Dead Voices Read online

  Junia shrugged and smiled. “I haven’t the foggiest idea. Who do you think it might be?” she asked.

  “I — I don’t think it’s anyone ... Not really. But when 1 was in the bathroom, I ... I …

  Elizabeth’s voice cut off abruptly when the image of the face she had seen rose up in her mind. It was sharp and clear, but even now, with the numbing flood of panic receding, and the fire of the brandy soothing her nerves, she didn’t recognize the face, even though she felt she should. The dimming memory of it was that it had looked more like a girl than a woman. Maybe someone in her early teens. Her hair had been long and blonde, but that and every other detail of her face was lost in the disturbing memory of how pale and drawn, how wrung of life she had looked. It was almost as if, even with her eyes open and staring unblinkingly back at Elizabeth, she had been dead.

  “You saw something?” Junia said, her voice rising almost playfully.

  Elizabeth bit down sharply on her lower lip and nodded. “Yeah — in the mirror.”

  “But you’re sure you didn’t recognize her?”

  “No — I mean, yes. What I mean is, I feel like I should have recognized her,” Elizabeth said. She shook her head and looked pleadingly at her aunt, wondering why she had said her. How did Junia know it had been a woman or girl? Elizabeth couldn’t help glancing around behind herself again when she felt the hairs at the nape of her neck prickle.

  Junia lowered her voice and, looking directly into Elizabeth’s eyes, said, “Did it ever cross your mind that it might have been Caroline? That she might be trying to get in touch with you?”

  FOUR

  Old Flame

  1.

  The mere mention of Caroline’s name sent a tingling chill up her spine.

  “Could we — go outside? I think I need a breath of fresh air,” Elizabeth said. She felt pressure coiling up inside her like heavy, black smoke.

  “That might not be a bad idea.” Junia replied, glancing toward the living room doorway. “That way we won’t disturb Elspeth.”

  Once outside on the porch. they each sat down in one of the heavy, wooden lawn chairs that had been stored on the porch for the winter. The chairs were a grainy, faded white, and looked as if they had needed a fresh coat of paint for at least five years.

  The traffic zooming by on Route 22 was much heavier than Elizabeth remembered it, but she still found the view peaceful and enjoyable. Sunlight poured through the huge maple trees, casting dancing shadows that made the front lawn and walkway look as though they were bubbling with activity. The warm breeze wafting from the south carried a moist, tingling smell of fresh growing things. Even the sound of passing traffic was lulling, rather than irritating. Aided by the brandy. Elizabeth’s jangled nerves began to unwind.

  But as pleasant as the early afternoon was, Elizabeth was still restless and uneasy in her heart. When she recalled how much she had enjoyed sitting here, sipping lemonade and talking with Aunt Junia, she couldn’t stop thinking that Caroline would never be able to do this. As when she was exploring the treasures and junk in the attic, there were all these constant reminders of things Caroline was missing. Visiting with the aunts had always been something Elizabeth had appreciated; and she had always assumed Caroline would develop that same relationship with the aunts while they were still alive. She had never imagined that both Junia and Elspeth would survive Caroline.

  “You know,” Elizabeth said, taking another deep breath and looking up at the sky, “I just can’t accept that Caroline doesn’t — doesn’t exist ... somewhere.” She squeezed her clasped hands between her knees, earnestly wishing she could shift her attention to something else. But she couldn’t stop her thoughts from almost constantly revolving around Caroline and the things she was missing. Maybe, Elizabeth thought, coming back home was only going to make her healing all the more difficult because of the memories it stirred.

  Junia reached out and gently gripped her arm. “There are a lot of things in life,” she said mildly, “which surprise us when they happen.”

  Elizabeth took a shuddering breath and, not knowing exactly what Junia meant, closed her eyes and leaned back against the chair. She concentrated on feeling the spring breeze wash like water over her face. One small part of her mind, a part that got increasingly smaller as she got older, earnestly wanted to believe in ... something — some kind of personal survival after death. But after the accident, she had lost any element of faith in a kind or even a benign universe. Things in life just happened — birth, death, accidents, misery, and happiness; they were all just the results of random activity. There was no wise, overseeing God who kept watch over things; there couldn’t be, because if there were, how — in any conceivable way — could He justify taking away someone as precious, as innocent, as Caroline?

