Advocate For The Dead (Complete Novel)

Chapter 10: The Sheriff & The Spectre

The initial shock of seeing this girl swinging back and forth on a chain took a while to wear off. I have seen death many times before but this was different. It almost seemed brutal, as if the grim reaper himself was saying "look what despair brings to the weak."

And I've seen suicides before, but none had eyes like her, open wide in terror. She had not died feeling a moment of desperation, but of complete horror. Someone had hung her. I didn't have the proof, but I was sure of it. Someone wrapped the chain around Carla's neck and hoisted her from the ground to leave her feet dangling mere inches from the earth. I imagined the killer just stood there and watched her struggles, feeling either a grim sense of satisfaction or nothing at all.

Carla's death brought all kinds of questions. Did this incident mean someone had killed Summer too? Was there a jealous party who didn't approve of their relationship? What about the boy Jeff Dennings had mentioned? The brother of the Kaleidoscope Killer. Was he picking up where his older sibling had left off? Or was it the jock boyfriend who got dumped by Summer for Carla? Was the humiliation and embarrassment he felt a catalyst to send him into a murderous rage? And what of Summer's own parents? Didn't Jeff tell me they wanted to kill them both when they found out about the relationship between the two girls? Certainly they wouldn't have killed their own son in the process, would they?

In a daze I walked back to the patiently waiting cab, these questions swirling in my head. Summer had fled in tears. Maybe the shock of seeing the girl hanging like that, her face colorless and blank, made her remember other things. Maybe she remembered what the girl had meant to her. I didn't try to chase after her. I knew sometimes even ghosts need their time alone.

I had the cabbie radio in the dead body to his dispatch, so the police could be called. When the first squad car pulled up to the cab parked on Darrow's Road, and I told them who I had found dead in the woods, they informed I couldn't leave the scene because Sheriff Deacon would want to question me personally. I figured as much, but I knew this wasn't going to be pleasant. He steals my wife, I find his only daughter dead and swinging from a chain. You tell me how that looks to you.

The sheriff was ex-military and you could tell it. Broad shouldered, Navy Seals tattoo on his forearm, and a buzz cut that screams "yes sir." When he pulled up and saw me sitting on the hood of the cab under the watchful eyes of one of his new rookies, he glared at me. I wondered if anyone had told him what waited for him at the tree house in the woods.

When he came back out of those woods twenty minutes later, his eyes were red and there was a grim determination on his face. I guess he didn't know whether to be sad or angry. He always came off as a "one emotion at a time" kind of person. When he saw me I knew which emotion it was going to be.

He strode up to me and just stood there staring with this intimidating look for a few minutes. When he finally spoke, I could hear the trembling in his voice as he tried to contain what he was really feeling.

"You want to tell me what happened, Winter?"

He crossed his arms over his chest as I related my tale of finding Carla. I left out any mention of Summer's ghost, of course. He's never been the superstitious sort. He'd probably try to have me arrested just for being a nut.

"What were you doing out here?" he asked, after I finished.

"I was feeling nostalgic."

"Nostalgic?"

"Lacey and I used to play here as kids." The mention of Lacey was not lost on him. He gave me an even harder look. For some stupid reason, he'd always blamed me for her death. Last time he did it publicly, I had reminded him it was him she'd been living with at the time. He had reminded me to shut up with a broken nose. I vowed I'd be more prepared next time.