Haunted Souls, page 12
“Well, I’m not. Ty is not that manipulative.” She needed more coffee. And possibly some food. Grabbing her mug, she headed over to the group of appliances sitting on the counter. Several tiles with small colorful handprints, labeled with names and dates, were propped up along the wall. Would the Leeds ever want Tyler’s up there as well?
“All I’m asking is if it’s possible. Was there water on the floor?”
She slammed the microwave door with a little too much force. “Yes. Because I made him get out of the tub to unlock the door.” Stabbing at the buttons, she finally brought the machine to life. Apparently it planned to cook her beverage for seven minutes. That might be a bit much.
When he didn’t respond, she spun back toward him. He was looking at her pointedly, his blue eyes revealing a hint of sympathy for her poor, confused state of mind.
“Fine,” she snapped, yanking open the microwave door to stop the thing from incinerating her coffee. “I suppose, based on the evidence, it’s possible Ty did it. I don’t think he did, however. And I need you to promise, for his safety, that you won’t say things about Josiah not being real in our house.”
He spread his palms out on the table. “I can do that. It might not seem like it, but I really don’t want to fight with you. In fact, I want to ask you something.” He pushed himself to standing and ran his hands along the sides of his head. His bicep muscles bunched beneath the black and green tattoo. “I want to do something alone with Tyler this weekend. What do you think?”
Pain lanced through her. Hiding her expression, she reached for the mug. The ceramic seared her fingertips, but she only tightened her grip. “I think Drew would blow a gasket.”
“I think you’re right. But I’m not asking Drew. I’m asking you.”
She sighed, leaning back against the counter. “I think Ty would love it.”
“Really? You’re okay with that?”
“Yes. Drew doesn’t know Tyler like I do. He doesn’t know you like I do.” Oh. The blush that seemed to have taken up permanent residence under her skin returned as her brain registered what she’d said. Would this ever end?
Brett didn’t seem to catch her unintended innuendo. Instead, his blue eyes shone with genuine gratitude. “Thank you, Em. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
A lump lodged itself in her throat. She nodded, lifting the mug to her lips. Outside, a police siren wailed in the distance, the perfect soundtrack to her inner turmoil.
This was it. Ty would start spending time alone with his father, and she’d miss huge chunks of his life. Weekends would become bargaining chips; holidays would be split between them.
And she’d only see Brett during the mandatory drop-off and pick-up exchanges.
Something in her expression must have given her away. Lines formed across his forehead as his brows pulled together. He cleared his throat. “I’m not doing this to hurt you, Emily. It’s something that has to happen.”
“No, it’s fine. I mean, I understand. And it’ll be great, because then I can get some research done. On the ghost thing.” The words came out in staccato chirps, like some deranged bird. She probably sounded as crazy as she looked.
“Okay.” He stared at her for another few seconds, perhaps waiting to see if she really was okay. With a small shrug, he gathered his things off the table, crossing the kitchen toward the sink. “Oh, and I made a few things I found in the freezer—sausage and hash browns. I realize those aren’t the healthiest of choices, but there’s not a lot of food here right now. Anyway, he seemed to like it. The leftovers are in the fridge; help yourself if you’re hungry. I’m going to throw some laundry in, and then I’ve got to get back to the base.”
“Okay. Thanks.” Her gaze flicked toward the refrigerator. So, they were going to pretend last night didn’t happen. Fine, she could play that game too.
No, an inner voice insisted as she studied the seashell magnets pinning family pictures to the fridge. Tell him. Tell him the rest, now. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough for forgiveness, but it might make him hate her less.
She picked at a cuticle, debating as he stopped to wash his coffee mug in the sink. A million reasons not to have the conversation tumbled through her mind. He was in a hurry. Tyler was right in the other room. She probably looked like she’d been caught in a tornado.
“Brett,” she began, hesitating. He turned, and she noticed how tight the shirt he was wearing was—most likely something borrowed from his father. Because his own shirt was down in the bed, left behind in his escape.
