SPN Fic: Origin Stories
Oh god, I've finished something. In fact, this is the longest thing I have ever finished.
Title: Origin Stories
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG 13
Summary: Sarah's willing to accept that ghosts are real. She's a little more skeptical that a string of suicides in Albany might be the work of one. Sarah, Jo, extremely mild Sarah/Jo
Word Count: ~8200
Spoilers/Warnings: No warnings; spoilers through season 2.
Notes:Written for bellatemple for the
fic exchange. Thanks to familiardevil for looking it over
Two days after Sam Winchester blows out of town with his brother, Sarah thinks about calling him. She has his number, the memory of the stupid-giddy way he made her feel, and his solemn insistence to "call if you ever need anything."
But that's the problem. She doesn't exactly need anything, and she's smart enough to think that Sam, for all his good qualities, isn't exactly the best person to start a relationship with.
Of course, he doesn't call her. She's kind of disappointed about it, and she's kind of relieved.
Two weeks after Sam Winchester blows out of town with his brother, she reads about a couple mysterious murders a few counties over. Two violent, bloody deaths, both of young men, and in both cases, the room they were found in was locked.
She considers calling Sam then. It seems like the kind of thing he and his brother would be interested in. She even picks up her cell phone, scrolls down to where his name sits between Sam Matthews, one of her work contacts, and Sasha Kendrick, her roommate from her freshman year of college.
But she doesn’t call. It’s just a couple of bizarre suicides, she thinks. Or a very clever murderer. It’s not easy to convince herself, but it’s a better thought than the alternative. The human mind is remarkably resistant to change.
But she still dreams about little girls with long knives.
There’s a third death a week after that, another young man, and apparently three times is the charm. The police begin floating the idea of a serial killer after that. But it’s also the last death, and everyone figures that whoever the killer was, he’s moved on. The deaths are consigned to dusty files in the Albany police department.
Sarah doesn’t rest easier after that, but she feels a little less guilty.
&*&*&
Winter comes like a fog; she wakes up one morning and it’s there. Her breath is clouded on her bedroom window, the leaves on the ground shiny with ice. The house fills slowly with the sounds of her dad’s morning rituals, the way his knees crack as he walks down the hall, door opening and closing as he goes to get the paper, the tea kettle whistling.
Sarah lies in bed and counts the number of hours she slept the night before. It’s never very many. She gets up. She goes to work with her dad, argues with art houses half the day, and spends the other half smiling at customers. Occasionally she even goes on dates or out with friends.
For the first time in her life, she realizes that her dad is getting old. His memory’s getting poorer, and he walks a little slower every morning, complains more about the pain in his back. His temper is as sharp as ever, but she knows it’s only a matter of time before he retires. And just like that, she sees her whole future unroll ahead of her: taking over her dad’s place, marrying someone, settling down, having kids. It’s a neat existence, tidy, comfortable, a life with no place for ghosts or the men who hunt them.
Sarah is not the woman she meant to be. She was a pretty child, and smart, her adolescence no more or less awkward than anyone else’s. Good parents, good grades, ambition. She was going to be an artist, and she spent her first two years of college realizing she was a bad one, the next two years majoring in art history.
So she didn’t stray too far from her parents’ path. But she didn’t intend to go back. Her mom had connections in LA, and Sarah intended to strike out west, live among the palm trees and sunshine, selling overpriced paintings to newly minted movie stars searching desperately for class.
It was a good plan, a little cynical, and she’d been in LA for a month when she got the call about her mom.
It was nothing less than an inversion of her entire life. She moved back home, into the bedroom she’d had as a child, held her father’s hand throughout the funeral arrangements, and started taking on her mother’s responsibilities at the gallery. She’s been putting herself back together ever since, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever make it back to LA.
The winter passes like that. Her friends say she works too much, and maybe they’re right. But she’s happy, has come to terms that her life will be consigned to the neat parameters her parents lived by.
And then the deaths start back up again.
Thomas Steinert dies bloody and alone in the attic of his parent’s house. He was twenty-two, about to graduate college, and he dies the same way the other three boys did- wrists slit, room locked.
It’s a small article, tucked onto the margins of the third page, Albany just far enough away for this to be of note, but not near enough for it to be overly worrisome. Sarah only sees it because she has a habit of reading the news carefully every morning. She tells herself she wants to make sure she doesn’t miss any art shows or estate sales, but she only got in the habit of reading so closely after she met Sam.
She cuts the article out and sticks it to her corkboard, a tiny piece of newsprint amidst a clutter of to-do lists and postcards from friends. She doesn’t forget about it after that; it sits in the back of her mind, a nagging voice like when she’s putting off an important phone call.
She thinks putting off an important phone call is exactly what she’s doing.
Sarah picks up the phone a week later when she finds a slightly larger article on the second page of the morning paper. There’s been another death, a kid named Adam Tam, and someone’s finally connected it to the deaths from last autumn. The working theory is a suicide pact, even though, as the paper admits, none of the boys knew each other.
There’s also a brief interview with the family, bewildered and grieving, and the boy’s picture. He had just been accepted at Cornell, was popular and well-liked and ran for his school’s track team, and “There was no reason he would do this. None at all.”
It’s the obvious grief that finally gets her, speaks to a similar ache in her own chest. She knows what it’s like to lose someone suddenly, but at least she was able to know the reason behind it.
She calls Sam, and he picks up on the third ring. He sounds honestly surprised when he says her name. It’s been months since he passed through her life, so she’s mostly just glad he remembers who she is.
"Hey Sam," she says in response. "I, um, had a question to ask you."
She hears Dean's voice muffled in the background, and Sam gives her a terse, "Hold on."
"It's Sarah," she hears. He sounds tired, tense, and Dean, for all his humor, doesn’t sound much better off when he replies.
"What? She making a booty call? We're not that far from New York."
She snorts, and Sam's voice is clear again when he says, "Sorry about that. Dean's being...Dean. Is everything all right?"
"Yeah," she says. "Everything's fine. I was just. Um."
She pauses. She just wanted him to drop everything, come by and right the world, to tell her that the deaths are just normal tragedies, horrifying but mundane. And if they’re not, she wants him to fix it, quietly and quickly and slip out of her life again.
"You said you had a question?" presses Sam.
She’s beginning to realize that she’ll never be able to stop her bad dreams.
“I did?” she says, feigning confusion. “Oh. I, uh, must have forgotten.”
But she might be able to stop the deaths.
There’s a beat of silence, and then Sam says, sounding concerned, “You sure everything’s all right, Sarah?”
“Yeah,” she says. And then because she doesn’t think the first time was forceful enough, “Yeah. You take care of yourself Sam.” She smiles into the phone. “I’ll see you around,” and she hangs up.
Sam calls back twice over the next few days, but she doesn’t answer. She googles ‘ghosts’ when she’s supposed to be writing e-mails, buys more salt than she and her father will use in months when she goes grocery shopping, clears out her weekend schedule.
Sam doesn’t try to call a third time, and she figures that's the last she'll hear from him.
&*&*&
By Friday, she’s in Albany trying to figure out, why, exactly, she decided not to tell Sam about the murders. Because it’s increasingly beginning to look like they’re exactly Sam and Dean’s kind of thing.
She’s been playing dress up as an insurance agent all day in black heels and a power suit. She doesn’t feel powerful, but she doesn’t feel like Sarah Blake either. Adam Tam's father had looked at her suspiciously through grief-stricken eyes and she’d coolly told him that she had graduated with honors from Wharton.
She never acted in college, was too scared to even though she always thought she’d like it. But she’s acting now. It seems like an easier fear to face than the one her brain is still skirting around; she still hasn’t convinced herself of the real reason she’s here.
She’s good at faking being an insurance agent though, been dealing with them since she was a teenager and her parents started making her do more work for the gallery, and then with an entirely different set of insurance agents after her mother passed. She knows their cool sense of sympathy, their polite inability to yield.
“I had no idea my sister’s insurance company had so many attractive agents working for it,” says Adam Tam's uncle, letting her out of the house after she finishes interviewing the family.
“Excuse me?” she says. She arches her eyebrow for effect and tries to project frosty disapproval. The uncle grins sheepishly.
“You and that little blonde girl who stopped by yesterday,” he explains. “She was really young and pretty too. Though I don’t see why you couldn’t have come at the same time.”
“Our company policy mandates that we be thorough in our investigations, sir,” she says with another icy stare. He backs off, waving his hands apologetically, and she walks back to the car she borrowed from one of her father’s dealers. It’s black and sleek and small, and looks much more the part than the sunny yellow VW bug she normally drives.
There are three messages from her father when she checks her phone. They become successively more anxious and she sighs and calls him back as she pulls off the shaded cul-de-sac that Adam Tam lived and died on.
“I’m in Albany for a piece,” she explains, as soon as her father picks up. “Matthew said there was a prospective seller here with something we might be interested in.”
There’s a beat and she can picture her father struggling for words, trying to decide if guilt or an apology is the proper option. Her father’s never so thoughtful with strangers, and rarely was with her. But things change; family becomes more important.
“You could have left a note or told me,” he says stiffly.
“I did Dad,” she lies, and lying to her dad about something so simple hurts more than all the lies she told the Tams. “It was on the fridge. Maybe it fell?”
She hears her father shuffle around the kitchen and then his voice crackles through doubtfully, “I don’t see it.” But there’s an implication of trust beneath that, that if she says she put a note up, then she must have.
“I’ll be back by Monday, Dad,” she promises softly, and it’s the only thing she’s said in the entire conversation that’s been true.
&*&*&
Sarah stops by the house of the other recent death after she gets off the phone with her dad- Thomas Steinert. His family is just as shell-shocked as Adam's, the death still new enough to not yet have scabbed over, let alone scarred.
She’s a journalist this time, figures that even if the family isn’t yet over the initial grief, the insurance company- if there was even a policy- will have already been by to console and gently break the news that self-inflicted deaths aren’t covered.
The parents are stone-faced, even when she brings up the earlier deaths.
“There’s a connection,” she insists to Mrs. Steinert, but the woman shakes her head and asks once more for her to leave. “All of these boys can’t just have chosen to commit suicide in the same way.”
It’s not a complete loss though. Just as she’s getting into the car, she hears someone shout, “Wait!”
Thomas’s young sister slouches up to her, long bangs hiding half her face, but it’s clear that she’s been crying.
