Wm. F. (Bill) Sattelmeyer

Writer

Interactive Designer

Once Dead

Maggie McAuley is dead, leaving behind a barely started career, a shattered family, and a devastated fiancé. She seems to be a ghost of some sort – a spirit, a phantom, a shade, whatever you call it – not that she wants to scare anyone. She’d settle for a last goodbye.

None of that ought to matter anymore, but now someone is killing her friends, and her father is not only the prime suspect, he’s also next in line for a gruesome death.

There is probably no better place to be dead than coastal California, but Maggie doesn’t need a seance or an exorcism; she needs help to stop a ghostly—and ghastly—murder.

Chapter One—Friday Morning

I don’t care what they say, it isn’t ever a good day to die. Obviously, whoever thought that a great way to start the morning was a tunnel of white light and a “Hey, I’m looking down on my body!” had never experienced it.

Death sucks. Even a couple of weeks later.

Like today: from where I stood in the middle of Ocean Street, an iridescent blush painted the renovated stone and stucco buildings of Santa Pasa’s revitalized downtown. As the sun lifted up over the coastal range, the early-morning gauze of Pacific fog shredded, and the tops of the tallest palms caught fire against a sapphire sky. The air was redolent with salt and ozone and promise.

I didn’t expect any of the promises would be kept.

I shrugged off my depression and padded back toward Monterey Bay. I’d lost track of time somewhere, and the half-dozen coffee shops within a stone’s throw of mid-town had already shed their morning addicts. A new crop began forming as café tables and chairs appeared on the broad sidewalks. At the north end of Ocean, two young women in fashionable sweats raced their jogging-strollers for the juice bar at the end of the block. Across from me, tall cans of fresh cut flowers threw splashes of color into the shadows in front of Book Shop Santa Pasa. All in all, it was another spectacular northern California morning, and I’d already be slipping into a bikini or a wet suit and heading to the beach if I hadn’t actually been lying flat on my back under six feet of dirt.

When I pinched myself, it still hurt, but however much I felt like a material girl, I was pretty sure I was still dead. Not a single person on the street could see or hear me. My family, surfing buds, fiancé, best girlfriend: all inaccessible across a gulf wider than life and deeper than death. It had been fun for maybe all of two minutes. For the rest of the past two weeks it had been a blur and a bummer. If time was the measure of our days, apparently I’d already been to the tailor and fitted for my suit.

Still, for all that I had changed, Santa Pasa remained a constant, an unchanging bastion of tie-dye, liberal politics, and high surf. The first of the street entertainers began to arrive by bicycle and Beetle, with perpetual high-hopes for an affluent and generous tourist trade. Two blocks down, a peach and saffron-robed Krishna troupe gathered in meditation.

Down at the corner of Cooper Street, one of the more free-spirited locals began settling in for the day on the former courthouse steps, marking his place on the sidewalk with a well-worn paper coffee cup and a bent piece of cardboard that read “God Bless.”

Charley’s gray and thinning hair exploded from the sides of his head, and his weathered nutmeg hands shook as he primed his cup with seed-change. His heavy winter overcoat covered well-worn jeans and a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt. You could never tell about the August weather, and Charley was prepared for whatever Mother Nature threw at him. It was good to be prepared. It meant you had options left.

I watched Charley survey his domain and curl down into his morning lotus. Elsewhere he might have been homeless, but in Santa Pasa he made a decent enough living to at least sleep under a roof when he wanted. Dad had hired him to watch the Book Shop that first winter after the fire, and we’d shared a few secrets over cups of after-closing coffee. He’d be rich one day, he’d said, and wouldn’t forget his friends. Rich still seemed as far from him as life now seemed from me.

He clicked his teeth together several times, staring down Ocean Street, anxious for the day to begin.

I took my time crossing the street, absorbing the sunshine. The afterlife temperature hovered constantly at the chilly side of comfortable—which maybe was a good thing, not that I believed in fire and brimstone—and loneliness echoed across the landscape.

At least one paper remained in the Sentinel’s white and orange box in front of the Book Shop. Out of habit I bent down to scan the front page, surprised to see a faint reflection peering back at me from the Plexiglas. It wavered, distant and blurry, but I could make out my unruly mop of short sun-bleached hair with that permanent wind-blown look. Dark eyes—underscored by dark circles—balanced on either side of a too-Irish nose inherited from my father. At least I didn't have the freckles. I did have my mother’s strong shoulders and narrow hips. In between I had been cheated by both sets of genes.

