Beautiful Dead Book 1 Read online

  “No, Darina.” Laura tried to get near me.

  “You’re putting words into her mouth,” Jim complained.

  I groaned and shook my head. What was the use? “I’m out of here,” I said.

  As I drove out to Deer Creek, the sun was high in the sky, baking the pink granite boulders to either side of the narrow road. A red kite soared on a wind current way overhead.

  Music for a dead friend—I could hear it from half a mile away, bouncing off those rocks beside the clear running water. Loud and metallic, banging to a heavy beat—Brandon’s taste, not Phoenix’s. So much so that I almost turned back.

  But other cars were coming up behind me. Kids revved their engines and leaned out of the windows, yelling for me to head on. “Let’s party!” “Drive, Darina, drive!”

  “This is so what Phoenix would want.” Some girls from our senior year at Ellerton High were sitting by the creek as I drew up and got out of my car. Water dripped from their clothes and hair, as if they’d swum fully dressed. “He wouldn’t be into black and all that grieving,” someone agreed. “He’d want us to have fun.”

  How do you know? Did you ever even talk to him? I walked right on past and went to say hi to Brandon.

  “You came,” he muttered, half raising his eyebrow. He’d taken off the funeral jacket he’d bought at Laura’s store and loosened his tie. His eyes looked heavy, as if he hadn’t slept in a week.

  I nodded. “This is unreal,” I said, glancing around at kids dancing in the open air. They acted like they always did—guys laid-back and cool, girls glitzy and flirty. Did it feel right? I was too unsettled to know.

  “It’s the way we say good-bye.” Brandon dipped into a big cooler and took out a can. He handed it to me. “Enjoy,” he muttered, sliding off to talk to some guys from one of the cars that had followed me up the track.

  The music thumped at my head as I went to sit on a rock overlooking the creek. I stared down into the clear water there for maybe ten minutes before Brandon came back and perched on the rock beside me.

  “So, Darina?”

  “So?”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Not good,” I confessed. “How’s your mom?”

  “Not good either. It’ll take her awhile.” He stared at the fast current. “She emailed Dad about what happened to Phoenix, but he didn’t reply.”

  “Where’s your dad living?” I knew from Phoenix that the Rohrs had split just after Zak was born and that there’d been zero contact since.

  “Europe somewhere. Germany, I guess. Maybe he changed his address. Anyhow, Mom never thought he’d make it to the funeral.”

  “That’s sad,” I murmured.

  “So what’s new?” Brandon stood up to toss his empty can into a trash bag then changed the subject. “You haven’t danced?”

  I shook my head.

  “Or been in the water.” Brandon clearly didn’t want me sitting there looking tragic and casting a cloud over the party.

  “Swimming I can probably do,” I conceded. The thought of jumping in and having the cold, deep water close over my head suddenly seduced me, so I stood up, teetered at the edge of the rock, then took a great leap.

  The cold shock of the water hit. I sank to the bottom and felt the current swirl around me, opened my eyes in the watery world of weeds and smooth rocks. For a few seconds I was weightless, drifting, rolling with the current. Then I pushed off from the bed of the creek and rose to the surface.

  I broke clear with a gasp and sucked in air, realizing that the water was rapidly carrying me downstream and that I hadn’t worked out an exit strategy.

  “Swim, Darina!” Jordan yelled from the bank. “For God’s sake, swim!”

  She was there with Logan and Hannah in an out-of-the-way place under some trees. I was being carried fast between the sheer rocks.

  I kicked hard against the current, just enough to stay level with Jordan and Hannah while Logan quickly threw off his shoes. But before he could act, I saw Brandon leap from rock to rock along the bank then dive in. He was downstream of me and I was losing strength, sliding toward Brandon, taking in gulps of water as I was sucked toward a massive boulder in midstream. I went under, down into the shadowy depths.

  As I gave into the tugging current, Brandon’s arm locked around my waist. He dragged me to the surface and swam strongly toward the weird boulder, hoisting me onto its dished surface then scrambling up after me.

