page)

T
HE ROAD TO
S
HADOW
G
ROVE VEERED OFF
M
AIN
Street into more forests and hills, but after several miles the trees turned to pasture, and a bright sliver of water ran alongside the road. There were farmhouses and red barns dotting the fields, and sheep and cows standing so still it seemed they had been painted onto the landscape.

The air was fresh and the car windows were down and if they weren't on a gruesome mission, Gretchen would have felt like she could drive forever beside Hope, the girl's steady hands on the steering wheel of the beautiful vintage car, windows down—her hair blowing in the breeze. She
punched in the cigarette lighter and then sighed to herself as it popped back out.

“All the women who were working on figuring this stuff out are gone,” Gretchen said. “Esther, your mother, my mother.”

Hope gave her a wry smile. “When you put it like that it doesn't sound like such a good idea to find out what happened.”

“Just when these women thought they'd made a breakthrough, they died—almost like some secret world protecting itself.”

“And my father was just an innocent bystander? Killed 'cause he was in the car with my mother?”

“You haven't talked about your father,” Gretchen said.

“He was like Hawk.” Hope squinted, drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, then rubbed an eye with one hand.

This surprised Gretchen. She knew their father had been in the military; they had talked about it last night when they stayed up late. Hawk was a gentle spacey musician who had no interest in driving a car.

“Really?”

“Before he came out here with my mom, our father was the head of Remote Viewing for the air force,” Hope said, as if Gretchen knew what she was talking about.

“He worked with some kind of surveillance technology?”

Hope laughed. “Sort of,” she said. “He was part of an elite group who could see where the enemy was with their minds.”

“Oh my God,” Gretchen said.

“Yeah,” Hope said. “Try skipping school with a dad like that. He died before he'd managed to teach either me or Hawk much about it. But Hawk turned out to be a natural.” She took a deep breath. “I do think if my parents had lived none of this would be going on. Anyway, none of this stuff happened exactly on the anniversary. Not Esther, not my parents.”

“Did they all die in days or hours before the anniversary?” Gretchen asked. “I mean, we know these forces have been getting stronger, but the rest of the town, all of history says it was an accident. Celia and Rebecca say they started the fire, because of how they play. And now the town is gripped by an epidemic of accidents every year.”

“We know it wasn't Celia and Rebecca,” Hope said. “Like you said before. The killers have the same faces. And those faces do not belong to a little white girl and a little black girl who like to put dresses on cats.”

Hope opened her mouth to say something else but just as she did a massive form plowed out of the woods
and tumbled over the car. Hope hit the brakes and the car spun, tires shrieking as blood sprayed across the windshield and the girls were thrown forward, then jerked back suddenly by their seat belts.

They were turned nearly ninety degrees in the road, the mangled body of a deer splayed over the road in front of them.

Hope and Gretchen breathed heavily. Looked at one another in terror.

Hope turned the key in the ignition and the engine started again, making a grinding whining noise.

“That does not sound good. I hope this thing can get us the rest of the way there and back,” she said.

Gretchen unbuckled her seat belt. “I'm going to get out and survey the damage.”

Hope grabbed her arm. “No,” she said, her voice shaking. “We're not taking any more unnecessary risks. The car's working, the tires aren't blown. We're not going to tempt fate.”

She put the car in gear and drove slowly around the bloody remains of the deer, then headed out along the road.

After another two miles Hope pointed to a bramble up ahead. “We're here,” she said.

There was a hand-painted sign, set back from the road, partly covered by an overgrown honeysuckle bush. Gretchen managed to catch just the word
SHADOW
and a red arrow. She snapped a picture as they were turning onto the property.

There was a guard at the gate—a small redheaded man with a patch over one eye. He sat on what looked like a milking stool, waiting to look over anyone who might come through, but there didn't seem to be anyone headed to Shadow Grove that afternoon. He recognized Hope, and stood up.

“You all right? Your headlights are smashed. Your friend looks like she's been in a fight.”

Gretchen realized she must look like hell: cuts, bruises, a swollen eye.

“We're fine, but it was assisted suicide for a deer back there,” Hope said.

The man shook his head solemnly.

“Bad day to be driving, young lady.”

“We'll be okay,” Hope said. “We're looking for Annie.”

He nodded. “She should be down at the pavilion.”

Hope drove in and parked the Triumph in a lot to the side of the gate. They locked the doors and began walking. The damage to the car wasn't as bad as Gretchen had thought, but the lights were indeed smashed, and there
was blood all over the hood. If the deer had run into them head on, she thought, they might be dead.

As they walked, Gretchen was surprised to see Shadow Grove was a town like any other. She'd expected a rural ruin with a few run-down houses. But this place was lovely. Much nicer than the plastic small-town perfection of Mayville. The streets were lined with large silver-trunked elm trees. A welcome sign that read
Shadow Grove
and beneath that
Making Darkness Luminous
stood in the village square and had a directory of psychics and places of spiritual communion listed below it, as though words like “healing temple” and “clairvoyant” were as common as “dentist's office” and “town hall.”

“Is this place for real?”

“Depends on what you mean by real,” Hope said. “But yeah. You know how there used to be whole towns of people employed by one company? This is like a whole town of people dedicated to the spirit world.”

They walked past a large library, a sandwich shop, and a baseball diamond.

Farther down the road they came to a clear blue-green pond surrounded by willow trees, where ducks swam serenely. The park surrounding the pond was filled with stone sculptures and a well-tended wildflower garden.

Just past the park, in a small clearing near the entrance of
a pine woods, was the pavilion. A stage was set up in front of rows of wooden benches, on which fifteen or twenty men and women, mostly older and mostly gray-haired but wearing very colorful clothes, sat watching a pale-eyed woman with shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair who was dressed entirely in black. She was simply sitting in a chair looking straight up through the treetops, as if she were reading something written on the sky. When Gretchen and Hope sat down on a bench at the back, the woman looked out at them with focused attention and spoke.

