Poltergeist (23 page)

I jerked back, swamped with bleak memory. "My dad used to call me 'little girl.' “

"Harper, I'm sorry. I'm not presumin' on him. How long he's been gone?

"A long time. I was twelve when he died. Now there's just me and Mom and we don't get along.”

"That I know. So…that why you don't be comin' round? We're too clingy?" Then he sat back and winked at me. "Or maybe you don' like Miranda's cookin' no more?”

I snorted a laugh, relieved to be off the subject of me and my wretched family—even if it did mean dealing with the oddities of the surrogate one. "I love your wife's cooking and I'd be twice as fat as you want me to be if I ate it as often as I'd like to. And three times as fat if I ate it as often as you'd like me to. Things have been a little strange since I got hurt and I've been busy. And Phoebe's mad at me.”

"Oh, she don't be so mad as dat.”

A plate of steaming food was shoved onto the table in front of me.

"I am too as mad as 'dat.' “

I looked up into Phoebe's scowl. Or rather, her attempt at a scowl that broke up into a smile as I watched. She put down her own plate and sat across from me. One of the family slid some glasses of water onto the table for us as they passed. Another dropped off rolls of utensils and napkins, never missing a beat on the cleaning and prepping for drinks, dinner, and dancing that took over the place on Fridays and Saturdays.

Noises came from the bar area and the front of the dining room as the tables were rearranged to make a dance floor and stage for the band. Shouts and laughter gusted out of the kitchen with every swing of the doors. Phoebe and I had to lean toward each other to speak at a normal volume.

"Hey, girl," she said.

"Hey, yourself. Thanks for seeing me.”

"Oh, like I'm goin' t'hold a grudge. I was mad. But I understand." She had picked up her father's accent again.

I'd already explained myself and resisted any impulse to do so again. "How are you doing?”

"Fine. I'm goin' back to the shop tonight. How's it lookin'?”

"Fine. Your cousin told me I could get Amanda's home address from you. I need to talk to her.”

"Oh, that Germaine! When Hugh told me he sent that good-for-nothing to my store I thought I'd have to strangle him!”

"Which one? Hugh or Germaine?”

"Both of them! How could he do that to me?”

"He's just trying to help.”

Poppy laughed, breaking into the conversation. "He's trying t'make you stop feeling sorry for your own self, girl! You come in here all long-faced a week ago and crying f'your friend. That's OK. That's right. But now you jus' being stubborn-sorry f'yourself. You're like your ma, Phoebe—ya got t'be busy.”

"I am busy, Poppy.”

"You is busy with everything but you. I love you, girl, but it's time you go home." He fixed his sparkling eyes on me. "You goin' t'make her go back t'her own place, ain't you, Harper?”

"I don't know, Poppy.…She's pretty muleheaded.”

"That d'truth!”

"You two! Worse than Hugh and Mamma.”

Poppy cackled.

"Phoebe, you know you should.”

She made a face. "Yes. 'Specially since everyone be bossin' me about it!”

Hugh came by with a tray full of glasses for the bar and bent down to kiss Phoebe on the head as he passed. "You get back what you dish out, big sister.”

One of the glasses did a backflip out of the stack and darted toward me, trailing a familiar yellow strand. I snatched it. Phoebe put it back onto Hugh's tray with care, keeping one eye on me.

"You got you a duppy now, too?" Phoebe asked.

"Just the garden-variety poltergeist," I replied. "Nothing so nasty as a duppy—they are nasty, right?”

"They be the nastiest things ever," Poppy answered for his daughter.

"What makes them so bad?" I asked him, picking at my plate of food—it was delicious, but I couldn't concentrate on eating, my brain going in so many directions: the poltergeist, my dad, psychic walls…

Poppy leaned back in his seat, gesturing with his water glass. "Duppies, they're the spirits what don' make it to heaven. They got lost somehow on the nine nights and they settle back to earth. But they got no heart t'feel with, no brain t'think with—their soul, it be broke in two. Half here, half the other place. They don' feel the rightness or wrongness o' somethin'. They don' think what happen. They just do what they want. They come slap you or pinch you or make f'break things.”

"How do you know it's a duppy?”

"You see them. Like skeletons wearing fog. The—what they call it here? Willow wisp?—That's the thing they look like. Ancestor spirits, you can't see them—they as pure as air. But the duppy be tainted and evil. And they just get eviler and eviler the longer they hang round. Dogs be howlin' when they about and you feel the spiderweb on your face. That's the duppy sign.”

