Waking Up Dead Read online

  And then I glanced down at the small trash can beside the bench. There, inside it, lay a small piece of piano wire. It looked just like the wire the man had used to kill Molly.

  I’d watched a lot of television in the past few months. I’d seen just about every episode of CSI. Twice. And I knew that if this was from the same spool of wire used to kill Molly McClatchey, a lab could match the cut ends. And I knew that if it had anyone else’s DNA on it, it might cast doubt on Rick’s guilt.

  What I didn’t know was how to get it out of the workshop. I mean, I could pop open drawers, turn bolt locks, and make bells ring, but all of those things were short-term events. And they took a lot out of me. I didn’t think I could get the wire out of the trash can and all the way to Ashara. Certainly not with all these people around.

  Just then, the bearded man from the front of the shop walked to the doorway of the workroom.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but I can help you?” He had a deep voice, deeper than I would have expected.

  I continued staring into the trash can, trying to figure out how to get it to the police. Everyone else looked up at him.

  “Nope,” the woman said. “I’ve almost got this damn thing straightened out.” The rest of the repairmen went back to work.

  The young man shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, moving into the room, “but you can’t be back here.”

  “Ha, ha,” said the woman, not looking up from her trombone. “Very funny, Stephen.”

  Stephen looked at her, then shook his head again, his eyebrows knitted in confusion. He took several more steps into the room.

  That’s when I realized that he was talking to me.

  I looked at his face, my eyes huge.

  “Can I help you?” he asked again. His colleagues looked up again.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” the burly man asked irritably.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes. Actually, you can help me. Let’s go to the front.” I scurried out of the workroom before poor Stephen had time to say anything else. No need to make his colleagues think he was totally crazy.

  Once we were in the showroom again, I glanced around to make sure no one else was within earshot.

  “Whose workbench was that?” I asked.

  He stared at me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

  Good question.

  “Well,” I said hesitatingly, “I’m a friend of Rick’s. And Molly’s. And I don’t think Rick did it.”

  “I don’t either,” Stephen said.

  “So I was just wondering if there was anyone who might have something against either of them.”

  “You know, the police have already been here and asked all those questions,” Stephen said.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Who did you say you were again?” Stephen asked.

  “A friend.”

  He just stared at me.

  I sighed.

  “My name is Callie Taylor. I’m a friend of Rick’s. I really am just trying to help.”

  “So why do you want to know whose workbench that is?”

  I thought about it for a second, then took a deep breath and said it. “Because there’s a length of piano wire in the trash can. If it’s from the same spool that killed Molly, the police might be able to do something with it. Maybe they could prove it wasn’t Rick.”

  Stephen’s eyes narrowed. “Really?”

  I shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”

  Stephen headed back to the workroom.

  “Don’t touch it!” I called out after him. “Just bring the whole can!”

  He nodded in acknowledgment.

  He came back in, staring down into the trash can. “So what should we do?” he asked.

  “Maybe call the police?” I suggested.

  “Yeah. Good idea,” he said. He picked up the phone.

  “So whose bench is it?” I asked again, just before his fingers touched the number pad.

  “Jeffrey McClatchey,” he said. “Rick’s brother.”

  * * * *

  I left the shop while Stephen was on the phone with the police. No need to get him thrown into a mental ward for talking to The Woman Who Wasn’t There.

  But I did stick close by. In fact, I slipped into the back seat of one of the two police cruisers that had shown up. I wanted to see what they did next.

  In the meantime, I thought about what kind of sicko Rick’s brother would have to be to strangle Molly and then cut her up like that. At least the sick fuck who’d killed me had been the “Stranger” in Stranger Danger. I hadn’t ever seen him before that awful night when he’d grabbed me.

  After about half an hour, the cops came back out of Rick’s shop.

  “We’ll take this to the lab in Birmingham,” one of them said, waving an evidence bag. “Why don’t you two go back to Jeffrey McClatchey and see if he’s changed his story any.” Two of the other policemen nodded and headed toward their patrol car.

  The other patrol car.

  Dammit. I wanted to see Jeffrey McClatchey. Besides, I couldn’t go to Birmingham even if I wanted to.

  I slid across the seat, out of the car, and dove through the back passenger door of the other police cruiser just as it pulled out from in front of the store. I sat up in the back seat and looked out the window to see Stephen staring at me, his eyes enormous and his face as white as a--well, not ghost, ‘cause I’m not especially pale. Let’s go with sheet. A white one. Not a floral printed one.

  I guessed that he had seen my little non-corporeal cruiser-switching act.

  I would have bet almost anything that he was heading back to the workroom to ask his co-workers about the woman who had been looking at Jeffrey’s workbench.

  Poor guy.

  I sat in the back of the patrol car, unsure whether or not to hope that Jeffrey McClatchey was the killer. How awful that would be for Rick.

  I also spent some time hoping that if it was McClatchey, the police cruiser wouldn’t go outside the city limits and leave me popped back into the middle of the downtown square.

