Deep-Fried Homicide (The Laurel Falls Mysteries Book 1) (29 page)

"No," he mumbled, dazedly. "This one wants to talk."

Trina retrieved the pad and pencil and tossed them back to the sideboard. "Mostly, Benny practices automatic writing. The spirits communicate by controlling his arm. That's why the signatures are exactly the same as the original person's. For all intents and purposes, Benny's arm and hand belong to them while he is channeling."

"I see," Jason sighed. He could think of nothing else to say.

"Margaret wants to talk to you." Benny turned so that he faced Jason, but his eyes remained shut.

"So, you did your research on me." Jason shrugged and sighed. He leaned back in his chair and waited for the show to start.

"Don't be such a ninny, Jason. And sit up straight. You'll end up with scoliosis."

The voice was not his mother's, but neither was it Benny's own. It had an odd, shrill quality to it, though not the sort of shrillness that a man faking a woman's voice would take on. Jason felt a chill.

"Now, I want to tell you something so that you know it's really me. I could tell you about the Good Fairy."

Jason sat up in his chair, his back straighter than he had thought possible, and his lip trembling a bit.

"Remember? When you were little you were SUCH a handful. So, on those rare occasions when you were good all day long, the Good Fairy would come and hide a special treat for you. But you had to find it. Remember?"

"I remember." His voice didn't sound like his own now. It was dreamy and far away. For a moment, he wondered if he had been hypnotized somehow. He shook it off and tried to think straight. "And what was that treat, Mother?"

Benny laughed in his shrill, not-quite-a-woman voice. "A test. Okay. Grape Life Savers. You loved them more than anything in the world." She laughed a bit in Benny's voice and then continued. "And you've never called me 'mother' before in your life. Mommy or Mama. Never mother."

Jason felt his hands begin to shake and tried to stop them. He licked his lips and regarded Trina for a moment. Was that a self-righteous grin he saw on her face? Or was she simply happy to have given him something to hold onto?

"So, Mama, are you happy there? Where you are?" He felt like a child again. He hated that.

"I am. The afterlife is rather different than I thought it would be. I haven't seen anyone we know except my mother…your grandmother…but everyone here is calm and full of love and peace."

"That's…good." He was at a loss. His heart was pounding, his hands shaking, and he couldn't think of a single thing to ask his dead mother.

"Oh, and about that other question you asked Benny? Her name was Sylvia Goldberg and you refused to go out with her on a steady basis because everyone gave you grief. So, you took her to the drive-in one Saturday night and you let her give you your first French kiss. It had you walking around in a daze for a week, remember?"

Jason laughed in spite of himself and nodded. "I do remember. I remember telling you about it, too. And I remember what you said."

"Still testing. All right, my boy. I told you that girls would come and girls would go and that it was just a kiss and that if you didn't get over it, you'd marry the first girl you slept with and be miserable for the rest of your life. And you didn't get over it."

"And I married the first girl I ever slept with."

"And it only lasted six weeks."

They both laughed at that. For some reason beyond his comprehension, Jason wanted to hug Benny just then. There were tears in his eyes and his hands had stopped shaking. Everything just felt right again, the way it had before his mother had died, the way it hadn't felt since.

"I love you, Mama."

"I love you, too, boy. More than anything." There was a pause. Benny shifted in his chair. "I have to leave you now. My presence takes a steep toll on this gentleman and I don't want to hurt him. Tell your brother that I love him, and that he should stop going to the track on Tuesdays. He will never win more than he loses."

"I'll tell him. I love you, Mama. I miss you so much."

"I know. I miss you too. Until next time."

Benny's head began to tilt toward the table until Jason reached out to grab hold of his shoulder. Benny blinked at him and smiled. "Did I do good?"

Jason sat up straight and tried to adopt his usual gruff persona. It just wouldn't come. "You did real good, Benny." He sniffed, then cleared his throat. "How do you do it?"

"I dunno. They just come visit me when they need to. I worked real hard to call your mom up. They almost never come when I look for someone specifically. Just when they have something to say."

Trina stood up and made her way to the kitchen. When she returned, she had a tray in her hands and on it were all the trappings of a fine tea party. She set the tray down with a smile, still having not spoken a word. She poured each of them a cup of tea, then took her place once more.

"So," Jason began over the top of his cup, "you haven't had much to say this evening."

She shrugged and took a sip from her cup. "What's to say? You were a doubting Thomas. Benny proved you wrong. End of story."

Jason mulled this over. He wasn't one to admit to being wrong. He was a natural-born skeptic, a doubter tried and true. And when caught being wrong, he would merely dismiss it, never admit it.

"I guess I just never thought that people could go on after death. I mean, you want to think there's some glowing happy afterlife where all the people you ever knew went when they died. But it's hard to believe it actually exists…"

"It doesn't." She was very careful now, it seemed, in choosing her words. "There's not a heaven and hell like we all think. The afterlife is all around us. When push comes to shove, everything we are is nothing more than pure energy. And energy never goes away. It just becomes other forms of energy. So the energy that is the dead flows through Benny and others like him. They stop off for a visit, but never stay. Sometimes they impart wisdom to us. But they never really die."

It all made a crazy kind of sense to Jason, though he was reluctant to admit it, even to himself. Still, Benny had told him things that nobody on earth – not even his brother – could have known. Only his mother knew about that kiss, and what she had told him about it. Tears tortured his eyes for a moment and then were gone.

"I was an ass," he mumbled into his tea.

"Excuse me?" Trina leaned forward. If she felt an ounce of self-righteous indignation, it didn't show on her face.

