Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
We walked out of the 1960’s and right into the 1980’s.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Gram whispered in awe as we walked onto the empty set of a TV game show. The studio was cavernous. There was a lit-up stage and bleachers for the audience. Everything was clean, shiny and psychedelically colorful. It felt incredibly ominous.
This wasn’t just any game show it was Wheel of Fortune … or a bastardized version of it. A large spinning-wheel was on a platform stage, and the wheel was divided into multiple segments. Behind the wheel, a massive puzzle board composed of rectangular tiles, that, if this farce followed the actual game, would light up when correct guesses were made and the tiles were turned.
“The show will go on, and the wheels will turn,” Alana Catherine said, repeating what she’d communicated earlier through Pandora.
“Do you recall saying all of that?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I do. It’s fuzzy, but I do.”
“Do you know what it means?” I questioned, hoping she could get us ahead of the game, so to speak.
“I wish I did, but I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Ain’t nothin’ to be sorry for,” Gram told her, taking the words out of my mouth. “You’re mama’s a badass, just like you and me. She’s just looking for all the angles. We’re from deep in the south, where sushi’s called bait. We don’t leave no stone unturned.”
Amid a bad situation where things could get ugly fast, Gram made me smile. The woman always knew how to make me smile, and she always would.
“Do you think we’re the contestants or the audience?” my daughter asked as we crossed the sound stage and approached the wheel.
“Not sure,” I said. “But Steve said to start with the ending I desire and work my way back.”
“You got any idea how to do that, Daisy girl?” Gram asked.
“None whatsoever,” I replied. “The ending is sending the dead back into the fully functional Light. This game must be how we work our way back.” I sounded ridiculous to my own ears, but we had to start somewhere. Situations in our world rarely happened without reason. There had to be a reason for this…
I stopped dead in my tracks when we got to the wheel. The Higher Power was not just playing games, It was playing hardball. My fists clenched at my sides, but I made sure to keep my body language calm. Even though it seemed like it, I didn’t believe we were alone on this set. It was watching.
The wheel was similar in size to the one on the TV show. However, what was on the triangles made my stomach turn. Instead of dollar amounts, there were names. Names of people I knew. Names of people I cared for. Except for the two black and white bankrupt signs, the names Sam, John and Birdie repeated all over the wheel. They’d been three of the six ghosts standing on my porch who should have been in the Light. I’d helped them go into the Light. Were we about to play for their lives?
“This is fucked,” I said flatly.
“I’m gonna give you a pass on that F-bomb since I agree, darlin’,” Gram said. “In fact, I’m gonna give all of us an F-bomb pass during this entire mission.”
I glanced over at her. “Candy Vargo will crap her ugly sweatpants when she finds out.”
Gram giggled. “That sweet gal will get over it.”
Sweet was kind of a stretch when describing the Keeper of Fate, but Gram loved her. I loved her, too, but to me, she was more salty than sweet.
I looked back at the names on the wheel and my mind raced with memories.
Birdie was a trip—real name, Ethel. I called her Birdie because her mission in death was to flip me off as much as possible. As a ghost, Birdie enjoyed stashing random body parts all over the house to freak me out. That went over like a lead balloon. However, she was truly silly, and I adored her.
Back when she was squatting in my home, I was positive the ghost had been calling me a hooker. Turned out that she’d been a lady of the evening during her life. She’d passed away from a heart attack after blowing a famous politician. Birdie had clarified that she’d been a very high paid escort and enjoyed her job. I’d enjoyed being around her. She was all kinds of wonderfully wrong. However, what she had done after she’d died made me love her even more.
My mother, Alana, had been Birdie’s Death Counselor. Clarissa, the Angel of Mercy before me, had it out for my mom. Wanted her dead and she’d succeeded. However, Birdie was a hooker with a heart of gold. In thanks to my mother for vindicating her after death, Birdie stole my mom’s soul from the vile Clarissa and brought her to my BFF Missy’s great-grandmother. Missy’s granny, like Missy, was a Soul Keeper. Missy’s granny kept my mother’s soul inside her for safe- keeping and, unbeknownst to Missy, had passed the soul to her great-granddaughter right before she died. Missy had kept my mom and Birdie protected from Clarissa for decades. The reason souls came to me was that they had unfinished business. Birdie’s unfinished business was to let me know where my mom’s soul was hidden. It was one of the greatest gifts I’d ever been given.
