The Burning Girl: A Whispers Story (The Whispers Series)

by Lisa Unger

  It took Eloise a moment to realize that The Burning Girl was pointing at Nick’s wife, Miriam, who sat beside him, holding an infant. Miriam, a former reporter for The Hollows Gazette, was now a stay-at-home mom. Ella, her infant daughter, was not quite three months. Miriam had interviewed Eloise once. The young woman had been respectful and open-minded. She was one of those Agatha called “the seekers,” people who believed that there was something more to life than what they could see before them. They just weren’t sure what it was.

  Miriam had written a thoughtful and flattering feature about Eloise, which got some national pickup and eventually led to television exposure. Of course, Eloise was no publicity hound. In fact, she actively avoided the spotlight. But Agatha had urged her to do appearances and interviews. The more familiar we are to people, Agatha had said, the easier it is to do our jobs, the less abuse we take.

  Tonight, Miriam looked sunken with exhaustion: big, dark circles under her eyes, a kind of grayness to her skin color. She was nothing like the bubbly, light-hearted girl who had interviewed Eloise. How long ago was it now? Five years? Six? Miriam was so thin that Eloise could see her collarbone, the hard knobs in her wrists. She had a kind of blank stare. Depression. Eloise could feel it, that sucking darkness within, that cave inside where you can dwell. She knew it all too well.

  The Burning Girl was standing behind Miriam, looking like a normal little girl again, not burning, not combusting with rage. She just stood there beside Miriam, almost leaning into her. If anyone else could see her, they’d assume that she was Miriam’s child. Their energies were wrapped around each other, mingled.

  Talk turned to the graveyard that sat on state land at the edge of the property that Nick himself owned and where he lived with his family. Some people wanted the graves moved to the other, larger site over by the road; some wanted the gravestones restored. There was a small church there as well. If renovated, it could serve as a museum, suggested Joy Martin, a tribute to the people who lived and died in The Hollows.

  Sounds like fun, someone quipped.

  The Burning Girl started to cry.

  What do you want? Eloise wondered.

  • • •

  That night, The Burning Girl took Eloise into the woods. The girl skipped through the trees, past a dilapidated and long-abandoned one-room house, weaving in and out of the towering trees. The girl was a sprite, at home in the forest, not afraid of the dark. How long had she been out here alone?

  As they walked, Eloise could hear The Whispers. They had so many stories to tell. If you listened too hard, you could disappear into it. It will drive you mad, said Agatha. Tune it out as much as you can. This directly conflicted with the advice her departed daughter Emily had given her once. It seemed like a million years ago that Emily had visited Eloise while she was tending the garden. Just listen, Emily had said that day. Who was right?

  Eloise lost sight of the girl, but she kept walking. The moonlight, in its silver-white way, was as bright as the sun. And when she came upon the little graveyard, it looked almost magical, even with the gravestones tilting like a mouth of crooked teeth, the church that was little more than a ruin of stones. The place was overgrown with weeds and a variety of wildflowers.

  Eloise saw Miriam sitting among the stones. The young woman looked dewy and fresh, flushed with happiness, as she linked flowers into a chain. Eloise understood that she was seeing Miriam as she was in the past, before her daughter was born.

  Miriam was singing. Eloise moved in closer to hear the words.

  Little flowers in the garden,

  Yellow, orange, violet, blue,

  Little angels in the garden,

  Do you know how I love you?

  Eloise felt a strange chill move through her. And then she experienced something she had never experienced before—a vision within a vision. Talk about disappearing down the rabbit hole. She saw a woman leaning over a claw-foot bathtub weeping. She wore a long, white dress. Then it was Miriam in a dirty, flannel nightgown. Then it was the woman in white again. Then Eloise was back in the graveyard, her head spinning. Miriam kept singing.

  Little flowers in the garden,

  Growing tall toward skies of blue,

  Little flowers in the garden,

  Oh, your mama so loves you.

