The Dead Lands Read online

  The first thought he’d had out at the park that day was that Megan McGowan was a little slut who had lured not just him, but someone else out there at the same time.

  What kind of game was she playing?

  Or was it a sting to nab him?

  Was she working with the cops to entrap him and send him back to prison for the rest of his life?

  He couldn’t survive that, and now, even though he had gotten away free and clear that day, here’s Detective Gray, hounding him as if a few e-mails were proof he was Megan McGowan’s killer.

  He knew he wasn’t.

  If the other guy he had seen hadn’t been a cop, then he must have killed the girl, unless she’d fallen from the cliff by accident.

  Collins knew in his bones that wasn’t what happened.

  The guy was wearing a yellow raincoat. No one undercover would wear a bright color like that, so he must have been the killer. The man’s posture alone gave him away, the way he moved like he was stalking her.

  So in the end, maybe Megan McGowan got exactly what was coming to her. She shouldn’t have been writing the kinds of e-mails she did, cock-teasing and loaded with enough innuendo to drive any man nuts, and she sure as hell shouldn’t be luring men to out-of-the-way places to meet her … not unless she wanted to end up dead.

  The problem was, Collins was furious that suspicion had fallen on him.

  How was that fair?

  He saw that his glass was empty and started to pour more whiskey but then decided to hell with it and threw the glass to the floor and took several large gulps from the bottle. The booze exploded in his brain like fireworks. He felt the couch shift beneath him, and the room began to spin in a slow, stomach-churning glide. When he pulled the bottle away from his lips, he was smiling, but the smile slowly melted when his eyes went to the digital clock again, and he saw the time.

  It was 1:01.

  “Damn it,” he whispered, and he picked up the revolver, squeezing the handle hard enough to make his knuckles ache.

  He wondered if the next time he looked up, would it be 1:11 or 1:23 or 2:22 or 2:34?

  Was it just coincidence? Or did these patterns have some hidden meaning.

  It was enough to drive anyone crazy!

  His body was shaking as he considered what he was thinking of doing.

  No, he told himself. Own it! Don’t take the chicken-shit way out!

  But there was no way he could come clean. Not now. If he told Gray what he had seen, Gray would accuse him of making it up. Saying he’d seen someone wearing a yellow raincoat would only cast more suspicion onto him.

  And if Collins left town now, Gray would take that as an admission of guilt, too, and no matter what he said or did, no matter where he went, the cops and the press and everyone in town would eventually hang that girl’s death on him.

  “No way,” Collins muttered. “It ain’t gonna happen.”

  He chuckled at the sound of his slurred voice and then suddenly lurched to his feet. Reaching out with both hands for balance—the gun in one hand, the nearly empty whiskey bottle in the other—he staggered into the kitchen, tripping and stumbling the whole way. He collapsed forward onto the counter, supporting himself on his elbows and panting hard. With a snort, he wiped away a trail of saliva that dangled from his chin and tried to concentrate, focusing on the pad of paper he kept there. His hand was shaking as he put down the bottle and picked up a pen. But then he glanced at the clock on the wall above the stove.

  The time was 1:23.

  “I’m not gonna beat it,” he muttered to himself, his voice sounding like someone else, speaking in the room. “I’m gonna beat ‘em all, damnit!”

  He picked up a pen, gripping it so hard in his hand he bent the plastic tube, but he managed to scrawl a few words onto the pad of paper.

  “I SWARE TO CHRIST I DIDN’T DO IT!”

  He pushed the pad of paper away and then, without thinking, he put the barrel of the revolver into his mouth. He chipped a tooth as he bit down on the metal and then, squeezing his eyes tightly shut, pulled the trigger.

  He never heard the sound of the gun when it went off.

  Abby

  It’s weird how, even after all these years, I still have some … I guess you’d call them ‘habits’ of a living person. What’s even stranger here in the Dead Lands is how even the landscape both day and night seems to reflect how you’re feeling.

  I feel sad pretty much every day I’m not asleep in my grave. On sunny days, I hang around the beach—not too far from the cemetery—and watch people swimming and playing in the water or lying in the sand. There are some unusual games you play these days, like those things that look like pie plates that people throw to each other and catch. I’m amazed how those things float on the air.

  It still strikes me as strange, though, how so many people, young and old, lie out in the sun to get their skin tanned. They do it on purpose. Back in my day, it was a sign of beauty and high class not to have a tan. If your skin was as white as could be, it proved you didn’t have to work outside, in the fields, like poor people and, until the War, the slaves did.

  No, we never owned slaves. We were too poor and, to be honest, I always felt sorry for them. Friends and neighbors called them all sorts of terrible names. Lots of people in my area treated their former slaves like animals. I could never understand why.

  But I was telling you about some of the ways I still feel alive. It isn’t just that when I’m lying in my grave, I hear a mockingbird singing and then rise up. As far as I know, I’m the only person this happens to, but I haven’t traveled very far from the cemetery, so I don’t know for sure. There might be other ghosts like me.