  “You know,” Junia said, her voice sounding dreamily distant, “the older I get, the stronger I believe that those who have passed on do experience a better existence than this one. And I’m positive they sometimes come back to visit those they loved who are still in this world.”

  With her eyes still closed, Elizabeth had a vague sense that she might be drifting off to sleep, but she focused her attention on her aunt’s words and let them drag her back to awareness.

  “You actually believe that?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Junia replied. ‘‘I’m convinced that death is only the beginning of a new and glorious adventure.”

  “But why — ? Why would someone who’s died do something like that, come back to where they used to live or whatever?” Elizabeth asked. The slug of brandy still warmed her belly, and she was feeling incredibly relaxed; she felt as if she were melting into the wooden chair. Her own voice had a muffled mellowness that soothed her in spite of the topic they were discussing. She thought how nice it must be to have faith in the idea of life after death — or in anything — as strongly as Aunt Junia apparently did in the continued existence of the soul.

  “Souls can stay on the earthly plane for a whole host of reasons, you know,” Junia said, “Some stay voluntarily; some involuntarily. I’m sure that, just as we who are still alive think we know their reasons for doing so, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of reasons to return that those on the other side have — reasons we aren’t even aware of. Usually, though, I suspect a spirit will return to exact some kind of revenge or else to warn somebody — a loved one, usually, of some danger.”

  “But what makes you think Caroline might be trying to contact me?” Elizabeth asked. She opened her eyes and looked intently at Junia. As she had been by the bottle of brandy hidden in the cupboard, she was surprised by this conversation. Junia had always shown an interest in horoscopes and such, but Elizabeth had never even suspected that she had such a strong faith in religion or spiritualism or whatever you wanted to call it.

  “I didn’t say I know Caroline is” — Junia shifted her eyes, holding her hands up in the air and sweeping them around —” here.”

  Elizabeth grunted softly, closed her eyes again, and let herself float on the cushion of brandy. “But when I told you what I saw in the bathroom mirror, you said something about how it might be Caroline. Don’t you think I would have recognized the face I saw — or whatever it was-if it was my own daughter?”

  “Who’s to say?” Junia replied. “You might have been so surprised, so scared, you didn’t even recognize her face.”

  “I saw ... enough,” Elizabeth said, stirring uneasily on the chair. She wanted to open her eyes and sit up, but the brandy continued to press her backward into the chair. “The face I saw was an older girl-a teenager or something.”

  Junia sniffed. “Who’s to say?” she repeated. ‘‘I’m not saying it was or it wasn’t Caroline or anyone. I’m just suggesting that if it was Caroline, she might be nearby, trying to tell you something, trying to help you.”

  “And what do you think she’d —” Elizabeth cut herself off and suddenly sat bolt-upright in her chair. Her eyes snapped open as if she had been hit by a
n electrical charge. The sudden choking sensation she had was the only reason she didn’t cry out or say out loud the thought that had popped into her mind.

  — To exact some kind of revenge!

  That’s what Aunt Junia had said! If ghosts didn’t return to warn someone of something, they came back to exact revenge for what’s happened to them!

  Maybe Caroline hasn’t “passed on,” Elizabeth thought, through a flood of panic; maybe now she’s come back because she wants me to pay for what happened ... maybe she wants me to die!

  That’s impossible! Elizabeth told herself, even as panic raged inside her. All of this talk is — it’s impossible! It’s crazy!

  She fought to control her voice when she spoke-partly because she didn’t want to hurt Aunt Junia’s feelings about something in which she had obviously invested a great deal of faith-but she just couldn’t bring herself to accept any of this. She didn’t even want to be thinking or talking about it!

