No, it wasn’t Price’s body that was drifting. It was Kylee. What was left of her, anyway. She felt less substantial than a vapor, wispier than a cloud.
A woman stepped into Kylee’s view, her long flaming red hair whipping around her as if blown by an invisible gale. She looked at Kylee with her piercing blue eyes.
A tug of familiarity pulled at her . . . spirit? Kylee had seen this woman before. How did she know her?
The woman held out her hand toward Kylee, palm outward, and Kylee’s upward floating jerked to a stop. Then the woman thrust her hand toward the lake, and Kylee found herself thrown downward as well.
And then she was floating above Price under the water, staring at his closed eyes.
Something was different. His eyes opened, and yet they didn’t. “Kylee,” he said. But his mouth didn’t move. The word filled her soul, surrounding her, drifting around her.
Price, she thought.
And she understood.
Price was dead.
She wanted to scream. Her soul ached, but she felt like in a dream when no matter how hard she tried to cry out, no sound came. Never had she wanted so badly to keep someone from harm, to save someone, as she did with Price.
And she’d let this happen. She’d let him walk into this.
Her soul wept.
He reached out and touched her hands. The sensation was like passing her fingers through gelatin that wasn’t quite set. She looked at his hand as it drifted away, no more tangible and alive than she was. “I can’t feel you,” he said. He looked past her. “Are we under water?”
“You’re dead,” Kylee said. Kind of. She didn’t speak, but she could communicate with him.
“Bill,” Price said, his head bobbing. “He killed me.”
He didn’t seem too upset about this. “Yeah.” She didn’t bother to explain her mother’s role.
“We can be together now, right?” He tried to touch her again, but their bodies didn’t connect. “Right?”
“I don’t know.” None of this felt right. Soon she would fade away, and Price . . . what would happen to Price?
That woman. She had sent Kylee here for a reason. There must be something she could do to help. “I need to save you.”
His face shifted into what was probably a smile. “That was my job.”
She looked down at her hands, transparent outlines in the water. She wasn’t tangible, and yet, she still had some form of herself. It wasn’t enough to lift Price from the water or perform CPR. But maybe she didn’t need to. On impulse, she thrust herself into Price’s body.
“Kylee?”
She heard his voice as clearly now as when she’d hovered next to him, but she didn’t answer. Instead, Kylee forced her gaze inward. To his silent lungs, his still heart.
Still warm heart.
She poked it. Nothing happened, but she almost, almost felt it. She willed everything in her soul into one little spark, one little pulse.
She touched his heart.
It jumped. It jolted, and then it beat. His body convulsed.
She focused on his lungs now, on trying to expand them, flush out the water. Price’s body jerked around, and Kylee was expelled. His body lifted up out of the water.
----------------------------------------
Kylee was floating again.
She found herself hovering above the dry ground. Her mother hadn’t moved from where Bill left her at the pond’s edge. Bill was nowhere to be seen. But Mr. Hudson was there, sitting in the water, holding Price’s sopping wet body in his arms.
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“Price,” he sobbed, “come on, Price. Open your eyes.”
Price drifted to join her, his eyes on his hands, which he turned over and over. “I don’t feel any different.”
Kylee reached for his arm. Her hand passed right through his. “Price, why are you here?”
He looked at her. “I’m dead. I’m with you.”
“But you’re not with me.” Kylee gestured to his arm. “I can’t touch you. You’re still alive. Your heart is beating.” She could hear it. She could hear the weak thumping of his heart from here, the tenuous grasp he had on life. She moved closer to him. “Go back. Live.”
He hesitated, turning his attention to his father, who rubbed his arms vigorously, tears streaming down his face. “But I’ll be without you.”
Now it was her turn to smile, and she felt the sadness as it penetrated the corners of her eyes. “You already are.”
Price closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
In Mr. Hudson’s arms, Price’s eyes flew open, his body jerked sideways, and he vomited.
Kylee didn’t have to look to know she was alone.
----------------------------------------
Kylee watched from a distance as the cops wrapped Price in blankets. The paramedics arrived, and two of them carried her mother away while two others checked on Price.
