Chapter 26
There in front of Devon was Jerry, holding a gun to Camden’s head. She nodded at Jerry. “It really was you, wasn’t it?”
He glared at her.
She smiled at him. “Do you really expect to get away with it?”
“Sure,” he declared. “I killed six before. What’s another … four?”
“Oh, nothing to a serial killer,” she replied, but she was still buzzing with energy.
The kids were shaking beside her, but she focused on Jerry. “You killed a whole family because one woman, a teenage girl, didn’t want you.”
He glared at her and snapped through his teeth, “She just needed more time. She would have loved me … eventually.”
“No,” Devon countered. “You were trying to force yourself on her, and then her father found you.”
He stared at her and asked, “How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “There’s a lot of reasons why you would kill somebody, but this was really personal and brutal, destroying their bodies so there was no proof of your actions and what you did to that poor girl,” Devon explained.
“It had to be that way.”
“Shame on you,” she snapped, her tone laced with disgust, “for blowing out all those beautiful lights, killing all those people just to hide your pathetic tracks.”
“Of course I did,” he declared, then sighed. “It was pretty gross to me too.”
“Of course it was. And every blow of your axe would have cemented your guilt in your own heart. It’s been poisoning you ever since.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he argued. “My life has been grand.”
“No, it hasn’t,” she countered. “You’ve been alone and angry, forever looking over your shoulder. You came back again because you couldn’t stand the thought that it still might all come down around you, ready to blow up at any moment, and now it has.”
“It won’t now,” he stated. “You don’t have any proof.”
“Oh right,” she quipped, tilting her head as she listened to the ethers, then nodded.
“I just helped Mark cross, so I already know that you killed him,” she added, “and that’s on you.
We already have his sworn witness statement, including the part about you calling him Burly Mark as you walked out the door with the axe, your murder weapon. ”
He stared at her, gave a dry laugh. “He really did remember, didn’t he?”
Devon nodded. “He sure did, but he couldn’t bring himself to figure out how to tell people—not in a way so that you would go to jail for it. He was so busy trying to hide his own shame that you were free to run around and to cause chaos everywhere you went.”
“He really killed the whole family?” Tabby asked, her shock threading through her voice.
“Yes, he really killed them, and I just saw them,” Devon shared. “All of them. In pieces. Because that’s how they saw each other in those final moments. You didn’t spare any of them. They died in horrific conditions, and they carried their final moments to the other side.”
He stared at her, almost hysterical as he spat, “That’s not possible.”
“I know you may think so,” Devon noted, “and that’s okay.
However, when it’s your time, believe me that I won’t be helping you across.
I’ll be more than happy to see you rot in the fading energy.
Worried about all the things that can go wrong in your new world,” she said, with a smile, “because, yeah, you have a destiny with the other side of life.” She shrugged.
“That’s not anything I’ll help you change,” she added, “not after what you did to that family.”
He stared at her and shook his head. “You can’t prove anything.”
“I don’t need to,” she reminded him. “We already have Mark’s statement.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that already, but that’s still not enough. He’s been an unstable mess his whole life. No judge would convict me on anything from him.”
“Maybe not,” she conceded, then added a lie she hoped he wouldn’t see for what it was, “but what you don’t know is that Camden also grabbed the axes from your house and sent them off for DNA analysis.
So it’s only a matter of time until we get the results.
Just imagine how many blood spatters and different DNA will be found on them. ”
He stared at her in shock.
She nodded. “So, you see now, don’t you, Jerry? It’s over. Soon everyone will know who you are and what you did and how you killed those people in cold blood.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Yes, you did. You had a choice, just as everybody does. And we can always decide to do what’s right or to do what is selfish,” she pointed out, as she squeezed the kids beside her. “It’s not always cut-and-dried, but eventually, if you work at it, you’ll get to the right answer.”
The kids wrapped their arms tightly around her.
“So, you already know where you’re going while you still are among the living, and I can only imagine how many people will be more than grateful to see your sorry ass behind bars.”
“That can’t happen,” Jerry wailed, panic in his tone. “They’ll crucify me.”
“Yeah, they will. Who knows? Maybe you’ll become some prison hero because you got away with it for so long. Then again, once they find out that you raped that poor girl, it will be a different story.”
He stared. “You can’t know that,” he stammered. “You can’t. Nobody knows that but me.”
“Yeah, well, now we all do,” she snapped, staring at him with a hard gaze. “We all know, and, no matter what you say, the truth will come out now. Every sordid bit of it.”
He shook his head and yelled, “No, I’ll just kill you all. I did it once. I can do it again.”
She laughed, a sound that echoed eerily in the still night air.
“I don’t think so. See? I’m still out here, still wound up with energy—energy of the good, energy of the light.
It’s the energy of those who have suffered.
It’s the energy of the ghosts of people all around me.
They haven’t all crossed over yet. I promised I would take them, but they knew you were coming, and they’re here waiting, knowing I can help them, …
if I’m alive,” she added. Her small smile seemed to flicker, as if a candle in the wind.
The kids in her arms shuddered, their eyes wide with a mixture of fear and awe, and she squeezed them gently, as if to reassure them that they were safe, at least for now.
“These energies aren’t malevolent. They’re just who they are, souls in want of peace.
Souls wanting to find rest, souls wanting to heal.
Souls who died violently and didn’t understand.
Souls who want to go where they need to be so they can carry on with whatever comes after this,” she shared, her voice a soothing balm against the rising tension.
But the air around them began to thicken, charged with an unseen force that crackled with static electricity. Shadows danced at the edges of their vision, twisting and contorting into shapes that seemed almost human, yet not quite.
