Dance With the Dead by H.P. Mallory

Chapter Three

Victoria Falls

A moment after I first saw her, the apparition fell down the stairs, violently, bouncing from side to side and landing in a heap at the bottom, her neck at an angle that precluded life.

“Gwendolyn…” Petra whispered from beside me.

She didn’t need to say any more than that; we both knew we were seeing the final moments of Victoria’s life played out before us. It happened sometimes in violent death, the dead couldn’t get past it, and so they relived the moment of their end, over and over again.

Even as we stood there, Victoria vanished from the heap at the bottom of the stairs and reappeared at the top.               Down she went again, but this time I was watching more closely.

“She was pushed.”

“You think so?” Petra asked as she studied Victoria, who rolled down the stairs before disappearing and reappearing at the top again.

“Look,” I said and pointed at the top of the stairs. Victoria’s back was to us. “Why would you go down the stairs backward?”

“Ah, very astute,” Petra answered, eyeing the spirit with interest.

There could be no question, the way Victoria moved, made it clear that hands had pushed her chest to send her down. But whose hands?

“See the way she looks like she’s been thrust down?” I asked.

Petra nodded. “I do.”

“Can you interact with her and ask her what happened?”

Petra disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, looking at me as she shook her head sadly. “I tried to reach her, but I don’t believe she’s sentient. She appears to be one of those spirits who simply replays her death over and over again,” Petra finished on a sigh.

But there was more to it than that. At least, I felt something more. If I hadn’t known the circumstances of Victoria’s death, I wouldn’t have been able to identify this vague apparition, that was barely more than a translucent shape, lines of ethereal feedback shimmering across it. The more shocking the death, the longer it took for the spirit to adapt to what had happened to him or her. The manifestations of accident and murder victims hardly looked human at all, they were more like emotions given a rough shape, and while they couldn’t communicate in any coherent way, they radiated feeling. And right now, I could feel Victoria’s anger and her craving for justice. Even if I hadn’t been able to see that she’d been pushed, I still would’ve known it was murder that radiated these types of feelings—this sort of outrage and hurt.

For the first time, Victoria seemed to see us, because she turned her head to face us when she reappeared at the top of the stairs for the fourth time.

“Oh... perhaps she can see us,” Petra said and seemed surprised. Then she floated closer to Victoria and said, “Good evening.”

The ghost of Victoria then turned toward the kitchen, lifted her arm, and extended her index finger as if she were pointing toward the oven. Then she shrieked and vanished.

***

“Given time, she will just go,” said Petra, as I ate breakfast the following morning.

“And you’d be happy leaving her like that—when she’s clearly under duress?”

Petra shrugged. “I don’t know what other options we have. Violent death is not nice to look at, Gwendolyn. But Victoria will move past it eventually and once she does, she’ll be gone before she can even say ‘the man who killed me is…’.”

“Hmm.” Finishing my toast, I walked my dish over to the sink and rinsed it before laying it down on the drying mat on top of the counter.

“Trust me, as I’m quite familiar with these things.”

“And then her killer just walks free,” I said grimly.

“One thing you learn as a spirit,” mused Petra. “There are killers walking free wherever you go. Getting away with murder is easier than you might think.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“What is the alternative?”

“I don’t know.”

It was then that I remembered the way Victoria had lifted her hand and seemingly pointed toward something. I wasn’t sure if she had, in fact, because as I mentioned earlier, most spirits didn’t appear as delineated as Petra did. So what might have seemed to be Victoria’s arm, could have simply been her dress or her vanishing and leaving behind a trace of where she’d previously been.

Yet... yet, I felt like she was trying to pull my attention to something that was within the kitchen, or thereabouts. In the hopes I might uncover some clue, I decided to listen to my hunch. Yes, it might have been a silly thought or a waste of time, but the thought wouldn’t leave me so after another twenty minutes of wrestling with it, I stopped trying to unload my box of kitchen gadgets and instead, started searching the kitchen. Petra, meanwhile, floated nearby and watched me, arms crossed against her chest.

“You don’t think someone would have done this already?” asked Petra. “Before they sold the house?”

“You saw the amount of dust that was covering everything,” I answered, looking up at her as I shook my head. “Clearly, no one cleaned anything.”

She nodded. “It does appear as if the house is probably just as Victoria left it.” As an example, a surprising amount of Victoria’s stuff had been left behind—stuff I was still trying to sort through.

“And you saw Victoria,” I added. “I’m pretty sure she was pointing at something in the kitchen.”

