Chapter 5
I buy pee pads so I never have to take Bob out after dark again, and the biggest carton of salt I can find. Only after I’ve paid do I realize I have no idea if I’ve even bought the right salt. Does it have to be sea salt? Does the Morton’s girl make a difference?
I should ask Donny and Nico. They’re right outside.
But when I push through the sliding doors with my bags, the parking spot where their van was parked is empty.
Just an oil stain on the asphalt and a discarded Coke can rolling through the space, being carried by the wind.
I stand there, shopping bags cutting into my fingers, and try to ignore the weird, disappointed feeling settling in my chest. I barely know these people.
I turned down their job offer. Of course they left.
I could call Donny with questions, but calling him minutes after I said no to his offer feels annoying, like I should’ve thought of these questions when we were already talking.
I can figure this out myself.
I climb back in the car, and Bob launches himself into my lap, covering my face with kisses like I’ve been gone for hours, and the cone presses against my cheeks.
There are enough ghosts out there for Donny and Nico to stay busy, but those guys actively go searching for them. I’ve only seen one ghost in twenty-one years. That’s not exactly an epidemic.
Even so, I need to be ready just in case. Donny made a salt circle to trap the ghost inside it. So, logically, a circle should also keep ghosts out, right? If the salt is a barrier they can’t cross?
The question is how to make a salt circle in a car.
I could pour salt in a giant circle around the outside of my car, but I don’t want to risk it blowing away if we get bad weather.
I do some brainstorming and, thirty minutes later, am at Home Depot, pushing a flat orange cart around the store.
Bob sits on top of it, facing forward like a mermaid on the front of a ship.
I grab a cast-iron skillet in case I need to go all Rapunzel on some ghost asses, a fifty-pound bag of road salt, and a coil of vinyl tubing.
Back in my car, I use a funnel to fill the tubes with salt and tape the ends together to create a ring around my living space.
The skillet goes under my driver’s seat, where I can get it fast if I need to.
What if this isn’t enough? If another ghost comes to pay me a visit and my arts-and-crafts project does nothing but make me feel like an idiot before I die?
Bob looks up at me like a very old and disgruntled version of the Pixar lamp, and I scoop him into my lap. He smells like corn chips and the vet, but I hold him until my heart rate drops below panic levels. Maybe learning more about what I’m up against will calm me down.
I’m super careful walking up the marble steps into the library because Bob is smuggled in my backpack, his nose poking out of the zipper just enough to breathe but not enough to be seen, and I don’t want any sudden movements to hurt his leg.
Mrs. Chang is at the circulation desk. She’s got to be in her seventies, with silver hair she keeps in a neat bun and reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.
I pull a bag of caramel candies from my pocket and set it on the counter.
“Oh, Eden, you’re spoiling me,” she says, reaching for the bag. “You need to stop giving me these.”
“I will not be stopping, actually,” I say.
I started bringing her candy to thank her for pretending not to notice me sneaking Bob in every time I came here, and we ended up bonding over our shared sweet tooth. It became our thing.
She gives me a caramel, and I roll the hard candy around my mouth as I walk into the empty computer lab. I settle into the corner station where the security camera has a blind spot, and unzip my bag enough for Bob to stick his entire cone out.
“Stay quiet.”
He glowers at me, as if he’s humiliated to be carried in my backpack.
I stare at the search bar for a full minute before typing: William Caine serial killer.
These computers are from the nineties, so results take a couple of seconds to populate. I click on a Wikipedia entry, and there it is: a black-and-white photo of a man in his forties with hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, and thin lips pressed in a line.
It’s the same face I saw in the smoke.
Caine strangled four women in parking lots between 1987 and 1989, then was sentenced to life in prison.
Like Donny said, he had a stroke three weeks ago at the ripe old age of 79.
All of his victims were women in their twenties or thirties.
I click through to the victim photos, and get a cold and tight feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Every single woman has dark hair. I reach up to touch my own hair, staring down at the black strands as they run through my fingers.
I could have been one of them. I almost was one of them, because this…
this is real. Serial killers are coming back from the dead to continue their murder sprees.
I try to focus on breathing, but my breath comes out in puffs like I’m sitting outside and not in a heated library. Wait.
That’s not right. Why is it so cold in here?
