The Last to See Me (The Last Ghost #1) - M Dressler

1

He’s come to clean me out.

It’s as simple as that.

He’s come to scrape me clean, like a strand of meat clinging to a mussel’s shell.

He wants to put me down in Evergreen, in the tangled graveyard set aside for lost souls. This hunter, he hopes to put me down there with the poorest of the poor, the forgotten, the graves no one tends to, their crooked stones leaning aft, as if taken aback by how far injustice can go, even after death. In that cemetery, hard by St. Clements Church, the animals pile insult on injury. They burrow down toward the collapsing coffins, our boxes softened underground, and bring up bits of bone and tats of lace. And the dead can do nothing about it, their hands and feet tied.

But what ghost has ever asked to be gnawed and stripped? Who wants to lie down in a cold bed she didn’t choose or make? Who wants their bones rolled into a hole, like dice weighted to land on only one number, and always the worst?

Now, let’s say you want to change the odds. Let’s say you refuse to be put down in a pauper’s grave. What do you do?

You fight.

It helps to be trouble. Troublesome. Irish stubborn. A mighty will—that’s the ticket. It takes will not to be what everyone expects you to be. It takes heart not to go where they tell you to go. Especially here, along the rugged north coast, in this place where the tides would as soon see you dragged under as drawing breath.

In the seaweed that washes up on my village’s cove, you’ll find all sorts of things the tide has dragged along with it: bobbing globes of buoys, ruined fishing line, plastic grocery bags choked with sand. Things that can’t fight back. Look up from the beach, craning your neck toward the top of our crumbling cliffs, and you’ll see the village of Benito itself, ignoring the flotsam below, dressed in its Sunday best, even on the blackest days. For we do have black days here, even in this most beautiful part of California.

In winter, our sky grows so heavy it’s like a box lined with padded silk closing down on you. The fog stifles. The foghorns moan. The waves turn to claws on the black rocks, and the air smells of cold, wet lead.

In summertime, it’s better. That’s when the tourists come up in their bright, sparkling cars and their smart summer clothes, and they marvel at the view from our peninsula, and lick at expensive toffees and taffies, and don’t even guess that what they might be tasting, on their tongues, in the air, isn’t only summer’s seasoning but the ashes of all the brave women and men who once lived here, as I did, before each life turned to salt.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the people who eat up the most in this world often don’t taste what it is they’ve dined on? How those who have the means to eat whatever they like are always hungry for more, always more, while the truly famished among us sweep the floors and scrub the dishes and leave the village at night to sleep in places where the rooms are smaller, away from the water and the views, in the woods, in simple beds behind doors as thin as paper, the best wood having been cut for somebody else—for Augustus Lambry, and his like.

When the loggers first came here, a hundred and fifty years ago and more, they were poor—but their will was mighty. They might have worked for men like Lambry who slept in clean, white sheets, but the trees those lumbermen felled were their own business, their own life and death at the edge of the void, and they cut only the biggest, loftiest trunks and shoved and dynamited them downriver, toward the mills and the sea. In those days, Benito’s cove was a half-moon’s sweep of deep water, deeper than it is now, with cypress trees perched thick as crows on the cliffs, except for where a track was cleared to make way for the Lambry logging chutes. Even after the boardinghouses and saloons started going up—once there were so many loggers, a town had to be built to manage them—those trees, and the mounds of salt grass covering the headlands, stayed free and wild. Then, in time, the Main Street Hotel sprang to life, where maids who washed and ironed and cooked could hope to stay clear of grabby