I skimmed the headlines. It could have been any day, any week, except for the story at the fold:  “Founder’s Weekend Guide—Battle In The Redwoods.” Dated October Seventh.

“October?” I said out loud. Of course, no one answered me. Had it really been two months since my funeral? Not two weeks? I squinted at the heavens for confirmation, but the stars had long since faded. The date-window on my watch read “8,” but I had no way of knowing if that were today’s date, the day I had died, or some mythical ghost-time.

The Book Shop’s sidewalk café seemed to be filling up, and I wandered in that direction, puzzling over the missing days. I could ask Sam; Sam would know.

I recognized the guitarist setting up on the curb to play for the café customers. I couldn’t remember his name, but I remembered he could barely pluck a string on a guitar let alone play in tune. People left money in his guitar case, I was sure, to encourage him to move on and play somewhere else.

I stood in the Book Shop doorway and stared into the shadowy interior. There’d be a calendar at the front desk, I knew. It might confirm the date. Still, I remained rooted. I inhaled a soft scent of burnt cork and magnolias. I hoped I’d catch a glimpse of Dad, and I hoped I wouldn’t. Was he doing all right since my death? Was I?

I didn’t know what I had become—a ghost? A phantom? Whatever had happened to me, the silence was a constant reminder. While I could see the world I used to live in, no sounds crossed the gulf into the afterlife.

I looked toward the post office where the flag fluttered in a fitful breeze and wished I could hear the soft chime-like tap of rope against aluminum flagpole. The silence of the tomb creeped me out.

The guitarist strummed a couple of chords I couldn’t hear, shook his head, and fiddled with his tuning. On the other hand, sometimes silence was golden.

I jumped involuntarily at the scream. It echoed with an unspeakable anguish and reverberated with the sorrow of dreams unfulfilled. I spun around, searching for the source. People at the café seemed to have heard it too, which shouldn’t have been possible. A patron pointed south. I spun around.

Charley balanced on the Cooper House bottom step, up on his toes and bouncing, like a puppet with an inexperienced puppeteer. His head swiveled back as if it had come loose.

Someone stood in front of him, taller than Charley. Bearded and wearing a dark hat with a big brim, the man appeared thin enough to see through. He had hold of Charley by the front of his coat or shirt, although the man’s arm seemed too short.

Charley screamed again. Two people from the café ran past me as Charley flung his arms out, convulsed as if he had stuck his finger in a light socket, and crumpled to the sidewalk. His head bounced once, and he lay still.

The guitarist reached Charley first. He checked for vitals with a spare efficiency that he didn’t have in his music and began CPR before anyone else was even close. I considered how badly I had misjudged him.

Heads poked out of the Cooper House windows and vanished again. I drifted nearer as a small crowd formed, although no one crossed the invisible line that might indicate they were emotionally involved. They needn’t have worried, as Charley’s rescuer never looked up for anyone to spell him. The big red paramedic unit from Engine Company Three turned the corner three blocks down at Cathcart, lights whirling madly. At least someone had called for help. At the south end of Ocean, a green and white Sheriff’s Department cruiser swung into view with its own lights on.

There were probably warbling sirens and diesel horns, too, but for me the ballet played out like a silent film without the piano.

Rescue Three rocked to a stop. The first EMT leaped out, grabbed a kit from the sideboard and jogged into the crowd. He spoke to the guitarist and smoothly took over the life-saving rhythm. Charley remained white and limp. I found myself edging in closer.

“Come on, Charley,” I said out of habit. “It’s not too late. You can make it. Breathe.”

The Deputy Sheriff sprinted around the back of Rescue Three, nearly running into me as he arrowed through the onlookers. He pantomimed a larger space around Charley’s body and said something into the radio clipped to his shirt. I could have stopped breathing myself.

I loved the way his olive and gray uniform swept around the sharp edges of his body; I loved his sandy hair and his eyes the color of ocean spray, hidden now beneath silver aviator glasses. Deputy James Cooper had been my companion, my friend, and my fiancé. Until I died. Seeing him took my breath away.

The paramedics raised Charley on a gurney, which they slipped into the back of their truck, never stopping the heart-pumping life-saving beat.

Jimmy slapped a hand on the side to start them on their way, then turned back to the crowd for witnesses. Not for the first time I thought how unfair it was to have feelings after you died.

