Ghost Flower (11 page)

Every ghost story I’d ever read came back to me, and my skin started to prickle. “Hello,” I whispered. “Is there anyone there?”

Nothing answered.

I knew, rationally, there couldn’t be anyone there. That this was just a place where the air pooled, an architectural peculiarity.
There are no ghosts
, a voice chanted in my head.

Alongside me, I heard a sound. It was distinct. The sound of footsteps shuffling.

There
must
be someone else there.
Only I was unmistakably alone.

I swung the flashlight around, sending the beam bouncing off the walls. The corridor was empty. But even as I stood there, watching, seeing there was no one, I heard the footsteps again, now slightly in front of me. And beneath them a low, irregular sound. At first I thought it was someone sobbing. But then I realized it was… giggling. A horrible, manic giggling.

The flashlight arced wildly in my trembling hands as I ran back through the cold place in the corridor, back to the open doorway of my room and slammed it shut.

My fingers stumbled over the lock, and it took me three tries to turn it. I stood there thinking,
The footsteps sounded like they were next to me. But the corridor was empty, so that is impossible.
Thinking it as though it were rational, as though I could somehow see tunnel-like through my fear. Thinking all that as I furiously rubbed my arms to make the goose bumps go away, as my teeth chattered so loudly I couldn’t hear my heartbeat.

There are no ghosts
, I repeated to myself again and again.
There are no ghosts.

My breathing was just starting to come back to normal when one of the shadows near the bookshelf peeled itself away from the others and, assuming a hazy shape, came looming toward me.

“Hello, Aurora,” it whispered, reaching for me.

I
n the split second before I screamed, the shadow resolved itself into a figure in black cashmere and laser whitened teeth. Bain.

“What were you doing out there?” he asked.

My terror evaporated, leaving behind a granular mixture of fury and relief. “What the hell were you thinking?” I whispered angrily, punching him in the bicep. “Was that some kind of joke?”

“
Ouch
,” He stood back, rubbing his arm. “Was what some kind of joke?”

He did a good job sounding innocent, but I wasn’t believing it. “Jiggling the door handle. Pretending to be a ghost. Why didn’t you just knock and say who you were?”

Even in the darkness I could see him frown. “Because the door was open when I got here. What are you talking about?”

I realized the grooves of the flashlight were digging into my hand where my fingers were gripping it. “You weren’t the person trying to open my door? Jiggling the handle?”

“No. I didn’t have to. Like I said, the door was open. What happened?”

“Nothing. Just that. I woke up, and the door handle was turning. Or at least I thought it was. But when I opened the door there wasn’t anyone there.” I willed my fingers to uncurl from the flashlight. “I thought I’d locked the door. Where did you come from? Did you see a person in the hall?”

“I took the back stairs from the kitchen. Had the place to myself.”

I pictured the layout of the house. There were the front stairs I’d come up and another set originally built for servants that connected to the kitchens. I’d forgotten about those, but if Bain had been on them, no one could have gone that way. I said, “I must have dreamed it.”

“Probably,” he agreed, losing interest. “Especially after what that medium said at Coralee’s party. That was really something.” He started moving around Aurora’s room—my room—picking up and putting down her things. “Appearing at the party and having them haul you in was a smart play. You got them to run your prints without us having to ask. Once they got over being stunned by you being conjured from the dead. Made for some great YouTube viewing.”

“I didn’t know she’d hire a medium. That hadn’t been part of my plan.”

He sat in the desk chair and pivoted right, then left, balancing the tip of his index finger on the top of the desk. “Yeah. Tell me about that. Your
plan
. How did you come up with the idea to show up like that instead of doing it the way we talked about?”

“It seemed more like something your cousin would do.” I shrugged. “Make a big entrance. Plus people are always more likely to believe something that has to be coerced rather than volunteered.”

As I spoke the words I realized I’d said too much, revealed too much of my actual approach. If I’d been talking to Bridgette, it could have been a crucial mistake, reraised questions in her mind
I’d worked hard to put to rest, but Bain didn’t seem to recognize it. He nodded toward my bandaged left hand, which was on top of the covers. “You got hurt.”

