Dead Man Talking Read online

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  Tonight, two years later, well past midnight and all alone except for the ghosts and the pets I’d acquired, I toiled away on my latest novel amidst another self-imposed deadline hell. Only a twenty-five-watt desk lamp, computer monitor glow, and slow-smoldering embers in the fireplace lit the study. Miss Molly, Siamese and queen of the six cats who deign to live with me, curled on the loveseat beside the fireplace. Trucker, my hundred-and-fifty-pound Rottweiler, lay on the faded orange and brown braided rug, chin propped on crossed paws, brown eyes closed. The ghosts, aware of the number one rule of The Ghost Agreement — Never, EVER mess with Alice when she’s writing, under no circumstances! — prowled...well, wherever ghosts prowl. But they were quiet and avoided my study under penalty of that discipline I can mete out with no qualms.

  Puzzling over a tricky word, I stretched kinks from my shoulders and debated whether or not to call it a night. Then the desk phone pealed. Great granny’s knickers! Why are phones so much louder at night?

  “Damn,” I muttered. On the fireplace mantle, the clock face in Casper’s belly read a minute after two a.m. — definitely accurate. Casper hasn’t lost a second since my neighbor, Granny Chisholm, presented him to me for one of those birthdays I’d rather have counted down than added up. Turned out Granny enjoys chatting with ghosts as much as I do, and that shared interest formed the basis for our friendship. Granny’s eighty-year-old wrinkles had smoothed into a face that lit up like a sixty-year-old’s when I placed Casper in that spot of honor among my collection of German beer mugs. I’ve never had the heart to take him down.

  I checked caller ID, not that I wouldn’t answer. Late-night phone calls aren’t to be ignored. Bright white letters in the plastic window spelled out Katy Gueydan. Katy, my cousin and childhood friend, lives two hours away in Jefferson, Texas, about a half-hour from Longview. She inherited Esprit d’Chene, the family plantation, by default when our Uncle Clarence moved out. Katy also knows I don’t tolerate interruptions during deadlines. I grabbed the receiver in mid-third ring, prepared to remind her. Instead —

  “Alice, pack your damn ghosthunting equipment right now!” Katy shrilled before I could say hello. “I’m not taking this any longer. This — this — ghost person has to go!”

  “Are we talking Sir Gary Gavin again?” I grumbled.

  “He’s the only damn ghost I’ve got, isn’t he?” Katy snapped. “And I want him gone. Gone, gone, gone! Yesterday!”

  Katy never swears. Southern Belles learn the word “ladylike” in diapers. However, I’d already smirked a few “I told you so’s” over the last month during Katy’s calls to complain about Esprit d’Chene’s resident ghost, so I reluctantly held my tongue while Katy raged on. Evidently, Sir Gary closed the fireplace flue in the Master Suite when she’d decided to relax one chilly evening. A ghost in my cabin did that once — only once, after I threatened her with sea salt, which is a well-known disciplinary device among ghosthunters. Something about the salt keeps the ghosts at bay. It took me hours to clean the soot off the shelves, though.

  “Katy, you have to discipline ghosts if you decide to let them hang around,” I tried to interrupt with the same Twila-reminder I’d given her months earlier when she first reported Sir Gary’s presence.

  She ignored me. “. . . and he poured salt in the sugar canister! My black velvet cake tasted like I’d made it with gumbo roux!”

  “Katy!” More forcefully — same result. She veered into a gripe about the ghost watering down her julep syrup to the point where her mint juleps tasted sour.

  Sensitive ears reacting to my voice and probably Katy’s shrill tone from the phone, Miss Molly opened her blue eyes and yawned. She jumped down and touched noses with Trucker, who woke and stretched, a long, luxurious expanse of black and tan. They ambled over to my desk, Trucker’s weight shivering the hardwood floor planks even with the rug padding. Used to people not respecting my writing time, even those who should know better, I saved my precious book to the hard drive while Katy fussed on. The backup disk lay six inches beyond an arm’s reach, and I left the nearly completed manuscript on the screen.

