Arizona Heat

I’m Mojo Sheepshanks now, and as far as I can tell, I always will be.

Then again, you never know.

That’s what I’ve learned since the day I sat in the back of an overcrowded church in Cave Creek, Arizona, on a hot day in early May, too shaken to cry. You just never know—about anything, or anybody.

The casket in front of the altar was painfully small, made of gleaming black wood, and it was open. The body of seven-year-old Gillian Pellway lay inside, nestled on cushions of white silk, clad in a blue ruffled dress, her small hands folded across her chest. I know it’s what people always say, but she really did look peaceful, lying there. She might have been asleep.

She wasn’t at peace. If she had been, her ghost wouldn’t have been sitting in the folding chair next to mine, still clad in the single ballet slipper, pink leotard, tights and tutu she’d been wearing when she was murdered a week before, sometime after a rehearsal for an upcoming dance recital ended.

It wasn’t as if I’d had a lot of experience dealing with dead people. Early trauma and the years on the road with Lillian notwithstanding, I’d led a pretty ordinary life. I wasn’t psychic. I didn’t have visions.

Then, one night in April, I’d awakened to find my ex-husband, Nick DeLuca, in bed with me. Not too weird—divorced people sleep together all the time. Except that Nick had been killed in a car crash two years before. I saw him often, over a period of a few weeks, and I probably owe him my life.

But that’s another story.

Nick opened some kind of door, and I’ve been seeing ghosts ever since.

They’re easy enough to spot, once you know what to look for. Their clothes are usually outdated, and they often seem lost, as though they want to ask directions but can’t get anybody’s attention. I encounter them all the time now—in supermarkets, busy restaurants, even in dog parks.

I wish I didn’t, but I do.

I try hard not to make eye contact, but it doesn’t always work. Once they realize I can see them, they tend to get in my face.

That day, sitting through Gillian’s funeral, I had mixed feelings. Of course it was a tragedy—the apparently random slaughter of a little girl. That goes without saying. But most of the people weeping in that church were crying more for themselves than for Gillian—because they’d miss her, because it might just as easily have been their own child lying in that coffin, because they thought death was an ending.

It might be simpler if it were.

As I said, I was innocent then. I’d figured out that death wasn’t the final curtain, but the beginning of a whole new act in some complicated cosmic play. The proof was sitting right beside me, leaning against my arm. But the transition is rocky for some people, especially when it happens suddenly, or violently. Back then, I had no idea how many ghosts get caught in the thin, shifting, invisible web that separates this life from the next. A surprising number of them think they’re dreaming, and wander around waiting to wake up.

Helen Erland, Gillian’s mother, sat stiff-spined in a front pew, occasionally shuddering with the effort to hold in a sob. Her husband, Vince, wasn’t there to share in her grief and lend support—he was in jail pending a murder charge. Though Mrs. Erland apparently had no family to lean on, the place was packed—many of the mourners, I suspected, were the parents of Gillian’s classmates at school.

I wished I could tell Helen that Gillian wasn’t really gone, but how exactly does one go about that? By tugging at the sleeve of the bereaved mother’s cheap but tasteful black suit and saying, Excuse me, but your daughter is more alive than you are?

I don’t think so.

So I sat there, and I watched and listened, and I wondered if the real murderer was present, gloating or guilt ridden. Although Gillian had yet to speak a word to me since she’d appeared in the backseat of my sister’s Pathfinder soon after her death, she had indicated that Vince Erland hadn’t killed her. It seemed more a matter of instinct than certainty.

Conundrum number two. How to explain to the police that they were probably holding the wrong man, and you knew this because the victim had shaken her head when you asked if he’d been the one, but either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell you who had ended her life. All without winding up in some psych ward yourself.

My gaze wandered to Tucker Darroch. He was sitting up near the front, with one strong arm around his ex-wife, Allison, her head resting on his shoulder. Their seven-year-old twins, Daniel and Daisy, friends of Gillian’s, weren’t present.

I knew what was going to happen, of course.

Allison would need Tucker.

And he would move back in with her, if he hadn’t already.

Whatever had been starting between Tucker and me would be over.

I tried not to care. I wasn’t in love with the man, after all. But we were definitely...involved.

The service was ending.

I squeezed Gillian’s small hand, cold but substantial, and then Helen Erland rose shakily from her seat and walked to the coffin. With a soft wail of sorrow that pierced the lining of my soul, she laid a single white rose inside.

I felt Gillian pull away, and I tried to hold on, but it was no use. One moment the child was sitting beside me, the next she was standing at her shattered mother’s side, her little face upturned, her whole being crying out in a silent plea. I’m here, see me!

What could I do?

Rush up there and gather a child no one else could see into my arms? Drag her back to the rows of folding chairs that had been set up in the rear of the church to accommodate the overflow?

There was nothing I could do. So I sat still, clenching my hands together, my face wet with tears.

Helen Erland, understandably focused on the body in the coffin, was oblivious to her real daughter, standing right beside her.

Gillian, I called, without speaking. Come back.

She turned a defiant glance on me, shook her head and grabbed ineffectually at her mother’s hand. I was vaguely aware of a young woman at the periphery of my vision, a video camera raised to her face, and a slight shudder went through me.

Enduring the actual funeral was hard enough. Who would want to replay it?

Let this be over, I prayed distractedly. Please let this be over.

Gillian vanished, and did not return to her chair beside mine.

Tucker left Allison long enough to go to Helen, help her back to her place.

I couldn’t stand any more.

I got up and slipped out through the open doors of the church, doing my best not to hyperventilate. I would have given just about anything to have one or both of my sisters there, but Jolie, recently hired as a crime-scene tech by Phoenix PD, was going through an orientation program, and Greer was caught in the throes of a rapidly disintegrating marriage.

So I was on my own. Nothing new there.

I took refuge under a leafy ficus tree, grateful for the shade, one hand pressed against the trunk so I wouldn’t drop into a sobbing heap on the ground. I was dazed by the intensity of my mourning, and I didn’t trust myself to drive. Not right away, anyhow.

The service ended.

People flowed past, murmuring, the men looking stalwart and grim, the women dabbing at puffy eyes with crumpled handkerchiefs.

The pallbearers, Tucker among them, carried Gillian’s casket to the hearse, waiting in the dusty street with its rear doors open like the black wings of some bird of doom, ready to enfold the child and carry her away into the unknown. The minister helped Mrs. Erland into the back of a limousine; I looked for Gillian, but she was nowhere around.

When a hand gripped my upper arm, I was beyond startled. I could no longer assume I’d been approached by another human being—not the flesh-and-blood variety, that is.

I turned and saw Allison Darroch standing just behind me, her eyes red rimmed from crying, her flawless skin alabaster pale. She had lush brown hair, pulled into a severe French twist for the occasion, and she wore a black sheath that accented her slender curves.

“What,” she demanded in a furious undertone, “are you doing here?”

I swallowed, stuck for an immediate answer. I couldn’t say I’d come to Gillian Pellway’s funeral because the dead child had practically herded me there. Especially not to Allison, who clearly saw me as the Other Woman, even though she and Tucker had been legally divorced for over a year before I even met him.