The Last Kiss Goodbye: A Charlotte Stone Novel Read online

  “Yes, well, I’m not so sure it works for me. This is only temporary. Just until I can come up with something else,” she warned in an impatient whisper, and opened the door before he could reply.

  “Dr. Stone.” A bullet-headed bald guy in a police uniform greeted her. Maybe five-eleven, fortyish, relatively fit–looking, he stood right outside the door with his fist raised, obviously having been about to knock again. If he was surprised that the door had opened so opportunely, he recovered fast. “I’m Detective Todd Sager.” He held out his hand. Stepping into the hall, Charlie shook it with a polite murmur. Sager continued, “If you could come downstairs with me, there’s something I’d like you to take a look at.”

  “Sexy shoes, too,” the curse she was afflicted with said. “Oh, right, you had a hot date with FBI guy tonight. I get it. Wow, Doc, you were pulling out all the stops. Things had played out different, right now you might have been wrapping up your evening right over there in your bed.”

  Since snapping shove it was not an option, she didn’t.

  “Certainly,” she answered Sager. Having slipped back into her professional persona with the ease of long habit, Charlie managed a tight nod, and in response to Sager’s gesture preceded him toward the stairs. Her knees felt a little wobbly, and she had the beginnings of a killer headache: a reaction, no doubt, to the crisis-filled last half hour. A police photographer was busy taking pictures of the corner by the stairs where she had last seen Jenna. A record was being made of the wet spot on the floor where Jenna had crouched, plus the droplets of blood surrounding it. Charlie was busy processing the rise and fall of voices, the clicking of the camera and the rattle of metal and shuffle of footsteps, the swirl of activity around her and on the stairs and in the hall below when, just as she reached the top of the stairs, a woman’s piercing scream stopped her in her tracks. A startled glance at Sager was all that it took to tell her that the scream causing the hair to rise on the back of her neck was unheard by him. No one else seemed to hear it, either. Looking down, she could see that Jenna, eyes closed, swathed in blankets, was lying on a stretcher in the hall below. Surrounded by paramedics in a hallway filled to overflowing with cops, she looked like she was either asleep or unconscious. A square of white gauze covered the wound on her forehead. An IV drip had been inserted into her arm.

  The scream was coming from a second dark-haired, wet, and bloody young woman. Flying across the hall toward the oblivious Jenna, the woman held a jagged rock in her upraised hand. Even as Charlie’s heart jumped, even as she started to call out and alert Jenna, alert the people around her, stop the terrible thing that was obviously getting ready to happen, she realized that what she was seeing wasn’t a living attacker at all, but a phantom.

  A phantom whom, even as Charlie watched, went through the motions of bashing Jenna’s head in with the rock, slamming the jagged edge down into the pale forehead again and again and again. Without making a mark or disturbing so much as a hair on Jenna’s head. Since it had no corporeal existence, the phantom rock passed right through the living would-be victim’s flesh.

  Even as the girl wielding it screamed over and over again, “You murdered me, you bitch! You murdered me!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Charlie’s mind was spinning. What the phantom was saying—accusing Jenna of murdering her—was so off the wall that it couldn’t possibly be true. Could it?

  A low whistle from behind her told Charlie that Michael was witnessing the same thing. She almost turned to say something to him before she caught herself. As far as everyone else in the whole world was concerned, he—and the bloody, screaming phantom in the hallway below—was not there. If she wanted to retain any credibility at all, she could not let herself forget that.

  “Now that’s what you call a whole ’nother can of worms.” Michael sounded more entertained than taken aback. Taken aback would be how she felt, Charlie realized.

  “Dr. Stone? Is something wrong?” Sager asked. Since she had frozen at the top of the stairs, he had been forced to stop, too.

  “No.” Okay, she’d had lots of practice at keeping her cool in the presence of ghosts. She sounded perfectly normal, and was able to continue on down the stairs as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. The phantom girl had vanished, which helped. “Except for the fact that I’ve got a girl who apparently barely escaped being murdered in my house, of course.”