I forced myself to look away, and when I could focus again, I saw Charley standing two steps up, looking confused. His eyes goggled, and his head bobbled up and down like a pigeon. He flapped his hands. “Hey,” he said.

The rescue squad disappeared around the corner with his body. They weren’t going to be able to revive him; Charley was dead and lost in the afterlife like me.

He squawked as Jimmy picked up his sign and cup. “That’s mine,” he croaked, stumping off the steps. Charley grabbed for his belongings, but couldn’t hold them. He tried again with no more success. He stared at his hand as if it had a hole in it.

The cluster of concerned citizens evaporated as quickly as it had formed. The man with the hat had vanished. Even the guitarist had returned to his own spot of lost chords and sour notes. The Cooper House stood deserted except for one deputy sheriff and two very dead spirits. “Charley,” I said.

“They’re mine,” he muttered, not looking at me. “Make him give them back."

“I can’t, Charley."

He flapped his hands again. “Why not? Why not? I need them. They’re mine.” He grabbed Jimmy’s arm with both hands, unconcerned about the consequences. Jimmy staggered, his feet moving in a different direction from his upper body. The coffee cup flew from his hand and coins spun into the gutter.

“I worked for it,” Charley growled. “You shouldn’t take what belongs to a man. No one should.”

Jimmy hunkered over his knees, then stood, testing each. Charley scrabbled for his money but his fingers passed over them as if they weren’t there. They were; Charley wasn’t. Jimmy knelt carefully and patiently collected each dropped coin, flashes of gold and silver and copper like metal flowers on a blacktop meadow.

“They’re mine,” Charley whined. He collapsed on the curb. “It’s my gold.”

“Not any more.” Charley tilted his head to look at me and clicked his teeth. His eyes were dark wet gouges in a face rudely chiseled by life. “Charley... you’re dead.” He shook his head at me and dismissed the crazy talk with the flutter of one hand. “We’re both dead,” I said, although maybe only to myself.

You’d think there’d be something more to say, some explanation, some higher reason. If there was, I didn’t know what it might be, and, God knows, I still hoped I was dreaming.

Jimmy closed his notebook and headed back to his vehicle with the last of Charley’s worldly goods. Charley stumbled after him. “Please,” Charley said softly.

I wanted to run after Jimmy too. I couldn’t. All my will had drained from me with my life. Where had he been when I had died? Why hadn’t he saved me?

Jimmy stopped. Charley didn’t. They collided. Jimmy spun around as Charley sprawled on the sidewalk. Jimmy swept off his dark glasses and scanned the street. There was no one near him. He shivered and slowly replaced the lenses that hid red-limned eyes. At his feet, sobbing, Charley flickered and faded away. Jimmy backed up to his cruiser.

In another minute both were gone, and the morning sailed on, silent and peaceful again. Not a single thing indicated Charley had ever existed. I sat down on the curb, my forehead on my knees. People died; life went on. But no one had told me that dying would be as difficult for the dead as for the living. It didn’t seem fair somehow.

#

I wrapped my arms around one of the massive columns that surrounded the wraparound porch and let the breeze off the ocean play with my hair. I figured the post would hold me upright until the rest of my world stopped spinning.

“It takes time to get the hang of being dead,” Sam said from beside me. “It’s like learning to milk a cow. First you have to make sure it’s really a cow and not a bull.” He had found another spoon somewhere, levitating it over the porch railing. It spun slowly, a compass needle searching for true North.

The broad, covered porch that wrapped the first floor of the Conley estate had spectacular views of Santa Pasa’s historic downtown on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. I would never have guessed the ornate Queen Anne, now a cheery year-round bed and breakfast, to be a likely candidate for a haunted house. Over a hundred years old and not a sign of a squeaky floorboard or a rattling cupboard. The spoon tumbled over the side and into the Bougainvillea. The disappearing silverware may have been troublesome for the owners, however.

“I thought they hid all the spoons,” I said.

The ghost of Samuel Langhorne Clemens dropped into one of the white wicker chairs that circled the porch and patted his coat pocket. “And so they did.” He extracted a cigar from somewhere in the depths of his white serge jacket. “Why, if I hadn’t had such a powerful sense of direction, not to mention the fortitude and presence of mind to watch while they hid them, I might never have found them.”

He had found me, too. I couldn’t remember how; I couldn’t remember where. I wasn’t even sure he’d done me a favor in doing it.