Kylee knew she should talk to him. Tell him the truth of who had killed her. But she couldn’t bring herself to. The turn of events was still too horrible to internalize.
She kept waiting for the cold chill to overcome her, but it didn’t. She fished around in the grass and found the ring. No glow had returned. She slipped it on her finger, and it stayed there, hollow and lifeless.
The paramedics got Price on a cot and carried him from the woods. Kylee followed behind. She could walk again. She felt more corporeal than before. Shouldn’t she be fading?
An ambulance waited outside her house, lights whirring. Amy was there, her face splotchy and streaked with tears.
“Price!” she called when she saw him. “I tried to warn you, but you didn’t answer!”
“It’s all right, Amy.” Mr. Hudson paused next to her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “You did the right thing, calling me and the cops.”
“Is he okay?” She didn’t take her eyes off the stretcher as they loaded the ambulance.
Mr. Hudson didn’t answer her. Just gave her a squeeze and walked away.
“I’ll drive my car along behind,” he told the paramedic. “I need to check on my daughter, anyway.” He left for his house, but Kylee wasn’t interested in him. She climbed into the ambulance and settled next to Price.
His eyes were closed again, his chest rising and falling. She noticed her mother in another cot, a bandage that matched Price’s wrapped around her head, an oxygen mask taped to her face. “Mom,” she whispered.
“Kylee,” Price murmured.
The ambulance sirens turned on, and she pressed the palm of her hand against the blood-stained white cloth on his eye bone as the vehicle moved forward. “You’ve got another shiner.”
“Why are you still here?” he whispered, focusing on her with his uncovered eye.
She shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Can’t stay away from you?”
He turned her hand over and studied her ring. “It’s gone out.”
“Yeah.” She faked a smile. “I don’t know. I’m here, though.”
He shut his eyes and his grip on her went limp. “Doesn’t matter.” His breathing deepened. “Just stay with me.” The words sighed out of him.
She squeezed his hand but stayed silent. An uneasiness swept through her, a nagging tingling that pricked every part of her body. The urge to fly, to run away, pushed at her. She felt like she could crawl out of her skin. She had to get out.
Mr. Hudson was at the hospital when they arrived. Kylee listened as they rattled off a list of Price’s injuries, including a concussion, a skull fracture, and a punctured lung.
“The good news,” the doctor said, “is that he should make a full recovery. We’ll keep him overnight and see what he looks like in the morning.”
“Do we know who did this yet?” Mr. Hudson asked, one hand on Price’s shoulder while Price slept.
“The police are working on that.” The doctor’s voice droned on, but Kylee found herself drifting elsewhere, carried by her train of thoughts.
She entered another hospital room, where her mother lay hooked up to a series of machines. They beeped in the background while she spoke to a man in a suit, her voice dull and slurred. Her mother’s face was a mess of tears and snot, one side swollen and blue under the bandage wrapped around her head. He scribbled on a notepad, the pen scratchy on the paper.
“So if I understand you correctly,” the man said, “you shot her up with drugs.”
Theresa nodded. “He had been talking about it for awhile. Getting rid of her. I played along to placate him, but I never thought—I never planned to actually kill her.”
“But you did.”
She wrung her hands. “I was high, and she and Bill were fighting. I went into her room, and he had a knife. I thought—this is it. I have to save her. So I shot her up with a triple dose. All I had left.” Her shoulders shook. “My mind was gone. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
She lowered her eyes. “I passed out on the bed next to her. When I woke up, Bill told me he’d taken care of it.”
“Just like you planned.”
“I never thought he would actually kill her,” Theresa whispered.
“You. You would actually kill her.”
She nodded.
“So he followed the plan. Which was?”
“To make it look like a suicide. He used one of her knives to make a deep cut. But then he got scared and decided to pretend she’d run away. He went back and threw the body in the pond.”
“Why did you attack the boy?”
“He was getting too close to the truth.”
“Where is Bill now?”
“I don’t know,” Theresa said. “Maybe the docks. Maybe getting out of town.”
The man pocketed his notepad. “We’ll find him.”
Kylee had seen enough. Her bruised heart throbbed in agony, and she wished she’d moved on before learning her mother plotted her death.
The crime was solved.
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