Mavis sighed heavily. “He did. I didn’t know much about it, honestly. I knew he was spending a lot of time away from the house, and he was giving both Cal and me a lot of grief. But I don’t know. I think I was what you might call wilfully blind to Marlo’s troubles. It was easier for me to imagine he had some bad peers than it was to think of him using drugs. He certainly didn’t use in my house—I can tell you that.”

  “But he did hide drugs here,” Sully said.

  Mavis’s eyes narrowed, the question clear in her stare. “What do you mean?”

  “Cal showed me a bag he found in Marlo’s bedroom. Given what you say, I can’t swear to it he found it here and not at their mom’s apartment, but I had the impression it was here. He felt like Marlo was disrespecting you. In fact, they had a fight over it. Marlo took a swing at him. He missed, but Cal didn’t. Cracked Marlo pretty good actually.”

  Mavis’s hand fluttered to her mouth, and she had to drop it before speaking. “How—how did you know about that—the fight, I mean? The cops weren’t called or anything.” She eyed Sully. “Where was Marlo hit?”

  Sully pointed to a spot on his jaw. “Right here.”

  This didn’t appear to settle Mavis any. Her hand was mid-way back to her lips when she caught herself and lowered it to the table. “Oh! Oh God.”

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” Dez asked.

  A sheen formed in her eyes, and she nodded a little too rapidly. “Yes. Yes, of course.” She refocused on Sully. “Did he show you anything else?”

  “Actually, he did,” Sully said. “He showed me how he took the bag, intending to get rid of the drugs somewhere. When he couldn’t find anyplace he considered safe, he took it to his job site and hid it where he figured no one would find it. And he showed me something else. It won’t be easy for you to hear.”

  Mavis sat forward, hands flat against the table. While she didn’t speak, her body language suggested she was readying herself for whatever Sully was about to share.

  Sully flashed her a sympathetic smile before continuing. “He showed me he was doing some work installing rebar one night. I don’t know when this would have been relative to the drug thing, but I don’t think it was long afterward. Anyway, he heard a noise and turned in time to see a big shelf come down on him.”

  Mavis held up a hand. “Please, don’t. I know what happened. I can’t stand hearing it again.”

  “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t have to. There’s something else about my ability I haven’t explained yet. I only see specific ghosts—people who were victims of homicide.”

  Sully paused, giving Mavis a moment to put two and two together. Dez watched as, second by second, reality dawned.

  “But that means …”

  When Mavis didn’t finish the statement, Sully did it for her. “It wasn’t an accident, ma’am. Someone pushed the shelf onto him on purpose.”

  “Who?”

  Sully winced. “This is the hard part. After Cal died—once he’d left his body—he saw someone else in the room. It was Marlo.”

  Another long pause. Finally, the fingers of one of Mavis’s hands curled, clawing against the tabletop until they located a napkin. She balled it up, held it tight. “You—you’re suggesting Marlo killed him?”

  “It’s what Cal showed me, yes.”

  “Well, just because he was there doesn’t mean he murdered him. I mean, did you actually see him do it?”

  Sully’s mouth worked as if he were chewing on the inside of his lip. “Not exactly, no.”

  “So it might have been someone else. Marlo might have simply found him.”

  “Did Marlo call nine-one-one?” Dez asked.

  “Not to my knowledge. He didn’t even mention having been there.”

  Dez furrowed his brow as he considered this. “Why wouldn’t he have called if he wasn’t involved?”

  Mavis drew the napkin in closer, squeezing it into a wad with both hands. “What makes you so sure this is real? How can anyone even know Marlo was there in the first place?”

  Dez sat forward. “Because Sully saw him there. I don’t know much, ma’am, but what I do know is my brother is never wrong—not unless the ghosts are.”

  Sully met Dez’s eye. “You’re right. Sometimes they are wrong.”

  Dez tilted his head as he studied Sully. “What are you getting at?”