My lovely bird-flipping buddy had gone into the Light once her message had been delivered. I would owe her until the end of time. Birdie was one of the many beautiful reasons I would repair the rift in the Light.
My eyes moved to the next name—John.
John Dunn, age fifty at death. Banker. Wealthy. His death had been ruled a suicide. It was not a suicide. It was murder. John had been a lovely and level-headed man in both life and death. He’d also had shitty taste in women. He’d been murdered by his much younger wife, Sarina. She was a diabolical woman who’d been after his life insurance payout and all of his assets. John’s unfinished business was getting me to rescue his black lab, Karen, from the pound where his wife had taken the dog after his death and to prove that he hadn’t killed himself.
The Karen part of the mission had been easy. I’d adopted her and loved her with all my heart. I couldn’t replace John, but I could give her a spectacular life. John had been pleased about that. Proving Sarina had killed him was more complicated. Since all of the proof was coming from a dead guy, against my better judgement, I’d gotten my lawyer sister Heather involved. Color me shocked as all get out when it was revealed she wasn’t exactly human. The revelation had started a chain of events, exposing that many of the people in my life were not who I thought they had been. But that wasn’t part of John’s story. It was part of mine.
Heather had been a bulldog and destroyed Serina Dunn in a court of law. With Serina facing life in prison and Karen having a loving home, John no longer had any unfinished business. He’d tried to give me all of his money. It was a lot of money, but I’d said no. After a little illegal tampering by Heather and me with his will, John’s fortune went to the Humane Society at his request. He’d left this plane vindicated and at peace. I was proud I’d helped get him justice. It had been my true pleasure.
The fact that his name and life had been reduced to a cardboard triangle on a wheel made me sick.
My eyes moved one space over and landed on Sam’s name. My heart beat hard and fast in my chest. I thought about the old man often. Sam had been the first ghost I’d helped, and he held a very special place in my heart. When the ghosts first showed up, I thought I was having a psychotic break—thought I’d lost my damned mind.
I hadn’t. It had been real.
Sam’s sweet and loving persistence taught me how to be the Death Counselor before I even understood what a Death Counselor was. Sam had been in his eighties when he died of a heart attack. He was one of most adorable little old men I’d ever had the pleasure of meeting. I’d wanted to keep and make him my grandpa, but that wasn’t how it worked. Sam’s unfinished business had to do with his wife, Addie. She was in the early stages of dementia and would often lose her glasses. The night he died, he’d noticed she’d put them in the cookie jar. He was beside himself that she wouldn’t know where they were since he was no longer there to find them for her. The heartbreaking kicker was that her wedding ring was on the chain. Her arthritis had gnarled her hands a bit, and she wore her beloved piece of jewelry on her glasses chain.
Sam convinced me that true love existed and that I should commit my first breaking-and-entering. I smiled at the memory.
Sam’s home had been lovely. It was an older modest Craftsman with a nicely landscaped yard. Thankfully, it was the last house at the end of a tree-lined street and there were no streetlights.
“Are you seeing this?” Gram asked. “It’s like it’s my memory, only it ain’t mine.”
“It’s Mom’s,” Alana Catherine said. “She’s showing us.”
“Am I?” I asked. Why was I reliving the night I’d helped Sam move on into the light? I wasn’t sure why this was happening now, but it had to be important, right? Or maybe it was the Higher Power trying to distract us from the game.
“Don’t fight it,” Alana Catherine stated, her tone so adult and wise beyond her few months.
I nodded absently as the memory overtook all my senses threw me into memory. “I’m going to park a few houses down and we’ll walk,” I told Sam, who’d grunted his assent. “If we get busted on the street, I’ll pretend like we’re just out for an early morning run… or that I’m out for a run. Don’t think anyone will notice you, Sam. No offense.”
Sam giggled… kind of. His frail little frame trembled with excitement. I felt insanely great with all the stress on the word insane. It was crazy what I was about to do, but it was already established that I’d lost my mind.
“Is there a key hidden anywhere?” I asked, hoping to God there was.
I began to add up all the things that could go wrong. A security system was at the top of the list. I also didn’t want to break a window that Sam’s wife would have to pay to get repaired. If she was living on a fixed income, which I assumed she was, she didn’t need the expense of replacing a window.
Sam nodded and pointed at the welcome mat on the front porch as we quietly approached the house.
Quickly grabbing the key, I’d stayed low and made my way around the house. My heart had been beating so loud I was sure it would wake up the dead.
