Chapter Eight

I didn’t bother to follow the three men into McClatchey’s house. I already knew he wasn’t the killer.

I checked the clock in the patrol car on my way by.

Noon. Way too early to go get Ashara.

But maybe she’ll be on her lunch break, I thought.

No such luck. This time when I popped through the bullet-proof (but not ghost-proof!) window, she just started singing quietly to herself. Or rather, to me, but no one else would know that.

“Go on now, go, walk out the door. Just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore,” she sang.

“You’ve been working on that all morning, haven’t you?” I said.

She grinned a little, nodding.

Then I picked up the song. “Weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye? Did you think I’d crumble, did you think I’d lay down and die?” I danced across the room. “Oh, no, not I!”

Ashara cringed and shuddered.

Okay. So maybe I’m not the best singer in the world.

And maybe I don’t have the greatest rhythm. But she didn’t have to shudder.

“I went back to the shop,” I said, as Ashara leaned into her microphone and pushed a button.

“Good afternoon,” she said to the man driving the car.

“Hello,” he replied, sending the plastic container through the tube. It popped up into a box-shaped space next to Ashara’s elbow. She pushed a button and the cover flipped open. I watched with interest as she pulled the container out of the box and opened it.

“I always thought that was so cool when I was a kid,” I said.

“Just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore,” she sang under her breath as she began counting money. Her fingers flew over the keypads.

“I found some more piano wire,” I said. “In the trash can next to the bench the killer took something from. I got one of the guys working there to call the police.”

Her fingers slowed and she looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“He could see me,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “But no one else could. He didn’t know that, though. He thought I was real. Alive, I mean. I am real. I think he saw me walk through the police car door, though. So now maybe he thinks he’s crazy.”

Ashara shook her head and went back to work. She dropped the container into the box, closed the lid, and pushed a button. “Is there anything else I can do for you today?” she asked, leaning into her microphone.

“No, ma’am,” the man in the car said.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Johnston,” she said.

“So I was thinking,” I said. Ashara didn’t even look at me. She just moved on to the next car in her line.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” the driver replied.

“I was thinking that what we need to do now is figure out how to track down that man’s license plate number.”

Ashara stopped and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Her mouth tightened and she held up four fingers, flexing them emphatically in my direction.

“You okay?” Ann, the other teller, asked.

“Just stretching my fingers,” Ashara said. She pulled the container from the box and took several checks from the container. She typed in a code and began entering the checks into the computer.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get it. I’ll come back at four.”

I walked out through the door, singing “I Will Survive” at the top of my lungs. I glanced back to see Ashara shuddering again.

* * *

When Ashara got off work at 4:00, I was already waiting in her car. I had managed to turn the radio on and was listening to NPR radio. Ashara got in and switched the radio off.

“Hey,” I said. “It took me a long time to turn that on.”

“And it only took me a second to turn it off again,” she said. “We have to talk.”

“Okay,” I said. “What?”

“Look. I am helping you because . . . I don’t know why. Because Maw-Maw said to, I guess. But mostly ’cause you won’t leave me alone. But I do not need you showing up at my work. I am busy when I’m there and I ain’t got no time to talk to your dead ass.”

I looked at her for a minute, my eyes narrowing. “Why is it,” I asked, “that you speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences sometimes and other times you say things like ‘ain’t got no time’?”

Ashara drew in a long breath and blew it out in an even longer sigh. “That is not what we’re discussing right now.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I won’t bother you at work again.”

“Good.”

“Unless it’s really, really necessary.”

“How necessary?”

“I don’t know. Like someone else has died or something.”

She nodded.

“But you have to answer my question.”

“What question?” she asked.

“Why is it that sometimes you speak correctly and sometimes you don’t?”

She shook her head. “It’s called code switching,” she said, her voice suddenly sounding almost professorial. “And it’s not a matter of correct or incorrect. It’s a matter of dialect.

People who function in more than one world can switch back and forth at will. At work, I have to use the dominant discourse—I have to sound like a white woman. At home, I speak the way I was brought up to speak.”

I stared at her with my mouth hanging open.

“I learned it in my socio-linguistics course in college.” She shrugged. “It made perfect sense to me, so it stuck.”

She started the car and pulled out onto the street.

“What was your major?” I asked, trying not to sound as shocked as I felt. And embarrassed. I had made a set of assumptions about Ashara that clearly wasn’t correct.

