Spirit Caller 01 - Spirits Rising

reminds me daily. “Besides, I was a grief counsellor. It wasn’t like I was a cop or anything.”
    Mrs. Saunders waved me off. She reached down and, using one hand to brace herself against the wall, picked up a piece of birch firewood from the neat stack next to the stove. Using a hook, she pulled up a circular insert from the top and stuffed the log into the hole. Smoke puffed and curled up from the stove when she poked at the fire to stir up the flame.
    “Mrs. Saunders . . .” I started, but gave up almost as fast. I knew she meant well, and I didn’t want her to think I was ungrateful. I wasn’t. “It doesn’t bother me that people are afraid of me. I’m used to it. Maybe moving here wasn’t the best choice.”
    She shook her finger at me. “None of that foolishness. Back in my time, we had no problem with sensitive people like you. Even the Church recognizes that angels and demons and bad spirits are out there. You just happen to feel them more than the rest of us. No ’arm in that.”
    The weariness lifted from my soul a little. When I first moved to the northern Newfoundland town, a number of the older people called me “sensitive.” I took a bit of offence to it, at first, until Jeremy, a local Mountie and good friend, told me it was shorthand for “sensitive to the paranormal.”
    If that didn’t sum me up, nothing would.
    If only I could pop that skill into Mrs. Saunders’s stove like a piece of birch firewood, life would be a whole lot simpler, to say nothing of quieter.
    My cell phone buzzed. I grabbed my purse from the floor and answered.
    “Ah, Miss Mills?” a young man’s shaky voice asked.
    “Yes,” I said. The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it.
    “Um, it’s Manuel O’Toole. I’m really sorry to call, but I heard you’re back in town and I’m . . . I need help.”
    I glanced at the wall clock. The arms of Jesus read 8:25 p.m.
    “It’s a bit early for needing a ride from a party, isn’t it?”
    I rolled my eyes at Mrs. Saunders who clucked her tongue. The town teens knew they could call me and I’d give them an anonymous lift home to avoid them drinking and driving. While I had a lot of support from all the tiny towns around the area—some parents even joined me in offering rides—some became very angry at me for doing it. It probably had something to do with my driving home some of their drunken kids.
    No matter, I was a grown-up and I wasn’t letting a silly thing like crazy parents prevent me from stopping kids killing their drunken selves on the highway. I’m a trained social worker. My dad’s a retired Mountie. My mom’s a holistic healing hippie. I’d never be able to look myself in the mirror again if I let a kid drink and drive and die. “Where do I need to pick you up?”
    “It’s nothing like that. There’s a bunch of, um, people in the house and I can’t get rid of them. Mom and Dad are gone for the weekend to Deer Lake, see, for a church thing, and these guys are trashing the place. Dad’s going to skin me alive if these guys are still here when he gets home.”
    He had that right. “Who’s there? I can have their parents meet us.”
    “Ah, see . . .” He hesitated. “They’re not real people.”

    CHAPTER 2: All’s Fair in Love and Zombies

    I’ve lived in and around a lot of small, quiet towns in my life. None were as creepily quiet as the entire Northern peninsula of Newfoundland. Perhaps it was the nor’easter wind that blew through the tuckamores on a regular basis, twisting and bending the spruce and balsam into leaning towers of woodland. Or maybe the palatable salt that lingered in the ocean air. But the entire area was just damned quiet. Not sleepy. Quiet.
    Kids get into trouble, especially kids like Manny with too little to do and too many restrictions from well-meaning parents. It was never real trouble, though. Mrs. Saunders never even locked her doors at night. God, folks left their keys in the ignition when they ran into Ricky’s Convenience Store to buy a pack of smokes.
    I drove along the highway to St. Anthony and the O’Tooles’ home—all of twenty minutes away. The wind gusted against the car and I had to drive below the speed limit to stay on my side of the road. The makeshift scarecrows along the roadside gardens shook as the gales ripped at the bags and fabrics meant to scare away the crows.
    I passed my vegetable patch. The wind had already ripped the scarecrow away. I’d not been back in