“Gavin confronted you and said that?”
“No. Liz didn’t tell him who I was, but she said he took the breakup hard. And it wasn’t long afterward that she was dead.”
I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t seen sure proof of a murderer in him yet, but I was beginning to think that I didn’t want him to be guilty as much as she did.
She hadn’t even gotten any readings off him as evidence. So what the hell should I believe?
All I knew was that losing someone you loved changed your life in a lot of ways you would never expect. It changed how you thought, how you acted, how you made decisions. It bent those choices around until you wouldn’t have recognized the way you were acting anymore.
She bowed her head, shaking it. “I’m sorry for the way I went about this. But I couldn’t take the chance of alienating you. You were my only hope, and finding justice for Liz means too damned much. It means everything.”
“I know. She’s a priority.” Even more than catching my own killer. I paused. “And what about your husband, Michael? Did he ever exist?”
Amanda Lee paused, gave me another shameful glance, then shook her head again.
Shit. Where did the lies end?
“But,” I said, “I saw you with a wedding ring that night I looked in your room… .”
“It wasn’t from a wedding.” Her words choked off until she found them again. “There was no marriage for me and Liz. I never even had the chance to give her something that showed we were bound together, no matter what.”
I was speechless.
Amanda Lee rushed on. “I needed to give you a reason for my being so motivated in this case, and I was willing to go as far as I had to. If that included a made-up friend or a husband who’d had a tragic death, so be it.”
That was the last straw, and frustration powered me to the other side of the room, away from her. I felt like a churning ball of bad energy.
“So the truth is that you put salt around your house to keep me out, not just a bunch of generic spirits. You kept those bulletin boards a secret. Then you lied about Jon, Michael, and Elizabeth, too. You used me as a tool. So how can I know that you’re not setting me up to do harm to the Edgett household with more of your lies? How can I ever trust you again?”
Quietly, the proud woman in front of me on the ground began to weep. “I… never wanted you to… turn away from me… .”
I trembled, deeply affected, feeling my own anguish in her.
And I couldn’t stand to watch it.
“Damn you,” I said, my voice sounding funny. Could ghosts cry?
When she looked at me again, it was with a sense of profound regret. She was making this so hard.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I want to help Elizabeth, but I don’t know if I’m doing it for the right reasons now. Because here’s the thing—you don’t want justice, Amanda Lee. You want vengeance. I’ll do one but not the other.”
Even as I said it, I wondered if that was true. When it came time to confront my killer, would I be singing the same song?
As if Amanda Lee hadn’t heard everything else I’d said, she grasped the edge of the bench, pulling herself to her feet. “Please don’t give up on Liz. You can give up on me all you want, but not her.”
What else could I say? I was invested more than I’d ever imagined I could be.
“I’m not abandoning her,” I said, already on my way to the door. “But I can’t stay here, either.”
I was still smarting so bad that I couldn’t help delivering a little pain to her.
“You know,” I said, “for a time, I thought you were the only one I could depend on, too.”
And before I could definitely see if ghosts had tears in them, I slipped under the door, hearing Amanda Lee softly crying again.
God help me, but I hovered outside, knowing it would be smart to go, but wanting to stay out of a sense of… I don’t know. Loyalty? Good-heartedness? Duty?
But there was something my friend Suze used to say, and even though she’d been talking about guys, it was more relevant than ever for me.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
And it sure as hell wasn’t going to happen a third time.
• • •
Once again, after being betrayed by Amanda Lee, I had no idea where to go. But I was getting good at bouncing back from her misguided moves and finding my own way around the world.
I did the sitting-on-the-power-lines thing again, just like the last time we’d hit a personal snag. Amanda Lee’s revelations had drained me. So had the hallucinations—something I’d discovered tonight only after I slightly sputtered halfway through the travel tunnel I’d created after I’d scrammed away from her home.
This sucked so bad, hanging out on power lines, bored silly. I mean, just imagine an existence where your thoughts are active all the time and you never can fall asleep, even if you’re sapped. And it wasn’t just Amanda Lee’s confessions that were whirling through my thoughts right now, but complete irony, too.
Funny, how I’d goaded a confession out of someone tonight, and it hadn’t been Gavin Edgett. Maybe I should at least be happy that my skills were improving.
And maybe there was another positive to come out of all this. I’d never stood up to anyone like I had with Amanda Lee. During my wasted early-twenties life, I’d floated along just as surely as I was doing as a ghost. But after tonight, I wasn’t going to play like that anymore. I had to start truly living sometime.
And you know what? I was going to begin by getting to the bottom of Elizabeth’s and my stories on my own terms.
Feeling a little better, I lay on the lines all night, restoring myself, weaning myself off them at dawn with an idea about how to go about my missions.
Sailor Randy had given me good spiritual advice last time. He was more of a mentor than Amanda Lee could be, and I needed his input if I was going to go alone down a road that might very well send me into a time loop, aka the ghost version of a coma.
But where could I find him?
Where had he said he searched for his girlfriend’s letter during the light of day? Near downtown, by the water, on some rocks, right? And that narrowed a search down pretty well.
It didn’t take me long to find him balancing on a bank of dark rocks as the sun climbed over the rigging on the Star of India, a windjammer ship that’d been home-ported near the embarcadero longer than even when I was a kid.
Randy, his form just as black-and-white-TV-worthy as ever, was poking among the rocks near a seafood restaurant that sat on a dock over the water as I landed a few feet away from him.
“Need some help?” I asked.
When he glanced at me, he smiled, exposing his crooked teeth. His sailor hat was askew, just like last time, his cracked voice still goofy.
“Why, it’s the new ghost,” he slurred. “Jen-Jen.”
If I was stuck with that nickname for all eternity or however long it took to break my tether, I’d die all over again.
“Just Jen,” I said.
“You’re lookin’ a little grayer ’n’ usual.”
Oh yeah. “I had a bit of an… incident yesterday.”
“Ya gotta watch what ya get into out there. Know what I mean?”
He went back to searching.
“You having any luck with your girlfriend’s letter?” I asked.
“Nah. I swear I dropped it along here, though.”
He tripped over a rock, and I sucked in a pseudobreath, reaching out to catch him. But he righted himself before he got to my hands, and all I felt was that fuzzy sensation of ghost-near-ghost.