Ghost Flower

by Michele Jaffe

  We all agreed.

  “You never know what will happen. Sometimes the spirits arrive without our asking, and sometimes they must be invited. Shall we try again?”

  “I’d really like to get Jay back here,” Bain urged.

  Madam Cruz smiled up at him placidly. “You’ve made that clear, Mr. Silverton. And we will do what we can.” Her eyes came back to the group. “I ask that you all stand and hold hands.”

  We did. I had Bridgette on one side and Grant on the other. He was taller than I’d realized earlier. He smiled down at me as he took my hand. It was warm, and suddenly I was glad he was there.

  “Repeat after me,” Madam Cruz said, closing her eyes. “Powers beyond, powers who are near.”

  “Powers beyond, powers who are near,” we repeated.

  “Please let our loved ones kindly appear.”

  “Please let our loved ones kindly appear.”

  It was a foolish rhyme, and yet saying, hearing us all say it, gave it a strange kind of resonance.

  “Again,” she commanded.

  “Powers beyond, powers who are near. Please let our loved ones kindly appear.”

  “Again,” she ordered.

  “Powers beyond, powers who are near. Please let our loved ones kindly appear.”

  “More,” Madam nearly shouted, and we matched her volume, getting louder and louder with each repetition.

  “Powers beyond, powers who are near, please let our loved ones kindly appear. Powers beyond, powers who are near, please let our loved ones kindly appear. Powers beyond, powers who are near, please let our loved ones kindly appear.”

  “Stop!”

  Silence dropped like a trapdoor, sudden, fast, absolute. Madam Cruz’s eyes shot open.

  My phone rang.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Answer it,” Madam Cruz commanded.

  It said, “UNKNOWN NUMBER.” My hand was shaking as I brought it to my ear. “Hello?”

  I heard breathing.

  “Hello?” I repeated. “Who’s there?”

  A weak, raspy voice said, “Ro-ro.”

  My hand began to shake. “What?”

  “Ro-ro,” the voice repeated, sounding plaintive over the static.

  “Who is this? Who’s there?” I repeated. “Tell me your name right now or I hang up.”

  “No!” The sound was plaintive, a wail. “Please don’t… so lonely… I’ve missed you. I… I forgive you, Ro-ro.”

  The words froze me. “I’m hanging up,” I said.

  “Liza,” the voice said, the whisper urgent. “Who else? It’s Liza, Ro-ro.”

  In my mind I saw the girl with her eyes closed, closed forever, in the photo.

  In my mind I saw the girl that afternoon in the dressing room, staring at me in the mirror.

  I groped behind me for my stool and sat down, hard. There are no such things as ghosts, my mind repeated. “That isn’t possible. You can’t be Liza. Liza is dead.”

  “Best friend for… ever,” the voice said. “You know. You… saw me. At the mall… in the mirror.”

  “No. I imagined that.”

  “I was… there… with you… need you…”

  The sound trailed away. “Hello?”

  There was a whisper like wind brushing over the mouthpiece. I pressed the phone to my ear to hear better. The voice said, “They… must be stopped… before…”

  “Before what?”

  “Help me… find… the truth. Find the… coat.”

  I wasn’t sure about the last word. “Coat?”

  “Be careful!” The voice became higher pitched and urgent. “I feel… they’re… there. Someone… from that night. Someone… with you… Now.”

  I looked around the room. Everyone was staring at me. “I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?”

  “The coat… If you—”

  Bridgette’s hand wrenched the phone from mine. “This isn’t a funny joke,” she shouted. “No one is amused. Leave my family alone or you will be—”

  There was a rush of cool air like something leaving the room, and all the candles went out at once, plunging us into complete darkness.

  We sat in silence. I couldn’t move. I was freezing, but my heart was racing as though I’d just sprinted a mile.

  Bridgette crossed the room, found a light switch, and flipped it on.

  It felt like waking up in an unknown bed in bright daylight. Everyone seemed uncomfortable and shifted to avoid one another’s eyes.

