Goodnight Blackbird

Goodnight Blackbird

a novel
by Joseph Iorillo

Copyright ©2014 Joseph Iorillo. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author. Digital formatting by Christine Filipak.
Print edition ISBN-13: 9781502755155
Visit Joseph Iorillo online:
www.JosephIorillo.com

Acknowledgments

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
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three

More From Monolith Graphics

PART I

D
arren Ciccone noticed the woman as soon as he walked into the Starbucks. It was hard not to notice her—she was attractive in an upscale businesswoman sort of way, and they were the only customers in the place.

They both seemed to be waiting for someone.

Darren was waiting for Laurie, who said she'd be there at nine. His watch said 9:46. You didn't need to be a cryptographer to crack this code. He'd been stood up. He caught a reflection of himself in the rain-speckled window—Portrait of a Man All Too Familiar With Being Stood Up.

For a while he and the businesswoman performed a prosaic ballet: he'd go to the window and stare out at the cold April rain and the desolate mall parking lot, then he'd sit down and the woman would take his place, searching the rain. Maybe she'd been stood up too.

Since there wasn't a pay phone in the store, it took some coaxing—and a few dollars in the tip cup—before he could convince one of the twentysomething baristas to let him use her cell phone. Before she handed it over, though, her eyes flicked over his wool topcoat and silver tie with incomprehension. "How can you not have a cell phone?" she asked. "Are you Amish?"

"No. Just unpopular."

Laurie answered on the second ring. "Where are you? Darren, I've been waiting almost an hour."

"Where?"

"The Starbucks on Richmond Road, like you said."

"I said the Starbucks at Richmond Mall." She was about a mile north, next to the McDonald's at the Richmond Road-Highland Road intersection.

Laurie laughed—a delicious, wholesome sound. She was a senior at Cleveland State and worked at her dad's pizza joint around the corner from Darren's office. She could make grown men go giggly just by giving them a soft drink and her heartbreaking smile. And, miraculously, her face lit up like a Broadway marquee whenever Darren came in the restaurant. It had been a while since a woman had that reaction to him. "Our bad luck continues," she said. "This place is gonna close in a couple minutes, so maybe we better just call it a night. I have an eight o'clock class tomorrow morning, anyway."

"I'm really sorry about this."

"Not your fault. But you know whose fault it is."

Darren had once made the mistake of mentioning to her what had happened at his house back in 2002. Now she couldn't let it go. "The house is not haunted," he said.

"I heard the hesitation in your voice, Darren."

"You only heard disappointment in not being able to see you tonight." He received the expected
awwww
and Darren told her he'd call her tomorrow.

So he hadn't been stood up. But that was almost preferable to what seemed to be behind this ongoing comedy of miscommunications. This was supposed to be their first date (actually what he would have termed a pre-date—an hour at a coffee shop wasn't exactly dinner at the Ritz), but it was their third attempt to make it happen.

When Darren called her from his house last week, the phone as well as all the lights in the place went dead just as he was in the middle of the sentence, "Listen, what do you think about having dinner at this Mexican place on University Circle?" Hours later, he was finally able to get hold of her again and make definite plans, but she had to cancel a couple days later. One of the waitresses at the pizza place had come down with the flu and Laurie's dad needed her to fill in. (Gallantly, Darren showed up that evening to pick up a sausage pizza and give Laurie a long-stemmed rose. Her thousand-watt smile and cry of "Oh, that is just so sweet!" were damn near narcotic.) Then, yesterday, she had called him at home to ask him out for coffee. But the line was so choked with static they could barely make out what the other was saying. Tonight's mix-up was more or less inevitable.

Aside from those two instances with Laurie, Darren's phone had never had problems like that before.

When he left the coffee shop, he saw that the businesswoman was now standing outside under the Starbucks awning. It was raining harder. Rumbles of thunder provided an uneven bass line to the treble hiss of the rain, and Darren stood next to her, trying not to shiver. April in Cleveland was usually as cold as November.

The woman wore a rueful half-smile and appeared to be looking at the tall power pole at the corner of the parking lot.

"Waiting for someone?" Darren asked.

Several long seconds passed before she answered. "I'm not really sure."

He was about to dash for his car but the woman intrigued him. Her Donna Karan suit was getting a bit wet but she didn't seem to care. "You having car problems or something?" Darren asked. "I got cables in my trunk."

"No, I'm fine." She glanced at him then averted her eyes, looking embarrassed. Again, she went back to studying the power pole. "I think lightning's going to hit that," she said.

"What makes you say that?"

"Someone told me."

Over the last hour or so, Darren had seen the sky flicker only a couple times with half-hearted lightning. It wasn't that kind of storm. In fact, it really wasn't a storm at all. "Five bucks says you're wrong."