“Accounting,” she said. “I was good at it, too. I had a 4.0 GPA in my major. 3.5 overall.”

I tried to phrase my next question very carefully. “So why don’t you work as an accountant somewhere?”

“No jobs like that around here. Except at tax time. I do people’s taxes to make a little extra money sometimes.”

“But with those sorts of grades, surely you could have gotten a job in Birmingham or Atlanta,” I said. “Why are you here working as a bank teller?”

She shook her head. “Maw-Maw’s the only family I’ve got left, and she’s lived in Abramsville all her life. I can’t make her go with me, so I stay right here.”

I nodded. I understood that. I’d turned down a promotion once because it would have meant moving to Chicago, and I didn’t want to be that far from my family. Then I shook my head to dispel the memory, unwilling to think about my family. That would only lead to wondering how they were dealing with my death.

“So what next?” Ashara asked.

“Next we go find out who that license plate is registered to.”

“Don’t we need to go to the DMV for that? I don’t think they’re gonna let some random chick and her ghost friend just go on in and look it up.”

“I think we can get that stuff over the internet,” I said.

“No way!”

“I’m pretty sure. You got internet at your place?”

Ashara nodded. “Of course.”

“Let’s go then.”

* * *

Ashara’s house was small, but in a better neighborhood than her grandmother’s. “I got it pretty cheap,” she said as she unlocked the front door. “The guy who owned it had rented it out to a bunch of college kids and the inside was trashed. Way nasty. But I cleaned it out and been fixing it up a little bit at a time. I still got stuff to do, but it’s not bad.”

‘Not bad’ was an understatement. The outside of the house was a modest little A-frame, but the interior was beautiful. The walls were painted a creamy matte beige and the window and door frames were a bright white. Folk art adorned the walls, adding bright splashes of color to the room.

The wood floors were polished to a bright shine and colorful rugs scattered across the room complemented the art.

“This is lovely,” I said, staring around at the living room.

“Have a seat,” Ashara said. “I’d offer you something to drink, but . . .” her voice trailed off.

“Yeah,” I said. “But. On accounta I’m dead and all.”

“Yeah, that. I’m going to go change clothes. I’ll be back in a minute.”

When she returned, she had traded her black slacks and blue button-down shirt for a pair of gray sweatpants and a black t-shirt.

“The computer’s back here,” she said, leading me to a guest room. She sat down and I drifted up behind her.

“So where should we start?” she asked. She clicked the mouse and pulled up a web browser.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess maybe run a search for license plate registration?”

Ashara typed in the search terms, hit “search,” and waited while the page loaded. Then she let out a low whistle.

“Damn, girl. Is it really that easy?” she asked. The result page showed link after link to sites promising to allow you to instantly find license plate registration information.

She clicked on the first one. “Nope,” she said. “I ain’t paying no $99.95 just to find this out.”

“He killed a woman, Ashara,” I said. “If I could pay it, I would. But I can’t.”

Ashara looked up at me.

“He chopped her up, Ashara. He left her body in the bathtub with all the pieces carefully arranged.”

“God, stop!” Ashara put her hand up, palm facing me.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t pay for it at all. I said I wasn’t going to pay a hundred bucks. Geez. Let’s do a little comparison shopping before we start spending all my hard-earned cash, okay?”

“Okay.” I sighed in relief.

Ashara ran through several sites before finding one that satisfied her. “See? Twenty dollars, now that I can afford. Let me go find my purse.”

I hovered anxiously over the computer, waiting for Ashara to get back. We were close to finding out who had killed Molly. I didn’t know how we were going to get the information to the police, but I was sure we could.

Ashara returned, credit card in hand. “Okay,” she said, after setting up her account with the online company. “What was the number?”

I repeated it to her, she typed it in, and we both stared intently at the screen. I let out a whoosh of non-breath when the results came up. “Dammit,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Ashara. “I don’t think that was no seventy-two-year-old woman named Juana Nogales driving a Chevrolet Cavalier the other night.”

“Maybe he’s related to her somehow?” I surmised.

“Grandmother, maybe?”

“More likely he stole the plates and switched them out,” Ashara said.

I put my head in my hands. “I was so sure we had him.”

Ashara reached over to pat me on the back, and then stopped herself before she put her hand through me. “Look,” she said. “I need to go check in on Maw-Maw. Why don’t you come with me? Maybe we can think of something on the way over there.”

