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“Surely you can’t sue a national park?” I asked, but no one seemed to hear me, or maybe no one knew the answer.
“They can’t keep us out of that park,” Chris swore.
“They sure as hell can’t,” his brother Mike agreed. “We should go down there right now and—”
“No, no, no. I don’t think so. ” Angie took his beer away and set it down on the table before she could get any wetter. She’d be driving both of them home later, so she was sticking with soda. “Not tonight, anyway. Maybe this weekend, say Saturday night, we’ll pull a party together and go out there. That might be fun. ”
“The park closes at sundown, doesn’t it?”
Everyone got quiet and turned to stare at me. Several of them said in chorus, “So?”
Benny folded his sketchbook closed and tucked the mechanical pencil into his shirt pocket. “There’s a back way onto the grounds. Everybody knows about it. ”
“I don’t,” I assured him, but that only opened me up to the invitation I didn’t want to get.
“We could show you. Hey, that would be neat—you’re into ghosts, right?” Angie handed Mike his beer back and scooted her chair closer to mine. She looked excited and frightened at once. Her straight blond hair dipped past her ears and fell into her face. She tucked it back into place. “Do you want to come with us?”
“Um, I don’t know. I might be busy Saturday. ”
“But you’re the local ghost expert,” Mike chimed in, punctuating the sentence with a mighty belch. “You’ve got to come along to protect us. ”
“Protect you? From ghosts?”
Angie tapped my side with her elbow. “From themselves, more likely. You really oughta come. Have you ever been there?”
“Yeah, a couple of times. A long time ago. ”
Besides one or two elementary school field trips, Dave and Lu had driven me out there when I was in high school. I’d been doing a paper for history class. The place had looked dull to me then—all empty and neatly mowed, with statues and obelisks peppering the landscape.
“Have you ever gone there at night?” Jamie leaned in close to ask.
“No. And I don’t have any burning desire to, either. ”
They dog-piled on me then, teasing and goading. They insisted that it was easy as pie to sneak in at night, through the suburbs on the edge of the property. They told me all about how spooky it was—and how haunted it was, and how much fun it would be to go. “Spoken like people who have never actually seen a ghost,” I observed, and they just laughed.
“Look, if you’re serious about this,” I said, because I didn’t believe for a moment that they were, “you need to put more thought into it than this. You can’t just drag a couple dozen people onto federally protected land in the middle of the night. You’re not exactly a bunch of ninjas when you’re stone sober—God knows you’d have the cops all over you before you could say ‘Old Green Eyes. ’”
“Ooh, Old Green Eyes!” Mike gurgled. “I saw him once. Long time ago. ”
“Bullshit,” someone said from the fringe of the circle.
We all turned to regard our waitress, who had returned with my food and Jamie’s wine. She sat it down in front of us without making eye contact with anyone, then stood up straight and tucked her tray under her arm.
“If you’d actually seen him,” she practically whispered, “you’d never cross the Georgia state line again. ”
Everyone got quiet then. A couple of people misunderstood her enough to think she was being pissy. But I knew true fear when I saw it.
5
Down by the River
I’d abandoned Jamie to my tab and a ride home from someone else and was walking back to my car when my cell vibrated. Usually I leave it turned off and let all incoming calls go straight to voicemail, but since Lu and Dave were out of town, I’d left it active. Accidents and emergenci
es happen, and I’d have hated for them to be unable to reach me if they needed to.
I held up the phone and pressed a button to illuminate the caller’s number. It began with a 423 area code, so it was local, but I didn’t recognize the remaining seven digits. I don’t give out the number to many people, so I don’t usually ignore it. Curiosity got the better of me.
“Hello?”
