Dead Man Talking Read online

Chapter 1

  Weird things tend to happen when you live in a haunted house. I see ghosts. I talk to ghosts. Unlike people who scream and race hell-bent for leather the opposite direction at the first sight of a specter from another dimension, my aunt, Twila Brown, and I actually hunt down rumors of ghosts. I found my very own haunted house completely by accident — or with the help of Fate. Doesn’t matter. After two years, it suits me just fine, and my paranormal residents abide by the rules — most of the time.

  Two years earlier, however, all I wanted to do was curl up in my New Orleans apartment and hide from both worlds, real and supernatural. Then all the way from Yankee-land, Twila showed up on my doorstep the afternoon after the final court hearing on Jack’s and my divorce. She caught me halfway through a bottle of Crown Royal and had me in the car and on the road before I sobered up. Patiently, at first, she listened to my maudlin musings.

  “I thought we were being so...adult about the whole thing." I snuffled and wiped the back of my hand under my nose, and Twila sighed and shoved the box of tissues off the console into my lap. I ignored that in favor of the soggy bunch of fast-food napkins knotted in my fist.

  “I didn’t think it would be this hard,” I continued in a self-pitying whine. “But walking out of the courthouse — Jack didn’t even show up for the hearing! Did I tell you?”

  “Several times,” Twila answered.

  “Oh. Well, I was remembering how Jack and I talked that first year. That log cabin we were gonna build with the porch all the way around it. Rocking chairs where we’d sit and watch our grandkids catch lightning bugs in the yard. It just all went so damn wrong!”

  Westbound on I-10, we hit one of the miles-long stretches of causeway across a swamp, and the tires clickety-clanked on steel girders separating the asphalt sections. Twila accelerated and changed lanes to pass a pickup pulling a candy-apple red bass boat decked out with padded swivel seats and a huge Mercury motor. Boxes and suitcases filled the pickup bed. Before we reached the trailer brake lights, I ducked and buried my face, nose in the sodden napkins.

  “What in the world are you doing?” Twila asked.

  I turned my head sideways, but stayed crouched in a near-fetal position. “Jack. That’s Jack’s truck and the new boat he bought. He’s moving to Longview. Remember? I told you.”

  “No,” Twila mused. “I don’t recall you mentioning that news.”

  “I’ve had a few other things on my mind,” I pouted. “He has a new job. Detective on the Longview force. In Texas. Longview’s about a tenth the size of New Orleans.”

  We were still beside the truck. I could hear matching clickety-clacks from it, and Twila glanced out the passenger window. Then she lifted one hand in a friendly wave. “Yeah, Jack.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t get his attention!” I hissed.

  “We’re in your car, Alice. I assume he recognizes it. You’ve had it for two years.”

  I bobbed up like an apple in a water barrel and swiveled around. Twila flipped on the blinker and smoothly slid into the right-hand lane — leaving me a clear view of Jack in the pickup. Leaving Jack a clear view of me through the rear window of my Buick Regal. Jack nodded and lifted his hand to favor me with a wave. I managed a sickly grin and a finger-wiggle reply, then snapped forward. “I’m trading off this darn car when I get my next royalty check!”

  Unfortunately, the sunshade was down and the mirror on the back reflected my face. Half-moon mascara smudges coated beneath red-veined eyes and streaked my pale cheeks in zebra stripes. I moaned and yanked a gob of tissues from the box crushed on my lap.

  We hit the end of the causeway, and Twila sped up. Another mile or so down the road, she glanced in the rearview mirror and said, “He’s way behind us now. There’s a rest area up ahead. Want to pull off?”

  “No!” I spat. “What if Jack decides to stop there, too?”

  Twila shrugged and continued on past the blue and white exit sign. “There’s some baby-wipes in my satchel in the back seat.”

  I turned to reach for the satchel, but my eyes glued to that back window and searched the line of traffic behind us. I thought I saw a flash of red far back. Of course, there are lots of red vehicles on the road. Finally I unzipped the satchel and dug out the baby-wipes.

  “I guess I don’t blame Jack for moving to a smaller town,” Twila said. “That last case he had...he finally caught that child murderer. The story was even in our paper back home.”