“Yes?” says Sarah. She steps slightly away from the car, molds her features into an expression of eager interest. She’s a reporter, hoping for a big story, wants to get her name on the front page.
“Um,” says the girl. Her hands are shoved into the pocket of her hoodie, her face wan and wary. “You really think Tom didn’t kill himself?”
Sarah nods. “I think it’s a distinct possibility.”
Tom’s sister tilts her head. It’s a birdlike gesture, a fragileness to it that’s common to teenage girls everywhere, and she bites her lip before nodding. It’s more of a nod to herself than to Sarah.
“I agree,” she bursts out. “I think…I think someone killed Tom.”
“Luisa!” shouts a voice from inside the house, and Sarah recognizes Mrs. Steinert’s voice. Luisa flinches, eyes going sideways to the house.
“I should go,” she says hurriedly. “But if you. If you really think something killed Tom, you should come by tomorrow after three. I’ll talk to you then.”
There’s another sharp-toned “Luisa!” from the house, and Luisa flinches again then rushes away. Sarah watches her go, a sense that she might actually be able to do this rising within her.
&*&*&
Sarah’s sitting on the hotel bed, her heels kicked off but her panty hose still rolled halfway down her calves, when someone knocks at the door. She finishes pulling off her hose and mutes the Law & Order rerun she’s had on for the past five minutes, zoning into space instead of changing into her pajamas.
She doesn’t peer through the eyehole first, has no reason to. But the woman standing on the threshold when she opens the door is definitely not the maid.
She’s dressed same as Sarah, pencil skirt and a neat, black suit-jacket, in dark glasses and practical heels. Her hair is blonde, pulled back into a loose braid, and she’s tiny in a way that makes Sarah feel large and lumbering. But the woman carries herself like she’s a six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than she actually is.
“Are you Sarah Arnette?” demands the blonde, using the name Sarah gave the Tams and the Steinerts. At Sarah’s nod, she flips open a leather wallet, flashing an id card. “Joanna Portman, FBI. Mind if I come in?”
Sarah nods jerkily, stepping aside. Fraud’s a crime her brain babbles at her. The agent brushes past her, closing the door behind her with a sharp click. She spends a moment examining the room before turning to face Sarah, pushing her glasses onto the top of her head in the same moment. She’s young, terribly so, and can’t be older than Sarah is. Sarah wonders where the girl’s partner is. All FBI agents have partners. At least, she thought they did.
“So why is it,” says the agent idly, “that a reporter for the local paper is staying in a Holiday Inn?”
Sarah freezes. Her mind stutters through three or four excuses, none of them exactly plausible. The panic must show on her face.
“Relax,” says the agent. She looks amused. “I know you’re not a journalist. Good thing I’m not FBI.” She holds out her hand and Sarah takes it instinctively. Her mind’s frozen, completely baffled by the woman.
“I’m Jo Harvelle,” says the not-agent.
“Sarah Blake,” says Sarah automatically.
“You working the suicides case?” asks Jo. “I tracked you back from the Steinerts. What are you thinking? Spirit? Has all the signs of one.”
Her cadence is straight out of the Midwest, reminds Sarah of the way Sam spoke, and it hits her then that the girl isn’t crazy, she’s looking into the deaths same as Sarah is.
“So you think it’s a ghost too!” she bursts out. “I’m not nuts.”
Jo raises an eyebrow at her. “Um. Yeah,” she says. “Well,” she pauses, pursing her lips, “I can’t speak to you being sane, but it’s almost definitely a ghost.”
“Sorry,” says Sarah, shaking her head and grinning. It’s a great stroke of luck to run into someone who actually knows what she’s doing. “I’m kind of new at this.”
Jo’s expression shuts down, smile dropping from her face and eyes narrowing. “New at this?” she repeats. “Look. Sarah. This isn’t amateur hour. You’re-”
She’s about to launch into a speech, and a rehearsed sounding one at that. There’s a tenseness to her pose that indicates this is a conversation Jo’s had with herself a hundred times before.
“I know what I’m doing,” she snaps, interrupting Jo mid-word. “I find the body. I salt it. I burn it. I’ve just…never done it on my own before.”
Jo scowls at her. “Then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.” Sarah doesn’t say anything in response, just continues to glare right back at Jo.
“But I guess everyone’s gotta start somewhere,” mutters Jo, turning away.
&*&*&
Jo tells Sarah to meet her at the library in the morning, and Sarah shows up just as Jo’s getting out of a large blue pick-up truck. Jo’s in flannel and jeans, trucker casual, and Sarah’s beginning to wonder if it’s some kind of hunter dresscode.
“We’re looking for similar deaths,” explains Jo, setting a stack of papers going back to 1985 on the table between them. Sarah stares at them; she hadn’t realized how much of hunting was research.
Jo flips open the first paper, her tone didactic. “Young men, ages 18 to 26, suicides or unexplained deaths. The first death will probably be the one doing it. Any of the papers that don’t list a similar or related death, just put in a separate pile. Check obits first, then front page, then work your way through the rest of the paper. You’ll be surprised at where shit like this gets mentioned. I’ve figured out cases from articles in the third page of sports.”
“Wow,” says Sarah. Jo glances up, mouth quirked in a vague expression of curiosity. “You’re really into this teaching thing, aren’t you?”
Jo flushes faintly, and she looks back down at the paper. “Just trying to be helpful,” she mumbles.
“Thanks,” says Sarah earnestly. “Really. I appreciate it.”
Jo flushes even harder, and Sarah smiles at that for some reason, but she doesn’t say anything else. She bends her head over her own stack of newspapers. They spend the next couple hours in companionable silence, the occasional murmur and the constant switch of pages turning to mark the passage of time. Sarah’s head begins to hurt after awhile, the text blurring in front of her. She’s used to digging up old information, but she hasn’t done anything as intensive as this since studying for finals at college. Her back aches and her butt hurts from sitting so long, and, around noon, even Jo seems to be getting fidgety.
There’s nothing useful until the early nineties. Your average amount of suicides for the area- or at least Jo assures her it’s a usual amount, Sarah just never knew how many people killed themselves, but nothing that really matches their parameters. Then a teenage girl slits her wrists in 1992, and in 1994, a young man slits his wrists in his bathroom. Jo lets out a triumphant yelp at that, earning them a glare from the librarian.
“Robert Sears,” she says to Sarah, smiling wide. “Looks like he’s our guy. We’ll go dig him up tonight and be done tomorrow.”
“Great,” says Sarah, and it sounds forced even to herself. Jo raises an eyebrow.
“You have some kind of problem with wrapping things up so quickly?” she asks.
“No,” says Sarah slowly. And she thinks she’s reluctant just because she doesn’t want to dig up someone’s body. Ghost or no ghost, it seems indecent. The dead deserve respect.
But that’s not quite it either. Something’s not sitting right with Sarah. There’s something too neat and obvious about it. Sam and Dean had guessed the wrong ghost when it came to the painting, and she and Sam had both almost died because of it.
“I just think we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it’s him,” she says slowly, remembering her conversation with Luisa the day before. “I’d like to talk to Luisa first.”
“Steinert’s sister?” asks Jo.
Sarah nods, and Jo gives her a skeptical look before shrugging.
“All right,” she says. “It’s almost definitely Robert here, but talking to the girl can’t hurt.” She pauses, frowning down at the newspaper before her, then smiles up at Sarah, a quick, proud smile. “But first things first, let’s get something to eat.”
It’s only then that Sarah realizes she’s starving. They grab lunch at the deli across the street and eat on the benches outside the library. Neither of them talk, both too absorbed in their sandwiches for words. But when there’s nothing left but the paper wrapping, Jo tips her head back, hair gold-colored in the spring sunshine and clears her throat in a way that suggests imminent conversation.
“How’d you find out about ghosts anyway?” she asks, mixture of casual and curious.
Sarah thinks for a few minutes before replying. She’s never told anyone this story before, but it’s an important one to tell.
“One of the paintings at my dad’s gallery was haunted,” she explains slowly. “It was killing the people who bought it.”
“And what?” interrupts Jo. “You somehow figured out that it was haunted and destroyed it?”
Sarah laughs. “Right. Because the logical leap from dead art patrons is ghosts.” She shakes her head, smiling slightly. “No, there were a couple brothers in town. They were pretending to be art dealers, but I guess they’d heard about the deaths and figured there was a ghost. They needed me to get them access to the painting, and I, uh, kind of got dragged in from there. I heard about these deaths last winter, but didn’t even consider ghosts until a week ago.”
The last part is partly a lie, but the rest of it is true, even with everything she leaves out. It seems like such a small thing when she puts it like that, more of an accident than anything else.
Jo’s frowning, eyebrows drawn tight over her face, and then she asks, “These brothers weren’t named Sam and Dean by any chance?”
“Yeah!” says Sarah, excitement crashing across her voice. She grins. “You know them? Have you talked to them lately? How have they been?” She knows she could have asked Sam all this when she called him, but she has a feeling that, no matter how much he likes her, he wouldn’t have been as forthright with her as he would be with another hunter.
“We’ve met,” says Jo warily. “Last I heard the FBI was after them.”
“Oh,” says Sarah, feeling the conversation shrivel and die. Jo clearly doesn’t want to talk about Sam and Dean. But the FBI thing certainly explains why they both sounded so stressed. “I. Okay.”
There’s a silence, awkward and strained between them, and then Jo leaps into another topic. “You know there’s more than just ghosts?” she asks. “There’s demons, too. Vampires, ghouls.” She smirks. “Chupacabras.”
Sarah sucks in a breath, and no, she didn’t know. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that there was more in the dark than just ghosts. Ghosts at least made some kind of sense, had been people at one point.
She wasn’t expecting monsters.
She’s not sure whether to be angry that Sam didn’t tell her, or relieved that he at least left her that much peace of mind.
“No,” she says, voice small. “I didn’t.”
Jo doesn’t say anything, and there’s another silence. Most of Sarah’s interactions with Jo so far seem to consist of silence.
“It’s almost three,” says Jo eventually, “You should probably go talk to the sister.”
&*&*&
Luisa lets Sarah in with a wary look up and down the street, as if she were expecting her parents to jump out from behind the neighbor’s holly bush. She leads Sarah past the hallway and living room- both painted in a cheering yellow- and into her bedroom. Sarah sits on a neon pink comforter while Luisa stares at a Johnny Depp poster tacked to the wall.
