Elizabeth Webster and the Court of Uncommon Pleas

by William Lashner

  I jumped to my feet as the low moan grew louder and louder until it filled the room. And then the ghost in her poodle skirt turned toward me and with that skeleton hand lifted her head right off the stem of her neck, swung it behind her, stepped forward, and threw it at me underhand, like she was rolling a bowling bowl right at my face. Just before it hit me, the head exploded into a mass of sparks shaped like a smile.

  What I heard next was the most terrifying scream—which became even more terrifying when I realized it was coming from me.

  You can bet I didn’t wait for an explanation. I didn’t need an explanation. The fear that had plunged into my gut like a knife told me everything I needed to know.

  I tore out of that room, barreled through the darkness, stumbled down the stairs. All the way down I could hear the moans of the ghost, the yap-yaps of the dog, and my own high-pitched screams.

  When I burst out the front door into the cool night air, I didn’t worry about following the stone path to the long drive. Instead I charged straight down the hill, as fast as I could manage.

  Until I lost my balance and started tumbling, bouncing like a loose basketball, rolling like a runaway wheel.

  I landed on my back on a flat stretch of ground. Battered and dazed from the fall, I stared up at the spinning stars and fought to catch my breath.

  What had I just seen? I remembered closing my eyes for just a second. I must have fallen asleep and dreamed a terrible dream. And then maybe I had woken abruptly and charged like a spooked zebra out of the room, and out of the house, and down the hill.

  Henry Harrison must think I’m a total loon.

  But when I sat up and turned to look back at the house, I realized I wasn’t alone anymore. Henry was standing next to me, holding my coat, and the dog, Perky, was panting by my side. Henry stooped down, put the coat around my shoulders.

  “So what did you think of our ghost?” he said.

  “I didn’t dream it?”

  “Nope.”

  “And it wasn’t a trick?”

  “Trust me, Webster, I’m not that imaginative.”

  “Then it’s…that’s…”

  “What? Impossible?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there she is, haunting me for whatever reason. I didn’t think you’d believe me if I simply told you about it.”

  “You’re right. It’s unbelievable.”

  “And yet she keeps showing up in my room. She floats there all cute and flirty before her skin falls away. And to be honest, no matter how creepy it sounds, I think she likes me.”

  “She didn’t like me much. She rolled her head at me.”

  “Yeah, weird, right? That never happened to me. She’s lifted it off her neck, sure, but she’s never bowled with it before.”

  “So you think a ghost has a crush on you?”

  “Well, you know,” he said with a smile, “I have some charm.”

  “How long has this been going on?” I said.

  “I’ve been charming most of my life.”

  “I mean the ghost.”

  “Oh, yeah. For about two weeks now. There’s other stuff happening, too—the rattling of cabinet doors, the clattering of pots. A stain appeared on the living room wall in the shape of a snake. And the faucet in my parents’ bathroom let out a screech before a gush of gunk poured out. That’s the stuff that has my parents freaked, but the ghost only comes for me. I tried to show my parents one night, but they couldn’t see her. Instead of looking on in horror they looked at me like I was crazy. So the fact you could see her is a relief. It means I’m not cracked.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “But here’s the thing, Webster. When she comes, it’s like I can feel a sadness inside her. Is she sad because she’s dead? Is she sad because every night her skin peels off and her hair falls out and her head comes off? Or is she sad because she’s stuck here, as a ghost? I had no answer until a few nights ago when, before she fell apart, her lips began to move. And in this soft, hissing voice, she said the most surprising thing.”

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “One thing over and over,” said Henry.

  “What?”

  “A name.”

  “Whose?”

  Henry Harrison turned his head to look up to the house. Even though the rooms inside the monster’s head were dark, a pale flickering slipped through the windows, a cold and gray light dancing inside those walls.

  “Yours,” he said.

  “That’s enough.” I jumped up, slapped my hands over my body to wipe off the dirt and grass from my tumble, and put my arms into the coat sleeves. Henry rose with me so we were standing together, facing the big old house. “The creepiness factor has gone up to eleven. I’m getting out of here.”

  “She needs help,” said Henry. “And my family needs help, too. I can barely sleep anymore, and with all the rattling my mother’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. We have to do something, and the only clue the ghost has given is your name. So tell me, Webster, what should we do?”

  “Move,” I said. “Run, like I did, only maybe with a little more dignity.”

  “This is our house, our home. We don’t want to be chased out, and I don’t want to hurt the ghost. I want to help her, actually. But we need to get her to go.”

  “Good luck on that. She probably doesn’t take suggestions well because, you know…” And then I shouted, “BECAUSE SHE’S A GHOST!”

  “That’s why we need your help.”

  “What do you think I am, a ghost whisperer?”

  “I don’t know what you are, but you must be able to do something or she wouldn’t have repeated your name.”

  “You heard wrong.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said, no longer the swimming hero, just a desperate kid in a world of trouble. “She asked for you. Can you help her? Can you help us? Can you make her go away, Webster? Please?”

  It should have been shocking that a ghost with long, curly hair had whispered my name, don’t you think? It should have been an electrified bolt out of the blue.

