Gone But Not Forgotten Read online

  But then he didn’t do anything with it, just stood there like a porter at a hotel, protecting the luggage.

  Honey poked her head out the door. “Bring the suitcase in, sweetie. Bring it to Mama.”

  “Mama,” Jeremy echoed. He lifted the suitcase and carried it right up the stairs and inside.

  I could hardly believe it. The last time I saw the boy, if you handed him a grocery bag full of potato chips to carry, he dropped it on the ground and looked at you like you’d asked him to eat rats.

  Maybe Honey hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said Jeremy had improved. But as far as I was concerned, lugging one suitcase did not erase Jeremy’s Demon Child status. Not yet. I’d seen him compliant before. It lasted about ten minutes. Maybe this was his ten minutes for today.

  “Take it upstairs,” Honey ordered the boy as he entered the kitchen where she and Bert now sat holding one baby apiece. Casting the babies a wary glance, he trudged right to the stairs. At least he wasn’t frowning at them anymore, probably because they weren’t crying. They were happily sucking down formula in the arms of their aunt and uncle.

  As he disappeared up the stairs, Honey turned to Bert. “Did you fix up the room for the twins?”

  “Did it last night. I moved the rocking chair from Jeremy’s room into the babies’, and I brought his old baby bed down from the attic. Until we can get an extra crib, they’ll have to sleep in the same one.”

  Honey stared down at Anna, who bore her usual Ah-the-joys-of-the-bottle expression. Honey’s eyes grew suspiciously moist. “I never thought we’d get to use that old baby bed again.”

  “Me either.”

  The wealth of emotion in those two words brought me up short. Honey had once told me that she and Bert had decided not to have more children after Jeremy was diagnosed, because Jeremy was all they could handle. Bert had even gotten himself fixed.

  It had never occurred to me that the choice had been hard. Or that maybe they had even come to regret it. They sure did seem happy to have my darling girls in their home.

  “Do you think they’ll be okay sleeping upstairs in the guest room?” Bert asked.

  No way! I shouted. Jeremy’s room was upstairs, and Honey’s and Bert’s was downstairs. So who was going to protect my darlings from the Demon Child?

  “They’ll be all right for one night,” Honey said.

  “Sorry I didn’t have enough time to get that extra room down here cleared out,” Bert said. “With the weather turning so cold, the furnace started acting up again. I had to work on it half the morning.”

  The scowl crossing Honey’s genial features looked surprisingly like her son’s. “I told you to hire someone to fix it.”

  “I’ve got it figured out this time. It wasn’t that hard, really.”

  “Now, Bert—“

  “Knock, knock.”

  Honey frowned, but still said, “Who’s there?”

  “Don.”

  “Don who?”

  “Don’cha know I love you?”

  A laugh sputtered out of Honey. “That has to be the worst one you ever told.”

  He grinned. “It made you laugh.”

  “I’m so tired right now, I’d laugh at a monkey picking its nose.”

  “What a visual.”

  “It’s all your fault—you’re the one who taught me that gross-out humor is better than none at all.”

  “And knock-knock jokes.”

  She snorted. “Did you get that baby monitor from Jayne?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Then the babies will be all right upstairs tonight. We’ll clean out the downstairs room tomorrow.”

  Amy was fighting the bottle, and Bert stared at her in typical male confusion. “The girl hasn’t drunk very much for sounding so hungry.”

  “She needs to be burped.” Honey arched one blond eyebrow. “Think you remember how to do that?”

  Bert lifted the baby to his shoulder with a sigh. “This will take some getting used to, won’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Honey said as she hefted her own baby up to burp her.

  Bert looked thoughtful as he patted the baby’s back. “Do you think we made a mistake, offering to take them? Do you think we can handle them?”

  I tensed, not sure what answer I was hoping for. If Honey and Bert didn’t keep the babies, I wouldn’t have to worry about Jeremy. On the other hand, my husband had been an orphan, and whenever he talked about what that had been like, I knew I didn’t want that for my children.

  Besides, how many people would be willing to adopt twins? An adoption agency might have to separate the babies—would I really want that over having them grow up with Honey and Bert?