“It wasn’t suicide,” says Luisa firmly, looking away from the poster and picking a picture off the dresser; Sarah sneaks a look and sees that it’s one of Luisa and Tom. It looks a couple years old, and they’re somewhere sunny and bright, both wearing sunglasses and smiles. “I don’t care what everyone says. Tom wouldn’t’ve done it.”
“What else could it have been?” Sarah asks. “He was alone in a locked room. There were no signs of forced entry or struggle.”
Luisa’s mouth thins out, and Sarah leans forward eagerly. She knows enough about reading people to know when someone is trying to hide something.
“Luisa,” she says. “Did you see something?”
Luisa shakes her head quickly, but she doesn’t meet Sarah’s eyes. It’s almost too easy, all the classic signs of someone lying. Sarah realizes then how young this girl is. She’s in high school, seventeen at the oldest, and she’s just lost her older brother.
“It’s all right,” she says, pulling back. She feels vaguely ashamed of herself. It doesn’t feel like she’s helping people. They already know who the ghost is; Sarah’s just prying now. “You don’t have to say anything. I…I should go.”
She gets off the bed and walks toward the window, tucking her notebook back in her bag. She’s prising up the latches when Luisa stops her with a quavery, “Wait. I- he.” She spits it all at once as Sarah turns around, her face pinked with embarrassment. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I don’t know,” lies Sarah. And maybe it’s not a lie. There’s a difference between belief and knowledge. “Do you think a ghost had something to do with this?”
Luisa looks at the floor, but her jaw is set in a tight, determined line as she speaks.
“All I know is, Tom was in town to see his girlfriend and on the way back, he told me he almost crashed his car. Said there was a girl in the road, but she disappeared.”
“A girl?” asks Sarah sharply. “Are you sure?”
Luisa looks taken aback. “Yeah,” she says. “He said he saw a girl, and I,” she hesitates, and then pushes on. “A couple hours before he died, he asked me if one of my friends was visiting. Said he’d woken up in the middle of the night and saw a girl about my age standing over his bed. Creeped him the fuck out.”
“And you think it was a ghost?” asks Sarah gently.
Luisa shrugs, voice sad and wondrous. “What else could it be? Tommy wasn’t crazy.”
&*&*&
“Tom Steinert saw a girl before he died,” says Sarah on the phone to Jo later.
“Okay,” says Jo. “Cryptic much, Sarah. I need a little more than that.”
“A girl ghost,” explains Sarah. “He saw a ghost, and unless Robert Sears was a teenage girl, the ghost wasn’t him.”
Jo draws in a breath, audible even over the phone. “So you think it was that girl who killed herself? Back in, what, ’91, ‘92?”
“Probably,” says Sarah. She checks the dashboard clock, reads 3:42. “Look, Luisa said Tom saw his girlfriend the night before he died, so I’m going to go talk to her to make sure we didn’t miss anything else. Can you look up the name of the girl? The library shouldn’t close for another couple hours.”
“Sure thing princess,” says Jo. “How about we meet back at my motel when we’re done?”
“Yeah,” says Sarah, and Jo rattles off the address. Sarah writes it down on a pad of paper, and it sits there in her rounded penmanship beneath the name and work address of Tom Steinert’s girlfriend.
&*&*&
Sarah tracks down Tom’s girlfriend at the firm where she works as a legal assistant. The girl’s name is Mandy, and Sarah catches her just as she’s getting off work. She’s pretty, with wavy brown hair and cream-colored skin, but there’s a bruise across the side of her face, just beginning to yellow around the edges.
“And what?” asks Mandy caustically after Sarah introduces herself as a reporter from the Times-Union. “You wanted some sappy quote about what a great person Tom was?”
“Uh,” says Sarah.
“Well talking to his ex seems kind of like an odd choice,” continues Mandy, talking straight over Sarah. She speaks in sharp, clipped tone; it’s an aggressive mannerism, but Sarah recognizes it as also being a defensive one.
“His ex?” says Sarah, clinging to that. “His sister said you two were still dating. She told me he was in town specifically to see you.”
“He was,” says Mandy shortly. She’s clearly unhappy to be talking about Tom, but she’s not leaving either. “I’d called to tell him I was pregnant, probably from the last time he was here over the weekend, and he came by to tell me to get rid of it. I told him to shove it. He gave me this,” she taps the side of her face, the edge of her bruise. She shrugs. “Seems pretty obvious we were over after that.”
“So that’s why you think he killed himself,” says Sarah softly. Something’s shifting in the back of her mind. A theory’s developing, just out of reach of articulation, the edges of it becoming visible.
“Probably,” says Mandy, finally opening her car door. “He just hit his pregnant girlfriend who works for the largest law firm in the city. Not exactly a brilliant move on his part, and once I’d filed legal action.” She shrugs again, face shut down and bitter, and then opens the car door.
“Look,” she says, stepping inside, expression shifting into one of contrition. “Don’t print any of that, all right? He was a good guy overall. He just…he had his problems.”
“Oh, totally,” says Sarah, hastening to assure Mandy. “It’s all off the record. Just,” she hesitates, and she can’t really explain why she’s compelled to ask. “Had he ever hit you before?”
Mandy stares at the steering wheel. “That was the first time he did it while sober,” she admits finally. “But I wasn’t going to let him do it to the kid.”
&*&*&
Sarah recognizes Jo’s car when she pulls into the parking lot of the Motel 6 Jo’s staying at. It’s dingier than the hotel Sarah’s staying in for the weekend, the parking lot almost glimmering with oil stains and crushed soda cans littering the hallway outside the rooms.
It takes a moment for Jo to unlock the door after Sarah knocks. She’s dressed in sweatpants and a baggy t-shirt, her hair down around her face. It makes her look even younger than before, and Sarah’s stomach turns over slowly and uneasily. She wonders why a girl so young as Jo is so alone; she’s said nothing about family, made no indication of what she’s doing so many miles from home to look into the deaths of some men she’s never met.
“The girlfriend have anything to say?” asks Jo, leading her into the room. She sits down on the single bed in the room and Sarah sits down next to her. Jo has clothes and weapons scattered around the room; the place looks wrecked and something about it strikes Sarah as vaguely unprofessional. Whatever Jo’s reason may be for hunting, Sarah’s beginning to think she hasn’t been hunting for very wrong.
“Not much,” says Sarah. “Just that Thomas was an asshole.”
“Huh,” says Jo. “Well I got something a little more helpful. Name of our ghost.” She pulls out a slightly crumpled piece of paper and hands it to Sarah. It’s a scan of an obituary, slightly smeared. A young girl stares up at Sarah, dark eyes and dark hair. Christina Freedman.
“She’s young,” says Sarah softly, figuring out the girl’s age from the birthday and deathday listed in the obit. “Nineteen.”
“A lot of ghosts are,” says Jo. “They’re angry that they died so young. And that anger keeps ‘em here.” She nudges Sarah’s shoulder with her own. She smiles, proverbial cat with canary smug. “Anyway, you ever dig up a body before? Because I also found out where Christina’s buried.”
&*&*&
The skeleton is fragile-looking, delicate, the bones smooth and frail. Jo doesn’t pause to look at it, but Sarah’s caught by the frailness of it.
“This is it?” she asks. “This is all that’s keeping her here?”
“No,” says Jo calmly, pouring salt out of a carton and onto the skeleton. “Like I said earlier, it’s her anger that’s keeping her. This is just what’s letting her.”
“What’s she so angry about?” asks Sarah, collapsing onto the ground next to the shovels. She’s exhausted to the point of nausea, her muscles feel like they’ve seized up and she’s completely covered in dirt and sweat. She smells bad even to herself.
Jo is just as grimy as Sarah is, but doesn’t look even half as exhausted. She hoists herself smoothly out of the grave and then picks up the lighter fluid they left by the headstone. She pours some over the skeleton and then steps away.
“Now we all have to do is-” everything goes cold suddenly, a bone-numbing cold and Sarah sits up instinctively, skin prickling tight like she’d been shocked by static electricity. There’s a figure materializing behind Jo, and Sarah recognizes it as a ghost first, as Christina second.
“Jo!” she shouts. Jo ducks and rolls, the movement sending her sliding back into the grave, and there’s a sick crunch as the skeleton crushes. Christina howls with anguish, tears streaming down her face and blood streaming down her arms. Sarah’s paralyzed, and it feels exactly like what happened with Sam, the ghost advancing, herself powerless.
Christina swoops, and somehow that breaks Sarah’s paralysis. She ducks out of the way, and then yelps as a sharp pain pierces her wrists. She’s bleeding, she realizes distantly, shallow cuts forming on the inside of her forearms.
Jo clambers out of the grave then, less graceful this time. Her hair is wild, a stormcloud around her head, and she grits her teeth as she flicks on a lighter, throws it onto the skeleton.
Christina flies at Sarah again, shrieking, and the pain gets sharper in Sarah’s arms, the cuts deeper.
And then Christina screams, full throated and horrible, the way cats howl at night when they’re fighting. She disappears in a fury of fire and light, the scream echoing beyond her second death.
“That was…” Sarah trails off, mouth gaping open. It’s no more or less dramatic than the last time she saw a ghost go up all flame and glory, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a person could ever get used to.
“Anticlimactic?” suggests Jo with a grin, and maybe Sarah was wrong. Jo’s teeth shine white through the grime. “They normally are.”
“Not the word I was going to use,” says Sarah, grinning shakily back. She moans and falls back onto the grass. “Jesus Christ. My wrists.”
Jo’s expression switches to concerned, and she leans over Sarah. “Come on,” she says, placing a gentle hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “Let’s get you bandaged up.”
&*&*&
“So now what?” asks Sarah while Jo’s driving her back to her hotel. Her wrists are bandaged pretty heavily, but Jo decided she wasn’t in need of any medical attention. “That’s it? We just burn Christina’s body and leave?”
“Pretty much,” says Jo. “There’s really not much to it. Show up, get rid of the problem,” she smirks to herself, a sour twist to her lips, “kiss the pretty girl, leave.” Sarah can’t tell if Jo likes it that way, or if she’s pleased with it, her tone too neutral for Sarah to read it.
