Dying for You Read online

  Jack smiled. “What a wonderful idea.”

  “I agree,” Cathy said. “Plus, if we’re not here, we won’t have pop-in guests every third hour.”

  “What, I’m not going with you guys?”

  “Forget it, Nik.”

  “Nikki, you’re very nice,” Jack began tactfully, “but—”

  “No you’re not,” Cathy said. Impulsively she squeezed Jack so hard his eyes bulged. “Besides, this is me-and-Jack time. No pals allowed.”

  “So that’s it? You’re gonna take off with a guy who’s been haunting your house for a zillion years? A guy you barely know? That’s not like you, Cath.”

  “I know,” she said, and smiled at Jack.

  Paradise

  Bossed

  For Daniel and Lisa,

  who introduced us to the real paradise

  that is Little Cayman.

  Also, thanks to the Cannon Falls Bombers,

  and all those pep rallies back in high school,

  which have made the Cannon fight song stick

  into my brain like a fishhook.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The events of this story take place about a year and a half after the events in “The Fixer-Upper” (Men at Work, Berkley Sensation anthology, December 2004). Also, snorkeling is usually a harmless activity.

  Cannon, Cannon, loyal are we.

  Red and black we’ll shoot you to victory.

  So fight fight fight our motto will be.

  Rah-rah-rah and sis-boom-bah!

  Fight fight fight fight!

  Go for the red and black!

  —CANNON FALLS HIGH SCHOOL FIGHT SONG

  You’d bitch if they hung you with a new rope.

  —ALEXANDER DAVIDSON III

  “I see dead people.”

  “In your dreams…while you’re awake? Dead people like in graves? In coffins?”

  “Walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead.”

  —FROM THE SIXTH SENSE

  Prologue

  ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA

  FEBRUARY 21, 1975

  Jack watched with interest as his sister’s nosy-body neighbor dragged a GP (General Psychic) into his house.

  It was actually his sister’s house; it had passed to her on their parents’ deaths. But they both knew whose house it really was. Jack had lived there for many years. His sister was getting on, but he felt just the same.

  “You can’t mean to live like this,” Nosy-body was saying. “Who lives like this?”

  “Well.” His sister looked around helplessly, but Jack decided not to come to her assistance, this once. She really did need to learn how to stand up for herself. It was his fault she couldn’t, and now it was too late. Forty years too late. But if an old dog like him could learn, maybe she could, too. “Well, we get along fine, Jack and me.”

  “No, no. You must get him out. You can’t have a—a dead thing running amok in your own house. It’s—outrageous! Your chakra and your aura are completely screwed up.” Nosy-body rattled the purple beads around her neck as if to make a point. She was wearing a black T-shirt that had a pair of giant red lips on the front. She was an infant at twenty-seven.

  “Well, it would have been Jack’s house if he hadn’t broken his neck in the basement,” his sister said reasonably, and Jack almost groaned. “Really, I think of it as his house.”

  The medium, who hadn’t said a word to that point, was looking around at the carefully kept Victorian with an almost bored look on his face. He was holding hands with a small, curly-haired blond boy, a boy with the bluest eyes and dirtiest green coat Jack had ever seen. The child looked like an angel down on his luck.

  “You’ll never get the damned thing out,” the angel said.

  “Think so, Tommy?” The medium, who had the same curly hair (less vivid than the boy’s), dirty clothes, and blue eyes, seemed unsurprised at the child’s tone and language.

  “Dad, you can’t do it. Nobody could do it.” The child paused, his eyes narrowing with thought. “Maybe Mr. Graham in London. Nobody here.”

  “Sorry, then, ladies,” the medium said.

  “But you haven’t even taken your coats—”

  “If Tommy—”

  “Tom,” the child corrected, bored.

  “If my son says it’s a no-go, it’s a no-go. He’s much stronger than me, you see.” The medium offered a small smile, which didn’t match his eyes.

  “Besides, he’s not hurting anybody,” the child added, apparently in response to the stunned look on the faces of the two ladies. “He helps you, doesn’t he, Miss Carroll?”