Devon continued. “So, Jerry, you can try to do anything you want, but it won’t work.
You can pull that trigger, but it won’t go off,” she announced, her voice now a low resonant hum that seemed to vibrate through the very ground beneath them.
“Because every one of these spirits are here, looking for you, waiting for you, but one is here in particular. Her name is Amelia.”
He gasped, his bravado crumbling as he took a step back, his gaze darting around as if expecting to see her ghostly form materialize from the shadows. “She can’t be here,” he muttered, his voice a hoarse whisper. “There’s no way. … She can’t.”
“Why not?” Devon asked. “Don’t you think she deserves justice?
Do you think she hasn’t been waiting for you all these years?
” Her words were like a spell, weaving through the air with a power that was palpable.
“All this time, I thought that waiting for this—my coming to live in this house—was bad news, but I was wrong. It was coming to me because of good news, because they needed help. They needed me.”
As she spoke, the temperature dropped sharply, their breath visible in the suddenly frosty air. The shadows grew bolder, creeping closer, their forms more defined, glowing orbs glinting with an otherworldly light.
Devon still spoke softly, but there was an edge to her tone, a steely determination that cut through the fear.
“I am no longer afraid of any of them or what it means to be here. I am here, and I welcome them with an open heart and in open space because they know I’m not here to hurt them.
I’m here to help them, and, even more so, one of them in particular is rather desperate for closure.
So, why don’t you come down and say hello to Amelia? ”
Jerry stared at her, his face pale and drawn. “You’re crazy. There’s absolutely no way. You’re nuts, and it can’t happen that way.” But his words were hollow, his voice trembling as the shadows closed in, their whispers a haunting chorus that filled the air.
As he began to rant, his voice rose in a desperate crescendo. “She was a bitch and deserved what she got. No way I’m paying for that.” Even as he spoke, the shadows seemed to pulse with a life of their own, their forms shifting and swirling around him as if a living storm.
Devon watched as Jerry backed up several steps, wavering close to the top of the steps on her deck. What would it take for him to go over backward?
At that moment, an invisible hand pushed him right off the side of the deck.
His scream was a piercing wail that echoed into the night as he fell onto the concrete below, snapping his neck as he landed.
Then there was silence, a heavy, oppressive silence that seemed to press down on them from all sides.
Devon looked down at him, watching his spirit as it floated free from the body below, and she just waited, wanting to make sure.
Suddenly there was just blackness, a darkness of some sort that just sucked him up, swirling around him like a vortex. Jerry disappeared into a poof of black, his screams cut off abruptly as if swallowed by the night itself.
The kids clung to her, their eyes wide with terror, and she whispered, “It’s okay. He’s gone now. He’s completely gone.” Even as she spoke, the shadows lingered, their presence a reminder that the night was far from over, and the spirits still had their stories to tell.
Tabby whispered, “I think I saw that, all the black.”
“Yes,” Devon confirmed. “That was Jerry.”
“Dear God.” The girl turned and looked up at Devon. “I saw that other blackness earlier, and I thought it was Mom, but I was scared of it.”
“Unfortunately it was your mom,” Devon stated, softening her tone. “Your mom needs help, and I hope she gets it wherever she is, but doing what she did won’t exactly take her to heaven, will it?”
The twins stared at her, tears in their eyes, and Toby asked, “Will she heal from this?”
“Yes,” Devon confirmed. “At some point in time, your mother will get free of all that, but right now? … We can do nothing for her.” She turned to Camden, who had come down the steps to check on Jerry. “You’ll need to phone the cops, I guess, huh?”
Camden looked up at her and said, “I didn’t push him.”
“I know,” she stated. “That was Amelia.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “Good God.”
“I’m not against it,” Devon admitted. “Amelia had an awful lot of pent-up anger and emotions, … all because of what he did.” Devon shrugged and added, “I don’t know how much of this you’ll want in the case files.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know how I’ll explain to the captain that Jerry’s dead body was carted off by remnant ghosts either. None of this can go in the official report because nobody will ever believe me.”
She laughed. “You’ll need to get statements from the kids and me, so we should discuss how to handle that. However, right now, we rather desperately need to get some sleep tonight.”
Toby looked up at her and asked, “Will there be more ghosts around here?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on how much of that work I want to keep doing.”
“You need to help them though,” Toby said. “I don’t want to think of all those people stuck here, waiting for somebody else like you to come along and help.”
“That’s good to hear,” she noted, “because a lot of ghosts out there need help, and I am one of those people who can do it.”
“Will you teach us?” Toby asked, and Tabby nodded.
“Maybe one day,” Devon replied. “You can already see them. So, from that perspective, it should be a whole lot easier for you than for a lot of people.”
Tabby nodded. “I never really saw them before, only when around you,” she clarified, “but I don’t know why.”
“That’s because it rubs off on you to a certain extent,” Devon said, with a smile. “We just have to make sure that you stay on the right path because otherwise—”
“Got it,” she muttered, with a shudder. “Don’t worry. … I think we learned our lesson on that one.” She looked over at Toby, who immediately nodded.
Toby stated, “I don’t want Mom to come home anymore.”
Tabby added, “It’s … it’s better this way.”
“It is better this way,” Devon agreed, “but that will be enough of that discussion then, okay? Forevermore.”
They looked at each other, looked at her, and declared, “Yes. Forevermore.”
She smiled over at Camden. “I don’t know about you, but I suggest we have a cleansing ceremony and a barbecue tomorrow night, when all this is done and gone, so we can start fresh.”
He walked over, wrapped his arm around her and the twins in a big hug. “That is a great idea.”