If Noah and I were alive, wanting to know his last name would not be strange. In fact, it would be strange if I didn’t know it. And if he had been mentally ill in life, that sometimes affected how the person was in the afterlife. You didn’t die and revert to a perfect version of yourself.
I read through his record. It said that he had been committed to Haven Crest by his father, Patrick McCrae—so Irish!—on the seventh of October 1903 at the age of nineteen. The reason for this was “inconsolable grief.”
Oh, no.
Noah’s sister Maureen had died earlier that year, and it seemed that Noah had been unable to let her go. He’d told his parents that he could see her and still talk to her. They’d thought their son’s mind had broken. They’d thought he was mad, and the more they’d tried to help him, the more intense and violent he’d become that they wouldn’t believe him.
My eyes burned with tears. I never had to pee, but I could cry, though I had no idea where the tears came from. They weren’t wet, but I could feel them trickle down my cheeks.
Noah had been a medium. He and Kevin had to be related. That talent ran in families. How horrible for him. He could still talk to his dead sister, and no one had believed him.
Just like how no one had believed Lark about me.
LARK
I woke up at five. Not because Wren was there, or because I had some sudden revelation about Alys, but because someone was bouncing on my bed.
Groggily, I lifted my head, opened my sleep-crusted eyes and looked straight into the twinkling gaze of Joe Hard.
“Rise and shine, J.B.,” he said.
He was all hair and eyeliner, and it was a good thing ghosts didn’t have circulation, because his would have been cut off below the waist, his leather pants were so tight. He’d been a rock star back in the day, and even death couldn’t make him give it up.
“What do you want?” I demanded. “And how the hell did you get in here?” I had a few protections up, but couldn’t use too many because they’d work against Wren. Still, the house was somewhat fortified against unfamiliar ghosts.
“I knew your grandmother, remember? We have a connection.” He grinned. “Olgilvie is at the coffee shop down the street, so I decided to pop over. Your sister tell you I wanted to chat?”
I stared at him. None of what he’d just said explained why he was perched on my duvet at this time of morning, looking as fresh as a dead metalhead could. “No, she didn’t. We’ve been a little preoccupied lately.”
He nodded. “All Hallows’ Eve, yeah. It’s gotta suck for you. Nice to have a little freedom to roam, though.”
I sat up. “What do you want to talk about, Joe?”
The smile faded from his face, along with any other trace of pleasantness. “I need your help.”
Yeah, so he was a little scary. “With?”
“Making sure the police find a body before Olgilvie gets a chance to move it.”
But Olgilvie was the police. Oh. Oh. “Laura.” Back when I’d first returned to New Devon, I’d been unlucky enough to cross paths with the human stain known as Officer Olgilvie, who Joe haunted. I knew it had something to do with a girl named Laura, and I figured that Joe blamed Olgilvie for her death. Now, I realized that Olgilvie had killed her.
“Yeah.”
“Where is she?”
“Near the grounds of Haven Crest. It’s why the bastard’s been supervising construction and why he does security there—so he can keep an eye on her. But with the work the town’s been doing, he has to move her or someone will find her.”
“And you want to make sure someone finds her.”
He nodded. “Her family—this whole fucking town—needs to know what happened to her.” I didn’t ask, but he told me anyway: “He raped her, and then he killed her when she tried to get away. He says it was an accident, but you don’t bury an accident in an unmarked grave and watch over it for more than two decades.”
“He’s more of a monster than I thought.”
“You don’t know the half of it. I wouldn’t even ask you to tangle with him if it wasn’t for Laura.”
“Is she anchored to the grave?”
“No. She moved on when he...when she died.”
And Joe had made the choice to haunt her killer when his own death came, rather than move on with her. He must have seen my confusion, because he added, “I couldn’t be with her, knowing he’d gotten away with it. I loved her, and I should have been with her that night, but we’d had a fight. I thought she’d taken off to LA like she always threatened to do. It took ten years and me dying of an accidental overdose to discover the truth. She came for me, but I couldn’t go—not without making him pay.”
“Dude, that’s messed up, but I get it.” I nodded. “What do you need me to do?”
“You’re going to the concert?”
“Yeah. Probably one of the worst decisions of my life, but I’m going.”
“He’s working security, but he’s going to move her during the show.”
“Isn’t that risky?”