I realized what she was suggesting. This woman really was a lean, mean, retribution machine.
“Are you thinking that, if nothing else works out, I should punish Gavin by taking over his body and doing God knows what to it while his consciousness is still working?” I asked.
She kept gripping the wheel.
That’s when the straight-A student in me suddenly remembered where I’d heard the last name that Amanda Lee had used with Gavin. Edmond Dantès was the main character in The Count of Monte Cristo, a man who’d been out for revenge against those who’d ruined his life.
Vengeance, I thought. Not justice. Amanda Lee was never going to want the latter because it wouldn’t satisfy her.
“I feel sorry for you,” I said, not even wanting to explain to her that Randy had told me humans needed to willingly accept a possession and that demons were the ones who took over bodies without permission.
I was so disgusted that I did something awful. I threw out a sound to Amanda Lee.
Elizabeth weeping.
And I didn’t stick around to see the tragic sound of hurt and devastation haunting Amanda Lee as much as it did Gavin.
16
Immediately afterward, I started beating myself up for the cruel trick I’d pulled on Amanda Lee out of sheer frustration. She wasn’t a bad person, after all—just misguided, unwilling to listen to reason. Bullheaded.
But I was a little like that, too, and I feared we’d be butting heads from here on out, even if we were trying to get to the same goal.
Even so, what good would it do to dwell on her when Gavin was inside the mansion, maybe even falling asleep? I didn’t want to lose any momentum with him, so I headed back there to see if I could prod him even closer to revealing the absolute truth about him and Elizabeth.
If he hadn’t provided the truth already.
But would I be able to do that before Amanda Lee could return? With the empathy option off the table, maybe I should exercise some patience and charge up on some power lines, going back to Gavin in an hour or two to see if he’d fallen asleep then. Or it might be time for some full-on hallucination therapy instead. After all, I’d been able to perform those car accident mirages on Amanda Lee while she’d been blocking my empathy, so why wouldn’t the same technique work on him?
Sorting through my choices, I took a seat on the power lines outside the mansion, where fancy cars wound over the curvy road below me. The early-afternoon sun relaxed in the sky as electricity fed me like it was junk food, giving me a rush.
Just as I was getting way pumped, I felt a change in the lines, a shift in energy, and I looked around to see what was going on.
I startled when I saw Twyla a few yards away, her back propped against the power pole as she lay lengthwise on the wires. Her dark petticoats draped down, and she was winding her long black, straight hair around a finger. The other half of her hair was as light and teased out as ever.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked.
“Just popped in to say hi. I totally guessed where you were, too, because it had to be in, like, one of three places. Your death spot, here, or Amanda Lee’s. And what do you know? I was right and you’re predictable. Bravo, dipstick.”
Whatever. “What’s your cause?”
She fixed her eyelined sight on the red tile-roofed mansion, exhaling. “Okay. Honestly, I was bored. And I thought of how your haunting might be going. And just thinking of you made me more bored. But the whole haunting a murderer thing is actually, like, bitchin’. So I came.”
A hitchhiker ghost. Rad. “I thought you more experienced ghosts pooh-poohed the idea of getting involved with humans.”
“Sweetie, smart ghosts don’t get involved with human problems. We didn’t say anything about not enjoying a good show.”
“Forget it. You’re not going to watch me haunt.”
“Pretty please with sugar on top? Like, how entertaining would that be? It’s like seeing a retarded little girl at her first ballet recital stumbling through The Nutcracker.”
She was really something.
“You know,” I said, “besides your dismaying attitude, the last thing I need is for a ghost to cock-block my serious business.”
She laughed.
“Twyla, I’m not fooling around. I’m trying to find out if the man who lives here took the life of a woman. Why would that amuse you?”
Twyla’s dark-lipsticked mouth straightened into a line and she stopped playing with her hair.
Then she said, “I just wanted to see how you, like, went about this serious stuff.” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “It’s so easy to forget that things matter, you know? Because out here, we’ve seen it all. And there’s no end to it, just the hope that there’ll be something more interesting that comes along to create a spark in us.”
I didn’t dare interrupt her. I wasn’t sure Twyla had many soul-searching moments.
She shifted, poised over the wires like I was. “I haven’t really met a new ghost in years. Your kind is usually really, like, shy, and they either stay away or they find a group to dig in with. Ghost cliques, you know?”
I surveyed her half-Goth, half-Val appearance. “Which clique were you in back in the day?”
She swung her legs. “I don’t know, really. I was one of those kids in high school who changed who I was all the time, and I thought, after school ended, I would settle into an ID. But no.”
“How old were you when you died?” I’d never found out that detail.
“Nineteen, a few months after I said bye-bye to high school.”
Whoa. I’d thought she was older. Maybe it was the raccoon eyes, or how Randy had talked about her going clubbing on the night she’d passed on.
She continued. “Through senior year, I was the ultimate Val. I mean, can’t you tell?”
She pointed at her Lauper hair, then her clothes. She looked a little sad, her dark mouth turning down at the corners.
“Then I went to a Cure concert and… you know how it is. The music crept into me, and I thought I had found it. My purpose. Unfortunately, this was what I got.” She gestured to her Goth side. “Now I’m a schizoid forever because of a fucking hair dryer.”
“You’re not alone,” I said. “Ever since I met Amanda Lee, I’ve been pulled in two.”
“So don’t be around her anymore. Duh.”
I laughed. Twyla made it sound so simple.
The lines hummed beneath us, and Twyla lifted her face to the sky, like she could feel the sun or something. Now that I thought about it, there was energy there. Back during my wastoid days, I used to watch documentaries on PBS, and I remembered one that showed societies that used the sun’s rays to cook food.
Duh.
“So, what’s on the agenda?” Twyla asked.
“With the haunting? I’m still working it out.” What Amanda Lee had said about possession pinched at me.
“Have you ever taken over a human body?”
She looked at me like what I’d just said had made her visit very worthwhile indeed.
“Maybe I’ve possessed someone,” she said. “Are you thinking of it?”
“No. It sounds terrible.”
It almost sounded like we were talking about having sex for the first time.
“It’s only terrible,” she said, “if you do it on an unwilling human.”
I got my mind out of the gutter and said, “Randy told me that only demons possess the unwilling.”
Twyla rolled her eyes. “Okay, Gawd. Like you guys know everything.” Then she glanced around, like we were in a crowd or something, and whispered, “I’ve totally done it.”