  “Well, yes, I don’t know how I’d get along without my Jacky.…”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the problem,” the child said. “S’long as you both feel so strongly about helping each other out, he’ll never leave. And nobody will ever get him out.”

  “Er…oh.”

  “Good-bye,” the child said, almost politely.

  “Good-bye, dear. Thank you—thank you both—for coming.”

  “Bye, Jack.”

  Jack knocked once in response, making Nosy-body jump. The child didn’t even turn, and the father was halfway out the door already.

  That poor boy! He was, what? Four? Five? And how much of the human condition had he already seen? Murder, sex, greed, thievery, vanity—it made Jack shiver to think about it.

  “Not one of my finer moments,” his sister said when they had left.

  He knocked.

  “I know, I know, I should have told Sharon I wasn’t interested. Because I wasn’t, you know. She just has a way of—taking over, I guess. All that chakra talk makes a lady tired.” She paused, waiting, and then added, “And I’d never get rid of you, darling.”

  Sulking, Jack didn’t respond.

  “But I must admit I was curious.”

  Jack restrained himself from snorting.

  “And I also have to admit I wanted to meet a famous medium.” While she chattered, she set the pot on for tea and rummaged through the cupboards. She was a tea snob, and would no sooner use a Lipton bag than go outside without a girdle.

  “Thomas Fillman is supposed to be the most powerful psychic in the Midwest. But I see it’s Thomas Jr. who’s the real talent. That poor baby! Better at five than his father ever was, and now he’s being dragged all over town to dig through old houses, looking for ghosts.…I could cry right now.”

  Well, don’t, Jack thought. It’s none of our business.

  Still, he couldn’t help wondering, as the years passed, how the child was doing, and if he was happy.

  Chapter 1

  LITTLE CAYMAN, 2006

  Nikki floated through the azure waters beyond Little Cayman like a—well, like an angel, thank you very much! Her long blond hair was fanning out behind her as she twirled and whirled through the water, dancing like a water sprite, wriggling through schools of fish like…like…

  Like someone who’s got to get a grip, she thought, and snorted, and then had to swim to the surface.

  She spit out the mouthpiece, along with a mouthful of seawater. “Angel!” she crowed, and only the gulls heard her. They spun overhead, laughing at her. Natch! Angel. Shit.

  She dipped her head back in the water, skimming the long strands away from her face (ah, they were like strands of kelpy, smelly seaweed, that was romantic, right?), then adjusted her mask and bit into the big rubber nipple.

  Then she dove back down to examine the glory that was Little Cayman Island. She should have gone back and re-slathered sunscreen, but dammit, she was having too much fun.

  And soon enough, she’d be out here constantly; Pirate’s Point Resort wasn’t that big—maybe ten guests, total, and most of them on the boat all day. Cathy and Jack, who didn’t dive, would be necking all over the place. Nikki felt like enough of a third wheel at home; she had no intention of feeling like that on her vacation.

  It wasn’t their fa
ult, and they weren’t doing anything wrong. Cathy was newly in love, ditto Jack, and after eighty zillion years, Jack was starved for sex, touching, hugging, kissing, even handshakes. A trip to the store to get milk could quickly end up an X-rated straight-to-video incident.

  She was nuts to have accepted their invitation—it was their anniversary, for God’s sake.

  That said, she’d also have been nuts to turn down a free trip to the Cayman Islands…although why Cathy had a jones on about coming to a place famous for scuba diving, when neither of them dived, was a mystery. It was like deciding to go to Antarctica when you didn’t like penguins, or the cold.

  She swam down, wiggling her flippers to get as close as possible to the sea floor. Schools and schools of fish swam by, ignoring her—to them she was just another skinny tourist in a Target bikini. But Christ! It was like being on the Discovery Channel. Fish and coral—live coral, no less—and birds above and turtles below. Unreal. Here she’d been going to Disney World every year, with no idea what she was missing.

