Till death, p.1
Till Death, page 1
part #5 of Ghost Detective Short Stories Series
In the Ghost Detective Universe
Ghost Detective Novels
(best read in order)
Beyond the Grave
Unveiling the Past
Beneath the Surface
Piercing the Veil
Ghost Detective Shorts
(all standalone)
Just Desserts
Lost Friends
Family Bonds
Common Ground
Till Death
Family History
Heritage
New Beginnings
Far From Home
Severed Ties
Eternal Bond
Harsh Expectations
Dull Expectations
Ghost Detective Collections
Unfinished Business, Volume 1
Unfinished Business, Volume 2
Till Death
A Ghost Detective Short Story
R.W. Wallace
Varden Publishing
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Also By R.W. Wallace
About the Author
Copyright
One
We don’t often get double funerals in our cemetery.
We once had a couple who died in a car crash who were buried together, and once eighty-year-old twin sisters who died mere hours apart. In both cases, the families did a single funeral.
In neither case did any of them linger as a ghost.
This afternoon, when the church doors open and two caskets are carried out, the screams are so loud I’m guessing the ghosts in the cemetery of the next town over can hear them.
New arrivals.
“Jeez, that’s loud,” Clothilde says from her perch on her tombstone. Never a ghost for respecting the rules of the living realm, her worn Converse slide through the stone every time she swings her legs and her wavy shoulder-length hair blows in a non-existent breeze.
I shove my hands farther into the pockets of my jacket, hiking my shoulders up toward my ears, wishing it would help with the volume.
“Well,” I say tentatively. “There are two of them.”
A snort.
I hope they won’t take too long to accept that they’re dead. The caskets won’t let them out until they’ve made their peace with it—and until they do, we’re stuck listening to the screams.
I cock my head as I listen more closely. “Do they sound…off…to you?”
Clothilde rolls her eyes in true teenager fashion, but she focuses on the noise. “Yeah,” she agrees.
“It’s not quite the right type of screams, is it?” I squint at the advancing caskets as if that will help me figure it out.
Clothilde jumps down from her perch and advances toward the freshly dug grave, leaving me to scramble to follow. Her white shirt billows in the imaginary breeze.
“They’re not screams of panic,” she says, clearly intrigued now. “They’re screams of anger.”
She’s right.
Where most people—myself included—fight the panic for days on end by yelling for help, and by hitting the casket with all our force, this sounds like we should be expecting two enraged Hulks.
They’re pounding on their caskets, but it’s not the unrelenting thumps of panic. It’s calculated bursts of pure rage—maybe at the casket for keeping them prisoner.
Maybe at something else.
We reach the double-spaced grave at the same time as the group of mourners. Standing less than five meters from the caskets, I can make out swear words, inventive ways in which to kill someone, and just pure, unadulterated fury.
“What the hell happened?” I wonder out loud.
“Dunno,” Clothilde says with a smile. “But I can’t wait to find out. I’m gonna go listen in on the friends’ conversations.” And off she goes.
At first, I’m dumbfounded by her enthusiasm. Usually, she lets me do the work on investigating the circumstances around a new arrival’s death, and she’ll tag along helping me figure things out when she feels like it.
The priest clears his throat, and I snap back to the present.
I have a job to do.
The funeral procession isn’t particularly large for a double funeral, and I can only make out one “family” group, so at first, I think we’re talking about two members of the same family. Siblings?
The “friends” part of the group seems to average in the late twenties—probably the age of our victims, too.
As I sidle closer to the family members to eavesdrop on anything they might say during the ceremony, I realize there are actually two families.
I most definitely have two pairs of parents—in their late fifties or early sixties—but they’re standing together. They know each other well enough to lean on each other.
Our Hulks are most likely a couple, then.
“I just don’t understand,” one of the mothers—a regal woman with long, graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses—says to her shorter and darker-haired counterpart. “The local police keep saying there are no dangerous currents in the area. But Bruno and Audrey both knew how to swim. How could they have drowned?”
“I don’t understand it, either,” the other mother replies. “We spent entire weeks by the ocean while Bruno was growing up. He never needed rescuing no matter where we went.”
The first mother dabs a handkerchief at the tip of her nose. “I have half a mind to make a scene at the police station downtown tomorrow and insist they send someone to Tenerife to investigate properly.”
Seems likely we have a double murder on our hands, in other words.
It might explain the anger.
A bloodcurdling shriek emits from the casket on the right.
I take an involuntary step back. We’ve had our share of murder cases in this cemetery, but none of them have been this angry at being dead.
I glance over at Clothilde, who’s standing between two women in the “friends” section, eavesdropping with a glint in her eyes.
