“How should I know?”

  “Ain’t you the expert on dead people?”

  I snorted. “Not the ones that have gone to Heaven or Hell, jackass. I only deal with the ones that ain’t moved on yet.” I killed my beer and reached into the box for another one. It was at least half full. Good. I was going to need it to get through this shit. I might end up sleeping it off in the cab of my truck, but God knows I needed the fortification right then.

  “Hell, I don’t know what you do, Lila Grace. Up until last year I thought you were either crazy or…no, I just thought you were crazy.”

  Last year. Everything changed last year. When I helped solve Jessica Miller’s murder, I went from the town pariah to, well, not anywhere close to the favorite daughter, but at least somebody you didn’t cross the sidewalk to avoid speaking to. Most days. “I know. Everybody did.”

  “But it was all true. The whole time?” I could see him looking at me out of the corner of my eye, trying to see me crack a smile, or let on that I was faking somehow. I wished I could.

  “Every word.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry, Lila Grace.”

  The sincerity in his voice jerked my head around like it was on a rope. He looked right at me, bug brown eyes almost spilling over, the regret as real as anything I’d ever seen on anybody.

  “I’m sorry for the way we treated you. There wasn’t no call for it, even if you were lying, or crazy. We were stupid kids, and we were mean, and I’m sorry. I should have said a long time ago. Hell, I should have felt it a long time ago, but I didn’t. I was wrong, and I am asking your forgiveness for the way I treated you when we was kids.”

  He meant it. I’ve had a lot of people lie to me, and I can spot one with almost infallible certainty, and Terry Robbins was not lying. “I’ll accept your apology, and I will work to forgive you, Terry. On one condition.”

  Those regret-filled eyes grew wary. “What’s that?”

  “You don’t kill yourself.”

  He scowled. Not the stolid, don’t you mess with me child scowl that Miss Tot wore when I tried to skip out on this meeting, but the almost pouting scowl of a child that was told he had to eat his broccoli before he could have his dessert. I knew that scowl well, because I hated broccoli.

  “I can’t make no promises.” He looked back up at me, a stubborn set to his jaw.

  “Then I can’t forgive you.” I looked him right in the eye, my jaw sticking out just as far. I was cut from the same country cloth Terry was, so he couldn’t out-bullhead me if he tried.

  But after a couple of seconds of staring at each other, I relented a little bit. “It’s going to take time, Terry. I can’t just forget about years of asshole because you were nice in a moment of weakness.”

  He relaxed a little and pitched his empty out into the yard. “Only good thing about living alone. I can throw my damn beer cans wherever I want.”

  “Until you have to pick them all up when it’s time to cut the grass,” I pointed out. “Which, by the way, looks like it was about two weeks ago.”

  “Yeah, I ain’t had a whole lot of motivation lately.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Is she okay? Susan, I mean.”

  I knew who he meant, but I let him clarify like there might have been somebody else we were talking about. “She’s okay, but she can’t move on until she knows you’re alright.”

  “Well she might be stuck here for a while, then.” The bitterness in his voice held a sharp edge, like he’d been polishing it up over weeks of hurting.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t know how this shit works! I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to the woman who’s been talking to my dead wife’s ghost to convince her that I ain’t going to put a shotgun in my mouth the minute she pulls out of the driveway! Because I ain’t one hundred percent sure that ain’t exactly what I’m going to do! I don’t know what anything means anymore, Lila Grace! I just know that it feels like somebody has reached down inside my chest and yanked out everything that’s ever been good in me, and everything bad, too, and left me with nothing but a bunch of nothing, and I want so bad for something to fill up that nothing, or if I can’t fill it up, at least make it to wear I don’t feel the nothing no more. And booze don’t work, and weed don’t work, and I took a couple of Vicodin, but they don’t do shit, and I don’t know where to get nothing stronger and even if I did, it probably wouldn’t work, because…goddammit!” He reached out with his left hand and swept the half case of beer off the porch and into the yard, scattering red and white cans all through the high grass. Then he put his elbows on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and started to cry.

  He cried with these huge, wracking sobs that seemed to come up from somewhere deep inside him, like they were tearing him apart all the way up and out, and it broke my heart to watch. All of a sudden this wasn’t the boy who tormented me in school and made me miserable. This wasn’t the kid who led chants of “Crazy Gracie” at every recess in middle school. This wasn’t the man I’d held a grudge against for thirty years, never letting go of one ounce of my own bile and bitterness.

  This was just a man. More like what was left of a man. The broken pieces left of what used to be a man, who had lost the one thing he loved more than anything else and didn’t know where to go from here. I reached out to that man, put my arm around his shoulders, and pulled him into me. He turned toward me in that awkward way you do when you’re sitting next to somebody but you want to hug them, and he wrapped his arms around my waist, latching onto me like I was the last life raft on the Titanic. He buried his face in my shoulder and sobbed, and cussed, and howled, and cried, and I cried with him. I cried for his pain, for the loss of him getting to grow old with the woman he loved. I cried for the man who’d lost sight of the daughter he still had because he could see past what he’d lost, and I cried for the years I’d spent hating this man, this good man who had grown out of shitty little boy, and the years we could have been, if not friends, at least polite.

