Pennies for the Ferryman - 01 (6 page)

People who know me understand that I have a bit of a temper. Jenny didn’t know me that well. Yelling at Jenny was pretty much the equivalent of kicking a puppy dog. She got real quiet for awhile and didn’t say anything. I stared out the window until I heard the first sniffle and I realized that she’d been on an emotional roller coaster tonight as well.

“Don’t cry, Jenny.”

“But you’re mad at me!”

She started to blubber which, given her already dubious driving skills, suddenly decreased my life expectancy. For both our sakes, I tried to reassure her.

“I’m not mad at you. You didn’t give me this and you’re trying to show me all the things I could do with it. I’m just worried what’s going to happen next time and it’s not like I’ve had time to think this through. Let’s just get back home and get a good night’s sleep and things will be better in the morning.”

“Really?”

I borrowed a tired line from one of the Shrek movies, “Really, Really.”

About 10:30 pm Jenny’s cell phone rang. She was safety conscious enough to pull off to the side of the road to answer it. Either that or she knew that driving with one arm and a phone conversation was beyond her limits. What followed was a rather terse exchange with her aunt concerning Jenny’s whereabouts.

Despite Jenny’s efforts to break the sound barrier, we wouldn’t be back until at least 12:30 am. From there, I needed to get home and Jenny couldn’t shift after she dropped me off, so it looked like a late night bus ride for me. In Montgomery County, only the finest characters are found on the buses after midnight. Jenny’s aunt sure didn’t sound like she’d be willing to give me a lift.

“She sounded pretty angry.” It didn’t sound like this was the first time they’d had this discussion before. I heard the phrase, “I thought you had changed, but I see I was wrong,” come out of her phone.

“Yeah, back when I first moved in with them, I was a bit of a wild child. It took me some time to get my act together, by then my grades weren’t salvageable. Montgomery College was about the only school I could get in to.” Jenny confessed before she turned up the radio, apparently pretending that the conversation with her aunt hadn’t happened. I could tell even then, that Jenny was an impulsive girl used to getting her way.

It’s sort of funny, but no one really refers to an eighteen to twenty year old as a “man” or a “woman.” It’s always “boy” or “girl.” I’d never really thought about that before. Although I was only a couple of years removed from that age myself, my own fire and certainty about how I was going to change the world took a beating. My life plan boiled down to enlisting in the Army as a way to claw my way out of poverty, but one bad minute in the Iraqi desert smacked me right back down.

Now, I was important again. I wasn’t just a broken-down soldier. I was special. I could do something probably no one else in the world could do. The question was, what would I do with it?

It was closer to 1:00 am when we pulled into Jenny’s driveway. There was an awkward moment between us where I thought she was going to kiss me. Her aunt barreled out the door, so there wasn’t a whole lot of time for heartfelt thanks.

I escaped with only a cursory interrogation from Shannon Wycheck. She was in her early fifties and I vaguely recalled meeting her in the Montgomery College administration office. It was a good guess that my student file would be opened up, first thing tomorrow.

The bus ride home was everything I dreamt of: a “working girl,” several incoherent bums, a handful of working class schmucks returning from late shifts, a pair of wannabe “gang bangers,” and a nut job who can see dead people.

Jenny caught up to me the next day and said that her argument with her aunt would blow over, eventually. I almost hoped she would tell me that our weekend trip back to Roanoke was off. Sadly, it was still on.

After picking up our ghost, I hoped that it would be a quick and easy afternoon. I’ve since learned to lower my expectations. Our first mistake was going to the Roanoke City
Police
Department. After explaining our situation to the guy working the desk and getting the expected guffaws and a request for hot lottery ticket numbers, they were more than happy to put a call into the Roanoke County
Sheriff’s
Department explaining that it was out of their jurisdiction.

I guessed that there was a bit of a rivalry between the county and the city. I later learned that the city and the county are pretty much two completely separate entities. Naturally, Jenny remembered this little tidbit twenty minutes too late to save us from any embarrassment.

About an hour later, I was beginning to give up when a female shaped deputy came in, looking rather flustered. She must have drawn the short straw and been the one stuck with dealing with the crazy Yankees.

I’ve always had a thing for a woman in uniform. Nurses, policewomen, hell, even a meter maid. I hold the firm belief that a gal in a uniform is at least twenty-five percent “hotter” than that same girl without the uniform – unless, of course, she’s naked. That usually trumps my uniform fetish. I will say that it made my time in the Army rather pleasant.

“Okay, I’m Officer McKenna, which one of you is the psychic? C’mon, I ain’t got all day! So, let’s just cut through all this horse…Wait a second! You look familiar. Where do I know you from?” She said in an overly cute southern accent as she pointed at Jenny.

Jenny gave the woman a questioning look. “Candy? It’s me, Jenny.”

“Lil’ Jenny! I haven’t seen you in years!”

“You went into Law Enforcement! Wow, I would have never guessed that in a million years!”

I let this go on for a minute or two before clearing my throat, which got Jenny’s attention. “Oh, sorry. Mike Ross, this is my cousin, Candy McKenna.”

She held out her hand, “I go by Candace now. Nice to meet ya.”

The strawberry blonde eyed me like a hunk of meat, pondering whether she should salt me before throwing me on the grill. I was already a bit on the self-conscious side because of the whole “psychic boy” thing. Candace was attractive and apparently in her mid-twenties. A quick, furtive check told me that there was no wedding band on her left hand.