  “Katy, Sugar, dig your panties out of your crack and hush!" That halted her rant on a huff of suspended breath. “I told you I was under deadline three days ago when you called. Sir Gary died two hundred years ago, and he’s been at Esprit d’Chene for months, maybe years. Probably haunted the house before you moved in. You’ll have to put up with him a few days longer.”

  Katy set off again down the complaint path. “I can’t! Do you know what he did a while ago? Waggled his finger and un-alphabetized my library! It’ll take me days to reorganize!”

  I chuckled — a mistake given Katy’s fury. Her teeth gritted as Miss Molly sailed onto my desk and settled down, hoping I’d stroke her now that the keyboard wasn’t clacking. Trucker leaned against my leg, head on my knee, liquid gaze fastened on my face.

  “If you won’t help me, Alice,” Katy said in a deadly voice, “I’ll see what I can find in that chant book you published a while back and get rid of him myself. I...am...not...putting up with Sir Gary another minute!”

  Uh oh. The uninitiated shouldn’t mess around with those chants. My audience for that book was a specialized circle, ghosthunters and Wicca friends.

  “Katy,” I soothed. “Soon as I Fed Ex this manuscript — ”

  “The heck with your manu — what? What now?” Katy shrilled.

  Her voice faded as she mumbled to someone else. Sir Gary, evidently, since she’d informed me only the week before — during another phone rant — that she wasn’t entertaining any more until she decided what to do with her resident ghost. I really couldn’t blame her. It must have taken some tall explaining on Katy’s part to convince Senator Wilson-Jones that a draft in Esprit d’Chene floated a half dozen pair of sexy panties down the formal stairwell as the senator bid Katy adieu after a cocktail hour. Katy had decided. Sir Gary had to go.

  “Katy?” I asked, confused at a strange tone amid her mumbles. “What did you say?”

  “It wasn’t me!” Katy snapped. “Gary said it. Excuse me! Sir Gary! He said you’re the only one who can help. He’s been reading your books in my library — the ghost stories mostly, but he likes the mysteries, too.”

  “Tell him I’m flattered — ” I began, then recalled another one of Twila’s training sessions: Never trust a ghost who hasn’t proven his honesty. Since I had yet to meet Katy’s paranormal housemate, I switched tactics. “On second thought, ask Sir Gary which book he liked best.”

  “She wants to know which book you liked best,” Katy said in another aside. Then she screamed in my ear, “Put those back!" I could still hear her when I jerked the phone away and she shouted, “You can’t use my bras for bookmarks! You’ll ruin the book spines!”

  I moved the phone close again, since her voice now held more frustration than piercing irritation. “Darn it, Alice! He wiggle-waggled that finger and floated all eighteen of your books off the shelf! You’ve got to come. He says you’re the only one he can trust.”

  “I might work him into my schedule early next week,” I conceded. “Sir Gary’s obviously not leaving on his own, but I can’t drop everything and hightail it over there to talk to a ghost.”

  “Oh, he’s obviously not leaving! He claims he has as much right here as I do!”

  “Do you have any sea salt? Sprinkle it in the corners of the rooms where you don’t want Gary. At least you’ll get that much peace." A canister of sea salt resides near The Ghost Agreement in every room of my cabin, just in case a stranger from the other dimension happens by. Which does happen once in a while, because the atmosphere here attracts wandering souls like buzzards around Texas road kill.

  “I used the last of my sea salt in a bath yesterday." Katy’s voice crescendoed again. “Trying to relax from all this stress! But I’ll darn sure go to the health food store in the morning — what?" A second later Katy continued with a resigned sigh, “He says his death was murde
r, but not deliberate murder. That he can’t find eternal rest until the deed is exposed.”

  That got to me. The ghost must have known it would. How can you have an undeliberate murder? I never could ignore a murder mystery with a death riddle attached.

  “Interesting,” I mused.

  “Are you coming then? In the morning, not next week?”

  I chewed my lip and contemplated. Katy’s the type who insists a person respond to a request with “certainly,” “I can’t possibly,” and preferably not “maybe." From what she’s told me, she and Sir Gary match that way, both of them raised with a Miss Manners Primer. Sir Gary rises when Katy enters a room and opens doors for her with a wiggle of his mischievous spiritual finger. Katy issues handwritten invitations for even simple gatherings such as drinks before an evening at a local theater and never fails to send thank-you notes or bring hostess gifts. One drawer in my bedroom bureau overflows with Katy’s “thank you for your hospitalities." Still, no matter how many times I remind her that I’m allergic to peanuts, she always forgets and sends the nut mixture instead of soft centers when the gift is my beloved Russell Stover candy. Chocolate always helps me through a writing marathon —

  “Alice!”