  Still holding my phone, Bridgette planted herself in front of the medium, who had sunk back into her chair. “Where is your assistant? Where is the person on the other end of this phone? Are they close by? Someone on the catering staff? I will find them and you will pay.”

  With her words, the tension in the room dissipated. It was such an obvious, easy stunt, I felt stupid for having been taken in by it. I had the sense that everyone else did too.

  Madam Cruz looked at Bridgette with an expression that could have been pity. “I have no assistant. I had nothing to do with that. That—was the spirits.”

  “I have a hard time believing the spirits have a calling plan,” Bridgette said. I don’t think I’d ever liked her as much as I did then.

  “I cannot help what you believe or don’t believe. Spirits communicate in many ways, whatever is at hand.” Madam Cruz wiped her forehead with her palm, and I realized that she was sweating. She gazed around at all of us intensely. “I have never experienced anything like that before.” She swallowed, and it struck me that she was as disconcerted by what had happened as we were. “Never.”

  “I’m sure,” Bridgette said, sounding unconvinced.

  But her objections felt hollow in the face of Madam Cruz’s very real agitation. The medium’s eyes went to my face. She leaned toward me at an angle, half in and half out of her seat like she was afraid of approaching too near me. “You have been given a gift,” she said. “That—never before. Perhaps this shows the strength of your love for this girl, or hers for you. Extraordinary. Most extraordinary. Use it wisely.”

  Her eyes were regarding me with a mixture of wonder and fear. Bridgette moved in front of her to hand me my phone back. “Use it wisely,” she mimicked.

  “Can’t you let it rest?” Bain burst out. “Just because you don’t believe doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t.”

  Bridgette’s posture became rigid. She turned slowly toward him. “I’m sorry if I am undercutting your experience of the occult,” she said stiffly. She leaned over my head to whisper to him, “You’d better start hoping ghosts can’t come back and talk. For all our sakes, you’d better hope that.”

  Then she turned and headed for the door.

  I looked around to see if anyone but me heard what she’d whispered to Bain, but Bridgette’s opening the door had broken the spell of the room. And as the noises from outside filtered in, the taut bond that had seemed to hold us all together vanished. Suddenly, everyone was an unreadable stranger.

  This has nothing to do with you, I told myself, but my heart wouldn’t stop racing.

  Coralee breezed through the door headed right for me. “That was amazing. Totally gnarly. You should see your face in the footage.”

  “Pass.”

  Her head tilted to one side, and she studied me. “You look a little pale.”

  “I think I just need a second. I’ll be right back,” I said and threaded my way out of the music room.

  I reminded myself that this had nothing to do with me. And even if it did, there was no such thing as a ghost—

  You saw me.

  —Liza had jumped off a ridge—

  Find the coat.

  —and there was absolutely no proof—

  Find the truth.

  —to the contrary.

  Please just leave her alone, her father’s voice screamed into my mind.

  Liza was dead. She had committed suicide. This was some kind of prank to scare me—

  Someone… there. That night. Someon
e with you.

  —and it was working.

  Involuntarily my mind flashed over the guest list from that night, first past the faces of the people there tonight—Jordan, Grant, Bain, Bridgette, Stuart, then what I remembered from photos of Roscoe Kim and Xandra Michaels. They were beautiful, polished, spoiled, perfect. None of them looked like killers.

  But any of them could be one.

  I forgive you.

  There was a powder room between the music room and the main area, but I passed it and ran up the stairs to the second floor. I wanted to be alone, and as far from the others as I could get. I turned into the master suite, crossed several miles of Siberian white carpet, slipped into the master bathroom, and let the solid wood door slide closed.

  A strong hand caught it two inches before it hit the wall, and my heart froze. Slowly, the door was pushed back open. Stuart Carlton stepped in, closed the door, and clicked its lock into place.

  He leaned back against it and grinned.

