Waking Up Dead Read online

Honestly, I was impressed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the small-town cops had arrested Rick immediately and called it a day.

  But they didn’t. They called Birmingham, and in the end, that was Rick’s--and my--big lucky break.

  I found out that night that crime scene stuff takes a lot longer than it looks like on TV. The police spent hours putting up crime scene tape, taking photos, examining the body, and removing the body. But eventually, a guy came in and started taking swabs of all the blood in the bathroom. He looked over everything pretty carefully, taking swabs from the tub, the floor, even around the toilet. And he looked at the vanity. But he missed the tiny blood drop the murderer had left behind. I stood beside it, jumping up and down on the balls of my feet, shouting “Here, over here!” But he wasn’t one of the sensitive ones. He didn’t sense a thing wrong.

  So finally, I did the only thing I could think of.

  I turned on the electric toothbrush.

  Doesn’t sound like much, does it?

  Well, it was. I was already exhausted from all the energy I’d expended getting the murderer to leave the drop of blood behind in the first place and then keeping him from seeing it before he left.

  But like I said, electronics are easiest of all, so I touched it and imagined twisting the wires as I sent energy coursing through them. Instantly, the toothbrush and its charger started jittering across the vanity. I gave them a little nudge with my finger and they headed toward the side of the vanity with the blood drop.

  The CSU technician stopped in the doorway and turned around, frowning. He reached over and switched off the toothbrush. He gave the room a sweeping glance and turned to leave, still frowning.

  I turned the toothbrush on again.

  The technician froze in the doorway. He turned around slowly, staring at the toothbrush with narrowed eyes.

  It continued buzzing its way across the counter.

  The technician reached over and unplugged it. But this time he didn’t leave. He stood staring at the toothbrush.

  So I gathered up my last shred of energy and shoved the toothbrush as hard as I could. It skittered the last two inches to the edge of the counter and balanced there, just on the verge of falling off.

  The technician stared at it intently.

  And then he saw the blood.

  I knew the moment he saw it, too. The suspicion disappeared from his face. He leaned in closer to the counter, zeroing in on the blood drop.

  Almost absently, he used his gloved forefinger to push the toothbrush back to its place on the counter. Then he set his kit down on the floor, pulled out a swab, and swiped it through the blood.

  Finally confident that Rick wouldn’t go to prison for his wife’s murder, I retreated, exhausted, to the living room.

  * * * *

  Ghosts don’t really sleep. This one doesn’t, anyway. Never having met another ghost, I can’t speak for anyone but myself. I do, however, just sort of drift. It’s a little like daydreaming--I’m aware of what’s going on around me, but I don’t really pay attention to it. If I wanted to, I could spend days and days like that. In fact, sometimes I did.

  This time I didn’t seem to have a choice. I had probably expended too much of my spook energy--or whatever it is--keeping Rick out of trouble.

  Or so I thought.

  I think I drifted for about three days. In that time, I have a vague recollection of police officers moving through the house periodically. Crime scene techs vacuumed up everything that might be on the floors and took all the trash bins with them.

  When I finally regained full consciousness, the house was empty. I realized that Rick had never come home.

  That worried me.

  So I put my hand on the television and concentrated until it came on, then worked at flipping through the channels until I found the Birmingham news station.

  I didn’t have to wait long. A gruesome murder like this one was big news, not only in Abramsville, but in all the nearby towns and cities. It might even hit the national news soon. A still photo of Rick flashed across the screen, then a picture of Molly, taken at her wedding. The photo receded to a corner of the screen, replaced by a moving image of Rick, in handcuffs, being shoved into a police car.

  “. . . Rick McClatchey, indicted today for the strangling murder of his wife, Molly McClatchey,” the blonde newscaster was saying, “due to the presence of his DNA on the piano wire used to kill her.”

  I turned the television off. I didn’t want to hear any more.

  All my hard work, for nothing.

  Had the crime lab even tested the blood drop from the real killer?

  Apparently the evidence I had arranged wasn’t going to be enough.

  I know it wasn’t my problem. Not really.

  It’s not like I’m some sort of guardian angel or anything. Ugh. Just the thought of all that responsibility gives me the creeps.

  But Rick hadn’t done it. Some other scumbag had. And that scumbag was walking around having a grand life while Rick was going to jail.

  That just wasn’t right.

  I went back and forth, considering.

  I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I should do.

  But the McClatcheys were the closest thing I had to friends in Abramsville.

  Not that I could help. I could barely turn on a television.

  Not alone, anyway.

  In the end, I made up my mind.

  I needed help.

  Chapter Three

  Like I said, I had taken to hanging out with people who weren’t sensitive to my presence. But now I needed to find someone who was sensitive.

  In fact, I needed someone who was more than just a little “sensitive.” I needed someone I could talk to. If such a person even existed.

  So I started looking.

  Abramsville is a small town, but it still has roughly 15,000 people. Surely one of them had to be sensitive to ghosts. I didn’t, however, consider how long it would take to test that many people. Or even just the adults.