  “I hear you. Not the kind of thing that usually happens around here.” Sager made a sound that almost could have been a grim chuckle. Charlie couldn’t be sure, because right as he finished speaking the spine-tingling scream was repeated. It was all Charlie could do to control her impulse to fly to Jenna’s aid as the phantom girl reappeared. Instead, she could do nothing more than watch as the phantom rushed across the hall toward Jenna, who still lay, eyes closed and unmoving, on the stretcher while the paramedics rigged up some kind of waterproof shield above her to protect her from the rain that was still falling outside, in apparent preparation for moving her to the waiting ambulance.

  “How’s she doing?” Charlie asked the closest paramedic with careful control as she stepped down into the hall. The paramedic, a young Asian woman in a blue uniform, looked around at her just as the phantom reached the side of the stretcher and brought the rock crashing down.

  Charlie felt her pulse jump.

  It can’t hurt her, she reminded herself. Looking at Jenna’s colorless face, Charlie tried turning the scenario she’d been picturing on its head and envisioning Jenna inflicting the hideous wounds that the phantom girl exhibited.

  Her mind boggled.

  “Her vital signs are stable. We’ve sedated her because of the degree of emotional upset she was experiencing. We’ll know more once we get her to the hospital.”

  Had Jenna killed that girl? What was the alternative, a lying—or mistaken—ghost?

  Grappling with the need to warn him to keep Jenna in custody until the investigation could determine the facts—and how could she do that, without revealing what she had seen?—Charlie looked at Sager. “Did she say anything? Did you get her statement?”

  Sager shook his head. “We’re waiting on the FBI for that. We’ve already been informed that they’re on the way.”

  Of course the FBI would be involved in such a high-profile disappearance.

  “You’ll keep her in some kind of protective custody, won’t you? Because whoever did this is still out there.” Asking for a guard to be kept on Jenna was the best Charlie could do under the circumstances.

  “She won’t get out of our guys’ sight,” Sager promised.

  “You murdered me, you bitch! You murdered me!” The shriek echoed off the walls. Charlie couldn’t help it: what felt like a cold finger slid down her spine, and her notoriously sensitive stomach clenched.

  I’ll never get used to this.

  Watching the rock slash through Jenna’s forehead again, Charlie felt nausea building.

  Oh, no.

  “Hellfire, you been seeing this kind of thing your whole life?” Michael’s question reminded her that, for what was practically the first time in her existence, someone else was seeing the same thing she was. It was unsettling, but kind of a comforting, too.

  I’m not alone in this anymore.

  Since that thought was almost more disconcerting than the screaming phantom, Charlie was still trying to come to terms with it when the phantom girl suddenly looked her way. Their eyes met. Charlie felt the jolt of connection, and knew instantly that the girl could see her, which, with phantoms, wasn’t always the case. Just like most people can’t see ghosts, most ghosts can’t see the living, but this traumatized spirit was clearly one of the exceptions—and she obviously knew that Charlie could see her as well.

  “Look at me—I’m bleeding! There’s so much blood! It hurts—oh, it hurts! She stabbed me! That bitch stabbed me! You have to help me—please!” The girl rushed toward Charlie, the rock still clutched in her hand. Her feet didn’t touch the floor; her so
aked, seal-black hair flew behind her. A gaping wound in her neck spouted a waterfall of bright crimson blood that gushed down the front of her body, staining her clothes, her legs, splashing around her feet. More blood ran down her face from a slash in her cheek, and there was another heavily bleeding gash in her upper arm. Like Jenna, she was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, denim and pink respectively, both now saturated with blood, and she was wet and muddy and wild-eyed. Having learned already that (in every case she knew of, although it was possible there were exceptions) spirits couldn’t harm the living, Charlie was horrified and filled with pity, but not afraid as a wave of freezing cold air engulfed her in advance of the spirit’s arrival. Michael, however, hadn’t been dead long enough to know the rules that covered ghosts on the ground, as she called them. Charlie realized that when he jumped in front of her, interposing his big body between her and the phantom before the girl could reach her. His intervention was effective: the phantom stopped dead, shifting her attention from Charlie to Michael.