I held it up. “No one can ask me to play tennis or the piano with this thing,” I said.

He let out a low whistle. “Nice.” He got thoughtful again. “The only thing I don’t get is, why not tell Bridgette and me? We would have gone along with it.”

“This way you won’t have to pretend to be surprised.”

He gave a little bark of laughter. “I think you wanted to show us who had the power.”

“I think you must have me confused with your sister. I’m not nearly that clever.”

He gave me a quick, sharp look. “Sure.” He got busy opening desk drawers, poking around them with one finger. “Just remember that we’re all on the same team here. Working together. Right?”

“Right.”

Another sharp look. He picked up a piggy bank in the shape of a cat, shook it, and put it back down. “Of course Bridgette is livid. She spent something like six hours at the train station trying to figure out where you’d gone. She doesn’t like it when people don’t follow her plans.”

The adrenaline must have been leaving my body. I felt spent, exhausted again. I yawned. “I got that.”

“She’ll come around. Now that you’re here, the pressure’s off. Since Grandmother brought you home, everyone else has to believe in you too. Tonight was a triumph. Only two more hurdles to go.” He lifted a finger. “One, meet the Family. That shouldn’t be too bad. And two, answer the cop’s questions about what happened and where you’ve been.”

“I’m sorry, Officer, I don’t remember anything,” I chirped, then went back to my regular voice. “I know what to say.”

“Don’t get cocky. The last thing in the world we want is for you to attract their attention for any reason.” The word “we” seemed to hang in the air, emphasizing our complicity. He’d finished with the desk and was gazing in my direction, but I had the sense that what he was seeing was in his head.

“Look, I’m tired. Can I go to bed?”

“Oh, sure, of course.” He didn’t move. He just sat there staring at me.

“What?” I demanded. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

He shook his head slowly. His expression was the same one he’d had at Starbucks three weeks earlier, before this started. “It’s just seeing you here, in her room—it’s so
real
. So possible.” He got up, but instead of going to the door he took a step toward me.

“Good. That’s the point, isn’t it?” I asked. I felt the cool metal of the flashlight handle against my thigh beneath the comforter, and I let my fingertips rest on it.

“Yes. Ro home again. Home, alive, in the flesh,” he said. His fingers flexed, then straightened. “Irrefutable.”

Something was going on inside him, something I didn’t—and didn’t want to—understand. He took another step toward me. My uninjured hand wrapped around the bottom of the flashlight beneath my comforter.

I wanted to snap him out of it. My eye fell on the photo strip on my night table, and I pulled the flashlight out and turned it on, pointing to the row of pictures. “Do you know who that is? Or why Ro would have scratched out his face?”

It worked. The faraway expression left his face. He took another step in my direction but this time focused on the photostrip. The
beam of the flashlight was on the photo strip, not him as he bent to look at it, so I couldn’t see his face. But I thought his forehead might have wrinkled in a frown. “Where did you find this?”

“In her sock drawer.”

“Was there anything else?”

“Socks?” I said. “Why? Does it mean something?”

He stood up, shaking his head. “Beats me. I have no idea why Aurora would have scratched this guy’s face out.” The way he said it I believed him.

“She kept the photo though. So he must have been someone important to her. Any idea who it is?”

“I already said I didn’t know,” he told me, even though he hadn’t. He seemed agitated and suddenly in a hurry to go. Glancing through my window in the direction of his house, he said, “I’d better get back. I don’t want to ruin everything by getting caught in your room.”

He made the door in two easy strides, paused, and turned back to face me. “I’d keep that picture you found out of sight. Somewhere safe where no one can get to it.”

“Why?”

“People might ask who the guy is. It would blow the whole thing if you couldn’t tell them, right?”

“Sure,” I agreed. It was a good point. But I had the sense it wasn’t the real reason.

As I moved to lock the door behind him, I replayed Bain’s reaction to the photo strip. He’d been genuinely surprised by it, but not by the guy
in
it. I could have sworn that despite the face being scratched out, he knew exactly who that was.