Anything she said now would seem like a desperate attempt to keep the door open for sex. She quickly changed tactics. “Um, I just wanted to say thanks. For letting us stay,” she amended quickly.
He paused in front of her, his jaw line set in a hard line. “I will always be there for both of you. Always.”
Chapter 17
He glanced back, checking on Ty once again as he pulled out of Emily’s driveway. Thank God he’d somehow had the foresight to buy a pick-up truck with a backseat. Otherwise, he’d have to borrow a car to drive his son anywhere.
Tiny raindrops fogged up the windshield. It was a gray, drizzly day—not what he’d hoped for on his first Saturday alone with his son. But they would still have fun. Without the distracting temptation of his mother.
He shouldn’t have done what he did on Wednesday night. And yet, all he could think about was having sex with her again. It was driving him out of his mind. He’d avoided both of them for the rest of the week, hoping some distance would help lessen this raging adolescent desire. It didn’t work. From the second he saw her this morning, all he wanted to do was drag her upstairs and toss her on the bed. This, while his attention should be focused on his son.
What was it about her? Emily had always possessed some strange combination of strength and vulnerability he found irresistible. Physically, she was gorgeous. In bed, their chemistry threatened to ignite the sheets. Now, she was the mother of his child, which was no small thing.
And it could never work. She was also the woman who had kept his child a secret. He was a man who required special housing exemptions due to night terrors. Once, in the hazy days following the explosion, he’d attacked a male nurse who’d had the unfortunate luck to wake him from a horrifyingly vivid dream involving combat. A normal relationship would never be a possibility. At the very least, his screams would continuously deprive anyone near him of regular sleep. The worst case scenario involved an unconscious act of violence against someone most likely half his size. He’d learned later what he did to the nurse, even with his injuries and IV lines. There was no telling what he might do to an unsuspecting woman emerging from a deep sleep.
A dull ache flared in his knuckles, and he loosened his grip on the steering wheel. Calm. The last thing Tyler needed was to be exposed to Brett’s anxiety. He flicked the wipers to a higher speed as he merged onto Route 6. “Ready for our big day, bud?” he called out, forcing all thoughts of Emily from his mind.
****
Emily locked the front door and collapsed onto the couch. She felt as worn out as the sagging cushions. The exhaustion, plus the depression over Tyler leaving with Brett, sapped every ounce of energy from her bones.
Maybe she could go back to sleep. Unfortunately, she’d tried to combat a sleepless night with hefty doses of coffee this morning, so it might not work. She was supposed to hit the library to do some research, but the effort it would take even to drive there seemed no less arduous than climbing Mt. Everest.
A heavy sigh escaped as she watched the rain spit against her living room windows. Nope. She was not going out there.
She pushed herself off the couch, a small smile touching her lips as she thought about the weather. Brett had decided to take Ty to the Cape Cod Children’s Museum. On a rainy Saturday. She suppressed an evil giggle. He had no idea what he was getting into.
In the kitchen, she opened a can of tuna and cracked the sliding glass door. Terence usually ate outside now, on the back deck, but she’d been reluctant to put his cat food out in the rain this morning. She was hoping the combination of hunger and dampness might lure him inside today. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” she called, tapping a fork against the can.
Terence’s orange head emerged from underneath the deck, right where the steps down to the yard didn’t quite meet up with the flimsy wooden lattice trim. He stared at her suspiciously.
“Come on, T.” She leaned down and waved the tuna enticingly.
After a short standoff, he slipped out of the hole and crept up the two stairs, his tail twitching.
“Gotcha!” she whispered, nabbing the scruff of his neck. She scooped him up and braced herself as she stepped into the kitchen.
No claws sank into her skin. He twisted in her arms, landing with a thump as she released him. Before he could dart back outside, she grabbed the tuna can and shut the door against the gray drizzle. She could almost feel her hair frizzing in her heavy ponytail.
She forked the tuna into Terence’s dish while he slinked around the room, performing a feline security scan. Everything must have checked out, because he returned to his dishes and dug into his treat with alarming enthusiasm.
