Kiss Me Deadly: Tales of a Paranormal Romance

him. Forever.

No. No, she’ll come back. She has to come back.

He’d arrived at Amber Frank’s room on autopilot. Her father—Cal couldn’t recall his name—saw him and rushed over to shake his hand, at once thanking him for coming and offering condolences for his loss. Cal imagined that he was so numb that he couldn’t feel either the kindness of his words or the pressure of the other man’s hand.

“Amber wanted to talk to you, Officer Wilson,” Mr. Frank was saying. “I realize this is a very, very difficult time, but once she started to get a sense of where she was and what happened to her, it became very important that we contact you.”

Cal nodded without really comprehending what the man was trying to say. He allowed Mr. Frank to guide him into his room where Mrs. Frank was sitting by her daughter’s bedside. Cal looked down at the girl in the bed. Her face was mottled and bruised, her cheeks puffed and swollen. Cal closed his eyes, remembering how her legs had been twisted when they’d found her in the snow.

“I can come back later,” Cal whispered to Mrs. Frank, who shook her head as Amber tried to speak. Her eyes were so swollen Cal hadn’t been able to tell that she was awake.

“You might have to lean close,” Mrs. Frank—Helen, he remembered—said to him. He lowered his head toward Amber.

“Jake,” she whispered. “Jake.”

Cal closed his eyes and opened them again when the vision inside his head was of Jake and his daughter, driving away.

“Jake ... wasn’t ... drinking,” she said. “Mandy ... neither.”

Cal looked at her, and then at Helen, who was smiling at her daughter and patting her hand. He straightened up and cleared his throat.

“Thank you, Amber,” he said. “Thank you for telling me. You get better, okay?”

Mr. Frank stopped him in the hallway.

“Thank you,” he said. “It was really important for Amber to tell you that. From what I gather, she and the other boys had had a few beers, but Jake refused because he was driving.”

“And Mandy doesn’t drink,” Cal said. His own throat was dry.

Mr. Frank nodded. “That’s right. That’s what Amber said. ‘Mandy doesn’t drink.’”

Cal turned to go, but before he could escape, Mr. Frank’s hand was on his arm.

“I hope ... I hope she comes back,” Mr. Frank said, faltering as Cal’s eyes met his own. “If that’s what you want.”

Cal didn’t know if he should thank him or punch his lights out, so instead he just nodded and moved away.

It is what I want, he thought.

But three days later, she still hadn’t come back.

* * *

Chuck Barnes found out about the milk and the peanut butter on toast on the third day.

The first few times, Andy had gotten away with it because Chuck was up earlier than everyone and out the door by the time they all came down for breakfast, so he never saw Andy leaving it out on the deck. Nor did he see his wife Molly, once the children had all been packed off onto the morning bus, go out onto the deck in her housecoat and slippers to retrieve the milk and toss the peanut butter toast out into the backyard for the birds and the squirrels to eat. And he was never there in time to hear Andy’s first words upon arriving home from school, which were: “Did Jake come and get his breakfast?” And he wasn’t there to see him run to the sliding door and look out onto the deck for any sign or trace that his brother had been there. Nor did he hear Molly’s assurances that Jake had, in fact, come home to have his breakfast. Andy was nine, but he still believed in both Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny; it wasn’t such a stretch for his imagination to picture the arrival of his deceased brother coming to collect his breakfast, whom he had actually seen with his own eyes.

Andy was up early again on Saturday to fix Jake his breakfast. He was excited about it because he thought that if he sat really quietly just inside the door and behind the curtain, he might actually get to see Jake. If Jake didn’t get scared, then maybe he could even talk to him. He really missed his older brother. If he saw Jake, he’d talk to him about school and TV and stuff, but Andy didn’t think he’d mention that last night he’d cried a little at bedtime thinking about him. Jake had enough to worry about without knowing his brother was a crybaby.

Andy was proud of himself when he went downstairs into the kitchen and poured Jake a big glass of milk. So proud and so elated at the thought of helping Jake that he didn’t hear his father flush the toilet down the hall and walk into the kitchen. Andy’d unlocked the sliding door and was just about to set the glass of milk down in a nice little pile of snow when his father’s voice startled him so badly he spilled half the milk onto the deck.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?”

Andy didn’t want to turn around. He wanted to keep facing toward the backyard, where at any moment Jake could be walking out of the woods, ready to take Andy away with him. Andy rose to his feet and blinked against the chill air, wishing it to happen.

“Turn around!” his father yelled. “Answer me!”

Andy turned, aware that the remaining milk was in danger of spilling because his hands were shaking. His father was glowering at him, the gray black tufts of his hair still wild from sleep. “I ... I...”

“Out with it!”

“I ... I was getting Jake his breakfast,” Andy said.

His father struck him hard enough to send him to the floor. The glass broke beneath his hand, and he felt a hot bright pain as his palm was sliced open.

“He’s dead, do you understand me? Dead!”

Andy tasted blood from a cut inside his cheek. Red drops rolled off his wrist and swirled into the pool of spilled milk spreading around the broken glass. It was in this way that Andy realized that some things, once broken, could never be repaired again.

* * *

There was a place in the woods where we used to go in the summertime, Mandy and me. A place that was near the lake but that you couldn’t see from the lake and we used to like going there on the days where it was too hot for anything else. We must have gone there five times—no, I know, we went there exactly five times and each time we went it was better than the time before and when we walked back Mandy would hold her sandals in her left hand and my hand in her right and most times we didn’t say anything at all the entire walk back to my father’s van. But on the fifth and last time, the best time of all, she said “Summer’s almost over.” She said it like she was sad but then I looked at her and I said that it didn’t matter, because summer is just a season, and that the only thing that was over was a season. That made her laugh a little and thinking back on it that might have been one of the smartest things I’ve ever said.

I tried to find that place in the woods and I walked and walked and walked and you’d think I’d be able to find it okay because I’d spent the best times of my life there. Literally, the best times of my life, now that my life was over. But I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t have imagined how differently everything looked with just a change of seasons.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find there, even if I could have found it. Mandy wouldn’t have been there. If Mandy had come back she would have been with her father. The only way that Mandy would have been there was if she didn’t come back. Ever. This is what I was thinking but my thinking was so confused it was no wonder I couldn’t find our place in the woods.

Eventually I stopped looking. I stopped looking and decided to go to the place where I thought that Mandy would be, not where she had been.

* * *

Bill Trafton’s boy Curtis rose on the sixth day. His parents embraced him, and Cal could hear Sandy Trafton telling Curtis that “everything was going to be all right, everything will be all right.” He watched their embrace from the couch outside the morgue. Curtis’s eyes, unfocused and milky, found Cal’s. Cal had to look away.

* * *

Mandy—beautiful Mandy—lifted herself up off of her hospital gurney. She walked down the hallway, one bare