  But somehow it didn’t seem so shocking at all. And if the ghost had really said my name—and where else would someone like Henry Harrison ever have gotten hold of it in the first place?—then I was certain that this summons had something to do with my father.

  I haven’t told you yet about my dad. My biological dad. The truth is, what I knew about him then was muddy at best. While my stepfather, the completely boring Stephen, was there at every dinner and every squeaky winter concert, Eli Webster was an iffy presence in my life.

  When I was younger he would show up here and there, but never where you would expect to find a normal dad. He didn’t attend my concerts or our holiday dinners or my birthday parties. Instead, two or three times a year, he’d magically appear, picking me up at elementary school or cheering for me in his booming voice as I indifferently kicked a soccer ball. Our meetings were always kind of awkward: my father trying too hard while I hid silently behind my hair.

  “You’re a talkative one, aren’t you, Lizzie Face?” he’d say to me. Lizzie Face was his pet name for me, or Lizard Face when I grew angry, which often happened around him.

  But even those visits had petered out a few years ago. Now I never saw him—well, maybe never.

  There were times when I thought I spotted my father’s wide red face and thick black glasses as he beamed at me from a sideline or in an auditorium. Yet when I went looking for him afterward, he was never there. I couldn’t decide if my father was secretly keeping track of my life or if I was imagining him doing it out of some sad-sack need to have a father who cared. And I couldn’t decide which possibility was worse. It was all so odd.

  Then there were the stray remarks from my mother that might not have made much sense at the time but seemed to now. Oh, Elizabeth, don’t go chasing phantoms like your father. Or, Try to suppress the Webster in you and don’t let your fantasies run wild. Or, I’m so glad you like math—it’s nic
e to deal with stuff that’s real, not figments of some wild imagination, which only showed how little about math my mom really knew.

  “What does Dad do?” I asked my mother after I made my way back from Henry’s house.

  My nerves were still jumping, as if the ghost had chased me all the way home, and my clothes were marked with dirt smudges and grass stains. Luckily my mother, grading papers at the kitchen table, hadn’t seemed to notice my condition.

  “You know, patents and stuff,” she said.

  “No, not Stephen. My real father.”

  My mother swiftly looked up from her work. “What happened to you?”

  “I fell.”

  “Down a well?”

  “Something like that. I’m just wondering.”

  “Your father’s a lawyer, Elizabeth, just like Stephen.”

  “What is it with you and lawyers anyway?”

  My mother smiled slyly, like that Mona Lisa painting.

  “But what kind of lawyer is he?” I said, trying not to appear too curious.

  “The usual kind, I suppose.”

  “Does he represent criminals? Businesspeople?”

  “Your father always says the law is a helping profession and that’s what he does—he helps those in need.”

  “What kind of need?”

  “Oh, this and that, nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “How was your tutoring, dear? Was he nice?”

  “Nice enough, I suppose.”

  “And a swimming star, think of that. Did he end up getting it?”

  “Oh yes, he got it, all right.”

  “It always feels so good to see understanding light in a young person’s eyes.”

  “Yes it does,” I said, as understanding lit in my own.

  I headed to the fridge and pulled out the jug of milk, pretending that all the questions had flown from my skull like a startled flock of bats. But after my mother and Stephen had gone off to sleep, I waited for a safe interval before slipping out of my room, down the stairs, and into my stepfather’s office. Have one measly encounter with a ghost, and the next thing you know you’re creeping around your own house like a burglar. But I knew what I was after.

  I closed the office door behind me before turning on the light and heading straight to the storage closet. I pushed away a heap of useless computer equipment, a box of old video cameras, a crate of Stephen’s vinyl records. And then there it was, like a long-lost artifact buried in an ancient tomb: a white carton with “Personal Papers” written across the cardboard in my mother’s careful printing.

  I dragged the carton out of the closet and sat before it like it had some sort of magical power over me. Then I pulled the box flaps apart.

  Inside was a tightly packed row of files, all that remained of the Webster family records from the time before my mom became a Scali. I didn’t care about bank accounts and tax records. I didn’t care about the checkbooks or financial statements or letters about the mortgage. I was looking for a single file—the one with my parents’ divorce papers. It took me a moment to find it, thick with paper and jammed in the middle of the box. I took hold, tugged it out, and opened it slowly.

  Attached to the file with a metal clip were page after page of letters from one lawyer to another, along with documents from a court case, Webster v. Webster, signed by my mother and father. It was all as boring as could be and yet still it swept my breath away. These letters held my family’s hidden history, revealing how it had finally been determined which of my parents would get what, including me. But those depressing details weren’t what I was after this night.

  Page by page I went through the file, searching and not finding what I was looking for, and page by page my disappointment grew. You would have thought there would be something directly from my father in the file. You would have thought he cared enough to write at least one stupid letter about me in the course of the divorce that had wrecked all our lives. I was letting my anger flare, the way it often did as I thought about my father, when one of the pages I was skimming through felt peculiar in my fingers, thicker than the rest.