  “Cal believes Marlo’s responsible for what happened to him—and maybe, indirectly even, he is. Except he didn’t see the person behind the shelf when it was pushed onto him. He saw Marlo in the room, though, and it could be he leapt to the wrong conclusion because of the faith he’d already lost in his brother. We could be starting in the wrong place, looking for the killer. Maybe this is why Cal and Marlo have been unable to cross over—Cal is struggling with what he believes Marlo did, and Marlo doesn’t know how to make peace with Cal.”

  “But why wouldn’t Marlo have called for help for Cal?”

  “Maybe he suspected Cal took his stuff. Might be why he went there. If so, last thing he would have wanted was to connect himself to a sizeable quantity of illegal drugs, right?”

  Dez would have thought the last thing Marlo would have wanted was to let his brother die without lifting a finger to help, but he left the thought unspoken. Not the sort of thing he wanted to voice in front of Mavis.

  Instead, Dez leaned nearer Sully, speaking quietly. “Are they here?”

  Sully shook his head. “I haven’t seen or felt either of them since we got here.”

  “How do you want to handle this?”

  “We’re going to need to talk to Marlo. Problem is, Marlo’s attached to someone who wants nothing to do with me.”

  “Who do you mean?” Mavis asked.

  Sully met her eye. “Steve Rossi, sergeant in charge of—”

  Mavis held up a hand. “I know Steve. He shot the boy who killed Marlo. You’re saying Marlo’s with him?”

  “He’s connected to him, yes. Maybe it’s simply to do with that moment. All the emotion and trauma, it can create bonds—both in life and in death. Marlo might feel safe with Sergeant Rossi, or he might recognize him as someone who experienced similar psychological trauma from what happened.”

  “Or maybe he thinks Steve can help him,” Mavis said.

  Dez shifted in his chair, which creaked beneath his weight. He hadn’t met a lot of chairs that didn’t complain when he sat on them. “You call him Steve. You’ve known him a while?”

  Mavis nodded. “Since it happened, yes. He came around to see me shortly after, expressing his condolences. I was hardly in a place to consider someone else’s feelings at the time, mind you, but I know now how badly he felt about the whole thing. He still sends me cards each Christmas, and he comes to see me once or twice a year. If the weather’s bad in winter, he stops by to shovel my drive on his way to work. We don’t talk about what happened that day with Marlo, but you don’t need a psychology degree to see he feels terrible about the whole thing. I mean, he was too late to save Marlo. Yet I wonder if he doesn’t think about what might have happened had he gotten there even a minute or two sooner.”

  She dropped her face into her hands, rubbing at her forehead a long moment. When she spoke, it came out slightly muffled behind her hands. “If you think you can find your answers this way, I’ll give him a call, ask him to stop by. Even if he won’t happily speak with you, I think he’d do it if I asked him to.” She lifted her head to eye Sully and Dez. “Is that what you’d like?”

  Dez cupped one hand around the other atop the table as he met her eye. “You might not get answers you’ll find easy to accept.”

  “Dez, you’ve just told me my boys are stuck here in turmoil. If your brother can help get them what they need to pass over to the next world and find some peace, I’ll accept whatever I have to.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Steve was finishing his shift when Mavis called, inviting him over for supper. Sully noted she didn’t mention a pair of private investigators would be joining them.

  “No point giving him a chance to come up with an excuse,” Mavis reasoned. She patted her thighs. “So what’ll we have for supper?”

  “I’ll order something in,” Dez said. “Least we can do given the way we’re upending your life.”

  Mavis gave him a warm smile. “Dez, my life was upended two decades ago, and it’s never righted since. Maybe you two flipping it over will prove a much-needed course correction.”

  Sully forced a smile. He’d helped a lot of people, both living and dead, but rarely did he walk away feeling like he’d given someone’s life a complete one-eighty-degree turn. At the end of the day, they were all still missing loved ones, and no fix existed for that.

  Mavis gave Dez the go-ahead to order a couple of pizzas, telling them she and Steve had shared a pepperoni and cheese a couple of times in the past. Suited Sully and Dez fine, so Dez left the table to put in the order while Sully stayed to chat with Mavis.