  But I really didn’t have enough time to hope much of anything at all for very long, because after a few moments, the patrol car pulled into a brand-new subdivision on the edge of town. The houses all had brick facades and siding on the sides. Nice, but not extravagant. If this was where Jeffrey McClatchey lived, he was doing well, but not as well as his brother. Rick and Molly lived in a huge remodeled Colonial-style home. Then again, this was small-town Alabama, not Dallas. Houses in Dallas were much more expensive.

  I followed the two cops up to the front door, glad that they weren’t able to see me. The taller of the two rang the doorbell, and after a long pause, a man in his mid- to late-thirties answered the door. He wore sweatpants and a t-shirt, and his hair stood up in the back, as if he had been asleep. His eyes were rimmed in red.

  My shoulders slumped, but I wasn’t sure if it was in relief or disappointment. This was not the man who had killed Molly McClatchey.

  “Yeah?” he asked, scratching his chest through his t-shirt.

  “Mr. McClatchey?” The taller officer spoke first

  “Yes.” Jeffrey McClatchey stared at the cops through slitted eyes.

  “May we come in for a moment and talk to you?”

  “I’ve already told you everything I know,” he said. He sounded almost belligerent.

  “There have been some new developments and we’d like to discuss them with you,” the shorter officer said.

  McClatchey sighed and opened the door wider. “Okay. Fine. Come on in.”

  Chapter Eight

  I didn’t bother to follow the three men into McClatchey’s house. I already knew he wasn’t the killer.

  I checked the clock in the patrol car on my way by. Noon. Way too early to go get Ashara.

  But maybe she’ll be on her lunch break, I thought.

  No such luck. This time when I popped through the bullet-proof (but not ghost-proof!) window, she just st
arted singing quietly to herself. Or rather, to me, but no one else would know that.

  “Go on now, go, walk out the door. Just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore,” she sang.

  “You’ve been working on that all morning, haven’t you?” I said.

  She grinned a little, nodding.

  Then I picked up the song. “Weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye? Did you think I’d crumble, did you think I’d lay down and die?” I danced across the room. “Oh, no, not I!”

  Ashara cringed and shuddered.

  Okay. So maybe I’m not the best singer in the world. And maybe I don’t have the greatest rhythm. But she didn’t have to shudder.

  “I went back to the shop,” I said, as Ashara leaned into her microphone and pushed a button.

  “Good afternoon,” she said to the man driving the car.

  “Hello,” he replied, sending the plastic container through the tube. It popped up into a box-shaped space next to Ashara’s elbow. She pushed a button and the cover flipped open. I watched with interest as she pulled the container out of the box and opened it.

  “I always thought that was so cool when I was a kid,” I said.

  “Just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore,” she sang under her breath as she began counting money. Her fingers flew over the keypads.

  “I found some more piano wire,” I said. “In the trash can next to the bench the killer took something from. I got one of the guys working there to call the police.”

  Her fingers slowed and she looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  “He could see me,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “But no one else could. He didn’t know that, though. He thought I was real. Alive, I mean. I am real. I think he saw me walk through the police car door, though. So now maybe he thinks he’s crazy.”

  Ashara shook her head and went back to work. She dropped the container into the box, closed the lid, and pushed a button. “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” she asked, leaning into her microphone.

  “No, ma’am,” the man in the car said.

  “Have a nice day, Mr. Johnston,” she said.

  “So I was thinking,” I said. Ashara didn’t even look at me. She just moved on to the next car in her line.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi,” the driver replied.

  “I was thinking that what we need to do now is figure out how to track down that man’s license plate number.”

  Ashara stopped and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Her mouth tightened and she held up four fingers, flexing them emphatically in my direction.

  “You okay?” Ann, the other teller, asked.

  “Just stretching my fingers,” Ashara said. She pulled the container from the box and took several checks from the container. She typed in a code and began entering the checks into the computer.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it. I’ll come back at four.”

  I walked out through the door, singing “I Will Survive” at the top of my lungs. I glanced back to see Ashara shuddering again.

  * * * *

  When Ashara got off work at 4:00, I was already waiting in her car. I had managed to turn the radio on and was listening to NPR radio. Ashara got in and switched the radio off.

  “Hey,” I said. “It took me a long time to turn that on.”

  “And it only took me a second to turn it off again,” she said. “We have to talk.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What?”

  “Look. I am helping you because . . . I don’t know why. Because Maw-Maw said to, I guess. But mostly ‘cause you won’t leave me alone. But I do not need you showing up at my work. I am busy when I’m there and I ain’t got no time to talk to your dead ass.”

  I looked at her for a minute, my eyes narrowing. “Why is it,” I asked, “that you speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences sometimes and other times you say things like ‘ain’t got no time’?”

  Ashara drew in a long breath and blew it out in an even longer sigh. “That is not what we’re discussing right now.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I won’t bother you at work again.”

  “Good.”

  “Unless it’s really, really necessary.”