  “Even if what you’re saying is true,” she said, measuring her words carefully, “that doesn’t explain why I saw someone else’s face in the mirror. It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been Caroline —”

  Her throat went suddenly dry, and she could say no more. The warm smile on Junia’s face never wavered as she leaned closer to her niece.

  “I’m not saying it was or it wasn’t,” Junia said placidly. “And I certainly don’t want to force my beliefs onto you or upset you, dear. You say you saw ... someone. I’m saying, if it was Caroline, who knows why you didn’t recognize her? Maybe you didn’t see her as the six-year-old you knew her as. Maybe you saw what I guess would be called the ‘spiritual essence’ of your daughter. I don’t know. I’d have to see it to know more definitely.”

  “Or maybe I just imagined the whole thing,” Elizabeth said softly.

  “Maybe,” Junia said, smiling. “Life is such a ... a mystery. I tell you, sometimes I’m not even sure whether I’m alive or dreaming or dead myself. How do we know — with certainty — what’s real or not? But I’ll tell you one thing.” She leaned closer to Elizabeth and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I could introduce you to someone who would be able to contact her for you so you could talk to her yourself.”

  “What — with Caroline?” Elizabeth said, almost a shout. Her first impulse was to laugh aloud and tell her aunt that maybe she was the one who needed to see a shrink. But the longer she looked into Junia’s eyes, the more she saw the love and concern her aunt felt for her. It helped soften her reaction, and she finished, rather lamely, “I just don’t — I can’t believe anything like that is even possible.”

  Elizabeth raised her hands to her face and, shutting her eyes, roughly rubbed her palms against her forehead. The sudden darkness exploded with spirals of color. She watched with mounting horror as the rapidly unfolding designs expanded.

  “I think my explanation makes a whole helluva lot more sense,” Elizabeth said, her voice muffled by her hands. Uncovering her eyes, she looked pleadingly at Junia. “I think it’s because I’m losing my mind because I’m so . . —”

  “Come now!” Junia said, harshly. “We’ll have no talk like that in this house!”

  “It’ s true, though,” Elizabeth said. Her voice shattered, and tears blurred her vision. “There wasn’t anything in the mirror except my own face. What I saw there, and the feeling I had all day that there was someone behind me, no matter where I turned, someone was watching me ... It’s all just my imagination, just honest-to-God, going-crazy hallucinations.”

  She raised her hands in front of her and shook them wildly as if she were desperately trying to restore the circulation. “And if I don’t get some help, real soon, I ... I don’t know what I’ll do!”

  Saying that, she leaned forward and, covering her face with her hands again, began to sob deeply. She was distantly aware that Junia was patting her gently on the back; and her numbed senses barely heard her aunt as she crooned, “There, there dear. There, there. You may not believe me, but I do know someone who can contact Caroline for you.”

  2.

  Detective Harris looked up from his desk as Frank walked into his office, and pointedly asked, “What the fuck are you doing, Melrose — bucking for a gold shield or something?”

  Frank smiled and shook his head. He still had a few hours before his shift began, but he excused his early arrival at the station by mentioning some paperwork that needed his attention. The Styrofoam coffee cup he was holding didn’t fully protect his fingers from the near-boiling coffee, and he had to pass it from hand to hand as he stood in the doorway.

  “I was just wondering if you had any leads with the Payne case?” he asked, trying to sound casual before taking a slurping sip of coffee.

  Harris frowned and shook his head with disgust before slapping his beefy hand onto the stack of reports he had been sifting through. ‘‘I’m awash in a raging sea of paperwork and madness,” he mumbled.

  “Hey, if you ever get tired of detective work, you could always become a poet,” Frank said with a laugh.

  “And you could become a fucking comedian,” Harris said, almost snarling. “But to answer your question — bluntly — no. We don’t have any leads. We conducted an area interview, but hey! On that stretch of road, there aren’t all that many houses near the cemetery. Anyone out there at that time of night either was doing the digging or shouldn’t have been there in the first place and is never gonna come forward. “

  “Can’t understand why,” Frank said. “You’re such a nice guy, and so easy to talk to.”

