“Despite the hour,” she said, “I called Jon in England to talk, and he mentioned something worrisome. He wanted to know if there was any way we might end up being connected to this haunting.”
“You and Jon?”
“Yes. We can’t afford for anyone to know we would be behind a confession from the killer. In fact, we need that confession to seem as unforced by human influence as possible. The haunting has to seem natural, with no ties to Jon or me whatsoever.”
I prepared to ask “Why?” again, but Amanda Lee raised an eyebrow.
“You’re thinking like a human who doesn’t know spirits exist. If you were the killer, and you came to a point where you realized that a ghost was after you and haunting you because of a crime you committed, what would you do? And don’t allow anything to inhibit your imagination.”
She’d never really asked me to strategize in major supernatural terms before. “Since Gavin has money, he can afford just about anything, so…”
Amanda Lee jumped in. “What if he got ahold of someone who could send other ghosts to stop the one that’s haunting him?”
I just stared at her, and the lyrics from a Kinks song ran through my head. Paranoia, the destroyer…
“It’s just a theory,” she said, “but not out of the question. An open-minded individual could very well defend himself against a haunting. Another ghost—a stronger one—could even get information out of you that a human wouldn’t be able to.”
“And that information might lead Gavin to you and Jon?”
“Right. So do you see why we don’t want him to even remotely suspect what’s happening?”
I nodded. She had more experience with weird phenomena than I did, so I would listen to her advice. But the part about another ghost stuck with me, and I asked, “What makes you think that other spirits might come after us?”
“It’s only speculation. Anything is possible in this world now, Jensen, and we have to think smart.”
“So you’ve never actually met bad ghosts who’d do that?”
“No. Remember how I told you that you’re the first one I connected with fully?”
“How about other psychics or mediums? Do you think they know any of those bad spirits?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” She hesitated. “I hope I haven’t scared you off.”
I actually had been thinking about what a rival ghost might do to me—would he have more power? Could he mess me up in a ghost fight?
Then I shook my head. “No. I’m not afraid.”
And I wasn’t. Instead of being scared of the possibility, I was kind of revved up. In life, I’d been thwarted in the cruelest way. But I felt like I had more control in death, and I wasn’t going to back away from a justified cause merely because of some what-ifs.
It just meant I had a lot to learn and to get used to as a ghost.
I wandered over to the battery on the nearby table, making contact with it, juicing myself to make up for the energy I’d lost tonight. “So, how are we going to go about taking you and Jon out of the haunting equation?”
She looked a little nervous, like she was about to lay something big on me. “Since there’s a teenage girl in the Edgett household, what if you acted as a poltergeist to throw any investigators off our scent? And, of course, you would have to be subtle about introducing Elizabeth into the details of Gavin’s haunting—he would have to come to the conclusion that she might be haunting him all on his own.”
I guessed I didn’t get the full thrust of her suggestion. “I remember that word, poltergeist. I saw that movie before I died.”
“Do you know what one is?” she asked. But she sounded relieved, grateful that I wasn’t backing out.
“Isn’t it a bunch of mean ghosts scaring the crap out of cute kids by coming through TVs and sending clown dolls after them?”
Amanda Lee gave me a you-poor-naive-thing smile, then said, “It’s an old German word meaning ‘noisy ghost.’ But there’s a school of thought that says a poltergeist is a psychokinetic event that usually stems from an unstable young person in a household, a female, most of the time.”
Wait. That didn’t sound so ghostly to me. “Psychokinetic event? Are you saying that poltergeists actually have nothing to do with ghosts? That it’s a person who uses her mind to throw things around a room?”
Amanda Lee offered a shrug, and the turquoise necklaces clinked together. “That’s what some think, and that’s what we would depend on for an explanation as to the activity you’d bring to the Edgett household. We would hope that any experts who might be consulted would think that it’s not a ghost causing trouble—that it’s a poltergeist generated by Wendy’s troubled energy, since it’s often centered on a puberty-aged agent who has a lot of teenage angst and sexual puzzlement inside her.”
I was trying to piece this all together. “Are there really more to poltergeists than just that?”
“I happen to believe so.”
I waited for her to explain.
“I think,” she said, “that malevolent spirits can be drawn to people who are as troubled and confused as young women in particular can be, and there’s your true poltergeist.”
Now I didn’t like where this was going. “If you’re suggesting that I harass that girl Wendy while I’m haunting Gavin, just so I can cover our tracks with a good reason for the sudden activity, you’ve got the wrong ghost.”
“I’m suggesting no such thing.” Amanda Lee seemed hurt, her gaze going sad. “I’m not asking you to harm Wendy.”
Even so, this was leaving a bad taste in my… you know.
I’d been so caught up in notions of giving bad people what they deserved that I’d failed to truly think about everyone around them.
Amanda Lee continued. “You might have to do one or two things to point the activity in Wendy’s direction, but sometimes poltergeists can favor the agent and intensely dislike others in the household. That’s my recommendation for how we go about this.”
“So you’re hoping that any experts they might call in would decide that Wendy is causing all our haunting, and that her bad energy is being aimed at Gavin because she’s a moody teen. I hate to tell you, though—from what I saw, it didn’t look like she hates him.”
“You never know what’s going on behind the picket fences,” Amanda Lee said. “And this is a good bet for us if we want to cover ourselves.”
She must’ve read my remaining doubts. “Sincerely, I hate this as much as you do. But when he decided to kill and defile Elizabeth Dalton, he brought pain and suffering to everyone around him. It was only a matter of time until it came back to…”
“Haunt all of them?”
I really looked at her, and she seemed to know it, because she lowered her gaze. She was really invested in this.
As if she’d read my mind—and maybe she had—she offered an explanation.
“I had a husband once,” she said, her voice twisted. “They said it was an accident when he died, but I knew better. He was hit by a car, and he knew the driver—it was a man he’d had a falling-out over work with. My husband was a lawyer, and the man believed that Michael had maliciously gone after him during a dispute about an inheritance. He felt robbed. And to this day, I believe he got his revenge.”
Damn. What could I say but “I’m sorry, Amanda Lee”?
“You shouldn’t be the sorry one. And that’s my point in all this. None of us victims should ever be sorry. We shouldn’t have to wish that scores were settled and life should be fairer than it is.”
I felt close to her, even though I was feet away. Both of us were on the outside, isolated from what was right. “Can I ask what happened to the man who killed Michael?”
Amanda Lee finally looked up. “I didn’t have a ghost to help me back then, so he got away with the ‘accident.’ And no matter what the police said, I knew he was guilty. I felt it with every chill in my bones and every vision that kept me up at night. He died without ever paying for what he did.” Her words wobbled. “So when my good friend Jon—”