  I cried, and Terry cried, and eventually, after something that might have been five minutes or might have been an hour, we ran dry. He pulled back and wiped his eyes and nose on his tank top, while I did the same with a couple of Kleenex I pulled out of my sleeve. When I was almost presentable, I passed one over to Terry, who blew his nose furiously, then tossed the tissue behind him onto the porch.

  I stood up, went and fished two beers out of the grass, handed one to him, and sat back down. “You know you’re going to have to pick that up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know you got like six beers laying out there in the grass.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know it gets better.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It ain’t easy, and it sure as hell ain’t fast, but it gets better. I remember when Mama died, for the first couple weeks I couldn’t think about nothing else. Then a couple weeks after that, I’d be trying to go about my regular life, and all of a sudden I’d just collapse crying on the kitchen floor because I saw a potholder she gave me. After a few months I got to where I could almost make it a whole day without crying. Then I’d make it a week, then a month, then it got to where as long as I don’t let myself waste too much time thinking about what I lost, I can pay attention to what I’ve still got, and I can get by.”

  “How long did that take?”

  I thought about it for a second. “I’ll let you know when I really get there.”

  He laughed and clanked his can to mine. “I am sorry, you know. I ain’t like that anymore.”

  “I stand by my earlier statement. I’ll forgive you as long as you stick around to prove it.”

  “I reckon I can do that.”

  “Good. Because you do have something left, you know.”

  “You mean Susie?”

  I slapped his shoulder. “Yes, I mean Susie, you asshole! Do you have any idea what that would do to her, to lose both her parents one right after the other? That poor child is hurting just as bad as you are, and instead of helping her get through this, you have been sitting here wallowing in your own B.O.”

  “I reckon we left the part where you’re trying to cheer me up.”

  “I never said a damn thing about cheering you up. I just promised I’d try to keep you from blowing your damn fool head off.”

  “I reckon that’s fair.” We sat there, looking up at the stars for a few minutes before Terry spoke again. “And no.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, I never thought about what it would do to Susie. I just thought I wasn’t strong enough to do this.”

  “You aren’t.”

  I felt, more than saw, his head turn to me. “What?”

  “You aren’t strong enough to do this shit alone. Nobody is. But you don’t have to be alone, Terry. There’s people who care about you, people who don’t want to see you die, people who you can talk to. There’s Susie, there’s your preacher, I’m sure there’s some friends from work…”

  “You?”

  Now I turned to look at him. “Me?”

  “You care whether I live or die, Lila Grace?” There was an honesty in his eyes that I felt deserved the same back from me, so I took a second to think about how to say it before I answered.

  “Before tonight, I would have said, ‘of course,’ and in an abstract way I would have meant it. In the sense that I don’t wish for anybody to hurt so bad that they think taking their own life is the only option. But it would have been just that - abstract. Kind of a ‘each man’s death diminishes me’ sort of thing.”

  “John Donne.”

  “Yes. I like that poem. But now…now I don’t hate you anymore, Terry. Yes, you were stupid, and you were mean, and it’s going to take some time for those scars to heal, but they can start to heal now. Because I believe you are sorry, and I believe you are a better person, because nobody who is a complete asshole gets a woman like Susan to stick around a cemetery just to make sure he’s alright when she’s got a spot in Heaven or wherever else waiting for her. What you said and did here tonight was important, but I started stopping hating you when I talked to your wife.”

  “She loved me more than anybody ever has. More than anybody ever will.”

  “She still does. That’s why she’s willing to wait on you, because she wants to make sure that y’all will be together when your time comes.”

  “Do you think I’d go to Hell if I killed myself?”

  “I don’t think so, Terry. I don’t know if I believe in Hell, but I know there’s different places people cross over to, and I cannot imagine somebody being punished for just losing a fight. Because that’s what suicide is. It ain’t a choice, it’s the loss of choice. It’s what happens when you’ve been fighting a monster inside you for so long you can’t fight no more, and you take just a second to catch your breath, and that monster rears up and lays you out. It’s losing a fight, and I can’t bring myself to believe that a soul gets punished for eternity for not being able to fight any more.”

  “Then why come here to stop me if you don’t think it’ll keep me out of Heaven?”

  “Because it would keep Susan out of Heaven. She won’t leave that cemetery and go where she needs to go next until she thinks that you’re going to be okay. She’s stuck here until she believes that you can keep fighting that monster, keep beating that son of a bitch every single day until he’s the one laying flat on his back looking up at the lights.”

  “Will you tell her I’m going to be okay?”

  “Are you?”

  He looked away for a long pause, and I saw a fat tear roll down his cheek. “I think so. Eventually. Not tomorrow. Not next week, or maybe not even next year. But I think I can get there.”

  “Then tell her that.” I pointed out into the yard, where a pretty woman in a flowered sundress stood there, her feet not quite touching the grass. She smiled a shy little grin and held out a hand.