Shaking my head, I’d grinned. I’d already woken up the dead—a whole hell of a lot of them.
“Sam, do you have a dog?” I asked, stopping my forward motion and regretting I hadn’t put a few dog treats into the pocket of my all-black break-in attire.
“Naawwwooo,” he grunted softly.
Heaving a sigh of relief, I bellycrawled the rest of the way to the back door. I would be filthy when I got home, but I figured this was the way to do it. Of course, I had no clue how to do it, but I planned to fake it till I made it on this one.
“Is the cookie jar in the kitchen?” I asked, slowly rising and peeking through the windowpane on the back door. Thankfully, the light over the sink was on and illuminated the countertop. “Is that it on the counter?”
Sam nodded. Maybe this would be easier than I’d originally thought. Open the door. Grab the glasses. Put them on the counter by the teapot and haul ass out. What could go wrong?
So much. So much could go wrong.
“Let’s do this,” I whispered to Sam—and then froze.
My dear dead buddy was crying… or trying to. It was heartbreaking and my stomach clenched. Had I done the right thing? Was this too painful for Sam?
Shit.
“Sam,” I said, reaching out to touch his withered, semi-transparent cheek. “If you don’t want to go through with this, we can leave now.”
“Waauufff lassssh gaussaus,” he said through his anguish. “Fiiauxxx.”
Breathing in and exhaling slowly, I nodded. “I’ll fix this for you. I promise. Stay here.”
Sam nodded and blew me a kiss. It made an unappealing squishy sound and I almost gagged. However, it was the thought and the love behind the gesture that enabled me to smile at him.
My hands fumbled clumsily as I pushed the key into the lock and prayed hard that there wasn’t an alarm about to go off. I had no clue who I was praying to since I didn’t really believe, but it felt like a good thing to do. My head felt woozy and my mouth went dry. While everything around me seemed like real time, my movements felt like I was under water.
I was not cut out for a life of crime. If I wasn’t doing something good, I’d be out of here so fast Sam’s barely attached head would spin. Anxiety gripped me and my feet turned into lead weights. If Sam wasn’t smiling at me so hopefully, I would have turned and ran.
“Here goes nothing,” I whispered as I tiptoed across the kitchen.
The kitchen was warm and inviting—all done in blue and white and immaculate. It smelled like lemon cleaner and cookies. I felt immediate comfort and terror at the same time. Breaking and entering didn’t include admiring décor. I was sure of that.
The glasses were right where I’d seen them in Sam’s mind earlier and, thankfully, so was the teapot. Quickly and silently, I put the glasses with the chain holding the wedding ring next to the teapot. Not hard at all. However, I almost puked when I replaced the cookie jar lid and made a loud noise. I wasn’t very good at this. I was far more skilled at gluing dead people’s appendages back on. I knew I couldn’t be good at everything, but a little stealth would have come in handy right now.
“Crap,” I hissed as I heard a movement from upstairs.
Swiftly looking around to make sure I had completed the bizarre mission, I hightailed it back out of the door and locked it with the key.
“Come on, Sam,” I said as I hit the ground and began to bellycrawl back around the house.
Sam didn’t move. His partial nose was pressed to the glass and he waited.
Damn it, what was I supposed to do now? Did I leave him? Would he be able to find his way back to my house? Was I being ridiculous? Yes. He’d found my house once. He could find it again. However, his sense of direction sucked and it could take him days to find me.
I did the only thing I could do. I did the crazy-stupid thing. Why? Because Sam meant something to me. I loved him and I was batshit nuts. I bellycrawled back to where he stood… or floated, to be more accurate.
“We have to leave,” I whispered as I peeked into the kitchen.
Sam said nothing. He placed his decomposing hand in mine and gently squeezed.
He wanted to see his wife find her glasses. I understood. However, there was a slight problem here. She couldn’t see him, but she could definitely see me.
Moving my head to the right of the door, I peeked into the bottom corner of the glass with one eye. It was still dark out. I had dark hair and was dressed all in black. Plus, she wouldn’t be wearing her glasses. It was risky, but if I was being honest, I would love to see her find her ring and glasses too. If I was going to partake in illegal activities, I should get to reap the reward of a misdemeanor well done… or something like that.
The little old woman entered the kitchen and turned on the overhead light. She was in her bathrobe and slippers. She was positively adorable. Sam sighed next to me in happiness and anticipation.