“That is debatable,” Petra said, one eyebrow arched exaggeratingly.

I didn’t necessarily expect to find anything, but I figured it was still worth taking a look. I mean, what did it hurt to try? I’d seen Victoria fall. I’d heard her scream. Someone had killed that woman and, apparently, only I knew it.

“What if you do find something?” Petra asked as I leaned down and started opening the kitchen cupboards. “What then?”

“Then I can go to the police and let them handle it.”

I dropped down to all fours and peered beneath the oven, where it seemed a matted wad of black fibrous... stuff was gathered there and stuck to the underside of the oven.

“What are you doing down there?” Petra asked. “Have you found something?”

“Maybe just something that needs cleaning,” I answered as, against my better judgement, I reached for the strange mound of what looked like a black dust-bunny and then regretted the fact that I wasn’t wearing gloves.

“Calling card from the murderer?” suggested Petra.

I shook my head. “Some sort of weird dust.”

“Not exactly a smoking gun.”

The dust, if that’s what it was, was black and rough to the touch. It wasn’t fluffy like dust, but more gritty and heavier. But the most notable thing about it was that it was stuck to the bottom of the oven. Looking around, I found more elsewhere, also stuck to the metal—like the filings of magnets.

“I think whatever it is, it’s magnetic.”

“Let me see,” Petra leaned forward and inspected the stuff with an expression bordering on interest but still laced with ennui. “I know what that is.”

“Do you?”

She nodded and I wondered what was going to come out of her mouth next. Hopefully nothing about trolls.

“I can’t quite remember what it’s called—but it’s the detritus from a smithy.”

“The what?”

She frowned at me like I was slow. “When blacksmiths are working, iron sparks fly off and then cool and this is what you get.”

I shook my head. “You are full of unlikely information.” Only this time, it seemed as if that information might actually be logical.

“Well, there were more blacksmiths in my day, weren’t there?”

“I guess so,” I said and sat back on my heels. “Doesn’t seem like most people would have iron filings just lying around in their houses though, does it?” Could these filings be the thing Victoria was pointing at?

“I would concur. Sounds to me as if it’s completely unrelated to our case.”

“And yet... we just met a blacksmith.”

“You... you just met a blacksmith,” Petra corrected.

“Right.” I looked at the iron filings between my fingers. “Maybe we should go and ask him about these?”

Petra studied me for a moment or two. “Do you know what I believe?”

“What do you believe?”

“That you are just aching to find a reason to go visit the blacksmith again and you consider yourself lucky to have just stumbled upon one.”

She wasn’t wrong but I shrugged anyway. “Hey, I didn’t identify this as blacksmith stuff, you did.”

“My point still remains.”

And her point still remained mostly right. I did want to see Leo again and this gave me an excuse to do so, even if it was a somewhat grim one. Not to mention the fact that if Victoria had been pointing the shavings out, was she trying to say that Leo had something to do with her death? Of course, that was a stretch but it was also all I had. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe Leo had anything to do with it. When he’d mentioned Victoria, there had been nothing but sadness in his eyes—pity.

***

Living in a town that boasted a blacksmith was pretty cool as far as I was concerned, even if the smithy was, to some extent, just there for the tourists. In some countries they have living national treasures, people who are paid to preserve ancestral traditions—Britain didn’t have that necessarily, but if it did, then Leo would have qualified.

He worked for a living, making fire surrounds, ornamental benches, gates, fences, and anything else that could be constructed from twisted iron, but at the peak of the tourist season—so I was told—you would struggle to get near the forge because tourists (usually Americans like me) were too busy craning their necks to see him at work. Shy as he was, I imagined this was a kind of living hell for Leo. But he seemed cheerful enough and apparently made a good trade in wrought iron souvenirs.

As I approached the smithy, I could hear the rhythmic thumping of the hammer and the heat became noticeable long before I reached the broad, permanently open doors. Peering in, I could see Leo at work. In my head, when I imagined him working his trade, he’d been shirtless and covered in soot (even though I wasn’t sure whether blacksmiths would be covered in soot—maybe that was chimney sweeps. Apologies, Dickens) but that probably wouldn’t have been safe with sparks flying everywhere. So, I supposed it wasn’t a big surprise that he was actually sensibly dressed in long sleeves and long pants, with a leather apron protecting his front.

I just stood there, allowing him to work, and figuring you shouldn’t disturb a man with a lump hammer in one hand and a bar of red-hot metal in the other. Finally, the metal was shaped to his satisfaction and he doused it in a bucket of water from which a gush of superheated steam shot up with a roaring hiss.