  “Ask Sir Gary why he doesn’t come over here and talk. I’ll leave a light on.”

  “I’ve already told him that,” she ground out. “Hell, I even got out a map and showed him where you live! But noooo. He insists you come here!”

  A stubborn ghost. He’d probably been that way in life, because Twila and I firmly believe a person’s living personality follows into death. One crotchety old man —

  “Alice!”

  “Ummm, sorry, Katy. I —" Her shriek burst against my eardrum, and I dropped the phone. Trucker and Miss Molly stared as it bounced on the paper-strewn desk and clattered to the floor amidst my now-displaced piling system. When I scrambled around and found the phone — Trucker pawed it from under the desk — the line was still miraculously open. I could hear Katy busy with a new disaster. She uttered another uncharacteristic curse. A muffled thump set my heart thudding before Katy’s strained voice came back on the line.

  “He levitated Great-Grandpere’s Confederate sword from above the mantle, over to the portrait of Great-Grandmere Alicia,” she gasped. “I thought he was going to slash the painting, but when I dashed for him, he only cut the braided cord it’s hanging on.”

  That did it! I’m Grandmere Alicia’s namesake, the woman I admire most in our Southern family branch. Strong women who stood beside their men as they settled the Louisiana coast and spread northwest into Texas, carving lives and homes for themselves and their children out of swampland and brushy timber. Making, losing, and regaining fortunes in the cotton and timber industries. Who stayed behind and kept the home fires, children, and businesses safe while their men marched off to play macho war games. I salvaged that portrait from the Esprit d’Chene attic myself and had it restored.

  Suddenly my computer monitor brightened. Above the silent keyboard, letters flew willy-nilly out of nowhere like a swarm of black gnats, slithered across the screen, curled a merry-go-round dance, and strung into sentences after my last keystroke. When I finally shook off my astonishment and snapped my mouth shut, the words didn’t make sense at first: Flatterers be like cats—they lick just a’fore they scratch. That Gary Gavin’s not your usual ghost.

  Experience told me immediately what was going on. Some spiritual being had manipulated the computer! Damned prankster. I re-read the message. Flatterers be like cats. How true. They lick just a’fore they scratch! Sir Gary followed his flattery about my books with a scratch! But who the heck typed it? And how did this ghost know Sir Gary?

  As that thought faded, bright green phosphorescence flashed in a corner above the fireplace, catching me off-guard. Miss Molly arched her back and spat one of those weird “meow-sers” that sets your teeth on edge. Trucker growled, a low vibration, and headed for the flash. Their psychic powers rival mine, a fact I’d found out after I adopted them.

  Grabbing Trucker’s collar, I whispered, “Don’t antagonize a ghost when I’m busy on the phone!" Heeding the command, Miss Molly settled down, but both animals stared at the corner.

  “Are you still there, Alice?” Katy demanded. “And are you coming? Now?”

  On the lookout for the invisible intruder, I answered calmly. No sense upsetting Katy even more by telling her what had just happened. I’d never get her off the phone, and right now, the being infiltrating the cabin demanded discipline.

  “Given the circumstances, I’ll have to come. Your darn ghost evidently knows what that portrait means to me." I kept glancing back and forth from the fireplace to the computer screen. “But tell him I’m highly ticked at his manipulations, and I’m not gonna be real sympathetic about his problems. Or inclined to help him out after that trick!”

  There. Twila insisted we could get into trouble if we showed our natural fear of ghosts. Still, sometimes we did find trouble. I groped among the papers on my desk for the Celtic Cross that Twila had blessed a few years back, and slipped the gold chain over my head.

  “What have you told Sir Gary about me?” I asked Katy.

  “Not much, I swear. Well...I did threaten that you could make his life miserable — I mean, his death — I mean — oh, hell, Alice. Just get here as fast as you can.”

