The Book of Eleanor (21 page)

“We’re getting to the bottom of it. It’s someone attached to one of the books Grey’s late partner owned.”

She watched me curiously. “What does the ghost want?”

I explained the whole Eleanor and Annalise story, wrapping up just as Grey entered the kitchen. I pulled her close so I could talk in her ear. “We have pannacakes.”

“Oh, good. I love pannacakes,” she responded.

“Good answer.”

Mama studied Grey and me. “I guess you’ll be glad to be shed of that ghost finally. Angie tells me y’all have been having a time with it.” She opened the refrigerator, took out a five-pound box of bacon, and started placing slices out on the meat griddle. A healthy sizzle filled the room.

“I will,” Grey said, watching with interest as Mama worked. “I want to open the coffee shop, but am afraid to with all this activity going on. This ghost even plays in the public restrooms, throwing paper towels and unrolling the toilet tissue.”

Mama and I both laughed at the admission.

“Well, we’d better go ahead and eat, sweetheart. We open in half an hour,” I said.

As if hearing my thoughts, Gail entered through the back door and stopped dead still, surprised to see us all standing there.

“Well, good morning!” she said. “How is everybody on this stormy Monday?” She stood an umbrella near Mama’s handbag and pulled her apron off the hook. “Have you opened up the front yet, Angie?”

I grinned at her. “No, ma’am, I’ve just been making pancakes.”

Mama grunted.

I made a face at her.

“I’ll bring breakfast,” Grey said. “You go open the front with Gail.”

I touched her hand. “Thank you, babe.”

Gail and I busied ourselves with switching on the overhead lights and paddle fans, and preparing the dining room for the day even as good food started piling up on the bar. I went over to the front door and slid open the deadbolts. Almost immediately, the door rattled on its hinges as a gust of wind battered it.

“Gail,” I called. “What are the wind speeds supposed to get to today?”

“About fifty miles per hour,” she said, coming up behind me to peer at the leaden sky.

“How long do you think we should stay open?”

“You know that’s up to Maylie, but I bet they close the bridge earlier than they said.” Gail switched on the red neon OPEN sign situated in the window next to the door.

I walked over to the bar and took the plate Grey handed me. I helped myself to pancakes, bacon and warm syrup. Grey served her own plate and perched on the barstool next to me. Mama came through the kitchen door and I hailed her.

“No sense opening up, Mama. Wind’s already thirty or better. I seriously doubt anyone’s coming out.”

Mama looked out the front windows where palm trees could be seen whipping about in a mad Dervish dance. “You might be right, baby girl. I’m here ’til noon though. That’s when Donny’s picking me up. Might as well stay open.”

“You can close up, Mama. I’ll run you home.”

“In that wide open vehicle of yours? I don’t think so. We’d never get out of the square in one piece.” She smiled at me and stuffed her mouth with a forkful of pancake.

“Can you call him? Get him to come a little early? You don’t want to be on the road when this wind gets up—”

“Now Angie, he’s just picking up plywood in Brownsville. He’ll be on directly.”

“Mama!” I said insistently. “I’m serious. You and Gail need to hightail it out of here.”

“Who died and made you the boss?” Mama growled, but she plucked her cell phone from her pocket and headed into the kitchen.

Later that day at my place, Angie and I had a simple dinner of sandwiches and chips, and discussed our childhoods while we waited for the storm to pass. Angie told me about how her mother, pregnant and alone, had made her way into South Texas riding a Greyhound bus from a small bayou town in deep south Louisiana. Maylie had saved money for her ticket by working in something called a crawdad kitchen. It was there that she learned about her talent for cooking.

After arriving in The Point, she waited tables and also worked as a cook in just about every restaurant around, living off one job and saving the money from the other. She lived frugally. To save money on child care, she took Angie to work with her when she could. Eventually, she fell into a good paying job at a place called Nonis which she bought and renamed The Fat Mother.

“Seems like I was born and bred in a kitchen,” Angie joked.

“So you never knew your father. Did she ever tell you anything about him?”

She shook her head and took a swig of beer. “Not much. She says I have his hair and chin, and that he was her high school sweetheart.”

“Why did they split up?”

