Walking After Midnight by Karen Robards

Author:Karen Robards [Robards, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80139-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

26

“The soul, like the body, lives by

what it feeds on.”

—Josiah Gilbert Holland

She was starting to get the hang of this ghost thing, Deedee realized.

At first it was disorienting to be always popping up here, there, and everywhere, without, she thought, much rhyme or reason. She’d found herself in the living room of her childhood home again, where she discovered her mother and her aunt Dot, who had lived together since both were widowed within a twelve-month span eight years before, trying to contact her via, of all things, a Ouija board.

“I tell you I saw her. Just as plain as I’m seeing you,” her mother was saying.

“I’m not sayin’ you didn’t, Sue. All I’m sayin’ is, this Ouija board ain’t pickin’ her up.”

“Maybe you just don’t know how to use it.”

“I’ve been usin’ Ouija boards all of my life, so I guess I know how to use one. A Ouija is what advised me to marry Jett, you know, when I would’ve taken Carl Owens.”

“That don’t recommend ’em much to me,” her mother said.

Indeed, Aunt Dot’s fights with Uncle Jett were legendary. Deedee had almost forgotten about them.

This time, try though she might, she couldn’t seem to materialize. But she could take control of the pointer.

“I-M-OK-A-Y …”

“Would you look at that?”

“Are you pushin’ that thing, Dorothy Jean?”

“You know I wouldn’t do that! Oh, my heavens!”

“I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U-M-O-M.”

“Deedee! Ohmigod, Deedee! It’s my baby! Deedee, Deedee!”

“Sue, calm down! Sue, ask her what happened that night! Ask her, quick!”

Deedee’s mother and aunt, work-reddened, unlovely hands poised on either side of the plastic pointer, frantically pushed the felt-tipped wedge around the board. But Deedee was already being sucked away.

When next she surfaced it was on a Nashville sound-stage. A pretty blonde of maybe twenty-five, wearing headphones and a scarlet mini, was crooning into a microphone.

Deedee found herself watching the singer from the Plexiglas-walled control booth, where two men listened, frowning, to what Deedee considered a reed-thin voice.

“We need more volume out of her, Bill.”

“Well, we ain’t gonna get it. That’s everything she’s got. It doesn’t matter, anyway. We can fix it. Hell, with the equipment we’ve got we can fix anything.”

“She’s scheduled to sing on Nashville Live Saturday night. ‘Agony’ is already number eighteen with a bullet. Nobody’s ever heard her sing live before. The critics are gonna be after her with knives if we don’t get her to punch it up.”

“Hell, I would if I could, and you know it. This little gal’s pretty, and she sings okay, but you and I both know she never would’ve got the first whiff of a recording contract if she wasn’t married to Hank Ketch urn.”

“You gotta admit, marryin’ the head of Jalapeno Records was one hell of a career move. Too bad I didn’t think of it.”

“I don’t think he would’ve proposed, in your case. Anyway, Ketchum signs our paychecks, so we’d best shut up.” Bill pressed a button and spoke into a mike. “Hallie, honey, try to hold those high notes just a little longer, would you? And see if you can put more emotion into it.

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