  Whap! “Ouch!” I rubbed my ear as I replaced the receiver. That wasn’t Katy-like either — slamming the phone down without a cordial good-bye. Heaven forbid she forget her manners like that. Maybe Sir Gary’s undeliberate murder would be an interesting quest, fodder for another book. I stared at the sentences again, smack dab after the interrupted paragraph on page 437. No doubt about it; a strange ghost prowled around nearby. None of my ghosts ever dared break that sacrosanct number one rule in The Ghost Agreement. A ghost who ignores the rules can stir up all sorts of mayhem. I couldn’t possibly leave for Esprit d’Chene until I got rid of it, no matter how upset Katy was.

  Too, I really should finish this current novel before researching another one. It had been going along so well. Barely fifteen minutes ago, my heroine, Annie May, and I were deep in the heart of the wild depravity of nighttime N’awlins Bourbon Street. Jumping and dodging hell-bent through half-naked and naked bodies, silly and serious drunks, transvestites and gays, out-of-state tourists, college kids whose parents had no idea where their offspring were spending their vacation money, and just plain revelers, all with enough beads around their necks to choke a draft horse. Chasing a glimpse of Rex, the Mardi Gras King, who was either Rex or somebody who had cojones enough to steal the costume from the sacred Fat Tuesday symbol. Now some being from another dimension roamed around just the other side of visible. A ghost who didn’t even offer a decent Texas howdy first!

  Anyway, previous paranormal encounter notes already stuffed an overflowing file in my desk. Sometimes ghosts I meet relate stories that foster a book idea. Like the man who lost three wives and still didn’t know who murdered them, even after vigilantes hung him for the death of his last wife. The lonely woman who sought solace from an abusive husband in the arms of a lover and desperately wanted to know if her husband had killed her lover. The teenager, paralyzed from a water tower fall one night and left to die by his friends, who thought him already dead and hightailed it out of there, scared silly of the consequences. And the Lady in Red, a saloon girl who followed me home from a haunted hotel. One day I’ll tell her story. So many stories. So little time to write. No need to add another to the list.

  Trucker whined, and I loosened my grip. The hair at the nap of his neck bristled, and Miss Molly emitted another cat-growl of animosity. I’d brought them here as just-weaned babies, although the other five cats in my menagerie wandered in over time. None of them were bothered by our paranormal residents. This stranger, though, was a different story. Since I’d bought the cabin, three of the residents had gone on through the veil, but three others arrived to take their place. Ten was the lim
it, and Howard and I kept track of them. No ghost had left recently, so there darned sure wasn’t a vacant room in this spiritual boarding house!

  I casually filtered my gaze across the room. Maybe by the time it crawled back, the words would be gone. I wasn’t in the mood tonight to mess with a disobedient ghost. Several plants scattered around the study — droopy, I noticed, stifling a yawn and adding another chore to my mental to-do list. Miracle Gro could wait. No sense stumbling around the kitchen measuring the proper amount of green, gunky particles into a plastic milk jug at this hour. Especially not until I figured out who’d dropped by from across the veil.

  The message still gleamed on the screen, type bolder than the manuscript words.

  The next room search stalled on the bar refrigerator beneath shelves of well-handled highball and souvenir hurricane glasses from Pat O’Brien’s Bar in New Orleans. Come to think of it, a beer would hit the spot, an icy-cold Bud Lite in a frosty mug. A hasty decision wasn’t a good idea when dealing with a ghost, though. The situation called for careful consideration.

  Thirsty, I groped for my thermal cup of ice water and lemon slices. Took a sip. Spit it back. Darned sure wasn’t beer. It tasted like lukewarm lemon. Given the marathon writing hours, the ice was probably puddled between the Mardi Gras parade on St. Charles Avenue and the chase on Bourbon Street.

  Howard and I had come to another agreement. When we do have a vacancy, he passes muster on any hopeful new spiritual arrival before we decide whether or not to let it hang around. He’d be especially welcome now, but I hadn’t seen him since this morning while I cleaned off Spanish moss from the live oaks and we chatted about those medieval torture devices he’d called medical tools in his lifetime.