“But what about why she did it?” asks Sarah. “What about those guys’ family members? Don’t they deserve to know what happened?”
Jo slants her a look. “None of that really matters,” she answers flatly. “Christina’s not going to kill anyone else, so we’ve done our job.”
Sarah thinks about Luisa, her tentative belief that her brother was killed by a ghost. If anyone deserves to know, it’s her. Sarah says as much, tacks on a thoughtful, “Learning about ghosts kind of screwed up my life for awhile. But I think if Sam and Dean had explained more to me, maybe I wouldn’t be so frightened all the time.”
It’s a hard thing to confess to another person, let alone to herself. And once the words are out there, it’s easy to admit that they’re true. She’s been scared ever since Sam left, about as scared as she was after her mother died.
“You’re gonna be waiting a long time if you want the Winchesters to come and kiss your boo boos, if that’s what you’re asking after,” says Jo dryly. “Most hunters are more into the saving business than the fixing one.”
“You don’t think it’s better to know?” asks Sarah. “You don’t think that’ll help fix things?”
Jo stares grimly through the windshield, jaw and hands clenched.
“No,” she says tersely, after a moment. “I really don’t.”
The rest of the car ride passes in silence, and Jo parks curbside when they get to Sarah’s hotel.
“Look,” says Sarah, before sliding out. “Thanks for all the help and for, you know,” she raises her wrists in indication of the bandages. “It was really good to meet you,” she concludes quietly. It’s a stupid thing to say, but she can’t think of anything else. She’s not sure she likes the way people pass in and out of her life.
Jo doesn’t say anything, just looks at Sarah with solemn, considering eyes. Then, she leans across the divide and tucks her hand under Sarah’s chin, tilting her head up. She kisses Sarah, soft and clumsy, and brief enough that Sarah doesn’t have much time respond before Jo pulls away. She’s left breathless and gaping, and Jo’s face remains in neutral as she starts the engine.
“It was good to meet you too,” says Jo, no trace of irony to the words. “You take care of yourself Sarah.”
Sarah nods numbly, automatically, and gets out of the car. Jo spares her one more look in the rearview mirror and a wave, and then she’s gone, riding off into the dawn.
&*&*&
Sarah sleeps into early afternoon, and when she wakes up, every muscle in her body aches, two motrin and a hot shower only enough to make walking feel slightly less like torture. She realizes it’s the first time she’s had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep in months.
But there’s an estate sale listed in the newspaper, with the kind of last name her father’d send her out to check up on anyway. It’s still only Sunday, and she figures she can go to this and pick up a piece, and still make it home sometime tonight and keep her promise to her father. The night before seems like a dream or a distant memory, everything washed out in her mind’s eye. But there’s plenty of physical evidence to prove it happened. Her aching muscles, the dirt-stained clothes, the bandages around her arms.
She gets to the estate sale only a couple hours before it closes, but there are still some promising pieces left. Her shirt has sleeves long enough to cover her arms, but the son of the estate owner seems more intrigued by her chest anyway. He’s a heavy set man with no interest in his dead mother’s art collection and even less idea of what Sarah’s talking about. She’s growing increasingly frustrated with him when she sees a flash of yellow hair and familiar figure out of the corner of her eye.
“Excuse me for a moment,” she says politely to the man, and turns around and leaves.
Jo’s standing by an umbrella stand with a plate of cheese in hand. She’s dressed in her insurance agent outfit, slightly wrinkled, and Sarah wonders if that’s the only nice outfit Jo owns.
“What are you doing here?” she whispers, and it comes out as more of a hiss than she intended.
Jo looks up at her and smiles, though there’s too much of an edge to it for smile to be the proper term.
“What? Is it so shocking to believe that I’m interested in art? I went to college, too, you know.” Jo pauses, head tilted like she’s reconsidering that statement. “Well,” she amends, “I went for a couple months at least.”
Jo glances around the room, eyeing the other buyers distastefully. The son is slowly circling back to Sarah, and Sarah gets the uneasy impression he plans on asking her for her number.
“And you thought you’d just drop by, pick up a painting to hang up, in what, your truck?” She realizes then with a sinking feeling that she has no idea where Jo lives, where she’s from, why she’s a hunter.
Jo shoves away from the wall and meets Sarah’s eyes for the first time in the whole conversation. She’s glaring hotly.
“I have a home,” she cries, voice cracking around the final word. “If that’s what you’re asking,” she tacks on, voice dropping into sullen.
“Sorry,” says Sarah hastily. She’s not sure why they’re arguing, if this is some weird leftover tension from last night. She reaches a tentative hand out and places it on Jo’s arm. Jo doesn’t move away or flinch, and Sarah feels some of the tension drift away.
“So what?” asks Jo, gone back to not looking at Sarah. “You’re here to buy some dead woman’s stuff? Isn’t that a bit morbid?”
“Any more morbid than what we were doing last night?” asks Sarah.
“So this is your day job?” asks Jo instead of answering the question. Her tone is as frustratingly bland as it was the night before, and Sarah can’t gauge whether she’s being mocked or judged. But Jo just looks vaguely interested, even though her hands are wrapped around her elbows like she’s uncomfortable being there. She notices Sarah studying her, and drops her arms to her side, relaxing into a more casual pose. The smile she flashes doesn’t look forced, but Sarah’s beginning to figure out just how good an actress Jo is.
“Yes,” answers Sarah, looking at a nearby painting. It’s overpriced, which isn’t unusual, and she absently figures out how she would haggle down. When to push and when to pull back; people are delicate. She twirls her pen between her fingers and glances back at Jo. Jo’s watching her. “Family business, I guess. It’s what my dad does. What my mom did.”
“Did?” asks Jo.
“She died a couple years ago,” says Sarah carefully, still not used to the words.
“Hence the past tense,” mutters Jo, smile gone. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she adds, a little stiffly. “My dad’s past tense too.”
“You think this is what your mom would want?” asks Jo abruptly, after another lull drags between them.
“What?” says Sarah with a small laugh. “Being an art dealer or hunting ghosts?”
“Both, neither. I dunno. I’m just trying to figure you out,” says Jo, shaking her head slightly. She’s talking sideways at Sarah, refusing to answer questions by asking her own. “Most people have some horrible tragedy in their past that makes them hunt. You’re just, what, moonlighting?”
Sarah frowns. “I’m helping people,” she explains. “I found out these- these things existed, and I couldn’t just let them kill people.”
“Murderers exist,” points out Jo calmly. “Rapists exist. You didn’t become a cop. You’re Batman without the Joe Chill.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware this was some kind of elite club,” sneers Sarah, angry and low. “So what’s your big dark secret?”
Jo stares at her, face flushed a bright pink, and then she smiles again. It’s a different smile from before, more a warning than a mask.
“It’s what my mom does,” she mimics. “What my dad did.”
“Is this what your dad would want?” Sarah asks. It’s a cruel thing to say, she knows.
“Honestly?” says Jo, with the same teeth-baring grin. “Probably not. It’s definitely not what my mom wants. But I don’t think it really matters what he would have wanted.”
She touches Sarah’s arm, hand stopping just above where the bandages are hidden beneath Sarah’s sleeves. “But it’s my job to protect civilians. And you’re one of them. You’ve got good instincts, but I almost let you get killed last night.”
Sarah wants to tell her that all it takes is practice. Practice long enough at something, and you’ll get good at it. But she’s a failed artist, and she knows that’s not true. And hunting isn’t baseball. The price of experience is blood.
“So you just came by to tell me I’m an amateur?” she says instead, same flare of anger she felt when Sam tried to shut her out of the case. “Thanks, but you’ve already told me that. Didn’t stop me earlier.”
“No,” admits Jo. “I. Honestly, I wanted to tell you I found some of the other victim’s girlfriends.” Jo’s mouth is thin and taut, tension visible in every line of her body. “As near as I can tell, they were all assholes. Kendrick hit his girl, too. Molina cheated on his girlfriend, broke up with her over text message, got back together, and then cheated on her again. And Jefferson was just an asshole.”
“And Christina’s boyfriend?” asks Sarah softly.
Jo shrugs. “Couldn’t find anything. None of her family’s left in the area. Doesn’t seem likely that he was a great guy though, considering the pattern.”
“So she was knocking off guys who reminded her of her jerk boyfriend,” says Sarah. The theory that’s been hovering at the edges of her mind clicks neatly together. Girl kills herself over something her jerk boyfriend did, then spends her afterlife killing jerk boyfriends.
But it’s not anything conclusive; it’s just a theory. And it irks her, that the story is only half-finished. Some people are just born twisted. Some people just die too young. But none of it really explains why.
Jo smirks. “Vindictive bitch. Can’t say the douchebags didn’t deserve it though.”
Sarah thinks back to Luisa, how obviously distraught she was over losing her older brother. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “Isn’t it kind of fast to judge someone on one aspect of their life?”
Jo looks at her disbelievingly. “Are you serious? These guys were capital A assholes. But,” she shrugs, “not for us to judge, I guess.”
“It’s just,” says Sarah, struggling for words. “There’s always more, isn’t there? More to the story.” She lapses into silence.
“That’s why it sometimes better not to ask,” says Jo. She squeezes Sarah’s shoulder and then lets go. “But you wanted to know. So I found it.”
Jo leaves then, her heels clicking across the hardwood floor. Sarah counts five seconds before turning around.
Jo’s already out the door, a flash of gold hair in the window.
&*&*&
She doesn’t buy anything, and she doesn’t talk to Luisa again either. The latter’s a much harder decision than the former.
Luisa will realize eventually that it wasn’t a ghost she saw, that maybe her brother was crazy after all. She’ll grow up, move on. People die, and everyone else gets used to it.
It’s not a fair decision, not even really Sarah’s decision to make. But she figures she’ll be taking something away from the girl as much as she’ll be giving something to her. She toys with that idea as she drives through the city- the transmission of knowledge as an act of violence.
She tells herself that she couldn't take Luisa's innocence away like that, and she can also accept it as an excuse.
Then, with a jolt, she realizes that the sun is setting, the rays of the sun splaying red and gold across the highway. She has to shield her eyes with her hand as she turns, and then the sun drops to just behind her shoulder and the highway stretches out ahead of her. It’s a straight and narrow path from here to home.
She has Jo’s number though, nestled safely in her contacts list. She thinks she’ll probably call.