  “The bitch stabbed me!” she wailed again, lifting the hand that wasn’t holding the rock to clutch at her bleeding throat. Blood instantly coated her hand, spurted through the spread fingers, and she pulled her hand back and looked at it in horror. Her eyes shot to Michael’s face. “Oh, oh, I’m bleeding! What do I do?”

  “It’s over. You’re dead. There’s nothing to do,” Michael said brutally, employing way less than the degree of tact Charlie would have used, if she had chosen to convey the same message. Hamstrung as she was by being surrounded by the living, however, Charlie couldn’t say a word.

  The girl screamed like she was being stabbed again. Then she vanished.

  Charlie couldn’t help it. Gathering herself, moving on toward the kitchen, she shot Michael a condemning look.

  “What? She needed to know,” he said.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to get this cleared up before the FBI gets here.” Sager took her arm, discreetly urging her along toward the kitchen in an obvious indication that he thought her progress was too slow. Charlie nodded and picked up the pace, moving past the knot of people in her entryway with only a few blind nods to those of them she thought she might know: neighbors, she was pretty certain because of their civilian clothes, but she was so distracted by this sudden shocking revelation about Jenna that she couldn’t concentrate enough to even start putting names and faces together. Plus, she had another pressing concern. She had taken only a few steps down the hall when the nausea that had been building inside her hit full bore. Swallowing, she pulled her arm free.

  “Excuse me,” she managed, before bolting into the small half bath beneath the stairs.

  She barely had time to hit the light switch, lock the door, and stumble to the toilet before she vomited.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Michael said.

  He was in the bathroom with her, leaning against the locked door, Charlie saw as she straightened.

  “Go away.” Feeling weak but definitely better, Charlie glared at him as she flushed the toilet and went to the sink. Turning the cold water on full blast, she washed her hands and rinsed her mouth. The blush and gloss had been a waste of time; she looked as white as a sheet, she saw with disgust. “Do you have no understanding whatsoever of the concept of privacy?”

  “I was worried about you.” It was a small bathroom, and he took up way too much space in it.

  For just a second or two, the idea that he had been worried about her made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside. And that annoyed her.

  “Seeing ghosts makes me sick, remember?” she reminded him tartly. Although apparently she was now immune to him. Repeated exposure to the same stomach-churning stimuli obviously mitigated the effect. “And I don’t want you worrying about me. I don’t want you trying to protect me, either. I don’t need you jumping between me and other ghosts.”

  He shrugged. “Get used to it. It’s part of the deal.”

  “What deal?” She was drying her hands. “We don’t have a deal. There is no deal.”

  He snorted, looked at her. “You need to find a new line of work.”

  “Wouldn’t help. Ghosts are everywhere.” Taking a deep breath, she turned toward the door. He was blocking her way.

  “Screaming, bleeding murder victims aren’t. They’re kind of like psycho murderers: you don’t go poking around in their business, you’re probably not ever going to encounter one.”

  “Would you move?” She reached for the knob, prepared to thrust her hand right through him if she had to. She didn’t have to: he stepped aside.

  “It ain’t healthy, what you do. Mentally or physically.”

  “Quit talking to me. We’re not speaking, remember?” Opening the door, she stepped back into the hall. Detective Sager was waiting for her.

  “You were the one who said you weren’t speaking to me. I never said a thing about not speaking to you.”

  Charlie swallowed a growl.

  “Are you all right, Dr. Stone?” Sager, frowning in concern, asked as she rejoined him. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal, I realize. The paramedics—”

  Charlie shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  Behind her, Michael made a rude sound. “You got low standards for ‘fine.’ I’m just sayin’.”

  With Sager looking at her, she couldn’t even shoot a glare Michael’s way.