  And there we were, me rescued from a near drowning, both stranded in the middle of the creek, crouching in the hollow of the scooped-out rock like two pygmies resting in the palm of a giant’s hand.

  I only went into therapy to keep Laura quiet.

  It was two days after Phoenix’s funeral and I still hadn’t slept. I wasn’t eating either, and she’d convinced herself that my incident at Deer Creek had been a secret cry for help.

  “Why did you have to tell her?” I’d asked Logan. He’d come around to my house the next day and I hadn’t wanted to talk to him. So he’d sat at the table with Laura and Jim instead, and they’d squeezed the whole story out of him—my plunge into the water, the way the current had caught hold of me, and how Brandon had played the hero. How the rest of the gang had taken a rope from one of their trucks and slung it across to the rock.

  “I don’t like the guy, don’t get me wrong,” Logan had said to my folks. “But Brandon definitely saved Darina. And it was him who came up with the idea of the rope. They used it to pull her onto the bank.”

  “My God, she’s suicidal!” Laura whispered to Jim that night after they went to bed. I could hear plainly through the paper-thin wall.

  “It’s worse than I thought,” he agreed.

  Next morning they got me an appointment with the local shrink.

  Her name was Kim Reiss. I went in at two thirty, gritting my teeth and knowing I wouldn’t like her.

  “Hey, Darina, take a seat,” she began. No psychiatrist’s couch, no big desk, no notebook. The room was light and plain: two comfy chairs, facing each other. The shrink had a quiet smile, high cheekbones, and a cute haircut. There was an inch-long scar down one cheek and I wondered about that. “Let me tell you about the method I use and see if you’re comfortable with it,” she went on.

  I sat down and stared out of the window, emphasizing that I wasn’t interested. I don’t even want to be here, I said with my whole body.

  “We use something called cognitive therapy,” Kim explained. “No deep psychoanalysis—we just focus in on what’s troubling you right now, this minute, and we work out practical strategies to handle it. Really simple, I promise.”

  I glanced at her. “My boyfriend got killed,” I said in a flat voice. Then I looked quickly out of the window again before she could make eye contact. Chew on that, why don’t you? my body said.

  She didn’t react. She waited.

  “He got killed, but I still see him.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Phoenix Rohr. He was in a fight. I was waiting for him out at Deer Creek, but he didn’t show up.” Why was I saying all this? I’d gone in there because Laura had prepaid for the session, period. “There was blood on the ground. He didn’t call me.”

  Kim was watching me, still waiting.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” I warned. “I’m sorry. You’re sorry. Everyone’s sorry.”

  “But you see him?” It was her second question, right on target.

  “You think I mean in my dreams, don’t you? People dream about the ones they’ve lost. I know that.”

  “Not in your dreams?” Kim prompted.

  “When I’m awake,” I insisted. “Awake as I am now. I see them all: Jonas, Arizona, Summer, and Phoenix. They’re really alive and beautiful. Not corpses.”

  “Ghosts?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “More solid. More real. They smile and talk. Scary Hunter takes care of them. They’re the Beautiful Dead.”

  Kim’s gaze didn’t waver. She didn’t seem to thin
k I was nuts. “You loved Phoenix?” she asked gently.

  “Totally. I can’t tell you.” He saw into my heart, I saw into his. Our guards were down, right from the first kiss. We were completely open.

  “You’re lost without him?”

  As I nodded, the tears spilled down my cheeks.

  “Words don’t cover grief,” Kim agreed. “We don’t have the vocabulary to express it fully. And what you’re experiencing is common—seeing Phoenix in the places you always saw him, as if he’s still here.”

  “What about places we never went?” I had in mind the old barn at Foxton, but I wasn’t ready to spill the beans about that.

  “That too,” she said. “Phoenix fills your head right now. He can pop up wherever you happen to be.”

  “And it seems totally real?” I checked. Maybe this was it after all—I was hallucinating like crazy because I was so grief-stricken. Not quite crazy, but drowning in sorrow.