People die, and there will always be more ghosts.
Title: Origin Stories
Fandom: Supernatural
Rating: PG 13
Summary: Sarah's willing to accept that ghosts are real. She's a little more skeptical that a string of suicides in Albany might be the work of one. Sarah, Jo, extremely mild Sarah/Jo
Word Count: ~8200
Spoilers/Warnings: No warnings; spoilers through season 2.
Notes:Written for bellatemple for the
fic exchange. Thanks to familiardevil for looking it over
Two days after Sam Winchester blows out of town with his brother, Sarah thinks about calling him. She has his number, the memory of the stupid-giddy way he made her feel, and his solemn insistence to "call if you ever need anything."
But that's the problem. She doesn't exactly need anything, and she's smart enough to think that Sam, for all his good qualities, isn't exactly the best person to start a relationship with.
Of course, he doesn't call her. She's kind of disappointed about it, and she's kind of relieved.
Two weeks after Sam Winchester blows out of town with his brother, she reads about a couple mysterious murders a few counties over. Two violent, bloody deaths, both of young men, and in both cases, the room they were found in was locked.
She considers calling Sam then. It seems like the kind of thing he and his brother would be interested in. She even picks up her cell phone, scrolls down to where his name sits between Sam Matthews, one of her work contacts, and Sasha Kendrick, her roommate from her freshman year of college.
But she doesn’t call. It’s just a couple of bizarre suicides, she thinks. Or a very clever murderer. It’s not easy to convince herself, but it’s a better thought than the alternative. The human mind is remarkably resistant to change.
But she still dreams about little girls with long knives.
There’s a third death a week after that, another young man, and apparently three times is the charm. The police begin floating the idea of a serial killer after that. But it’s also the last death, and everyone figures that whoever the killer was, he’s moved on. The deaths are consigned to dusty files in the Albany police department.
Sarah doesn’t rest easier after that, but she feels a little less guilty.
&*&*&
Winter comes like a fog; she wakes up one morning and it’s there. Her breath is clouded on her bedroom window, the leaves on the ground shiny with ice. The house fills slowly with the sounds of her dad’s morning rituals, the way his knees crack as he walks down the hall, door opening and closing as he goes to get the paper, the tea kettle whistling.
Sarah lies in bed and counts the number of hours she slept the night before. It’s never very many. She gets up. She goes to work with her dad, argues with art houses half the day, and spends the other half smiling at customers. Occasionally she even goes on dates or out with friends.
For the first time in her life, she realizes that her dad is getting old. His memory’s getting poorer, and he walks a little slower every morning, complains more about the pain in his back. His temper is as sharp as ever, but she knows it’s only a matter of time before he retires. And just like that, she sees her whole future unroll ahead of her: taking over her dad’s place, marrying someone, settling down, having kids. It’s a neat existence, tidy, comfortable, a life with no place for ghosts or the men who hunt them.
Sarah is not the woman she meant to be. She was a pretty child, and smart, her adolescence no more or less awkward than anyone else’s. Good parents, good grades, ambition. She was going to be an artist, and she spent her first two years of college realizing she was a bad one, the next two years majoring in art history.
So she didn’t stray too far from her parents’ path. But she didn’t intend to go back. Her mom had connections in LA, and Sarah intended to strike out west, live among the palm trees and sunshine, selling overpriced paintings to newly minted movie stars searching desperately for class.
It was a good plan, a little cynical, and she’d been in LA for a month when she got the call about her mom.
It was nothing less than an inversion of her entire life. She moved back home, into the bedroom she’d had as a child, held her father’s hand throughout the funeral arrangements, and started taking on her mother’s responsibilities at the gallery. She’s been putting herself back together ever since, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever make it back to LA.
The winter passes like that. Her friends say she works too much, and maybe they’re right. But she’s happy, has come to terms that her life will be consigned to the neat parameters her parents lived by.
And then the deaths start back up again.
Thomas Steinert dies bloody and alone in the attic of his parent’s house. He was twenty-two, about to graduate college, and he dies the same way the other three boys did- wrists slit, room locked.
It’s a small article, tucked onto the margins of the third page, Albany just far enough away for this to be of note, but not near enough for it to be overly worrisome. Sarah only sees it because she has a habit of reading the news carefully every morning. She tells herself she wants to make sure she doesn’t miss any art shows or estate sales, but she only got in the habit of reading so closely after she met Sam.
She cuts the article out and sticks it to her corkboard, a tiny piece of newsprint amidst a clutter of to-do lists and postcards from friends. She doesn’t forget about it after that; it sits in the back of her mind, a nagging voice like when she’s putting off an important phone call.
She thinks putting off an important phone call is exactly what she’s doing.
Sarah picks up the phone a week later when she finds a slightly larger article on the second page of the morning paper. There’s been another death, a kid named Adam Tam, and someone’s finally connected it to the deaths from last autumn. The working theory is a suicide pact, even though, as the paper admits, none of the boys knew each other.
There’s also a brief interview with the family, bewildered and grieving, and the boy’s picture. He had just been accepted at Cornell, was popular and well-liked and ran for his school’s track team, and “There was no reason he would do this. None at all.”
It’s the obvious grief that finally gets her, speaks to a similar ache in her own chest. She knows what it’s like to lose someone suddenly, but at least she was able to know the reason behind it.
She calls Sam, and he picks up on the third ring. He sounds honestly surprised when he says her name. It’s been months since he passed through her life, so she’s mostly just glad he remembers who she is.
"Hey Sam," she says in response. "I, um, had a question to ask you."
She hears Dean's voice muffled in the background, and Sam gives her a terse, "Hold on."
"It's Sarah," she hears. He sounds tired, tense, and Dean, for all his humor, doesn’t sound much better off when he replies.
"What? She making a booty call? We're not that far from New York."
She snorts, and Sam's voice is clear again when he says, "Sorry about that. Dean's being...Dean. Is everything all right?"
"Yeah," she says. "Everything's fine. I was just. Um."
She pauses. She just wanted him to drop everything, come by and right the world, to tell her that the deaths are just normal tragedies, horrifying but mundane. And if they’re not, she wants him to fix it, quietly and quickly and slip out of her life again.
"You said you had a question?" presses Sam.
She’s beginning to realize that she’ll never be able to stop her bad dreams.
“I did?” she says, feigning confusion. “Oh. I, uh, must have forgotten.”
But she might be able to stop the deaths.
There’s a beat of silence, and then Sam says, sounding concerned, “You sure everything’s all right, Sarah?”
“Yeah,” she says. And then because she doesn’t think the first time was forceful enough, “Yeah. You take care of yourself Sam.” She smiles into the phone. “I’ll see you around,” and she hangs up.
Sam calls back twice over the next few days, but she doesn’t answer. She googles ‘ghosts’ when she’s supposed to be writing e-mails, buys more salt than she and her father will use in months when she goes grocery shopping, clears out her weekend schedule.
Sam doesn’t try to call a third time, and she figures that's the last she'll hear from him.
&*&*&
By Friday, she’s in Albany trying to figure out, why, exactly, she decided not to tell Sam about the murders. Because it’s increasingly beginning to look like they’re exactly Sam and Dean’s kind of thing.
She’s been playing dress up as an insurance agent all day in black heels and a power suit. She doesn’t feel powerful, but she doesn’t feel like Sarah Blake either. Adam Tam's father had looked at her suspiciously through grief-stricken eyes and she’d coolly told him that she had graduated with honors from Wharton.
She never acted in college, was too scared to even though she always thought she’d like it. But she’s acting now. It seems like an easier fear to face than the one her brain is still skirting around; she still hasn’t convinced herself of the real reason she’s here.
She’s good at faking being an insurance agent though, been dealing with them since she was a teenager and her parents started making her do more work for the gallery, and then with an entirely different set of insurance agents after her mother passed. She knows their cool sense of sympathy, their polite inability to yield.
“I had no idea my sister’s insurance company had so many attractive agents working for it,” says Adam Tam's uncle, letting her out of the house after she finishes interviewing the family.
“Excuse me?” she says. She arches her eyebrow for effect and tries to project frosty disapproval. The uncle grins sheepishly.
“You and that little blonde girl who stopped by yesterday,” he explains. “She was really young and pretty too. Though I don’t see why you couldn’t have come at the same time.”
“Our company policy mandates that we be thorough in our investigations, sir,” she says with another icy stare. He backs off, waving his hands apologetically, and she walks back to the car she borrowed from one of her father’s dealers. It’s black and sleek and small, and looks much more the part than the sunny yellow VW bug she normally drives.
There are three messages from her father when she checks her phone. They become successively more anxious and she sighs and calls him back as she pulls off the shaded cul-de-sac that Adam Tam lived and died on.
“I’m in Albany for a piece,” she explains, as soon as her father picks up. “Matthew said there was a prospective seller here with something we might be interested in.”
There’s a beat and she can picture her father struggling for words, trying to decide if guilt or an apology is the proper option. Her father’s never so thoughtful with strangers, and rarely was with her. But things change; family becomes more important.
“You could have left a note or told me,” he says stiffly.
“I did Dad,” she lies, and lying to her dad about something so simple hurts more than all the lies she told the Tams. “It was on the fridge. Maybe it fell?”
She hears her father shuffle around the kitchen and then his voice crackles through doubtfully, “I don’t see it.” But there’s an implication of trust beneath that, that if she says she put a note up, then she must have.
“I’ll be back by Monday, Dad,” she promises softly, and it’s the only thing she’s said in the entire conversation that’s been true.
&*&*&
Sarah stops by the house of the other recent death after she gets off the phone with her dad- Thomas Steinert. His family is just as shell-shocked as Adam's, the death still new enough to not yet have scabbed over, let alone scarred.
She’s a journalist this time, figures that even if the family isn’t yet over the initial grief, the insurance company- if there was even a policy- will have already been by to console and gently break the news that self-inflicted deaths aren’t covered.
The parents are stone-faced, even when she brings up the earlier deaths.
“There’s a connection,” she insists to Mrs. Steinert, but the woman shakes her head and asks once more for her to leave. “All of these boys can’t just have chosen to commit suicide in the same way.”
It’s not a complete loss though. Just as she’s getting into the car, she hears someone shout, “Wait!”
Thomas’s young sister slouches up to her, long bangs hiding half her face, but it’s clear that she’s been crying.
