Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson(136)

“What do you think?” he said bitterly. “Do you think she’d haunt me otherwise? The case against me was dismissed, you know, because my money ensured that no one could prove my guilt.”

Sometimes people learn to lie so well I can’t hear it in their voice, especially if they’ve had years to practice or even come to believe their own lies. But I had to get a yes or no answer even to try.

“Did you kill your wife, Mr. Albright?” I asked again.

“I can’t leave,” his dead wife said again, and leaned her head against his shoulder. “I can’t leave.”

He shivered, but I don’t think he felt her. “Yes,” he said coolly. “Of course I killed her.” He looked at Lisa when she gasped. “You have to know it,” he said harshly. “If I hadn’t been filthy rich, I would’ve rotted in prison for the rest of my life—or sat on death row until someone decided to pull the lever.”

“Werewolves and Mercy,” Zack said conversationally, “can tell when you are lying.”

“What Zack means to say, Lisa,” I told her, “is that that was a big fat lie. Not the part about being rich having saved him—but the part about his having murdered his wife. Which leads to the question—why, then, is she haunting you, Rick? All she can tell me is that she can’t leave.”

Zack stared at me as if I were speaking Greek, but Lisa took a big shaky breath. “I knew it,” she said. Then she walked over to Rick and shoved him. “That’s for trying to make me think you’re a murderer. Stupid.” Then she turned back to me. “So why can’t she leave?”

I shrugged. “I’ve run into a few different kinds of ghosts.” I used to think there were only three kinds, but I’d expanded my knowledge a bit over the past few years. There are more things in Heaven and Earth and all that. But some things still held true. “One of the most common kinds that I’ve seen are repeaters—ghost that seem to reenact the same events over and over.”

“Traumatic events,” said Zack.

I nodded. “Usually. But sometimes just everyday things. Habits. They don’t interact with the real world much. The appearance of body parts—that fits with a repeater, except that she didn’t die here in the hot-tub room, right? And repeaters are usually tied to places, not people.”

“It’s his fault,” the ghost said.

“No,” I told her. “He didn’t kill you.”

“It’s his fault,” she said again. “I can’t leave.”

“Is he holding you here?”

She stared at me. “It’s his fault. It’s his fault I died.”

I don’t know if the dead can lie or not. I just didn’t think that this ghost had enough . . . personality left to lie.

I looked at Rick. “How could it be your fault that she died?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The hair on the back of my neck started to tingle, and my ears popped like I was on an airplane in rapid descent. A sweet scent from my childhood drifted to my nose as well as the sharp scent of ozone—lightning just before it strikes. I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t feel like anything very healthy. And the first rule in my sensei’s rules of combat is—run.

“Everyone out of the house,” I said.

I followed my own advice and started for the door. I grabbed Lisa’s upper arm as I moved. I didn’t run, but I wasn’t waiting for flies to gather, either.

Zack took my lead and, as he walked by Rick, he put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him along. Rick didn’t struggle so much as hesitate, but Zack was a werewolf—so Rick came with us.

So did Rick’s dead wife.

Even with the ghost tagging along, I felt better with the door closed behind us. Which meant whatever was unnerving me, it wasn’t Nicole Albright.

“Tell me,” I said, “about the times you saw your wife when you weren’t here. When was the first time?”

“If you’ll tell me why I just got hustled out of my own home,” Rick said.

“Something happened,” Lisa said. “I don’t know what, but a whole marathon of people were jogging across my grave.”

“Did you feel anything?” I asked Zack.

“The spike of emotion from you and a moment later from Lisa,” said Zack. He was kind enough not to say that what he’d smelled was terror. “But I smelled something different . . . not sure what it was. Sweet.”

“Bubble gum,” I said.

And Rick’s pupils contracted.

“That means something to you?” I said.

“My mother.” He half laughed. “She had this shampoo that was supposed to be pomegranate or something. She paid a fortune for it. But to me it always smelled like pink bubble gum.”

“Tell me,” I said, “about your mother.”

“I’m not in the habit of opening my personal box of poor-little-rich-boy stories to everyone who asks,” he told me. I think he meant to sound affronted or cold because he ended up somewhere in the middle—and I could smell his refusal. His pain.

Lisa put her hand on his and squeezed.

He looked at her, and I remembered what he said about intuition. He must know how she felt—even without intuition, Lisa’s face was open and honest.