  “It’s like you said,” Honey replied after a moment, “if we could handle Jeremy, the twins will be a piece of cake.”

  Yes, but could they handle both Jeremy and the twins? That’s what worried me.

  I was just starting to relax and drift off, half-consciously, toward the white light, when I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. Jeremy was back. Oh, no. That jerked my tether tight.

  The boy entered the kitchen and stood waiting until he got his mother’s attention. When she looked at him, he flicked his hand toward the refrigerator.

  Honey glanced at the clock. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. It’s way past your dinner time, isn’t it?”

  “Dinner time,” Jeremy said solemnly, and flicked his hand again, with more urgency.

  “Sit down. I think Anna’s done eating anyway.” Honey looked over at Bert, but Amy, the slower eater, was still sucking on her bottle. So Honey took Anna and headed over to where Jeremy had dropped into one of the ancient kitchen chairs once belonging to our mother.

  “Would you like to hold the baby?” she asked Jeremy.

  No! I screamed, so loudly I nearly splattered my ethereal self on the ceiling.

  Jeremy merely repeated, “hold the baby,” which was just as likely to mean, “Go fix my dinner, woman,” as “I’d love to hold my cousin, thank you.”

  But Honey, who should have known better, still bent and pressed Anna up against Jeremy’s chest, then placed his arms in position around the baby. “Hold tight now, sweetie,” she ordered him, and he squeezed the baby hard enough to startle her into a cry.

  “Not that hard,” Honey said hastily. “Gently. Gently.”

  Meanwhile, I was doing the dance of the dead—hopping from one ghostly foot to the other while trying not to go insane over the prospect of my sweet darling being squeezed lifeless by the Demon Child.

  He relaxed his grip, but leveled a severe frown on the crying Anna. For some reason, she found that humorous. Anna always did have fun with faces. She not only stopped crying, but started patting his cheek.

  “Good job,” Honey told Jeremy as she went off to make dinner.

  Jeremy looked skeptical, however. As Anna’s little fingers batted at his mouth, he inched his head back farther and farther until he was bending his neck at an unnatural angle to avoid the baby’s touch.

  I laughed in spite of everything. Maybe Jeremy was just as wary of Anna as I was of him. The twins were a lot like him, after all. They couldn’t talk, they expressed their emotions at an obnoxious volume, and they flailed about and put their hands where they didn’t belong without rhyme or reason.

  But they couldn’t hurt him. And he could sure hurt them. In fact, Anna now had her tiny grip on his lip and was yanking it like she yanked the arm of her Ernie doll. When Jeremy opened his mouth and I saw those teeth of his, I threw myself at him, screaming. Then flew right through him, which did no good whatsoever.

  Before I could even come back around to try again, however, Honey had returned to whisk the baby from Jeremy, apparently not even noticing that her deadly son had been about to make a meal out of m
y poor child’s fingers.

  “Okay, your pizza pockets are in the oven,” she told him cheerily. Jeremy’s diet consisted of two things—pizza pockets and burgers. And probably baby fingers. “I’ll be back to get them out in a minute. Your dad and I are taking the babies upstairs to bed.”

  I went with them. Not that I had much choice. I could wander a little away from the babies, but not very far, not if I didn’t want to get sucked into the light. I’d figured that out pretty quickly. And going to the light just wasn’t an option right now, not until I’d hit upon a way to alert Honey to the dangers of Jeremy.

  Yes, that’s what I needed to do—send her a message. My Baptist sister would never attend a séance, but maybe I could spell out a message in refrigerator magnets or something.

  What I needed was advice from other ghosts about how to haunt the living. Too bad I hadn’t run into any other ghosts. I wish I had. We could have formed a support group—Dead People Anonymous. I wouldn’t even have minded being the first to stand up in the front and say, “My name is Sunny Ross, and I’m a dead person.”

  But I was on my own.