“Yes?” says Sarah. She steps slightly away from the car, molds her features into an expression of eager interest. She’s a reporter, hoping for a big story, wants to get her name on the front page.
“Um,” says the girl. Her hands are shoved into the pocket of her hoodie, her face wan and wary. “You really think Tom didn’t kill himself?”
Sarah nods. “I think it’s a distinct possibility.”
Tom’s sister tilts her head. It’s a birdlike gesture, a fragileness to it that’s common to teenage girls everywhere, and she bites her lip before nodding. It’s more of a nod to herself than to Sarah.
“I agree,” she bursts out. “I think…I think someone killed Tom.”
“Luisa!” shouts a voice from inside the house, and Sarah recognizes Mrs. Steinert’s voice. Luisa flinches, eyes going sideways to the house.
“I should go,” she says hurriedly. “But if you. If you really think something killed Tom, you should come by tomorrow after three. I’ll talk to you then.”
There’s another sharp-toned “Luisa!” from the house, and Luisa flinches again then rushes away. Sarah watches her go, a sense that she might actually be able to do this rising within her.
&*&*&
Sarah’s sitting on the hotel bed, her heels kicked off but her panty hose still rolled halfway down her calves, when someone knocks at the door. She finishes pulling off her hose and mutes the Law & Order rerun she’s had on for the past five minutes, zoning into space instead of changing into her pajamas.
She doesn’t peer through the eyehole first, has no reason to. But the woman standing on the threshold when she opens the door is definitely not the maid.
She’s dressed same as Sarah, pencil skirt and a neat, black suit-jacket, in dark glasses and practical heels. Her hair is blonde, pulled back into a loose braid, and she’s tiny in a way that makes Sarah feel large and lumbering. But the woman carries herself like she’s a six inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than she actually is.
“Are you Sarah Arnette?” demands the blonde, using the name Sarah gave the Tams and the Steinerts. At Sarah’s nod, she flips open a leather wallet, flashing an id card. “Joanna Portman, FBI. Mind if I come in?”
Sarah nods jerkily, stepping aside. Fraud’s a crime her brain babbles at her. The agent brushes past her, closing the door behind her with a sharp click. She spends a moment examining the room before turning to face Sarah, pushing her glasses onto the top of her head in the same moment. She’s young, terribly so, and can’t be older than Sarah is. Sarah wonders where the girl’s partner is. All FBI agents have partners. At least, she thought they did.
“So why is it,” says the agent idly, “that a reporter for the local paper is staying in a Holiday Inn?”
Sarah freezes. Her mind stutters through three or four excuses, none of them exactly plausible. The panic must show on her face.
“Relax,” says the agent. She looks amused. “I know you’re not a journalist. Good thing I’m not FBI.” She holds out her hand and Sarah takes it instinctively. Her mind’s frozen, completely baffled by the woman.
“I’m Jo Harvelle,” says the not-agent.
“Sarah Blake,” says Sarah automatically.
“You working the suicides case?” asks Jo. “I tracked you back from the Steinerts. What are you thinking? Spirit? Has all the signs of one.”
Her cadence is straight out of the Midwest, reminds Sarah of the way Sam spoke, and it hits her then that the girl isn’t crazy, she’s looking into the deaths same as Sarah is.
“So you think it’s a ghost too!” she bursts out. “I’m not nuts.”
Jo raises an eyebrow at her. “Um. Yeah,” she says. “Well,” she pauses, pursing her lips, “I can’t speak to you being sane, but it’s almost definitely a ghost.”
“Sorry,” says Sarah, shaking her head and grinning. It’s a great stroke of luck to run into someone who actually knows what she’s doing. “I’m kind of new at this.”
Jo’s expression shuts down, smile dropping from her face and eyes narrowing. “New at this?” she repeats. “Look. Sarah. This isn’t amateur hour. You’re-”
She’s about to launch into a speech, and a rehearsed sounding one at that. There’s a tenseness to her pose that indicates this is a conversation Jo’s had with herself a hundred times before.
“I know what I’m doing,” she snaps, interrupting Jo mid-word. “I find the body. I salt it. I burn it. I’ve just…never done it on my own before.”
Jo scowls at her. “Then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.” Sarah doesn’t say anything in response, just continues to glare right back at Jo.
“But I guess everyone’s gotta start somewhere,” mutters Jo, turning away.
&*&*&
Jo tells Sarah to meet her at the library in the morning, and Sarah shows up just as Jo’s getting out of a large blue pick-up truck. Jo’s in flannel and jeans, trucker casual, and Sarah’s beginning to wonder if it’s some kind of hunter dresscode.
“We’re looking for similar deaths,” explains Jo, setting a stack of papers going back to 1985 on the table between them. Sarah stares at them; she hadn’t realized how much of hunting was research.
Jo flips open the first paper, her tone didactic. “Young men, ages 18 to 26, suicides or unexplained deaths. The first death will probably be the one doing it. Any of the papers that don’t list a similar or related death, just put in a separate pile. Check obits first, then front page, then work your way through the rest of the paper. You’ll be surprised at where shit like this gets mentioned. I’ve figured out cases from articles in the third page of sports.”
“Wow,” says Sarah. Jo glances up, mouth quirked in a vague expression of curiosity. “You’re really into this teaching thing, aren’t you?”
Jo flushes faintly, and she looks back down at the paper. “Just trying to be helpful,” she mumbles.
“Thanks,” says Sarah earnestly. “Really. I appreciate it.”
Jo flushes even harder, and Sarah smiles at that for some reason, but she doesn’t say anything else. She bends her head over her own stack of newspapers. They spend the next couple hours in companionable silence, the occasional murmur and the constant switch of pages turning to mark the passage of time. Sarah’s head begins to hurt after awhile, the text blurring in front of her. She’s used to digging up old information, but she hasn’t done anything as intensive as this since studying for finals at college. Her back aches and her butt hurts from sitting so long, and, around noon, even Jo seems to be getting fidgety.
There’s nothing useful until the early nineties. Your average amount of suicides for the area- or at least Jo assures her it’s a usual amount, Sarah just never knew how many people killed themselves, but nothing that really matches their parameters. Then a teenage girl slits her wrists in 1992, and in 1994, a young man slits his wrists in his bathroom. Jo lets out a triumphant yelp at that, earning them a glare from the librarian.
“Robert Sears,” she says to Sarah, smiling wide. “Looks like he’s our guy. We’ll go dig him up tonight and be done tomorrow.”
“Great,” says Sarah, and it sounds forced even to herself. Jo raises an eyebrow.
“You have some kind of problem with wrapping things up so quickly?” she asks.
“No,” says Sarah slowly. And she thinks she’s reluctant just because she doesn’t want to dig up someone’s body. Ghost or no ghost, it seems indecent. The dead deserve respect.
But that’s not quite it either. Something’s not sitting right with Sarah. There’s something too neat and obvious about it. Sam and Dean had guessed the wrong ghost when it came to the painting, and she and Sam had both almost died because of it.
“I just think we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it’s him,” she says slowly, remembering her conversation with Luisa the day before. “I’d like to talk to Luisa first.”
“Steinert’s sister?” asks Jo.
Sarah nods, and Jo gives her a skeptical look before shrugging.
“All right,” she says. “It’s almost definitely Robert here, but talking to the girl can’t hurt.” She pauses, frowning down at the newspaper before her, then smiles up at Sarah, a quick, proud smile. “But first things first, let’s get something to eat.”
It’s only then that Sarah realizes she’s starving. They grab lunch at the deli across the street and eat on the benches outside the library. Neither of them talk, both too absorbed in their sandwiches for words. But when there’s nothing left but the paper wrapping, Jo tips her head back, hair gold-colored in the spring sunshine and clears her throat in a way that suggests imminent conversation.
“How’d you find out about ghosts anyway?” she asks, mixture of casual and curious.
Sarah thinks for a few minutes before replying. She’s never told anyone this story before, but it’s an important one to tell.
“One of the paintings at my dad’s gallery was haunted,” she explains slowly. “It was killing the people who bought it.”
“And what?” interrupts Jo. “You somehow figured out that it was haunted and destroyed it?”
Sarah laughs. “Right. Because the logical leap from dead art patrons is ghosts.” She shakes her head, smiling slightly. “No, there were a couple brothers in town. They were pretending to be art dealers, but I guess they’d heard about the deaths and figured there was a ghost. They needed me to get them access to the painting, and I, uh, kind of got dragged in from there. I heard about these deaths last winter, but didn’t even consider ghosts until a week ago.”
The last part is partly a lie, but the rest of it is true, even with everything she leaves out. It seems like such a small thing when she puts it like that, more of an accident than anything else.
Jo’s frowning, eyebrows drawn tight over her face, and then she asks, “These brothers weren’t named Sam and Dean by any chance?”
“Yeah!” says Sarah, excitement crashing across her voice. She grins. “You know them? Have you talked to them lately? How have they been?” She knows she could have asked Sam all this when she called him, but she has a feeling that, no matter how much he likes her, he wouldn’t have been as forthright with her as he would be with another hunter.
“We’ve met,” says Jo warily. “Last I heard the FBI was after them.”
“Oh,” says Sarah, feeling the conversation shrivel and die. Jo clearly doesn’t want to talk about Sam and Dean. But the FBI thing certainly explains why they both sounded so stressed. “I. Okay.”
There’s a silence, awkward and strained between them, and then Jo leaps into another topic. “You know there’s more than just ghosts?” she asks. “There’s demons, too. Vampires, ghouls.” She smirks. “Chupacabras.”
Sarah sucks in a breath, and no, she didn’t know. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that there was more in the dark than just ghosts. Ghosts at least made some kind of sense, had been people at one point.
She wasn’t expecting monsters.
She’s not sure whether to be angry that Sam didn’t tell her, or relieved that he at least left her that much peace of mind.
“No,” she says, voice small. “I didn’t.”
Jo doesn’t say anything, and there’s another silence. Most of Sarah’s interactions with Jo so far seem to consist of silence.
“It’s almost three,” says Jo eventually, “You should probably go talk to the sister.”
&*&*&
Luisa lets Sarah in with a wary look up and down the street, as if she were expecting her parents to jump out from behind the neighbor’s holly bush. She leads Sarah past the hallway and living room- both painted in a cheering yellow- and into her bedroom. Sarah sits on a neon pink comforter while Luisa stares at a Johnny Depp poster tacked to the wall.
