"She tried to kill me!" Walt screamed. Or tried to. His voice was raspy.
"He
tried to kill
me
," Areila said. She relinquished the shovel and pointed at the pickax. "With that."
"Liar!" Walt whispered. Whimpered.
Across the park, the woman with the walking stick hurried to reach us.
Indignant as only a man who has been duped can be, Sheriff Jacobsen shouted at Areila. "No one sees the ghost unless they're crazy or medicated or mentally impaired. No one! Yet you say you can see him. Who should I believe? Our groundskeeper who's worked for us on and off for years? Or you?"
In a reasonable voice, Areila said, "I can see him because we're related."
"Right." Sheriff Jacobsen spoke into a two-way radio hooked to his holster. "Attempted homicide at Eugene Park. Request back-up and an ambulance." He put the device away and said to Areila, "Walt brought the pickax to help excavate the grave you believe is here."
"All the graves are here," I said.
Sheriff Jacobsen looked around. "Who said that?"
He had heard me. "I did," I said.
He spotted me. Just like that. He could see me. For one moment, he covered his eyes with his hand. Then lowered it.
He could still see me. And he wasn't crazy or medicated or mentally impaired.
Areila realized what was happening and smiled. "Perhaps, Sheriff Jacobsen, in the right circumstances anyone can see my great-grandfather Frank Vincent Montgomery."
Sheriff Jacobsen didn't want to believe it.
I moved closer to Areila.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
Kateri arrived, limping and leaning heavily on her walking stick.
She saw me, too. But then, she would.
With their attention captured, no one bothered to notice Walt. But I knew what was happening with him. Areila's blows had broken his nose, cracked his cheek and battered his throat. Blood clogged his breathing passages. His throat was swelling shut, and as it progressed, his struggle for air became progressively more acute. I watched and cheerfully considered how much he deserved this miserable death.
"My girls," he whispered. "You can't take my girls."
That brought the sheriff's attention back to him. "What girls?" Sheriff Jacobsen asked.
"The girls he's murdered," I said.
The sheriff put one finger in his ear as if trying to block the sound of my voice. But I didn't have a voice; he was hearing my thoughts in his head and he liked that even less. Yet he looked at me and answered, "That's impossible. This is a public park. I'm the sheriff. We would know if someone was killing women."
Areila said, "He's the park groundskeeper. He's quiet. He's non-descript. No one notices him.
I
didn't."
"He can always clean up the mess." With one shaking hand, Kateri pushed the fall of shiny black hair away from her face. "Mary Lees was my friend. I don't believe she would have left Virtue Falls without telling me. I really don't believe she wouldn't return her books first."
The sirens got closer. I could see red and blue lights flashing on the street.
Sheriff Jacobsen fought the truth. But he was a man of the law, a man of honor, and he acknowledged, "Last autumn, we had a tourist who went missing. One of the homeless women has disappeared. And I got a report from the FBI about a girl who ran away from home; they found her car in Virtue Falls Canyon and asked us to keep an eye out for her remains."
Areila made the logical leap and asked the logical question. "When we excavate Frank Vincent's grave — what will we find?"
"Bodies?" Kateri asked hoarsely.
Walt tried to speak, to demand his cache of murdered and mutilated woman remain untouched. But finally, he lost the power of speech, then consciousness.
Sheriff Jacobsen raised his voice. "EMTs needed here!"
Why?
This killer deserved to die.
But people ran toward them, yelling. Police officers. Men and women with medical equipment.
I was so angry. I wanted to shout at them.
Let. Him. Die.
Something distracted me. The faintest whisper on the wind . . .
Dearest.
It sounded like Sofia.
I wrenched my head around.
Dearest, where have you been?
I looked. I couldn't believe it.
It
was
Sofia, mature, glorious, glowing with beauty and grace. She stood on the other side of the line of consecration, smiling.
Dearest, where have you been? I've been looking for you all my life.
Her voice. In my head. Warm, loving, exactly as I remembered it.
She extended her hand to me.
I didn't think. I didn't hesitate. I moved toward her. I reached for her hand.
I stumbled to a stop, bound by the rules that had governed me for more than seventy long years.
I can't. I'm not allowed.
Take my hand,
she said.
She was so confident. So sure.
I reached. I touched.
Her fingers closed around mine, warm, vibrant, alive in a way I could never have hoped or imagined. At last, at long last, I was able to step beyond the bounds of my prison and into her arms.
Love had freed me.
Sofia was so lovely. So real. So there. She glowed with happiness, glowed as she had after we made love and created our son.
She looked beyond me, toward our great-granddaughter.
Areila, thank you. Thank you for finding my love. Thank you for letting me know how to locate him. From the day you were born, I knew you would be a blessing on our family.
Areila threw her a kiss. And then one to me.
Somehow, it reached me, made me feel as if I'd been hugged by a beloved child.
Sofia, she reminds me of you.
Sofia laughed, a soft chime of merriment.
Frank, she looks like you. Every time I gazed on her, I saw your face.
Really?
I looked at Areila again, pleased to know I had left something of myself on this earth. I turned back to Sofia.
But in her fierceness and determination, she is yours.
Ours,
Sofia corrected.
Our great-granddaughter. One of our descendants.