  I HAD SPENT THE last few hours experimenting. While Honey and Bert put the babies to bed, I tried moving the rocking chair. No good. It sat there. When Honey headed back downstairs to get out the pizza pockets, I tried blocking her on the stairs. No dice. I listened in when Mayor Walker called on the phone. I heard Bert tell her the babies were doing great. I tried to shout my opinion to the mayor. Didn’t work.

  And later, as Honey prepared Jeremy for bed, helping him bathe, drying him off, brushing his teeth, I tried sitting on the toothpaste. If I could only write a word or two in toothpaste . . .

  Nope, didn’t work, either. This being a ghost got more and more annoying by the moment.

  Honey put Jeremy to bed, then went back downstairs to join Bert, who was already in bed himself. Thank goodness they were both tired—I didn’t know how I’d handle watching my sister and her husband make love. And I would have watched, too, if there was any chance it would make them notice me.

  As they drifted off to sleep, I made one last attempt to reach her. If I could somehow appear in Honey’s dreams, maybe I could tell her how I felt about Jeremy being around the babies.

  But how does somebody appear in another person’s dream? I flew through her head a couple of times, I tried whispering in her ear, I even danced in front of the bed like a fool. Honey snored, that’s all. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t dreaming about me. And how could I know if I’d succeeded anyway?

  Still, I had to keep trying. I was in the middle of a particularly creative maneuver, sort of a charades for ghosts, when I heard a noise on the baby monitor. The twins were stirring. They didn’t usually eat in the middle of the night, but with Cam and me being dead, their schedule was off.

  I looked at Bert and Honey. They didn’t move. Honey had always been a sound sleeper, but she ought to hear my babies. Soon Amy and Anna were launched into full-fledged wail mode. Bert and Honey roused a little, then turned over and continued to sleep.

  That’s when Jeremy appeared, apparently bothered by the noise. Thank heaven he hadn’t done anything about it, like try to silence the babies. Instead, he approached the bed and nudged his mom. Honey snorted a bit, but didn’t wake. Geez, couldn’t they hear that racket?

  Jeremy frowned, then went to his father’s side and nudged him. Nothing. Bert was sleeping like the dead, no pun intended.

  I watched in a panic as Jeremy headed back upstairs. I flew after him, praying that he’d go straight back to his room, but oh no, he trudged right into the babies’ room. He stared down at them a long moment. Then, to my horror, he picked them up awkwardly, holding one under each arm the way a quarterback would carry footballs, and headed down the stairs.

  Torn between flat-out terror and relief that he was bringing them to Honey, I followed along, sobbing ghostly tears. He narrowly missed banging their heads on the banister half a dozen times. By the time we’d reached the bottom, I was one simmering mass of ethereal rage, cursing him, cursing my sister, even cursing God for bringing me to this place where I couldn’t even take care of my babies.

  When Jeremy didn’t go toward Bert and Honey’s bedroom and instead headed out the door with the babies, I thought I’d explode all over the porch. I flew back to Honey and Bert and screamed at them. Get up! Get up! I yelled. All they did was snore.

  By the time I got back to Jeremy, he was halfway to the Blackshears’ house, crossing a pasture in the freezing cold, still carrying the weeping babies slung under each arm. Oh, no. He was headed for that blasted pond—he was going to drown my babies!

  You have never seen a ghost go so nuts in all your life. I was like a whirling dervish, flying in and out of Jeremy, screaming at God, crying soundless, waterless tears.

  Then Jeremy walked past the pond. That brought me up short. What in heaven’s name was the boy doing? He reached Hank and Casey’s house, then trudged up onto their porch. For half a minute, I thought maybe he was planning to rock the twins in the porch swing. But that was an idiotic idea—if he’d wanted to rock them, there was a rocking chair in their room.

  Instead, he plopped them down on the porch on their backs. I gasped. All right, so he hadn’t hurt them, but darn, it was cold out here and all they had on was their matching sleep suits. Did he mean to leave them here alone, their little arms flailing at the chill? They’d be dead by morning. Bad as I wanted to hold my babies, I didn’t want it to happen like that. No, indeed.

