Yeah, I’d gotten something all right. At least, enough to tell me that I might be able to empathize with humans—and maybe not just Amanda Lee, either.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, brushing her hands down her skirt as she stood, then went to access the computer. She delicately typed with her manicured nails until a map showed up on the screen.
“Even if Dean wasn’t in Elfin Forest that night, seeing him might jar your recollection about what happened all those years ago.” She’d thought the same about visiting Suze.
She gestured toward the screen. “I’ve put his location up here, if you’d like to study it.”
“But…”
“Just think it over.”
After she left, I thought about how the Suze field trip had left me in a funk for days. But I had to admit it—I wanted to see my old boyfriend. The temptation was overwhelming.
I glanced at the directions on the computer. What was I going to do for the rest of the decade—just sit here and not care about solving my own crime?
Besides, the sad fact was that I did want to see Dean. I’d been wanting to ever since I was pulled out of the imprint, and now…
Now I took in the lay of the land on the computer, then went to the door, seeping through the crack under it, riding a current out of the chichi vibe of Amanda Lee’s Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood and north, toward the suburbs of San Marcos.
As I traveled, it seemed as if I was in the middle of a humming, pulsating tunnel—it felt like an artery, with me as the blood.
When I was human, I’d never realized that spirits have the ability to appear in different locations. Sure, I’d heard the stories about how Elvis haunted this house and that one, but I’d chalked all that up to kooky people seeing what they wanted to see. Elvis is a pretty popular guy, after all, high in demand, even in death. But now I know that, if the old dude is actually a ghost now, he could easily go from one place to the next if he needed some excitement. Or maybe he just has a purpose in being in more than one place.
Any way you slice it, it seems the farther we spirits travel from our death spots, the weaker we get. I’ve learned this much from my few experiences so far, and my saving grace is that Amanda Lee doesn’t live too far from Elfin Forest, and she also has batteries in the casita, which keep me healthy and glowing. If it wasn’t for those, Amanda Lee thought I might run the risk of being pulled back into that noninteractive imprint mode she found me in.
No, thanks.
As I slipped out of the current’s tunnel, I shuddered, discombobulated, hanging in the air above a street that featured cookie-cutter ranch houses. I sensed that I was in the general area of where I’d been aiming—a neighborhood with grass yards shining under a warm, spring, late-afternoon sun. I have to say that there was a sort of high I got as I floated onward, whisking close to humans who lay on lounges in their backyards or who washed the cars in their driveways, having no idea why it’d suddenly gotten chilly, only to immediately warm up again.
I tracked the address Amanda Lee had given me until I came to the one I was looking for: 297 Sajen Road. A cute white house with green trim around the windows, an old Toyota in the driveway, even a damned white picket fence. No kidding.
Then I focused in on the kids and the man behind the fence.
He was throwing a football back and forth with a teenage boy, probably his son, and a slightly older girl was nearby, practicing cheers with her red-and-white pom-poms, egging the team on.
Daddy sent her a fond smile, then sent a zinger to his son.
I didn’t know if a spirit’s heart could ache, but it sure felt like that’s what mine was doing, because the last time I’d seen Dean Morgan, it’d been almost six months before I bought it.
His hair had been surfer blond and cut straight to his chin back then. He’d been tan, his muscles lean on a streamlined body. His eyes were the color of a shot of whiskey, his smile enough to disassemble me and put me back together all in the space of a second.
“Don’t worry, Jen,” he’d said to me the last time I saw him while he stood in front of his beat-up Camaro, which was loaded with milk cartons full of clothes and cassette tapes. “I’ll be coming back.”
But he never did. There’d only been graduate school across the country at Columbia and phone calls filled with the same promise. I’d believed him, though, thinking it was true love.
Maybe it had been, back then.
I blew out a breath, stirring the leaves of the elm tree I was hovering next to. A bird jumped to another branch with a frantic tweet.
The sound caught Dean’s attention, and for a heart-jamming moment, he looked up.
Straight through me.
If I’d had blood in me, it would’ve stopped. That’s what this spirit version of heartbreak felt like, at least. But then, second by second, as he went back to playing catch with the son he’d had with someone else, I saw that his hair wasn’t so blond anymore. He was a little older than Amanda Lee, gray, with a paunch and wrinkles around his eyes.
He was a different person who had moved on after my death, and I couldn’t feel a connection to him anymore. I wasn’t even sure I’d ever really known him.
As I retreated away from the tree, the bird chirped, like it was relieved I was going. Damned fucking bird.
Damned fucking whoever had killed me, because maybe, if I had run a little faster or if my friends and I had gone to the forest on any other night, I could’ve been in this yard today, with Dean. But my death had taken that from me.
It had taken everything, and every time I made one of these field trips, the pain of loss just got worse.
I had to get away, but just before I summoned a travel artery, I saw Amanda Lee’s Bentley down the road. She was behind the steering wheel, her hands resting on it, just as if she’d known I would happen on by and she’d been as prepared as always.
She power-rolled down the window, allowing me to slide inside the car, and I sensed her shudder as my cool essence raked by.
The radio, which crackled in my presence, was playing a low tune—something blue by a woman who sounded like she’d been crying into her drink all night.
“It’s not fair,” she said, “is it?”
“Dean forgot me. I think they all have.”
“No, I guarantee they still remember, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they miss you, Jensen. But they went forward because life allowed them to.”
“Life allowed that?”
At my anger, the radio buzzed, almost like a chain saw, and Amanda Lee shut it off.
I calmed down. “Was it life that spared them and cornered me by that tree in the forest?”
“No, it wasn’t.” Amanda Lee turned in her seat to look at me, and it felt good to have someone on this earth who knew I was still here. “A human monster made the choice to hurt you.”
“I wish…”
“What?” She still watched me as if I were real enough to matter.
She made it so easy for all my resentment to boil out. “I wish I would’ve been strong enough to fight back that night.”
“And if you could have fought back?”
“I would’ve killed him before he killed me.”
I didn’t even know if the murderer was a “him,” but that wasn’t the point. Him, her, it—I hated whatever it was.
Amanda Lee leaned back in her seat, her gaze on the windshield, like she saw a thousand psychic things outside that I would never see. And maybe she did.
“Would you have really gone that far?” she asked. There was a tiny tremor in her voice.
I didn’t even have to think about an answer. “Of course I would’ve.”