A minute went by. Then two. Darren felt ridiculous and was about to hurry off to his car when the sky briefly flickered and a jagged bullwhip of lightning shot out of the sky and crashed into the transformer atop the power pole. The crack of the whip sounded like a ten-kiloton bomb going off. The ground shook, and Darren almost jumped out of his shoes. The transformer erupted into a sizzling, drooling confetti burst of white and yellow sparks. Car alarms wailed, the lights in the coffee shop and the adjacent movie theater winked out, and the baristas came out to look at the impromptu fireworks display.

Darren stared at the businesswoman. "How did you know that was going to happen?"

The woman shrugged. She still wore the serene, somewhat sad smile, but she no longer seemed to be a mild, waiting trance. She looked around. "Guess it's time to go. Christ, I should've brought an umbrella."

Darren nodded at the handful of cars in the lot, sitting there like stray, helpless cattle caught in a downpour. "Which one is yours?"

"Silver Camry. The one about a thousand miles away."

It was about six rows beyond Darren's Accord, which was a good twenty-five yards away. "Wait here. I'll bring my car to the curb, then drive you over. You'll only get partially drenched."

"You don't have to do that—"

"Wait here." He hustled to his car, trying without much success to avoid the puddles. It took him a few wet seconds to dig his keys out of his pocket. He pulled his Honda up close to the Starbucks and heaved open the passenger door.

The woman hesitated before climbing in. "How do I know you're not another Ted Bundy?"

"You're the one who can control the weather. I think I have more to fear from you."

Once in the car, she smiled. "Sir Walter Raleigh in the flesh. Thank you." There were a couple paperbacks on the floor that she had to move out of the way. She looked at their titles with curiosity—
Encyclopedia of the Supernatural
and
Ghosts, Poltergeists and Other Visitors From Beyond
. Now it was the woman's turn to study him with interest.

The transformer was still sparking and smoking. Ozone-fragrant air wafted in through the car's vents. Darren was still shaken from the lightning strike. It was easy to understand how primitive man would have interpreted something like that as the accusatory finger of a spiteful god. "How did you know that was gonna happen?" he asked. "Tell me."

"It's not important." She was looking at the back cover of one of the books. "I have this one, too. Haven't read it yet."

It occurred to Darren that this was the first time he'd had a woman in his car since his divorce. It gave him a silly little thrill, like he was once again a normal member of the species, upwardly mobile and out on the town with his significant other. "They haven't been particularly helpful," he said.

"Helpful how? Do you have a ghost problem?"

He pulled up next to her Camry. "I'm not saying anything. You won't tell me how you can control the weather."

She had her hand on the door handle but she remained where she was. "Believe it or not, it came to me in a dream," she said.

Darren sensed the woman was looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to talk about his ghost problem. For some reason he felt like she would understand. He stared off through the windshield as the wipers slapped away the rain—moments of clarity alternating with moments of misty, fragmented confusion.

His house was a problem, no getting around that. It was the ostensible reason for the divorce and now it seemed to be waging a low-grade guerrilla war on his painfully embryonic post-divorce love life.

The irony was that he had taken a cheap, ghoulish pride in the place at first. When he brought up the house in conversation, it was always a juicy bit of attention-getting gossip: Speaking of housing values, try to top the deal I got. Two-story colonial, two bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, ninety-eight grand in a neighborhood where the cheapest place was going for one-fifteen. All it took was being the site of a massacre. Bank just wanted to get rid of it. I didn't even have to pay closing costs.

When people asked him if he'd seen any ghosts, he told them the truth—no, he hadn't seen any. No gossamer mist, no Jacob Marley dragging his ectoplasmic chain.

But ghosts don't have to be seen to be present, he supposed.

It wasn't just the stuff with the phone. One morning last July he woke up in a bedroom so cold he could see his breath. There was also the night back in January when he came home late from work and from the driveway saw the light on in the spare bedroom. When he went upstairs, though, the light was off.

And there were the rose petals. One morning last November he found a handful of rose petals in his bathroom sink. Occasionally he'd find them sticking to his clothes.

"Do you remember someone named Jerry McAvoy?" Darren asked the woman.

"Sounds familiar. But I don't know why."

"In November 2002 he lost his job as a salesman at Shearson-Copley, a company that made electrical components for forklifts. He went home and put a bullet in the heads of both his wife and teenage daughter, then shot himself in a corner of the dining room, where I have a shelf full of books. You can still feel the spot where they filled in the bullet hole in the drywall with putty."

He continued to stare out at the rain, but he could still feel the woman looking at him. "I think," Darren said, finding the words difficult, "there might be something wrong with my house."

The woman held out her thin hand. "Jacqueline," she said.

"Darren."

"A poet once wrote that there are two kinds of ghosts. The ones who are here to suffer and the ones who are here to teach. Do you know which one you have?"

"I don't know. Which kind should I be scared of?"

The woman appeared to consider the issue. "The ones who teach."

She slipped out of the car and into the rain. The transformer smoldered sullenly, spitting the occasional spark. Darren watched as the headlights on her Camry came to life. She raised her hand to him in farewell, then pulled out. The car's taillights grew smaller and smaller until they dissolved in the rain.

Darren assumed he would never see the woman again.