Ghost Shadow

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He didn’t want to wait. He left Katie and went striding quickly toward the beautiful ghost figure in long, flowing white. As he neared her, she turned. She saw him.

And then she was gone.

Katie shook her head. Sadly, the world of relationships was always hard. Even for ghosts. Maybe more so for ghosts.

She heard laughter and turned. A group of tourists was coming along; they had just been visiting the area of the monument to the survivors of the Maine; a wrought-iron fence encircled a single bronze sailor who looked out over the markers of his companions.

They were now coming to take pictures of the Beckett tomb with its beautiful, high-rising angel. Katie decided to slip away.

She walked around to an area where graves were stacked mausoleum-style in several rows, and stood where she wouldn’t be seen. The group was a happy one, and she knew that visiting the historic and unusual cemetery was something that people did. Since life was basically a circle and all men died, it seemed a good thing that people enjoyed a walk in the cemetery. But today, for some reason, the laughter irritated her.

Bartholomew remained around the oldest graves. He had gone down on one knee, and she assumed he was trying to read the etching on some of the gravestones.

As she waited and watched, she was surprised to see the woman in white appear again. She was behind Bartholomew. Bartholomew didn’t see her. As Katie watched, the woman started to place a hand on his shoulder.

Again, the group of tourists seemed to issue, in unison, a loud stream of laughter. The woman turned to fog, and she was gone.

But there was someone else there. A girl. She was also in white, but she was wearing a more modern gown, one similar to the famous halter dress in which Marilyn Monroe had been immortalized in dozens of pictures.

She, too, watched Bartholomew.

She looked around, though, and saw Katie. She seemed to panic.

Then she, too, was gone.

Katie frowned; there had been something about that particular ghost—something that seemed to stir inside her. Katie should have recognized her.

But she didn’t. Irritated, Katie dismissed the idea.

Ghosts everywhere! she thought.

Well, she was in a cemetery. But, as Bartholomew had said, ghosts didn’t really linger that often in cemeteries. They haunted the areas where they had been happy, where they had faced trauma or where they searched for something they hadn’t found in life.

“Hiding?”

The very real, solid and almost tangible sound of a deep male voice made her jump. Katie swung around.

David Beckett had come to the cemetery.

“Hiding? No. Just—waiting,” she said.

“I guess it’s a good thing that a cemetery, even an active cemetery, draws the laughter of the living,” David said. He watched as the loud group moved on.

“You came to see your grandfather?” she asked.

“My grandfather isn’t here,” he said.

She smiled. “No. When did you see him last?”

“Right before I headed out to Kenya,” he said, looking toward the mausoleum.

“Oh,” Katie said.

He looked at her with a tight smile. “I didn’t desert my grandfather, Miss O’Hara, though that seems to be the consensus here. I didn’t like my home anymore, and I can’t help it. I like living a life where you don’t stare into faces every day that are speculative—are you or are you not a murderer? I met Craig in Miami often enough, even Key Largo and sometimes Orlando. Imagine. Craig loved theme parks. Here’s the thing of which I am certain—if there is a heaven, Craig is there, and he’s with my grandmother. They had a beautiful love that was quite complete. They will not be misty ghouls running around a graveyard.”

“You know, you sound defensive,” Katie observed.

He shook his head. “Yep. I have a big chip on my shoulder.” He lifted his hands and she saw that he carried a beautiful bouquet of lilacs. “Gram’s favorites,” he said.

The tourists were gone. Katie followed him back to the Beckett mausoleum. He set the bouquet right before the wrought-iron doors.

“Very nice—pretty flowers,” Katie said.

“They seem forlorn,” David said.

She shook her head. “No, that’s forlorn,” she told him, pointing to a family graveyard that was surrounded by an iron fence. Cemetery maintenance was kept up, but no one had been to see the graves in decades. The stones were broken, a stray weed was growing through here and there and all within the site were long forgotten, not even their names remaining legibly upon the stones.

“That’s life,” David said flatly. “Well, I’ll leave you to whatever you were doing,” he told her. But as he turned, he stopped suddenly.

Katie saw that he was looking at a man across from them, in another section of the cemetery, one that was bordered by Olivia Street.

She knew that Tanya Barnard was buried in that section; most people knew that she was buried there, even though her marker wasn’t on her grave. Because of the Carl Tanzler/Elena de Hoyos story, the powers-that-be at the time of her death, along with the family, had determined that no one but Tanya’s parents would know exactly where she had been buried; there would be no grave robbing. In death, Tanya had become a celebrity.

Katie had never seen Tanya’s astral self, soul or haunt.

She had seen Elena de Hoyos frequently. Then again, if anyone had the right to haunt a place, it was poor Elena. Ripped from her grave, her body adored and yet desecrated, she had missed out on the beauty of youth and the sweetness of aging in the midst of normal love.

She didn’t weep when she walked. She did so with her head high. And sometimes, she danced, as if she could return to the dance halls of her day, as if she imagined herself young again, falling in love with her handsome husband—happy days before tuberculosis, desertion and the bizarre adoration of Carl Tanzler.

Would she know Tanya if she saw her? She had heard the story about the woman, of course. It had been Key West’s scandal and horror. Her picture had certainly been in the newspapers. But Katie had never really seen Tanya.

“Damn,” David murmured.

The man across the way seemed to know exactly where he was, and what he was looking for.

Katie stared, squinting against the sun. He was the man who had been in O’Hara’s last night, the man who had appeared to be familiar, who had tried to buy her a drink. He had flowers; he laid them at the foot of a grave.

“Who is it?” she asked.

He didn’t glance her way. “Sam Barnard. Tanya’s brother,” he said.