  On sunny days, I miss the warmth of the sun; and on rainy days—days that, when I was alive, I would have found so dreary and depressing—I wish I could feel the gentle patter of rain on my skin. Just once. And snow. We never got much snow where I lived, so you can imagine how amazing the world looks to me when it’s covered by a thick blanket of snow. Even during the worst blizzard, and there are some strong ones that come in off the ocean, if I’m not asleep in my grave, I wish and pray that for just one minute I could feel that cold, raw wind blowing against my face.

  At night, of course, it’s much different … much scarier.

  One reason I never travel far is because I’m afraid of my uncle and his Hell Hounds. But I never forget that I was coming to Maine to live in a town called Windam.

  Have you heard of that place?

  Does it still exist?

  Whenever I come out of my grave, I can’t help but think I should try to find Windham if only to see what it looks like now. I’m sure the place has changed a lot. Even here, near the cemetery, I’ve seen tons of new houses built. Some of them are huge, too. I often wonder if the house I would have lived in is still standing. I doubt it … but maybe.

  The saddest thing of all is when I think about the life I might have lived. Then, even if it’s the sunniest day you can imagine, I look up at the sky and all I see are dark clouds.

  Chapter 10

  Confession

  —1—

  “I think we have to talk about this,” Mike’s father said.

  Mike, his mother, and his father were gathered in the living room. It was late afternoon, the day after Megan’s funeral. The atmosphere in the house still seemed stifled and stale to Mike. He was sure the absence of his older sister was what made things seem so weird. He wondered if that feeling of emptiness would ever pass. With time, would he get used to Megan not being here?

  He doubted it.

  “I’m still not satisfied with your explanation for how you got this!”

  His father’s face was furrowed with barely repressed anger as he held out Megan’s sneaker and shook it inches beneath Mike’s nose.

  “I already told you,” Mike said, cringing at the quaver in his voice.

  “You say you took it from her closet as a memento.” His father shook his head. “I still don’t see ho
w the sneaker Megan was wearing the day she—” He paused and, casting a quick glance at his wife, refrained from saying the word, died. “How her sneaker ended up in your room, hidden away under your bed like it was a … a—what?”

  Mike twisted his hands in his lap, finding it impossible to look his father or mother straight in the eyes.

  “Mikey?” his mother said. Her voice was low and pleading, like she was asking him a favor, but he was sure she was just as suspicious of him as his father. They had already talked about it, and he had poisoned her thoughts against him.

  His father began pacing back and forth in front of the chair where Mike was sitting. With every other step, he slapped the sneaker in cadence into the palm of his hand. Mike couldn’t help but wince with each slap, and all he could imagine was that next, it would be his face his father slapped.

  “I really don’t want to get the police involved here if we don’t have to,” his father said, “but I have to say—something like this makes me wonder exactly what might have happened out there that day.”

  Mike started shaking his head from side to side. Bones in his spine snapped, sending tiny jolts of pain down to his shoulders.

  “N-n-nothing happened …” he said, his voice raw and croaking. “Nothing at all ... Honest.”

  His father exhaled through his nostrils and then stopped pacing and stood glaring at Mike for several long seconds. Finally, he spoke.

  “Something sure as hell did happen. Your sister died out there!”

  From the corner of his eye, Mike saw his mother jump as though she’d received an electric shock. She choked back a strangled cry as her shoulders slumped forward.

  “I mean to get to the bottom of this, young man,” his father said, “so you’d best tell me right now everything you know. If I have to get the police involved … I … I don’t know what …”

  A cold, sinking sensation filled Mike’s chest as if he’d swallowed a handful of ice cubes. The back of his neck flushed, and his stomach tightened as he prepared to be slapped.

  After a long, terrible moment, his father straightened up and resumed pacing, all the while slapping the sole of Megan’s sneaker against his hand. Tears blurred Mike’s vision, and he caught glimpses of shadows, shifting around him like clouds passing in front of the setting sun.

  When his father stopped pacing, he stood in front of Mike, towering over him. Mike could feel his father’s breath against his forehead as he panted heavily, like a horse that had just run a race.

  “You want to know what I think?” his father said, but before Mike or his mother could speak, he continued, “I—I don’t dare tell you what I think, but I have to say it.” Turning to his wife, he added, “I have to say it out loud, Caroline.”

  Mike glanced at his mother and saw her face go bone pale. Her lower lip began to tremble, and a faint hitching sound came from deep in her throat.

  “I think you do know what happened out there.” His father’s voice was cold and dispassionate. “In fact, I even think you may have had something to do with it.”

  His mother let out a gasp, and for an instant, Mike was more concerned for her than he was for himself. She looked like she either was going to faint on the spot or else leap to her feet and start screaming like an insane woman. There was only so much grief she or anyone could take. Seeing his mother suffering like this and being so vulnerable cut him deeply. But he remained perfectly still as fragments of memories from that day flashed through his mind.

  “I hate to say this. You have no idea how much it pains me to say this, but I have to ask you, Mikey …” His father dropped down to one knee and took Mike’s arms, his viselike grip squeezing his biceps. “Did you have anything to do with what happened to Megan?”