“It wasn’t suicide,” says Luisa firmly, looking away from the poster and picking a picture off the dresser; Sarah sneaks a look and sees that it’s one of Luisa and Tom. It looks a couple years old, and they’re somewhere sunny and bright, both wearing sunglasses and smiles. “I don’t care what everyone says. Tom wouldn’t’ve done it.”
“What else could it have been?” Sarah asks. “He was alone in a locked room. There were no signs of forced entry or struggle.”
Luisa’s mouth thins out, and Sarah leans forward eagerly. She knows enough about reading people to know when someone is trying to hide something.
“Luisa,” she says. “Did you see something?”
Luisa shakes her head quickly, but she doesn’t meet Sarah’s eyes. It’s almost too easy, all the classic signs of someone lying. Sarah realizes then how young this girl is. She’s in high school, seventeen at the oldest, and she’s just lost her older brother.
“It’s all right,” she says, pulling back. She feels vaguely ashamed of herself. It doesn’t feel like she’s helping people. They already know who the ghost is; Sarah’s just prying now. “You don’t have to say anything. I…I should go.”
She gets off the bed and walks toward the window, tucking her notebook back in her bag. She’s prising up the latches when Luisa stops her with a quavery, “Wait. I- he.” She spits it all at once as Sarah turns around, her face pinked with embarrassment. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I don’t know,” lies Sarah. And maybe it’s not a lie. There’s a difference between belief and knowledge. “Do you think a ghost had something to do with this?”
Luisa looks at the floor, but her jaw is set in a tight, determined line as she speaks.
“All I know is, Tom was in town to see his girlfriend and on the way back, he told me he almost crashed his car. Said there was a girl in the road, but she disappeared.”
“A girl?” asks Sarah sharply. “Are you sure?”
Luisa looks taken aback. “Yeah,” she says. “He said he saw a girl, and I,” she hesitates, and then pushes on. “A couple hours before he died, he asked me if one of my friends was visiting. Said he’d woken up in the middle of the night and saw a girl about my age standing over his bed. Creeped him the fuck out.”
“And you think it was a ghost?” asks Sarah gently.
Luisa shrugs, voice sad and wondrous. “What else could it be? Tommy wasn’t crazy.”
&*&*&
“Tom Steinert saw a girl before he died,” says Sarah on the phone to Jo later.
“Okay,” says Jo. “Cryptic much, Sarah. I need a little more than that.”
“A girl ghost,” explains Sarah. “He saw a ghost, and unless Robert Sears was a teenage girl, the ghost wasn’t him.”
Jo draws in a breath, audible even over the phone. “So you think it was that girl who killed herself? Back in, what, ’91, ‘92?”
“Probably,” says Sarah. She checks the dashboard clock, reads 3:42. “Look, Luisa said Tom saw his girlfriend the night before he died, so I’m going to go talk to her to make sure we didn’t miss anything else. Can you look up the name of the girl? The library shouldn’t close for another couple hours.”
“Sure thing princess,” says Jo. “How about we meet back at my motel when we’re done?”
“Yeah,” says Sarah, and Jo rattles off the address. Sarah writes it down on a pad of paper, and it sits there in her rounded penmanship beneath the name and work address of Tom Steinert’s girlfriend.
&*&*&
Sarah tracks down Tom’s girlfriend at the firm where she works as a legal assistant. The girl’s name is Mandy, and Sarah catches her just as she’s getting off work. She’s pretty, with wavy brown hair and cream-colored skin, but there’s a bruise across the side of her face, just beginning to yellow around the edges.
“And what?” asks Mandy caustically after Sarah introduces herself as a reporter from the Times-Union. “You wanted some sappy quote about what a great person Tom was?”
“Uh,” says Sarah.
“Well talking to his ex seems kind of like an odd choice,” continues Mandy, talking straight over Sarah. She speaks in sharp, clipped tone; it’s an aggressive mannerism, but Sarah recognizes it as also being a defensive one.
“His ex?” says Sarah, clinging to that. “His sister said you two were still dating. She told me he was in town specifically to see you.”
“He was,” says Mandy shortly. She’s clearly unhappy to be talking about Tom, but she’s not leaving either. “I’d called to tell him I was pregnant, probably from the last time he was here over the weekend, and he came by to tell me to get rid of it. I told him to shove it. He gave me this,” she taps the side of her face, the edge of her bruise. She shrugs. “Seems pretty obvious we were over after that.”
“So that’s why you think he killed himself,” says Sarah softly. Something’s shifting in the back of her mind. A theory’s developing, just out of reach of articulation, the edges of it becoming visible.
“Probably,” says Mandy, finally opening her car door. “He just hit his pregnant girlfriend who works for the largest law firm in the city. Not exactly a brilliant move on his part, and once I’d filed legal action.” She shrugs again, face shut down and bitter, and then opens the car door.
“Look,” she says, stepping inside, expression shifting into one of contrition. “Don’t print any of that, all right? He was a good guy overall. He just…he had his problems.”
“Oh, totally,” says Sarah, hastening to assure Mandy. “It’s all off the record. Just,” she hesitates, and she can’t really explain why she’s compelled to ask. “Had he ever hit you before?”
Mandy stares at the steering wheel. “That was the first time he did it while sober,” she admits finally. “But I wasn’t going to let him do it to the kid.”
&*&*&
Sarah recognizes Jo’s car when she pulls into the parking lot of the Motel 6 Jo’s staying at. It’s dingier than the hotel Sarah’s staying in for the weekend, the parking lot almost glimmering with oil stains and crushed soda cans littering the hallway outside the rooms.
It takes a moment for Jo to unlock the door after Sarah knocks. She’s dressed in sweatpants and a baggy t-shirt, her hair down around her face. It makes her look even younger than before, and Sarah’s stomach turns over slowly and uneasily. She wonders why a girl so young as Jo is so alone; she’s said nothing about family, made no indication of what she’s doing so many miles from home to look into the deaths of some men she’s never met.
“The girlfriend have anything to say?” asks Jo, leading her into the room. She sits down on the single bed in the room and Sarah sits down next to her. Jo has clothes and weapons scattered around the room; the place looks wrecked and something about it strikes Sarah as vaguely unprofessional. Whatever Jo’s reason may be for hunting, Sarah’s beginning to think she hasn’t been hunting for very wrong.
“Not much,” says Sarah. “Just that Thomas was an asshole.”
“Huh,” says Jo. “Well I got something a little more helpful. Name of our ghost.” She pulls out a slightly crumpled piece of paper and hands it to Sarah. It’s a scan of an obituary, slightly smeared. A young girl stares up at Sarah, dark eyes and dark hair. Christina Freedman.
“She’s young,” says Sarah softly, figuring out the girl’s age from the birthday and deathday listed in the obit. “Nineteen.”
“A lot of ghosts are,” says Jo. “They’re angry that they died so young. And that anger keeps ‘em here.” She nudges Sarah’s shoulder with her own. She smiles, proverbial cat with canary smug. “Anyway, you ever dig up a body before? Because I also found out where Christina’s buried.”
&*&*&
The skeleton is fragile-looking, delicate, the bones smooth and frail. Jo doesn’t pause to look at it, but Sarah’s caught by the frailness of it.
“This is it?” she asks. “This is all that’s keeping her here?”
“No,” says Jo calmly, pouring salt out of a carton and onto the skeleton. “Like I said earlier, it’s her anger that’s keeping her. This is just what’s letting her.”
“What’s she so angry about?” asks Sarah, collapsing onto the ground next to the shovels. She’s exhausted to the point of nausea, her muscles feel like they’ve seized up and she’s completely covered in dirt and sweat. She smells bad even to herself.
Jo is just as grimy as Sarah is, but doesn’t look even half as exhausted. She hoists herself smoothly out of the grave and then picks up the lighter fluid they left by the headstone. She pours some over the skeleton and then steps away.
“Now we all have to do is-” everything goes cold suddenly, a bone-numbing cold and Sarah sits up instinctively, skin prickling tight like she’d been shocked by static electricity. There’s a figure materializing behind Jo, and Sarah recognizes it as a ghost first, as Christina second.
“Jo!” she shouts. Jo ducks and rolls, the movement sending her sliding back into the grave, and there’s a sick crunch as the skeleton crushes. Christina howls with anguish, tears streaming down her face and blood streaming down her arms. Sarah’s paralyzed, and it feels exactly like what happened with Sam, the ghost advancing, herself powerless.
Christina swoops, and somehow that breaks Sarah’s paralysis. She ducks out of the way, and then yelps as a sharp pain pierces her wrists. She’s bleeding, she realizes distantly, shallow cuts forming on the inside of her forearms.
Jo clambers out of the grave then, less graceful this time. Her hair is wild, a stormcloud around her head, and she grits her teeth as she flicks on a lighter, throws it onto the skeleton.
Christina flies at Sarah again, shrieking, and the pain gets sharper in Sarah’s arms, the cuts deeper.
And then Christina screams, full throated and horrible, the way cats howl at night when they’re fighting. She disappears in a fury of fire and light, the scream echoing beyond her second death.
“That was…” Sarah trails off, mouth gaping open. It’s no more or less dramatic than the last time she saw a ghost go up all flame and glory, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a person could ever get used to.
“Anticlimactic?” suggests Jo with a grin, and maybe Sarah was wrong. Jo’s teeth shine white through the grime. “They normally are.”
“Not the word I was going to use,” says Sarah, grinning shakily back. She moans and falls back onto the grass. “Jesus Christ. My wrists.”
Jo’s expression switches to concerned, and she leans over Sarah. “Come on,” she says, placing a gentle hand on Sarah’s shoulder. “Let’s get you bandaged up.”
&*&*&
“So now what?” asks Sarah while Jo’s driving her back to her hotel. Her wrists are bandaged pretty heavily, but Jo decided she wasn’t in need of any medical attention. “That’s it? We just burn Christina’s body and leave?”
“Pretty much,” says Jo. “There’s really not much to it. Show up, get rid of the problem,” she smirks to herself, a sour twist to her lips, “kiss the pretty girl, leave.” Sarah can’t tell if Jo likes it that way, or if she’s pleased with it, her tone too neutral for Sarah to read it.
“But what about why she did it?” asks Sarah. “What about those guys’ family members? Don’t they deserve to know what happened?”
