Nightwing (9 page)

She turned left on the porch toward the terrace to check her geraniums. They were bone dry. She put one pot on the table to weight down the paper and the mail, took her watering can out of the bin and headed for the kitchen sink.

She heard a crash and a yowl from upstairs as she came through the French doors, put the can down on the dining room table and bounded up the steps. In the bedroom next to hers she found Callie peering out from under the bed, and her grandmother’s sewing cabinet, which she used as a nightstand, overturned on the woven cotton rug in the middle of the room.

Willie had put it there with one of the shaving mirrors she’d bought at Pac ‘N Save on top, angled and aimed at the one over the dresser. She dropped to her knees, picked up the flimsy plastic mirror and saw it was unbroken.

“Lucky for you,” she said to Callie as the cat crept out from under the bed. “Or you’d have seven years of bad luck.”

The drawer fell out as Willie righted the cabinet, spilling buttons, thimbles, a tape measure and one of her grandmother’s quilt-pattern notebooks with a blue dotted-swiss cover. Willie let Callie bat a thimble around while she replaced spools of thread on the brass brackets built inside the flip-top lid to hold them.

Then she put the drawer back and took the thimble away from the cat. Callie fought her for it and snagged a claw on one of the strips of bright material laid between the pages of the notebook. Willie gently disentangled her and refocused the mirror. Then she opened the book and flipped through it, hoping to find the chop suey recipe for Frank.

The quilt pattern her grandmother had sketched was “Drunkard’s Path,” a crazy up-and-down zigzag that made Willie smile. Maybe she’d try this one. The pattern was goofy enough that her mistakes wouldn’t show. Willie got to her feet smiling, turned the page and froze. Below the drawing of a quilt block and some notes on fabrics, her grandmother had written in pencil and her age-crabbed script.

Johnny came today. Saw him at dusk walking up from the beach. First time I’ve seen him outside. He looked sad and lost until I called to him. Then he smiled and seemed to remember where he was. Hasn’t a clue where he’s been. Never does, poor thing.

Oh, God. Willie clapped the book against her pounding heart and stared at her wide-eyed reflection in the dresser mirror. Granma had seen Johnny Raven’s ghost, too, and knew his name. So did Lucy, but Lucy was supposed to. She was a curator. Like Teddy, his friend who’d been killed by pirates. How had Betsy found out his name? Did ghosts talk?

Willie peeled the book off her chest and flipped quickly through the rest of it. She found a recipe for quince jelly, a grocery list, a reminder not to forget to send “the jackass” a birthday card, but no more notes about Johnny.

She wanted to scream, but went flying out of the bedroom instead. It took her an hour to find eighteen more notebooks, the mirrors mocking her harried, room-by-room pawing through drawers and bookshelves. There were lots more someplace, but Willie didn’t take the time to find them. She raced the ones she had into her office and dumped them on her desk, knocking over the mirror trimmed with glued-on seashells she’d made Granma in Girl Scouts. A few shells fell off, but the glass didn’t break. Willie stood the mirror up, dropped into her chair, booted up the Mac and opened a new file she named JOHNNY.

Sunset was in full purple-and-mauve swirl outside the office windows, but the glow from the monitor gave Willie light enough to read. It took her half an hour of fevered skimming to find another entry. It was written in pencil and smeared, as if Granma had rubbed her hand over it while she wrote.

Johnny sat on the porch with me after supper. He can’t talk, so we just rocked in the swing and listened to the surf. We heard whales, too, and Johnny cried. Didn’t shed one tear, still I thought his heart was going to break.

“How did you find out his name, Granma?” Willie asked. “And why didn’t you tell me you were leaving me a ghost along with Beaches?”

If Johnny Raven could rock in a porch swing and cry, even without tears, why couldn’t he talk? Willie frowned and picked up a notebook with a purple paisley cover. What she knew about ghosts she knew from books and movies. Hardly scientific, but if Jacob Marley could talk to Scrooge in A
Christmas Carol,
how come Johnny Raven was mute?

Willie frowned and opened the purple notebook. The patterns and notes Betsy had written here were mostly in ink. Her handwriting looked stronger and clearer, too. She must’ve started this one after her lens replacement surgery, Willie thought, a chill creeping up her back as she turned a page and found an entry written in green ballpoint, dated July 12, barely six weeks before Betsy died. It was the only dated entry Willie had found so far. She tried to ignore the pang it gave her, but her eyes filled with tears as she read.

