Stones Unturned (3 page)

Ceridwen sat astride him, her rhythmic movements sending wave after wave of intense pleasure through them both.

"Though the world may change around us," she breathed, "what we now have together . . . this is something that will forever remain untouched."

She leaned down to kiss him again, her hair brushing his face as their bodies moved together.

A delicious overture, before the inevitable storm.

"So when do the lovebirds get back?" Julia Ferrick asked her son from the stove, where she was currently putting together their evening's meal of Texas chili.

Danny loved his mother's chili, and his empty stomach rumbled just thinking about it. Seated on a stool behind the marble island in the center of the large kitchen, he inhaled the delicious smells of her cooking. The lovebirds she referred to — though the expression made him wince — were Mr. Doyle and Ceridwen, gone to England to spend some private time together.

"I think sometime tomorrow," he said, picking strips of dead skin from around his fingernails. His body was continuing to change, becoming more and more . . .
demonic
.

"Don't pick," his mother scolded. Julia chopped up an onion on the wooden cutting board, as four strips of bacon popped and sizzled in the frying pan on the gas burner. The air was filled with the delicious aroma of cooking meat.

"It's just dead skin," he said, paying her no mind. His nails had become long, curved, and thick, growing to nasty points, and when he tensed the muscles in his fingers, the nails distended, reminding him of a cat's claws.
They could do some serious damage in a fight,
he mused, recalling the scrapes he'd gotten into since coming to live in Conan Doyle's Beacon Hill brownstone.

"I don't care," his mother replied. "It could still get infected. Leave it alone."

Danny glared at her. "Have you fucking looked at me lately? An infection is the least of my problems."

Using tongs, his mother flipped the bacon over in the pan. "Language, Danny, please. I didn't let you talk that way in my house, and I don't want you to talk that way here."

He laughed. "Everybody talks that way here."

"Talks how?" asked a voice, and the temperature in the kitchen dropped considerably. The ghostly form of Dr. Leonard Graves slowly materialized.

Danny shrugged. "Y' know, cursin' and shit. Everybody does it."

"Well, I don't, and neither does Leonard," his mother said, sliding the pan over to an unused burner. Using the tongs, she moved the bacon to two sheets of paper towel.

"Your mother's right," Leonard said, in that low voice that somehow managed to be both creepy and comforting at the same time. "There's no reason to speak that way . . .unless you want people to think that you're an uneducated cretin."

Danny chuckled, pretty certain that he'd never been called a cretin before.

Julia came over to them with the bacon on the paper towel, placing it down in front of him. She didn't use the actual bacon in her chili recipe, just the grease. He helped himself to a piece; it was crispy, cooked just the way he liked it.

"I'm making chili," Julia said to Graves. "I'd ask you to join us, but I know you don't eat." She gave a small laugh, smiling at the ghost, as her hands played with her hair.

There it is again,
Danny thought, chewing slowly on his bacon. His mother had been acting weird around Dr. Graves lately. Different. Almost nervous. He'd entertained the notion several times that his mom was flirting, but dismissed it as too crazy. Now he wasn't so sure. Did his mother actually have a thing for the ghost of a guy who'd been dead since World War II?

How fucked up is that?

"Thank you, Julia," Graves said. "I'm sure it's delicious. I wish I could try some, but it's just beyond my reach."

With a sympathetic look, she returned to the stove and began to scrape the bacon grease into the large, cast-iron kettle that she'd brought from home.

"Well, you're welcome to hang out with us, of course," she said, turning the flame on beneath the kettle and placing the dirty pan in the sink, filling it full of warm soapy water. "We've got an exciting evening of Battleship and a showing of . . . what's the name of the movie again?" she asked Danny.

"Old Boy,"
he said. "It's Korean, supposed to be a killer."

"Yeah, that's it," she said, smiling again as she wiped her hands on a dish towel. "Like I said, you're more than welcome."

