Shadow Bound (Wraith) (12 page)

He raised that eyebrow. The one that made me fall for him, and the one that at this very moment made me want to smack it off. “I won’t because obviously there is no need for me to comment on all the laws you broke to help Evan and the completely reckless way you risked your own life to save him. I won’t bring that up.”

“It’s not the same.”

“The hell it isn’t. This time it’s about me and not you and your BFF Evan. It’s about some girl you have no reason to be jealous of – dead or alive.” His eyes flashed mean. “It’s about stuff you wouldn’t understand, Jane, with your quirky, supportive family and friendly ghosts.”

I step back. “Is that a back-handed way of calling me naive? I’m not naive, Connor.”

“Maybe not, but I have a ghost, a friend no less, in my head and in my dreams. And this girl had a shitty life. Horrible. Obviously, she isn’t ready to let go and I don’t really have a choice. So right now, what I need is a supportive girlfriend, not one bent on jealousy and destruction.” He picked up his paint brush and dipped it into the can on the ground. “Obviously, you can’t handle that.”

“What does that mean?” Was he breaking up with me? I swore he was breaking up with me.

“It means I’ve got to get back to work before Mr. Brady catches me talking to you.” He climbed a couple of rungs on the ladder. “And you have to decide how you’re going to handle this. It’s not all about you. Not this time.”

“I...” what do you say to a guy who calls you jealous and naive and self-absorbed? I hoofed it to my truck and wrenched open the door. Halfway into my seat I found the words I was searching for.  I leaned out the car and yelled, “Screw you, Connor Jacobs.”

W
hat a jerk.
An infuriating, mean jerk. Just a jerk. I reminded myself of this while I drove home. I refused to cry. Not anymore. My eyes landed on the plastic bead necklace hanging on my rearview mirror. Part of the tacky decorations at the spring formal. I recalled how Connor looped dozens of them around my neck and arms and legs. One ended up here, obviously intended to be a painful reminder of what a jerk he could be.

After parking, I checked the mail, but instead of walking to the mailbox, I ducked between the bushes that separated our yard and Ms. Frances’.

“Tonya,” I called from behind a wild azalea bush. “Tonya!”

I looked around Ms. Frances’ tidy yard but did not see her. The concrete front steps were a couple of feet away. I stared at the thick layers of red paint peeling off the steps, trying to decide what to do.

“Tonya,” I called one more time, to no avail. The weathered yard and house were in stark contrast to my own renovated home mere feet away. I pushed aside the awkward feeling I had about the obvious difference in our households and ran up the steps. At the top, I hesitated before marching over to the screened door, where I knocked lightly. Noise from a television filtered through the door and I knocked again, afraid my resolve would waver with each passing second. Just before I decided to leave, the front door opened and I came face to face with my neighbor with only the screen door between us. Warm air from inside wafted out, which seemed wrong since the temperature outside was unbearable. The smell of fried food assaulted my nose from somewhere deeper in the house.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said with a smile. “Well, come in. I’ve got food on the stove.”

She unlatched the screen from the inside and pushed it toward me. The springs creaked and I hesitated. Honestly, I was a little scared. No one knew I was here and what did I really know about Ms. Frances? My worries were cut off by the sound of her voice.

“You coming?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I hurried inside, only stopping to close the door behind me. The house was dark inside but clean. The furniture old. The room was warm – stifling – and I realized that she probably didn’t have air conditioning.

“This way,” she said, disappearing through the living room and into a door I assumed was the kitchen. I passed photographs on the walls. Graduation pictures, babies, a black and a white wedding portrait hung prominently over the fireplace. Sure enough, once I entered the next room, Ms. Frances stood over a pan of boiling oil, dropping in pieces of flour-covered chicken. The faded yellow walls and a row of windows across the back of the room made the kitchen brighter than the rest of the house.

“I was wondering when you’d make it over here,” she said, turning a piece of chicken around in the pan, which made a sizzling sound.

“You know why I’m here?” I asked. This surprised me since I wasn’t exactly sure myself.

“Oh yes. I’ve been waiting.” She waved me into a seat at her kitchen table. “Took you longer than I thought.”

“I’m here about...” I searched for the right words.

“Tonya. My baby girl. I know.”

Ms. Frances bent over and opened the oven beneath the stove top. Heat rushed out and I could feel it across the room. She put her hand inside and pressed down on what I assumed from the smell was biscuits. Apparently satisfied, she used a pot holder to pull the tray of biscuits out of the oven and rest it on the counter. The smell of the chicken frying in the pan combined with the bread made my mouth water and I realized it had been hours since I had last eaten. The elderly woman closed the door with a bang and looked at me. “She passed when she was 11.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The Lord must have needed her.”

I watched her fiddle at the stove, stirring a pot, turning chicken and pulling it out before it burned. She rested the cooked pieces on a paper towel on the counter.

Since we were speaking truths here, I decided to tell her mine. “I can see dead people.”

“Mmmm hmmmm.”

“You know this?” I wasn’t totally surprised at this point.

Ms. Frances smoothed the front of her apron. “I seen you talking to them. Tonya likes you.”

I was stunned. Could she see them also? “You can see them?”

“Oh no, child. I can’t see no dead people. But I’ve known Tonya has been waiting around for something. She was always a mama’s girl, but I knew she wasn’t here for me. I see now. She was waiting on you.”

“Me?”

She nodded and went back to her stove.

“But I help the spirits move on – cross over. She’s never asked me for help.”

“I don’t expect so. Tonya don’t need your help.” She leveled a dark eye at me. “You need her help.”