* * *

Maw-Maw was still in her recliner. “Well,” she said as we came in through the front door. “I see you still got you that white lady ghost.”

“Yep,” said Ashara. “We can’t seem to find out enough about that guy to go to the police with it.”

Maw-Maw snorted. “What you think you gonna tell the police anyway? That you know that man killed that woman ’cause a spirit told you so?”

“We hadn’t gotten that far,” I said, sitting down on the couch. “First we’ve got to find out who he is, then we can figure out what to tell the police.”

“Tell me what you know,” Maw-Maw said.

So I did. Everything. Well, almost everything. I didn’t go into graphic detail about the man cutting up the body or anything. No need to frighten the old lady.

Ashara had moved into the kitchen, where I heard her opening cabinets and cans, pulling out dishes.

“Ashara, honey?” Maw-Maw called.

“Yeah?”

“Where’d that killer man turn off the main road?”

“Onto some dirt road,” she called from the kitchen.

“Before the interstate, but after you pass your doctor’s office.”

“Hmm.” Maw-Maw nodded to herself. “That sure sounds like the road out to the old Howard place.”

Ashara came into the room with two plates of food—roast chicken, creamed spinach, and cornbread, and it all smelled wonderful—and set one of them down on the end table next to Maw-Maw’s chair. She took the other one over to the end table next to the couch and moved back into the kitchen.

She came out a moment later with two glasses of iced tea and sat down on the couch.

“What you want to watch on the TV, Maw-Maw?” she asked.

“I don’t want to watch nothing right now. I want to talk more about this murder case you girls are working on.”

“Maw-Maw, this is not like one of your crime shows,” Ashara said. “We are not working on any ‘case.’ I’m just trying to help Callie here out.”

“Oh. So the white ghost lady got a name now, does she?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m Callie Taylor. I’m here from Dallas.” It’s amazing how quickly southern training kicks back in. I can be a total bitch, but you put me in a room with an old woman, and suddenly it’s all “yes, ma’am, no, ma’am.”

And I don’t care what Ashara says. Dallas is still the South.

“And you, young lady,” Maw-Maw said, suddenly turning on Ashara, “don’t you go acting like I don’t know the difference between my TV stories and real life. I been alive plenty long enough to know what’s what. And just ‘cause I’m old and half-blind don’t mean I’m senile. Not yet.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ashara said meekly.

“Now. What did that man look like?” Maw-Maw asked, turning back to me.

I described the man to her.

“Yep,” she said. “That sure does sound like one of them Howard boys. Bad skin, every one of them.” She shook her head. “They never was no good. Always in one kind of trouble or another. Not nothing like this before, mind you. Not murder. Not that nobody ever found out about, anyway.”

I leaned forward avidly. “You think that maybe there was something that nobody knew about?”

Maw-Maw nodded. “There was rumors. When I was just a girl, Jimmy Rowell just up and disappeared. Prettiest boy you ever saw. My momma thought maybe he was gonna marry me someday, but Jimmy Rowell was just a big ol’ flirt. Didn’t mean nothing by it.” She smiled as she reminisced.

“Anyway,” she said, “Jimmy Rowell went missing one day. His people said he hadn’t just run away. They said he’d gotten into a fight with one of them Howard boys. They was pretty sure them Howard boys had done dragged Jimmy Rowell off and done him in. Now what was their names?” She stroked her chin as she tried to remember. “Oh, yes,” she said.

“Graham and Owen Howard. That’s who they was. Owen was always the meanest one.” She shook her head sadly. “Anyway, not much came of it. Colored boy gone missing? Sheriff didn’t pay much attention to Jimmy’s people. Said Jimmy must’ve gotten himself in trouble with some girl and run off. Either that or gone to look for work someplace else. But Jimmy’s people knew better. We all did. Jimmy wouldn’t have left without telling his momma goodbye.”

Ashara and I both leaned forward, listening intently.

Ashara had completely forgotten the food on her plate.

“Like I said,” said Maw-Maw, shaking off her reverie, “them Howard boys are no good. You watch out for this man. If he’s a Howard, there ain’t no telling what he might do.” She reached over and picked up her plate of food.

“Maybe you girls can just take me out there after we’re done eating. That way I can tell you for sure if it’s the old Howard place. Yep.” She nodded to herself. “That’s what we’re gonna do.”

Ashara and I stared at each other in mutual horror.