“She never said exactly, but from what I overheard when I was younger, I think she walked in on him with another woman. So she left and never looked back.”

“I wonder if he even knew about you,” I mused.

“No clue.” Angie shrugged. “Weird that Mama never married anyone. That kinda bugs me. I don’t want Mama to grow old alone.”

I shook my head. “She won’t. We’ll always be around. As long as she feeds us, that is.” We had a good laugh over that one.

The power went out that night about eight o’clock. I have to admit to the terror that paralyzed me when the lights snapped off with such brutal suddenness. I just knew Eleanor was there, hovering, ready to strangle one of us.

Angie had expected this and came prepared. She quickly lit the dozen or so candles scattered about the apartment almost immediately, so I felt somewhat reassured. The flickering shadows offered their own menace, though. We huddled together on the sofa, trying to read and talking desultorily. The howling wind was deafening. Oscar Marie cowered in my arms, her claws alternately extending and relaxing as she kneaded my arm, seeking comfort.

“Should we go to sleep?” I offered finally when I’d had to read the same paragraph six times just to glean some meaning from it. I couldn’t concentrate. There was a funny feeling to the apartment, a sense of electricity. I could tell Angie felt it too. I’d never seen her so jumpy. Was it just the lightning outside? Or was there something more sinister manifesting?

“As if,” she answered. She slapped her book closed and rubbed her eyes. It was about that time that the storm growing inside mirrored perfectly the storm outside.

It started with the dishes in the kitchen cabinets. They began rattling at the same time as a sudden burst of thunder. I thought at first that the vibration of the thunder had caused the noise, but the sound continued even when the thunder abated.

Angie slowly stood. Oscar Marie squalled loudly and leapt from my arms to disappear behind the sofa. I rose to my feet just as a butcher knife dislodged from the knife block and whizzed past my head to stab into the wall behind me. I heard the twang of metal as it vibrated.

“Oh, no,” whispered Angie. “The storm has given her strength!”

“Is it Eleanor?” I asked, eyeing the knife as it seesawed, its point buried in the wood.

“Yes,” Angie hissed.

“What will she do to us?” My voice quavered.

Sudden repeated thuds against the door to the Bookmark set my heart racing. They were so hard, I felt them in the floorboards beneath my feet.

“I’m not sure,” Angie answered when the sound quieted, “but I’m sure it won’t be pleasant.”

One by one, the kitchen cabinets creaked open. The doors stopped as if meeting resistance until each one was precisely aligned. Drawers opened. As I watched, the contents rose and hovered until a sharp wind appeared and swept them into a whirling spiral.

I knew this trick, had seen it before but with books.

“Get down,” I screamed, just as a rain of kitchen implements shot out and made a beeline for us. Angie and I cowered on the floor, hiding our faces and heads as a curtain of lightweight metal draped across us. Some of the pieces stung and hit hard enough to draw blood.

A wail sounded, so loud that it thundered and echoed in the room. Unimaginably loud whispers sounded, one-sided conversations that actually tickled my eardrums. I clasped my hands over my ears and screamed, in fury or fear, I wasn’t sure which. The attack continued until the items had been exhausted, but then saucepots and lids shot out from the bottom cupboards and crashed around the room in a volley of noise.

A wind swept by me. The stack of paper I kept in my drafting table went flying across the room to separate into individual wings that floated wounded to the floor. The drapes at the dining room window billowed and whipped around until I feared they would be pulled from their mooring. They subsided into stillness. All that I could hear was my hitching breath and the howling wind outside.

Angie stood and moved to the center of the room. She spoke in a loud, clear voice. “Eleanor. We know what you want. We are trying to find out what happened to Annalise for you. I swear. Just give us more time…”

A sudden scream ripped through the apartment. Angie went down as if she’d been bludgeoned. I screamed myself, remembering the day I’d seen Eleanor strangling Angie in the easy chair. A shadow darted across the room with mind-numbing speed, and the door to the Bookmark creaked open. All was still once more.

I crawled to Angie’s side and discovered that she was alive, just dazed by the blow. Together, we knelt in the center of the floor and peered toward the door.