Clothilde, like so many teenagers, has a very short fuse, and although I don’t know much about the circumstances around her death, I do know she’s very, very angry about it.
“Clothilde!” I yell, not needing to worry about the priest taking offense at me yelling during his speech. “Were you this angry when you woke up?”
She glances up at me with half a smile lurking on her lips. Shakes her head.
I stay with the parents until the caskets are in the ground and people start moving toward their cars, but don’t learn anything useful.
“You get anything?” I ask Clothilde as we’re once again alone in the cemetery and strolling back toward where our own graves lie.
Clothilde shrugs. “They were on their honeymoon in Tenerife. Drowned together in a secluded but calm and not-at-all-dangerous creek on the fourth day. Local police say no foul, but nobody here believes it.”
I sit down on the slight mound that marks my grave. My gaze goes to the fresh grave and those screams.
“Maybe they were killed,” I say without conviction, “and they know who did it. That’s why they’re so angry?”
Clothilde jumps up on her tombstone and sits with her feet dangling and crossed at the ankles. “They’ll tell us when they get out.”
Two
After two days, the screams and insults are down to being only sporadic.
The good news is, Clothilde and I get some much-needed respite from listening to them, and it probably means their acceptance of their new status as ghosts and subsequent release from the casket is imminent.
Not so good news, or…weird news? They seem to be screaming at each other now, across caskets and the small space separating them six feet under.
I didn’t even know that was possible.
Now that they’re buried under six feet of fresh dirt, I’m not actually able to make out the words, just the general feel.
And they’re most definitely communicating down there, with nothing but fury and hate.
These people were on their honeymoon?
Another two days, and one morning we hear a triumphant, “Finally!” as a dark blond head erupts from the new grave.
It’s closely followed by a woman’s head with long, black hair and a beak nose. “Aaargh!” she screams—at her husband’s ghost.
I don’t know what happens if two ghosts start fighting—and I’m not particularly keen on finding out. So I rush over to the young couple crawling out of their graves.
“Welcome to our cemetery,” I say to them in a horribly fake cheery voice that makes me cringe with embarrassment. “I see you’ve finally been released.”
Yup, horrific greeting.
But it does the tick.
Both man and woman shut up and stop advancing on each other to stare at me instead.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” I say, keeping my fake smile in place. “My name is Robert and I’ve been haunting this cemetery for thirty years already. I believe you are Bruno and Audrey?”
They stare at me as if I just sprouted a second head, but Bruno finally replies, “Yeah, that’s us.”
The woman—Audrey—sniffs.
Bruno snaps around to face his wife, fists clenched at his sides. “What?”
Audrey snarls back at him. “Always talking for the both of us.”
Pointing at me, Bruno’s practically growling. “He asked if he had our names right. Did I not give the right answer? Are we not Bruno and Aud
Oh, dear Lord.
I have no idea how to deal with this. I wasn’t much for relationships when I was alive, and I certainly haven’t felt like hitching my wagon to anyone since I became a ghost.
I search the cemetery for Clothilde, but the girl is nowhere to be seen.
Of course, having died at only twenty years old, she might not be much help in this situation anyway.
“There now,” I say, trying to sound calming. “I didn’t mean anything by the order in which I said your names.” I point to the wooden crosses shoved into the dirt at the head of their graves, with their names penciled in. “I simply read them in the order I see them.”
Bruno looks vindicated, his lips lifting into a slight sneer.
Audrey ignores me as if I’m not even there.
“And here we go again! I tell you once that I’m a feminist and you throw it back in my face whenever you can. I ask you to do the dishes? It’s because I’m a feminist. I make you fold your own clothes when they come out of the dryer? It’s because I’m a feminist. Anything that might make you actually do something around the house, and you make it about politics.
“Well, it’s not!” She screams at her husband so loud, I jump back a step in fright.
“It’s about human decency,” she screams on. “About treating me like an equal, a human being. And not your freaking maid and sex slave!”
I seriously consider just leaving them to it.
This is way beyond my area of expertise and things are getting way too personal.
Bruno laughs.
The guy has some balls to have the guts to laugh at a woman behaving like Audrey is right now.
“Sex slave?” His voice drips with venom. “You don’t think that’s taking it just a tad too far?”
He turns to me—taking his eyes off the murderous woman not even a meter away—and gives me that look that says, can you believe this woman?
Sorry, buddy. Not going there.
“As you may have noticed,” I say, my voice not quite as steady as I would have liked, but close enough. “You’ve become ghosts.”
They both look at me like I’m an idiot again, but at least they’ve shut up.
“Now, as you may also have noticed, there aren’t all that many ghosts here, despite the numerous graves.”