  “How necessary?”

  “I don’t know. Like someone else has died or something.”

  She nodded.

  “But you have to answer my question.”

  “What question?” she asked.

  “Why is it that sometimes you speak correctly and sometimes you don’t?”

  She shook her head. “It’s called code switching,” she said, her voice suddenly sounding almost professorial. “And it’s not a matter of correct or incorrect. It’s a matter of dialect. People who function in more than one world can switch back and forth at will. At work, I have to use the dominant discourse--I have to sound like a white woman. At home, I speak the way I was brought up to speak.”

  I stared at her with my mouth hanging open.

  “I learned it in my socio-linguistics course in college.” She shrugged. “It made perfect sense to me, so it stuck.”

  She started the car and pulled out onto the street.

  “What was your major?” I asked, trying not to sound as shocked as I felt. And embarrassed. I had made a set of assumptions about Ashara that clearly wasn’t correct.

  “Accounting,” she said. “I was good at it, too. I had a 4.0 GPA in my major. 3.5 overall.”

  I tried to phrase my next question very carefully. “So why don’t you work as an accountant somewhere?”

  “No jobs like that around here. Except at tax time. I do people’s taxes to make a little extra money sometimes.”

  “But with those sorts of grades, surely you could have gotten a job in Birmingham or Atlanta,” I said. “Why are you here working as a bank teller?”

  She shook her head. “Maw-Maw’s the only family I’ve got left, and she’s lived in Abramsville all her life. I can’t make her go with me, so I stay right here.”

  I nodded. I understood that. I’d turned down a promotion once because it would have meant moving to Chicago, and I didn’t want to be that far from my family. Then I shook my head to dispel the memory, unwilling to think about my family. That would only lead to wondering how they were dealing with my death.

  “So what next?” Ashara asked.

  “Next we go find out who that license plate is registered to.”

  “Don’t we need to go to the DMV for that? I don’t think they’re gonna let some random chick and her ghost friend just go on in and look it up.”

  “I think we can get that stuff over the internet,” I said.

  “No way!”

  “I’m pretty sure. You got internet at your place?”

  Ashara nodded. “Of course.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  * * * *

  Ashara’s house was small, but in a better neighborhood than her grandmother’s. “I got it pretty cheap,” she said as she unlocked the front door. “The guy who owned it had rented it out to a bunch of college kids and the inside was trashed. Way nasty. But I cleaned it out and been fixing it up a little bit at a time. I still got stuff to do, but it’s not bad.”

  ‘Not bad’ was an understatement. The outside of the house was a modest little A-frame, but the interior was beautiful. The walls were painted a creamy matte beige and the window and door frames were a bright white. Folk art adorned the walls, adding bright splashes of color to the room. The wood floors were polished to a bright shine and colorful rugs scattered across the room complemented the art.

  “This is lovely,” I said, staring around at the living room.

  “Have a seat,” Ashara said. “I’d offer you something to drink, but . . .” her voice trailed off.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But. On accounta I’m dead and all.”

  “Yeah, that. I’m going to go change clothes. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  When she returned she ha
d traded her black slacks and blue button-down shirt for a pair of gray sweatpants and a black t-shirt.

  “The computer’s back here,” she said, leading me to a guest room. She sat down and I drifted up behind her.

  “So where should we start?” she asked. She clicked the mouse and pulled up a web browser.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess maybe run a search for license plate registration?”

  Ashara typed in the search terms, hit “search,” and waited while the page loaded. Then she let out a low whistle. “Damn, girl. Is it really that easy?” she asked. The result page showed link after link to sites promising to allow you to instantly find license plate registration information.

  She clicked on the first one. “Nope,” she said. “I ain’t paying no $99.95 just to find this out.”

  “He killed a woman, Ashara,” I said. “If I could pay it, I would. But I can’t.”

  Ashara looked up at me.

  “He chopped her up, Ashara. He left her body in the bathtub with all the pieces carefully arranged.”

  “God, stop!” Ashara put her hand up, palm facing me. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t pay for it at all. I said I wasn’t going to pay a hundred bucks. Geez. Let’s do a little comparison shopping before we start spending all my hard-earned cash, okay?”

  “Okay.” I sighed in relief.

  Ashara ran through several sites before finding one that satisfied her. “See? Twenty dollars, now that I can afford. Let me go find my purse.”

  I hovered anxiously over the computer, waiting for Ashara to get back. We were close to finding out who had killed Molly. I didn’t know how we were going to get the information to the police, but I was sure we could.

  Ashara returned, credit card in hand. “Okay,” she said, after setting up her account with the online company. “What was the number?”

  I repeated it to her, she typed it in, and we both stared intently at the screen.

  I let out a whoosh of non-breath when the results came up. “Dammit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Ashara. “I don’t think that was no seventy-two year old woman named Juana Nogales driving a Chevrolet Cavalier the other night.”

  “Maybe he’s related to her somehow?” I surmised. “Grandmother, maybe?”