  CHAPTER 26

  Stuart let his hooded eyes rest on me and whispered, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long.” I stepped away, but he followed and trapped me against the wall.

  I pushed against him, hard, but he was stronger than me. “What are you doing?”

  Stuart laughed. “This is a re-creation of the party that night, isn’t it? I’m re-creating all of the events.”

  I braced my arms against his chest and kept my elbows locked. “I don’t remember what happened that night. Any of it.”

  “I’m a little surprised you don’t remember our part,” he said. “But that’s okay, just follow my lead.” He leaned down and nipped at my neck.

  “Ouch,” I said, pulling away.

  “Very good. That’s what you said that night.”

  I felt like a caged animal. No one downstairs would hear me scream up here, and he was between me and the door. My mind raced in panicked circles: I’m trapped… get him away… I’m trapped.

  He seemed to sense my fear and smiled slowly. “That’s just how you looked that night. You were scared then too, weren’t you?”

  Breathe, I told myself. Think. “Why don’t you tell me what we did first?” I blurted, trying to buy myself some time. “You know, to, um, get me into the mood.”

  I saw his Adam’s apple go up and down as he swallowed hard. “Well, I was leaning against the counter, and I held you pressed up against me. Like this,” he said, gathering me to him.

  I struggled to keep as much space between us as I could. “And?” I swallowed.

  “I had my hands on your shoulders like this, and I told you to grab a towel to kneel on, so that you could—”

  “What I was wearing,” I interrupted, trying to steer the narrative in a different direction. Distract him. “Do you remember?”

  “Yeah. That’s how it all started. I came in here for obvious reasons, and you were in the bathtub taking a little nap. No water in it, just you, sitting up in that coat you were running around in.” He gazed fondly at the bathtub. “When I came in, you sort of woke up, and I said, ‘Let’s see what you have on underneath that coat.’ And I undid it, and—”

  “I was wearing a coat?” I repeated. “In June?”

  “Yeah. A trench coat. Very sexy. And it wasn’t like you had much on beneath it.” The way he said it made him sound like a panting dog.

  I was staring at myself in the mirror over his shoulder. And then something shifted, and I could picture it—

  Aurora standing by the sink, staring into the mirror. Her mascara running down her face, Stuart behind her. His hands stripping the coat from her shoulders, his mouth on her neck, his fingers closing on her breasts, squeezing them through the fine fabric of a summer dress. Her eyes widen then, realizing what’s about to happen. She reaches up to pry his fingers off of her, but he turns her around, toward him, and starts pushing her to her knees with one hand, the other going to the waist band of his jeans—

  My mind flipped to another man, another girl. A shadowy bedroom, the only illumination from the streetlight outside and the Winnie the Pooh digital clock next to the bed. The man is holding the girl pinned against a wall. She is wriggling and crying and begging him to stop. Pleading. She promises she won’t tell anyone what he’s done if he just leaves now.

  The man laughs. “Who you going to tell, little one? Who would believe a little whore like you?”

  Her eyes widen as she realizes what is about to happen—

  “Things were getting good,” Stuart said, his voice, his breathing hot and fast against my ear, wrenching me back to the present. “Then things were getting really good.” His eyes were glassy, and his hips pressed against mine.

  “Then what happened?” I asked, trying to move away slightly.

  His eyes refocused on me. “Then your little bitch friend came in and dragged you out.”

  “Coralee?”

  “No, the dead one. Liza. She said you’d hate yourself in the morning if you went any farther with me. Like she was your mother. Snotty bitch.”

  “Do you remember if I was wearing my coat then?”

  “I think you put it back on. I left before the two of you came out. I’m not into that girl-on-girl lezzy shit,” he sneered.

  Charming, I was thinking when something occurred to me.

  “Do you remember if I was dating anyone?” I asked casually.

  “Not that night you weren’t.” He took a big handful of my leopard print cardigan and pulled me up against his chest. “So, now that you know the script,” he said, rolling one of the silver buttons around in his fingers, “why don’t we rehearse?”