Usually, new arrivals always ask the same questions. This couple doesn’t seem to care about anything but each other, so I’m going to answer the questions even if they don’t ask.
“The reason for this is that only people with unfinished business linger. So that they can tie up any loose ends before moving on.”
Still no reaction other than disdain, so I soldier on. “Do you know what your unfinished business might be?”
“Him,” Audrey says, pointing at her husband.
“Her,” Bruno says at the same time, with the same gesture.
I nod. Several times. “Right. What about each other haven’t you finished?”
Again, they answer at the same time.
“I want to kill him.”
“I want to kill her.”
My mouth gets away with me before I can stop it. “Well, that already seems to be accomplished, doesn’t it?”
Three
“You think they really killed each other?” Clothilde asks from her perch on her tombstone.
We’re at our usual spot, watching the recently married Bruno and Audrey try to kill each other.
They’ve been at it for almost a week already.
Ghosts can’t hurt other ghosts. But they apparently need more time to accept that fact than they did to accept that they’d died and become ghosts.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “If they did, their unfinished business shouldn’t be unfinished, should it? They’d know who killed them, and the murderer is dead.”
Bruno launches himself at Audrey in what would have been an awesome rugby tackle—if any of the participants had had an actual physical body.
He flies right through her and they both scream in frustration.
“Maybe someone else killed them both while they were swimming in Tenerife,” I say. “And their unfinished business is figuring out who it was. The parents seemed convinced there had been foul play.”
“Hmm.” Clothilde tips her head from side to side as if weighing several sides of an argument. “They were also convinced Bruno and Audrey were ‘the happiest couple alive.’” She cocks an eyebrow. “I beg to differ.”
I bark a laugh.
“They’ll have to calm down at some point,” I say. “We’ll get the truth out of them then.”
It’s a good thing we’re all dead and don’t have anything better to do.
It takes them a month.
They quarrel and yell at each other while their family members come and go, while the stonemasons come to install their tombstones, and while the grass slowly starts to grow on their graves.
And then, one day, they stop.
They sit, each on their half of the grave, feet out in front of them, heads hanging, and anger gone.
Exhaustion.
Not physical exhaustion because that’s not possible for ghosts, but we’re quite capable of the mental kind.
I get up and brush non-existent dirt off my pants. “Wanna come this time?” I ask Clothilde.
“Sure.” She jumps down from her perch and skips along the path in front of me like a ten-year-old.
“You could have helped out last time, too, you know.” God knows I needed it.
A one-shouldered shrug. “They weren’t ready.”
Bruno and Audrey look at us through their lashes when we approach, defiant but also resigned.
“I don’t think we got off on the right foot the other day,” I say and sit down across from the couple. “I’m Robert and this is Clothilde.”
“Hey.” With a huge smile, Clothilde plops down next to me.
“We’re the only resident ghosts at this time,” I say. “In addition to you guys, of course. And we’d love to help you figure out what you need to move on.”
The newlyweds give me no answer, but they’re listening.
“Like I said before, if you’re here, it means you have unfinished business. It can be saying goodbye to a loved one, making sure the people you leave behind are okay, finding your murderer. These are just the most common cases. Do you feel like any of them fit?”
Audrey’s gaze is flat and her face impassive. She seems completely worn out, and highly unimpressed.
“No,” Bruno finally answers in a low but annoyed voice. “None of that fits.”
He takes a deep breath and starts ticking points off on his fingers. “If we needed to say goodbye to anybody, we would have done so when they came to visit.”
So they had noticed, at least.
Second finger. “We’ve been married for less than a week, have no kids, and our parents certainly don’t need our inheritance. Nothing there to tie up.”
Third finger. “We were most definitely murdered, but we already know who did it.”
I perk up. So there was foul play.
Maybe our task is to make sure the killer gets caught.
Bruno folds down the first two and turns his hand to point the less-than-polite gesture at his wife.
Audrey doesn’t even bother to move a muscle. “You killed me first,” she says.
It’s not an accusation, nor a tease. She’s stating fact.
Clothilde lets out a peal of laughter, making me jerk in surprise.
“You guys really did kill each other?” she says. “That’s priceless. How did you do it?”
“She may have died first,” Bruno says. “But she did the deed first. She didn’t leave me a choice.”
Sitting cross-legged on the grass, Clothilde leans forward toward the couple. You’d think she was at the cinema.
Ignoring her, I level Bruno and Audrey with my sternest gaze. “You’re going to tell us what happened. From the beginning. And without accusing each other of murder.” I hold up a hand to stop their arguments. “Even if it is true. Now, give me the facts.”
Four