  “Trauma is a tricky customer,” my new shrink explained. I was liking her after all. She wouldn’t need to hear about my relationship with Laura, or pry where she wasn’t welcome. “And it’s not unhealthy for you to be remembering Phoenix so vividly, so soon after his death.”

  “Thanks.” I fell silent then. What about Jonas, Arizona, and Summer? I wanted to ask. What about the sound of wings inside my head, the skull faces and Hunter giving me a look that could kill?

  “So I suggest you don’t stress too much about it, and meanwhile we talk in detail about how you should take care of yourself.”

  No pressure from my calm counselor then. I was grateful. I took a deep breath and dried my tears. We talked for a long time about rebuilding a pattern of healthy eating and sleeping, agreeing that I should come back in a week.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Darina,” Kim advised as I got up to leave. “Remember you’re human.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Be ready to share. Expect to break down and ask for help. There’s a whole lot of support out there.”

  I blinked then nodded.

  “Good. See you next Thursday. Make it four thirty.”

  Out in the waiting room, I almost walked right past Zoey in her wheelchair.

  “Why are you here?” I challenged when I spotted her. I didn’t mean it to sound so unfriendly.

  “Same question,” she shot back. “Are you going crazy like everyone else?”

  I hadn’t seen Zoey in almost a year. She looked totally different—much skinnier, and her blond hair had grown out to its natural brown. Then of course there was the wheelchair, plus the scared look in her dark eyes.

  “No, I’m cool,” I lied. “How’s it going with you?”

  Zoey shrugged. “They put steel plates in my legs. They fused my spine in two places so I can stand. I’m good.”

  It was so bad we smiled. “Zoey, I’m sor—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “OK.” There was a long gap then we both spoke. “I came to visit,” I told her.

  “I heard about Phoenix,” she said.

  “Lots of times,” I ignored her and rushed ahead. “After the accident, I came to the hospital. All the weeks you were in the coma I came to sit with you.”

  Zoey frowned. “They didn’t tell me.”

  “Then afterward, when you woke up, your dad wouldn’t let me come. He said you were too sick to have visitors.”

  “Listen—I don’t remember anything. I mean, really—nothing!”

  I was shocked. “But you know me?” I checked.

  “Sure, Darina. I remember the time before and most things since the crash. But right there, where the accident happened, there’s a black hole. That’s why I’m here—for PTSD.”

  Post-traumatic stress disorder. The thing that soldiers in war zones suffer from. It’s a neat label for crazy, violent stuff going on in the head.

  “Me too, I guess.” I almost told Zoey that I’d spotted Jonas mending a fence out at Foxton, but that would have been too stupid.

  “So will you start to visit again?” Zoey asked. She gave me a pleading look.

  “If your folks will let me.”

  “Pay no attention to what they say. Definitely come,” she said, pressing a button and steering her chair toward Kim’s opening door. “Talk to me about what happened, Darina. Help me to remember.”

  That night I had the same dream/nightmare/vision—call it what you like. I was deep asleep, fighting to stay there, but the death faces rushed at me, with their black eye sockets and yellow-white skulls. They whirled close and I shuddered awake. I sat in the darkness, listening to the storm of beating wings.

  Early the next morning I drove out to Foxton like a person possessed.

  I gripped the steering wheel and hunched over it, willing my crappy car to go faster up the hills, taking sharp bends with a squeal of tires, throwing up a spray of dirt as I left the paved road behind.

  I dumped the car by the stand of aspens and ran through the long grass toward the ridge. There was the tall water tower and the slope down to the house and barn. The rusted truck was still parked by the house and then the barn door banged shut.

  Stay away! said the wings in my head, like a huge flock of birds rising into the sky. Beyond crazy, I ignored them and ran down the hill past the recently mended fence toward the barn.

  At any moment I expected to see Hunter. He would stride out of the house and glare at me, send the skull heads rushing at me, scaring me half to death. Or he would be in the barn with the others—the women with the child, the young guy, and my fellow students from Ellerton High.

  But no one interrupted me as I slowed down by the house, which seemed empty, its windows grimy, paint flaking from the frames. The pale green door was firmly closed.

