“Who areyou really? What’s going on here?” Tate interjected. He looked ready to pass out.
“I told you, my name is Charlie. Charlie Randolph.”
Tate mouthed the name silently, dazed, before he swore for a third time. “That’s not possible.”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I sighed. “You can say it as many times as you want, but it doesn’t make it true. He really is Charlie Randolph.”
“Charles Randolph is dead. He died almost forty years ago.” It sounded like Tate was trying to convince himself more than us.
“Yes, that’s true,” Charlie said.
“This is some kind of fucked up practical joke, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a joke.”
“Do you really expect me to believethisguy,” he pointed at Charlie in disbelief, “who is very much alive, is Charles Randolph,theCharles Randolph, responsible for killing six people thirty-nine years ago before disappearing off the face of the planet?”
“He didnotkill those people,” I growled.
Tate looked incredulous. “That’sthe detail you take issue with?”
“It’s about time someone fucking does,” I spit back. “Maybe people wouldn’t be disappearing all over again if someone with more than two brain-cells to rub together had considered Charlie might not have been the killer.”
Tate’s eyes flashed to Charlie, then back to me. “I don’t believe you. Whatever game you’re playing, I want no part of it. I thought you were a better person than this, Reece. Your dad calls me almost every day, asking if you’re safe out here. Bobby won’t leave me alone about this case. I hauled my ass all the way out here to talk to you,again,because you won’t pick up your goddamn phone, and you pull something like this? It’s a slap in the face to everyone who cares about you.”
“He’s not lying,” Charlie cut in, angry and defensive. “I am Charlie Randolph, and to my great dismay, I’m not alive. And I’ll fucking prove it, you asshole.”
And then he disappeared.
The clothes he’d been wearing,myclothes, fell to the ground in a lifeless heap.
I smirked at the stunned expression on Tate’s face, his mouth hanging wide open. “Believe me now?”
“But—he—that’s not possible. I’m hallucinating. He just—he was right there,” Tate rambled, spinning in circles to peer around, as if Charlie could’ve undressed and streaked away to hide in the trees in the blink of an eye. “Where’d he go?”
Right then, Tate’s ball cap lifted off his head seemingly of its own accord, twisted around, and plopped down again, facing backwards.
He spun around, hands going up to hold the hat in place. “What the?—”
Charlie materialized right behind him, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Boo.”
“AHH!” Tate screamed, skedaddling away from him. “What the fuck?”
Rocky had lain down a while ago. He cracked an eye open just long enough to watch Tate’s distressed retreat before closing it again, entirely unbothered.
That’s what happens when you don’t give them enough cheese,I thought.
As much as I wanted Charlie to keep going, if only to see his playful side return, Tate looked one more fright away from a heart attack, and I wasn’t prepared to explain a ghostanda dead cop.
Schooling my grin, I said, “Now that we’ve cleared that up, will you stop shouting and accusing me of being a shitty person?”
Eyes following Charlie as he returned to his place next to me, Tate put a hand to his chest, breathing hard. “I need to sit the fuck down.”
Back in the lookout, Charlie earned Rocky’s trust nearly immediately through several offerings of cheese and ear scratches. Then, the dog curled up by the fire and promptly fell asleep.
Tate sat in the desk chair, finally calm enough to have a coherent conversation after gulping down a cup of instant coffee. Charlie and I sat side-by-side on the bed facing him.
“So you’re, what? A spirit? An apparition?” Tate asked, looking like he, too, was confronting the beaded curtains.