Jo slants her a look. “None of that really matters,” she answers flatly. “Christina’s not going to kill anyone else, so we’ve done our job.”
Sarah thinks about Luisa, her tentative belief that her brother was killed by a ghost. If anyone deserves to know, it’s her. Sarah says as much, tacks on a thoughtful, “Learning about ghosts kind of screwed up my life for awhile. But I think if Sam and Dean had explained more to me, maybe I wouldn’t be so frightened all the time.”
It’s a hard thing to confess to another person, let alone to herself. And once the words are out there, it’s easy to admit that they’re true. She’s been scared ever since Sam left, about as scared as she was after her mother died.
“You’re gonna be waiting a long time if you want the Winchesters to come and kiss your boo boos, if that’s what you’re asking after,” says Jo dryly. “Most hunters are more into the saving business than the fixing one.”
“You don’t think it’s better to know?” asks Sarah. “You don’t think that’ll help fix things?”
Jo stares grimly through the windshield, jaw and hands clenched.
“No,” she says tersely, after a moment. “I really don’t.”
The rest of the car ride passes in silence, and Jo parks curbside when they get to Sarah’s hotel.
“Look,” says Sarah, before sliding out. “Thanks for all the help and for, you know,” she raises her wrists in indication of the bandages. “It was really good to meet you,” she concludes quietly. It’s a stupid thing to say, but she can’t think of anything else. She’s not sure she likes the way people pass in and out of her life.
Jo doesn’t say anything, just looks at Sarah with solemn, considering eyes. Then, she leans across the divide and tucks her hand under Sarah’s chin, tilting her head up. She kisses Sarah, soft and clumsy, and brief enough that Sarah doesn’t have much time respond before Jo pulls away. She’s left breathless and gaping, and Jo’s face remains in neutral as she starts the engine.
“It was good to meet you too,” says Jo, no trace of irony to the words. “You take care of yourself Sarah.”
Sarah nods numbly, automatically, and gets out of the car. Jo spares her one more look in the rearview mirror and a wave, and then she’s gone, riding off into the dawn.
&*&*&
Sarah sleeps into early afternoon, and when she wakes up, every muscle in her body aches, two motrin and a hot shower only enough to make walking feel slightly less like torture. She realizes it’s the first time she’s had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep in months.
But there’s an estate sale listed in the newspaper, with the kind of last name her father’d send her out to check up on anyway. It’s still only Sunday, and she figures she can go to this and pick up a piece, and still make it home sometime tonight and keep her promise to her father. The night before seems like a dream or a distant memory, everything washed out in her mind’s eye. But there’s plenty of physical evidence to prove it happened. Her aching muscles, the dirt-stained clothes, the bandages around her arms.
She gets to the estate sale only a couple hours before it closes, but there are still some promising pieces left. Her shirt has sleeves long enough to cover her arms, but the son of the estate owner seems more intrigued by her chest anyway. He’s a heavy set man with no interest in his dead mother’s art collection and even less idea of what Sarah’s talking about. She’s growing increasingly frustrated with him when she sees a flash of yellow hair and familiar figure out of the corner of her eye.
“Excuse me for a moment,” she says politely to the man, and turns around and leaves.
Jo’s standing by an umbrella stand with a plate of cheese in hand. She’s dressed in her insurance agent outfit, slightly wrinkled, and Sarah wonders if that’s the only nice outfit Jo owns.
“What are you doing here?” she whispers, and it comes out as more of a hiss than she intended.
Jo looks up at her and smiles, though there’s too much of an edge to it for smile to be the proper term.
“What? Is it so shocking to believe that I’m interested in art? I went to college, too, you know.” Jo pauses, head tilted like she’s reconsidering that statement. “Well,” she amends, “I went for a couple months at least.”
Jo glances around the room, eyeing the other buyers distastefully. The son is slowly circling back to Sarah, and Sarah gets the uneasy impression he plans on asking her for her number.
“And you thought you’d just drop by, pick up a painting to hang up, in what, your truck?” She realizes then with a sinking feeling that she has no idea where Jo lives, where she’s from, why she’s a hunter.
Jo shoves away from the wall and meets Sarah’s eyes for the first time in the whole conversation. She’s glaring hotly.
“I have a home,” she cries, voice cracking around the final word. “If that’s what you’re asking,” she tacks on, voice dropping into sullen.
“Sorry,” says Sarah hastily. She’s not sure why they’re arguing, if this is some weird leftover tension from last night. She reaches a tentative hand out and places it on Jo’s arm. Jo doesn’t move away or flinch, and Sarah feels some of the tension drift away.
“So what?” asks Jo, gone back to not looking at Sarah. “You’re here to buy some dead woman’s stuff? Isn’t that a bit morbid?”
“Any more morbid than what we were doing last night?” asks Sarah.
“So this is your day job?” asks Jo instead of answering the question. Her tone is as frustratingly bland as it was the night before, and Sarah can’t gauge whether she’s being mocked or judged. But Jo just looks vaguely interested, even though her hands are wrapped around her elbows like she’s uncomfortable being there. She notices Sarah studying her, and drops her arms to her side, relaxing into a more casual pose. The smile she flashes doesn’t look forced, but Sarah’s beginning to figure out just how good an actress Jo is.
“Yes,” answers Sarah, looking at a nearby painting. It’s overpriced, which isn’t unusual, and she absently figures out how she would haggle down. When to push and when to pull back; people are delicate. She twirls her pen between her fingers and glances back at Jo. Jo’s watching her. “Family business, I guess. It’s what my dad does. What my mom did.”
“Did?” asks Jo.
“She died a couple years ago,” says Sarah carefully, still not used to the words.
“Hence the past tense,” mutters Jo, smile gone. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she adds, a little stiffly. “My dad’s past tense too.”
“You think this is what your mom would want?” asks Jo abruptly, after another lull drags between them.
“What?” says Sarah with a small laugh. “Being an art dealer or hunting ghosts?”
“Both, neither. I dunno. I’m just trying to figure you out,” says Jo, shaking her head slightly. She’s talking sideways at Sarah, refusing to answer questions by asking her own. “Most people have some horrible tragedy in their past that makes them hunt. You’re just, what, moonlighting?”
Sarah frowns. “I’m helping people,” she explains. “I found out these- these things existed, and I couldn’t just let them kill people.”
“Murderers exist,” points out Jo calmly. “Rapists exist. You didn’t become a cop. You’re Batman without the Joe Chill.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware this was some kind of elite club,” sneers Sarah, angry and low. “So what’s your big dark secret?”
Jo stares at her, face flushed a bright pink, and then she smiles again. It’s a different smile from before, more a warning than a mask.
“It’s what my mom does,” she mimics. “What my dad did.”
“Is this what your dad would want?” Sarah asks. It’s a cruel thing to say, she knows.
“Honestly?” says Jo, with the same teeth-baring grin. “Probably not. It’s definitely not what my mom wants. But I don’t think it really matters what he would have wanted.”
She touches Sarah’s arm, hand stopping just above where the bandages are hidden beneath Sarah’s sleeves. “But it’s my job to protect civilians. And you’re one of them. You’ve got good instincts, but I almost let you get killed last night.”
Sarah wants to tell her that all it takes is practice. Practice long enough at something, and you’ll get good at it. But she’s a failed artist, and she knows that’s not true. And hunting isn’t baseball. The price of experience is blood.
“So you just came by to tell me I’m an amateur?” she says instead, same flare of anger she felt when Sam tried to shut her out of the case. “Thanks, but you’ve already told me that. Didn’t stop me earlier.”
“No,” admits Jo. “I. Honestly, I wanted to tell you I found some of the other victim’s girlfriends.” Jo’s mouth is thin and taut, tension visible in every line of her body. “As near as I can tell, they were all assholes. Kendrick hit his girl, too. Molina cheated on his girlfriend, broke up with her over text message, got back together, and then cheated on her again. And Jefferson was just an asshole.”
“And Christina’s boyfriend?” asks Sarah softly.
Jo shrugs. “Couldn’t find anything. None of her family’s left in the area. Doesn’t seem likely that he was a great guy though, considering the pattern.”
“So she was knocking off guys who reminded her of her jerk boyfriend,” says Sarah. The theory that’s been hovering at the edges of her mind clicks neatly together. Girl kills herself over something her jerk boyfriend did, then spends her afterlife killing jerk boyfriends.
But it’s not anything conclusive; it’s just a theory. And it irks her, that the story is only half-finished. Some people are just born twisted. Some people just die too young. But none of it really explains why.
Jo smirks. “Vindictive bitch. Can’t say the douchebags didn’t deserve it though.”
Sarah thinks back to Luisa, how obviously distraught she was over losing her older brother. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “Isn’t it kind of fast to judge someone on one aspect of their life?”
Jo looks at her disbelievingly. “Are you serious? These guys were capital A assholes. But,” she shrugs, “not for us to judge, I guess.”
“It’s just,” says Sarah, struggling for words. “There’s always more, isn’t there? More to the story.” She lapses into silence.
“That’s why it sometimes better not to ask,” says Jo. She squeezes Sarah’s shoulder and then lets go. “But you wanted to know. So I found it.”
Jo leaves then, her heels clicking across the hardwood floor. Sarah counts five seconds before turning around.
Jo’s already out the door, a flash of gold hair in the window.
&*&*&
She doesn’t buy anything, and she doesn’t talk to Luisa again either. The latter’s a much harder decision than the former.
Luisa will realize eventually that it wasn’t a ghost she saw, that maybe her brother was crazy after all. She’ll grow up, move on. People die, and everyone else gets used to it.
It’s not a fair decision, not even really Sarah’s decision to make. But she figures she’ll be taking something away from the girl as much as she’ll be giving something to her. She toys with that idea as she drives through the city- the transmission of knowledge as an act of violence.
She tells herself that she couldn't take Luisa's innocence away like that, and she can also accept it as an excuse.
Then, with a jolt, she realizes that the sun is setting, the rays of the sun splaying red and gold across the highway. She has to shield her eyes with her hand as she turns, and then the sun drops to just behind her shoulder and the highway stretches out ahead of her. It’s a straight and narrow path from here to home.
She has Jo’s number though, nestled safely in her contacts list. She thinks she’ll probably call.
People die, and there will always be more ghosts.