Yesterday I found a sand dollar on the kitchen table, in a pool of sand still warm from the beach. Today I found poppies, red ones—my favorite—in the old blue Mason jar. Presents from Johnny, I know it. It’s July, and he always comes for his birthday. I haven’t forgotten him, even though I haven’t been able to see him since I had the damn cataracts taken off. Makes me feel good to know he hasn’t forgotten me, either. Makes me wonder, too, if I’ll be here when he comes next summer.

“Oh, Granma,” Willie said around the lump in her throat. She wiped tears off her lashes with her fingertips and reread the passage. Her eyes filled again, but this time she smiled and murmured, “Thank you, Johnny,” just as she glanced up and saw him in the seashell mirror.

Chapter 9

He sat on the white wicker trunk against the wall by the door, elbows bent on the knees of his riding breeches, a faint, expectant smile curving one side of his mouth—that oh-so-sexy mouth she’d last seen in the emergency room of Stonebridge General—as if he’d been waiting for her to look up and notice him.

He didn’t seem at all threatening. Still, Willie felt every hair on her body stand on end. It was one thing to set traps for a ghost, but something else to actually catch one. Now that she had, she didn’t know what to do. Except meet his dark eyes in the mirror and repeat, “Thank you, Johnny.”

He raised his right hand, palm upturned, and swept it in a graceful arc toward his body.
“You’re welcome,”
he said in American Sign Language.

Gooseflesh shot through Willie. Someplace around here there was a sign language dictionary she’d found her grandmother studying when she’d come to visit during spring break her junior year at Cornell. “You’re never too old to learn a language,” she’d said, but now Willie knew the real reason.

The rest of the few simple phrases Betsy had taught her flew out of Willie’s head as she spun out of her chair. But all she could see was a silvery shimmer in the air above the trunk. Just like the one she’d seen beside her bed.

Last night she would’ve sworn it had no shape, but now it looked like a reverse image on a negative, of a man about six foot two, maybe three, with very broad shoulders. It gave her the creeps and a nasty shock of vertigo. She turned her head quickly toward the pedestal mirror she’d put in the corner, saw Johnny Raven on his feet and moving toward the door.

“No, please!” Willie flung one hand toward him in the mirror. “Don’t go!”

He stopped and looked back at her, catching her gaze in the seashell glass. He knows about the mirrors, Willie realized with a jolt that sat her down, hard, in her chair.

“I’m okay now,” she lied. “You just startled me.”

He gave her a wry, no-kidding smile. Willie stared at him, wondering what to say. He looked as real as she was—as long as she kept her eyes on the mirror—so real she could see sweat stains on his brown leather vest, sand caked on his boots and grass stains on his breeches.

And he looked so much like Jonathan Raven that her heart skipped. Not with fright, but with pure female awareness that, alive or dead, this Raven was as stunningly handsome as the other. And why not? They looked like identical twins.

“I’m Willie,” she said. “Betsy’s granddaughter.”

He nodded
I know
and sat down again. Over the top of the mirror Willie saw fireflies hovering in the leaves of the oak tree in the side yard. The shadows beneath the tree deepened toward dusk. She wanted to turn on her desk lamp, but didn’t; she was afraid Johnny would vanish in bright light.

“Can you see me without looking in the mirror?” she asked, and he nodded. “How come I can’t see you?”

He shrugged and spread his hands. In any language the gesture meant
I don’t know.

“You can hear me, but you can’t speak, right?” He nodded and then shook his head. Yes and no.

“How did you learn sign language?”

He pressed his hands together, and then let them fall open.

“A book?” Willie asked, and he nodded. “You can read?”

He nodded, his luminous dark eyes gleaming with amusement in the mirror. Dumb question, Willie supposed, since he’d gone to Harvard. Over a century ago, when Cambridge was a half day’s ride on horseback from Boston.

“Wish I knew where Granma’s sign language dictionary is.”

Johnny leapt to his feet, made a wait-here gesture like a traffic cop, and ducked out of the room—through the doorway, thank God, not the wall. Willie was pretty sure Jacob Marley’s ghost had walked through walls. So why
did
Johnny Raven observe the spatial laws of physics?

