Dying For You (9 page)

“Maybe. It’s something, anyway. Better than waiting for…better than waiting.”

She stroked his long thigh. “I guess it sounds like a silly complaint, but three months in paradise is too much. And it’s no fun without Nikki here.”

“Thanks,” Jack said dryly.

“I’m sorry, babe. You know what I mean. Everything’s, you know, unfinished. I feel like I’m in limbo.”

Unseen by both, Nicki stuck her head through the wall and yelled, “
You
feel like you’re in limbo?”

“Yes,” Jack agreed as if he hadn’t been interrupted. Which, in a way, he hadn’t.

“Do you know who to call?”

Nikki popped back in. “Oh, we’re in a rerun of
Ghostbusters
now? ‘Who you gonna call? Nikki-busters!’ ”

“I mean,” Cathy continued, “how do you find a psychic?”

“I know exactly who to call—not the medium, but the medium’s intermediate. She can put us in touch. The boy would be”—Jack’s dark eyes narrowed in thought—“well into his thirties. Assuming he’s still in the business.”

“One way to find out,” Cathy said, and got up to get dressed.

THREE DAYS LATER

Nikki was gratified to see Jack and Cathy come out of their cabin after the sun had set. She didn’t want to risk interrupting another (gag) intimate moment and besides, she had high hopes. It was a full moon (again) and if she knew her spooky movies and Ouija board fiction, it was a great time for spirits to speak to the living.

“Guys!” she said, following them to the lodge. Their footprints sank deep in the sand; she, Nikki observed glumly, left
none. “It’s still me. Still Nikki. Don’t you think it’s about time you noticed me? You know, if you can stop having sex for five minutes.”

The lodge van, a tasteful serial-killer gray, pulled into the drive, and her friends hurried to meet it.

That was weird. There hadn’t been any new guests since—well.

“Let’s try a new one,” she said, trailing after them like a puppy. “You’ve gotta remember this one, Cath. We worked on our walkovers for six months to get it right. Remember? We went to Michigan with my folks that time and memorized it? Cath? Remember?”

The van’s engine cut off, and the driver and a lone passenger got out. Nikki, focused on her friends, ignored them.

She punched a fist through the air and cheered:

She took another breath (force of habit), made a V for victory, clapped, and continued.

“God, will you stop making that noise?” the passenger said, clearly irritated. “I’ve already got a headache from all the plane rides.”

“What?” Cathy said.

“What?” Nikki said.

He was a tall drink, at least six feet five, and thin—too thin, like he forgot to eat regularly. He had a headful of blond, shoulder-length waves—the moonlight bounced off them in a romantic, yet weird way—and the palest, bluest eyes Nikki had ever seen. Pilot eyes. Shooter’s eyes. He hadn’t had a chance to shave in a couple of days, and the beard coming in was surprisingly dark and coarse.

“Is this a joke? It must be. I fly two thousand miles to listen to a dead cheerleader reliving her glory days.”

“Hey!” Nikki snapped. “I was never a cheerleader. Too tall.” Then she realized what was happening. “Wait a damn minute. You can hear me?”

“She didn’t make cheerleading,” Cathy was saying sorrowfully. “She was too tall. But we had fun practicing together.
That’s amazing, that you would know that. Did your psychic vibrations tell you that?”

“The only vibrations I get are when I lean up against the washing machine.”

“In lieu of regular dating, I guess,” Nikki snarked.

“Shut up, what do you know about it?”

“So how did you—Did you study up on her background before you came here?” Cathy was asking.

“Please,” the man said, rolling his blue, blue eyes. Then he looked at Jack. “What are
you
doing alive again? That’s not your body.”

“It is now,” Jack said. “It’s nice to see you again, Tommy.”

“Tom,” the man corrected. “For God’s sake. I’m too big to be a Tommy.”

“This is my wife, Cathy, and—”

“Do you think you can find her?” Cathy interrupted.

“What’s to find? She’s here.”

“Yippee! Finally, someone can hear me!”

“Yeah, lucky me,” Tom said sourly.

She jumped up and down in her excitement and he flinched. “Don’t. For the love of God, don’t do another cheer.”

“I wasn’t going to.” Then she realized what he had actually said. “You can
see
me, too?”

