Heather frowned. “This early?”
“Well, ah…” Martin glanced at Sue.
“Julia sent her to us,” Vivien said. “Sue’s cool.”
“Someone confronted her about talking to an empty desk,” Martin said. “I guess she was calling it the name of some classmate who died a few years ago before we moved here. Some of the kids took offense and threw a book at Jan. She’s fine, just a little bruised. They thought it best I pick her up.”
“Bring her here,” Heather said. “We’ll talk to her.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” Martin gave Heather another kiss before rushing out the door.
“Poor Jan,” Heather said.
“Poor Martin,” Vivien added. “None of this can be easy for him.”
“Is Jan a troublemaker?” Sue asked.
“No, she’s just having a little trouble telling the difference between ghosts and livies,” Vivien said.
“Livies?” Sue frowned.
“Alive people,” Vivien said.
Sue thought maybe she was supposed to laugh, but their expressions didn’t change. “Ghosts?”
“You know you have one stuck to you, right? That is why you came to us,” Vivien stated.
Sue quickly looked around. Fear prickled the back of her neck. “No. That’s not real. The accident. I have a head injury. The doctor said I…”
“Viv, come on, a little tact,” Heather scolded.
“Trust me. Blunt is better, like pulling off the supernatural bandage really fast. Get the sting over with so we can get down to business.” Vivien arched a brow toward Sue. When Sue didn’t answer, Vivien lifted her shirt to show a bruise on her side. “Look familiar?”
Sue looked at the ring on her hand. Her finger tingled. “Hank?”
Had Hank done something to Vivien? How was that possible? She had been at his funeral. They buried him. If ghosts were real and not a hallucination caused by the accident, why didn’t more people know about them? Scientists would have said something. News of sightings would have erupted all over the internet—not just stupid light reflected dust particles people tried to call spirit orbs.
“Hank? Was that your husband?” Heather asked.
Sue nodded. “I smell him sometimes, his cologne, for no reason. I even replaced my pillows, but it’s like he’s coming into the room and laying down next to me. And then I started tasting him.”
“Tasting him?” Vivien repeated. “You mentioned your mouth being cursed.”
Lorna appeared quietly next to Vivien in the doorway, listening.
“I taste what he used to taste like after he’d been drinking and smoking, which had been almost every night.” Sue took a deep breath. Why was she telling them this? “Everything I put into my mouth, whether it’s water, a sandwich, a cookie, it tastes wrong and burns when I swallow.”
Vivien dropped her shirt to cover the bruise.
“Did I… bump you when I fell?” Sue had been so tired when she arrived. She remembered falling and them discussing moving her to a bedroom.
“Lorna transferred the injury from you to me,” Vivien said.
Sue remembered Lorna touching her when she was on the floor. Relief had come over her at contact. Her aches had lessened, and the hunger pangs had gone away.
“I’m a healer,” Lorna explained. “Really that just means I can transfer illness from person to person. I know it sounds strange. Honestly, I’m getting used to it myself, but when I was trying to help you yesterday, that bruise moved from your side to Vivien’s.”
“I didn’t have a bruise yesterday.” Sue touched her side.
“Uh, yes, you did.” Vivien gestured at her waist. “How else did I get this?”
“The last time I had a bruise-like that was months ago. It took a while to fade after the accident, but…” Sue shook her head. Was she having this conversation? Her side still ached sometimes, a residual pain that echoed in her memory, but the bruise had been long gone. “Is this some kind of—I don’t know—a bad reality television show? Tease the new widow? Scare the stranger?”
“I know it’s a lot to accept,” Lorna said. “It was for me. I can promise you, though, that this isn’t some kind of sick prank. When I summoned my husband back from the dead, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was so angry with him. I needed to give him a piece of my mind.”
“Did he hurt you?” Sue hugged her arms to her waist in a protective gesture.
Lorna nodded. “After he died, I found out Glenn had another wife. I was his second.”
“She was a piece of trashy work, too,” Vivien muttered. At Lorna’s glance, Vivien shrugged. “What? She was.”
“His first wife was legally entitled to inherit everything, and my kids and I were left with practically nothing.” Lorna had a sweetness to her, a soft-spoken natural goodness that was easy to see in everything she did. “The only good thing was that the kid’s college tuition was all taken care of, so they at least got to keep that much. I couldn’t take all the gossip about it, so I decided to move here to take a job at Heather’s theater. That’s when I found Julia’s ring, or rather when it found me.”
“Lorna is too nice to say it, but her ex was a real asshat, emphasis on the asshole,” Vivien stated. “We sent Glenn’s spectral ass packing.”
“The point is, thanks to Julia’s help, I was able to get closure,” Lorna corrected.
“And she started dating Mr. William Warrick.” Vivien grinned.
“Warrick?” Sue glanced at Heather.
“Yep, my brother.” Heather sat on the arm of the couch and crossed her arms over her chest. “Though I’m not sure that had anything to do with the ring.”
“Thanks to the rings, Vivien was able to say goodbye to her first husband, Sam. We found a message in a bottle from him buried at the beach,” Lorna continued. “And Heather was able to say goodbye to someone as well.”
Sue waited for them to elaborate on Heather, but they didn’t. They stared at her expectantly. She refused to speak.
“We can help you,” Lorna said at length. “There is a way we can bring the dead to us to talk.”
Were they insane? She didn’t want to call Hank back from the dead for a conversation. Summoning a demon from the depths of hell sounded like more fun. A devil would probably get less pleasure out of kicking the shit out of her too. “I don’t want to say goodbye to anyone. I don’t want to confront anyone. I just want to be left alone. I want the hallucinations to stop.”
“Sometimes confronting them is the only way to get them to leave you alone. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘I know you’re there. You’re dead. Leave me alone.’ And sometimes it…” Vivien rubbed her temple and closed her eyes tight. She made a strange noise in the back of her throat. Then, almost dramatically, she whispered, “Oh my god, please tell me that it wasn’t as bad as all that.”
“What?” Heather rushed to Vivien. “What are you sensing?”
Vivien’s demeanor had changed. The feistiness of her personality left her. When she opened her eyes, they were moist. She slowly shook her head. “Tell me he didn’t do that to you. Not with a bottle.”