Suddenly, as we watched, a flame of light grew in the darkness near the center of the Bookmark. It formed into a round ball. As Angie and I gained our feet, it raced toward us. Only by leaping apart were we able to avoid being hit by it. The ball flickered and died before slamming into the wall behind us. Another ball grew and also streamed toward us from the darkness. Sounds of weeping carried to us as the storm whipped against the house from outside. Yet another spectral fireball came out of the darkness.

“I am so over this,” Angie ground out.

Dodging the newest fireball, she leaned her weight against the door to the Bookmark, trying to close it and stop the attack. She almost succeeded, but just before she got it closed, the door slammed open again, sending her flying across the room, into the sofa and a coffee table. My heart stopped when I saw Angie’s body crash down after being tossed like a rag doll. Tears sprang from my eyes and sobs tore from me. If I lost Angie too, my life would be over for certain.

Beginning at the top of my head, I felt like warm bathwater flowed across me. The sensation made me unable to breathe for an eon of seconds. Panic filled me. What new diabolical torture did Eleanor plan next? Yet this felt different somehow, so I stilled and waited, drawing on every ounce of forbearance I could muster. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Angie crawl from the wreckage and shake herself. She spied my distress, my stillness, and she came to me.

“Your hair,” she breathed. “It’s...it’s standing up. You’re glowing.”

I looked at her, saying goodbye with my eyes, sure that Eleanor was taking me with her. I felt no pain, only heat. I wanted to wipe away the trickle of blood on Angie’s brow that threatened to invade one of her eyes, but my arms would not move. I realized that I could breathe but only shallowly, sipping tiny gulps of air.

Angie laid a hand against my forearm and closed her eyes.

“It’s Mary,” she whispered. “Mary is with you.”

Tears sprang from my eyes only to be kissed away by heat.

A voice sounded in my head and I rose, somehow pulling Angie with me. We moved as one toward the Bookmark. When another fireball flashed into existence, we walked right into it unscathed.

Angie stumbled on the threshold, and we were free of Mary’s weight. Angie pulled me into her arms and we pressed against the interior wall of the Bookmark.

As we watched, a glow began to fill the room. It started by the front windows. At first, I thought it came from the repeated lightning from outside, but this glow grew steadily, backlit by the flashes of lightning.

Then I saw her. I saw my Mary.

I saw Mary release Grey and move to the front of the room. Light emanated from her as she stood examining us with dark, unreadable eyes. Oddly, she was outlined in tiny points of light. Even her eyes and lips were outlined. I watched her spellbound. I studied her fingernails and the veins on the back of her hands, wondering at the tiny pricks of light that covered them. Her clothing was like a fabric made of miniscule stars.

“Isn’t she beautiful,” Grey said in a breathy voice.

I looked at her and followed her gaze. “You can see her?”

She nodded silently. We watched transfixed as Mary shimmered before us.

Then I saw Eleanor. She sat in one of the chairs near Mary. Her face was in her hands, and her long hair streamed over her hands and moved in a spectral wind as she rocked to and fro. I heard her sobs. The word
abandoned
came to me over and over again.

I pulled Grey against me, sensing a need to protect her from what would happen next.

Eleanor paused in her movements. She lifted her face from her hands. Her eyes, horrible in their vacant whiteness, fixed on Mary. Eleanor’s scream rang through the room as she leapt on the other spirit, only to encounter a wall of light. She fell back, defeated, and flickered like a faulty diode. I felt fury rolling off her in waves. Books began to move on the shelves. Some broke free and whirled through the room, bullets of potential pain.

A slim, black-clad leg appeared next to Mary, as if stepping from behind a curtain. Eleanor stilled. Books crashed to the floor throughout the room. The curtain parted to reveal the slender body of a beautiful redhead. The woman stood with Mary in the capsule of light.

“Annalise,” I whispered. Grey stirred in my arms. I knew she could see her as well.

Annalise moved closer to Eleanor. I saw her mouth move, but couldn’t hear what was said. Eleanor must have heard, however. She smiled and changed subtly.
Annalise
. The word echoed through the room.

Annalise smiled and held out her hand. Eleanor reached through the glowing light this time. As their hands met, the entire room lit up like houselights in a darkened theater. The flash blinded me for a moment, but when I squinted and looked again, Annalise was home in Eleanor’s arms. The two spirits faded into mist. Only Mary remained.