On the way out the door, I motioned for Bobby Joe. He hadn’t wanted to hang out in police station any more than I did. Mitch joined him. It was going to be crowded in the car.

Mistake number two was getting into a conversation with the two ghosts about what they can do. I watched as Mitch swiped his hand through Jenny’s chest and then ogling her response to a sudden cold draft. Not to be left out, Bobby Joe gave Officer McKenna the treatment as well.

I was pretty certain that Jenny pieced together what happened, which of course led to mistake number three as she caught me appraising her cousin’s reaction. It was par for the course, the redneck doofuses were behind the ladies waving their hands in the air while I’m the one with egg on my face for sneaking a look.

By the time we got out on the highway things in the patrol car were getting worse. Jenny was in the front seat, which left me in the back with the two ghosts who would occasionally bump me, which of course led to the electric shock that I was becoming accustomed to. Then of course there was the flawed assumption that Jenny and Candace actually were fond of each other. That “honeymoon” lasted all of fifteen minutes before I noticed the claws come out.

I would say I was beginning to regret coming out here, but I was way past that point. Mitch tried to answer some of my questions about what he could do. He could do things like move small objects and if his wife lost something, he could stand next to it and scream and jump up and down. All that commotion would sort of make his widow notice it. Mitch joked about how he’d turned off Bobby Joe’s alarm, hidden his car keys, and knocked the phone off the hook.

This led to a fight in the back seat between the two ghosts, who didn’t get along that well to begin with.

“Goddammit! Stop!” I shouted as the two guys started pushing at each other with me in the middle. Naturally, the officer driving thought I meant her and she jammed on the brakes.

You know that wire mesh they put up between the front seat and the back seat? It hurts when you smack your face into it. There wasn’t much need to keep count after that. The entire day was one long, continuous mistake!

The second argument between the dead guys started over directions, and stopped just short of a brawl. We ended up going with Mitch’s, because he told me that a ghost can always go to where he is buried. That explained how Jenny’s mom arrived at the cemetery long before we did.

When we finally arrived at our destination we got out of the patrol car. Candace put away her claws and simultaneously put on her face of intimidation. “Alright, I’ve humored y’all, but you’d better be able to show me something.”

I yelled to the two ghosts. “Hey guys, do you reckon that you could pick me up. Listen, we’re here in the middle of nowhere, right? I don’t have any hidden wires or anything. Ow!” I grimaced in pain as Bobby Joe came up behind me and put me in a full nelson and Mitch lifted my legs off the ground.

I’m sure it must have looked pretty wild. It was painful enough alright. Both Jenny and her cousin looked suitably impressed. From the looks of things, Officer McKenna was on her way to becoming a believer.

“You were just kinda floatin’ off the ground there. So, there really are two ghosts right there?”

I nodded, though Bobby Joe was back to staring down the deputy’s shirt. Candace handed me a shovel and got out a camera from the trunk of her patrol car. That’s when I realized that I’d just volunteered to dig up the body.

Fortunately, one of my ghostly friends was as lazy when he was living as he was in the afterlife. Mitch’s grave was pretty shallow. When I started finding bones, it kind of hit Jenny pretty hard and she sprinted back to the patrol car. That was enough evidence for Candace. She marked the area and called for the coroner to dispatch a unit.

“So, how long have you and Jenny been dating?” she asked.

“We’re not dating. We go to school together and I spotted her mom making her life miserable.”

Candace didn’t look very surprised as we pushed our way into the little area where Bobby Joe stashed the Ford F-150 pickup with a faded sign on the side for Mitch’s Plumbing. “Aunt Rose? Yeah, I could see her doing that. I reckon when you start headin’ back to Maryland Jenny’s gonna start tellin’ you what a no good little bitch I am.”

I asked her why. She gave me a sly smile, tilted her head, and pulled down her mirrored sunglasses enough for me to see her green eyes, “Because she grew up watchin’ me, darlin’. That’s exactly what I’d do.”

She snapped off a few pictures of the truck and pulled on a pair of gloves. I watched her dust for prints on the steering wheel and so forth. In a way, it was pretty cool watching her do her thing. Another fight broke out between the two ghosts when Mitch found out that Bobby Joe stole sixty-three dollars out of his wallet. Turns out Bobby Joe walked away with the deer Mitch killed as well.

I wasn’t really tempted to break it up, even though Mitch was beating the tar out of his killer until the fat ghost vanished, leaving the angry plumber in his wake. I was busy describing all this to the laughing deputy.

“I suppose this means that if we’re idiots here, we’re the same idiots on the other side?” Candy asked.

“Looks that way, but none of the ghosts I’ve talked to know what comes next. My grandpa believed he was finally going to be reunited with his wife.”

“Well I guess there are things to look forward to. The good news is that I can put you in for a Crime Solvers reward. It might make your trip down here worth it.”

That was the first positive thing out of what was otherwise a nasty, ugly day. When Candy wasn’t looking, I helped myself to one of Mitch’s cast iron pipe wrenches. As I figured it, it beat carrying a frying pan around and wouldn’t look nearly as stupid if it was dangling from a tool belt. Further conversation was cut short by the approaching lights of several emergency vehicles.