I didn't know if I would call the yellow thread spiderweb, but I recalled the sensation on my face the first time I fell into it, when I investigated the room; I had thought of the feel of it as cobwebs then, myself. The idea of a ghost that grew more and more evil from a lack of conscience seemed to match the behavior of Celia—and its psychopathic master—to a T.

"Why you keep askin' 'bout duppies?" Phoebe demanded. "Maybe that's why they're botherin' you now.”

I tried to calculate the response to any possible answer, but I'd never been very good at the elusive math of relationships. I stuck to the easier side of truth.

"Mark's project was about ghosts and I think there's a connection to his death. This duppy thing seems a lot like the ghost they made and maybe—”

"They made a ghost? That's crazy.”

I shrugged. "Maybe it is. But I thought I'd better talk to Amanda about the night Mark got hurt.”

Phoebe stared at me. "You think some ghost-thing hurt Mark. For real?”

"I don't know. But you don't get answers unless you ask questions. I need Amanda's address.”

Phoebe pushed her lips together and frowned. "OK, but you be nice t'her!”

"I will.”

Poppy wouldn't let Phoebe go to get Amanda's address until she finished eating and he wouldn't let me go with her to get it once she was done, either. As soon as Phoebe had disappeared through the kitchen door, he turned a searching gaze on me.

"What you really think, Harper? You think some duppy killed Mark?”

I turned my eyes toward the tabletop. "I don't know.”

"You can' go lyin' t'me, girl. You know somethin' that you wish you don' never know.”

"You don't need to know it, too, Poppy," I said, shaking my head.

He put his free hand over mine. He waited a minute, but I didn't confide in him or look up. He patted my hand and sighed, sounding very old and tired. "Dem sure give you a basket f'carry water," he said, shaking his head.

I made excuses to leave as soon as Phoebe returned with Amanda's information. Phoebe and her father both watched me go through narrowed, thoughtful eyes.

It turned out that Amanda had been staying with her parents in Shoreline. Once I had the address from Phoebe—and had been fed enough food to fatten up most of Ethiopia—I drove to the Leamans'. Although Mark and Amanda hadn't dated in months, his death had thrown a veil of misery over her that tinted her eyelids a perpetual pink and her skin ashen. She had the house to herself at the moment, but preferred to sit on the porch swing nestled under the wide overhang of the front porch and watch the intermittent drizzle.

"The house gets too stuffy," she said, pulling her feet up onto the seat and huddling over them with her arms wrapped tight around herself and a depressed olive green cloud clinging to her in the Grey. I sat on the other end of the swing, listening to it creak in time with the slight swaying we made.

"Manda," I started, keeping my voice low, "do you remember the day Mark got hurt in the shop?”

She kept her eyes on the mist. "Yeah. The detective asked me. I remember, but I'm not sure I told him everything right. I was still pretty freaked." Her voice was too bland.

"Do you mind telling me, too?”

She shrugged, setting the swing rocking aslant. "It was kind of late. Monday. A couple weeks ago, now. Mark was stacking some books in Biography and there was this guy talking to him. Arguing, I think. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but they sounded mad. You know—kind of snapping at each other and their voices going up and down. And then the guy kind of… threw out his fists. Like this. You know—like a cross." She spread her arms out straight from the shoulder and almost caught my cheek with the back of one closed hand. She didn't notice and dropped her hands back around her knees again. "And I saw something black flying through the air in the mirror. And it smacked into the bookshelf by Mark's head.

"Then Mark started to turn his head and look at the guy—he'd been looking at the books—and this big book fell down off the shelf over his head and hit him. He sort of… um…shied away from it like maybe he saw it falling. And I heard him shout. I don't know what he said, just some noise like he was surprised or angry. And then the book hit him and he fell off the stool. And the guy ran away." She slapped her hands against her shins. "That was it.”

"Did you know what the object was that flew through the air?”

"Oh, yeah. It was one of the gargoyles from the fireplace.”

"How do you know that?”

"I went back to help Mark pick up the books. He dropped the whole pile he was stacking. So I saw him pick it up and put it away.”

"What about the book that hit him? Do you know what it was?”

"Umm…a biography of Schopenhauer, I think. Not sure. Mark didn't make a big deal about it.”

"Can you describe the person he was talking to?”

"Not too well. The mirror makes people look kind of short and funny—you're always looking at the tops of their heads. Anyhow, I don't know how tall he was, but not very short or very tall, I think. Dark hair, wearing a dark jacket and jeans—I think it was jeans.”

"Did you get a better look at him when he ran out?”

