The Girl in the Mirror Read online

  Praise for The Girl in the Mirror

  “The Girl in the Mirror is the first installment in the Sarah Greene Mysteries series, and while the book plays with the usual mystery genre conventions, it has the added intrigue of supernatural elements. It’s an excellent first entry to this exciting new series, set in the California town of Dos Santos where a shady history lends itself to all kinds of paranormal drama for protagonist Sarah Greene. Author Steven Ramirez weaves a gripping mystery at the center of the novel, and the unpredictable twists keep the pages turning well into the last act.”

  IndieReader

  “The Girl in the Mirror is a well-paced paranormal mystery that delivers chills, laughs, and romance all in one go, and gives the reader a heroine to root for. The character of Sarah begins as a woman unsure if her choices in life are the right ones, but through her trials she becomes stronger and more confident in herself and her abilities. Ramirez delivers highly readable prose that is both funny and unnerving when it intends to be.”

  The BookLife Prize

  “The Girl In The Mirror is a spooky, supernatural thriller. The first page drew me into the story and kept me there until the end, with the suspense building on each page. This is a well-paced story, with plenty of action and a great plot filled with twists and turns that keep you hooked.”

  Readers’ Favorite

  Also by Steven Ramirez

  Tell Me When I’m Dead—When a plague decimates the town of Tres Marias, recovering alcoholic Dave Pulaski, his wife, Holly, and a band of soldiers must kill the living and the dead to survive. “Tell Me When I’m Dead is a gritty, pulse-pounding read that never loses its sense of humor, for an original and well-rounded work of zombie fiction.”

  Dead Is All You Get—Fighting to protect his wife, Holly, from the hordes of undead, Dave Pulaski discovers the truth behind the contagion—a revelation that will drive him past the limits of faith and reason. “Steven Ramirez has driven a stake into the brain of this genre and created something new that is definitely worth the effort, and demands a read from fans of zombie fiction.”

  Even The Dead Will Bleed—In Los Angeles, Dave Pulaski is on a mission to rescue an innocent girl from a secret facility experimenting on humans, then kill the man responsible. But he encounters dark forces that will deliver him to the brink of hell. “The brutally terse and matter-of-fact style of narration creates a constant mood within the story that is hard not to admire, and matches up with other masters of the thriller genre.”

  Chainsaw Honeymoon—At fourteen, Ruby Navarro is on an insane mission to get her parents back together, and she needs her two best friends, her dog, an arrogant filmmaker, a bizarre collection of actors, and a chainsaw-wielding movie killer to do it. “In the form of Ruby, Ramirez imparts to readers all the confusion brought about by puberty; the emotional neediness camouflaged by sarcasm; the obsession and continuing frustration with boys; and the bonds female teenagers forge with one another.”

  Come As You Are: A Short Novel and Nine Stories—Seventh-grader Ivan Stein finds a notebook controlled by demonic forces that will inflict suffering on the good as well as the bad and take his soul as payment. “Impossible to put down until the last page is read.”

  About the Author

  Steven Ramirez is the author of the acclaimed horror thriller series Tell Me When I’m Dead. A former screenwriter responsible for the funny, bloody, and action-packed movie Killers, he has also published Chainsaw Honeymoon, a satirical romantic comedy, and Come As You Are, a horror collection. Steven lives in Los Angeles. He enjoys Mike and Ikes with his Iced Caffè Americano, doesn’t sleep on planes, and wishes Europe were closer.

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  Author Website

  stevenramirez.com

  The Girl in the Mirror

  A Sarah Greene Supernatural Mystery

  Steven Ramirez

  Copyright © 2019 by Steven Ramirez.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at stevenramirez.com/permission.

  Glass Highway

  Los Angeles, CA

  stevenramirez.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  The Girl in the Mirror / Sarah Greene Mysteries Book One / Steven Ramirez.—1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-949108-02-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019903351

  Edited by Shannon A. Thompson

  Cover design by Damonza

  For Daphne, who taught me dread.

  They kept coming at him from the air, silent save for the beating wings. The terrible, fluttering wings. He could feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. Nothing else mattered. He must keep them from his eyes.

  Daphne du Maurier, “The Birds”

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Afterword

  One

  It was the screaming that woke Sarah Greene. Her screaming. Sitting up, she tried calming her jackhammering heart by using a breathing technique she’d learned from a psychologist years ago. A slow, steady breath through the nose… Hold for three seconds… Purse the lips and exhale slowly… Relax and repeat. That always helped, even though she’d felt Dr. Bates had been a condescending bitch. There’s no such things as ghosts, she had said through impossibly huge black designer frames and thin, pale lips that reminded Sarah of a Muppet. Did Muppets have lips?