  I stopped and looked at the page. It wasn’t anything important, just a notice from a lawyer about an upcoming court date, but there seemed to be some kind of printing showing through the thick paper. Then I realized there were two letters here, one attached to the back of the other as if stuck there with tears. Slowly, carefully, I separated the two pieces of paper and revealed a single typewritten letter.

  Dearest Melinda,

  I’m so sorry for everything. I’ll never forgive myself for all the ways I’ve failed you. Your lawyer is a bloodsucking vampire—and who would be able to recognize one better than a Webster—but I can’t bear any more fights with you. I’ve agreed to everything. Be happy, please. And take care of Lizzie, she is my life.

  Love Always,

  Eli

  Before I read that letter from my father to my mother, I never knew I was so allergic to dust.

  I wiped my eyes and nose with the sleeve of my pajama shirt, but I wasn’t searching for sentimental messages, even ones sent by my father from the distant past. I was looking for something else, something hard and specific that would help Henry Harrison in the here and now, something that I had often tried and failed to find online.

  There it was on the top of the letter I had just discovered, printed in fancy type—no phone number, no website, just an address and a name. It was the address I was after, the address of my father’s law office in the city. But it was the name of the firm that shook me so hard it rattled my bones:

  Natalie was waiting at my locker as soon as the buses arrived. Her arms were crossed. The toe of her white-and-gold sneaker tapped impatiently on the floor.

  “Could you, like, answer your texts for once?” she said.

  “My battery is dead,” I told her as I pulled a pile of books from my pack, even though my phone wasn’t so much dead as off.

  “It helps if you recharge it now and then. So?”

  “So what?”

  “Come on now, Lizzie, spill. I’m your oldest, dearest, and possibly only friend, don’t hold out on me.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “Don’t tell me it was only math.”

  I looked left and right, noted only the usual assortment of scruffy kids ambling by. One of them looked at me and said, “Squeak.” It was a half-hearted effort, and when I growled at him, he scooted away.

  I lowered my voice and said, “No, it wasn’t only math.”

  Natalie’s eyes opened in wonder, like the Easter Bunny had just fallen down her chimney with a dreidel in its teeth. “Yikes alive. Now you have to tell me. Tell me everything.”

  “Stop.”

  “Our Elizabeth Webster and Henry Harrison. No one will believe it.”

  “There’s nothing to believe,” I said. “Well, maybe there is, but not what you think. Can you keep a secret?”

  “You know me.”

  “That’s what worries me. Look, I need to go into the city this afternoon and I’m a little nervous about it. Can you come with?”

  “But there’s debate club this afternoon.”

  I grabbed Natalie’s arm and pulled her close. “Natalie? Please?”

  Natalie looked down at my hand, knuckles turned white from squeezing so hard, then back up at my face. “Okay, yes. I’m sorry. Of course.”

  “Thanks,” I said, a little embarrassed by the show of desperation. Keep it together, Lizard Face, I told myself. Wherever I was now, I was only heading toward Crazytown from here. “I’ll tell you all about it on the way in.”

  And that was what I did.

  As the train rushed toward the city, past the neat suburban stations with their shrubbery and into the jagged mash-up of urban jumble, I told the whole shaggy ghost story to my best friend. She took it in with the appropriate nods and widened eyes.

  At the end of my wild tale, Natalie thought about it all for a
moment and said, finally, “So when is he asking you out?”

  “Did you not hear anything that I said?”

  “I heard, I heard. A ghost rolled her head at you like a bowling ball. Cool story. Tell it at the next campout. But I was hoping for fireworks.”

  “Her head exploded into sparks. It was fireworks enough.”

  “So why are we going into the city?”

  “To see my father.”

  “Your stepdad?”

  “No, my real father. I think my dad might be able to do something to help Henry.”

  “It’s ‘Henry’ now, huh? Mighty chummy, aren’t we?”

  “I just want to help him, Natalie. But I haven’t seen my real father in a couple of years and I’ve never been to his office before.”

  “Why do you think he can help?”

  “I just do. He’s a lawyer, right?”

  “So’s your stepfather.”

  “Yeah, but Stephen represents, like, normal people and companies. My father works at a firm called Webster and Son, Attorneys for the Damned. What does that even mean?”

  “It means you don’t want to be one of his clients. Maybe he’ll save Henry by boiling a newt in a big metal pot. What is a newt, anyway?”

  I tilted my head at Natalie and gave her a long look. “You don’t seem so weirded out about the whole ghost thing.”

  “In my family, if a ghost actually showed its face that would be a relief.”

  And somehow, Natalie’s matter-of-factness put a ray of sunshine into my heart. To Natalie, stuff like shoes and cat videos were the important things in life, while the stuff that always worried me most, like grades and the future, never caused her much concern. That was one of the reasons I loved being her friend. What I was facing now felt so heavy I needed Natalie around to keep me from collapsing from the weight.

  And I wasn’t thinking only of the ghost.

  As we climbed the stairs up from the train station, a cold breeze seemed to dart right into my face. I closed my eyes against the force of it and when I opened them again I was staring straight at the sprawling heap of stone that was City Hall.