  “Susan?” Terry stood up slow, like he was scared of spooking a shy animal, and walked slowly out into the yard. He stopped right in front of his wife’s apparition, holding up a hand to stroke her cheek. He couldn’t, of course, his fingertips passed right through her face, but I saw her smile a little as he tried.

  Terry turned back to look at me. “Is this…is this real?”

  I just nodded.

  He looked back at Susan. “I miss you. I miss you so much I don’t know what to do. But I’ll try. I promise I’ll get better, and I’ll try harder, and I promise that I won’t…I promise I won’t.”

  Susan smiled at that, and she threw her arms around his neck. I couldn’t imagine what that felt like, but Terry didn’t pull away, so it must have been fine. Then she stepped back, looked at me, smiled again, and disappeared in a pillar of light that came down from the sky and enveloped her. It descended like a glimmering elevator, wrapped itself around Susan’s form, and grew in brightness until I couldn’t see anything and had to look away. Then, with one last flash, it was gone, and Susan with it.

  Terry dropped to his knees in the yard, and I thought he was going to start bawling again. But then he bent over and picked up a red and white cylinder out of the grass and stood up again. He turned to me, popped the top on his Budweiser, and held it up in a silent salute. I nodded to him, then got up and walked to my truck. I patted his shoulder as I walked past, and he grabbed my hand.

  “Do you forgive me now?”

  “I forgive you tonight,” I said. “But we don’t know about tomorrow yet. You’re just going to have to stick around to find out.”

  He smiled, and something like a person lived in his eyes again. “I reckon I can live with that.”

  And that’s how one of my worst childhood tormentors came to be one of my closest friends.

  THE END

  For more Lila Grace Carter, pick up Amazing Grace.

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  3

  High Fashion Hell

  A Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter Short Story

  “Hose,” I said, pulling at the thin covering on my legs and grimacing. “If I have been pleased with one thing in my exceptionally long life, it is that I managed to avoid every era in which men were expected to wear hose. And yet here I am, walking through a dung-infested collection of anachronisms wearing what else but hose. It must truly be the End Times.”

  “One, it can’t be the End Times, jackass. You killed most of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” said my partner in fashion tragedy, Detective Rebecca Gail Flynn of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. “And two, you’re bitching about hose? Why don’t you walk a mile in my corset, Harker? Until then, why don’t you walk your hose-covered ass over to the concession stand and buy yourself a steaming mug of shut the fuck up.”

  I chuckled at Flynn, but she did have a point. I was at least able to move, and thus fight, in my costume, which consisted of a dark green doublet with a rampant lion in red on the chest, a pair of dark brown hose, brown boots, and a sword on a sword belt that wasn’t nearly as “prop” as the re-enactors all around us would probably prefer. Flynn was stuck in a corset, a chemise under the corset, then a skirt, with an overskirt, and finally a bum roll to give her the appropriate amount of Dark Ages junk in her trunk.

  I did walk over to the concession stand, but I bought a turkey leg and two beers. I brought the food and alcohol over to a picnic table under a cluster of trees where Flynn had taken refuge from walking in her dress. I passed her a beer and sat down.

  “Sorry, shut the fuck up is a seasonal brew. They won’t have any ’til spring.” I grinned at Flynn and took a huge bite out of my turkey leg. The skin was crisp, the meat was tender, and the juices ran down my chin and spattered all over the front of my doublet.

  “Good lord, Harker, use a napkin,” Flynn said, rolling her eyes at what passed for my table manners.

  “Nah, napkins don’t taste as good as turkey.” I gave her a grin.

  Just then a small dark-haired man with an oiled beard and a mustache waxed to fine points appeared beside me. I mean he walked up suddenly, not that he teleported.

  “Are you Harker?” the slight man asked. He was dressed for the Faire, in pumpkin pants and hose.

  “That depends entirely on what you want with Mr. Harker,” I replied, taking another gigantic bite out of my turkey leg.

  “I’m Jacob Strunin, I’m the Faire’s Director of Public Relations. I called you about our problem.” He stuck out his hand, looked at the state of my greasy mitt, and shook with Flynn instead. He took a seat at our picnic table and looked around. We were surrounded by attendees in varying degrees of costume, from suburban dads in Panthers sweatshirts and jeans to a family of five all decked out in steampunk garb from top hat to boot-clad toes. They milled around the juggler in the open space between tables or sat at their own tables getting a break from the walking and scarfing down chili in a bread bowl, but largely ignored us.

  Strunin went on, speaking low so I had to lean in close to make out what he said. “We’ve had reports from some of our Faire folk that there’s a mysterious figure walking the grounds at night. It seems to come out around midnight in back of the Starfire swords booth, wander down past the petting zoo to the jousting field, then it circles all the way up to the Tartuffe Brothers stage near the main entrance and vanishes somewhere around the Royal Pavilion.” He pulled out a map of the festival grounds and traced the “ghost’s” route along the paper.

  “Who’s seen the ghost so far?” Flynn asked.

  “And how much had they been drinking or smoking before they saw it?” I asked the natural follow-up question.

 

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