Body & Soul полностью

A barely muffled round of snickering emerged from the crowd, and I felt my face get hot. Evidently, Alona and I had not been as discreet as I'd thought. Technically, there wasn't anything wrong with our relationship. Except, I suppose, the part where I was alive and she was… not. Still, it wasn't like that. We'd known each other when she was alive, and we were the same age… Oh, forget it.

I tried to rally and regain control over the room, despite all the smirking faces. “And I take it you want me to start by helping you?” I asked Evan.

“I've been waiting.” He leaned his mop against the wall and stepped forward, hands out in an “I'm here” gesture and a grin stretching across his acne-scarred face.

Except he'd been sent to the back of the line by Alona, I knew, which meant that most, if not all, of these people should have been ahead of him. To my surprise, though, none of them protested his advancement, which could only mean they'd given up on the order Alona had established and were desperate enough to see someone, anyone, helped to give them hope that they would one day be in his position.

Not good.

It was also a problem because it was Evan.

“Well, come on, then.” He stepped around several of the others and patted my desk chair eagerly. “Turn on your machine and let's get cracking.” He looked from my computer to me expectantly, and the ghosts shuffled and shifted around in my room, moving closer like they wanted to be sure not to miss any of the show.

I sighed. “Evan, you killed people.”

“It was an accident!” he protested.

“I know,” I said wearily. Sort of. To hear Evan's side of it, he'd only intended to scare the kids he'd caught tagging and egging the school in the middle of the night. Actually, he hadn't even caught them. He'd heard gossip about the intended midnight prank during the day and planned to stake out the school until they showed. It had, apparently, become a point of pride for the Groundsboro students in the early nineties to torture him by making messes they knew he'd have to clean up. And he'd become equally determined to catch them in the act and turn them over to the cops. Unfortunately — or not, as it turned out — they'd moved up their plans, and by the time he arrived, they were already done and trying to make a not-so-clean getaway. Per Evan's description, it looked like a chicken factory and a paint factory had exploded simultaneously — minus the feathers… and the fact that there is no such thing as a chicken factory. But whatever. This was Evan's story.

The perpetrators scrambled to get back into their pickup, even as they taunted Evan on his late arrival. Infuriated and humiliated, he'd accelerated at them in his van, intending to brake and swerve at the last second. Except he didn't.

He said his brakes had failed, but the police hadn't been able to find evidence of that. Two kids had ended up dead, and a third one was badly injured. It didn't help that one of the kids who'd died was the son of a prominent lawyer. Evan had been convicted, given the death penalty, and executed by lethal injection in 2002, right before they put a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois, which still rankled him to this day.

“You've already tried apologizing,” I pointed out. He'd attempted to make amends to the affected families before his death, but it hadn't helped. He was still stuck here, in between. “What else do you want to do?”

“I don't know!” He folded his arms over his jump suited chest. “That's your job to figure out.”

Like I didn't have enough to do? Like my own problems weren't already trying to hold my head under the water until I quit breathing? At least I was trying to solve them instead of dumping them in someone else's lap. So, blame it on frustration, momentary insanity, or just forgetting for a second that the guy was a killer — no matter what he said — but suddenly I couldn't keep my mouth shut any longer. “How about telling the truth, for a change? You didn't swerve because you didn't want to, and that's what's keeping you here.”

Dumb, Will, definitely dumb.

He lunged at me, and the room exploded in noise.

The woman in the suit, the one who I'd noticed earlier, appeared in front of me suddenly, blocking Evan's path. “Back off.” She shoved at him, and he stumbled, looking stunned. “And the rest of you, shut it already,” she said to the others. She glanced at me, as if expecting my gratitude and/or approval.

But I was too distracted. I recognized her now. It was Spring Break Girl from Malachi's place… except she was dressed differently. She'd ditched her bikini top and shorts for a suit that clung to her curves and a fancy, twisty hairstyle, both of which made her look older than the nineteen or twenty she'd probably been. How was that even possible? Ghosts couldn't change their appearances, not like that.