  She saw something out of the corner of her eye and turned to get a better look, then jerked back, startled. Stingray. Nice-sized, too—a six-foot wingspan. It wouldn’t hurt her; rays were huge but gentle, and this one was startled, and as it flinched away from her, the barbed tail whacked her, quite by accident, across the side of her face.

  But that was okay, because they were harmless, you just had to watch out for the—for the thing—the thing on the end of their—

  Luckily, her face didn’t hurt. And the blood in the water—it probably wasn’t hers. And even if it did attract sharks, there was nothing in these waters that could hurt her. Not even rays—they only stung you if you stepped on them by accident. That’s what her instructor told her, and he knew his shit. Besides, it hadn’t even hurt.

  No, nothing hurt; everything was numb. She’d figured on swimming up for another breath of air, but she didn’t need one now.

  She brought a hand up to touch her face and missed. Were her lips gone? Or was she too numb to find them? She swam to get to the surface, and bumped into the ocean floor.

  This is not good, she told herself, but really, it was impossible to get worked up over it. It was so beautiful here, so peaceful. She was almost a part of it, lying on the floor in the rich silt, a part of the fish and even the saucy ray who had smacked her by accident and gone on its way.

  She pulled off her mask and snorkel. Ah! That was better. Now she could breathe. It was a lot harder, breathing water than air, but she was up to the challenge.

  It was too bad, though. She herself didn’t mind so much, but her pal Cathy would completely lose it when she heard the news.

  Chapter 2

  “What do you mean, ‘missing and presumed’?” Cathy shrieked. “What does that mean? Why aren’t we looking for her? Why weren’t you looking earlier?”

  “Is she dead?” Jack asked. “I guess you’d better tell us if she’s dead.”

  “Of course she’s not dead, she’s just snorkeling. Right?”

  “For eighteen hours?” her husband asked gently.

  Cathy clawed through her hair, the curly dark hair Nikki so admired. And still did admire! Not past tense: present tense. Nikki was very much in the pesent tense, nothing was wrong, it was all a stupid misunderstanding, that was all, just a—

  “…came alone, and we’re pretty casual here.…You can keep the snorkeling gear in your room and go out whenever you want. We have no idea when she left, but she wasn’t at supper last night, or breakfast this morning, so we alerted the coast guard as well as—”

  “Nobody’s seen her since last night? Well, we—we—” She cast around. “We have to find her, then. That’s all. We just have to. She’s a good swimmer but she’s not used to the ocean—we live in Minnesota—and she’ll be waiting for us to get her…” Cathy burst into tears, and was instantly pissed at herself for doing it. This accomplished nothing. It slowed everything down.

  Her husband, cool as a flounder in most situations, patted her but fixed his gaze on the guide, waiting patiently for an answer to his question.

  “Yes,” the guide said with great reluctance. “I think she’s dead.”

  “Of course she is, she’s been dead since last night, only she was alone and no one noticed. She was alone,” Cathy said, and did something she had never done before, and hoped never to do again: she fainted.

  She woke up in their room, their little cabana on the ocean. Jack looked calm and unconcerned, but then, he always did. He looked like a twentysomething handyman who had to struggle with Body Art Monthly, when in fact he was a hundred-year-old intellectual.

  “They’re still looking,” he said, patting her wrist. She saw he’d taken off her shoes and placed her neatly in the middle of the bed. “They’ll find her.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said, and rolled over to bury her face in the pillow. “I’ll never forgive myself, never!”

  “Honey, I didn’t catch that.”

  She rolled back over. “I said I’ll never forgive myself. She came down here alone and we were all supposed to be together, only she came down alone, and we should have noticed when she didn’t come back from snorkeling, we should have! Who dies going snorkeling, for God’s sake?”

  “Well,” Jack began cautiously, then stopped. It was just as well; what could he have said? He had died falling down the basement stairs. Talk about senseless.

  “What if they never find her?” she asked. “What if she gets…you know. Eaten.”

