When I got there, I stopped by the hole-marred window first, noticing that she’d taped up the damage from the shears. I expected it’d be fixed by tomorrow, since I couldn’t imagine Amanda Lee tolerating even a day of something broken in her home.
The light wasn’t on in there anyway, so I took a whirl around her two-story home, thinking she was tucked away in bed, until I found an illuminated upper window in the back.
As usual, the curtain was drawn.
But not all the way.
I had a teensy view of a room that was so awesome that it could’ve come from the pages of I Have Splendid Taste—Check Me Out magazine. I could almost smell jasmine incense by looking at the mosquito netting that covered the exotic circle-shaped bed, the shadow from the blades of a ceiling fan slanting over the white spread.
When I saw Amanda Lee, dressed in a long white nightgown, crossing my field of vision, I peered around outside for something I could manipulate for a tap on the window.
Nothing.
But I’d done some fine knocking back at the Edgetts’, so I shaped myself into that fist again and rapped.
Knock, knock.
But she’d already walked out of my sight, maybe even out of the room.
Well, damn. I wasn’t about to hover here all night, so I did the next best thing—I went for the chimney, since that maneuver had worked nicely back at the Edgett mansion, too.
I swooped over the roof and, feeling good about my ever-expanding powers, decided I’d go for a ta-da dive into the flue.
I arced above it, paused, then fell down and down—
At the opening, I slammed into what felt like a brick wall.
Stunned, I felt my essence numbed, ringing like a gong.
It took a few moments for my thoughts to solidify, but when they did, I inspected the chimney.
What had blocked me? The opening was clear. But when I pressed against it, there was definitely something invisible barring me from entering.
Seriously? What was this?
On closer inspection, I found white grains sprinkled around.
Something I’d read on the Internet came back to me. Salt?
Hadn’t one of those amateur ghost-hunting pages said that the substance blocked spirits from entering places? But why would Amanda Lee use it on me?
I went back to her bedroom window, and this time I looked closely at the window frame.
Salt there, too.
Had there been some on the window that I busted open with the shears and I just hadn’t noticed?
I peeked inside her room. She was back, sitting on the edge of her bed.
And what I witnessed embarrassed me because I’m sure I wasn’t meant to see it.
She was looking at something on her finger. A ring, and the expression on her face was… I guess you could say impossible to glance away from.
She seemed devastated as she kept staring at it.
I got the feeling that remembering her husband might be a nightly ritual before she went to bed. Or maybe she couldn’t get to sleep and this was how she spent the wee hours, haunted.
She would wither away from mortification if she knew I was seeing this, and I was just about to move away from the window out of pure discomfort. Truly. But then the air must’ve kicked on—I heard the rev of it through the wall—and the left corner of the curtain belled up.
That’s when I saw something hanging on her other wall.
As the air kept the curtain billowing, I spied a bulletin board with a full-color picture taped right to the middle of it.
My picture from the last night I’d been alive.
I took in the image of the carefree girl with the reddish blond hair spilling over her shoulders, her slight freckles, the Mello Yello in her hand, and the tomboy clothes. She had no idea what was going to happen in a few hours.
Newspaper articles surrounded my photo like they were orbiting it.
But my bulletin board wasn’t the only one on that wall. There were three others, all with big pictures of men and women in the middle, clippings circling them, too.
I hovered closer to the window, wishing I could come in and read those articles, see who those other people were, but then a body blocked my view.
Amanda Lee, holding back the curtain, stunned.
Even if the window was shut, I could hear her voice through the panes. “Jensen…”
The obvious emotion confused me. Who was this woman? What did she really want with me by reducing me to a bulletin board of newspaper clippings and a tragic photo?
I sped away from her window, going in the opposite direction of my casita. I was damned if I knew where I was going.
But it sure wasn’t to my room, just like a prisoner who didn’t have any other purpose but to obey Amanda Lee’s orders.
6
I was as aimless now as I’d been in life, heading to nowhere in particular, but it didn’t feel as freeing as I’d thought it would.
What did I really know about Amanda Lee? Not much. And seeing my picture posted on the bulletin board alongside the others made me feel like an object. Part of a collection.
It was the first time I’d realized that, even if I could still think like a human and act like one, I wasn’t even close. Amanda Lee had clearly never thought of me that way, either, since it was obvious that she had something she’d never shared with me up her sleeve. I was definitely a dead person to her.
Was she tracking down other killers, using other ghosts—the ones on the bulletin boards?
None of it made sense, and I just wished I could ask someone if this was a normal existence for a ghost. Besides, now that my trust in Amanda Lee had been rattled, I wanted to see if there was a reason she had been keeping me to herself in that casita.
As the night enclosed the sky, I sat on some power lines, absorbing energy since I was farther than I’d ever been from my death spot. After I left Amanda Lee’s, I’d zoomed away so fast that I hadn’t been thinking about where I was going. The travel tunnel had blocked out any view of where I was, too, so I had ended up busting out of the artery way down in south San Diego County, on Coronado Island.
It was a mellow community, with high-end houses and beachfront real estate, populated by affluents and military families. Training for Navy SEALs went down nearby on the beach, near the island’s most famous landmark, the Hotel del Coronado, with its red, upside-down cone roofs and white wooden walls.
The hotel was just across the street from where I was sitting in the streetlamp-dim dark. The place was timeless, with its resort feel, flags flying from the rooftops, and the black ocean spreading out behind it.
Back when I was alive, I didn’t spend a lot of time in the south county. My parents had died just off the coast down here, so I liked my apartment in the north, by San Marcos, far enough away for me to distance myself from the nightmare. I’d never even visited the Hotel del, but I’d always heard that there were ghosts here.
Now I wanted to go in to find someone like me so I could get better answers than I’d been getting.
I was just starting to float down from the power lines when all my plans were shot to shit.
Something sped past me so fast that it zapped me, sending me flying down the street until I recovered in midair. As I tried to figure out what it was, I only hoped it wasn’t fake Dean. Like I needed another old-boyfriend encounter to top off my night.
I waited to find out what’d hit me, so when I heard the air buzzing nearby, I followed the sound past the sleepy, closed boutiques and shops to the white-planked facade of a bar that rested under a dormant neon palm tree sign.
Near the door I saw the atmosphere yawning open to show what looked to be the arterial inside of a travel tunnel. An electric blur popped out of it, just as I always did when I got to my destination.