  I crept toward the door and turned the handle. It was locked. Stay away! Don’t come near!

  I peered through the nearest window and saw an old kitchen range and a bare table. A row of green and white plates was arranged on a dresser. A dusty iron kettle stood on the hob. Step through that locked door and you went back a hundred years. There was grit a century deep, a fire grate that hadn’t been lit for generations.

  Turning from the house, I crossed the yard and headed around the back of the barn. Down the side I noticed an old hitching rail with yellow weeds growing up around it, and at the back was a tangle of thornbushes and spiky yuccas overlooking a small meadow of that long, silvery grass.

  I paused again to wonder why I’d come and if I should go on. For a start, this was not what Counselor Kim had meant by taking care of myself. I was out here alone and I hadn’t told anyone where I was, living a nightmare and not sharing it. Not trusting a single soul—not even myself.

  Secondly, I could be truly mixed up. Some stuff might be fact and other parts not. For instance, seeing Phoenix everywhere—in school, at his own funeral—could be part of the post-traumatic stress thing for sure. Whereas Hunter could be real. Maybe he was a recluse who owned this broken-down place and hated intruders. In which case, he would be well within his rights to throw me off his property.

  But it wasn’t only Phoenix. I’d also seen Summer, Arizona, and Jonas, the first time here in the barn, before Hunter had spotted me and I’d gotten the hell out. Then the second time I’d seen Jonas again.

  Sure, those kids meant something to me, especially Summer. She’d been special, not just to me but to everyone who knew her. But why should they enter my head now, when it was already full of sorrow for Phoenix? Why not before, at the point when they’d died?

  I’d heard them speak. And I’d seen the dazed look in Phoenix’s eyes when they welcomed him into their circle, back from beyond the grave into the world of the Beautiful Dead.

  Hunter had fixed it for him to come back, Summer had explained. Hunter was the boss man.

  It definitely happened! I told myself. I’ve seen Phoenix in this barn, surrounded by people I know are dead.

  I stepped forward through the bushes until I found a narrow door into the bar
n, probably used to lead horses out into the back meadow. It hung on rickety hinges, which creaked as I opened the top half and climbed inside.

  The barn was dark and smelled musty, as before. A stack of hay bales had disintegrated across the dirt floor; there was an ancient swallow’s nest in the eaves. The wide front door banged.

  “No one’s here,” I muttered, feeling a thud of disappointment. The fine gossamer of spiders’ webs was undisturbed, the silence felt complete. I made it all up, I thought.

  And for a second I was relieved—almost free.

  Then the door swung open and I saw the gleam of a small metal object on the floor by the wide entrance. At first I thought maybe it was part of an old horse brass that had fallen from the dusty harnesses hanging on the nearby hooks. But it seemed too shiny and new. I strode forward to pick it up, turned it between my fingers and recognized the Harley insignia stamped into the steel buckle.

  I examined the Harley Davidson skull logo and the motto “Always Stay True to the Core,” the biker’s icon.The buckle in my hand made my heart race.

  “Jonas!” I murmured. I would lay down my life that this was no coincidence and the buckle belonged to him.

  It was then, as I stood in the dark barn with Jonas’s buckle, that the sound of the beating wings rose again and I sensed someone outside.

  I grasped the buckle tight, turned, and fled toward the stable door, wrenching at the bolt so I could stumble through. But it was rusty and I would have to climb out, and someone was entering the barn—probably Hunter on the prowl for intruders—so I grew panicky again, and clumsy, losing my balance and falling back against some broken hay bales.

  Footsteps came near and a hand grasped mine to help me up. The hand held me tight.

  I was looking into the face I loved.

  “Sit down here,” Phoenix said gently.

  We sat cross-legged on the dirt floor, surrounded by hay. I held both his hands and stared into his beautiful blue-gray eyes. So beautiful—everything about his smooth, pale skin, his high forehead rising to thick dark hair, the lightness of his eyes, his smiling mouth. And his body—I knew the breadth of his shoulders, the strong curve of his chest like they were a part of my own self.