  “I don’t mean to cast doubt on what you do,” she said. “After what you described to me, I’m convinced you’re for real. But I struggle some too.

  “Before the boys died, I was a religious woman. Went to church every Sunday. Took them along with me, before they got too old to drag.” She chuckled at whatever memory came with the statement, the amusement fading as quickly as it had come. “When Cal died, I thought nothing in the world could hurt so bad. Then Marlo was taken from me too. I don’t mind telling you there was a point where I thought I might join them. But my daughter was having a hard time with it, and I felt I owed it to her to stick it out and support her.”

  “What happened to your daughter?”

  Mavis’s smile was sad. “She got remarried a few years after the boys died, and they moved away. I hear from her still, on the phone. We rarely see each other in person outside of major holidays. She’s never actually said it out loud—maybe she hasn’t even fully admitted it to herself—but I wonder sometimes if part of her blames me for what happened. They were under my roof at the time, under my care. They were my responsibility.”

  Sully eyed her. “You sure that’s what it is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve met a lot of people in your shoes—far more than I like to think about. Unexpected death leads to a lot of messed up emotions. For her, moving away might have been a matter of needing to start over somewhere her sons had never been—leaving a painful past behind.

  “Blame’s another matter. Sometimes, when we feel a certain way about ourselves, we think everyone else thinks the same thing—even when they don’t. When someone we love dies in a traumatic way, it’s common to question whether we could have done something to change the outcome. Most of the time, it’s not rational, but the things we feel the deepest rarely are, are they?”

  Mavis’s eyes welled with tears. This time, she didn’t move to hide them or wipe them away. “You think I blame myself?”

  Sully brushed at a crumb on the table. “I think you’ve gone all this time holding onto something, not knowing where to put it. More than once, you’ve probably wondered whether you could have done more to keep Marlo on the straight and narrow. If he had been, maybe he would have been okay. Maybe Cal wouldn’t have been distracted on the night he died.”

  Mavis’s face crumpled. “Is it—is it my fault?”

  Sully sat forward. “It’s normal to feel this way, but you need to understand it’s not your fault. None of it. You did a great job with them. Cal showed me. Sometimes, no matter what we do, the people in our lives are going to make bad choices, and those choices have consequences. And sometimes those consequences are the sort they can’t come back from. Doesn’t make it your fault, not even for a second.”

  He reached across the table and touched her fingers. “Let Dez and me find out what really happened to Cal. Chances are it won’t only give him and Marlo some closure, it’ll help you too.”

  Mavis turned her hand and took Sully’s fingers in hers. “What you do, it must be so hard.”

  He smiled. “It is. Helping people gets me through it, though. The outcome’s all that matters.”

  At least, that was what Sully was telling himself when Steve Rossi showed up half an hour later, minutes after the pizza arrived. Given the expression on his face when he spotted Sully and Dez, Sully guessed Steve wanted them to leave here wearing their meal.

  “What is this?” he demanded, accusing eyes darting between Mavis, Sully and Dez.

  Mavis waved him into the kitchen. “Come in, Steve. Please.”

  Though Steve did as requested, his gaze continued to shift between Sully and Dez. Obvious he thought he was being railroaded but couldn’t figure out why.

  Steve allowed himself to be ushered by Mavis into one of the chairs at the table. While he refrained from talking while Mavis served a few slices onto plates Dez held and distributed, it was clear to Sully he wouldn’t stay quiet for long.

  “I know you’re wondering what this is about,” Dez said.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually.” Steve shot forward in his chair and fixed Dez in a glare. “You and your brother were snooping around the old station and now he”—jabbing a finger in Sully’s direction—“thinks he saw—”

  Steve cut himself off, gaze shooting toward Mavis as if suddenly recalling where he was and who he was with.

  Mavis finished dishing up and sat as Dez did, holding up a placating palm toward Steve. “It’s all right, Steve. I know all about it. They filled me in.”

  Steve aimed his glare at Sully. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, coming here and putting her through this. She’s been through enough, damn it.”