Don’t think about it, she told herself, or you’ll run out of here screaming and never come back. And wouldn’t that just delight the hell out of Dr. Jonathan Raven?

She didn’t see how Johnny could be in cahoots with Raven to scare her out of Beaches, but she didn’t like the fact that the possibility had occurred to her. Was there something wrong with this picture or was she nuts? If Johnny Raven was dead, how could he see and hear and read? Why was he visible only in mirrors? Was he really a ghost? And if he wasn’t, what the hell was he?

She almost asked him when he came back with the blue-and-white soft-covered dictionary she remembered, but didn’t. She wasn’t afraid to hear the answer; she was terrified. Johnny held the book up to her in the mirror, one dark brow raised.

“That’s it,” Willie said.

He smiled, leaned over her and put the book on the desk. The sleeve of his shirt fell away in soft folds from his well-muscled arm. This close up, she could see splattered, rusty stains on the yoked front inside his vest and buttons torn off the open throat.

She remembered he’d been killed by grave robbers, realized the stains were blood and shivered. His wrist, long fingers and the back of his hand were sinewy and sun browned. She could even see a sprinkle of dark hair on his knuckles and a small hook-shaped scar near the second knuckle of his index finger.

In the mirror, anyway. In her peripheral vision there was only a smeared, silvery flicker. The sign language dictionary seemed to be floating onto her desk.

Willie dosed her eyes until the urge to toss the Oreos she’d had for lunch passed. When she opened them, she saw Johnny in the mirror, sitting on the trunk again. He made the sign for book and then put his hands together, index fingers touching. He drew them apart, pointed them at his mouth and moved them back and forth, rapidly and eagerly, toward his lips and then away. Willie hadn’t a due what he was saying.

“Slow down,” she said, opening the dictionary as she picked it up. “And say it again.”

He repeated the signs while Willie glanced from his image in the mirror to the alphabetized drawings illustrating the most common words and phrases and back again. He said it six times before she thought she had it figured out.

“Open the book,” she said tentatively, “and let’s talk?”

He nodded yes, yes, and raised his right arm, thumb curled below his fist. He flexed his wrist up and down and pointed at his right hand with his left index finger.

“Does that mean yes?”

A smile so radiant it all but lit the room spread across his handsome face. Whatever he is, he’s lonely, Willie realized, her heart catching with sympathy. His smile and his joy were so human, so touching and so infectious that when he leapt to his feet and flung out his arms, she did, too.

“By George, I think she’s got it!” Willie crowed, tossing the book in the air and spinning toward him on one foot.

Instead of Johnny’s glowing smile, her gaze collided with the shimmer. Dizziness swept through her so sharply and so suddenly she reeled and stumbled. In the pedestal mirror she saw Johnny grab her forearms, yet she kept falling.

She managed, somehow, to get her hands up and catch herself on the desk. She hung over it, breathless and blinking in the seashell mirror, the compact in her pocket digging into her thigh. Johnny stood behind her gazing at his hands, a distressed, I-don’t-get-it frown on his face.

Neither did Willie. “If you can pick up a book,” she asked him, “how come you can’t grasp my arm?”

He looked at her and shook his head. He started to sign something, but his hand froze and his head whipped toward the doorway. It took Willie a good ten seconds of straining her ears to hear the throaty purr of a big engine. The same powerful growl she’d heard from Raven’s Corvette.

Johnny’s eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. Hear, my foot, Willie thought, he’s got ears like a bat. He flung her another wait-here gesture and raced out of the room.

Willie pushed herself off the desk and followed, stopping in the dining room doorway when she saw Johnny in the closest mirror. He stood at the French doors, palms pressed against the panes she’d exposed when she’d opened the sheers. Purple spears of twilight shot past him, edging his shoulders with lavender and pooling shadows on the hardwood floor.

“It’s Dr. Raven, isn’t it?”

Johnny whirled around, shaking his head and beating his right fist against his chest.

“I know,” she said, “but it’s his name, too.”

He shook his head again and thumped his chest. When a car door slammed in the driveway, he flung his arms across the French doors and shook his head violently. Willie didn’t need a dictionary to figure out what he meant.