Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files) (30 page)

This, I thought, was a perfect excuse to talk to my sister Rowena. If it wasn’t about us, or family, or me, or Harry, maybe I could sneak a conversation in. At least I could hear her voice just one time, and I wasn’t asking for anything for myself. Rowena had been cleaning homes for the elderly on a volunteer basis since she bumped an old man off his bike when she had been driving drunk at eighteen. The man had minor injuries, but Rowena had been so shaken that she had given up drinking completely, abandoned driving, and devoted her life to serving others. An extreme reaction, but Baranuiks go big or go home. In typical Baranuik fashion, my sister had overreacted and gone off the deep end.

He took the card and whistled softly. “What’s ‘Director,
UnNatural Biology Department’ mean?”

“It means if your chickens sprout fur and start howling at the
moon, or sucking the goats' blood,” I said, pointing up to the still-dark sky, “you feel free to give me a call. I’ll be on the very next flight back.”

Lennie used my card to scratch his temple. “When you say
have
to do volunteer work, are you talking community service?”

“More like guilty conscience.” I noticed Schenk pretending not to pay attention to this. He wasn’t as good at it as he thought. “Clean a house to clean the soul.”

“That so,” Lennie murmured thoughtfully. “I mean, I hardly
invited you here so’s you could help me. I meant to help you.”

 “And you did,” I assured him. “You change your mind, that number forwards to my cell phone. You give me a ring, okay?”

Lennie waved goodbye to us and watched us trudge back
through
the snow to the car. The snow had gained a frozen crust since we
had
gone inside, and the temperature was dropping fast. I figured he
would have shoveled the walk if he could.

I thought Schenk was reading this all on my face, but when we
got in the car all he said was, “Good job spotting the swollen knuckles.”

“You saw them, too, eh?”

“I did.”

“It was more that he kept rubbing them, prodding the sore spots. Sometimes, we can’t help fiddling with our pain.” I did my seatbelt up and half turned to him as he warmed up the car. “I think I know
where Britney got my old business card.”
And why Ellie’s not
answering my texts.
“You don’t mind giving my pal a ride to work, do ya?”

“This friend wouldn't happen to be blonde and have, and I
quote, ‘big jugs?’”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Neither Nowland nor Hiscott ever mentioned her.” Schenk
poked at the radio. The clock softly reminded us that it was seven fifteen. “Let’s go pick her up.”

I texted Ellie:
I’m on my way with coffee
.
Be ready.

ELLIE WAS NONE
too happy to have Constable Schenk pick her up for work in his Sonata, but when push came to shove and shit got real, she was an obedient woman; she slid into the back seat without expressing her displeasure. I had chosen to sit back there, too, so I could more easily study her face, and we wouldn't be interrupted by the clock's continued admonitions about the time. I’d taken off my gloves, but I put my bare hands in my pockets so as not to alarm her.
She sat with her knees primly pressed together, angled away from me toward the door, and stared out the window at the hoary
wasteland.

I decided that to pussyfoot around would put Ellie through more anxiety than was strictly necessary, and got right to the point. “Ells, why wouldn’t you tell me you know Britney Wyatt?”

“That’s not your scarf,” she said. “You weren’t wearing one. Whose is it?”

“Mr. Merritt’s,” I said. “And don’t side-step my question. You knew why I was here. Why didn’t you tell me you know Britney?”

I could see the reflection of her face in the window. She screwed
up her lips to one side as she thought about her answer. “She’s a
flake. We’re not friends. I barely know her.”

“You gave her my business card,” I said. “Why?”

“She had something she wanted you to Grope with your whaddyacallit, your touch psychic Talent.”

“Yeah, I know all about it,” I bluffed, thinking about the bowling bag and the ball under the priest’s desk. “She took it to Father
Scarrow.”

“No, not the skull,” she said. “A necklace.”

I bit down on my tongue hard to keep from yelping.
A skull?
It had rolled off her tongue like it was nothing, no big deal, just part of a dead person taken from a grave
.
I stared at the side of her face in wonder.
Dark Lady above, who is this person? Is this
my
Ellie?