  But Jeremy didn’t leave. He opened the porch door and tried the door knob to the inner door. When it proved to be locked, he started kicking the door. And banging. And pressing the doorbell with his finger, over and over. I went from terror to relief, then back to terror in seconds. What if nobody was home?

  Thankfully, it wasn’t long before the porch light came on. Hank opened the door, his eyes still bleary with sleep. “Jeremy? What are you doing here? It’s nearly two in the morning!” Then he heard the crying and spotted the babies laid out on the porch like a pair of turtles knocked on their backs. “Oh, no, Jeremy, you can’t carry those babies out here like that. What’s got into you, son?”

  “Got into you, son,” Jeremy repeated dutifully. He watched as Hank rushed out and picked up the babies, one in each arm.

  Hank started back toward the door. “Come inside a minute, while I throw some clothes on and tell Casey what’s going on. Then we’ll call your Mom and Dad—”

  Jeremy blocked the door before Hank could go back in. Then he pushed Hank, hard enough to make him stagger back a step.

  I screamed. Hank just frowned. “Now stop that, Jeremy. You’re only making things worse. We’ve got to get these babies out of the cold.”

  Jeremy grunted, an almost primeval sound, then pushed him toward the steps. With his hands full of babies, Hank could only protest and back down the stairs. But Jeremy kept pushing, just enough to move him, but not enough to make him lose his balance. Hank finally gave up.

  “Okay, we’ll go over there now.” Hank grumbled the whole way. “Casey’s going to be frantic, wondering what’s going on. And couldn’t you even let me get a coat? Coldest night in Mossy Creek in a long time, and you’ve got to drag me out into it without a coat. It’s freezing out here.”

  Not for Jeremy. Honey had told me that the boy once dove into Hank’s pond in the dead of winter. When they’d fished him out, he wasn’t even shivering.

  But maybe he wasn’t completely immune to the cold, because now that he had Hank moving in the direction he wanted, he was walking so fast that even long-legged Hank was having trouble keeping up with him. As they approached the house, with the babies sobbing and Jeremy nearly running, Hank swore under his breath.

  “Your mother is going to have your hide for leaving the door open on a night like this, son.” Hank marched up the
stairs behind Jeremy, nearly running into him when the boy stopped short on the threshold.

  That’s when Hank’s expression changed. To my shock, he handed the babies to Jeremy. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He hurried into the kitchen where I heard him pick up the phone.

  At first, I was too preoccupied with hovering over my babies to notice what Hank was saying.

  Then his conversation filtered in through my fear. “It’s not too bad in the front of the house, Chief, but I’ve got to get to Honey and Bert. Just bring Doc, okay? The gas smells pretty strong the further you get into the house. Thank God Jeremy left the door open.”

  The truth hit me then. Why Honey and Bert hadn’t roused. And Bert had said something about the furnace . . . The furnace, of course! It must have a leak.

  I began to quiver. Some guardian I was. I couldn’t even tell when there was a gas leak, when my babies were about to die. But Jeremy could, bless his heart.

  Moments later, Hank came out of the house, carrying Honey, and laid her on the porch. He took a few big breaths, held the last one, then went back in and got Bert. By the time Hank had emerged with my brother-in-law slung over his shoulder, the firemen and paramedics had arrived. As the fire chief rushed inside, a paramedic stayed behind to work on reviving Bert since Hank had already started on Honey.

  For the first time since my death, I paid no attention to my crying babies. I just kept watching the air over Honey and Bert, praying not to see a spirit. Because what would I do without them to watch over Amy and Anna? And what would Jeremy do without his mom and dad?

  Jeremy. I looked over at my nephew. The babies were practically screaming in his ears, and he just stood there stoically, his face contorted in a frown, his arms holding the babies tight, but gently, oh so gently. He kept his eyes fixed on Honey, and in them I saw worry.

  Suddenly, Honey coughed and sputtered a little and came awake. “What on earth—Hank, what are you—”

  “You’re very lucky to be awake, let me tell you,” Hank told her, “and you can thank your boy for that. He saved your life.” Bert roused beside Honey, mumbling about his head hurting, and Hank broke into a grin as he added, “Jeremy saved both your lives.”