Free Love Never Dies by Christina Dodd

 
     
     
     
    A murder committed. . .a love lost. . .and a ghost haunted by the past.
    Only one woman can right all the wrongs. . .if she can survive the night. . .
     
    Midnight in the oldest park in Virtue Falls, Washington
     
    I've been dead over seventy years and still when I hear a woman scream, I find myself standing, listening, wanting to help and unable to do anything except watch.
    Tonight was no exception. Eugene Park was a blur as I moved through the leafy bushes, over a brown, neglected lawn made scraggly with the drought of August. I reached the scene in time to see the killer level the second blow, taking the girl's cheek half-off with a machete.
    The pitch of her scream changed from surprise to pain to horror.
    This female wasn't yet a woman; she was perhaps sixteen years of age, a girl running away from home or a dumb kid meeting some other dumb kid for a tryst or, from the way she was dressed and the late hour, a young prostitute trolling for a wayward client.
    But no matter what her intention, she didn't deserve to die. Not like this.
    The killer grasped her hair and twisted, bringing her to her knees. He raised the machete.
    I dove at him, desperate to stop the carnage.
    I swirled through, as useless in death as I had been in life.
    I was still airborne when he scalped her with a wild swipe.
    Gore splattered the sidewalks, the fountain, the shrubs. Her screams became whimpers. I could hear her heart slow as it fought to pump the rapidly decreasing supply of blood. I could see her soul struggling to remain within her body.
    No one ever made their passage easily.
    I hadn't.
    A few more cruelly enthusiastic blows and the girl died. Her soul rose from the body. She looked at me reproachfully.
    As I watched, she slipped away.
    The killer took his time gathering up the body. He tweaked her clothes, ran his hand through the swathe of hair in his hand, took a sickening pleasure in the cooling body. Throwing her over his shoulder, he started up the walk toward the dark corner of the park where the park merged into forest. At the last minute, he turned and looked right at me.
    He saw me.
    "Interesting, isn't it?" he asked, and, "Are you going to stick around for all the killings?"
     
     
    Eugene Park, unkempt and neglected, was a two square block piece of land on the outskirts of town. As far as I could tell, the park served merely as a tree-laden shelter for the homeless, a place for dogs to relieve themselves, and a shortcut for those in a hurry.
    There for days and months and years, I waited, destined to witness events I did not wish to see. I didn't understand what I was doing there. What purpose did I serve? What penance was I enacting? I had died trying to help a young woman under attack. Surely I didn't deserve hell.
    Yet my mother always said life wasn't fair, so maybe death was nothing more than a continuation of injustice. Maybe I was paying for my stupidity in leaving Sofia the way I had.
    Regrets. Too many regrets. Too many deaths. Too many women's faces dissolving into disbelief, agony and death. I remembered each one.
    The leaves turned orange, then brown, then withered and whirled away on the cold wind. Snow covered the rhododendrons; they became elfish mounds. The flakes retreated, then returned, then retreated. Rain came and froze the park into a glossy sheet of ice. The long darkness of the north was upon us, and I was alone. I told myself alone was good, because he was not here with his machete.
    Then she came.
    It was just past sunset when I felt a vibration not unlike the dramatic, opening chord on a Spanish guitar. A young woman had stepped across the park's boundary into my territory . . . and his. She huddled into her coat, moving from the side of the park near the canyon, taking the short cut toward town. She wore a silly knit hat with tassels dangling from the sides and a matching knit scarf and I could see no more than her upper lip, the tip of her nose and as she passed under each