Seattle Ghost Story by Nick DiMartino

Author:Nick DiMartino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Epicenter Press Inc.
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

November Secrets

38 | Not Real

“You are not to go over there,” said Paul Beck, lowering the open Sunday news­paper and looking squarely at his son across the breakfast table, “and that’s all there is to it, Billy. You don’t know her well enough to be bothering them. It’s none of your business. They’ve got enough to deal with—and so do you. Believe me, I know best.”

Paul wasn’t so sure he knew best. How he wished he did! In his T-shirt and sweats, he was trying to relax that Sunday morning and not doing a good job. He grabbed the newspaper and opened it to hide his face. He didn’t want Billy to see how wor­ried he was by what had happened to Pepper Merlino.

The ambulance siren wailing through the neighborhood that Friday night had awakened them. Mrs. Skinner had stopped by Saturday afternoon as a concerned neighbor going from house to house to make sure everyone had seen the article in the newspaper and was properly warned. She told them all about it on the porch.

“The way I see it, that could have been any one of us,” said Wanda. “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We all need to be on the alert.”

“The thing I don’t understand,” said Paul, “is what she was doing down there so late at night in the first place.”

Mrs. Skinner leaned closer, lowering her voice, but not so low that Billy couldn’t hear. “They think he lured her down there. Or dragged her.” She shuddered at the thought. “No one knows why he did it—or why he stopped.” She showed them the article in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer that referred to the incident as “a particularly brutal Halloween prank.”

The twenty-seven-year-old UW graduate student was in good condition, hospitalized overnight to make sure she didn’t have a concus­sion. A neighbor reported a homeless man the ravine that night.

Paul waited until Wanda was far enough away, knocking on his next-door neigh­bor’s door. “Billy,” he asked in a casual voice, “do you see any homeless people down in the ravine?”

“No more than usual.”

“Do you ever talk to them?” He spread strawberry jam on his toast. “Do they ever talk to you?”

“No,” said Billy, spooning up the last of his Frosted Flakes. His Dad’s questions were starting to spook him.

“Billy, I don’t want you going down in the ravine for a while.”

The boy stared at him in wide-eyed horror. “But Dad—!”

“You heard me,” said Paul sternly, lowering the newspaper with a trembling crackle. “It’s not safe.”

“But—” Billy rose from his chair, like a prisoner desperately pleading his case. “Dad, you’ve got to believe me. It’s not a homeless man. It’s the man in my night­mares. I know who it is—it’s him!”

“Billy, the man in your nightmares doesn’t exist,” said Paul with forced patience. “There’s no one lurking in the back yard. There’s no one looking in the window. He may seem real in your dreams, but he’s not real. Trust me, mister, you’re dealing with enough without scaring yourself by going to see this woman.

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