  “You’re my cousin’s boyfriend,” I objected.

  “Bridgette and I have an agreement. Besides, that didn’t bother you before.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. I couldn’t explain how, but I knew I was right.

  The way his sneer wavered confirmed it for me. “You know you wanted it. You were just afraid to admit it. I could see it in your eyes, no matter what you were saying.”

  “No,” I said, and my voice sounded small, almost childlike. “You’re wrong.” I cleared my throat. “Besides, I’m different now.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “You’re all grown-up.” He tugged at the neck of the cardigan, popping one of the buttons.

  I pulled back and covered my chest with one hand and tried to push him away with the other. “Stop it. I don’t want to do this.”

  His eyes weren’t lazy anymore. Now they looked hungry. “That’s what you said that night too. But you didn’t mean it.” One of his hands plunged down the front of my sweater to grab my bra, and the other grabbed my ass. “I can’t tell you how much I regretted having to leave this untapped,” he said, giving it a squeeze. “Tonight could be the night.” I tried to wrench away, and another button flew off the cardigan.

  “Let me go!” I pushed against him with my fists.

  He grabbed both wrists in one surprisingly strong hand and held them to the side, staring at my bra as he said, “That’s right, baby. Fight me harder.”

  “No!” I said, trying to twist my arms free. “Let me go!”

  His eyes looked wild with pleasure. He licked his lips. “Make me.”

  I brought my knee up into his groin hard.

  “Aww man,” he moaned, recoiling in on himself. “You filthy little slut, what the hell did you do?” He was rocking back and forth, clutching his crotch with both hands.

  I moved away from him. “I told you to stop.”

  “Dirty tease,” he said, crab walking to the door. He shot the lock and threw the door open. He paused on the threshold to shout, “Stay away from me, you filthy slut,” and disappeared around the corner.

  For a moment I stood frozen where I was, his parting words ricocheting from wall to wall. I could picture him saying the exact same thing in that exact same room three years earlier, picture it all with a clarity that knotted up my stomach.

  Dirty tease! You filthy slut!

&
nbsp; I slid the door closed and locked it, then went and sat in the bathtub shivering and rubbing my arms and wondering what you had to do to clean a fireplace like the one in the wall.

  After awhile there was a knock at the door.

  “Aurora?” Coralee’s voice said. “Can I come in?”

  “I’m fine, I’ll be out in a second.”

  “Okay.”

  More time passed. I lay back in the bathtub and thought maybe I could just stay there forever. There was another knock. “It’s me,” Bridgette’s voice said. “Let me in.”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Let me in. Bain will kill me if I break this door down before he sells the house, but I will if you force me to.”

  I got out of the bathtub and unlocked the door, then climbed back in. She came in and stood with her back to the sinks. I braced for her to yell at me.

  She twisted the ring on her finger and looked near—but not at—me. “That was unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate?” I repeated.

  “It shouldn’t have happened.”

  “That’s for sure,” I agreed. I was glad she wasn’t screaming at me, but this was even stranger.

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said, nodding to herself. “It won’t happen again. Just—whatever he says, go along with it?” Her eyes were on me now. “He’s a pain when he’s angry.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She bit her lip. “He’s out there now saying you made a pass at him and got angry when he rebuffed you.”

  I felt like I was in a nightmare. This couldn’t be real. This wasn’t how people acted. “Are you crazy? Why would I—”

  She put up her hand. “I know. It’s what he needs to do. Just let it go, okay?”

  “What does he have on you?” I asked.

  Her eyes flashed with surprise, and she snapped, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” When I just stared at her, she said, “I don’t think you understand. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. You’re going to do it because I told you to.” She tapped her clutch. “And I have an ID in here that says you agree.”

  She opened her clutch, took out a lip gloss and a travel brush, and began carefully applying it. “Besides, Stuart saying you acted like a bitch is more in keeping with what people would expect of Aurora anyway.”