  Mike shook his head from side to side in adamant denial. Tears gushed from his eyes and spilled down his cheeks as he looked at his father. Behind him, all around him, he saw dim, gauzy clots of shadows shifting back and forth whenever he shifted his eyes.

  “If you did …” his father went on, “if you were—I don’t know, mad at her about something, or maybe you guys had an argument, and maybe you didn’t mean to do it, but maybe you pushed her, and she lost her balance and she fell. Is that what happened?”

  Mike let loose a wailing cry that tore his throat as another fragment of memory came back to him. He realized the memory had been too frightening, and he had suppressed it, trying to convince himself he hadn’t seen what he thought he had seen, but now, he knew with total certainty that the man he had seen out there that day had not just looked like his father …

  It had been his father!

  — 2 —

  “That’s not fair,” Megan said, her voice almost a twisted shriek.

  Abby was standing by the living room window. She looked at Megan and felt deep sadness. An emotional outburst like that had to have a deep source, and the strength of it convinced Abby that what was going on here was connected to what was keeping Megan here in the Dead Lands.

  “What’s not fair?” Abby whispered as she shifted across the floor toward her. She raised a hand and placed it on Megan’s shoulder. When the girl looked her in the eyes, she saw the depths of her suffering.

  Megan looked away from Abby to her mother, father, and brother, who were gathered in the living room. They had lurked there, unseen and unheard, throughout the conversation. Neither one of them had reacted until Megan’s outburst just now.

  “The way he’s treating him! Threatening him! He—he’s all but accusing Mikey of … of killing me!”

  “And you know he didn’t, right?” Abby said.

  Megan didn’t answer her.

  “You were running, and you tripped and fell. You were by yourself.”

  “Yes! Yes!” Megan shrieked, but she wasn’t entirely convincing.

  Abby knew not to press too hard. It was always up to the recently deceased to come to the realization on their own. It wouldn’t work out well if she pushed things along. It could make the situation worse.

  “So why does talking about it upset you so much?” Abby asked, wondering even as she did if this constituted pushing too hard.

  “I don’t know. It just does!”

  Megan shifted forward and reached out to Mike, but her fingers passed through him like vapor. He and his parents—his father, at least—kept right on talking, but their words sounded distant and muffled.

  Abby noticed how Megan’s mother just sat there, staring off into space. She knew, from experience, that sometimes this was when people could see or at least get a hint that one or more ghosts were present, but Megan’s mother seemed not to react to their presence in the least.

  “If we have to get the police involved … I don’t know … I just don’t know,” Mike’s father said.

  Megan’s mother suddenly jumped as though she had received an electrical shock. She looked, wide-eyed, at her husband and said, “I can’t believe you’re even suggesting such a thing.”

  “See?” Megan said, turning to Abby. “She knows the truth. She knows Mikey would never do anything to hurt me.”

  Abby nodded and said softly, “But did someone else?”

  “What do you mean? Did someone what?” Megan shouted, turning on her.

  Her voice must have been loud because her mother tilted her head to one side and said, “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Mike’s father said, looking around.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Megan’s mother eased herself up from the couch and took a few unsteady steps toward the window, looking around and cocking her head from side to side. She reminded Abby of the way a bird tilts its head when looking for worms and bugs in the grass.

  “I thought I heard … a voice,” her mother said, but that was all. She shook her head and turned to look at Mike again, who was still sitting in the chair, staring straight ahead and looking stunned.

  “I know,” Mike said u
nder his breath. Neither of his parents seemed to hear him.

  “He knows what?” Abby whispered to Megan.

  “I have no idea what he’s talking about,” Megan replied, but her tone of voice and her demeanor were unconvincing. Abby was sure, now, something that needed to be said still hadn’t been said, and it was up to her to get Megan to say it.

  “Well-l-l-l, young man,” Mike’s father said, ignoring his wife and turning his full attention back to Mike. “I want you to think long and hard about what you did that day, and I want you to tell the truth, no matter how painful it is.”

  “Really?” Mike said, his voice was shaking, but it also had a hint of resolution.

  “Really,” his father replied.

  All the while, his mother was glaring at her husband with deep pain in her eyes. Without another word, she started toward the door and left the living room. For a count of ten, Mike’s father just stood there, staring at him. He still gripped Megan’s sneaker in one hand and looked like he might use it to throttle Mike. But then his posture relaxed, and he also left the room.

  Once they were gone, Megan shifted close to Mike and, bending over him, tried to hug him with both arms. Mike didn’t react in the slightest.

  “You’re right,” Abby finally said. “It isn’t fair.”

  Megan glanced at her but said nothing. Her body was trembling as if she were still alive and had been caught in a winter gale.

  “Your father’s treating your brother way too mean,” Abby added.

  Megan scowled at her and then said softly, “He’s not my father! Remember? He’s not my real father.”

  “Sorry. I forgot.”

  “My real father divorced my mother years ago, and the last I heard was living in Denver. I never see—never saw him after I was three years old. I have no memory of what he looks like.”

  Abby nodded, but she knew this wasn’t the confession she wanted to hear or the one that Megan needed to make.

  “Well, he sure didn’t have anything to do with what happened,” Abby said.