  “Christ, you’re regular David Lettemmn material, you know that?” Harris said, scowling.

  “I always figured that show was on way past your bedtime,” Frank snapped.

  “Don’t let the doorknob bump your ass on the way out, all right?” Harris said, looking back down at his work.

  “Seriously, though,” Frank said. “Nobody was passing by and saw anything, or remembers seeing anything suspicious out there that night?”

  “Only one neighbor,” Harris said with thinly veiled disgust as he riffled through the papers on his desk. “Dan Wood’s house is about a quarter mile down the road. He said he thinks he saw a truck go into the cemetery that night just as he was coming home from work at the jetport. ‘Least he thinks it was that night. He said he’s so used to seeing teenagers go in there at all hours to drink or park or whatever the fuck they do for kicks these days that he stopped taking notice years ago.”

  Frank sniffed and said, “Yeah, well, if I know Dan, I’ll bet he was using the butt end of a whiskey bottle as a telescope, too.”

  “We get leads, we check ‘em all out, all right? You got any other suggestions on how I should conduct this investigation?” Harris asked, smiling thinly.

  “That’s it so far, then, huh?” Frank went on. “You didn’t get anything back from the lab on those tire tracks or anything yet?”

  Harris’s chair made a ferocious squeak as he leaned back and hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. His sports coat hung open, exposing his shoulder holster. Glaring at Frank, he snarled, “Do you mind if I ask why the fuck you’re so damned interested in all of this?”

  “I dunno,” Frank said as he looked down at the floor and scratched behind his ear. “I mean, you know — finding something like that kind of did a number on me and my partner.”

  Harris frowned and, glancing quickly over his shoulder, said, “I don’t see no Goddarnned psychiatrist diploma on my walls. If you’re looking for someone to tell your troubles to, I ain’t the guy.” He paused, then sniffed loudly and ran his hand back over his scalp. Suddenly pointing at Frank, he said, “Wait a fucking minute-the fact that you and the stiffs niece were high school honeys wouldn’t have anything to do with this, now, would it?’

  The bluntness of the detective’s manner had always impressed Frank; but for the first time ever, being on the receiving end of it wasn’t the least bit comfortable.

  “Oh, no — not at all,” Frank replied, sensi
ng the transparency of his lie. “It’s just — you’ve got to admit, this isn’t your typical everyday small-town crime. I was just ... you know, wondering if you were any closer to a suspect. “

  Harris shook his head and, jabbing his forefinger at Frank, said, “No, and shooting the shit with you all Goddamned morning isn’t going to get me any closer, either. Tell you what, though, Melrose — if I come up with some hot lead, you’ll be the first to know. All right?”

  Frank knew he had already pushed Harris too far, so he accepted the kiss-off, backed out of the detective’s office, and went down the hallway to the conference room. He couldn’t help but wonder how Harris, when he had gone to notify Junia and Elspeth Payne as well as Elizabeth’s parents yesterday about what had happened at Oak Grove, had handled something that required even a modicum of delicacy.

  “Paperwork be damned,” Frank said aloud as he got up and poured what remained of his coffee down the drain and tossed the cup into the trash. He knew all along that he had just been looking for an excuse to go out to Elizabeth’s aunts’ house and talk with them. If Harris or anyone else asked him why he was going out there, he’d tell them it was to smooth over what, in Harris’s hands, might have been a fairly rough delivery of the news. But he was honest enough with himself to realize that, if nothing else, this would start to prepare him for his first face-to-face meeting with Elizabeth in nearly twenty years.

  3.

  Elizabeth was still wrung out and drawn from her emotional outburst when she heard a car pull into the aunts’ driveway. Tires crunched on the loose gravel as the car stopped. The sound set her already overworked nerves on edge. When she looked up over the edge of the porch and saw that it was a police cruiser, and that Frank Melrose was stepping out, she almost stopped breathing. Feeling a wave of dizzy nervousness, she sat heavily back into the chair and hastily wiped her face with her hands.