She glanced around the kitchen in confusion. I ducked down so she wouldn’t see me and then curiosity got the best of me. Slowly I rose up and peeked again.
She gasped and placed both of her hands over her heart. Her body began to shake with sobs as she carefully walked to the teapot and touched her wedding ring with such reverence that my eyes filled with tears. Sam’s body trembled beside me. I couldn’t look at him or I would truly lose it. I just held tight to his hand and watched.
Taking the glasses with the ring attached into her gnarled hands, she kissed her ring and began to laugh.
I couldn’t hear a word she said, but her intention was clear. Pointing at the ceiling, she shook her finger and laughed through her tears. As her lips continued to move, I could make out the words Sam and I love you.
Glancing over at Sam, I gasped and almost cried out. My chest felt tight and my head began to throb.
Gently pulling me to the side of the house, Sam smiled and touched my cheek.
He was no longer a decaying corpse of a man. However, he was still dead. An ethereal and somewhat blinding golden glow surrounded my friend, and his body was restored to what it must have been before he’d passed. He was beautiful. Sam’s eyes twinkled and his smile would stay etched in my memories always.
“Sam?” I whispered in a panic, not understanding what was happening.
“Thank you, Daisy,” he said in the voice that was the same one I recognized from being inside his mind earlier. “I can go now.”
As he began to fade away, my tears came quickly. I knew this was the last time I would ever see Sam. He’d stayed to make sure his beloved found what she treasured the most. He was moving on. Selfishly, I didn’t want him to go. In the short time I’d had the privilege of knowing him, I’d grown to love him. This was the suckiest, most beautiful experience I’d ever had.
“Bye, Sam,” I whispered, reaching out to touch the golden glow surrounding his diminishing body.
It was warm and inviting—felt like silky liquid. I waited for Sam to completely disappear before I got back on my stomach and began to crawl. My heart was shattered, but it also felt strangely full. I’d just helped my friend move on. It was clear to me he was going somewhere lovely. The golden glow was a sure sign.
I blinked as the memory faded and the Wheel of Fortune stage reappeared.
Gram was sniffling. “That was just beautiful, Daisy girl.”
“I agree,” I told her, still unsure why I’d relived the memory.
“It was your first time,” Alana Catherine said.
“Yeah, I know.” I shook my head. “I’d managed to help Sam’s wife, and that had put Sam on track to cross over.”
My daughter smiled gently. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what?” It couldn’t be the breaking-and-entering part. “My first time being a criminal?”
She shook her head and chuckled. “No, Mom.”
My heart zinged at hearing her call me mom again. I thought it was something I would never grow tired of. “My head’s a little fuzzy, daughter. Why don’t you spell it out for me?”
She laughed now, and the sound was magical. “It was the first time you learned that anything was possible as long as you believed. Sam helped teach you that lesson, and it’s one you need to hold onto.”
There it was again. Belief. I gave my daughter an incredulous stare. “You’re going to make a great Immortal.” When her brow arched, I added, “You already know how to talk around a topic in a way that still makes me feel clueless.”
“You got this, girlie,” Gram encouraged. “Time to play this game and whoop some butt, so your hard work with them ghosties don’t get undone.”
Sighing, I touched the names on the wheel. “They’re going back into the Light where they belong.” I ran my hands through my hair and cased the room. No one was visible but us. I still didn’t believe we were alone. “I just need to figure out how to do it.”
“You don’t have to figure it out alone,” Alana Catherine said.
“That’s right!” Gram added. “We’re the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Ain’t no one that can beat that.”
I wanted to point out that she was nuts, but the army of skunks that entered the stage shocked me to silence. They were armed with tiny grenades and razor-sharp swords. It was not right.
They were scared, angry and unbelievably cute. I had a thing for small furry creatures. Not that skunks were like dogs or even cats, but they were cute. Of course, the fact that they were armed was alarming…
“Am I wrong or are they kind of adorable?” Alana Catherine whispered.
“Like mother, like daughter,” I said with a wince. “Yes, they’re cute, but they also look deadly.”
“No sudden movements,” Gram whispered, horrified by the sight. “They blow butt bombs when they’re startled.”
“Umm… mom,” Alana Catherine said.
“What?”
“You have a fertile imagination,” she stated flatly. “You might want to keep that in check.”
I closed my eyes. This was my fault. Bringing up skunks was going to bite us in the ass or worse.