Unbinding Love: An Angela Panther Mystery Novella (The Angela Panther Mystery Series) (11 page)

I sped the whole way, and we both ignored Aaron’s phone calls and text messages. When we arrived at Justin’s grandmother’s house, everything appeared status quo. The house wasn’t shot up, the windows weren’t busted, the front door wasn’t kicked open, and Bill Marx was MIA. 

“Dang, either we’re too late or they’re not here,” I said.

“Is Fran here?” Mel asked.

“I dunno.” I checked out the area. “Ma? You here?” The air didn’t cool and none of the hairs on my neck lifted. No normal signs of dead people went off around me. “I got nothing,” I said to Mel. “No dead people.”

“That’s not good.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe it means no one is dead here.”

“There’s that,” she said.

We got out of the car and slinked toward the house. The hairs on my neck stood. “Crap.”

“What?”

“I feel dead people.”

“Crap.”

Emma Marx shimmered in front of us. “They’re alive but they’re not here.”

I latched onto Mel’s arm. “Oh, thank God, they’re alive.”

“How do you know?” Mel asked.

I explained.

“Where are they?” I asked Emma.

She crooked her partially transparent index finger. “Follow me.”

We followed the ghost behind her mother’s house and down a path into the woods.

“Shouldn’t we be going through the woods to grandmother’s house?” Mel joked.

Under normal circumstances I would have laughed. “Does Bill know where they are?” I asked Emma.

“No. My mother has protected them from him again, but it’s not going to last.”

“Before you were confused but now—“

She held out her hand. “I see things clearly now. All is well within me. I am here to protect my child from them. I will not let them hurt him.”

“Can you tell us who that is?”

“There is no time. We must hurry,” she said, and practically speed-floated through the woods.

We followed until we reached a small shed and Emma disappeared inside.

I pulled on the door handle but it was locked. “She’s inside here.” I knocked. “Hello? Emma?”

The door cracked opened and Emma’s mother peered out. “Who else is with you?”

Before I could finish saying Mel’s name, a loud blast boomed through the air and the door flew open. Emma Marx’s grandmother flung backward and fell to the ground, blood pouring from her forehead.

Mel and I ducked and ran for cover as bullets shot from all sides of the woods. Mel screamed. I screamed. Someone else screamed.

More shots fired and more people screamed but I couldn’t make out any of the words because I was too busy screaming. Mel and I clung to each other, our bodies flinching each time a shot fired. I prayed she wouldn’t get hit. I prayed none of us would get hit.

Out of nowhere a man showed up next to Mel’s shoulder and pointed his gun straight at my face. I froze. My mother showed up and swearing in Italian, swung her arm wide, and sent the man’s gun flying out of his hand. She swerved and whipped her other arm and sent him five feet into the air. He landed on a tree stump with his knees bent the wrong way. I cringed.

“Run,” she said and pointed left. “Aaron’s car is there. Go. Now.”

I pulled Mel’s arm and we sprinted, injuries be damned, toward Aaron’s car parked in an open area of the woods.

Ten minutes later, out of breath and exhausted, we’d made it to his car, and two uniformed officers we both knew.

“Thank God,” I said when they handed us bottled waters. “I’m so thirsty.” We collapsed onto the side of the car.

My attempt at humor was met with frowns.

“Wait here,” one officer said.

So we did.

Aaron showed up about thirty minutes later.

“How’d you—“

He shook his head. “I put an app on Mel’s phone. You think I’m stupid? I knew you’d try and find the kid on your own, and I knew you’d lead us to whoever Bill Marx owed the money to.”

“We almost didn’t,” I said. “Bill tried to fool us but we figured it out.”

Two officers walked up from the woods with Justin Marx. His mother floated next to him. She smiled at me.

“Wait,” I said. “Aaron, may I talk to him?”

He nodded.

I glanced at Emma. “Do you have anything you’d like me to say to your son?”

She placed her hand on her child’s chest and I watched as he caught his breath.

“No. He knows. Thank you.”

The only thing I could think of was that her mother had the gift too, and was able to communicate with her. Her mother appeared next to her and the two of them shimmered away.

Tears formed in the boy’s eyes, and in mine too.

“Justin,” I said. “You know your mom and grandmother loved you very much, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t forget that, okay? They’ll always, always be with you.”

“I know. I can feel them in my heart.”

Mel sobbed. The kids always got to her.

Aaron nodded to the officers and they took the boy to a car and left.

“What’ll happen to him now?” Mel asked him.