I snap my head up from the screen, scanning the rows of empty computer stations. Nothing. Just dust motes and the hum of ancient computers. But I can feel it. The same alarm bell that went off in my brain right before the rope came over my head.
My fingers dig into my biceps as I try to shake the feeling. It’s like something’s hovering just behind my shoulder, breathing but not breathing.
“… hhhhh-eeee…”
I twist around, but there’s nothing there.
“… puh-puh-llll…”
The sound is garbled and wet, like someone trying to speak through a mouthful of water. Bob’s ears snap to attention.
“Hello?” I whisper, because even though my brain is screaming at me to shut up and run, my mouth has decided to function independently of it.
A low growl rumbles from Bob, vibrating through my backpack and straight into my spine. The panel of light above me flickers, then stabilizes with a buzz that sets my teeth on edge.
Then I see her.
A woman pushes out of the wall. She looks like she’s in her thirties and dressed in bell-bottoms and a turtleneck that’s stained dark across the chest. She’s gray.
Her movements aren’t fluid. She stutters and skips like she’s a clip on a damaged VHS tape.
She stops moving. Her eyes widen as her hands claw at her throat.
Then she moves again. Her feet pad an inch above the linoleum as she takes three steps forward, stops, and claws at her throat again.
Bob’s growl deepens. I’m not hallucinating.
The woman freezes with her hands around her throat. Her head turns.
Our eyes meet.
I duck my head and stare at my keyboard, my heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat. Do ghosts find eye contact threatening? Animals do. I wish I’d asked more questions before walking away from the only people who know what they’re doing.
I try to look absorbed in reading, but I can still see her in the corner of my vision. The woman cocks her head. She takes a single step toward me. Then another.
She definitely saw me looking. I looked right at her, and now she knows I can see her, and oh God, what does she want from me? Does she want to kill me, too?
“… hhhhhelllll… sssssuh…”
I force myself to keep staring at the computer screen even though the words are swimming together, and I can’t focus on anything except the glimpse of her getting closer.
“… hhhheee… mmmmeee…”
She’s right next to me. I can feel her there, like a cold pressure against my skull.
“… sssssooo… llllll… ssssssince… ssssomeone… ssssssaw…”
A hand drifts into my field of vision. Gray fingers reach for my face. I can see through them to the computer behind, but she’s solid enough that the air around her hand shimmers with cold. Her fingertip brushes my cheek.
The sensation tingles to the point of pain, like when your foot falls asleep and you have to walk on it. My cheek goes slack, the muscles quivering around her touch.
Fuck this.
I grab my backpack and bolt toward the exit. Bob’s eyes bug out of his head at the sudden movement, and I clutch the bag tightly against my chest so as not to jostle him too much. Mrs. Chang shrieks as I barrel past the circulation desk, and I yell, “Sorry!” over my shoulder but don’t slow down.
I dive into my car, gulping down air like I’ve been drowning. Pins and needles spread from my cheek to my jaw where she touched me. I scrub at the spot with my sleeve, but the feeling won’t go away.
What did she want? Help, she said. Help with what?
Bob sleeps in the back seat as I drive, eventually finding myself turning onto the road the construction site is on.
I park across the road. The last thing I need is for Ray or, God forbid, Dylan to see my car, but if I’m going to have any more unwelcome visitors today, it would be good to have some other people around.
Swallowing hurts so bad, but I manage to get down two Ibuprofen and curl up with Bob, watching an illegal recording of Rent until my brain turns off.
At three, Ray emerges from the trailer. Part of me wants to run over and beg him to tell me what I should do, but I slam that thought down hard. He’s not my dad. He gave me a job. That’s all.
But times like these make me wish I didn’t have to be alone all the time. I try to get rid of that thought too because it’s not going to change a single thing about my life, but I find myself chomping down hard on my lip and trying not to cry.
I dig a can of soup out of my reserve for dinner. Bob wants nothing to do with the pee pad.
“Please?” I beg, dragging it closer to him with my foot. “I don’t want to go out there alone.”
Bob sniffs at the pad.
“Fine.” I crawl into my sleeping bag. “I’m going to leave it there, so if you want to go at any time during the night, please use it. I’ll be very upset if you pee in my sleeping bag.”