  So I started with the ones that I already knew had some sensitivity. I made my way to their houses, stood in front of them, waved my arms, jumped up and down, and screamed until I would have turned blue in the face if I’d been alive.

  Some of them jumped a little, startled by something they almost saw out of the corners of their eyes. Several of them shivered and turned up the thermostat or wrapped themselves in sweaters.

  And the guy who had seen me behind him in the mirror? This time he really did pee himself. Desperate as I was, I decided that he was too easily spooked to help me. What policeman was going to believe some pee-soaked lunatic who came in blathering about the evidence a ghost had told him about? He’d probably get arrested himself. Anyway, I had absolutely no assurance that he actually heard me when I said, “Please. You have to help me.”

  And to be honest, I have no idea what he saw. When I looked down at myself, I saw just me, wearing the clothes I’d worn the day I died. Black slacks, gray button-down shirt, black leather jacket, medium-heel black boots. Casual professional. When I’d managed to cast a reflection in the mirror, I’d still looked like me. Medium-toned skin, green eyes, dark wavy hair to my shoulders. A relatively attractive woman who could stand to lose five or ten pounds. Normal.

  But for all I knew, when he saw me, I looked like I must have looked by the time I died. And from what I remember, that sight would be enough to make just about anyone soil himself.

  I pretty quickly gave up on going door-to-door. I know the wheels of the legal system grind slowly, but I really didn’t know how much time poor Rick McClatchey had. And time seemed to run differently for me now; I would go into my drifting phase and wake up to realize that days, not hours, had passed. So I began going to places where people congregated in large groups.

  I started with churches. I figured, people in churches are believers, right? They’ve got to have some connection to the Great Hereafter.

  Not a single one of them saw me.

  Maybe
the trouble was that I wasn’t part of the Great Hereafter. I was just hanging out on the wrong side of the Right Here and Now.

  I tried the college next. I did my little “Here I am, look at me now” song and dance right up in front of a whole classroom. One guy clearly saw me, but went scrabbling in his book bag for a bottle of prescription medicine. When I floated over to check it out, I saw that it was labeled “Haldol.” Even I knew that that was some sort of anti-psychotic medication. Poor guy. I left that classroom immediately. Psychosis was even better than pee-soaked pants for demolishing credibility.

  I finally found her at Wal-Mart, of all places. I had decided that in a town as small as Abramsville, just about everyone would eventually go to Wal-Mart. So there I stood in the entrance, just like the little old ladies who worked as greeters, spending hours on their feet saying “Welcome to Wal-Mart” to everyone who walked through the door.

  I didn’t say “Welcome to Wal-Mart.” I didn’t say anything, usually. I just stood in front of customers’ shopping carts, hoping they would see me. For the most part, though, the few who paused did so because they needed to drop a purse into the cart, tell a child to catch up, adjust a strap on a sandal. Not because they saw me. Some of them walked right through me. Brrr. Some of the more sensitive among them skirted me without ever even knowing why. Until Ashara. She pushed her cart right up to me, within inches, and stood there for a second, staring straight into my eyes.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I need to get through here.”

  I blinked. “You can see me?” I asked.

  Her forehead wrinkled and she held her hands out in front of her, palms up. “Well, yeah.” She shook her head.

  I looked at her more closely. There didn’t seem to be anything special about her--not metaphysically, anyway. Physically, she was beautiful. She was short, about 5’3”, African-American, with huge brown eyes and clear, dark skin. Her hair, brown with red highlights, fell in tiny ringlets down past her shoulders. She wore blue jeans and a red t-shirt. I put her at about twenty-four or twenty–five, just a little younger than I had been when I died.

  Watching me assess her, she took a deep breath. Her nostrils flared. She gripped the handlebar of her shopping cart more tightly. “If you’re done staring, why don’t you get out of my way before I run your white ass over,” she said.

  “Oh. Sorry,” I said, so nonplussed that I actually moved out of the way.

  “Bitch,” I heard her mutter as she walked by.

  This was not going as well as I might have hoped.

  “Hey,” I said, hurrying after her. “Wait up.”

  “I know you’re not talking to me,” she said. She stared straight ahead and pushed her cart down the middle of the aisle toward housewares.

  “I am talking to you. Look. I know this is really weird, but I need your help.”

  “Well, I’m not talking to you. I don’t know what your problem is, but you can take it somewhere else.”

  I wanted to reach out and grab her cart, to make her stop and talk to me, but of course I couldn’t. Which gave me an idea.

  I scurried out in front of her, planting myself in her path.

  “Move,” she said.

  “Not until you hear me out. Please?”

  She moved her cart to the left. I stepped out to intercept her. She moved to the right. So did I.

  “You got some kind of death wish or something?” she asked.

  I laughed and shook my head. “If only you knew.”

  “I’ve got no time to talk to no crazy white lady in the Wal-Mart,” she said. And she slammed into me with her shopping cart.

  At least, that’s what she planned to do.