Katie stared, looking at David, and then at the man again. David left her, striding across the cemetery. He passed the brick vaults and kept going, at last calling out. His voice carried on the breeze. She heard him calling out, “Sam!”

Sam turned slowly. He was clean shaven now, in Dockers and a polo shirt, and she wondered if he had been as drunk as she had thought last night, or if he had been playing the drunk, watching folks at the bar. He had to have been familiar with O’Hara’s—her uncle’s bar had been there for twenty-five years. But her uncle, Jamie O’Hara, had not been there. Jon Merrillo had been on as the manager, and Jon had only been in Key West for five years.

Katie felt her heart thundering. For a moment she thought that she should turn away, that none of this was any of her business. But then she felt a trigger of unease. No, fear. What if the two men were about to go after one another? Maybe Sam Barnard had vengeance on his mind. David Beckett had just returned, and suddenly Sam Barnard was back in the city, as well.

She dug into her handbag for her phone, ready to dial 911.

But she didn’t.

The two men embraced like old friends. They began speaking to one another, and walked toward the grave together.

She felt a strange sensation—not cold, not heat, just a movement in the air. She turned her head slightly. Bartholomew had an arm draped around her. “That’s touching,” he said. “Seriously, you know, I like that fellow. He reminds me of someone I knew years and years ago…” He shrugged. “Hey, it might have been one of his ancestors, come to think of it.”

“I thought he was a jerk and you were going to protect me from him,” Katie said dryly.

Bartholomew shook his head. “He’s redeeming himself. That’s what life is all about, eh? We make mistakes, we earn redemption. So, you want to join up with them?”

“No. No, I want to slip away.”

“Wait.”

“Wait—for what?” Katie asked.

“Maybe Tanya Barnard is hanging around the cemetery.”

“Do you see anyone? I don’t,” Katie said.

“No,” Bartholomew admitted. “Maybe she’s gone on all the way. But she was murdered, and her murder was never solved. You’d think, with her brother and ex-fiancé together, she would make an appearance.”

Katie looked around the cemetery. No ghosts were stirring. None at all.

They were probably unhappy with the laughing tourists.

Every man and woman born came to the end of their lives. Death was the only certainty in life.

But ghosts could be touchy.

“Let’s go. I have to go to work tonight and I want to do some searching online,” Katie said.

“You go on. I’m going to hang around a bit longer,” Bartholomew said.

“Snooping—or looking for your lady in white?” Katie asked.

“A bit of both. I’m looking for my beauty…or waiting for you, my love. But you’re awfully young, so I’d have a long wait.”

“Well, thanks for that vote of encouragement,” Katie said.

She walked quickly, exiting the cemetery from the main gate. Neither of the men, now involved in a deep conversation together, noticed that she left.

Sam Barnard was David’s senior by four years. He’d been in college when David had been in the military, so they hadn’t hung out, but they’d shared many a holiday dinner with one or the other’s family.

“I heard about Craig’s death, and I’d heard they were trying to reach you,” Sam Barnard told David. “To be honest, though, I didn’t come down to pay my respects to anyone. I’d heard a local was trying to buy the museum. It brought everything back. Not just the fact that my kid sister was murdered, but the way she was left…and the fact that her killer was never found. Hell, I didn’t come down to start trouble. I’ve spent the past years not even a hundred miles away, and I haven’t made the trip down here since my folks left. But now…”

“I’m not letting anyone reopen the museum,” David told him.

They sat at a sidewalk bar on Front Street. Sam lifted his beer to David. “Glad to hear it. And I’m not here to hound or harass you, either. I know you didn’t do it.”

“Do you?” David asked.

Sam nodded. “I guess a lot of folks think I’ve followed you down here to pick a fight, beat you to a pulp, something like that.”

“Probably.”

“My folks knew you didn’t do it. I knew you didn’t do it.”

“That means a lot.”

“You know, I knew what was going on. She was my sister, but I never put her on a pedestal. I really loved her, but she was human, you know. Real. From the time she was a little kid, she wanted to live every second of the day. When you left for the military, I had a bad feeling. Tanya was never the kind to wait around. She was never going to find true love with that football jock—he had a roving eye. I told her so. She’d made all her arrangements for college in the north. But she wasn’t leaving until she had talked to you. I’m pretty sure she was going to make a stab at getting back with you. That’s why she was drinking. She needed courage.”

“She never needed courage to see me.”

“You didn’t know—you really didn’t know that she wanted to make up, did you?” Sam asked.

“No. And no matter what, we would have stayed friends,” David said. “I didn’t hate her. Maybe I understood.”

“She’s just a cold, closed case now,” Sam said.

“I hope not. I hope there’s still a way to find the truth,” David said.

“How, after all this time?” Sam demanded. “Hey, you didn’t secretly go off and become some kind of investigator, or medium, eh? What the hell could anyone possibly find now?”

“Actually, cold cases do get solved. Not all of them, no. And no—I can’t conjure up Tanya to find out what happened.”

“So you are a photographer?” Sam said, frowning. “And you film stuff, too, for nature films? Underwater—like Sean.”

“Yep. Oddly enough, yes, Sean and I wound up doing close to the same thing. I do more straight photography than Sean, though.” He waited a minute, but Sam remained silent. “And you—you’re still running charter fishing boats, right?”

Sam nodded, rubbing his thumb down his beer glass. “Yep, I do fishing charters.”

“Is there a Mrs. Sam yet?”

“No. And you—you never married either, huh?”

“I’m all over the globe,” David said.

Sam leaned toward him, his grin lopsided and rueful. “Neither one of us has married because we’re both fucked up. The murderer might as well have strangled my folks right alongside my sister. And let’s see—the girl you thought you were going to marry winds up dead and replacing an automaton, and everyone thinks you did it. Hell, yeah, I can see where you’re pretty screwed up in the head.”