"No. I was going back to help Mark. I shouldn't have left the cash desk, but I didn't think of that, then.”

It wasn't much of a description, and the only people it let out of the suspect list were the Stahlqvists and Wayne Hopke. Even distracted, Manda would have noticed their pale hair.

"Are you certain the person was male? Could it have been female?”

"A woman?" She thought about it, rocking in the seat. "I guess. She couldn't have been very…curvy, though.”

"What about the hair? Was it long, short, black, brown?”

She thought, then shook her head with her brows drawn down in an unhappy scowl. "I don't know. I can't remember. It was just… hair. Dark hair. I wasn't paying much attention.”

"Could you see a part in it?”

She kept shaking her head. "I just can't remember.”

I tried to bring back any other details, but the longer we went on, the less Amanda knew. She wouldn't agree to anything she wasn't certain of or try to describe something she had to guess at. Finally I gave up, thanked her, and started to go.

"Oh," she said. "Are you coming tomorrow?”

"Coming? To what?”

"The funeral. Its at LakeViewCemetery at two. I'm sure it would be OK if you want to come.”

"Oh. Thank you, Amanda. I may come. I liked Mark very much.”

"Yeah. He was a great guy." She bit her lower lip and stood up. "I think I'd better go inside." She let the door swing closed on its own and I heard the first quavering breath of a sob before the lock clicked shut between us.

I went back to my truck and started south, toward Seattle.

Unlike Solis, I didn't care about motive. I only needed to know who controlled Celia. If the incident in the bookshop had been the precipitating event, then the person Amanda had seen in the mirror was Mark's killer. That person couldn't have been either of the Stahlqvists or "Wayne, and Patricia wouldn't have passed for a man even in a badly foreshortened mirror. I was back to Ian, Ana, and Ken, again. Or not. Carlos had left room for error in his guess. The business at the bookstore might not have been the precipitating event or had anything to do with Mark's death. And Amanda might not remember as well as she thought.

If I assumed that I was right so far, then I might need to figure out a motive. All three of my suspects had demonstrated some control of Celia—the last séance had convinced me of that, though the evidence wasn't clear enough to determine who had done what. I could imagine some sort of motive for Ken or Ian—anger over the fakery, jealousy over the women—but not for Ana. Although she had said that it would be up to Celia to take revenge…

I pulled into a parking lot and looked for her phone number.

Ana wasn't enthusiastic about meeting me again and this time she insisted it not be at her parents' place. She was working downtown and reluctantly agreed to meet me in the building lobby after work, but she had an appointment and could only spare a few minutes.

The west lobby of the City Centre building poured light down from the two-story windows and focused track fixtures onto collections of glass objects housed in display cases on both levels. The light ran over the glass escalator and the brass trim, turning golden and breaking into sudden bright sparks that pierced the greenery pressing against the cluster of food kiosks at the street level.

I ascended the escalator to the mezzanine. Ana came around the corner from the elevators. I walked to meet her in front of the massive installation of Chihuly disks, floating like striped and spined jellyfish and Jackson Pollock splatters that flowered in the rich colors of Persia.

"Hi," I said.

She raised her hand. The back was scored with cuts that matched a set of marks around the edge of her face and neck. Her hair had been cut to chin length, but still looked a little ragged where it had been clipped to remove glass shards from her scalp. "Hi," she replied. She sounded tired and nervous.

Glass rattled. We both turned our heads to look at the display. The swirling colors of the "Persians" quivered, jittering and chiming as the glass shapes strained toward us.

With one mind, we moved away from the display, heading for the exit and casting quick glances up to the streaming, icy shapes of the chandelier that hung from the ceiling sixty feet above the escalator.

"I'm so jumpy," Ana started. "Things like that keep happening. Some much worse.”

"What would be worse than having a million dollars worth of art glass fall on you?”

She shivered. "Don't ask. I don't have a lot of time to talk to you— I'm meeting someone for drinks. Can we walk?"

“Sure.”

She scrabbled around in her purse as we headed out the revolving doors. Just under the portico, she paused to light a cigarette. She stood for a moment, smoking and staring around as if she expected something to swoop down the streets and attack her. She hunched her shoulders and hugged her coat tighter. She looked at the cigarette and threw it on the ground with disgust, making a face and sticking out her tongue. "Ugh. I don't know why I do that. I stop smoking long time ago." She cocked an inquiring look at me. "You have any gum? I want that taste out of my mouth.”

I shook my head. "No. Sorry." Her English, as well as her healthy habits, was breaking down a little from stress.