From where I stood I could look down the thirty feet of limestone cliff to where Ocean Street turned back across the railroad tracks and slid to a halt above Lifesaver Beach. It stretched empty now, pulpy strands of seaweed marking where high tide slowly nibbled away the summer sand. A vee of pelicans dipped low above the town pier and passed over two bright orange sea kayaks paddling out through rising swells.

In the six years I had spent on the lifeguard chairs in my red swimsuit and white nose block, I had rescued more than three dozen people who had underestimated the surf or the undertow. The first summer, after rescue number seven, I had painted out three letters on the warning sign at the back of my tall chair. Ever after it was known as “Lifesa” Beach. Wasn’t that the truth. Death hadn’t turned out to be much better.

I settled tentatively into a chair next to Sam.

“Didn’t fall through the chair, again, I see,” he said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke.

“Aren’t ghosts supposed to be able to walk through walls? And if you can walk through a wall, why don’t you fall through the floor or the furniture?”

“Did you expect the physical laws of the universe to be repealed simply because your body wasn’t using them anymore?”

“Well, yes, actually. Or ... I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Really? Insightful.” Sam propped his feet up on a wicker footstool and leaned back, rolling his cigar between thumb and forefinger.

“Can we?”

“Can we what?”

“Walk through walls, float, moan in an eerie voice, rattle chains ... you know, all the scary things ghosts do.”

“Am I to presume you have personal experience of such events?”

“No,” I admitted. “I’ve never really seen a ghost.” He blinked at me. “Before. I mean, assuming that’s what we are. It’s not true?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Anything is possible.”

“Now who isn’t clear?” I threw my arms across my chest and then realized I must look like I was pouting. “Damn.” He squinted one eye at me. “What are we? Where are we? What happened to me?” I held up my hands. Neither was transparent and I still had the scar on my thumb from the knife that had almost severed my tendon. “I don’t look like a ghost. I don’t feel like a ghost. I can’t do anything a ghost is supposed to be able to do. How do I know I really am dead and not lying in a coma somewhere? Ghosts don’t fit into what I know of how the universe operates. What happened to the conservation of energy? What happened to Newton’s Laws?”

“Didn’t know he’d lost them.” Sam waved off my retort. “So many questions, each with answers far from simple. Suppose you were looking to make a fortune in silver, what would you do? Well, you’d go where the silver is. How would you get there? How would you even know where it was? One step at a time. Your body is gone but you are not. Believe that first.

“You can learn to do much of anything you desire. It takes considerable practice, though, and not a small amount of effort.” He looked up at the white bead-board ceiling. “You play a musical instrument?”

I took a deep breath and shifted mental gears. “Guitar," I said finally.

“Come naturally, did it? Picked it up one day, and you were on your way to Carnegie Hall?” He raised one bushy white eyebrow over dark and lively eyes.

“No. Practice, practice, practice. I get it.”

“Well, then," he said as if that explained everything. Another spoon appeared over the railing, did a somersault and tumbled down the steps. "If you’ve got the time and energy, you can do most anything, though I don’t know why you’d want to. If we were supposed to work so hard after we died, we wouldn’t have been ‘laid to rest.’ ”

Before I could consider a reply, Grant strode around the corner of the porch, his greatcoat billowing behind him. He tossed his broad-brimmed cavalry hat on an end table and commandeered a nearby chair. He didn’t fall through either.

“Morning, Sam,” he said, giving me a nod as well. “Miss Maggie.”

“Why, so it is, General,” Sam said as if taking notice of his surroundings for the first time. “It is good of you to bring it to my attention.”

Grant set a spoon on the table. "This is yours, I presume."

Sam settled back in his chair. "Ah, indeed.” The spoon spun off for the bushes.

Was this all a delusion? Could I have dreamed these men up? I knew a little of their relationship: General Ulysses S. Grant and Samuel Clemens had become close after Sam had volunteered to publish Grant’s memoirs shortly before his death in 1885. When Sam passed away twenty-five years later, the former Union general and 18th President was waiting for him. Grant said Sam had immediately wanted to know who, then, was buried in Grant’s tomb?

I wanted to believe they were real because I wanted to believe that I was still real. Had my death been real? Charley’s had seemed frighteningly genuine.

“Did you find him?” I asked.

