Then there was… nothing.
No more Jensen, no more missing girl.
Nothing except for the empty air, traced by a smell that stole into Amanda Lee’s senses. Fear. Sweat. And the faint hint of something else she couldn’t identify yet.
She calmed her heartbeat, her intuition telling her there would be more to come. She reached into her skirt pocket and gripped an object she had brought with her—something that would be all too familiar to Jensen.
“I’m only here to help you,” Amanda Lee whispered again.
Nothing moved—not unless you counted the near-distant creak of a branch, the wind whistling through trees.
Still, she waited.
Waited.
Until Jensen popped into existence again, out of thin air.
Hardly surprised at this turn of events, Amanda Lee watched as the girl repeated everything she had done before, as if she were in a time loop: crouching beneath the tree, her wide gaze on something in the near distance—
This time, though, Amanda Lee held out the objects in her hand—a black-banded network of rubber bracelets like the ones Madonna used to wear before she’d gone fully mainstream. They were dull with age.
Ignoring them, Jensen was already shaking her head, inching back toward the tree.
“Jensen!” Amanda Lee had focused every bit of mental energy and desperate sympathy she had into the name, and now…
Now, with a burst that felt electric and startling, Jensen Murphy swiveled her gaze over to Amanda Lee.
Air whooshed out of her lungs, and for a breathless second, she didn’t know what to do. She’d never encountered anything like this before.
But Amanda Lee recovered soon enough, straightening her spine as Jensen’s gaze locked onto the bracelets.
“You lost jewelry just like this that night,” Amanda Lee said, offering the objects again, just as if the conversation she was having with Jensen were perfectly normal, as if, every day, she encountered missing women like this.
She shook the jewelry, reclaiming the girl’s focus. “These could have been yours.”
Jensen narrowed her eyes, obviously confused now. Then, spooked, she looked around the forest, then back at Amanda Lee, whose blood was rushing to her head, making her dizzy with surreal success.
“You have a sort of amnesia,” Amanda Lee said as gently as possible. “I hear it isn’t unusual, and it should disappear as you get over the initial shock.”
“I’m…” Jensen trailed off.
The word had sounded like a burst of static, but somehow Amanda Lee understood it clearly.
“It’s March fifteenth.” Amanda Lee smiled at Jensen, her gaze going fuzzy with oncoming tears. Emotion that she couldn’t hold back for much longer. “I’ve tried to find you on other nights, but then I realized… you might come and go, but you would definitely be here now, on this date, after midnight. That’s when your friends noticed you hadn’t returned to their party here in the woods.”
The young woman lifted her colorless gray hand, looking at it as if she was just now recalling something vague, something that was slowly coming back to her. “This… is the night…”
She was having trouble forming words, but Amanda Lee had no problem supplying them.
“That’s right,” she said softly, gradually walking toward her. “This is the night you died, nearly thirty years ago, and I’m here to help you figure out who killed you.”
She didn’t add that she had something else in mind for Jensen Murphy, too.
She reached out to touch the ghost’s face, but Amanda Lee felt only a zapping chill when her hand met the freezing air.
1
It took me a while to get used to being a real ghost, and I only say that because, since my death, I guess I was in some kind of state of shock.
That’s what Amanda Lee told me, anyway.
My so-called savior was an intuitive and—well, let’s just be honest—a different lady. First of all, when she pronounces her name, it sounds a lot like that creepy house in the book Rebecca. Remember “Manderley”? That’s just about how Amanda Lee says her name, except with an a at the beginning. “A MANdaley.” I think it’s because of the years she spent living in Virginia before moving to SoCal. She told me a little bit about that after she rescued me from the woods, but we’ve basically been talking about me instead ever since then.
At least, she’s been telling me what she knows of my story.
Based on what my friends had said to the police about that night, the tale went a little something like this: a young college dropout slash Round Table Pizza waitress and her buddies went out late to frolic in the spooky old forest out of sheer boredom. Said waitress had been drying out from a bender the night before, so she’d drunk scads of soda pop because she’d been in charge of carting around her doped-up buddies, then wandered off to take a pee, never to return.
And that’s all she wrote. No body, no blood at my death spot, no trace of evidence that would help the cops to find me—not much of anything, really.
Weirdly, when I heard what’d happened to me, it didn’t surprise me all that much, because the second I snapped out of what Amanda Lee called my “residual haunting phase”—a time loop I was clearly stuck in until she yanked me out of it with the psychic mojo in her voice and the sight of the bracelets from my era—I knew just what I was.
Dead.
Deader than a doornail. Deader than a shrunken head. Deader than when video killed the radio star.
Very dead indeed. Actually, I had been living that truth over and over for a long time in that forest, so death didn’t seem like all that big an issue when I became an intelligent spirit. What actually freaked me out more than anything was the fact that I didn’t remember who my killer was. I guess I’d spent so much time in my noninteractive ghost state that I’d gone a little numb. Or maybe, as Amanda Lee suggested, I had some sort of “fright wall” erected in my brain, and that was the only thing keeping my fragile spirit psyche together.
Amanda Lee thought my memories would all come back to me, though, just as soon as I was ready to deal. And, being a total rich-lady do-gooder, she promised to help me figure out my deal. To her, I was a real live… I mean… not totally alive mystery.
I’d latched onto Amanda Lee’s offer to help me straightaway, mainly because she’d also told me I’m probably “tethered” to this plane because of being killed, and the only way my soul can find peace would be to take care of my earthly business.
Funny, huh? That word—tethered. Like I was a volleyball tied to a pole, winding around it and around it, going nowhere.
About a week after Amanda Lee found me, I felt about as aimless as that ball as I hovered in front of a computer in a teeny casita guesthouse on her property. Since Amanda Lee theorized that spirits are composed of energy—she mentioned electromagnetic radiation—you could say that I was using my connection with the electricity in the air to manipulate what she called “Web pages.” Even if the screen always futzed a bit when I got too close, I had already done a ton of research into my killing and had hit every barrier imaginable. Now I’d graduated to satisfying my curiosity about things such as whether Jane Fonda ruled the planet yet, or if there was any place you could still buy Pop Rocks.
By the way, I couldn’t get over this Internet. It was like the mind of a communal, confused, sometimes idiotic god.
Amanda Lee eased open the door and strolled into the room, wearing designer hippy-dippy boots under a flowered skirt, a long-sleeved sheer purple top over a camisole, and a clump of turquoise necklaces. Pretty hip for her age. She reminded me of the type of cool, got-it-together mom who’d lived on my suburban block when I was a kid—and her house would’ve had the swimming pool that everyone liked to visit because she was never home except to say hi. Her hair was a deep red with white streaks framing her face, pulled back in a low ponytail today. She was tall and slender, with a longish face and high cheekbones, her eyes a clear gray.