“My great-great-great-great-granddaughter has joined us,” she said.

“Oh boy,” Gretchen whispered under her breath.

The people on the benches turned and blinked in their direction and Gretchen realized the funeral director was there—now he actually was wearing Birkenstocks and jeans, his hair more unkempt than when she'd seen him earlier, when he was handing over her aunt's ashes.

Gretchen didn't know what to say so she sat there watching.

“They're here,” Annie said, apparently channeling Fidelia. “They are almost all here now. You are the only one who is still on the other side.” She pointed directly at Gretchen.

“You gotta wait for a while for anything good,” Hope whispered to Gretchen.

“Tonight we will all be together in the house. Nine generations.” Her narrative seemed a little slow and obvious and Gretchen had had enough. She stood up with her camera and snapped a picture of Annie. Then she called out.

“Who burned down the church?”

“A man . . . ,” Annie began, but then stopped as if in the middle of a mystical vision.

“Well,
that
narrows it down. Men are only responsible for ninety-nine percent of
all
violent crime in the world since, like, the dawn of time. Who specifically? What was his name?”

Hope laughed and covered her mouth, nudging Gretchen. “I think
you're
channeling Esther,” she whispered.

“You were there, Fidelia, You saw it,” Gretchen said again loudly. “What happened?”

At that Annie fell to the floor and began sobbing. “Celia. Rebecca. No. No. It was to be their First Communion. They wore matching white dresses. They . . .”

The theatrics were becoming too much for Gretchen.
Nobody
would take this long to answer a simple question back in the city. No one—not even a spirit being channeled through a hippie. In the city they would just tell you—and then go on their way, because they would have something to do or a train to catch.

“It was the White Christian Patriots, right?” Gretchen
asked impatiently. “But the WCP is made up of people, so
who
did it?
How
did they do it? Why are you still hanging around, Fidelia? Why is everyone stuck here?”

The people on the benches stared at her with shock and indignation. She smirked at them and then snapped their pictures. Hope nudged her again, this time seeming really concerned.

“Do you people want to do this
every
year
of your lives?” Gretchen yelled. “Really? I mean
seriously
? You want to spend your lives stalking people who've already
died in a horrible way
?”

At this the crowd gasped. “She's channeling Esther!” a thin, meticulously groomed man shouted, pointing at her, and the rest of the crowd murmured their agreement, then stared at her even more intently.

“It might be fun for you to do this every year,” Gretchen went on, “it might be a game for you to talk to the dead victims of a mass murder—but for
us
”—she gestured to herself and Hope—“for
us
it sucks, okay? Get it? Real people were murdered, by psycho bigots. Looks like my relatives have a habit of committing suicide and now my family home is a disgusting, neglected mess. It's really not cool or spooky!”

“Esther,” a woman in the audience said to her gently, as if she were talking to a dangerous animal that needed to be
pacified. “Esther, you've passed over, tell us what it was like.”

“Good lord!” Gretchen said. “You couldn't have asked me what things were like when I was alive? What was it like? Living alone for forty years? Hating it here so much I drank photo chemicals?”

At that they gasped again. And Gretchen gave a little vindictive chuckle. She had no idea why she was talking in the first person when they'd addressed her as Esther—why she was using the word “I” at all. She felt light-headed, wanted a drink. A real drink, a double.

“If you'd all leave your patchouli-soaked campsite here and get the hell out into the real world you'd see that death is no big deal!” Gretchen shouted. “I don't goddamn care about death. I've had it up to my neck with death.”

“Esther!” many people in the crowd cheered, nodding at one another, as if Esther was indeed sitting among them. Some of them started to smile, others looked at her in awe. She could feel herself getting angrier and angrier the more they stared at her. For a moment she felt like she could understand Celia and Rebecca's desire to trip and scratch people. The reason the ghosts wanted to overtake or even kill the people just living their quiet lives like nothing had happened.

“We're talking about a
crime
here—an unsolved crime,” she went on. “It's nothing to revel in. Not a thing for you to
come over to our property and howl at the moon about!”

“What do the spirits want?” one particularly odd man in his thirties, who looked like he'd escaped a science fiction convention, asked.

“
What?
” Gretchen asked incredulously. “To be left the hell alone, goddamn it! If you're not going to help solve this crime then quit poking at us, asking us dumb crap about what some old relative of yours is doing in the afterlife. We don't have a clue! And stop trying to take our pictures. Live your own goddamn lives!”

When she was done scolding the crowd she leaned back and put her hand on her camera. She badly craved a cigarette. “Doesn't anyone here smoke?” Gretchen shouted. Hope looked at her with eyebrows raised. Then she shook her head slowly.

“Oh shit,” Hope whispered. “You are
not
yourself.”

Annie stared at Gretchen and Hope as if she had been shaken out of a trance. She came and sat on the edge of the stage, “You look like them, you know,” she said to Hope and Gretchen. “You look like the girls, like Celia and Rebecca, all grown up.” Then she slipped off the stage and came over to them. “Come,” she said. “Come back to my place, and have some tea.”

“We're gonna need something a hell of a lot stronger than that,” Gretchen said.

1861

Two months. Nothing to say. A cruel joke. I cannot bring myself to write the words, for if I do it will be real. And I cannot bear for it to be real. And I am not able to stop weeping. This all seems impossible. Things like this do not happen.

James Axton. My only love, my one true friend. Killed at the Battle of Carthage. The very first battle in which he fought. Like that. So quick. How could this have happened? He was here just two months ago. He was smiling beside me, his cheeks flushed, his blue eyes filled with such intelligence and passion. Holding my hand. Laughing, making plans.