  “After six months...and three dead children. It burned him out. But he wouldn’t even talk to me about it! He just brooded whenever he did happen to stop by to shower and shave.”

  “Seems to me you were on a book tour part of that time,” she reminded me.

  “Not all the time,” I defended myself. “Where are we going?” I finally thought to ask as I faced the mirror again and scrubbed. Or maybe I just wanted to change the subject.

  “I heard about this little forgotten-time town over in East Texas,” she replied. “Six Gun, Texas. It’s supposed to be crawling with ghosts.”

  “It’s not close to Longview, is it?”

  She shook her head. “At least a couple hours away. From the looks of the map.”

  “It’ll be dark by the time we get there.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a grin. “Neat, huh?”

  I nodded in eager agreement. Nothing like a scary nighttime ghosthunt to lift a new divorcee’s spirits. There were probably a few old graveyards, too, in Six Gun. Twila and I delight in roaming graveyards, daytime or in the full and dark of the moon. Ghosts and spirits congregate there, perhaps hoping for a glimpse of family members who visit their gravesites.

  Two stops for directions later — Twila and I aren’t known for our attention to road signs when we get to chatting about ghosts — and an hour after sundown, the headlights skimmed past a faded real estate sign along a back country, two-lane road. Twila slammed on the brakes, glanced at me, and said, “I’ve got a feeling about that place.”

  “Go for it,” I agreed. We’d had lots of adventures when Twila got one of her feelings.

  We were alone on the road, so she backed up until we could see the sign in the headlights again. Overgrown weeds nearly obscured it; the place had been on the market a while. Untrimmed yupon branches scratched the Buick as we drove down the sandy driveway, but it wasn’t more than a hundred feet before the sprawling log cabin came into view. Security lights burned, one in front, another through the trees behind. It had a deck across the front, no doubt high enough to provide a view of the lake I’d noticed across the road just as we saw the sign.

  Twila parked and we both slid out of the car. Landscaping had grown wild, but it could be tamed with a pair of clippers. Instead of climbing the steps to the deck, we wandered around the side, to the back yard. Ancient live oaks, pecan, and native cedar trees interspersed at least an acre, which stretched back to where the famed East Texas Piney Woods encroached. Spots of color indicated rose bushes and azaleas, two of my favorite plants.

  “Beautiful,” I breathed.

  “Could be, with some work,” Twila agreed.

  We walked across the back patio and tried to peer in the glass doors, but curtains prevented us. So we headed back to the front deck — and smiled at each other when the little old man visualized at the top of the steps and shook his fist.

  “If he only knew,” Twila whispered with a chuckle.

  “Yeah,” I agreed sotto voce. “What better place for a writer and ghosthunter? All this privacy, and ghosts I don’t have to hunt.”

  “Plenty of room for a few pets, too,” Twila said. “You’ve always dreamed of having a dog and cat, but never had the room to take care of them.”

  We climbed the steps, and the elderly man backed up, a startled look on his face. No sense offering to shake hands. My grip would pass through his. Instead, I greeted, “Nice place.”

  “There’s ten of us here already." He propped his fists on pudgy hips. “No more room!”

  A
month later, I moved in. The jittery real estate lady in Six Gun caved in immediately when, after a night in a nearby motel, Twila and I informed her that we preferred to examine the cabin alone. Inside, hardwood floors lay under a film of dust, and rustic beams outlined high ceilings. There were two beautiful stone fireplaces, one in the living room and one in a room I knew immediately would be my study. The kitchen was modernized — not that I do that much cooking, since I have a tendency to even burn water. We met four more of the ghosts, but they weren’t inclined to welcome us either. That didn’t bother me; they could be handled over time.

  “Above all, ghosts need discipline,” Twila always insisted. And she’d taught me the rules for dealing with recalcitrant souls who hung around, refusing to cross through the light for various reasons of their own. Still, with the closing behind me, and before my furniture arrived, Twila returned. A ghost or two were within my fledgling realm of powers, but ten called for someone with a tad more experience in supernatural territory.

  The little old man turned out to be Howard, the ghost-in-charge. Once Howard and his band of cohorts realized their scare tactics wouldn’t work on us, we drew up The Howard and Alice Ghost Agreement. A copy of that all-important document is tacked up in each room now.