“Wow,” I said finally, figuring it was now safe to do so.

Leo turned and once he recognized me, a huge smile overtook his face. “Gwen! Hello.”

“Hi, Leo.”

“Nice to see you.”

“It’s nice to see you.”

Then we both just stood there for another second or so, smiling at each other and saying nothing.

“Can I help you with something?” Leo finally asked.

“Oh, right, yes,” I smiled and blushed, as if his shyness was so aggressive as to be infectious. “I think... maybe you can help me. I mean... I hope so.”

“Come in.”

At the back of the forge was a little workshop that wasn’t open to the public and from what I could tell, this was the place where Leo doodled designs and could relax in private. A collapsed couch in red leather, horse hair stuffing popping from between its button fastenings, slouched against one wall and Leo offered me a seat and a cup of tea which I accepted.

As he washed out a cup with hands blackened from heat, I quickly explained about the magnetic dust I’d found in my house.

“Oh, yeah, that stuff gets everywhere,” Leo confirmed with a quick nod. There was nothing like suspicion or worry clouding his big, blue eyes. “Clings to everything, even if it’s not metal.”

To demonstrate his point, he brushed his pants and a heavy cloud of the black dust fell to the floor.

“But how’d it get in my house?” I asked, tentative but pressing. “Victoria’s house, I mean.”

“I fitted a new gate there not long before… well, not long before,” Leo explained, slopping milk into his cup and stirring the tea as he lost his words.

“Right... not long before she died.”

He nodded and then sighed. “She asked me in for a coffee after I was finished. Think I had an orange juice actually. It was quite hot.”

“I can imagine.” Although I didn’t imagine his English version of ‘hot’ could quite compare with the muggy humidity of a New York summer. But I wasn’t about to argue that point with him.

“I’d guess that was when the filings happened to end up in your house.” He gave a ‘what can you do?’ shrug. “Once it’s in the house, that stuff’s hard to get rid of. Sticks to everything, as I said.”

“And the cleaners did a very poor job at Victoria’s place,” noted Petra, leaning by the wall.

Maybe I looked disappointed at my only lead having such a prosaic explanation, because Leo spoke again. “Why the interest?”

“Just…” What could I reasonably tell him? That I’d seen Victoria in her ghost form as she was pushed down the stairs and she’d pointed at the kitchen, as if trying to tell me there was a clue there? And that I’d partly considered that he might have been involved? Yeah, no. Even if I left out the fact that my suspicions had brought me to see him, the fact that those suspicions were founded on a supernatural sighting would just make him think I was crazy.

But as those blazingly blue eyes looked at me and that lopsided, boyish smile was back in place, I found I wanted to tell him everything.

“So… and this is going to sound crazy…”

“This is a horrible idea,” noted Petra.

I tried to ignore her—over the years I’d gotten pretty good at conducting a conversation with that other voice continually in my ear.

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” Leo smiled but couldn’t quite meet my gaze. There was something so appealing about that blend of strength and sensitivity. Yep, I needed to be careful with this one or I might find myself head over heels in no time at all. Which might sound silly coming from a forty-two-year-old woman but, again, romance and I hadn’t been acquainted in years.

“Well, see if you think I’m exaggerating after I tell you my story,” I suggested with a smile as I rubbed the back of my neck and wondered if this were a huge mistake. “So... the cleaners didn’t do the best job of clearing Victoria’s place—hence the iron filings I found stuck to the oven. Plus, I’ve got a bunch of her clothes still hanging in the closet, some furniture, and a ton of boxes in the attic.”

“Right.”

I struggled with what I could say that might tell him my suspicions without me sounding nuts and the more I thought about the subject, the more I decided against just coming out with the ghost part. “Right—lots of junk in the garage too—all sorts of stuff, you know? And the more I look through it, the better idea I get of Victoria and the type of woman she was…”

“Where in the world are you going with this?” Petra asked.

I swallowed hard. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it and Leo looked confused. “And... I don’t know... but, well, Leo... I’m just not convinced she fell down those stairs.”

Leo nodded quietly for a while before answering in his low, husky voice, “How does someone’s household items give you an idea of whether or not they might have fallen down the stairs?”

Now wasn’t that just a fantastic question? It had obviously been a stupid thing to say and it was very polite of him not to point that stupidity out. After all, there really is no type of person to fall down stairs.

“I don’t know,” I had to admit.

“Don’t tell him you saw her ghost,” Petra advised.

