I thought it was the perfect time, but I also saw his point. I bit my tongue against asking more questions, and he added, “Besides, I had them in me for a minute there. I might be out of my league, but at least I can tell when I’m dealing with more than one ghost.”
I unbit my tongue. “If you’re out of your league shouldn’t I—” He didn’t have to say anything this time. I bit my tongue again and Billy turned his attention back to the Trans Am. All the color had pressed up against the vehicle’s nose, under his hands, like it was trying to get out. In fact, I could feel it trying to get to him, but it was a minor nuisance, like a dull itch. I’d have to be rendered unconscious to loosen the hold I had on the ghosts, and I wasn’t sure even that would do it.
“Something’s holding you,” Billy murmured. “Something strong enough to tie you all together. Family?”
“N-n-n-noooo.” The cry sounded like a wailing child, angry and full of uncertainty. Unexpected sympathy lurched in my heart. Things trying to take over my friends were inherently bad, but lost things trying to find a way home were merely pathetic. I liked the idea of helping a lot more than banishing.
“The way you died, then.” There was sorrow and certainty in Billy’s gentle voice, like he was trying not to upset the already unhappy child. He whispered, “Shh, shh,” to the uprise of misery that vibrated through the car, and I winced on behalf of the Trans Am’s windows. It was magical, and the windows would hold because I wanted them to, but Ella Fitzgerald had nothing on the pitch the ghosts reached. “Violent death,” Billy guessed softly and, this time to me, said, “It’s what holds most spirits beyond their time.”
Nervously, because I wasn’t certain I was allowed to say anything, I asked, “How long would they usually stay? You see them all the time….”
“Not all the time. Just with murders. With an ordinary death, illness or age, they fade away as soon as the body dies unless they have some need for closure that’s not related to their deaths. If they’re victims of abuse, for example, or once in a while if they feel someone they love is in need of help or comfort they’ll stay. There are people who say they feel the dead with them, even years after they’ve crossed over.” He glanced at me. “Most of them are kooks, but some of them really do have spirits who stay with them, like Caroline did with me. There are mediums who can communicate with the long-dead, but my ability is shorter-term.”
Beneath his quiet speech, the ghosts in the car twisted and howled, clearly too agitated by his question to give a straight answer. He ran his hand over the car’s hood, soothing motion, but they still screamed and battered themselves against the cage my magic made. Billy ignored them, giving me more of that crash course in ghost investigations after all. I thought it gave the spirits something audibly soothing to latch on to as much as it educated me. “Even with a lot of violent death, like car wrecks, the spirit usually only takes a few hours, a couple of days at most, before it lets go. They usually have a sense of self still when that happens. Forms that you’d recognize as human, the ability to communicate.”
He turned his attention back to the car. “These ones are old, Joanne. There’s almost nothing left to them than the need to survive and earn vengeance. It’s all right,” he murmured, clearly no longer talking to me. Compassion deepened his voice, turning him into a gentle bear of a man, and tears stung my nose. I didn’t think I had that depth of kindness in me. “I’m here to listen and to help. When you’re ready you can tell me what you have to say.”
Maybe it was worse for them to fear they might lose Billy’s attention than to contemplate their stories, because despite his assurance he’d stay, their cries stopped and their halting, miserable voice searched for words. “S-s-s-sown, all s-sown.”
“What,” I said, “you reap what you sow? Does that mean you were murdered because you’d been murderers yourselves?”
Billy, over outraged spiritual screams, said, “You’re really not helping,” and I had the grace to feel a little abashed, especially since I’d just been admiring his compassion. “She won’t say anything else,” he told the Trans Am, and the steely note in his voice suggested to me that I’d really better not. I had vulnerable points Billy didn’t know about, but he had enough of a grip on some that I probably didn’t want to get in a fight with him, not even when I theoretically had the home-team advantage. He said, “Sown,” when the ghosts had quieted and it seemed likely I wasn’t going to open my mouth again. I could almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he worked through the possibilities of that word: “Buried in fields, or dismembered and scattered across fields? I wonder what was beneath that party hall fifty or a hundred years ago.”
Frustrated rage gave the ghostly shrieks a new edge: “S-s-sown! All sown!” They swirled away from Billy’s hands, filling the Trans Am with agitated gray, and beat at its windows and roof with blows that felt, to me, like human hands. I shuddered and told myself I was anthropomorphizing. These things hadn’t been human in a long time.
They came back to Billy, and this time I could see I wasn’t forcing human aspects onto nebulous bits of ether. Bony hands spread against the inside of the hood, matching Billy’s, pressing like they’d reach through and slide their fingers through his. Their screams faded, turning into desperate intensity as they tried for words that had faded from their consciousness a long time ago. “Sown d-d-dead. Dead.”
Way in the back of my brain, a penny dropped, and my mouth said, “Sown dead. Sowen, the day of the dead. Samhain,” without filtering it through the active thought process in my mind. It was just as welclass="underline" if I’d thought about it, I’d have never figured it out. Samhain was the Irish new year, falling on the same date as the western Halloween, and the next day was, in plenty of cultures, the day of the dead. I’d learned all about it from a precognitive anthropologist who’d predicted my death wrongly, and her own with depressing accuracy. To the English-reading eye, the word looked like it should be pronounced Sam-hayn, but in Irish, it was Sowen. “They all died at Halloween.”
The ghosts erupted in a shriek of triumph, and Billy twisted to give me a good hard look before he said, “Nice job,” without a hint of begrudgement. I didn’t quite know what the look was for. It sort of made me feel as if I’d been holding out on having an encyclopedia of arcane knowledge to draw from, but I really didn’t. I knew more than I had a year ago, but that wasn’t saying much.
“It’s a pattern.” Billy was still looking at me, though the way his voice went calm suggested he was speaking to the ghosts. “It gives us a place to start. I want to make you an offer.” He turned his attention back to the Trans Am. Faces were beginning to appear beneath the translucent hood. Not fully fleshed human faces, but something more than skulls. They reminded me unpleasantly of The Scream painting.
“We’ll find your bodies, if we can. We’ll find your killer, if we can. But I don’t have the skill, even here, to draw your memories out clearly enough to learn everything we can from you.” Billy sounded utterly at home with his talent’s boundaries. I envied that, not because I wanted more power, but because I didn’t know where the edges of mine lay. I’d read often enough that if you argue for your limitations, then sure enough, they’re yours, but that wasn’t what I heard in Billy’s voice, or saw in the image of himself. He’d had most of a lifetime to learn what he could and couldn’t do. The window in which he could see the dead had extended bit by bit over the years. In another thirty, he might be able to talk to ghosts a week dead instead of just a couple of days, but maybe not, too. Either way, I didn’t get the sense he rested on his laurels, only that he accepted what his gifts were.