  The Burning Girl danced around the graves. She was laughing, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. It was mean-spirited and edgy, laced with anger and sadness. The sound of it made Eloise’s blood run cold.

  • • •

  Eloise came back to herself in her own bathtub, bleeding from the head where she’d obviously hit it on the faucet. There was blood on the white porcelain, on her hands, down the front of her blouse. She climbed out of the tub and moved over to the sink. In the mirror, she saw the big gash just over her right eyebrow; it would need stitches.

  Eloise turned on the faucet, smearing that with blood, too. Using a washcloth, she cleaned the wound. The blouse she was wearing would have to go in the trash. A vision within a vision, she thought. That was too much. Could she just go deeper and deeper, until there was no way out again? Eloise realized that she was going to need some help with The Burning Girl.

  • • •

  Agatha Cross lived in a grand old house at the end of a long, gated drive in a town just an hour from The Hollows. She had told Eloise that she had no compunction whatever in exploiting her “gifts” to the greatest extent possible.

  “Why shouldn’t I reap the monetary benefits of this?” Agatha had asked, not really wanting an answer. “It has robbed me of everything else.”

  Eloise could see Agatha’s point. This “ability,” given to Eloise in tragedy and slowly draining her of her loves, her appetites, her desires, was not something for which she’d ever asked. Eloise had come to see it as one might an accidental injury that had left her permanently disabled. You could learn to live with it, or you could let it kill you. Eloise dwelled in a kind of purgatory between those two poles, not really living, but not dying either.

  Agatha, however, was “on the circuit”—talk shows, personal appearances, celebrity readings, and spiritual counseling. She had a full-fledged “Talk to the Dead” business with a waiting list three years long. She even had a private jet and was regularly consulted by law enforcement agencies, private detectives, and newsmagazine shows.

  “I’m about seventy-five percent theater, about twenty-five percent for real,” Agatha often quipped. “But that twenty-five percent? Wow, it’s a doozie.”

  Today, they sat on Agatha’s long, cool porch, where a lovely young woman served them iced tea in tall, sweating glasses. Agatha spread out her long flowing skirt and sat elegantly in a big wicker chair. She jingled—bangles on her wrists, seashells sewn into the batik design on her blouse, big, glittering earrings. She ran a plump bejeweled hand through her long, silver-white curls.

  Eloise recounted for Agatha everything she’d seen of The Burning Girl so far. And Agatha shifted her ample weight in the chair while she listened.

  “It sounds like what you’ve got,” she said when Eloise was done, “and I don’t say this lightly, is a full-blown haunting.

  “The question is what or who she’s haunting,” she continued. “And why.”

  Agatha took a big sip of her tea, then got a distant look in her eyes. Eloise knew to be quiet.

  The trees swayed and danced in the breeze. The Whispers were loud here. And Eloise had to work hard to block them out. A large swimming pool glittered behind Agatha. It was so blue that Eloise felt a powerful desire to swim. When was the last time she’d done anything like that? Anything pleasant? She and Alfie used to take the girls to the community pool in the summer. They’d rented a lake house one year and spent the whole season either swimming or sunning on the little dock. That was a long time ago—maybe close to twenty years.

  When Eloise looked back at Agatha,
the old woman was frowning. In their many years of friendship and mentoring, Eloise wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Agatha look worried.

  “I don’t like this one, Eloise,” she said. She gave a decided nod. “I have a bad feeling. Keep your distance.”

  It did have a bad feeling. The Burning Girl was raw power, all childish rage. She was loneliness and misery. Eloise didn’t say anything.

  “Children are the most dangerous in this type of situation,” said Agatha. “They are the most unpredictable.”

  “But how?” Eloise asked. “How do I keep my distance?”

  Agatha sat up, gave Eloise a stern look. “You need to tell her that you can’t help her and that she must go home.”

  “I’ve never been able to do that,” said Eloise. “They don’t listen.”

