Chapter Three

Like I said, I had taken to hanging out with people who weren’t sensitive to my presence. But now I needed to find someone who was sensitive.

In fact, I needed someone who was more than just a little “sensitive.” I needed someone I could talk to. If such a person even existed.

So I started looking.

Abramsville is a small town, but it still has roughly 15,000 people. Surely one of them had to be sensitive to ghosts. I didn’t, however, consider how long it would take to test that many people. Or even just the adults.

So I started with the ones that I already knew had some sensitivity. I made my way to their houses, stood in front of them, waved my arms, jumped up and down, and screamed until I would have turned blue in the face if I’d been alive.

Some of them jumped a little, startled by something they almost saw out of the corners of their eyes. Several of them shivered and turned up the thermostat or wrapped themselves in sweaters.

And the guy who had seen me behind him in the mirror? This time he really did pee himself. Desperate as I was, I decided that he was too easily spooked to help me.

What policeman was going to believe some pee-soaked lunatic who came in blathering about the evidence a ghost had told him about? He’d probably get arrested himself. Anyway, I had absolutely no assurance that he actually heard me when I said,

“Please. You have to help me.”

And to be honest, I have no idea what he saw. When I looked down at myself, I saw just me, wearing the clothes I’d worn the day I died. Black slacks, gray button-down shirt, black leather jacket, medium-heel black boots. Casual professional. When I’d managed to cast a reflection in the mirror, I’d still looked like me. Medium-toned skin, green eyes, dark wavy hair to my shoulders. A relatively attractive woman who could stand to lose five or ten pounds. Normal.

But for all I knew, when he saw me, I looked like I must have looked by the time I died. And from what I remembered, that sight would be enough to make just about anyone soil himself.

I pretty quickly gave up on going door-to-door. I know the wheels of the legal system grind slowly, but I really didn’t know how much time poor Rick McClatchey had. And time seemed to run differently for me now; I would go into my drifting phase and wake up to realize that days, not hours, had passed. So I began going to places where people congregated in large groups.

I started with churches. I figured, people in churches are believers, right? They’ve got to have some connection to the Great Hereafter.

Not a single one of them saw me.

Maybe the trouble was that I wasn’t part of the Great Hereafter. I was just hanging out on the wrong side of the Right Here and Now.

I tried the college next. I did my little “Here I am, look at me now” song and dance right up in front of a whole classroom. One guy clearly saw me but went scrabbling in his book bag for a bottle of prescription medicine. When I floated over to check it out, I saw that it was labeled “Haldol.” Even I knew that that was some sort of antipsychotic medication.

Poor guy. I left that classroom immediately. Psychosis was even better than pee-soaked pants for demolishing credibility.

I finally found her at Wal-Mart, of all places. I had decided that in a town as small as Abramsville, just about everyone would eventually go to Wal-Mart. So there I stood in the entrance, just like the little old ladies who worked as greeters, spending hours on their feet saying “Welcome to Wal-Mart” to everyone who walked through the door.

I didn’t say “Welcome to Wal-Mart.” I didn’t say anything, usually. I just stood in front of customers’ shopping carts, hoping they would see me. For the most part, though, the few who paused did so because they needed to drop a purse into the cart, tell a child to catch up, adjust a strap on a sandal.

Not because they saw me. Some of them walked right through me. Brrr. Some of the more sensitive among them skirted me without ever even knowing why. Until Ashara. She pushed her cart right up to me, within inches, and stood there for a second, staring straight into my eyes.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I need to get through here.”

I blinked. “You can see me?” I asked.

Her forehead wrinkled and she held her hands out in front of her, palms up. “Well, yeah.” She shook her head.

I looked at her more closely. There didn’t seem to be anything special about her—not metaphysically, anyway.

Physically, she was beautiful. She was short, about 5’3, African-American, with huge brown eyes and clear, dark skin.

Her hair, brown with red highlights, fell in tiny ringlets down past her shoulders. She wore blue jeans and a red t-shirt. I put her at about twenty-four or twenty-five, just a little younger than I had been when I died.

Watching me assess her, she took a deep breath. Her nostrils flared. She gripped the handlebar of her shopping cart more tightly. “If you’re done staring, why don’t you get out of my way before I run your white ass over,” she said.

“Oh. Sorry,” I said, so nonplussed that I actually moved out of the way.

“Bitch,” I heard her mutter as she walked by.

This was not going as well as I might have hoped.

“Hey,” I said, hurrying after her. “Wait up.”

“I know you’re not talking to me,” she said. She stared straight ahead and pushed her cart down the middle of the aisle toward housewares.