  Jack just shook his head, and she suppressed a flare of temper. Most men would be all “There, there.” Jack knew too much, had seen too much. He wouldn’t comfort her if he thought it was a lie.

  “Well, we’re not going anywhere until we find her. Hear that?”

  “I hear that,” he replied.

  “Thank God I quit my job last month,” she muttered, throwing a forearm over her eyes.

  “I have money,” he reminded her.

  A bundle. His sister, a lovely woman still living in a St. Paul nursing home, had figured out their secret, and insisted on giving half her inheritance to Jack. Or, rather, the body Jack now lived in. It had amounted to several million dollars, and had certainly taken the pressure off. No more temp jobs for her, and plenty of money for new carpeting.

  The thought of her happiness, of the money making her happy, when now her best friend was most likely shark supper, made her burst into fresh tears.

  Chapter 3

  Oh this is so BOGUS.

  And not a little bogus, either. Big, gooey, lame bogus. Unendurably bogus.

  I hated the movie Ghost. Demi Moore dripping tears over everything that moved, stupid Patrick Swayze getting his damn self shot, stupid Whoopi Goldberg—well, she wasn’t so bad…

  Nikki knocked on the cabin door, forgetting, again, that she was incorporeal. The ghost thing was tough to get used to. Worse than passing bio in college!

  Her fist passed through the wood of the door and she hesitated. She’d been through three other cabins, looking for Jack and Cathy. This could be lucky number four. That was good, right? Right. Only, she prayed they weren’t doing it.

  She stuck her head through the door. Success! There they were, Cathy sobbing (nuts) on the bed as if, uh, she’d lost her best friend (okay, she had), and Jack sitting beside the bed, his chin resting on one fist, watching her with a glum look. He was shirtless, in khaki shorts, deeply tanned, and even in the middle of her rather large problem, she noticed for the hundredth time how yummy her best friend’s husband was.

  Who was tan in March? They lived in Minnesota, for goodness’ sake.

  “Sorry to ogle,” she said cheerfully, “but it’s your own fault for letting him walk around without a shirt.”

  Nothing.

  “Guys! I’m okay! Well, relatively speaking.”

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” Cathy said, her voice thick with tears.

  “You did nothing wrong, love.” Jack’s voice w
as a soothing rumble.

  “I just can’t stand the thought of her floating around out there, all alone—Nikki hates being by herself.”

  “Uh, guys?”

  “Cathy, you’ve got to stop. You’ve been crying for hours. You’ll make yourself ill.”

  “Guys?” She walked over to them—she might be able to pass through walls, but an old habit like walking on the floor was hard to break—and waved her hands in front of them. “Guys? I’m here. I’m okay. Relativ—never mind. Don’t cry, honey, you know how your nose swells up.”

  “I can’t help it,” Cathy cried. “This was supposed to be a fun vacation for the three of us, and now what? The coast guard is looking for my best friend’s body.”

  “They are? Oh, great. I guess.” She grimaced at the thought of gorgeous tropical fish nibbling on her toes. Had she sunk? Was she floating? The salt water was going to be murder on her hair.…

  “Because of you,” Cathy accused. “You just had to finish that damned painting.”

  “Don’t go blaming him,” Nikki said sharply. “It was a silly accident.”

  Jack’s mouth tightened for a moment, then he replied, most gently, “Love, Nikki wouldn’t want you carrying on like this.”

  “Yes I would! I mean, you guys can mourn for a day. That’s all right.”

  “I can’t help it,” Cathy said again.

  “You must. It’s been a week. You have to try to calm down. You must think of the baby.”

  “The baby?” Nikki almost yelled.

  “I’m sorry for what I said,” Cathy said. “It was my fault, too. I wanted to stay for the doctor’s appointment.”

  “Baby?” Nikki shouted again. “Oh, nice! You let him knock you up, and you were gonna tell me when? Jerks!”

  Then it hit her: a week? But she’d only died a couple of hours ago! Sure, it had taken her a while to get back to the island and find their cabin, but—