“Yeah. You need to comb your hair.”

She nearly reeled from a combination of surprise, relief, and rage. “Hey, at least I’m not sporting three days of stubble, jerk!”

“You mean she’s here?” Cathy gasped. Fortunately, the driver had taken Tommy’s beat-up bag into cabin 5, and it was just the four of them. “Right here?”

“Yes, and she won’t shut up.”

“
You
shut up.”

“Tell her we’re sorry,” she begged, “and tell her—”

“She can hear you,” Tom said, looking bored. “You just can’t hear her.”

“Tell her she must move on,” Jack said, obviously forgetting the rules.

“Get lost,” Tom said to Nikki. “Go away. Scram.”

“Oh, suck my fat one,” she said crossly. “Who died and made you king?”

Tom grinned, which was startling. It changed his whole face, took years off. Made him look, she had to admit, almost attractive. “Apparently you did.”

Tom had gone from pooped to horny to annoyed to intrigued, in twenty-five seconds.

And normally, nothing would have gotten him out of his hometown (Pontiac, Missouri) just when it started to get perfect out: not the wet, overwhelming heat of summer, not the brown mid-temps of winter. But he couldn’t say no to that kind of money, no matter how nice he’d gotten the yard to look.

As usual, it took him a second to figure out who was dead. What was not usual at all was how instantly attracted he was to the ghost. And what wasn’t to like? A tall blonde in khaki shorts and a white oxford shirt; pink sandals and toenails the same shade. He knew it was how she pictured herself, the mental image she carried around, as opposed to what she’d
actually been wearing when she died. Another surprise: most people saw themselves as unattractive and badly dressed.

And nobody on the other side (that he’d seen, so far) worked on cheers; they were much more concerned with finding forgiveness, or happiness, as opposed to spelling out
S
-
P
-
I
-
R
-
I
-
T
with their arms.

Heh.

“Thank you so much for coming,” the man who used to be dead was saying. Tom remembered Jack Carroll well: It was seeing him alive in a new body that was surprising. Jack had been dead for decades, devoted to his sister, and stuck in a beat-up Victorian in St. Paul. “As you can see, we have a rather large problem.”

“Who are you calling large?” the ghost said crossly.

“Heh,” Tom said aloud. It was downright alarming; he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He had a dozen questions for Jack and didn’t care; the ghost was a thousand times more interesting.

What a damn shame he’d been hired to get rid of her.

“So, what’s the problem?” he asked her.

“You mean, besides my untimely demise?” she replied. “I mean, I know how self-absorbed you probably think I am—”

“You and every other ghost I’ve met.”

“Not that you should make snap judgments, but don’t you think I’m entitled? Just this once? I mean, I’m dead!”

“And you shouldn’t be here,” he reminded her, inwardly thinking,
Of all the luck
.

“Tell me!”

“Oh,” he said.

“Tell her,” Mrs. Carroll interrupted (not that she knew she was interrupting), “that we’re so sorry, and we’ll do whatever she wants. What does she want?”

Tom waited. The ghost (he groped for the name and found it: Nikki) waited. Jack and Cathy Carroll waited. Finally, Tom said, “Aren’t you going to answer her?”

Nikki started. “Oh. Right. I guess I was waiting for you to say ‘They want to know what you want,’ and then I’d answer, and you’d tell them what I said, and then they’d answer, and…you know.”

“You don’t speak English anymore? You lost your hearing when you lost your head?”

“Okay, okay. Tell ’em I’m fine. You know. Relatively speaking.”

“She’s fine,” he said.

“But boy, this is going to get old, quick.”

Normally, yes. He almost literally had to bite his tongue to stop from saying, “Naw, not this time.”

“Don’t you want to go to your cabin and freshen up, or whatever?”

He had; he’d forgotten his urgent need for a piss and a shower the second he’d spotted her, but now the urges came rushing back. “Yeah,” he said.
Oh, you’re impressing the hell out of her! “Yeah.”
“
Naw
.”
Great!

On the heels of that thought:
Why do you want to impress a stranger? A dead stranger?

“Well, I can wait. I mean, it’s been a couple of months. What’s another hour?” She smiled, flashing perfect American
teeth. “I bet you’ve talked to people who’ve waited a lot longer.”