“I am talking to you. Look. I know this is really weird, but I need your help.”

“Well, I’m not talking to you. I don’t know what your problem is, but you can take it somewhere else.”

I wanted to reach out and grab her cart, to make her

stop and talk to me, but of course, I couldn’t. Which gave me an idea.

I scurried out in front of her, planting myself in her path.

“Move,” she said.

“Not until you hear me out. Please?”

She moved her cart to the left. I stepped out to intercept her. She moved to the right. So did I.

“You got some kind of death wish or something?” she asked.

I laughed and shook my head. “If only you knew.”

“I’ve got no time to talk to no crazy white lady in the Wal-Mart,” she said. And she slammed into me with her shopping cart.

At least, that’s what she planned to do.

The shopping cart, however, slid right through me.

When it stopped, the basket had sliced cleanly through my midsection. The bottom rack merged with my ankles. From my perspective, it looked like two perfectly solid objects—me and the shopping cart—had melted together. I don’t know what she saw.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

The woman’s eyes widened and then rolled up into her head as she slumped to the ground in a dead faint.

I bent down to try to wake her up, but no matter how hard I concentrated on making contact, I couldn’t even touch her.

I hate being a ghost.

* * *

Luckily, there were other people in the store, and they could help her. Someone called the manager, and pretty soon there was a small crowd around her. She woke up blearily, looking around at all of the faces surrounding her.

“What happened?” the manager asked her as he helped her to her feet.

“There was this woman,” she began, shaking her head.

Then she saw me, leaning in over all the other people around her—easy enough to do if you can float up three or four feet off the ground.

“That one,” she said frantically, pointing at me. The people between us stared around at one another.

“Which one?” asked the manager. “What did she do?”

The woman pointed at me again. “That one. The white woman. In the black jacket.”

Again, everyone looked around expectantly.

Finally, the manager placed his hand on her back and leaned in close to her. “Honey, there’s no white woman in a black jacket here. Are you sure you’re okay?”

The woman looked from him to me and back again.

“You don’t see her standing there.”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t. Is there anyone you want me to call for you?”

She stepped away from him. “No. No thanks. I’ll be fine.” She pulled her purse out of her basket and moved away, never taking her eyes off me or turning her back on me.

She hit the parking lot at a run. I moved right beside her, talking the whole time.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just need help.”

The woman was muttering under her breath, and after a minute, I realized that she was praying.

This was awful. I had absolutely no desire to terrify this poor woman, but she was the only person who had actually seen me in days of trying. And she could hear me, too.

I couldn’t let her go. I had to get her to listen to me.

So I followed her to her car. She ran as hard as she could, fumbling with the keys to the old Chevrolet. By the time she got into the car and slammed the door behind her, I had settled into the back seat.

She adjusted her rearview mirror, saw me in it, and screamed. Then she put her head down on her steering wheel and started sobbing.

“Hey,” I said, reaching out toward her but unable to pat her on the shoulder. “Listen. Really. I mean it. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I just,” she said, choking out words between sobs, “never thought that I’d get haunted at the Wal-Mart.” The last word ended with a wail and another bout of sobbing.

“But you thought you might get haunted somewhere else?” I asked.

“Why won’t y’all leave me alone?”

“Y’all? As in, more than one?”

She nodded, sniffling.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ashara.”

“Okay, Ashara. So I’m not the first ghost you’ve met.”

“No. But you’re the first one who’s talked to me in the Wal-Mart.” She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes and turned to glare at me suspiciously. “Why you haunting the Wal-Mart, anyway?”

“I’m not haunting Wal-Mart,” I said. “I was trying to find someone who could see me, who could hear me.”

“Well, why don’t you go on back in there and find someone else?”

“Because I’ve been looking for days, and you’re the only one I’ve found. And I’m running out of time.”

“Looks to me like you already ran out of time, what with being dead and all,” she said.

“Thanks for the reminder,” I said dryly. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll listen to my story, listen to what I know and what I need help with, then I’ll get out of the car and let you go if you decide you don’t want to help me, okay?”

“Promise?” She stared at me, her eyes narrow.

“Promise. Cross my heart,” I said, making the appropriate X over my chest. “Though I guess that the ‘hope to die’ bit doesn’t really apply here,” I added. That one got a snicker from Ashara.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Talk.”

“First you have to promise to seriously consider helping me.”

She nodded. “Promise.”

So I told her my story, all about Molly’s death and Rick’s arrest. About my determination to help Rick by finding the real killer. She stared at me intently the entire time, her eyes wide.

When I had finished, she lowered her eyes and took a deep breath to regroup.