Ruth mentioned that this girl was playing games, but even so, none of this made sense. Not only that, everyone seemed to know more than I did. “What does that mean? If she wants to help, then help me. I don’t even know what I need help with.”

Ms. Frances moved slowly to the cabinet next to the sink and pulled out a cream-colored dinner plate. She carried it to the stove and began ladling food out of one of the pots. She speared a piece of chicken and dropped a golden biscuit next to the other food. After fussing a bit more, she brought the plate to me and settled it on the placemat.

“It looks wonderful,” I said, eyeing the delicious food. “I think mother is waiting for me though.”

“Eat,” said, sitting own across from me. “I told her you would be here.”

Nerves exploded in my stomach. How? How would she know this? The decision to come over here was a whim, made in a split second. “How did you know? I only decided when I got home from the hospital.”

Ms. Frances smiled devilishly. “There are more gifts than yours, Jane Watts. Or your aunt’s. Some see the past. Others death. Some the future. I have my own abilities. When I realized you would be here during dinner, I called your mother and told her I needed a little help in the house.”

I almost dropped the fork I had picked up. “You can see the future?”

“Something like that.”

Of course, vague answers. I shouldn’t expect anything else.

She nudged the plate toward me. “Eat and I’ll tell you what I can.”

So I did. I began shoveling food in my mouth. Bread and chicken and black-eyed peas. Everything tasted amazing. Fried and greasy. Real butter on the biscuits and pieces of bacon mixed in with the peas. I only had Southern food like this at my grandmother’s. My mother thought it was unhealthy.

“Tonya was a sweet but mischievous child. She ran me ragged. Her brother, Darius, was three years older. All she ever wanted was to be just like him.” She laughed wistfully. “Darius was in and out of trouble all the time, so that wasn’t a good idea at all.

I continued eating while Ms. Frances spoke, hanging on every word. She stood and went to the refrigerator and brought out a Coke and left it on the table in front of me. “I worked back then. Cleaning homes. It was just me and the kids. Tonya was either in school or with her grandmother. Sometimes she came to work with me. Things were different back then. Some things harder, others easier.

“One summer day, I had to work. School was out and Tonya’s grandmother was ill. I told Darius to keep an eye on her, but he was busy with his friends, playing ball or whatever game they was big into at the time.”

“Is that when it happened?”

“On the bus ride home, I had a vision. I saw Tonya walking down the street one minute and the next – poof,”’ her hands made a quick movement. “She was gone. I ran home from the bus stop calling her name. Girl was nowhere to be found. We ran to the neighbors’ and asked all the kids. No one had seen her. Darius said she was whining about going to the store down the block. You know that little building on the corner? It used to be a candy store. Mr. Johnson owned it.”

I nodded, we passed the boarded-up building every time we left the neighborhood.

“Darius said he had no money, so he didn’t want to go. I guess Tonya got impatient ‘cause later, when we were looking for her, Mr. Johnson said she came by and bought some candy. No one saw her after that.”

“She was dead?”

She nodded, her eyes wet. “Two days later, her body was found in the alley behind the house.”

I placed my fork on the table and wrapped my hand around my waist. I felt sick. “Oh no.”

“She’d been dead the whole time. Darius and Parker found her.”

“Poor Darius.”

“A man in the neighborhood did it. He was sick. On the drugs,” she shook her head.

“Did he go to jail?”

“Yep. After the other men in the neighborhood beat him senseless,” she said. “The worst part was I saw it all coming. This gift, you see… I saw it, clear as day. Not the part about where she was or how to find her, but the fact she disappeared. Even so, I didn’t have the clarity until right before and not with enough time to save her. I lost my baby girl that day.”

“I’m so sorry.” It may have been the most horrible story I’d heard so far. Evan’s story was tragic, but this one seemed worse, although I realized it was silly to put a qualifier on whose death was more terrible than the next.

“Her death was the hardest thing I had ever lived through. Right away, I knew she didn’t pass over like she should have. She was waiting around. I’d see her little swing out back swaying in the breeze. I knew it was her – it’s why I never took it down. Sometimes in the afternoon, when I pull a cake out of the oven or a pie, I hear that back door slam hard and fast. But there ain’t no one there. I pretend it’s the wind cause I don’t want that girl lost – seeking me out for eternity. I had visions. Brief, but enough to show me what I needed to see. Tonya was here for someone, to help someone in the future. I didn’t know who, nor how, but I knew the day would come.”

I had stopped eating at this point. I had a feeling Tonya’s story and my story were about to merge. Ms. Frances knew it too and began nodding.

“The day your mama and daddy came to look at the house, I knew. I was struck by the sight of a young blonde girl with wide gray eyes. That girl was gonna meet up with my little girl and things were going to happen. I saw you that first day and my heart filled with hope. You were going to set my baby girl free.”

I shook my head. “This is where I’m confused. You say she is here to help me, but I’m supposed to set her free? I don’t understand.”

“I suppose you’re right. Tonya needs your help and you need hers. She’s got something to tell you.”

“I’m ready. I’m ready to hear what she has to say.” I found myself looking around the room wondering if Tonya was here now. She wasn’t visible, but I knew better than to think that meant she wasn’t around.

“She’ll come when she’s ready or when you’re ready.” She pointed to my dinner. “Done?”

“Yes. Thank you. It was delicious.”

She stood and picked up my mostly empty plate and carried it to the sink. I watched as she methodically scraped the waste into the trashcan before rinsing and washing the plate by hand. There was no dishwasher or disposal in the house. When she was finished, she turned back to me, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.