  Surely, if it were that easy, she would have told it to all of the women and girls who had come to her over the years—the missing, the murdered, the abducted, the imprisoned, the abused. She had tried to help them all in the ways she had been asked. Eloise had located missing children, even led the police to a compound where girls and their mothers were being kept as slaves. She had uncovered long-buried bodies and given some measure of peace to parents who had spent years wondering about their lost loved ones. She helped bring killers and other evil men to justice. She’d helped Pennsylvania police locate a child who’d accidentally fallen down a well.

  She’d never once turned anyone away. What right did she have to do that when people needed her?

  “You have to mean it,” said Agatha. “Like children and dogs, they know when you don’t mean what you say.”

  Agatha was still frowning as she reached forward to take Eloise’s hand. Eloise felt her power, it was a current running from Agatha’s hands to hers. The woman was a force, some kind of anomaly of energy in the universe, a vortex. Eloise had never bought Agatha’s line about being seventy-five percent theater. Not at all.

  Agatha held on to Eloise tight.

  “You’re giving them too much,” Agatha said. “It’s eating you alive, Eloise. You don’t have to give them everything. You have a right to live.”

  Eloise blew out a breath.

  “I don’t know how to stop,” Eloise admitted.

  Agatha gave a gentle nod. “Or is it that you don’t want to stop?” she asked. “Grief has such a powerful pull toward destruction. And the living have it so much harder than the dead.”

  Her words touched some kind of chord, and Eloise bit back tears.

  “I don’t know,” said Eloise. “I just don’t know.”

  Agatha drew away, giving Eloise’s hands a final gentle squeeze as she did. “Think about it.”

  They sat in silence for a minute, a blue jay singing in the trees, a woodpecker knocking somewhere. Then:

  “A haunting is a relationship. It’s a give and take. Energy adheres—to people, to places. It seeks fertile soil. Then it burrows in and plants a seed. If conditions are right, the seed grows. It might literally be the land that The Burning Girl is attached to. You said that Miriam is depressed; that makes her vulnerable. It might be her that The Burning Girl wants.”

  Eloise listened.

  “It’s not about slamming doors and cold spots, demons dragging you from bed. That’s for the movies.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  It was true that in all her years doing this, Eloise had never seen anything like what she saw in the movies. In Eloise’s experience, this thing (whatever it was) was all about people needing help or justice, people who were lost and wanting to be found. It was about people who didn’t have voices or about unsettled energies broadcasting themselves. Only certain people could pick up the signals. But The Burning Girl was not like the others.

  Agatha shrugged. “What is any relationship about? People act out of only two motivations—love or fear. Everything else—greed, revenge, jealousy, sadness, kindness, generosity, passion, desire—are products of one or the other of those two motivators. Of course, it’s often hard to tell the difference.”

  “What do you think The Burning Girl wants?” Eloise asked.

  “It could be anything,” said Agatha. “But it doesn’t matter because you are going to stay away from her. Don’t let her get her hooks into you. You can’t help her. Right?”

  “Right,” Eloise said. She tried to make herself sound more certain than she was. Agatha frowned, unconvinced.

  This wasn’t the kind of answer Eloise had expected from Agatha, but she felt better than when she’d arrived. Agatha had given her something, some love, some kind of energy infusion. And Eloise was grateful, because Agatha was the only person who never took anything from her. Even Ray wanted and needed so much from her. If it hadn’t been for Agatha, her guidance, her friendship, her advice, Eloise wasn’t even sure she’d have survived the last fourteen years. She often felt bad that she had nothing to give Agatha. Eloise hoped that the old woman had someone or something that filled her up.

  “Don’t let them have everything, Eloise.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  Neither of them believed it.

  • • •

  When The Burning Girl came to call that same afternoon, Eloise told her, “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. You have to go home.”

  But The Burning Girl wasn’t having it. She proceeded to set everything on fire—the couch, the curtains, the clothes in Eloise’s closets. The whole house smelled like smoke, but of course only Eloise could smell it.

