Pennies for the Ferryman - 01 (10 page)

Great! There went my hope that the guy wouldn’t know any moves if things got physical. He’d likely overpower me while mocking my technique. Well, at least forewarned was forearmed and all that! Of course, some of the things I picked up in hand to hand combat training weren’t ‘common’ wrestling moves, so I was only concerned, rather than being frightened.

Naturally – or supernaturally, I was slightly suspicious of Elsbeth. At that point I only had her word that Charlie was doing all this. What if he wasn’t? What if she was a vindictive ghost like Jenny’s mother? She could be setting him and, by association, me up.

“I gotta ask, what proof do you have? Why should I believe you that he’s going to kill her? For all I know, you could just be trying to get even with him for being such an ass to you.”

That earned an angry smack from her that really stung.
“How dare you!”
She tried to do it again, but this time I caught her hand and despite the pain squeezed as hard as I could.

“I can play that game too, Elsbeth. You can hurt me, but it goes both ways! My guess is Charlie used to beat you and that’s why, even now, you’re still scared of him. Trust me, you could be making his life a living hell right now, but you won’t – will you? You’re asking me to risk my life to stop him for nothing in return. Give me a damn reason to believe you!” I let her wrist go violently and watched her clutch it to her chest with what looked like tears in her eyes.

She started talking a mile a minute, but then stopped herself, remembering that I couldn’t hear her unless we were touching. I never was much as a lip reader, beyond the usual phrases that accompanied rude gestures.

“He’s been setting up his alibi by telling his coworkers that she has a weak heart and occasional chest pains. He’s already made two appointments for her to see a cardiologist and cancelled them for phony reasons. Charlie has another one scheduled for the week after he plans to kill her, so he can say that he was trying to convince her to go see someone, but she was being stubborn. He’s even gotten onto her computer and faked emails from her Hotmail account telling him that she’s fine. Grandma doesn’t know the first thing about computers! You could call the Doctor’s office and confirm that the appointments were made and then ask Grandma if he’s been trying to get her to go to one. Is that enough for you? I can pay you, you know.”

Elsbeth let go of me, drew herself up as straight as she could, and walked away – not paying any attention to the massive oak tree in her way. She was headed towards a 7-11 – maybe ghosts have a fondness for Slurpees.

Somehow I was supposed to convince Jenny’s uncle, Brian Wycheck, who already doesn’t really care for me, that Charlie was going to kill Megan. I wasn’t particularly enthused by this job – if it was a job at all.

Elsbeth came back eight minutes later. Evidently it wasn’t the Slurpees.
“Six tickets down on the Maryland Cash scratchers is a one hundred dollar ticket – that’s the only way I can pay you right now.”
 

And so, questioning my sanity, I went in to the store and spent twelve dollars, making a hundred. As Elsbeth explained it to me, when she ran her finger over the tickets, she could make out what was printed underneath the silvery coating. Honestly, I didn’t feel any remorse. Was it bad karma to ‘use’ the dead like that? I didn’t know, but what I did know is that if I walked away from this, I wouldn’t have to try and convince a cop to believe in messages from beyond the grave. Was a few dollars for my troubles really that much to ask?

I returned from my afternoon classes to find the Reverend Reginald Duncan waiting with my mother in my living room. For as long as I could remember, Pastor Duncan was the pastor of the Maple Street Methodist church. He was a bland fellow, and his reputation among the adults was that while he wasn’t much as a preacher, he was a good pastor, patching together a number of shaky marriages. Unfortunately for the Ross family, dear old Dad split before we realized there was even a problem. Pastor Duncan gave me the warm appraising look that he’d been giving me for the past twenty something years, shaking my hand with a firm, strong grip. He looked to the kitchen, where my Mom had retreated, and then smiled.

“Want to go for a drive, Mike?” he asked.

I nodded – if we were going to have a private conversation, it wasn’t going to happen while Mom was staking out the kitchen.

As kids, we’d always admired Pastor Duncan’s car – every two years, year in, year out, he’d change to a new-model car – usually a Cadillac. I hadn’t given it a thought when I was a kid, but now that I knew how much they cost, I wondered how he could afford it. Maple Street Methodist didn’t pay him that much, and his wife was a teacher at the local elementary school.

“So, Pastor,” I began, once we were belted in and backing out of the driveway. “How can a preacher pay for wheels like this?”

Pastor Duncan smiled, reaching out to twiddle a knob on the air-conditioning. “When I was a newly minted Minister, back in the dark ages before cable TV and cell phones, I was an assistant minister out in Ohio. I learned then that if you were going to be worth spit in the job, the hours tended to be something other than nine-to-five.”

He paused to turn off the radio, “So, one Saturday night at eight o’clock, when I was hoping to put the final, finishing touches on the next day’s sermon, I took a phone call on our church’s hot-line. The caller was a troubled young man who wanted to die and was looking for someone to talk him out of it. I spent the next eight hours talking to him on the phone. He decided that life might be worth living.
 
I delivered a pretty vanilla sermon the next day and I didn’t hear from the gentleman for a long time.”

I got the sense that his good deed was rewarded. Pastor Duncan continued, “Three years later, I got a call back from that young man. In the intervening years, he made something of himself and felt that he owed me something, which was ridiculous, but that’s how he felt. He asked me what I was driving then, which was a beat-up old Chevy with too many miles on it. The next morning, he drove up with a new car and a stack of papers – an hour later, he drove away in my old beater, and I owned a new, top-of-the-line Caddy.”