  The shopping cart, however, slid right through me. When it stopped, the basket had sliced cleanly through my midsection. The bottom rack merged with my ankles. From my perspective, it looked like two perfectly solid objects--me and the shopping cart--had melted together. I don’t know what she saw.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  The woman’s eyes widened, and then rolled up into her head as she slumped to the ground in a dead faint.

  I bent down to try to wake her up, but no matter how hard I concentrated on making contact, I couldn’t even touch her.

  I hate being a ghost.

  * * * *

  Luckily, there were other people in the store, and they could help her. Someone called the manager, and pretty soon there was a small crowd around her. She woke up blearily, looking around at all of the faces surrounding her.

  “What happened?” the manager asked her as he helped her to her feet.

  “There was this woman,” she began, shaking her head. Then she saw me, leaning in over all the other people around her--easy enough to do if you can float up three or four feet off the ground.

  “That one,” she said frantically, pointing at me. The people between us stared around at one another.

  “Which one?” asked the manager. “What did she do?”

  The woman pointed at me again. “That one. The white woman. In the black jacket.”

  Again, everyone looked around expectantly.

  Finally, the manager placed his hand on her back and leaned in close to her. “Honey, there’s no white woman in a black jacket here. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  The woman looked from him to me and back again. “You don’t see her standing there.”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t. Is there anyone you want me to call for you?”

  She stepped away from him. “No. No thanks. I’ll be fine.” She pulled her purse out of her basket and moved away, never taking her eyes off me or turning her back on me.

  She hit the parking lot at a run. I moved right beside her, talking the whole time.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just need help.”

  The woman was muttering under her breath, and after a minute, I realized that she was praying.

  This was awful. I had absolutely no desire to terrify this poor woman, but she was the only person who had actually seen me in days of trying. And she could hear me, too. I couldn’t let her go. I had to get her to listen to me.

  So I followed her to her car. She ran as hard as she could, fumbling with the keys to the old Chevrolet. By the time she got into the car and slammed the door behind her, I had settled into the back seat.

  She adjusted her rearview mirror, saw me in it, and screamed. Then she put her head down on her steering wheel and started sobbing.

  “Hey,” I said, reaching out toward her but unable to pat her on the shoulder. “Listen. Really. I mean it. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “I just,” she said, choking out words between sobs, “never thought that I’d get haunted at the Wal-Mart.” The last word ended with a wail and another bout of sobbing.

  “But you thought you might get haunted somewhere else?” I asked.

  “Why won’t y’all leave me alone?”

  “Y’all? As in, more than one?”

  She nodded, sniffling.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Ashara.”

  “Okay, Ashara. So I’m not the first ghost you’ve met.”

  “No. You’re just the first one who’s talked to me in the Wal-Mart.” She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and turned to glare at me suspiciously. “Why you haunting the Wal-Mart, anyway?”

  “I’m not haunting Wal-Mart,” I said. “I was trying to find someone who could see me, who could hear me.”

  “Well, why don’t you just go on back in there and find someone else?”

  “Because I’ve been looking for days, and you’re the only one I’ve found. And I’m running out of time.”

  “Looks to me like you already ran out of time, what with being dead and all,” she said.

  “Thanks for the reminder,” I said dryly. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll listen to my story, listen to what I know and what I need help with, then I
’ll get out of the car and let you go if you decide you don’t want to help me, okay?”

  “Promise?” She stared at me, her eyes narrow.

  “Promise. Cross my heart,” I said, making the appropriate X over my chest. “Though I guess that the ‘hope to die’ bit doesn’t really apply here,” I added. That one got a snicker from Ashara.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Talk.”

  “First you have to promise to seriously consider helping me.”

  She nodded. “Promise.”

  So I told her my story, all about Molly’s death and Rick’s arrest. About my determination to help Rick by finding the real killer. She stared at me intently the entire time, her eyes wide.

  When I had finished, she lowered her eyes and took a deep breath to regroup.

  Chapter Four

  “You have got to be shittin’ me,” Ashara said.

  “No. Really. That’s how it happened. And I need someone to go to the police, to tell them what really happened. Rick can’t go to prison for this. He didn’t kill his wife. The police need to know that.”

  “And you think that I should just go walking on in there and tell the police that I got some new information about that white guy who killed his wife?”

  “Well . . .” I paused for a moment, thinking it through. “Yeah, I guess,” I said.

  “And you think the cops are going to take me serious for even a minute?”

  “They might,” I said lamely.

  Ashara shook her head. “No. I’ll tell you what’ll happen if I go in there. They’re going to want to know how I know what I know. Then, when I tell them that some white lady ghost told me, they’re going to kick me out on my ass.”

  “Then there’s got to be some way to make them believe. Not in me. I don’t care if they know about me. But maybe we can find some more evidence, something that will clear Rick.”

  Ashara shook her head. “Uh-uh. No way, no how. Whoever killed that lady might still be around. I’m not doing anything that might get his attention. You think someone like that’s just gonna let me go digging around looking for evidence? Nope. Next thing you know, I’ll be getting myself choked with some wire. No. Not happening.”