  Her bedroom was dark except for the glow from the colorful guardian angel night-light she’d had since she was a kid. The only reason she still used it was in case she had to get up in the middle of the night to pee. Or that’s what she told herself. Maybe the real reason was that her mother had bought it for her when Sarah was suffering from night terrors. What time was it? She switched on a light and grabbed her phone from the nightstand. Just after midnight. She’d only been asleep, what, forty-five minutes?

  “Gary?” she said.

  She heard a thump from somewhere far off. Then, the familiar rapid padding noise as her sleek, gray tabby with the broken black stripes and cool green eyes bounded into the room. The cat leaped onto the antique iron double bed and maowed. She brought him close. That always made his eyes squishy, while magically pull-starting the purr machine.

  “That was a bad one, Gary.”

  Realizing it would be hours before she could get to sleep
again, she set the cat aside and threw back the sheet and duvet. She sat there, observing the goosebumps on the tan, muscular legs she’d developed running five miles a day. She didn’t recall why but she’d decided to sleep in the oversize Knicks jersey Joe had given her when they were first married. The man was a New Yorker through and through. Had she been thinking about her ex-husband again?

  “Goosebumps aren’t sexy,” she said, lifting a bare leg and modeling it for the indifferent feline.

  She talked to Gary a lot, she noticed. Pathetic when you stopped to think about it. But he seemed to listen. Sometimes. Eventually, though, he got bored and hopped off the bed, looking for something better—like a game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

  “Typical guy.”

  Sarah remained on the bed, waiting for the inevitable after-images she knew would follow. That’s the thing about nightmares. They’re never over until the sun comes up.

  And she’d been having this particular one—or variations of it—since she was fifteen. That was when her best friend Alyssa died in a car crash. Exactly one week later, she appeared in Sarah’s room. Sarah remembered she hadn’t been scared. Instead, she cried. A few nights later, she had The Nightmare for the first time.

  Now years later, she felt the familiar tingling dread—a cloud-like gloom gathering behind her eyes. Then, a parade of stilted pictures appearing like something out of a demented slideshow organized by evil clowns with French accents. A flash grenade of white-hot light sent her hurtling into a roiling vortex of familiar images.

  She was standing in a place she didn’t recognize, surrounded by dark, smooth walls. Though she was alone, she could feel a presence—something malevolent. Now, a whisper of wailing voices.

  A dark, reddish light glimmered behind the walls, and she could see something moving. People. They were naked, their eyes filled with terror. She turned in a complete circle and saw that they were all around her. She could hear a deafening scraping noise as the walls began moving in on her. Thousands of hands tried to grab her. She opened her mouth to scream.

  Coming out of it, Sarah could feel herself getting anxious again and decided to take another calming breath. Eventually, she pulled on a pair of jeans and made her way to the kitchen where she found the cat playing with a plastic bottle cap that had somehow missed the trash.

  Now what? Coffee? No, she’d never get back to sleep. A drink? Hmm. She had a bottle of Talisker 25 Year Scotch Joe had given her on her thirtieth birthday. Pretty pricey for a guy who was famous for replenishing his underwear drawer once every decade, and only if Penneys was having a sale. Okay, maybe a quick one. That stuff needed to last until she turned forty, which was seven years away. Shit, forty…

  She found a juice glass in the cupboard—she wasn’t big on formality—and was about to grab the bottle when the temperature in the room dropped suddenly and the lights flickered.

  “Come on.”

  Seeing her breath, she looked down and noticed Gary staring intently at something. Turning, she saw it, too. The wispy image floating not ten feet from Sarah seemed solid at times, then transparent. Each time it tried to materialize fully, the lights dimmed.

  Wordlessly, she dropped the glass, and it shattered on the floor, startling the cat and sending him skedaddling out of the room.

  “Alyssa?” she said.

  The last time she’d seen the girl, she came to warn Sarah—no, to prepare her—for her mother’s impending death from cancer. Then as now, Sarah felt a deep sense of longing she hoped she would get over after seeing her best friend in the world lowered into the cold ground on a wet January morning. Two years later she would return, only now the coffin would contain her mother.

  Alyssa Cortez was wearing the dress her grieving parents had picked out for her—white with little pink rosebuds around the collar and the gold crucifix they had given her for Christmas. Her dark hair was long—exactly the way she’d been wearing it since second grade. She was barefoot and still fifteen. Sarah recalled how in high school they used to spend so many hours in her old room painting each other’s toes and scaring each other with made-up ghost stories. Outside, Sarah’s younger sister, Rachel, would try to horn in on the fun, but to no avail. That seemed so long ago.