Grant ran a hand over his beard. “No.” He looked younger than his picture on the money, but his eyes were a hundred years older. He spoke softer than I had expected for a former Commander-in-Chief, and, in his boots, only stood as tall as my eyebrows. Yet he walked and talked ten feet taller.

“Is he dead then?” I asked.

Sam raised his eyebrows.

“I mean, I know he’s dead. Died. But is he... ” I made a swirling motion with my hands as words failed me.

“Dead?” Sam said.

“Sometimes, Mr. Clemens,” Grant said, “you are less than helpful.” He turned to me, pausing to craft an answer. “He may only be running for a time.”

“Running?”

“I don’t know a better word. He’s here, but he’s not. Running away from what he doesn’t understand.”

Sam moved his hand in a grand gesture that encompassed the earth, the sea and the sky. “He’s trying to escape from an event as certain as taxes and far more permanent. And more painful.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t suppose you have any idea where you, yourself, have been these last months?”

“Months?” I told him I vaguely remembered going out for a walk and ending up downtown.

“You’ve been gone most of six weeks altogether,” Grant said. “In and out. We were worried.”

I had no recollection of the missing time. It felt like the clocks had jumped ahead without me. Dreams, of course, worked like that. The wind off the ocean carried with it the smell of brine and wood smoke and the color blue. “But Charley…” I said. “He’s still here somewhere?”

“Somewhere,” Grant said.

Sam sighted down his cigar. “Or nowhere at all. Not only nowhere but nowhen. But don’t take my word for it.” He turned to Grant. “That professor fellow…”

Grant balanced one boot heel on the toe of the other. “Einstein.” He looked at me. “You know who he is … was … I presume.”

“Duh,” I said.

 “I will consider that a yes. If I remember what he said correctly, time is, well, tricky.”

Sam huffed. “ ‘Not an inviolate cohabitant of space’ is how he put it. I’ve navigated Mississippi River mud clearer than that man’s metaphors. Why, anyone who has ever fallen in love or sat on a hot stove can tell you that time isn’t always what it seems.”

“I think what he meant,” Grant said, “was that, while we occupy the same space—the same world—as the living, the time we spend in it is more ... flexible. Your friend wasn’t able to deal with his death—understandable under the circumstances—so he ran. He is not only running from the place of his death. He is running from the time of it, as well.”

“Like you,” Sam said.

“Like me,” I said. It was the best retort I had. I was feeling exceptionally dense, and I must have looked it.

“Sadly, when you run,” Grant said, “time does not pass for you. You return with no resolution. The same fear. The same pain.”

“The unluckiest,” Sam said, staring at the embers of his cigar, “are stuck in a loop ... appearing at a window, climbing stairs, haunting halls, endlessly reliving the same moments over and over. Those are the ones the living see:  those whose pain is so deep they can’t move on and yet are so centered on their own anguish they have no way of getting back.”

“This place between ... " Grant said, encompassing the porch, Santa Pasa, and the rest of the known universe with the sweep of a finger. “It’s strange, I know. New and frightening, perhaps.”

Sam leaned forward in his chair and put his hand on mine. “You hope you’ll wake up, and it will have been a bad dream. After a hundred years, I can assure you it is not. We can help, if you’ll let us. But we can’t make your grief vanish; only time can do that.”

I looked first at Grant, then Sam. “Why me? Us? What are we even doing in this place?” Maybe it wasn’t a question with an answer, but I felt the universe owed me one. “Why aren’t I… just dead?”

Sam peered at me curiously for a moment. “Make no mistake, Miss Maggie. This is no regular stop on life’s journey. You’ve been thrown off the train, and it’s not coming back. As for the reason? An unexpected death—sudden and traumatic—is a common cause.”

“Unexpected?”

His eyes were rifle-steady on mine. “You don’t remember how we found you?”

I shook my head.

“Well, in time.” His gaze drifted into the abyss beyond the ashes of his cigar. “Once you can tell if it’s a cow.”

 “What about Charley?” I asked.

Sam’s fingers rippled a tattoo on his knee. “You said it was his heart. You’re certain?” I nodded, remembering Charley screaming, stretched out on his toes. So real. So much pain. “Odd,” Sam said, “that you heard him, then. Odder that he ended up here … natural causes being the case.”

“Not totally unheard of,” Grant said cocking his head toward Sam. “As I recall.”

“There are always issues,” Sam said into a swirl of smoke. “Have no fear, Miss Maggie; he’ll be back.”

Of course he would, I thought. Where else was there to go?