Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

certainly plied the three members of The Dead Old Ladies Detective Agency, as the trio of ghostly busybodies who reside in the cemetery down the street from my house refer to themselves, with more than my fair share of nosy questions.

Peter reappeared about two minutes later, looking stricken. “You went home, didn’t you?” I asked, walking over to him. I didn’t try to touch him, wouldn’t have been any point to that, but just stood close by so he could know there was somebody there who cared about his hurt.

“It was awful,” he said. “Gloria is just sitting on the couch bawling, and little Maybelle is sitting next to her patting her mama on the leg and telling her it’ll be okay. She ain’t but nine. That child don’t have a single idea what’s going on; she’s just mimicking what she saw somebody else do one time. I heard Jeremy in his room throwing stuff around and yelling cuss words he don’t know the meaning of. Or at least he better not. He’s six, and I reckon I should have watched my mouth around him more. Oh, Jesus, how could I do this to them?”

He dropped to his knees and buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking with big, heaving sobs. I didn’t try to say nothing, because there wasn’t nothing to say. He was dead, and the people that he left behind suddenly had a Peter-shaped hole in their hearts and lives, and it was going to take some of them a long time to learn how to fill it, if they ever did. As cold as it sounds, the living weren’t my concern right at the moment. My work is with the dead, and with helping them find some kind of peace. And the first step on Peter Smalls finding peace was in him losing his shit on the side of the highway in the middle of the night. At least he didn’t have to worry about getting grass stains on his khakis.

After a few minutes, he pulled himself together and looked up at me. He was still down on his knees, so I got the full view of his bald spot as he lifted his head. “What now?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I reckon we try to figure out why you’re hanging around so we can get you some rest.” I covered my mouth as I yawned. “But first, and I do apologize for this, but I ain’t as young as I once was, so I have got to get some sleep.” I thought for a minute, then nodded. “Do you know the Red Hot gas station on the side of the highway right before you get into Lockhart?”

“Yeah, they’ve got good tater wedges,” he said with a smile that fled as he realized he didn’t get to eat tater wedges anymore.

“Meet me there tomorrow morning about nine o’clock. I’m going to get some sleep, and when I get up in the morning, I’ll get Willis to call and find out if they’ve done an autopsy on you yet. You said you were drinking on a Sunday, which might keep you out of Baptist Heaven, but depending on how much, might also create enough guilt to make your spirit linger.”

“I had two beers! I wasn’t drunk, I swear to God.” He looked around. “Wait, is God real? Should I not say that now?”

“There’s plenty of people who say you shouldn’t have ever been saying it, but I’m not going to judge. I’ve been at the top of a whole lot of people’s Most Likely to Go to Hell lists for nigh on sixty years, so if I don’t think a little necromancy is going to damn me, I don’t see why saying God’s name should damn you. As for if he’s real, well…I believe so. I don’t have any insider information, and I expect you’re more likely to have that than I am nowadays, but I’ve always believed there’s something bigger than us out there, and talking to a whole lot of ghosts over a whole lot of years hasn’t done anything to change that. Now I’m going to go get some rest, and tomorrow we’ll start working on getting you some, too.”

He stood up and gave me a sad little half-smile. I could see the tracks of light his ethereal tears made down his cheeks. He said, “Thank you, Lila Grace. I’m gonna go watch over my wife and children, like I should have been doing all along. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then he vanished, a sad little man going home to watch the family he left behind begin to learn what a world without him looked like.

At nine the next morning I pulled my beat-up old pickup into the parking lot of the Red Hot gas station and looked around for the deceased Mr. Smalls. He stood over by the door and smiled at me when I pulled into a parking spot right in front of him. Peter walked over to the passenger door and reached for the handle, looking confused when his hand passed right through it. Then he just stepped into the truck and sat down next to me.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” he said. “How come I can sit on the seat of the truck and not fall through it?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Some of my friends that have spent a lot more time than me wondering about such things believe that it has to do with how you think the world should behave. You think ghosts should be able to walk through things like car doors, so you can. But you also think you should be able to ride in a car, so you can do that, too.”

“What if I stop believing the car will hold me?” he asked.

“I’d rather you not do that until we get where we’re going. I don’t want to deal with you figuring out how