“He’s got family he’ll go to,” he said. He held my arm. “We got the lock box from your car already. And the people Marx owed money are dead. It’s over. Emma Marx and Juan Garcia’s murders will remain unresolved and end up in the cold file eventually. We can’t close them with their killer being a ghost.”

“He was desperate to save his son, I guess.”

Bill appeared. “I didn’t kill my ex-wife.” 

“Bill’s here,” I said. “He didn’t kill Emma.”

“It may look like that, but I really didn’t. They did it. They wanted the money but she wouldn’t give it to them. She wouldn’t tell them where it was. She wanted it so she could use it to live. They killed her for it.”

              “Does he have any proof?” Aaron asked.

              Bill shook his head.

After I told Aaron, he said he could use the information to try to close the file on Emma Marx’s murder, that it would be a logical connection to closing Juan Garcia’s case too, but he didn’t know if it would happen without any real proof.

“Justin will grow up knowing his father was a criminal already and that’s bad,” he said. “If we can get anything to prove his father tried to save him, we’ll do it.”

Not every story has a happy ending, but at least Justin Marx was alive and would live with family, family that would be safe from people Bill Marx had owed money.

Mel and I walked to my car with Bill Marx floating next to us.

“Bill, you don’t have to stay any longer, you know,” I said.

“I’m not quite ready to go,” he said.

“What’s keeping you here?”

“I’m afraid I won’t go to a good place because of the bad things I’ve done,” he said.

I stopped. His point was valid. He’d done some bad things. I’d be afraid too. “Do you see a light, Bill?”

He glanced around. “No.”

Oh boy. “Look hard.”

“There is a light, Angela, but before I go, you need to know something.”

“Yes?”

“You need to be careful,” Bill Marx said.

“Someone knows.”

“Someone knows what?” I asked.

But it was too late. Bill Marx had already crossed over.

The End.

Read on for chapter one of

Unfinished Business

An Angela Panther Mystery

"I laughed and I cried...and laughed...and cried...throughout the entire book!  This book was so real (yes even with the heroine seeing her mother's ghost) and the emotion in it will stay with me for a long, long time!"

—
Joe Cool Review

"It definitely touched a chord with anyone who has ever lost a loved one. The writing was strong and the dialogue -- which many people
simply cannot write—was terrific."

—
Christie Giraud, editor, Editingpro.com

"What a fantastic read! I couldn't put it down! I had to keep reading
just to see what twist life was going throw out at Angela next!"

—Chicklit Plus

"The author has a great sense of humor, even about death, but when the
story called for it, she was reverent and empathetic in the way her
characters handled each other."

—
Caroline Fardig, Bestselling Author of It's Just a Little Crush

The air in
the room felt frigid and sent an icy chill deep into my bones. Searching for comfort, I lay on the rented hospice bed, closed my
eyes, and snuggled under Ma’s floral print quilt. I breathed in her scent,
a mixture of Dove soap, Calvin Klein Eternity perfume and stale cigarettes. The stench of death lingered in the air, trying hard to take over my senses, but I refused to let it in. Death may have taken my
mother, but not her smell. Not yet.

“You little thief, I know what you did now.”

I opened my eyes and searched the room, but other than my Pit Bull, Greyhound mix Gracie, and me, it was empty. Gracie sensed my ever so slight movement, and laid her head back down. I saw my
breath, which wouldn’t have been a big deal except it was May, in Georgia. I closed my eyes again.

“I know you can hear me, Angela. Don’t you ignore me.”

 I opened my eyes again. “Ma?”

Floating next to the bed, in the same blue nightgown she had on when she died, was my mother, or more likely, some grief induced image of her.

“Ma?" I laughed out loud. “What am I saying? It’s not you. You’re dead.’

The grief induced image spoke. “Of course I’m dead, Angela, but I told you if I could, I’d come back. And I can so, tada, here I am.”

The image floated up in the air, twirled around in a few circles
and floated back down.

 I closed my eyes and shook my head, trying to right my brain or maybe shake loose the crazy, but it was pointless because when I
opened my eyes again, the talking image of my mother was still there.

“Oh good grief, stop it. It’s not your head messing with you, Angela. It’s me, your Ma. Now sit up and listen to me. This is important.”

As children we’re conditioned to respond to our parents when they speak to us. We forget it as teenagers, but somewhere between
twenty
and the birth of our first child, we start acknowledging them again, maybe even believing some of what they tell us. Apparently it was
no different when you imagined their ghost speaking to you, too. Crazy maybe, but no different.

 I rubbed my eyes. “This is a dream, so I might as well go with it."

I sat up, straightened my back, plastered a big ol’ smile on my face, because it was a dream and I could be happy the day my mom
died, in a dream and said, “Hi Ma, how are you?” 