So Josiah wasn’t in the kitchen. Good. He was probably somewhere in the spirit world, catching up on his sleep, since he’d been busy keeping her up all night with his antics.
She’d stayed up late to watch the Red Sox trounce the Yankees. That had been a mistake, especially since she’d worked the night before. When she finally went to bed, a repetitive knocking sound had her back up within minutes.
She rushed into the hall, pausing for a moment when the noise stopped. Her pulse thudded in her ears, and she tried to listen above the hammering of her heart.
Another series of eerie thumps echoed through the dark house. It was coming from Tyler’s room. Two quick steps brought her to his open doorway.
Moonlight trickled in through the striped curtains, painting the bedroom in a silvery glow. Between the two windows, the empty rocking chair slowly rocked, the top rail of the seat hitting the wall each time it traveled backward. From the corner, Tyler’s even breaths filled the silence between each creak and bang.
Wrapping her arms around her waist, she tiptoed toward the bed to check on his sleeping form. Somehow, the noise didn’t disturb him. His thick eyelashes fluttered as he mumbled something unintelligible; then he rolled to his side, still deep in slumber.
She pulled the stuffed lamb from under his shoulder as she debated her options. Calling Brett after midnight wasn’t one of them. Her first instinct was to get rid of the chair, but she saw several drawbacks: one, there was a child ghost sitting in it, and two, she didn’t want to anger said ghost. Her stomach churned as the bathtub incident played in her mind like a horrible movie.
Still, the rocking chair couldn’t continue its rhythmic banging against the wall. She took a few hesitant steps forward, shivering as the chill enveloped her. Her throat turned to dust as she prepared to address the boy ghost, and she swallowed hard. “Uh…Josiah? I have to move the chair. Just a little, to keep it from hitting the wall. You can stay.” Oh, God. Would he understand? He certainly had heard her the night in the bathroom.
The chair’s movement came to an abrupt halt. Well, there’s my answer. Hysteria bubbled in her chest as she sank down onto her heels in front of the chair. Now for the hard part—she didn’t want to risk touching any phantom body parts. With a deep breath, she reached out and grabbed the two wooden rockers.
It was like plunging her hands into a snow bank. Gasping, she yanked the chair forward a few inches. An image flashed through her mind—brown leather boots, worn and cracked—before disappearing so quickly it was impossible to tell whether her eyes actually saw the apparition or her mind simply manufactured it out of fear.
Her momentum continued to carry her backward as she released the chair. She sat down hard on the floor, the impact sending a jolt up her spine. Air rushed from her lungs with a whoosh.
A moment of silence followed, and then the chair began its slow rocking again. Now what? Carrying Tyler out of the bedroom might appear hostile, like some type of abandonment. But she couldn’t just go back to sleep in her room while this was going on. Sighing heavily, she trudged to her room and returned to the hallway with blankets and pillows to set up a makeshift bed outside her son’s room. Throughout the night, the chair rocked, creaking like a pendulum marking off the hours.
Terence meowed plaintively, pulling her from her dazed reverie. “Hmm?” she murmured, blinking as the dreary scene outside the sliding glass door swam into focus. The cat made another demanding noise; his amber eyes glittered as he looked at her pointedly. The dish beside him was empty.
“Oh, okay.” He was finally inside, surely he deserved a little more of his gourmet treat. She pulled the foil back off the can in her hand and dumped the rest of the tuna into his bowl. “Don’t get used to it. This is a bit more high-end than regular cat food.”
She ran her fingers along his warm ginger fur. “I don’t suppose you want to come upstairs with me, huh, kitty?” Terence didn’t answer. “Well, it was a rhetorical question anyway,” she continued, well aware she was trying to engage a cat in conversation. Maybe she should call Kaitlyn before she lost her last shred of sanity.
No. She was too exhausted. And she wasn’t ready to talk about what had happened with Brett. As it was, Kay was going to kill her for holding out this long. But that was a conversation that would end up taking a lot of time; it would have to wait until she felt ready to share. Right now, she was still reeling in humiliation.
“That’s it,” she told the cat. “I’m going to go take a nap.” She dragged herself up the stairs, holding on to the banister for support.
