Page 11 of Dead to Rites

In fact, according to a few things I’d heard from my parents, Hazel hadn’t ever gotten frail the way so many people did if they were lucky enough to reach their nineties. She’d been puttering along the same way she had for the past thirty years, and she’d just gone to sleep one night and never woken up.

We should all be that lucky.

Once the coffee was ready, however, and I was blowing onto its surface to cool it enough so I could drink some, she spoke again.

“It runs in the family, you know,” she said, as if picking up a conversation we’d dropped some time earlier. “This gift for seeing those who’ve passed, I mean. Sometimes it skips a generation, but it always surfaces eventually. It has to be triggered, though. The person with the gift has to have a brush with death to wake the talent.”

“That’s why you made that comment about the bee,” I replied, then risked a swallow of coffee, knowing I needed the caffeine to keep me going through this conversation. It was still a little too hot, but not so much that it burned my tongue.

She nodded. “Yes. In my case, I nearly drowned in Watson Lake when I was nineteen. It was monsoon season, and the wind picked up and the boat capsized.”

“Yikes,” I said, and sipped some more coffee.

A shrug that seemed almost careless. Today her twinset was pale pink, but she was still wearing the same Rose Petal lipstick as the day before. “I survived.” She paused before adding, “We should go into the library.

“The library?” I echoed, nonplussed.

“Follow me.”

When a ghost tells you to follow them, you should usually do what they say.

So I trailed after her into the library, where she went to the bookcase on the far wall and pointed at one of the middle shelves. “Take out Birds of North America.”

Still mystified, I went to the shelf in question and pulled out the book she’d indicated. “You want me to take up birding?”

Not even a hint of a smile. “Open it.”

I did as directed…and realized that the center of the book had been hollowed out. Inside was a thick leather notebook. I sent Hazel a questioning glance, and she nodded.

“Those are my notes about the ghosts I’ve encountered, the rules I’ve worked out about those of us who can see ghosts, the history of the family gift.”

The notebook was heavier than I’d expected. Its leather was soft and dark, as if it had been handled for decades…which I supposed it had…and the pages were dense with handwriting in half a dozen different inks.

“Don’t read it straight through,” Hazel told me. She was still standing a few feet away. The big diamond winked on her finger the way it always had, and I had to remind myself that she was dead, that I’d stood by her graveside in Mountain View Cemetery just two weeks earlier and watched her black, shiny coffin — a coffin that had seemed far too large for the small woman inside — get lowered into the ground. “You’ll give yourself a headache if you try to get through it all at once. Dip in when you have questions. The index in the back is fairly good, although I’ll warn you I got lazy about updating it in the nineties.”

Since I wasn’t sure what else to do, I took the journal back into the kitchen and sat down at the table there, coffee nearby and Chauncey draped across my feet. After a much-needed swallow of French roast, I opened the journal to the first page. The handwriting there looked younger than what I’d seen farther on — rounder, less confident — and was dated 1948.

I am nineteen years old, and I’ve apparently inherited something that nobody told me about. My mother found me crying on the porch this morning and explained, more or less, what has happened to me. I’m writing this because she said I should, and because she said her mother told her to write everything down. I suppose there’s some reason for it.

I looked up from the journal. “Your mother knew.”

A hint of a shrug. “Yes, she knew. She sat me down the morning after I nearly drowned in Watson Lake and explained the whole business in about forty-five minutes, and then she made me tomato soup and told me to get on with my life.” She crossed her arms, and the diamond glinted again, sending sharp little rainbows across the dolomite countertops. “She was a practical woman. I miss her.”

I turned a few more pages. They contained entries about Hazel seeing her first ghost — an older man who’d died in a hotel downtown — along with notes on what he could and couldn’t do, what he seemed to remember, what he didn’t.

“So the gift runs in the family,” I said.

“Through the women who show it, yes,” she replied. “But that’s different from where it comes from.”

She paused there, and I waited. Something about the way her lips pursed told me she had plenty more she wanted to say, and even though I wanted to hear it, I hoped she’d be able to get through it all before Celeste wandered downstairs in search of coffee. Obviously, I didn’t have to worry about my friend seeing my dead great-aunt, but it might be a little awkward if she saw me talking to thin air.

“The gift manifests in women,” Hazel continued, “but it travels through everyone. Men can carry it their entire lives and never know. They can’t manifest it themselves — for whatever reason, the talent that allows a person to see and talk to ghosts appears only in us — but a man can pass it to his daughter just as surely as his sister could pass it to hers. My brother — your grandfather — certainly carried it. He wouldn’t have believed in ghosts any more than he believed in the tooth fairy, but he was carrying the thing all the same. He passed it to your father. And your father passed it to you.”

I stared at her, trying to process the fact that my father, the high-dollar personal-injury lawyer whose face had been plastered on billboards over half the Phoenix metro area, had borne some kind of supernatural gene the entire time. “You’re saying my father carried this?”

“Carried it, yes,” Hazel replied. “Of course, he didn’t know anything about it, and he couldn’t have used it even if he had. But yes.”

This seemed like a good time to take a break and have some coffee, so I lifted my mug and allowed myself an oversized gulp. It was starting to turn lukewarm, but I didn’t care. Right then, it was the effect I craved, not the flavor. “My father would have laughed his ass off if I tried to tell him I could see ghosts.”