That was true. But normally he didn’t mind in the least making the dead wait. God knew they didn’t hesitate to impose on him. But somehow, it seemed particularly awful to keep this woman waiting. Seemed awful to picture her moping around in the sand, hermit crabs crawling through her feet and the wind blowing right through her, and nobody seeing her, nobody at all.

He bit his lip and said, “Thanks. But I can freshen up anytime. You—what do you need?”

She looked surprised. “I dunno. What anybody wants, I guess—to make their budget, to get good gas mileage.”

“That doesn’t help us.”

“Nikki,” Cathy was asking, “what happened?”

“An accident,” she replied. “I’m getting kind of vague on the details. I guess it doesn’t matter, right? Dead is dead.”

“An accident,” Tom told the Carrolls.

Mrs. Carroll was rubbing her little potbelly and looking anxious. “But is she—but you’re okay now? I mean—nothing hurts?”

“Not a thing,” Nikki assured her friend. The shorter woman was looking a foot and a half to the left, but Tom didn’t have the heart to tell her.

“If this were a movie, I guess we’d start looking for her killer.”

“No!” Nikki nearly shouted. “Don’t worry about my killer. Stupid thing’s probably a hundred miles away by now, anyway. Don’t hurt it.”

“Shark?” Tom asked, and was immediately sorry when Mrs. Carroll—Cathy—looked stricken.

“Stingray.”

“Stingray?”
he repeated, in spite of trying to spare the Carrolls’ feelings. “How’d you manage that?”

For the first time, the dead woman laughed. “Chum, it was just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I’m not really prone to that sort of thing.”

“Once was the charm.”

“Yeah,” she said, laughing again. “It was the dumbest thing. You wouldn’t believe.”

“Try me,” he said.

“Maybe later,” she replied. “You really need a shower.”

Nikki sat awkwardly on the bed, listening to the shower. Not that she had to stay out in the small bedroom/ living room/sitting area; she could have popped into Tom’s bathroom anytime she wanted. But being dead hadn’t made her ruder. Much.

It was oddly comforting, this ritual. Pretending there were important things to do like waiting for guests to clean up. But what else was there to do? She’d assumed he’d wave his hands over her and she’d
poof!
to heaven or whatever. But nothing had happened. He and Cathy and Jack had just stood around, looking at each other. They couldn’t even talk, because only Tom could see her.

The shower shut off. She again resisted the urge to take advantage of her ghost powers and stick her head through the door to check out his ass.

It was just about the most difficult thing she’d ever done;
it wasn’t like she had a lot of other ways to get her kicks these days. Oh, and it’d be morally wrong.

Speaking of morals, she was trying to keep them in mind as he opened the door and came out, damp and clean and wearing a pair of cutoffs. He grinned when he saw her. “Thanks for waiting.”

“What am I supposed to say to that?” she almost snapped, then was sorry, then was annoyed she was sorry. “It’s not like I had a choice,” she said instead.

The smile fell away. “Right. Sorry.”

“Me, too. Being dead makes me grumpy,” she joked.

They looked at each other. “I’ve, uh, this has never happened before.”

She blinked, which was interesting. It had to be pure force of habit—what did she need to blink, sweat, pee for? Finally, something good about being dead: no more bathroom worries. “ ‘This’?”

“I don’t—I mean, I show up, find out what the d—the spirit needs, the spirit goes away, I go away. I mean, this…” He looked around the cabin. “It’s almost…social.”

“Believe me, I’d leave if I could. I think I’m stuck here. Here, the island,” she added, “not here, your cabin.”

“But you’re not,” he said, going to his bag and rummaging in it. “You’ve created this—You’re here only because you think you—because you need to be.”

Because I think I need to be?
She decided to let the dig at her sanity pass. She was sure he didn’t know how annoying he came off.
Gee, we’ve got so much in common.
“I don’t
need
to be
in the Caymans,” she pointed out. “It’s just a really nice bonus, being stuck in paradise.”

“Obviously, part of you does need to be here.” Annoyingly, he paused. “So what do you need?”

“Peace on earth, goodwill toward men?”

“ ‘We’re the United States government. We don’t do that,’ ” he quoted.