“Just… how long she’d lived there.” Hmm, maybe I could make this sound almost plausible if I tried again?

“How long she lived there?” Leo questioned me and his eyebrows met in the middle of his handsome face and I realized I sounded completely off my rocker.

“Well, I hadn’t realized how long she’d lived there until I started looking at some of her stuff. I mean, really looking at it. Did you know she’d been in Bluebells like twenty years?”

Leo shook his head. “She was here when I moved here, but that was only five years ago.”

I’d have put money on Leo having grown up here and taken over his father’s forge—somehow he just seemed like a permanent fixture.

“So, yeah,” I went on. “And I just thought—okay, accidents can happen—but how many thousand times must she have gone up and down those stairs, Leo? If she’d lived in this house for twenty years, shouldn’t she have known those stairs like the back of her hand?” Okay, yes, it was a weak assumption, but the ghost card was out.

Leo nodded, but still looked a little confused. “Quite often, I’d assume.”

“And one day she just falls down them? Backward?”

And then he looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “How did you know she fell backwards?”

“Now you’ve done it,” Petra said, shaking her head theatrically.

“Oh,” I answered and swallowed hard. “I um... read... an article about it. And that’s what the article said.”

“Oh,” Leo said, and I suddenly panicked as I wondered if Morley even had a newspaper. Maybe they had an online presence...

“Online,” I quickly added. “The article was online.”

“I see,” he answered, and then looked at me blankly.

I smiled. “I guess one can fall down one’s own stairs,” I continued, figuring it was better to stick with the facts. “But... those stairs... well, they aren’t slippery. They’re carpeted. There’s nothing to trip on.”

“Perhaps she tripped on something else?” Leo suggested.

“Perhaps she was pushed,” Petra offered.

“Maybe it’s just my fears, as someone living alone,” I answered with an embarrassed, little laugh. “I’m single, you know.” Was that unsubtle? Well, it was out there now.

Leo nodded. “I actually see what you mean.”

“You do?” Frankly, I’d thought my argument was pretty tenuous at best.

But Leo nodded. “I’ve got a job in which a terrible accident is only ever a moment away, and there are days when my mind’s not on it and I’m on autopilot. But I’ve never even once come close to an accident. My hands,” he held up his large, workman’s hands that were covered with scrapes and callouses and were somehow the sexiest things I’d seen in years. “My hands know what they’re doing and they do it. Accidents happen, but you have a point, Gwen. If you do something day on day, you tend to do it right.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

He looked pensive for a moment, no doubt considering what this might mean. “You believe she might have been… pushed, then?” He was quiet for a moment. “And the fact that she fell down backwards... well, I hadn’t known that.”

I nodded. “I don’t believe it was... widely known. I had to do quite a bit of digging.”

“And you are a mystery novelist, aren’t you?” Leo asked, as I nodded. “Which means you must look for things that ordinary people wouldn’t—you’d pick up on such discordances.”

“Right,” I said, figuring he was giving me a bone, so I should take it. “I mean, it’s all just a theory, of course,” I replied on a shrug, trying to appear casual. It was more than that, of course, but I couldn’t justify my certainty.

“So, what do we do next with this theory of yours?”

There was only one word in that sentence to which I paid any attention. “We?”

“Well… if you don’t mind?” Leo hedged. “I mean… I liked Victoria and if something untoward happened to her, I would definitely like to get to the bottom of it. I can’t claim I knew her that well, but she was a good customer.” He paused. He’d absently picked up a tool from his bench and was now turning it in his hands as if it gave him comfort. “She appreciated iron.”

For a brief moment that I wasn’t proud of, I was quite grateful to Victoria Willis for having died and provided a means to bring Leo and me together. I suppressed the thought instantly though; it was very sad that she’d died, but she had died and while I didn’t welcome it, if some good came out of her death, then that was surely a good thing... right? Unless, of course, Leo had been the one to kill her. Which I still didn’t believe he was... yet. What had she been pointing at?

“I’d appreciate any help I can get,” I nodded, perhaps a little too eagerly. “I don’t know the town at all yet and certainly not the people.”

“Well, then, I’d be happy to help.” His smile was shy but creased his rugged face in appealing ways. “But I do have one question for you first.”

“Okay?”

“You must have thought I was a suspect?”

I swallowed harder than I had all the other times. “Um, not so much a suspect. I just found the iron filings in the house and decided to investigate, and you were my first stop.”

“Well, let’s get one thing out of the way first: I didn’t kill Victoria.”

I gave him a smile. “I didn’t assume you had.”