  Eloise still hadn’t told Ray about the girl. He had taken on a cold case, and he was consumed in the way he always was when he had a new one. Ray was always certain that he would be the one to find what no one else had been able to find. Eloise loved his confidence and his passion—until she didn’t.

  Ray’s new client, Tim Schaffer, had been searching five years for his missing wife, Stephanie. She’d simply failed to come home from work one night. Schaffer suspected foul play, had various theories that he had gone over in depth with Ray. But lacking any hard evidence, the police had closed the case. Tim had hired no fewer than five other private detectives since—one a year. He refused to give up on the woman he loved.

  There were so many cases like that, thousands of people a year who just went missing and were never found—though it was getting increasingly hard these days simply to disappear. When people couldn’t be tracked through cell phones or credit card use, the police generally assumed that they were dead. Possibly an accident—car off the edge of a cliff, maybe. Maybe a stranger crime—a seamless abduction, murder, and body disposal—though it was less likely. Or suicide—though most suicides left a note.

  But sometimes the missing person had actively sought to disappear. Which wasn’t a crime. An adult has the perfect right to walk off the edge of his or her life and never look back. Of course, most people don’t walk out on spouses, kids, relatives, jobs. Most people cling to those things. But some just toss it all away—depression, mental illness, or maybe they just get fed up with the day-to-day grind. For them, running away is the answer to those crushing questions: Is this it? Is this all there is?

  Ray wanted Eloise to meet the client, and she had agreed. She got in her car and drove to Ray’s office on the ground floor of a restored town house near The Hollows Historical Society. She usually didn’t love interfacing with clients, and Ray wouldn’t have asked her unless he was unsure about something. But today, Eloise was just happy to get away from the smell of smoke.

  She parked and walked up the tree-lined street, climbed the porch steps, and went inside. The office was a two-room space, consisting of an anteroom where a receptionist might sit, but in which there were only two folding chairs and a magazine rack containing back issues of National Geographic and nothing else. A doorway led to Ray’s space, which was furnished sparsely with a desk and chair, computer, phone, locked filing cabinet, and two
more folding chairs. Eloise thought he should fix it up—paint, hang some art, get a few pieces of nice furniture.

  “Why?” he’d asked. “Are we hurting for business?” He had a point. Ray Muldune was a low-overhead kind of guy.

  She felt Tim Schaffer before she saw him. He gave off an unsettling kind of frenetic energy. When he shook Eloise’s hand, he pumped it as if he were trying to draw water. Eloise felt her shoulder crack.

  “Our life was perfect,” he said to Eloise when she sat down across from Ray’s desk. “We had just bought a house. We both had good jobs. We were talking about starting a family.”

  Schaffer never stopped moving, pacing, gesticulating as he ran down the details Ray had already shared. How his wife had simply not come home from work on a Wednesday night five years ago. She’d taken no money from their accounts, had never used their credit cards. Her car had never been recovered. His energy wound down as he finished his story, until finally he slumped his tall, lean form into the chair beside Eloise. His eyes kept moving, though, drifting from one point to the next, hardly ever settling until they eventually rested on Eloise.

  “Are you getting anything?” he asked her again. His hazel eyes bored into her.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Mr. Schaffer,” Ray said. “What Eloise does—it takes time. She may not get anything at all. I do the work of a private detective, and if Eloise gets something, it can be a big help.”

  “But are you?” he asked. He leaned so far forward, Eloise thought he was going to topple his folding chair. “Getting anything?”

  Eloise shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Schaffer was a man on broadcast, one of those that only talked and never took anything in.

  “I met with a man who talks to the angels,” Schaffer said. He ran a large hand through wheat-colored hair. “He said that my Steph was out there, waiting for me. He said that she was praying I would find her. He promised I would if I just kept going, if I never gave up.”

  Eloise struggled not to roll her eyes. There was no end of frauds out there, exploiting the desperate. She wondered how much that visit had cost him.