Danny felt himself becoming perturbed; this was supposed to be
their
time — just him and his mom. It pissed him off a bit, her inviting somebody to hang, when it was just supposed to be the two of them. He dug at a particularly itchy patch of skin on the back of his hand, drawing blood. The crimson liquid slowly oozed to the surface of the torn, yellowed flesh.

His mother slid two packages of ground hamburger into the iron kettle. It hit the hot bacon grease, and the sound and aroma of it sizzling in the pot filled the air, distracting Danny from his anger. Once the meat was partially cooked, she'd add the tomato paste and then the spices. His mouth began to water, and his gums to itch, another new trait of his continued transformation. Whenever he got hungry, or even thought of food, his teeth grew longer. Danny flicked his tongue over the pointed tips of his prominent incisors. They were sharp, and he had to be careful not to slice his tongue.

"Thanks for the invitation," the ghost said. "But I'm afraid I have some pressing business that must be attended to."

His mother turned from the stove, continuing to stir the cooking beef and spices around in the pot. "Is everything okay?"

Dr. Graves seemed agitated, more distracted than usual. Danny had grown able to read him pretty well. They'd been spending quite a bit of time together lately. Danny couldn't go to school, and so Dr. Graves had been tutoring him a little. He didn't understand what the point was of continuing his education — after all, it wasn't like he was going to have a normal life. But Graves had been able to make him understand that knowledge wasn't just something to be used to impress a prospective employer or a college interviewer . . . it was a weapon. The right piece of knowledge at the right time could make the difference between victory and defeat, between life and death.

On that level, Danny understood. So he went along with the whole tutor idea, most of the time.

The more he learned about Dr. Graves, the more amazed he was at how much the guy had experienced and all the knowledge he had accumulated in his lifetime. Hell, he was still accumulating it, even after his death. Yeah, it was freaky to have a ghost for a teacher, but that was only appropriate, considering he himself was a total freak. He doubted the faculty over at Newton South would be up for teaching a kid with skin like an alligator, claws, and horns growing out of his head.

The anger was back, this time over the changes that were twisting his body. And that in itself was another change. Lately he'd found himself getting angry more often, the littlest things making him want to tear something apart — or tear some
body
limb from limb. He grabbed another slice of bacon, shoving the whole thing into his mouth.

The ghost had hesitated, and Danny could see storm clouds of trouble in his eyes.

"Dr. Graves?" he ventured.

"To be honest, everything is not okay," the ghost said. "And it's high time that I devoted my full attention to dealing with that."

"Sounds serious," Julia said, turning the flame down low beneath the kettle, so the contents could simmer a bit before she added the last of the ingredients. "Anything we can do to help?"

"Yeah, what's up?" Danny asked, refocusing his anger into concern for his tutor.

"I haven't spent a lot of time talking about it, but I know you're both aware of how I died. It was murder, and the mystery of my death has never been solved. I think I've waited long enough for answers, don't you?"

Graves didn't talk about this part of his past very often, but Danny couldn't blame him. He couldn't imagine how fucked up it must be to still be around after . . . to know what it's like to be murdered.

"Isn't Mister Doyle supposed to be helping you with this?" Julia asked.

The ghost chuckled, but there really didn't seem to be much humor behind it. "Yes, yes he is. In fact, the entire reason I've stayed here so long, in his house, and taken part in his war against the darkness — been a part of his
Menagerie
, as he likes to call us — was as payback for his help in finding the solution to my murder."

Danny tore off the end of a piece of paper towel, using it to staunch the seeping wound that he had scratched in the top of his hand.

"All the time you've been working with Mr. Doyle and still . . . ?" he asked, looking into the ghost's nearly transparent eyes.

Graves nodded. "Exactly. It's been a very long time, and I'm still no closer to answers."

Julia returned to the stove, lifted the lid and stirred what was inside. "Why is that, do you think?"

"I can't be certain," Graves said, shaking his head slowly. "There has been the occasional lead over the years, followed with a thorough investigation, but in the end . . ."

"The big donut," Danny said. "Nada. Don't you think it's sort of weird that somebody as smart as Conan Doyle — he created Sherlock Holmes for fuck's sake — couldn't dig up at least a little something that would be useful in solving your case?"

