Haunted

VI

"I'm going to go out for air." I told the others as they examined the necklace.

Cade gave me a weird look, but I went back outside without another word. As I suspected, the ghost of the girl was waiting for me there. She had seen the way I looked at her, not straight through her like most people must've been doing since her death.

"You can see me?" She asks, just like every other ghost I meet.

I nodded, looked back at the garage, but then figured that the others probably wouldn't be able to hear me from in there. I could speak freely to the ghost.

"Yes, I can see you."

The relief in her face was evident. She had only been a day without human contact and was already tired of it. Most of the ghosts I talked to had been months or years without a single person noticing them. I couldn't imagine how it felt to be totally alone in the world like that.

"Am I really . . . you know?"

I nodded sadly, "Yeah, you are."

She took it better than most, probably because she didn't die in her sleep or crash a car, but instead was tortured to death. It was the obvious conclusion to make.

"So," she mustered up, "are you the only one who can see me?"

"Yeah, as far as I know."

She nodded again, already having made that conclusion by now.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Jeanine Ferguson."

"What about T. E.? From the necklace?"

Her face fell at the mention. "Todd Erickson, my boyfriend." She got visibly stuffy remembering him. "We were talking about marriage, even though we're only in college. I even found the ring in his desk drawer before I came here. I didn't tell him anything because I assumed he had something planned for when I got back on Wednesday. And now I'll never get back." Jeanine's voice broke.

My heart was torn. I always heard last regrets like these from spirits. Things they never got to do, people they would be leaving behind. It was the worst because though you could hear them, you knew they were gone, unable to finish their unfinished business.

"Did you come to Elk Springs for a specific reason?" I asked, pushing past the emotional stuff. There was nothing I would be able to tell her that would bring her back, and nothing I could do to change her past.

She nodded, wiping a tear from her eye. "Yeah, I was researching for my paper in psychology 101. I only lived a couple hours away from where one of the most famous serial killers lived and I thought it would be perfect if I could do some actual ground work. Everyone else in my class was just looking them up online, but I was going to be the overachiever who got real witness accounts on how Willy Woods was as a person and what made him like that. My dad was even one of the people on the jury for his case." She paused and let out a weak laugh. "Figures, I came here to research a famous serial killer and I end up getting killed by one."

There were more tears after that. Knowing you were dead and accepting it were two different things.

"How do you know that they were a serial killer?"

She sniffled and looked up. "Umm, they were talking to me as they were . . . you know. They said I was number two on their 'list'. They were laughing about how there was always people like me in Elk Springs and that I just happened to be the lucky one. They were bragging about how their first was so frozen in shock that they barely struggled. It was . . . awful."