The Other Side - J. D. Robb [142]
“Me?” She squirreled her bite of turkey club in her cheek to keep from choking. “But I—”
The expression he gave her was beseeching; he was counting on her to tell the boy the truth. Her gaze gravitated to Jimmy’s . . . which was all but daring her to lie . . . because he already knew the truth. Instinctively, she knew this was a deal-breaker with the boy. Tell the truth and become an adult he can respect and trust or lie and become subhuman slime. And this mattered to her, why?
She nodded, looked down at her plate as she replaced her food and gathered her thoughts. Why was this suddenly her problem to deal with? Her mother and aunts should never have contacted Jimmy. Of course, once they found what they’d lost in the house and were free to cross over to the Other Side, this would no longer be a problem—for Jimmy or for her. The sisters would be gone, and the house would come down. So, as far as she could tell, her choices were few. She had to help the ghosts find what they had lost, and she needed to convince Jimmy that they had better places to go.
“Well, I don’t know that much about ghosts.” She saw Ryan’s face change in her peripheral vision as she directed herself to the boy. He’d just have to think she was humoring the boy to prove their point . . . well, his point, anyway. “But maybe if you come over tomorrow afternoon, you’ll see that that big old house isn’t as scary . . . or worth saving . . . as you might think.”
“I’m not a-scared of the house . . . or the ladies.”
“Good.” He was sort of cute in a fuzzy-puppy-on-a-thick-leash sort of way . . . from her side of the table. “Come after lunch and bring a flashlight.”
The waitress arrived to take their order.
“Let me guess.” She grinned at Jimmy. “Hot fudge sundaes.”
“You got it.” Ryan ruffled his son’s hair. “We’ll have our usual plus one more for our friend here.”
M.J. waved her hand, shook her head, and made negative noises as she finished chewing and swallowing her last bite of sandwich.
“Actually, would you happen to have any apple pie?”
Four
Her mother held out her hands to stop M.J.’s lecture, then turned them palms-up for understanding.
“How many times must we tell you, darling? Children, until they reach the age of reason, straddle the fence between fantasy and reality and are more susceptible to seeing us whether we want them to or not.” She stopped in front of a floor mirror in her room and smoothed her already perfect blond shag of thick, lustrous curls. M.J. noted there was no reflection in the glass. “He came here twice before I died, with his father, who wanted me to convince the boy that Odelia didn’t exist. I did my best. I showed him pictures of when she was as old as I was at the time . . . a truly hideous creature, you must remember. Almost as wide as she was tall and the pain from her arthritis permanently written on her face so that she scowled almost constantly. The boy didn’t recognize her, of course, but he could smell her pies. The little bugger broke loose from his father and found her in the kitchen. What more could I do?”
“Couldn’t she have waited somewhere else until he was gone?”
“It may not have done any good.” She walked by the cold fireplace to touch and readjust the pictures that were—and weren’t—on the mantel at the time of her death. Lingering over the photo in the center, she caressed the glass with two fingers as she spoke. “We can travel anywhere we want . . . anywhere we’ve been before, but there are places we, our spirits, are more attracted to than others. It’s usually a place where our strongest emotions were felt, a place we loved or a place where the decisions we made affected us most . . . or for some, places where we were murdered.”
“You weren’t—”
“Gracious no, Maribelle, I would have told you by now.” She turned from the mantel to face her daughter, her impatience present but short-lived. “But those are the souls who give us a bad name, you know . . . stuck in the places where they feel only fear and anger until they can find whatever they lost there and pass over to