“She was going to mail it to you,” Ellie continued. “The necklace. I told her she could trust you, but I honestly didn’t want you
involved, and when it came time to give her your info, I …” She scrunched her mouth again, and balled her hands together. She was wearing fluffy, yellow knitted mittens, and it looked like she was holding the sun in her lap. “I figured if she couldn’t get in touch with you, she might drop it. It seemed harmless.”

Grave robbing.
Sweet Mother
.

“Tell me about the skull,” I said quickly, impressed that Schenk hadn’t started his own interrogation from the front seat yet. He
seemed
happy to let me take this one, though his eyes spoke to me in the
rearview mirror, pressing me to continue. “Did you see it?”

“No. She found it at the pond, with Simon and Barnaby. I wasn’t with them.”

“And the necklace?”

“That, too. At first, she figured some other ghost hunter or hiker just lost it, until she checked Google images for others like it. Turns out what she found was really old.”

Found?
“Ellie, Britney Wyatt robbed a two hundred-year-old grave.”

“They’re not like that,” Ellie said, and finally turned her head to
look at me. “Really, Marnie, I’m serious. They’re just curious kids goofing around. They weren’t digging stuff up. She said she found it in the mud.”

It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger who was so
familiar, seeing someone from your past in the line at the grocery store whose face you couldn’t quite place. I tried to sweep aside my anger and disapproval and stay focused on gleaning information from her, like she was just a source and not my best friend since kindergarten.

“Where did she find it, exactly?”

“There’s a spot along the south shore of the canal’s overflow pond where the land juts out a bit. There used to be some old
Lutheran church there, ages ago, and a graveyard. I guess they moved some of the bodies up to the Old Red Hook Cemetery back in the twenties.”

“Where is the necklace now?” I asked, remembering a necklace with a long, crystalline pendant in a plastic bag in the evidence box on Schenk’s desk.

“Britney always had it in her purse. She was going to mail it to you if you agreed to examine it. Once she suspected it belonged to
someone who had been buried there, she was
obsessed
with finding out exactly who it belonged to. She went to all the local museums, churches, genealogy groups, trying to find a map or layout of the old cemetery, the one that got moved.”

“Did she ever find answers?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I think she did. Because when she told me the phone number on your card didn’t work, she was okay with it. She said she didn’t need you anymore.”

I wondered if Scarrow had given her answers, and how truthful they'd been, and whether he'd tried to give her anything else. “You
gave her an old number, not my new one. Why did you mislead
her?” That's me, an endless wellspring of trust.

“Because there was no point. It was silly. I didn’t want her to bother you.”

“You don’t get to make these decisions, Ellie. I still don’t get why
you wouldn’t tell me.” I was pouting. It was unprofessional, and it wasn't showing off my positivity whatsoever. It might have qualified as a people skill if it had done the least bit of good in getting Ellie to open up.

“It didn’t seem relevant.”

“Relevant,” I repeated. “She went missing at the canal. She
found the skull and the necklace at the canal’s overflow pond.”

Ellie went back to staring morosely out the window.

“Ellie, they found her
body
in that overflow pond yesterday. Britney Wyatt is dead.”

I didn’t expect any emotion; Ellie had always been very good at hiding her feelings. The choked-off sob that came out of her was a surprise. “Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was ever involved. I just want
to stay out of it.”

Too late for that, Ellie.
“Why were you ghost hunting if you don’t believe it at all?”

“Barnaby works with me. Barnaby Nowland. He works in the
kitchen
at the hospice. He thought the spirits of the dead patients were
hanging
around, haunting the place. He was always coming to me with stories and stuff he thought was proof. When I told him I didn’t
believe in ghosts, he got even more determined to show me they existed.” She squeezed the mittens into a tighter ball. “He’s a loud, goofy kid. It
was just for fun. We went all over the place. To the cemetery, to
haunted houses, to the Blue Ghost Tunnel.”