Pastor Duncan paused and then shook his head. “Every two years after that, he comes by my house, drops off a new car, and drives away with the one he’d delivered two years prior. I pay for tags, title, and insurance – which isn’t bad, given the cost of cars these days.”

By this time we were on the beltway, heading towards the District.

“So, Pastor, do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.

It turned out that Pastor Duncan
did
believe in ghosts, which wasn’t all that unusual, given his firm belief in life-after-death, but it was refreshing to talk to a seemingly sane person who could take my story in, believe it, and not bat an eye. He stopped the car for a minute, parking carefully before dialing a number on his cell phone. “Mike, there’s someone you’ve got to meet.”

Sixteenth Street in the District is a long, north-south street, and every few blocks there’s a different church: catholic, orthodox, protestant, even a mosque. As you drive further south, the neighborhoods become increasingly gritty and distressed, until you reach the hospital district, where it becomes downright scary. There’s a cluster of hospitals there, including an outstanding rehabilitation hospital. I’d never been there as a patient, but I’d visited any number of my friends, soldiers and ex-soldiers, there.

One of the by-products of Mr. Bush’s war was an ever-growing network of castoffs trying to make our way back into American society, but I digress. As I said, the neighborhood around the hospital district is a less than inviting place, but Pastor Duncan parked in front of a liquor store, which was three doors down from a storefront bearing the placard “Ebenezer Church of Deliverance.”

Well, just as there was an old-boys-network of soldiers, apparently there’s an old-boys-network for ministers, too. Pastor Duncan and I waited patiently on the sidewalk as the service inside the storefront church let out. More than a few of the people nodded at Pastor Duncan as if they recognized him. I got less polite looks, but as it was obvious that I was with the Pastor, I was given the benefit of the doubt.

The only person left in the church when we walked in was a thin, extremely old black man, playing the piano. He was playing up a storm, moving from hymns that I recognized, to songs that I didn’t, all the while keeping a strong rhythm with left hand while beating out a melody with his right. As we approached he cocked an ear towards us and stopped playing abruptly.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

“Your old brother, Silas,” Pastor Duncan replied.

“Pastor Reggie!” he exclaimed with glee. He went back to playing the piano, playing a quick few measures of some tune that brought a smile to Pastor Duncan’s face. He then stopped playing again, closing the cover on the keyboard before turning to us. Introductions were made, and we were five minutes into a three-way conversation before I realized that Brother Silas, as he wanted to be known, was blind, totally blind. “Twenty-twenty darkness” he called it.

Brother Silas, it turned out, was a twofer – not only was he a member of the old-boys networks for pastors, but he’d lost his sight in the US Army, trying to defuse a booby-trap in a tunnel north of Saigon, which placed him firmly in the old-boys network for broken soldiers. We shared something else in common, beyond a fondness for stride piano and twelve-bar blues.

He could see ghosts too and he could see me as well!

We had much to talk about.

It was four o’clock in the morning when Pastor Duncan dropped me off at my house in the ‘burbs. Mom wasn’t waiting up, but there
was
a pizza in the fridge waiting for me, which was as about as effusive as Mom was known to get these days.

Days later, I found myself back at Megan Rosemont’s home. Elsbeth had given me the ‘all clear’ that Charlie would be out of town well into the evening, coaching a wrestling match.

“Mr. Ross, so nice of you to drop by again – how are you?” she asked. “Please come in. Can I get you some tea?”

“No thank you, I’m doing fine, ma’am. I figured since I was in the area I would drop in and see if you had any more strange occurrences.” I knew she hadn’t. Elsbeth already grabbed my attention, so there was no more need for the ‘gaslight’ nonsense.

“Goodness, no! You must have scared whatever it was away,” she said with genuine warmth. “Kind of a shame too, somehow it feels lonelier in this old house.”

“Well if it really is your granddaughter, I doubt that I’d scare her away for very long.”

“I don’t know. Elsbeth was a very skittish young woman.”

I asked if she wanted to talk about her granddaughter for something to pass the time. There was no need to look suspicious. After about twenty minutes, I asked if I could use her computer to check my email. Being the gracious hostess that she was, she allowed me to.

I didn’t have to resort to any of my barely-existent computer hacking skills. She was set up to automatically log into her email account and sure enough, there were a pair of emails in her sent bin that had been saved for the purpose of making her look like a stubborn woman who was refusing to keep her doctor appointments.

Coming to the conclusion that her ghostly granddaughter wasn’t trying to sell me a bill of goods, I moved on to my final little ‘white’ lie. “Mrs. Rosemont, can I ask you a question?”

The tiny woman in the living room looked up from her crossword puzzle and smiled at me, “Of course dear.”

“It’s my mother; she’s not doing so well, she has these occasional chest pains. Do you happen to know a good Cardiologist?”

“No, I’m afraid not. My Samuel died of heart trouble back in 1995. I think the practice he went to closed down or moved a few years ago. If your mother is having problems, you should encourage her to get checked out.”

That sealed it! Now all I had to do was figure out a way to get the police interested in this case without getting locked up in the loony bin – piece of cake, really. I thanked her for her advice and continued listening to a few more Elsbeth stories. Honestly, it felt weird listening to someone fondly remembering Elsbeth, when I was still on a speaking basis with her. I guess there was something to this whole weird paranormal thing I had going on.