Along Came a Demon

Along Came a Demon

Whisperings book one

Linda Welch

When people talk of ghosts I don’t mention

the apparition by which I am haunted, the

phantom that shadows me about the

streets… .

Logan Pearsall Smith

“
There’s a naked woman in the garden,” Jack said.

“
Ung?” I mumbled, which was about as coherent as I got at seven in the morning. I glanced through the diamond-paned kitchen window. Yep. Naked woman standing on the grass. I didn’t recognize her. I groped my way to the counter and hit the button on the coffeemaker, glad I remembered to load it up the night before. The programmable timer hadn’t worked for months, and the less time I spent in that no-man’s land between getting out of bed and sucking down my first cup, the better.

“
Don’t you think that’s a bit odd?” Jack insisted.

Happily, I was not slugging back my first caffeine fix of the day, or I would have snorted coffee. Odd? When was anything in my life
not
odd? I lolled over the counter as the first drop of water hit the grounds and the truly wonderful aroma of coffee laced with caramel permeated the air.

“
A naked
wet
woman in the garden. Dripping wet,” he emphasized.

I sighed and turned to lean my spine on the counter. I would rather she were an escaped lunatic who wandered into the neighborhood than what she really was. Although how she could be wet on a chilly November morning was anyone’s guess.

“
I’ve been watching her from the bedroom window,” Mel said, coming through the door from the hallway, mussing up her permanently mussed red hair with one hand. “She’s been standing there, wet, for half an hour.”

Not a disoriented stranger in the wrong backyard. Not an escaped loony. Worse. One of them. I sighed again. I did not want to deal with her this early in the morning. “She’ll have to wait till a
fter
I have my coffee.”

I didn’t want to deal with her, period. I’d just signed off on an unpleasant case and looked forward to a break. Warren Bigger of Ogden reported his wife missing. She went to visit a girlfriend and never came back. He called the friend, but she said she didn’t see Monica and did not arrange to meet her. Twenty-four hours later, Warren and the boys were frantic and he called the police. Search parties were organized and leads investigated. Warren stood outside his house, looking solemn, his sons at his side as he spoke to reporters. One of the boys couldn’t take it and shook with tears. Sympathy poured in from the community. And I had to go stomp on everyone’s good intentions and commiseration by finding Monica’s body and fingering Warren as her killer.

I almost gave up after I questioned every dead person in Ogden - and there are a lot of them - and got nowhere. But I methodically went from one to another leading away from the city. Then I talked to Sheila. She saw Warren and Monica take the onramp and head toward Brigham on Interstate 15, the same morning Monica was supposed to be with her girlfriend and the boys were in school. Philip saw them turn off Highway 13 west of Corinne. Finding Monica in the desert took me less than an hour; she was the only woman standing on flat terrain with her hands and ankles tied and a flour sack on her head, right over where her body lay. She told me who killed her. DNA evidence did the rest.

So now the Bigger twins were in foster care, the last place I wanted any kid to be, but would soon be given into the custody of their maternal grandparents, which eased Monica’s anguish. Their dad was in the state penitentiary. Hopefully, he would end his days there and Monica could go on to where the shades of the dead go.

I wanted to sit out the morning in the silence of my kitchen, drink strong coffee, maybe clean out my old pink refrigerator, and make a pan of Louisiana bread pudding with whiskey sauce.

No such luck.

Jack sniffed condescendingly, went back to the kitchen table and stooped over the newspaper I picked up on the way home last night, his long brown hair flopping over his brow into his eyes. Mel stood at his shoulder.

Jack’s hair permanently flops in startled pale-blue eyes. Mel’s hair is always mussed up, as if she just got out of bed, or battled a strong wind. She rakes at it, or tries to smooth it down, but it never changes. Mel’s freckled face wears the same apprehensive expression as Jack’s does.

I opened the newspaper, then turned back to the counter to fill my mug with precious liquid. I got liquid creamer from the refrigerator, added a good dollop to the coffee, and took my mug to the window. I watched the woman as I sipped. This
was
kind of strange, or I should say stranger than normal. They always remained at their place of departure and this one sure did not depart from my backyard, unless I missed some bizarre event during the night. And why dripping wet? It indicated drowning, but she couldn’t have drowned out there.

She looked right at me.

“
Ahem!” from Jack.

I stepped to the table, flipped to the next page for him and took a seat, then nursed my mug in both hands. “So what’s new with the world?”

“
Unfortunately, our provincial little paper doesn’t often mention the world,” Jack said with a sneer in his voice. “However, you might be interested to know there was a death in the apartments.”

“
The apartments? You mean… ?” I jogged my head.

“
Yes. Those apartments. The ones behind us.”

“
Coralinda Marchant,” Mel added helpfully as she peered near-sightedly at the newspaper. “Found dead in her bathtub.”