  “Sarah, you’re in danger,” the apparition said, its voice muted, as if she were speaking through a closed door.

  “What? But how—”

  “Be careful when you help the girl.” Her voice was clearer now. “I hope… I’d really like to see you again.”

  Her image became unstable. Like a sigh, it faded into nothingness. Sarah reached out to her friend, hot tears streaming from her eyes.

  “Alyssa, wait!”

  But she was gone, and Sarah was alone.

  The Cracked Pot was dead. Like Denny’s on Blue Monday. Only woozy denizens desperate for a caffeine fix could be found hanging out at that hour because it was the only place in Dos Santos that was open. And the coffee was good, though you had to wait forever for a refill because each cup was “crafted” by hand.

  It was one-thirty in the morning. Sarah sat across from her ex-husband and current business partner, Joe Greene, with two cups of steaming Guatemalan Antigua separating them. The beans had been roasted out back in a little shed earlier in the day, which was why the coffee was so damn good. She took a sip. Screw it, she wasn’t getting back to sleep anyway.

  Sarah thanked God Joe never complained whenever she called him up in the middle of the night to meet her so she could dump her latest problems on him. Come to think of it, he had never complained about anything—even when she informed him that she wanted a divorce. Hell, he’d been downright conciliatory about the whole thing and offered to help her find an attorney. She’d stayed mad about that for a long time. What? He couldn’t wait to be rid of her?

  She added more half-and-half to her cup, watching Joe drink his black. She had decided to wear her white cashmere sweater with the skinny jeans. In the old days, Joe would always tell her how much he loved that sweater—the way it hugged her every curve. Damn him, he even looked handsome just having fallen out of bed: graying hair that he always wore short, beard stubble, lean muscles bulging through his black T-shirt from all the physical labor. A softer Henry Rollins, she decided. And hot—stop it, Sarah.

  “So, what happened?” he said, clueless as to where her mind was at the moment. “The nightmare again?”

  “Yeah.”

  Coming down from her lustful feelings, she sighed dramatically and picked at a red spot on her cup that was in reality baked into the enamel.

  “Sarah, you’ve had these before. It’ll pass.”

  “I just wish I knew why, though.”

  He noticed she was holding the St. Michael medal she always wore around her neck. “I feel like you’re not telling me everything.”

  For a guy, Joe had loads of intuition. “What? No, I… Okay, fine.”

  She lowered her voice, though the scruffy, tatted-up twenty-something server with the gauged earlobes was way over on the other side of the restaurant taking an order from that odd elderly couple she recognized from the local hardware store. They always seemed to be purchasing light bulbs, she remembered.

  “Later in the kitchen, I, uh, I saw Alyssa.”

  “Your dead friend from high school?”

  “Uh-huh. She was there. Almost in the flesh. Gary saw her, too.”

  Sarah never felt uncomfortable telling Joe about these episodes. They’d known each other for fifteen years—had it been that long?—and he had learned to accept that she was “special.” In fact, he’d once told her he was glad to know there was an afterlife. Said it gave him hope.

  “Was it like the last time? Did she speak to you?”

  “She told me I was in danger.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “Kind of. Apparently, I’m supposed to be helping some random girl. I immediately thought of Katy, but then I wondered why Alyssa wouldn’t have come out and said my niece’s name.”

  Jo
e drained his cup and spun it back and forth between his hands. Sarah knew he did that whenever he was mulling something over. One time, he’d tried it with a wine glass at a fancy restaurant. Disaster. It wasn’t a total loss, though. While a busboy cleaned up the mess, Joe proposed to her.

  “I dunno,” he said. “Maybe one of Lou’s cases?”

  “I don’t think the police chief will be asking for my assistance anytime soon, not after that last fiasco. Anyway, I got the feeling this is something else. That something’s going to—”

  “Drop into your lap?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “I guess we need to wait and see. You want another cup?”

  “No, I’m good. We should go.”

  They stood, and Joe looked around for the server but didn’t see anyone. He opened his wallet and threw down a ten-dollar bill.

  “Isn’t that too much?” she said.

  “Whatever.”

  Outside, they stood in the October chill between two vehicles—her classic black 1963 Ford Galaxie 500 XL and his late-model gray Dodge Ram truck. It occurred to Sarah that she’d never seen Joe driving a regular car. And the only time he’d put on a suit was when they got married. She had worn a white dress her dad had bought her in Santa Barbara.