Page 11 of No Surrender
I saw that name on the list. Damn.
“Please, take my hands.” Simon placed his palms up on the table, and Lois took hold. Her thin-boned hands felt dry and fragile in his much larger grip.
“You can keep your eyes open—this next part is up to Alicia. I’d like you to please picture her as vividly as you can. Think about her face, her voice, the smell of her favorite fragrance, her handwriting. I’m going to close my eyes and try to sense her energy. If she answers, ask your most important questions first—there’s no telling how long she can stay,” Simon advised.
He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, doing his best to relax and open his gift. The spirit who had followed Lois at a distance came closer but not yet near enough to communicate. Simon shivered as the temperature plunged, more to do with the ghost than the air conditioning. He studied the spirit silently, worried that trying to reach out too soon might scare the ghost away.
The ghost looked to be in her mid-twenties, with dark hair in a ponytail and a fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door look. She wore a waitress uniform from a hotel dining room, complete with a name tag—Alicia—and practical shoes. Her sad eyes tugged at Simon’s heart, and even though she didn’t appear with her death wounds, he knew she’d come to a bad end.
Alicia came closer, staring at the old woman who was her younger sister.
“How long?”she asked.
“Alicia is here,” Simon said quietly. “I don’t know if she can become visible. She wants to know how long she’s been gone.”
“Forty years,” Lois replied, and she gasped, letting Simon know Alicia was visible. “Alicia? I’ve missed you so much.”
“Are you the only one left?”
“What about other family members?” Simon paraphrased her question, lending the spirit some of his energy to extend the contact.
“They’re all gone,” Lois said. “Except for grandchildren and nieces and nephews born after you went away.”
“Not my choice.”
“She didn’t choose to leave.” Simon turned his attention to Alicia. “Do you remember what happened?” he asked the ghost, worried that Lois might falter asking the hard questions.
“A pirate grabbed me and killed me.”
Simon relayed the information, puzzled at the cryptic clue. He wished he could ask more questions, but he could feel Alicia fading, and he wanted Lois to have as much time with her sister as possible.
“I looked for you for such a long time,” Lois said, her resolve faltering. Simon opened his eyes when he heard the tears in Lois’s voice. “I want you to know that we looked. I never forgot.”
Alicia’s ghost nodded solemnly. She had managed to look almost solid, but now as her energy faded, the image became translucent. Simon had to ask one more question.
“Where is your body?”
“In the pirate caves.”
Alicia’s form blurred like mist in the wind, and her final words were almost too faint for Simon to catch before the ghost disappeared.
Tears streamed down Lois’s face. She released her painfully-tight grip on Simon’s hands as if she only now realized how hard she had hung on. “Thank you,” she said, and while her eyes were wet, they also held a glint of determination. “You found her.”
He handed a tissue to Lois, who accepted it gratefully to dab her eyes.
“Have you lived in or near Myrtle Beach this whole time?”
Lois nodded. “You’re wondering why Alicia didn’t haunt me sooner? I think she knew I wasn’t ready to give up hope. For a long time, I couldn’t let her go. But these last few years, I’ve lost friends and family—cancer, car wrecks, pneumonia. I realized that I needed to put my affairs in order—and that included finding out the truth.”
She sniffled and blew her nose. “I knew, deep down. After all this time…I knew she was gone. We never believed she would have run away.”
“Did you report her missing at the time?” Simon asked as gently as he could.
Lois nodded. “My parents did. The police told us that she probably ran off with a boy or moved to California to smoke pot. She was a young waitress from an unimportant family. I don’t think the police tried very hard to find her.”
She leaned back in her chair, twisting the tissue as she spoke. Simon thought Lois looked suddenly older with the confirmation of Alicia’s death.
“We put up posters all over town. Offered as much of a reward as we could afford. People called with tips, and we followed up on all of them, but nothing panned out. We talked to everyone she worked with that last day. Nothing unusual happened. Nobody bothered her, no rude customers. She got on the bus at the end of her shift—someone saw her do that—and she never made it home.”