“Britney wore the necklace to the tunnel?”

“She said she brought it there with the skull and an Ouija board to try to contact whatever spirit owned the necklace. They invited me to go along, but I was working. I met with them afterward. At
eleven-thirty, on the third, at the south shore of the pond. They told
me there had been a ton of activity in the tunnel, lots of voices on their recorders, answers to questions, spirit orbs on photographs, all that. Then she put the necklace on the planchette on the Ouija board right there by the pond. She called to the person by name.”

I could picture it perfectly: a hokey party game, a two-centuries-old necklace, and four idiots bumbling around with shit they didn’t
fully understand. I suddenly understood Scarrow’s reluctance to
speak to us near the pond, where Britney’s body had been.

“What name, Ellie?” I prompted.

“She called the spirit Mama-Captain.” Ellie’s chin fell, and she
crumpled. A soft squeak of a sob came from within the shelter of her
chest. “I should have told you. I heard it. I heard Mama-Captain. I
saw
her. I swear to you.” She hiccupped and sniffled. “Her anger. Rage.
She howled at us. In our faces.
Howled
.”

I caught Schenk still looking at me in the rearview mirror, and I would have doubled-down on my swear jar that we both had the
spectral librarian from
Ghostbusters
going from “
Shhhhhhhh,”
to
“
GRRAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!”
in mind. We had pulled to a stop in front of the hospice, but Ellie didn’t notice.

Her words, now released from their prison, tumbled over each other in a jumble. “Barnaby fell over. I felt something shove past me
to get at him. All this ice, shards of it, flew at us. It didn’t seem to
come
from the water, but it must have. Ice doesn’t form in the air from nothing. I had to cover my head with my arms. The sleeve of my
other winter coat, the black one, is shredded. Imagine if that was my face, my cheeks. Britney was so excited, but we kept telling her this was bad. It was really bad. She was on cloud nine, she wouldn’t hear it. She kept promising Mama-Captain that she’d return the necklace, but only if Mama proved some things to her. It was almost…” Ellie choked on a sob and then shook it off, violently, before continuing, “Like Britney was holding the necklace hostage until the spirit behaved the way she wanted. But that can’t be what killed her. Can it? Marnie? It just
can’t
be. It makes no sense!”

“I don’t understand, Ellie,” I said softly. “What does ‘Mama-Captain’ even mean? Who is Mama-Captain?”

“I don’t know,” Ellie said, lifting her teary-eyed face. Her nose was bright red and her cheeks were pale. “But whoever she is, she’s really fucking pissed off.”

ELLIE TOOK A
few a moments to collect herself before she fled the car. When she’d disappeared beyond the glass doors of the hospice, I moved to ride shotgun. Schenk had his file out, but next to a few small notes, he’d scribbled abstract shapes. After shading them in, he began to tap his pencil,
taptaptap
, as he stared out into the distance.

“Eight forty-five,” the car helpfully informed us. I was already exhausted. Schenk had a glassy-eyed, wired look on his face.

“What are you thinking?” Schenk asked me.

“Not much.” I pulled on my gloves. “I’m thinking I want to try that Balkan donkey cheese. Also, I’m slowly adjusting to the realization that I might never be crowned Lord of the Dance. And I think you need to Google how to shut the frigging clock up, eh?”

He took this all in with a slow nod. I knew he would. “That’s heavy stuff for a Friday morning.”

I glanced over at him. He was doing his thing, staring straight ahead, giving me a window of privacy in case my bottom lip wanted to wobble, offering me easy-going space to talk if I needed to; there was no judgment, no pressure. I liked him a lot for that.

“On a completely unrelated note, my friend is apparently a grave robber,” I said, “and she’s not even sorry about it. Not
really
.
She's sorry someone got killed, but she’s sorrier about how that affects
her
.” I should probably have felt guiltier about being judgmental about it,
since Asmodeus, the Overlord Hizzownself, had accused me of
always doing what was best for me, and the fact that it wasn't always the capital-R Right thing tickled His infernal balls.