I twisted to look through the window at the tall, dark-haired, wet woman in my backyard. I took another sip of coffee. “What a coincidence.”

Now I really did not want to go outside. “Do they know who killed her?”

“
No mention of murder. The police are in their no-comment mode,” Jack informed me.

“
Then they’re stalling. She was murdered.”

“
Cops? Useless!” Jack opined too vehemently. I internally winced, recognizing a lead-in to one of his totally unfunny jokes. They always involve dead people in some way.

“
Did you hear the one about the Irish cop? A newcomer said he’d heard about a lot of criminal activity in the area, but it seemed like a quiet little place to him. So the cop tells him, ‘Ah, to be sure, we haven’t buried a living soul in years.’”

This had to be his fifth rendition of the same, stale old joke.

Mel wrapped her arms over her stomach and deadpanned, “Oh, Lord! she says, clutching her stomach and rolling on the ground with unrestrained mirth.”

“
You’ve heard it before,” Jack stated.

“
Why would you think that?”

Tsk
ing, I put my mug on the table and pulled the paper to my side. Coralinda Marchant: single, thirty-two, lived alone, worked as a secretary at a storage facility on West Canal. A neighbor found her when he saw her apartment door wide open and couldn’t resist a snoop; two days ago, on November 17
^th
. They estimated her death as the evening of November 16th.

I pushed the paper back to Jack, turned to the next page for him and tucked my feet up on the rungs of the chair, wishing I put slippers on over my socks. The sun would soon rise above the peaks and flood the kitchen with light and warmth, but until then the inadequate heating left it cool, and the floor felt icy. The radiant heating in my house is old. It is also noisy, popping and crackling at odd hours of the day and night. One day, when I strike it rich - ha ha - I will replace the heating system. Until then, a cold day in mid-November tends to worm its way inside.

A redbrick cottage built in the post-World War II era, my house is small and well built, boasting the original wooden floors and window frames. My favorite rooms, the kitchen and bathroom, are large, and in winter the warmest rooms in the house, the bathroom big enough for my treadmill and TV to fit in with room to spare. I can jog for hours and watch my favorite shows at the same time.

I have to keep in shape. At six-foot-four and slim, my muscle will go to fat if I don’t take care of my body, then I’ll look like a great lump. I used to be fanatical about exercise, but when my special little talent reared its ugly head, for a while there I lost interest in just about everything except hiding away from the outside world. Seeing the sorry - okay, flabby - shape I was in, helped pull me out of it.

I drained my mug, leaned over it so I could see out the window. She was still here, but now she wandered in tight little circles.

It did not make sense. Why - more importantly, how - did dead Coralinda Marchant end up in my yard?

On a half-acre of land at the end of a cul-de-sac, the house butts right up to the curb, with a narrow strip of grass either side and in front where Beeches Street begins a winding descent to Clarion. The woman stood in the middle of the strip on the north side of the house, hands hanging loose at her sides, waiting.

I walked beside the house, my shoes leaving tracks in a thin coat of frost. Hesitating at the corner, I braced for a vision. I don’t always see a shade’s death, but when I do it literally flashes on the insides of my eyelids like a flickering movie. Even though I know I watch the last moments of a person’s life, I think I could learn to live with it as there is a kind of detachment, if not for the accompanying emotion. I feel what they feel and I will never become accustomed to that.

I see what they see. Except for when they are taken from behind, I see the face of their killer.

But nothing came. That’s always a relief, but can make discovering what happened to a shade harder, because they are not always sure themselves.

One of the first things I learned about talking with the dead is you do not offer them information. You do not put words in their mouths. If they are confused and you say, “Can you get a message to my Aunt Bertha?” they are just as likely to say they can, because they want to please you. They figure if they please you, you will talk to them again.

So I walked up to the woman I presumed to be Coralinda Marchant and stopped in front of her with one eyebrow hiked like a question mark. The early morning chill bit at my exposed face and hands. I wrapped my arms around myself to stifle a shiver.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought tears mingled with the water on her face.

“
Thank you,” she whispered.

I once asked a spirit why he whispered to me, why they all did. He said he didn’t whisper, he spoke in a perfectly normal voice. To me, they seem to whisper.

Her voice was rather high, the sort which could become piercing if she were excited and talking a mile a minute. Dark-brown hair clung to a pointed face and almost down to the waist of a tall, slim, lanky body with small breasts and narrow hips. Thick brown lashes framed huge blue eyes. Not beautiful, but attractive enough to turn a man’s head as she walked past him. Just my opinion. The water on her fascinated me; her entire body, every strand of her hair, each individual eyelash. I expected it to drip off, but it coated her like a sheath.

“
I’m Lindy Marchant. I live … lived on the third floor,” she went on, flicking one hand back over her shoulder to indicate the apartment complex behind her.