She shrugged. "Oh, well. Come on." She walked up to the corner and waited for the light to change in our favor. "So, what did you want?”

"I wanted to ask you if you'd ever had any kind of relationship with Mark.”

Ana's face pulled down into a questioning frown. "No. I met him in January. I don't know him before then. You mean, like, did we ever go out? No.”

The signal changed and she stepped out into the street. I stayed beside her. "Not at all?”

"Not alone. I go out with Mark, sure, but with the others along, too. Ian and Ken and Wayne and Patricia. Sometimes just me and Ian and Ken. But not alone. I like Mark, but that's all." Her expression grew stormy as we paused on the next corner. "You think because I go out with one man, but I'm attracted to another, I'm a slut? I have a lot of boyfriends in the past, but most of them are not nice men. I just want to find a nice man. Someone fun, someone good for me. I don't sleep around. OK?”

We crossed the next street together, heading south down Union.

"I'm sorry Mark died," she continued. "I am. He was nice. He was good, but he's not for me. I already said this to the detective from the police. Why anyone thinks I had anything to do with this?" she demanded, her English syntax shattering. Something rattled nearby.

"There's a woman involved in this. There was a woman at Mark's before he died.”

"Not me!”

We walked past a hat shop, our faces reflected for chopped instants under the fedoras and sun hats. A haze of yellow floated behind us like an impression of toxic fog.

"Do you think Celia would be capable of killing Mark?”

"What?" She stopped under the awning of a shoe repair shop and turned to stare at me. "Our ghost?”

I nodded.

"No." Then she paused. "No…maybe. But it's just us doing it. Why would any of us want to hurt Mark?”

"Why would any of you throw a table through a window or crack Ian's ribs? Why would anyone do any of the things that happened on Wednesday? Why would they hurt any of you?" She'd been one of the least hurt and that raised my suspicions as much as anything. That we were being trailed by Celia only heightened them.

Her eyes got hard. "Because he faked Celia! He lied to us!" she spat.

"And Celia took revenge like you said she would?”

"Yeah! Maybe she did!”

"How do you know Mark faked the phenomena?”

She caught her angry breath and held it, huddling herself in her coat and gnawing lipstick from her bottom lip. Then she let her breath out slowly. She turned and started to walk toward the corner. "Ken told me.”

That brought my eyebrows up. I caught up to her. "How did Ken know?”

She shrugged, looking down the steeper incline on the other side of the street, toward First Avenue and Puget Sound beyond. "He used to do acting when he was a kid. He and Mark used to talk about it. I think he always knew Mark faked it.”

"When did he tell you?”

The light changed. "Wednesday. Wednesday night. I saw him at the hospital when I was waiting for Ian. Everyone was upset. We talked a lot.”

I stopped her again on the other side of Third in the clouds of fragrant steam that escaped from Wild Ginger's kitchen vents. The light from the huge readerboard on the side of Benaroya Symphony Hall sent shadows scurrying around the intersection with the smell of garlic and ginger. "Did you ever go to Old Possum's?" I asked.

Ana looked blank. "Huh? What's that?”

"It's in Fremont.”

She was about to shake her head when she got it. "Oh! Right, right! Mark's bookstore. No, I never go there. Fremont's hard to get to without taking two or three buses. We have the Kinokuniya and ElliottBay near my house.”

She didn't seem to know Old Possum's was a used bookstore.

She cast a look over her shoulder. "I need to go," she pled. Paranormal ribbons of yellow and blue wove around her and a slow flush pinked her cheeks. "I don't have anything else to tell you. I have to go.”

I put my hands in my pockets. She gave me a strained smile and turned away. I stepped back into the shadow at the corner of the building and watched her scamper down the steep sidewalk to the Triple Door—the jazz club underneath Wild Ginger. The hazy smear of Celia's sliced energy followed her, benign as a pet. Another thread twined and writhed toward the shape of Celia like an inquisitive snake. The thread was the same color, but was disconnected from Celia and moved like a blind thing seeking something.

I wanted a better look at that wandering thread. In the dark and the bustle of rush hour I took a risk and sank back into the shadow, into the Grey, feeling the slight jolt and nauseating slip of the worlds in transit.

The mist-world of the Grey was bright silver and knotted with tangled embroideries of energy moving and darting through the cloudscape. I looked for the seeking thread and found it broken by the heavy bulk of a building and the cold blackness of a rail that guarded the edge of a pit. I sidled around, but couldn't find a door through it to pick up the other side of the thread. Frustrated, I stepped back into the normal.