by Apryl Baker
Published: August 13, 2013
Publisher: Limitless Publishing
Cherry blossom lipstick: check
Smokey eyes: check
Skinny jeans: check
Dead kid in the mirror: check
For sixteen year old Mattie Hathaway, this is her normal everyday routine. She’s been able to see ghosts since her mother tried to murder her when she was five years old. No way does she want anyone to know she can talk to spooks. Being a foster kid is hard enough without being labeled a freak too.
Normally, she just ignores the ghosts and they go away. That is until she see’s the ghost of her foster sister… Sally.
Everyone thinks Sally’s just another runaway, but Mattie knows the truth—she’s dead. Murdered. Mattie feels like she has to help Sally, but she can’t do it alone. Against her better judgment, she teams up with a young policeman, Officer Dan, and together they set out to discover the real truth behind Sally’s disappearance.
Only to find out she’s dealing with a much bigger problem, a serial killer, and she may be the next victim…
Will Mattie be able to find out the truth before the killer finds her?
Excerpt
“This is so NOT a good idea, Mattie Louise Hathaway!” Dan glares at me again. God, he’s been harping at me since I told him where we were going. I roll my eyes even though he can’t see me. The lock is simple and I can get it if he’ll just shut up for two seconds.
“You didn’t have to come,” I snarl.
“Did you expect me to just let you go by yourself?” he all but shouts and I wince.
“Keep your voice down.” I sigh and keep a weak hold on my temper. “Look, Officer Dan, I have a juice record already. If I get caught, no big deal. They’ll write it off as emotional distress due to Sally gone missing. My shrink will testify. If you get caught, you’re a cop. You’ll get into a lot of trouble, so…” I spluttered, “you can leave or wait in the car. But SHUT up.”
“I’m not gonna wait in the car while you break into somebody’s house!”
“Then shut up or we’ll both get caught!” That did it. Blessed silence. Thank God. I seriously am not taking him along on any more B&E adventures. He’s a pansy. Well, he is a cop, so he does have to at least protest, but he does it with such vigor. I swear I can strangle him here and now and die happy. I might feel bad about it later mind you, but not right now.
I hear the lock click and grin. “Haven’t lost my touch after all.” I pocket my handmade jimmy and stand. Dan glowers at me. No high five? Oh, well. I roll my eyes again, softly open the door, hurry Dan inside before closing the door behind us. “Kitchen. Ugh.” It’s so dated; the lime green walls do nothing for the orange-flowered cloth on the breakfast table. The room smells slightly and that’s when I see the flies circling the garbage can. No one has been in to do any kind of cleaning yet. Great.
“Have you ever been in here before?” I ask Dan.
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know! Your mom seems to have known her. I thought maybe she’d dragged you over here or something.”
“Well, I haven’t.”
“Are you always this grumpy?”
“Only when I’m forced into criminal acts by high-strung teenage girls.”
“You are such a pansy.”
“What? I am NOT a pansy just because I’m worried about getting caught and going to jail!”
I shake my head and leave the kitchen. Now I’m in the living room. The furniture here hasn’t been updated since the early seventies. The walls are paneled in a deep brown and the brown carpet has definitely seen better days. There is an old brown leather couch and two chairs in the same leather flanking a coffee table. The old floor model TV is off, but I bet if I turn it on, it’ll be on the game show channel. Old people, I’ve discovered, are notorious for watching their shows. You don’t stand between them and Wheel of Fortune if you know what’s good for you. So says this Voice of Experience.
There is a small door on the right wall; next to the door is a montage of pictures. I open the door and find a bathroom. The walls are pink. Seriously. Pink. The woman needed an interior designer in the worst way. Gag. I shut the door on the pink horror and look around the living room again. There’s a small door on the opposite wall. It blended in so well with the paneling, I hadn’t seen it when I first came in. There’s a deadbolt and it’s locked. Strange. I unlock it and open the door. There were steps going down. Bingo. “The basement.” I tried the light switch and a fuzzy yellow light blared to life at the bottom of the steps.
I glance at Dan. “Are you coming?”
He nods and I start down the steps. It reeks down here of mildew. I’d bet money the old woman has mold growing down here. It is certainly damp enough. The first thing I see is the washer and dryer. A laundry basket full of towels sits on top of the dryer, ready to be put away. For just a second, I feel bad for the old bat. She hadn’t asked to die. She’d planned on coming home and putting away her towels and then probably feeding Oliver.
Speaking of which… “Oliver?”
“Oliver?” Dan whispers. “Who’s Oliver?”
“Oh, so now you whisper when no can hear us,” I glare at him.
“Mattie…”
“Jeeze, it’s her cat.”
“Her cat?”