 “You ate my damn Hershey bars."

“Hershey bars? I dream about my dead mother and she talks about Hershey bars. What is that?”

“Don’t you act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, Angela."

“But I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ma.” I shook my head again and thought for sure I was bonkers, talking to an
imaginary Ma.

“Oh for the love of God, Angela, my Hershey bars. The ones I hid in the back of my closet.”

Oh. Those Hershey bars, from like, twenty years ago, at
least. The ones I did eat.

“How do you know it was me that ate your Hershey bars? That was over twenty years ago.”

The apparition smirked. “I don’t know how I know, actually. I just do. I know about all of the stuff you did, and your brothers too. It’s all in here now.” She pointed to her, slightly transparent head and smirked.

She floated up to the ceiling, spun in a circle, and slowly floated back down. “And look, I’m floating. Bet you wish you could do that, don’t you, Angela? You know, I’d sit but I tried that before and fell right
through to the damn basement. And let me tell you, that was
not
fun. It was creepy, and it scared the crap outta me. And oh, Madone, the dust between your two floors! Good Lord, it was nasty. You need to
clean that. No wonder Emily’s always got a snotty nose. She’s allergic.”

“Emily does not always have a snotty nose.” She actually did but I wasn't going to let Ma have that one.

The apparition started to say something, then scrutinized at the
bed. “Ah, Madone, that mattress. That was the most uncomfortable thing I ever slept on, but don’t get me started on that. That’s a
conversation for another time.”

Another time?

“And I hated that chair.” She pointed to the one next to the bed. “You should have brought my chair up here instead. I was dying and you wanted me to sit in that chair? What with that
uncomfortable bed and
ugly chair, my back was killing me.” She smiled at her own joke, but I sat there stunned, and watched the apparition’s lips move, my own mouth gaping, as I tried to get my mind and my eyes to agree on what floated in front of me. 

“Ah, Madone. Stop looking at me like that, Angela Frances
Palanca. You act like you’ve never seen a ghost.”

 “Ma, I haven’t ever seen a ghost, and my name is Angela Panther,
not Palanca. You know that.” My mother always called me Angela Palanca, and it drove both my father and me batty. She said I was the closest thing to a true Italian she could create, and felt I deserved the honor of an Italian last name. She never liked Richter, my maiden
name, because she said it was
too damned German
. 

“And that recliner of yours was falling apart. I was afraid you’d hurt yourself in it. Besides, it was ugly, and I was sort of embarrassed to put it in the dining room.” I shook my head again. “And you’re not real, you’re in my head. I watched them take your body away, and I know for a fact you weren’t breathing, because I
checked.” 

 Realizing that I was actually having a discussion with someone
who could not possibly be real, I pinched myself to wake up from
what was clearly some kind of whacked-out dream.

“Stop that, you know you bruise easily. You don’t want to look
like a battered wife at my funeral, do you?”

Funeral?
I had no intention of talking about my mother’s funeral
with a figment of my imagination. I sat for a minute, speechless, which for me was a huge challenge.

“They almost dropped you on the driveway, you know.” I
giggled, and then realized what I was doing, and immediately felt guilty, for a second.

Ma scrunched her eyebrows and frowned. “I know. I saw that. You’d think they’d be more careful with my body, what with you standing there and all. There you were, my daughter, watching them take away my lifeless, battered body, and I almost went flying off
that cart. I wanted to
give them a what for, and believe me, I tried, but I felt strange, all dizzy and lightheaded. Sort of like that time I had those lemon drop drinks at your brother’s wedding. You know, the ones in those little glasses? Ah, that was a fun night. I haven’t danced like that in years.
I could have done without the throwing up the next day, though, that’s for sure.”

Lifeless, battered body?
What a dramatic apparition I’d imagined.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes and considered pinching myself
again, but decided the figment was right, I didn’t want to be all bruised for the funeral. 

There I sat, in the middle of the night, feeling wide awake, but clearly dreaming. I considered telling her to stay on topic, seeing as
dreams
didn't last very long, and maybe my subconscious needed my dream to process her death but I didn't. “This is just a dream." I tried to
convince myself the apparition wasn’t real. 

She threw her hands up in the air. “Again with the dreaming. It’s not a dream, Angela. You’re awake, and I’m here, in the flesh.” She held her transparent hand up and examined it. “Okay, so not exactly
in the flesh, but you know what I mean.” 

