Page 4 of Down and Dirty

Chapter 3

My head lolled away as I tried to escape from the offending smell. Muffled voices sounded in the distance; the words garbled. My eyelids opened like a garage door on the verge of breaking midway. I blinked once and then twice, wincing at the flashlight shining in my eyes.

I tried to raise my hand to block the light, and it was jerked back into place with the bite of steel around my wrist. “What the…?”

I yanked my wrist again to hear a clanking noise.

The woman above me smiled. A brunette braid lay over her shoulder. Her warm brown eyes stared down at me. A stethoscope was wrapped around her neck. “Welcome back. What’s your name?”

What was my name? Did I even know?

“You’re traumatized, Faith. Snap out of it. Of course you know your name.” Veronica’s apparition appeared, and she peeked her head straight through the paramedic’s body and spoke.

“Even I know your name,” Jared said as he kicked a can at one of the officers, who glanced over his shoulder looking for the source of the movement. He’d never find it unless he could see ghosts too.

“Faith, what are you doing here?” Jimbo Jones, my childhood best friend, asked.

“I…” I snapped my mouth closed and ignored the heat flaming my cheeks.

“Could you give us a minute?” Jimbo flashed the woman a smile before unlocking the handcuffs from my wrists. “You were following the spirits again, weren’t you?”

My eyes widened, and my heartbeat raced as I sat up. “He’s here. The killer is here, and he saw me.”

“What does he look like?”

“Tall, dark, and killer-y,” I answered. “He was squatted next to the dead body when I saw him.”

“Then what happened?”

“The hill happened.”

“Did he push you down the hill?”

“No, I tripped when I saw my sister.”

“Which one?” he asked.

“Talia,” I answered, scanning the area for the face that I’d seen.

“You must have hit your head pretty hard, Faith. Talia died when we were in elementary school.”

“She was here,” I said, slipping my legs over the side of the gurney.

“Not so fast, Faith. You need to go to the hospital and get checked out.”

I leaned back onto the gurney, trying to make sense out of all of this. “There was a dead body, right?”

“Yeah,” he answered and lifted a wallet. “Ann Scott, age thirty-four. She does look a lot like I’d imagine your sister might have grown up to look like.”

He turned the wallet and showed me the ID. I rubbed at the knot forming in my chest. She looked exactly like the aged pictures we’d done of Talia. She could have been a doppelganger if it weren’t for the birthmark missing on her neck. Was this the woman that Fillpot had wanted my sister Gwen to find?

“I have to call Gwen,” I said, trying to remember.

“I’ll call her and tell her to meet you at the hospital for those tests,” Jimbo said, picking a Popsicle stick out of my hair. “I’ll also tell her to bring you a change of clothes. You smell pretty ripe.”

I nodded and turned my gaze back out to the landfill. Unlike the one ghost I’d seen at my sisters, now there were three more.

“Jimbo.” I caught his arm before he walked off and pulled him down to whisper in his ear. “You’re going to find three more dead bodies out there.” I pointed in the directions trying to help identify which piles the others were standing on.

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