Which meant something happened to Aurora the week before she disappeared that made her go from adoring the guy in the photo
to hating him. Something Bain didn’t want me asking questions about.

I decided I’d take his advice and keep the photo safe, but I doubted that his idea of safe and mine were the same.

SATURDAY

T
he lights are long silver dashes in the wet pavement, and the tires of the cars make squelching noises. Across the road a payphone is ring-a-linging. Every time I try to reach it, a car goes by, splashing me with more mud.
I have to answer it,
I think.
It’s a matter of life and death.
When I finally get there, I see the numbers have been scratched out and the receiver is missing. I stand there, staring at it, while it goes on ring-a-linging. There’s nothing I can do; I’m helpless. I must answer it, must answer for
it—

I woke up in a cold sweat, heart racing, blankets twisted around my legs, thinking,
Answer for
what? The sun was blazing through the windows, bouncing rainbows off the faceted sides of the star lantern.

The brightness was like a rebuke to the racing of my heart, the fear-clenched tightness in my chest.
What could be sinister here?
the room seemed to say, mocking me. Looking through the window, I saw a luxurious carpet of perfectly manicured green grass, with hills and a blue sky beyond it.
See, it’s paradise, the room seemed to say. Nothing to be afraid of.

On my way to the bathroom I unlocked the door of the room, feeling stupid for having locked it in the first place, and was washing
my face amid the green-and-white tiled splendor when I heard the sound of it opening. I turned around in time to see the woman enter, take in my empty bed, stop dead, then turn and see me.

She stood frozen, a tall, lean, woman with a face like an upside-down Anjou pear, smooth and golden brown with high cheekbones and a little round chin. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun and had more silver in it than I remembered from the photos. But the face was the same, and the smart, miss-nothing eyes behind the rhinestone cat-eye frames of her glasses were the same. She looked like the best kind of high school librarian, and I would never have guessed she was past sixty if I hadn’t known. She was wearing dark blue slacks, a crisp white blouse rolled up at the sleeves, and a silver and turquoise cuff bracelet that I imagined she’d gotten during a visit to her relatives on the Maricopa Reservation.

She was carrying a breakfast tray. I walked toward her and took the tray from her hand.

“Hello, Mrs. March,” I said.

“You are a very naughty girl,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“You leave like that with no word, and we worry and worry. And now look at you. All grown-up and far too skinny. I knew you couldn’t look after yourself on the streets. I fussed and fretted, and I was right.” Now she burst into tears.

I went to put my arms around her, but she shook her head. I let my hands fall to my sides. “But here I am. Back. You know the only reason I came back was to see you and eat your cooking.”

She sniffled. “Bah.” She pulled away and took an ironed handkerchief out of her pocket to wipe her eyes. When she was done, she stood and looked at me. “I can’t believe it.”

“I’m sorry I left,” I told her. It seemed like the right thing to say. And standing there, facing the only person who really seemed to have been moved by Aurora’s disappearance, I found I meant it.

“She’s sorry she left,” she repeated, hands on her hips, looking even more like a high school librarian. “Do you know what I should do to you?” Without pausing, she went on. “Neither do I, and I’m going to think about it, but right now you should eat these and be quiet.” She began smoothing her hair back into her bun.

“You brought me doughnuts.”

“I did, and I don’t know why because you don’t deserve them. Mind you eat all of them. The Family is waiting to greet you downstairs, and then your Uncle Thom is going to take you to the police for an interrogation. If you survive that, you have the added terror of going shopping with your cousin Bridgette, so you have something to wear to the Country Club. I’m not sure which activity should frighten you more, but you’re going to need your strength.”

“Thank you.”

She nodded to herself and turned toward the bed. Before she’d done anything, she froze and, as though giving in to something she couldn’t check, turned, crossed to me, and wrapped me in her arms. “Welcome home, Aurora,” she said. There was nothing frightening in the way she spoke the words, or in her touch. She was the first person to touch me on purpose with kindness.