“Yeah, I saw her at the diner and she was harping at me to let Oliver out of the basement.”
“Wait, you saw Mrs. Roberts? When? She’s been dead for days… oh.”
I chuckle at his strangled voice. “She was at the diner yesterday yelling at me to let Oliver out before he starves. I ignored her, but then remembered when your mom was talking about her at breakfast. I figure what will it hurt me to let her stupid cat out? No reason he has to starve just because she died.”
“So we are breaking into a dead woman’s house so you can help her cat?”
“Pretty much.”
“Where did you learn to pick locks?”
I shoot him a wicked grin. “Haven’t read my rap sheet yet, huh?”
“Mattie, you’re sixteen. What kind of rap sheet can you have?”
“Look it up and then talk to me. Now, where is that danged cat? Here, kitty, kitty.”
“You really are an odd girl, Mattie,” Dan tells me. “You try so hard to come off as a hard-ass, but you are the biggest softie I have ever met.”
“Take that back,” I tell him, appalled. “I am not a softie.”
“Then why are we here looking for a cat?”
“So the old bat will leave me alone.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Will you just shut up and look for the cat?” I turn away so he can’t see my cheeks flaming. Most people never, ever see past the walls I put up, but this guy can and it makes me uncomfortable. Jake sees past it a little, but not nearly as much as Dan does. I’m not sure what that means either.
Dan and I explore the entire basement and come up with nada. If that old bat sent me on a wild goose chase, I am so gonna give her a piece of my mind.
“Mattie, are you sure it’s a cat?” Dan asks very quietly.
“What else can it be?”
“Big snake?”
“WHAT?” I turn around to see Dan slowly backing up away from the furnace. He is inching backwards at a snail’s pace. I hate snakes with a passion. When I was eight, I got bit by a black snake and was so sick I thought I was dying. They’ve freaked me out ever since. When Dan finally reaches me, I peek over his shoulder and my eyes widen. OH MY GOD. Uncoiling itself from the furnace is a boa constrictor. Those things are huge, they can get like twenty feet long or something and can swallow you whole. “Holy crap.” Um, this one’s pretty big. I can see its body start to take shape and it has to be at least three feet wide and ten feet long. At least.
“Mattie, you need to back up towards the stairs,” Dan whispers. “I think it’s hungry.”
“Duh, it hasn’t been fed in days,” I whisper back. My feet won’t move, though. Snakes really, really freak me out and this one is pretty much the biggest one I’ve seen.
“Move, Mattie.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause I’m scared out of my mind?”
“Right.” He curses softly, grabs my hand and takes off at a run, dragging me behind him. I turn mid yank and try to keep up. My feet work if I’m not looking directly at the mammoth snake. The stairs loom up and I even manage to get up them. Dan slams the door and turns the lock.
Now I understand why there is a deadbolt. We both lean against the door, slightly out of breath.
“Animal control,” Dan tells me. “We are calling animal control right now.”
“Uh, no we are not.” Does he want to get caught? “Are you forgetting that we broke in here? How are you going to explain that one, Officer Dan? Wait until we get out of here, then stop and make an anonymous call at a pay phone.”
He stares at me. “You do this a lot do you?”
I shrug. “I used to.”
He frowns.
Whew. That look means I’d better explain. “When I was still in Jersey, I hooked up with some kids who taught me some skills. It was either that or starve. The place I was staying decided that we only needed to be fed every couple days. I got stuff for them and I got fed. I know it wasn’t right, that it was stealing, but when you’re eleven and hungry…”
“I’m sorry, Squirt.”
“Don’t be,” I gave him my best and brightest and falsest grin. “I’m fine.”
“You’re always fine, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. Now let’s get out of here, before Oliver decides to come through the door.”
He laughs softly and follows me to the kitchen, but I stop suddenly. There is something odd. The lime green walls are a little hazy now, almost like they’re shimmering. I cock my head and watch. The edges of the walls fade and it looks like I can see what I would call snow. The hazy snow of late winter. It’s eating the wall up and I shiver. Things flicker in the snow, shadows of things I can’t quite see. I take a step forward the snow branches out, creeping to the other wall where the fridge is. I’ve never seen anything like this before. What is it? The closer I get, the more I want to touch it. By the time I am standing a few inches from the wall, my hand is going up, fingers outstretched.
My fingertips graze the snowy wall. Screaming goes off in my head and I stumble back, falling to my knees. My stomach heaves from the force of the pain. I can hear Dan shouting at me, but the sound is faint; I can barely breathe past the screaming in my head. Then I look up and all I can see is the snow all around me. The world is covered in it. I try to stand and fall forward instead… and keep falling.
Then land face down on hard concrete. Ouch. That hurt.
I hear a hissing sound and push myself up.
Oliver.
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