Danny watched as Graves slowly crossed his arms, hovering a good six inches off the kitchen floor. "One would think. To be honest, I've let trust and friendship and sometimes despair get in the way of asking that very question. But after all this time, I'm not sure the answer even matters."

Julia pulled a blender out from beneath the counter, setting it down and plugging it in. A deep frown creased her forehead as she turned to stare at them.

"Are you two implying that Mr. Doyle is purposely not helping? Because if that's the case, I think you're both being ridiculous."

She poured into the blender the contents of another pan that had been boiling on the stove. Bright red chili pods bobbed inside the plastic container. Julia hit one of the buttons on the blender, and the clear water inside turned a dark, churning red, as the peppers were pureed.

"Regardless," Graves said over the roar of the blender. "I can't wait anymore, can't divert so much of my attention to other things. I'm going to start the investigation from scratch."

The kitchen went suddenly silent, as Julia switched off the appliance. "You're leaving?"

Again, Danny saw it in his mother, this affection for Graves.

"If I'm going to do this properly . . ." Graves's voice trailed off.

Though he was only a ghost, a transparent, shifting apparition of ectoplasm . . . not even really there, when you thought about it . . . he seemed weighted with regret. Danny stared at him. It was crazy enough to think that his mother had feelings for a dead man, but now Danny had to wonder if the ghost had feelings for her as well.

Julia detached the pitcher from the blender, taking its contents to her kettle. "How long do you think you'll be?" she asked casually, apparently not wanting to appear upset, but Danny could hear it in her voice.

If there was one thing he'd learned about his mother, it was how to read the tone of her voice.

"I don't know," Graves replied. "And I'm sorry. I know I made some promises about keeping up with Danny's tutoring —"

"It's cool," Danny said, batting a rolled and blood-stained piece of paper towel back and forth between his hands. "Do what you have to."

"And once you solve this case, your . . . your murder, what then?" his mother asked.

Graves was silent for a moment, drifting in the midst of the kitchen, moving as if struggling against a breeze Danny couldn't feel.

"I've . . . stayed here because of this, because I had unfinished business. Wandering spirits find it difficult to move on to whatever awaits after life, because they can't rest yet, because something remains to be done. Once I have the answer, once I know who murdered me, and why, the reason for me to haunt this world will be gone. Gabriella, my wife . . . she died during the years that my spirit was wandering aimlessly, before I was able to focus as a ghost. Somewhere on the other side, she's waiting for me."

His mother's hands went to either side of the sink, as if supporting herself. There was that smile again, and the slow nodding of the head.

"It would be nice for you," she said. "Finally getting to . . . to rest and . . . to be with your wife again."

"Yes, it would," the ghost replied.

"I hope you know how much you'll be missed," she told Graves, and it was painfully obvious to Danny that she wanted to say more, but couldn't bring herself to, maybe because he was sitting there.

From that point on, his mother was silent, going about the business of finishing dinner as if nothing was wrong.

"Will you be all right?" Graves asked, and Danny wasn't sure if the ghost was talking to him or to his mother.

"I'll be fine," he finally answered, wanting to fill the void of silence. "It's all good."

But it wasn't.

It wasn't good at all.

The rest of the evening had been a disaster. He and his mother pretended that everything was fine, but he could see that she was distracted by what Dr. Graves had told them, and the anger inside him continued to fester.

They'd eaten pretty much in silence, neither of them feeling very hungry in the end. After dinner, they put on the movie, but Danny found he couldn't really get into it. Eventually he pretended to fall asleep, and noticing this, his mother shook his leg, saying that she was tired, too, and was going to call it a night.

As far as he was concerned, she couldn't have left soon enough. It was taking everything he could muster not to lose it. Directionless anger and frustration boiled up inside of him, just looking for a target. He'd been feeling this way a lot since getting back from Greece the previous month — since his body had changed even further. It was worst at night; his skin would start to itch, and his temper was like a ticking bomb.