This wasn’t my mother, I knew this, because my mother died today, in my house, in this bed, in a dining room turned bedroom. I was there. I watched it happen. She had lung cancer, or, as she liked to call it,
the big C
. And today, as her body slowly shut down, and her mind
floated in and out of consciousness, I talked to her. I told her everything
I lacked the courage to say before, when she could talk back and acknowledge my fear of losing her. And I kept talking as I watched her chest rise and fall, slower and slower, until it finally stilled. I talked to her as she died, and
because I still had so much more to say, I kept talking for hours after her
body shut down. I told her how much I loved her, how much she impacted my life. I told her how much she drove me absolutely
crazy, and yet I couldn’t imagine my life without her.

So this wasn’t Ma, couldn’t possibly be. “You’re dead.”

The figment of my imagination shook her head and frowned, then moved closer, and looked me straight in the eye. I could see through
her
to the candelabra on the wall. Wow, it was dusty. When was it last dusted?

“Of course I’m dead, Angela. I’m a ghost.”

I shook my head, trying hard not to believe her, but I just didn’t feel like I was sleeping, so God help me, I did. 

My name is Angela Panther and I see dead people. Well, one
dead person, that is, and frankly, one was enough..

***

 “Honey, it’s time to wake up.” My husband, Jake, shook me softly. “We have to go to the funeral home. Come on, your brothers
will be there soon. Wake up.” He shook me a little harder. 

 I sat up. “Where’s Ma?”

He studied me, his expression a mix of sadness and compassion. “I know this is hard but it’s going to be okay.” He hugged me and it felt
good, comforting. I let him hold me a little longer, and then I remembered the night before.

“No,” I told him, pulled away, and rubbed the sleep fog from my
eyes. “Ma. She was here. Last night. I know she’s dead, but she was here. I saw her.” I grabbed his shoulders, trying to show him how
serious I was and whispered, “She told me she’s a ghost.”

His eyes widened and all of the sadness and compassion flew right out the dining room window. Jake was a fantabulous husband, and
supported me in ways that often tried his patience, but to see the
gray
area of what he considered to be only black and white was asking
too much. Fantabulous and all, he had his limits. 

“Ang, it wasn’t Fran. It was a dream. I’ve read that kind of stuff happens. People dream about the person who died and think it’s real.” He made a small attempt at comforting coos, but they just
sounded like our cat before she died.

I pushed away from him and got up. “Stop it. You sound like a sick cat, and I need coffee.” My mind barely worked without a good night’s sleep, but without coffee, even the simplest conversations were practically impossible. Besides, it wasn’t the time to get into a
debate about the
hereafter. I walked to the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee and said a silent thank you to Jake for making a pot. I would have said it out loud but I was a little miffed at him for discounting my ghostly
experience.

Jake was kind enough to get our two kids, Emily and Josh, off to school while I slept. I felt a sense of relief for not having to deal with them and then felt a little guilty for that. They left me a handmade card near the coffeepot knowing I’d be sure to see it there. It had red hearts and sad faces drawn all over the front, most likely by Josh, because he drew eyes with eyelashes. The inside of it read, “We’re sorry for your loss. We loved Grandma and miss her.” 

They weren’t here last night. I knew it was Ma’s last day, and Jake and I didn’t want them to see her die, so we made arrangements for them to spend the evening with friends. Jake picked them up after the funeral home took Ma. I lacked the energy and courage to
talk to them, so Jake asked them to give me some alone time.

The card was sweet, and I got a lump in my throat just reading it even though I was sure they’d never work for Hallmark. 

“What time is it?” I asked, and then checked the clock. “It’s ten a.m. What the – we have to be at the funeral home at eleven fifteen.” I finished pouring my coffee, took a huge gulp, and cursed myself as
it burned my throat, then rushed upstairs to get ready.

We arrived at the funeral home just before eleven fifteen. My long, blond hair was pulled into a ponytail since I didn’t have time to style it.
I didn’t have on an ounce of makeup and was dressed like a typical soccer mom heading to a yoga class. Normally I wouldn’t go to an
appointment like that but considering the fact that my mother just died, I didn’t really give a crap.

We walked in through the front doors into a sitting area I’m sure was meant to seem comforting and inviting but instead felt like a grandparents’ family room, old fashioned and overstuffed. The couch was a ridiculously
huge, twenty years outdated, 1980s floral print of mauve and gray, flanked with humongous pillows in matching solid colors. There
were
two matching and equally uncomfortable looking chairs and ugly, ornate tables that didn’t match, intermixed with the seating. A few magazines and tissue boxes sat on the tables. I grabbed a couple
tissues just in case I
needed them later. Overhead, soft music played, and I was sure they thought it made someone in my position feel better, but mostly it was just annoying.