  “Howard?” I whispered, but he didn’t respond. Probably off in my rowboat, fishing. He likes to do that now and then, although sometimes a property owner mistakes the boat for empty except for a cane pole dangling a bobber and worm, and tows it to my dock. Howard has better sense than to reveal himself to anyone else besides Granny Chisholm.

  Ticked off at the ghost’s refusal to visualize — frankly, on the verge of pissed off — I muttered, “Okay, you nasty little piece of sixth-dimensional protoplasm. Show yourself.”

  The ghost didn’t answer — obviously rude, on top of being an interfering busybody. I glanced at Casper’s red digital numbers, spread across a white belly that looked like he’d been on the wrong end of a fertility drug. Ten minutes had elapsed. Fingering the cross, I wandered my gaze back to the bar. But I’d have to expose this interloper before I dared venture across the study. More than once, even here in my home, a suddenly materializing specter has spasmed my nerves.

  Since this intruder refused to cooperate, I yanked open a desk drawer and pulled out a blue and white canister of sea salt. “En garde!” I whispered.

  A pop shattered the silence, and I jumped as my eyes swiveled to the fireplace. An ember glowed bright, and a piece of wood flared, then crumbled. The burst of energy sent a gray ash feather up the flue. Sea salt canister aimed like a can of roach killer, I chuckled and thumb-flicked the pour spout open.

  “Look,” I muttered, waving the canister. “Show yourself or leave. I’ve got work to do! This book’s scheduled for release just before next Samhain." Still no response. This ghost evidently didn’t care about deadlines or Sabbats my Wiccan friends held dear.

  Nut-brown drapes on either side of the glass patio doors frame the view into the now neat back yard. At times I stare out there, working out a plot point. Then a squirrel chases a blue jay away from the bird feeder, chitter and squawks of “thief, thief,” a pandemonium. Or one of the cats will slink in hunting mode across the lawn, intent on disobeying the don’t-chase-the-birds law despite a full belly from a never-ending supply of cat chow. At night the cats, birds, and squirrels leave the yard to an old hoot owl, which sits on a rose trellis and swivels its neck around at impossible angles.

  Tonight a ground fog, spawned from the cooling lake, filtered across the lawn, wisps trickling here and there like wandering water snakes along the brick paths and through the flowerbeds. As I watched, the fog thickened and billowed into waist-high vapor clouds, as dense as a smoke screen. Above the mistiness, light from a full moon silvered the treetops.

  Full moons are ripe atmosphere for ghosts or spirits to transcend that thin veil between the two worlds. And with Samhain, what most people call Halloween, less than a month away, there were numerous preparations in the works for such an important Sabbat. It pays to keep things like that in mind when you fool around on the other side of the veil like Twila and I do.

  Wind from an autumn storm last week had broken off a large pecan limb. It still waited to be chopped into barbecue wood, although the squirrels had rescued most of the pecans from the laden branch, easier pickings than hauling their fat tummies up and down the tree trunk. If I didn’t gather a few soon, the squirrels would pick the rest of the tree clean, too. Time for Granny to bring her pecan-picker-upper over. She bakes a pecan pie to die for, and just the smell of it cooling on her kitchen windowsill adds a pound or two to the hips.

  No four-legged or winged critters prowled the yard tonight, though, at least that I could see. Not even one of my other usual nocturnal visitors, which include a family of raccoons and occasional deer or armadillo. No owl. Maybe they were hiding? So I sent a mental query: Anybody prowling around out there? Ghosts communicate without spoken words if they choose. Only a bat responded as it dove for a fluttering moth. Lore maintains bats are messengers from the Underworld, but this bat only swooped off over the roof.

  A high hedge marks the end of the yard, and beyond it, jack pines, dogwoods, and live oaks shoulder together. Above the treetops, blazes of diamond-bright stars scattered across the sky. I couldn’t imagine my visitor sitting in misty splendor in one of my patio chairs or Humpty-Dumpty style on the hedge, but you never knew.

  A breeze swayed a tendril of Spanish moss on a low live oak limb. Only a glimpse, then it disappeared. That shouldn’t be. Not in that oak, that close to the ground, floating just above the fog line. Plus, this moss was whitish rather than the pale gray of Spanish moss. The ghost!