I cupped Sofia's face in my hands, stared into her warm brown eyes.
I never meant to leave you alone.
I know that. I never doubted you.
The guilt and horror of so many lonely, helpless years slipped away from me.
For all of these years, my heart was broken. At last . . . it is healed.
Time stopped. The space under the trees grew still and silent.
Kateri and Areila and Garik watched as the two ghostly forms reached, touched, combined, became one. The glow surrounding them grew to blinding proportions.
"It's love," Areila whispered. She spread her hands like a woman warming herself before a campfire. "We can see love."
The embrace of beyond enclosed the ghosts, enveloped them in warmth and welcome.
Abruptly they were gone.
Garik cleared his throat. "I guess they, um . . ."
"She never stopped looking for him." Kateri laughed a little. "She found him at last and they . . ."
"Love never dies." Areila blinked tears away. "They're together."
"Yeah." Garik pulled out his handkerchief and honked his nose.
The two women looked at each other in rueful amusement.
Then in a jarring return to the real world, action, light and noise lit up the darkness.
Cops arrived, pistols and flashlights out.
EMTs ran up with a stretcher. They shoved a breathing tube down Walt's throat, saved his life, and sent him to the hospital. They saved his life so he could face trial for murder. That's what they had been trained to do.
After briefing his men, Sheriff Jacobsen ordered them to set up strings of lights on the branches around the bare ground that Areila claimed as her great-grandfather's grave.
Garik no longer seemed to doubt they would find the body.
Because it was her right, Areila dug into the ground first. With the second shovel filled with dirt, she brought up a colorful scrap of flowered cloth.
Immediately she quit, but the deputies and curiosity-seekers continued. Before dawn broke in the now-clear sky, they uncovered five women's bodies, including Mary Lees. All the women had been murdered within the last year. The next morning, a different crew took their place and dug deeper. The people who wielded the shovels found another three bodies. Those women had died about thirty years ago, but with the same gruesome brutality.
Sheriff Jacobsen ordered an investigation into Walt's past, what he'd done, where he'd lived, whether those locations had suffered any heinous unsolved crimes.
When Walt's wife learned of his arrest and why, she was shocked and horrified — she seemed sincerely unaware — and started divorce proceedings.
Beneath all the skirts and bras and locks of hair and delicate bones and grinning skulls, the diggers found what Areila had been looking for — a broken pine coffin with an unknown man's remains. Shreds of a cheap suit styled in the forties covered the skeleton. At first the experts doubted enough DNA could be recovered to make a match. But the corpse's teeth were intact, and from those the geneticists determined that Areila was a direct descendent of this body and that he was a relative of the Seattle Montgomeries. Based on the evidence, the deceased was assumed to be disgraced World War II veteran Frank Vincent Montgomery who had been listed as a deserter.
When notified, the Seattle Montgomeries had no interest in the remains.
Whoever had cared about Frank Vincent was long dead. That left Areila free to have Frank Vincent's remains cremated. She took his ashes to her family's home in Yakima and on a gray rainy spring day, she carried the simple black crematory urn and a bouquet of orange blossoms to her great-grandmother's grave. She knelt beside the simple headstone. "Grandma Sofia, I know you're not here. Mostly because I saw you go on to the next world."
In a really spectacular way.
"But I wanted to tell you — I promised you I would bring Frank Vincent to rest with you. Here he is. I got the family's permission to have him placed in the ground here. We'll have a ceremony, just a few of us — my mom, my sisters and my little brother. We're working on having Frank Vincent Montgomery's name cleared with the U.S. Army . . . He doesn't deserve to be recorded as a deserter." Areila waited, somehow expecting a reply.
The rain spattered softly on the grass. The wind whispered through the trees.
"I wanted to come here by myself to say — as a child, you helped show me what love is, and I'm so happy you have found each other. I hope at last you're both . . . home." Areila felt a burst of warmth on the top of her head. She opened her eyes.
A ray of sunshine broke through the clouds, illuminating her, the urn, and the headstone.
She smiled through a sudden uprush of tears.
Yes. They were home.
THE END
Christina Dodd
here: Thank you for enjoying
LOVE NEVER DIES
. I hope you’re a fan of the
Virtue Falls
series … and that you accept my invitation to explore my worlds and join my
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The
Virtue Falls series
in order:
On September 6, 2016 from New York Times bestselling author, Christina Dodd,
comes the third and newest
Virtue Falls
thriller,
BECAUSE I’M WATCHING
!
Veteran Jacob Denisov lives alone in his small, darkened home, sleepless, starving, blaming himself for the horrors of the past and waiting for the moment when he gathers enough courage to kill himself. When neighbor Madeline Hewitson drives her car through the front wall of his house, she breaks his house—and Jacob’s life—wide open. She isn’t called “Mad Maddie” for nothing. The survivor of a college dorm massacre, a woman accused of her lover’s murder, she is haunted by ghosts and tormented by a killer only she can see. Dealing with construction and forced to see the world outside his home, Jacob watches Maddie, recognizes a kindred spirit and wonders—is this truly madness, or has someone caught her in a twisted labyrinth of revenge and compassion, guilt and redemption, murder and madness?
Today
Virtue Falls, Washington