“Ooopsh,” he said, shrugging. “Hate when that happens.”
“Do you ever…” I motioned to the rocks. “You know. Fall and die, just like you actually did in life?”
He laughed. “Nah, I’m not an imprint, so I don’t hafta relive that nightmare over ’n’ over.”
I started to join his fruitless quest, poking under rocks. “I’m sure you get a lot of energy from being around your death spot, though.”
“It helps. Besides, I like to be on the rocks—espeshly if it involves a good drink.”
I wanted to laugh. Randy was a crack-up, but I was still sore in my essence from what’d happened with Amanda Lee.
Randy might’ve been a drunk, but he was perceptive, and he sat on the rocks and leveled a look at me as, above us nearby, an early plane flew overhead to land at the airport.
When it’d passed, he narrowed his gaze. “Ya got troubles?”
I sat down, too, thankful he’d opened that door. “I’m not even sure where to start.”
“Oh. One of those stories.” He looked bored already.
Right. Drunk ADD.
I tried to make it short but sweet. “You know how I told you I was murdered?”
“Yup.”
I went for it, filling him in on how Amanda Lee had persuaded me to haunt Gavin, then lied to me about her real reasons for roping me in.
“So those are my issues right now,” I said in conclusion.
“Hmm,” Randy said.
The water kept licking at the rocks as the sun rolled higher in the sky. Boats were starting to cut through the water in the bay. Nearby, on the Star of India, I thought I saw a gray ghostly figure on deck: a teen who waved to us.
Randy waved back, just like he’d forgotten I’d told him a story and was waiting for a decent response. Meanwhile, I just smiled and gave the other ghost a bit of a wave, too.
“Thass John Campbell,” Randy said. “Poor kid was a stowaway. Fell from the mainmast and crushed his legs, then died a few days later. Ouch.”
I nodded, wondering if I’d have to repeat my story to Mr. ADD to refresh his memory and get more than a “hmm” out of him.
Evidently not, because he took up where I’d left off. “Ya really stepped into it, didn’t ya?”
“With Amanda Lee? I suppose I did.”
“I wouldn’t wanna be you, Just Jen. A fake wrangler on your tail is bad enough. But you’re askin’ for a lot of pain by gettin’ involved with human stuff, ain’t ya?”
I didn’t love his tone. Or maybe I was just chafed from the whole Amanda Lee thing and I wanted to be a rag to someone.
“Dude,” I said. “I came here for advice. Do you actually have any for me?”
He sobered. “Yeah, I do. Stay out of it.”
“But my tether… You told me that I’d be stuck on this plane until I resolved what was tying me here.”
“I didn’t tell ya to stick your nose in every death out there, did I?”
He gave no indication of being morally offended by my going after someone who could possibly be innocent in a killing. Had Randy lived so long that he was immune to what went on in the world outside of his girlfriend’s letter and getting eternally wasted?
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You don’t care about any of them?”
“Humans?” He seemed thoughtful. “Sure I care. I care that they keep my bars stocked. I care that they leave me alone and let me keep lookin’ for my gal’s letter.”
Damn. I’d expected for him to come out of this conversation appalled, not me.
“Hey, now,” he said, “you’re new. You’ll forget about most of it in time. You’ll find other ways of not bein’ bored.”
I faced front, wrapping my so-called arms around my bent legs. A salty breeze blew through me.
“Ya mad?” he asked.
“Not mad. Just… astounded.”
“’Cause I don’t sound… human?”
There it was again—the reminder that I was thinking too much like one of them, that I hadn’t even begun to let go.
Silence chomped the buzzing space between us.
But then I realized that this was dumb. I had a seasoned ghost by my side, and I wasn’t grilling him about so many things I needed to know. Besides, it wasn’t so much the fact that he’d said those things to me that hurt. It was the fact that, if Randy was any kind of example, one day I wouldn’t care much about anything going on around me, either.
Would that be the day I really became a ghost?
“You didn’t tell me about going into people’s heads while they were asleep,” I said, moving on to a new topic. But I still sort of sounded like a rag.
Randy perked up, not minding the bitchy part. “Have ya been practicing goin’ into humans?”
“Yeah. And I found out about dream-digging, no thanks to you.”
“Dream-diggin’.”
“That’s what I’m going to call it. Going into their dreams when they’re sleeping. You know?”
He frowned. “I coulda sworn I told ya all about that.”
“Nope.”
“Ah, well. A fella can’t get everything out durin’ a couple o’ drinks.” He lifted an eyebrow. “How’d it go?”
I shrugged. “Pretty well. It was trippy, seeing all the things in this human’s head.”
“You were scared as a sinner in a cyclone, huh?”
Before I could deny or confirm, he said, “First time I did it, I had no idea what was happenin’. I was tryin’ for a hallucinazion.”
There he went, mangling that last word again, just like the other night.
“What did you see in your human?” I asked.
“Giraffe ballerinas, mostly.”
“Really?” How would Amanda Lee interpret that?
But I wasn’t going to think about her.
“No lies,” Randy said, holding up his hands. “I was touchin’ a fella who worked at the zoo. Passed out clean on the sidewalk downtown. He’d been manhandlin’ his gal and—”
“You wanted to boo him. I know.”
I barely smiled at Randy as he returned the gesture, but much more effervescently.
“I jus’ hate when humans sleep,” he said. “No ghost likes to be ignored.”
“Is that why ghosts wake people up at night? So they can get a charge from their screams?”
“You’re catchin’ on, new ghost.”
When he got up to restart his search for the letter, I joined him. We were silent until he spoke again.
“Maybe you could use a little pickup. How about ya come with me today, and I’ll show ya what real ghosts do to stay active?”
I had so much on my plate, so many clues to hunt down, but I needed Randy. Needed way more advice, more interaction with my kind.
“Will we meet others like us?” I asked.
“Will we ever!”
With that lopsided grin, he conjured a travel tunnel. It burst into the air like an open mouth, and he waved me toward it.
After just a slight hesitation—still so much to do out here, so much to investigate—I nonetheless jumped in.
In for a penny…
… in for a pound of Boo World.
12
When Randy and I popped out of the tunnel in front of a two-story pine cabin house nestled into a flurry of oak trees in some bum-fuck part of nowhere, I thought he’d gotten his directions mixed up.
“Did you bring me to Grizzly Adams’s place or something?” I asked.
“Huh?” Randy scratched under his sailor cap as the travel tunnel folded up behind him.
I wondered if Randy and I should have a TV marathon someday. The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams had provided many nights of homey watching with my parents.
Randy started float-swaggering to the cabin before I could explain my love for the bear man.
“If you’re askin’ where we are,” he said, “we’re near Escondido.” Esh-con-di-do.