Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(132)

She’d only been in the bathroom a couple of minutes. And in that time someone had taken off the cover to the hot tub and dribbled body parts all over the hot-tub room. A leg, clean sliced like someone had put it through a band saw, lay on the floor in front of the statue of Pan. Another leg was positioned so the cut end was hidden by the hot-tub stair. The woman’s legless and armless torso was arched over the edge of the hot tub where the hot water bubbled red as blood. Red with blood. The woman’s head was balanced on the edge of the tub closest to Lisa.

When Lisa screamed, the eyes opened, and the detached head said, “It’s his fault.” Lisa later remembered hearing the words as clearly as though someone had whispered in her ear, though the glass blocked the sound of the bubbling water, and a detached head couldn’t speak—no air.

And that impossibility finally cued Lisa in that what she saw wasn’t real. A moment later, an arm wrapped itself around her and tugged her away from the hot tub and out the front door.

Rick sat her down on the top step on the porch and forced her head between her knees. When she could focus on what he was saying, she heard, “Tell me, damn it. You saw that. You did. You saw.”

She blinked a couple of times and pushed against his hands. He let her sit up.

“What the freak was that?” she asked him. “Rick? Do you have aspirations of being the next George Lucas or David Cronenberg or something? I’ve got to tell you, it really had me going until the head started talking.”

He sat down beside her and looked up at the sky and gave a funny half laugh. “You saw that.”

“The body in the hot-tub room? Yes, of course I saw it. It was brilliant.” She reconsidered. “Sadistic and horrible. But brilliant.”

He rubbed his face, then rubbed his hair and laughed again. “I thought I was crazy,” he whispered. “Fourteen years. No one ever sees it.”

Lisa just stared at him.

“It won’t be there now,” he told her. “You can go look. But she never stays for long.”

“She?”

“My wife,” he told her, and he put his head in his hands. “She’s dead. She’s dead, and she won’t leave me alone. No one sees her, no one ever sees her, but me.”

“You mean,” said Lisa, suddenly understanding what had happened. “You mean that was a ghost?” She blinked at him. “You see that all the time?”

•   •   •

My half brother Gary answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Wait just a minute,” he said, sounding a little breathless.

I waited, listening to a few grunts and my brother’s croons. I had an unsettled thought that there was a woman involved in this wait, just as he came back on the phone—though it wasn’t quite the right grunts.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m training horses. Right now I’m on a two-year-old who objected to my cell phone’s ringing.”

My brother had left the state of Washington with prejudice. He’d found a job at a horse ranch in Montana where they raised quarter horses, a few Appaloosas, and cattle.

“Isn’t two a little young?” I asked. I didn’t know a lot about horses, but I’d grown up around people who did.

“Yep,” he agreed. “This one will be three next week, but still young. Driven by the market, Mercy. There isn’t a lot of profit in breeding horses anymore, and the ranch has no choice but to listen to market forces if they want to survive. It’s not like we take them out for fifty-mile trips.” Then, presumably to the horse, “You can just settle your butt down, sweetheart. Get used to it now, my friend. Life for you is going to be all about hurry up and wait.”

“I need to know how to exorcise a ghost,” I said to Gary.

Lisa abruptly looked a lot less confident in me. I hadn’t told her why I was calling Gary. I held up one finger when it looked like she was going to speak. My brother has good ears; he didn’t need to get distracted by a pretty voice.

“You just tell them to move on,” he said.

“Just tell them?” I was doubtful, and I let him hear it. When I was a kid, I’d screamed “go away” at a lot of ghosts to not much effect.

“Tell them,” he said with exaggerated patience, “the way your Alpha werewolf husband would tell one of his wolves when they get pushy.”

“Okay,” I said. I almost thanked him and hung up—but there was something in his voice. He was a son of Coyote, as much as he hated it. And that made him a little tricksy. “Where do they go?”

He laughed, and I knew I’d been right. “Somewhere else. Usually not too far away. One of our distant nephews, back in the Victorian Age, had a grand con. He found a haunted house and drove the ghost—a nasty moaning type—out. They paid him for it, then he waited a week and went to the house next door and did the same. If he’d stopped at the fifth house, he’d have made a tidy profit. But he’d forgotten that neighbors talk to each other. He knocked on the door of the sixth, and the man of the house tried to hold him for the authorities. Sadly for both of them, the young entrepreneur was killed in the struggle.”

I waited, but he wasn’t going to continue until I asked. “Why for both of them?”

“Because when our budding con artist nephew died, the man in the sixth house was left with a very nasty ghost that no one could send on. I hear that it is still there today.”