Chapter 18
The idea came to her as she stood at the sink, cleaning the breakfast dishes on Sunday morning. Yesterday’s rain had finally moved on, and the sun was struggling to break through the remaining clouds. Emily chewed on her lip, chastising herself once again for failing to get any research done during her time alone on Saturday. The nap had done her a lot of good, but waiting for Brett to return with Tyler had caused her nerves to once again crackle with tension. In the end, the stress was completely unwarranted, since Brett barely uttered two words as he dropped Ty off. Truthfully, he had looked a bit frazzled—most likely the result of his first rainy weekend day at the Children’s Museum.
There would be no chance for a library trip today. Even if it was open, Tyler wouldn’t sit quietly while she pored over…what? What, exactly, was she going to try to find? The only clues she really had—the name Josiah and a place of death—were pretty vague. And those had come from a three-and-a-half-year-old.
She needed more to go on. Drying her hands, she glanced over at Tyler, who was wheeling a train under a Lego bridge on the kitchen table. She glanced around the room cautiously as she weighed the pros and cons of asking her son for help. While she didn’t want to encourage him to communicate with a ghost, she had to find a way to get the ghost back to…wherever he belonged. A place where he could rest in peace. Away from her son.
“Hey, baby, I have a question. Can you talk to Josiah whenever you want?” Her hand drifted to her mouth, and she chewed on a cuticle as she waited.
The train track he’d constructed this morning followed the edge of the table in a complete circle. He walked around as he guided the train, releasing it when he moved around a chair and then continuing his path around the table. “If he’s listening.”
Okay. “Is he…ah…listening now?”
He stopped, raising his blue eyes to the ceiling as if he were concentrating on establishing the mental connection he seemed to share with the child ghost. “Yes,” he said after a few tense seconds that stretched into hours.
Suppressing a shudder, she nodded. “Could you…ask him what his last name is? You know, like your last name is Shea? Maybe he could help you write it on the refrigerator.” She pointed toward the magnetic letters on the fridge with a shaking finger.
Still clutching the wooden train, he padded over to the cluster of colorful letters massed along the bottom of the door like an alphabet army. He cocked his head in concentration, moving his hand over the magnets until he hit on the right one. “Josiah says he can’t read good,” Ty explained as his little fingers closed over an “M.” “But he can spell his name.” A hint of pride for his friend’s abilities filled his voice.
Can’t read well. She pressed her lips together, fighting the wild urge to correct a ghost’s grammar. Her eyes tracked Ty’s movements as he slowly lined the letters up.
The word “Matthews” took shape on the dingy white door.
“Josiah Matthews?” she confirmed. She twisted the towel in her hands. What next? “Can he tell you what year he was born? You can use the number magnets.”
He stared off in the distance, and then frowned as he turned toward her. “He doesn’t know.” His forehead wrinkled as he listened to an inaudible voice. “He knows when he died,” Tyler finally offered.
Oh, God. “Can you…use the numbers to write it down? The year?”
He picked at the number magnets. A one…a seven…a five. After another search, he looked up at Emily. “I need another seven.”
It took a moment for his meaning to click. Then she understood: he needed another seven to complete the year 1757. A shiver traveled up her spine. Josiah Matthews had died before the Revolutionary War. This was surreal.
She pulled her attention back to Ty. “Oh…there’s only one of each number, honey. I’m sorry. But I understand what you mean. The year would be 1757.”
Although it had been weeks ago, she still clearly remembered the first time Tyler had mentioned Josiah—the morning after their trip to the Old Jail. He’d said his new friend was twelve years old. She quickly did the math: he would have been born around 1745. But why had a twelve-year-old died in a colonial jail?
“How did he die?”
It slipped out before she could consider the ramifications of such a question. Tyler’s eyes drooped with dismay moments before his features went lax. In a hollow voice, he muttered, “Someone hurt him. He just wanted to share his food. His head…” The sentence drifted off as Tyler lifted his hand to the back of his blond head, pain clouding his expression.