"I was an ass," he said more clearly. "I was just as bigoted about your beliefs as the KKK is about anyone who isn't white. My mind was made up and I couldn't for a second stop to think that I didn't know everything in the universe. I'm sorry."

"It's all right." Benny clinked his cup back onto his saucer and smiled. "We meet a lot of skeptics in our line of work."

"I bet you do. But I'm no longer one of them. Mind you, I'm not buying into all your supernatural hooey. But I believe that I spoke to my mother a moment ago and that Benny made it happen. I'm grateful."

"And you believe that Benny is really channeling people who sign their own sports cards with their own REAL signatures?" Trina's eyebrows shot up like two well-trained circus dogs.

"I do," he chuckled with an exaggerated nod. "I'm not sure that that makes them authentic in the same way that the star having touched the card would make them. But I don't think you're a crook or anything."

"Thank you." Benny clapped Jason on the shoulder and smiled.

"I'm going to show myself out now. It's late and I have a lot of thinking to do." He moved toward the door and then turned. "And tomorrow I have to see Mr. Armstrong about his cards. I have to find a way to explain all this to him so that he'll understand."

"I'll still give his money back if he wants it." Benny's face was soft and genuine. He was a truly nice guy.

"Don't you worry about it, Benny. I'll figure something out." He smiled and winked at Trina. Then he left for home.

FREE PREVIEW: LOVE LOST

A Historical Time-Travel Mystery

CHAPTER ONE

T
he sun shimmered through dusty panes of glass, flashing off the requisite metal napkin holder and momentarily blinding Amanda. The tray tilted, shook. A tall glass of iced tea held its ground for a few moments, then tottered enough to slop tea onto the table in a generous puddle.

“Damn!” she spat out loud before she could catch herself.

She let the tray clatter to the table loudly, a rain of peas slipping over the edge of the institutional plate and rolling about aimlessly. There was tea on the tray, tea on the table, tea all over her hand. She snatched a wad of napkins from that guilty holder and began blotting at the mess furiously, cursing under her breath all the while. Her face red, hazel eyes flashing to crimson, she tore at the napkins, trying fruitlessly to wipe the sticky sweet tea from her hand.

She felt the burning gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes on the back of her neck. The soft hairs rose and prickled. Finally, she dropped into the chair and hung her head. Her taste for tea had waned, her appetite gone. For the briefest of moments, she was that small girl back in the cafeteria of PS42, sitting alone, mocked by nearly everyone and weeping into her Partridge Family lunch box. Amanda Stevens was about to cry.

“Having one of THOSE days, are we?”

Amanda’s eyes shot upward, falling upon a smile which was brighter than it had any right to be. “Having one of those lives.” She waved her hand in the general direction of the other chair and sighed. “Better not sit too close. It could be contagious.”

Ignoring the fringe of acid on Amanda’s words, Dana sat down, smoothing out her flowered skirt with great care and slipping her chin into the bowl of her cupped hands. “So, you had a little mishap. Happens to us all. No need to get...”

“Oh, it’s not that! Face it! I’m a mess!” Amanda ran her hands through her stringy blonde hair and bit into her lip. “My house is a mess. My yard is a mess. The boat is a mess. I have more work on my desk than I can get to in three lifetimes. Face it. I’m a bona fide disaster.”

“You need to get away from things for a while. Take a vacation. Relax.” Dana smiled again, this time a bit cooler. To Amanda she seemed bored, tired, probably, of hearing another in the long list of Amanda disasters.

“I tried to take a vacation once. Don’t you remember? A simple drive up into the mountains to stay at a nice cabin and unwind. Halfway there, my car broke down. I went to call the auto club and by the time I got back, the road had iced up and my car had slid into a ravine.”

Dana made a sour face and blinked. “Oh yea. I forgot about that one.”

“I didn’t.” Amanda picked up her fork and pushed a few errant peas back into the communal pile, then made as if to eat them.

Dana sat back, folding her arms over her chest and watching as though she expected a light bulb to appear over Amanda’s head. “You know what you need? You need a MAN.”

Amanda laughed at that, the sound of it attracting more attention than her previous racket. “You HAVE to be kidding. We’ve been best friends for twelve years. In all that time, have you EVER known me to have a decent relationship?”

“Yes. Once.” That pointed glare made shivers run up and down Dana’s spine, but she forged on. “And you have to stop dwelling on it.”

“Some people were made to be in relationships. And some people were made to be alone. I’m an alone kinda gal. And I’ve made my peace with that.” She reached for the tea, suddenly drawing back her hand as though she’d been bitten. “Besides, I’m getting tired of hearing every man on the planet explain how I’m too detached to get serious about.”

Dana reached out and grabbed Amanda’s hand, yanking it to the center of the table. “Do you see how hard and rough and callused that hand is? And you hardly ever do any actual labor.” She stretched across the table, stabbing at Amanda’s chest with the same bony finger. “You mark my words, Mandy. If you don’t learn to use it, your heart’s gonna end up the same way.”

Dana shoved back her chair and stood up from it, her heels drowning out the scrape of light metal against cheap tile. Amanda stared over her shoulder after her friend, jaw drooping and eyes wide. Was that all a callous act, meant for effect? Or was Dana really about to abandon her? For several very slow heartbeats, Amanda was very scared. Then her mouth shut, and her head turned, and the walls went up again.

I
n a small square of light cast by a small square screen, Amanda sat motionless. Her shimmering hazel eyes were captured by the visions in that television, visions that mocked her own memory and stalked her like time-traveling demons. The faces were familiar, owned and operated by the movie channel. The story was as old as time, more painful than death and twice as frightful.