  Taking a cleansing breath, she focused on her surroundings instead. A glance told her that Jenna was no longer in the entry hall. The paramedics had apparently taken her away. The population of cops had thinned out, too. Two stood on either side of the front door as if stationed there, but the rest had gone. The neighbors—had she actually seen some neighbors mixed in with the cops? If so, they were gone now, too. As Charlie continued on down the hall toward the kitchen, it occurred to her to wonder how the spirit of the murdered girl had found Jenna. If someone suffered a violent death, it wasn’t uncommon for the shocked spirit to stick around, attaching to something or someone (as Michael had attached to her) that had been nearby at the moment the soul exited the body. But if the phantom had been attached to Jenna, it would have been with her from the first.

  Where, then, had the spirit come from?

  Charlie had no answer for that.

  Her kitchen was full of cops. The partially open back door was being dusted for fingerprints. Tape blocked off a path from the door to the kitchen table. A police photographer was taking pictures while something was being sprayed on the wood floor inside that path: Luminol, to check for blood? Charlie couldn’t be sure.

  The sense of violation that she felt because the peaceful sanctuary that was her house had been invaded by horror was suddenly immense.

  “Did he actually come inside?” she asked Sager over her shoulder. Michael was back there, too, looking grim, but Charlie didn’t have any trouble ignoring him.

  “Looks like it,” Sager replied. “Unless you left your back door standing open. Because it was open when we got in here.”

  Charlie shook her head. A breeze blew in through the open doorway, carrying the smell of rain on it. She could see that the downpour had eased off, hear the gentler splatter of droplets hitting the ground. Beyond the spill of light from the kitchen, the night was black as pitch.

  “You keep your curtains closed at night, you wouldn’t have to worry about some whack job seeing in,” Michael pointed out trenchantly. Irritating as the remark might be, their thinking once again seemed to be on pretty much the same page. Charlie was already repressing a shiver at the idea that an armed killer might be up on the mountainside watching them through the windows at that very moment.

  Only maybe there wasn’t an armed killer. Maybe Jenna was the killer. Maybe Jenna’s frantic advent into her kitchen had been part of some elaborate cover-up and …

  No way. Jenna’s terror had been real. And someone had opened the back door.

  Sager continued, “I want you to look at something on your kitchen table for me.”

  Charlie nodded.r />
  “ … called my wife …” Ken stood right inside the entrance to the kitchen talking earnestly to a cop, who was writing down what he said. His eyes tracked Charlie until she met them, when they slid away. “When I got here Dr. Stone let me in and …”

  Charlie overheard those snippets as she walked past him. By then his arms were crossed over his chest, his head was down, and he seemed to be trying very hard not to look at her.

  “Can you tell me if there’s anything on the table there that wasn’t on it before?” Sager asked.

  Charlie looked at the table. There was the mail she’d been opening, the overturned box, the spill of foam peanuts—

  And a white, business-sized envelope with a knife resting on top of it.

  The knife was about five inches long, with a wooden handle, and looked old. The handle was damp, and the blade appeared clean and razor sharp. Just looking at it made Charlie feel cold all over.

  “That settles it. Looks like Teen Queen was telling the truth.” An involuntary glance his way told Charlie that Michael was looking at the same thing.

  Although she couldn’t say so, that was Charlie’s conclusion, too. Because Jenna had never gotten out of her sight from the time she had entered the kitchen, and the door had been forced open, and the knife and envelope, which had definitely not been on the table when they had fled the kitchen together, were now there. Ergo, someone else had to have put them on her table—like the man with the gun Jenna had insisted was chasing her.

  It was a relief to definitively conclude that he was real. That whatever had prompted the phantom girl’s accusation, Jenna’s terror had not been faked.

  “The knife—and the envelope,” Charlie said to Sager. “They aren’t mine. They weren’t on the table.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Sager nodded with satisfaction. He waved a hand at the photographer, who was busy snapping pictures of the door. “Hey, Torres, you get a picture of that table?”