  Mavis sighed. “Steve, please. I’m fine. Or maybe I will be, anyway, if I can find out a few things. Which is why I asked you here tonight.”

  Steve fired her a pained look, a man betrayed. Whatever comments filled his brain remained unspoken though. Sully was pretty sure he knew why. Talk about a guy who understood the feeling of blame.

  “We aren’t here to stir anything up,” Sully said.

  “Sure shit doesn’t feel that way.”

  Movement behind Steve—a sort of shadowy shimmer—told Sully the reason for Steve’s invitation had arrived. A couple more seconds, and Marlo had fully materialized. His gaze drifted toward Mavis and held there.

  Sully studied him. No, there was definitely no anger or accusation within the stare; nothing, in fact, but love.

  Sully dragged his eyes from Marlo back to Steve. “You come here quite a bit for visits and to help Mavis when she needs it. You ever think why?”

  Steve sneered. “You serious?”

  Sully raised his brows in silent response.

  Steve shook his head, distancing himself from the conversation for a moment by chewing on a bite of pizza. No one spoke, as if everyone knew to wait him out.

  Steve took his time finishing the bite and swallowing. He dropped his slice back onto the plate as he fired Sully a glare. “I don’t know what you want me to say.” He jutted his chin toward Dez. “I’d imagine he filled you in.”

  “On what happened to Marlo? Yeah.”

  “So you know why I come here. This lady lost her family. That isn’t right, not for a damn second. They should be here every time it snows, keeping her driveway cleared. They should be the ones sending her cards at Christmas, making sure she’s got somewhere to go so she’s not alone for the holidays. Well, they’re not here, so I am.”

  “Which tells me you’re a good man,” Sully said. “What I was wondering, though, was whether it’s always a planned thing, you coming here, or whether you sometimes just get the feeling all of a sudden.”

  Steve cocked his head. “You’re going to tell me it’s Marlo, aren’t you?”

  Sully shrugged. “I think a lot of it’s you, but he chips in an awful lot. Two of you have been connected a long time. When that happens, it can get hard to differentiate between your own feelings and the spirit’s—especially when you don’t even know the ghost is there.”

  Steve’s chest heaved. At first, Sully thought he was getting angry, but it wasn’t rage Sully saw in his eyes.

  It was fear.

  “Tell me something right now,” Steve said. “Something about Marlo no one besides me knows.” He sat forward, the challenge clear in the hardness of his expression. “If he’s really around, get him to tell you what I was doing last night.”

  Sully peered up at Marlo. Marlo rolled his eyes.

  Sully twisted in his seat, making it easier for Marlo to reach his hand. “If it’s all right with you, Marlo, just think of the answer and let the memory play out in your thoughts. When you touch my hand, I’ll be able to see it.”

  Marlo moved to him, his expression registering bemusement. Ghosts typically trusted him with this part, but he supposed it made sense they might occasionally be as skeptical of his abilities as the living could be. Perhaps it was desperation, a need to pass along a message, to finally be heard by someone, which kept ghosts from questioning Sully. Some of them though—people like Marlo who’d once surrounded himself with the untrustworthy—weren’t quite so willing to share.

  He did though, long enough to provide the answer Steve requested.

  “You had a nightmare,” Sully told Steve once the vision ended. “You got up, chugged back a fair bit of alcohol straight from the bottle. Cuban rum, I think it was. From a cabinet next to the fridge, underneath the counter. You watched TV while you drank. Seinfeld. You didn’t laugh. You finally passed out on the couch.”

  As Sully spoke, Steve grew paler and paler until Sully worried he was about to pass out all over again for an entirely different reason.

  Dez reached toward Steve without touching him. “You okay, man?”

  Steve held up a hand, a call to leave him be for a moment. He took a few long, deep breaths, eyes squeezing shut. Sully wondered whether Steve might be trying to ward off a full-blown panic attack.

  “Wasn’t the answer I was going for,” Steve said at last. “I went to a movie with friends.”

  “The rest happened later,” Sully said. “I guess Marlo saw what he showed me as more important than the movie.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22