Nothing but Ghosts

by Beth Kephart

  Closing the book, I dip my hands back into the paper soup—start fishing stuff up at random. It looks like a tea bag was dragged across the old society news, and I’m worried that if I flatten the folds, I’ll crack the history in two. I see a third of an ad for new country houses. A fraction of a story about a fox chase. A headline about a horse that has broken through its barn. The scores of a doubles tennis match. Then there is a cutout that looks a bit more interesting, and I shake it loose, extremely careful. The dateline reads November 15, 1953. Four paragraphs in, I find her.

  Of course, the truest highlight of the evening was the debut of Miss Martine Everlast, only child of John Butler Everlast, chief executive officer of Quality Chemicals, and his wife, the former Andrea Bell. Not since Lillian Penwick has the Philadelphia Assembly Ball been graced by such transcendent lambency. Her silver peplum and chinchilla stole sent a shiver through the hall. A single pink diamond set off the midnight of her hair. She arrived with a bouquet of golden fleurs-de-lis.

  “So here you are,” I say, reading the paragraph several times through, closing my eyes, imagining an evening when Miss Martine was not much younger than I am now and turning the high-society heads at the Bellevue. “Transcendent lambency,” lambent being a word from my SATs, something about gleam or flame or glow, and I picture a whole room of rich people stopping to admire her, bow their heads to her, raise their glasses, and how do you go from being a star to being a black hole? How do you end up hiding behind windows, if indeed she’s hiding behind windows?

  My mind catches on the fleurs-de-lis, and I remember a story my mother told, about a French king, fifteen hundred years ago, who had been trapped, with his men, by German Goths. There they were, stuck at the River Rhine, my mother said, and there were these fleurs-de-lis, rising from the river’s center. Wherever the flowers rose, the river, the king knew, was shallow, and where there was shallowness, there was escape. “The flowers were his guide,” my mother said. “They saved his life.” I picture Miss Martine with a diamond in her hair and the bright golden flags in her arms. Flowers as lifesavers, I think. Or as escape? What does it mean?

  It’s enough for one day. Enough to wonder through, and besides, I promised Dad that I’d be home for dinner and I’m not going to disappoint him. I layer everything back into the box, flip off the light, clomp up the stairs, tell Ms. McDermott that I’m done.

  “Any luck?” she asks.

  “Fleurs-de-lis,” I answer.

  “Fleurs-de-lis?” She looks quizzical at first, then smiles. “We call them flags around here, or irises.”

  “Yes,” I say. “My mother explained it once. It’s not much, but it’s what I’ve got so far. I’m not counting on this to be easy.”

  “Katie D’Amore,” says Ms. McDermott. “What fun is there in easy?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Danny got what he was hoping for, which was rain, though this rain is like bright white sheets of fire, a genuine storm. It sounds like a thousand Sammy Macks dancing on the roof, and if I didn’t know better I would say we’re a big boat going down. The whole upstairs is an echo. There’s the drip-drip of rain leaking somewhere inside. Even when I pull the sheets over my head, I can see the lightning. It was quiet out there when I went to bed. Now it’s the end of the world, and the only good thing that I can think of is that there won’t be work tomorrow.

  The clock says two thirteen A.M., except that it feels like ten hours since I last checked it, like nothing is moving forward and day will never come. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see Old Olson’s hard blue stare and all the windows in Miss Martine’s house in their impenetrable glare. I think of what Reny said, about the heiress disappearing on a night that might have been just like this one: September 10, 1954. A bowling ball of a storm, those were his words, tearing straight through, ripping up houses, leaving people frightened.

  Two twenty-two. If this lasts any longer, we’re all going to sink and get buried, too, in dirt so hard that they’ll need to pickaxe through. I’m thinking it’s the second guest room where the rain has broken through, and that I might as well get up and get the bucket that sits beneath the sink in my bathroom. I turn on my lamp first, then flip my wall switch. I feel along the hall, hit that switch, too, and all the way down to the bathroom, I drag my hand across the wall, like there’s some kind of safety in that. I flood the bathroom with all its light when I get there, find the bucket and the biggest towel, and head back down the hall, push against the half-open guest-room door. The rain comes in through a crack in the window, splashes on the sill, on the floor. I push the bucket into place and use the towel to swipe and sop. In daylight I’ll take a better look. For now this will have to do.

  It is only after I’ve done as much as I can think to do that I notice the light across the drive. I blow on the window and rub away the steam, and if it’s hard to see with all the rain streaming down, I’m not doubting that it’s Dad. He’s out there again, forgetting all about the time, not even remembering that he’s missed another Letterman Top Ten. Probably he’s not realized that there’s a pour-down rainstorm yet, that there’s firecracker lightning all around.

  “Mom,” I say, because if she were here, she’d have gone to get him, she’d have dragged him right back into the house, thrown a towel at his head, tossed him a pair of dry pajamas. Mom lost friends because she loved Dad, that’s what she told me once, and I said, “Why, because he’s crazy?” And she said, “No, because he has genius.” She said that she knew from the first that he was better than brilliant, that he proved it to her though he wasn’t even trying, when her parents both went down in a plane. She was twenty-eight when she brought Dad her parents’ portraits. Four months later he’d brought their faces back to life. Mom was twenty-nine when Dad moved in, a few months short of thirty when I was born. I’ll be going to college next year. I don’t know what he’ll do when I am gone.

  Who could sleep with all this storm? I leave the window, go down the hall and the wide turn of stairs, cut out across the driveway. The rain falls hard as a full-blast spigot, spouts a river through my hair, smacks my T-shirt and my shorts against my skin; and I wish that I’d remembered shoes. I slam my weight against the door, flick a chip of gravel from my foot. Dad looks up, confused.

  “What in the world?” he asks, as I stand there wringing the wetness out of me, turning the floor into a pool.

  “Dad,” I stare back, an exaggerated stare. “Do you know what time it is?”

  He checks his watch. “Well, now I do.”

  “You have to sleep, Dad, you know.”

  “I’ll get around to it.”

  “No. Really. I mean it. You have to take care of yourself. You would if Mom were here.”

  He winces, looks away, but lets it go. “Is my favorite pot calling the kettle black?”

  “I was asleep,” I say. “I was awakened by the storm.”

  “Same destination, different journey,” he says. “You shouldn’t worry so much about me.” He pulls an old, clean towel from a cupboard he built and brings it over my way. Flaps it open and fits it like a shawl around my head. Gives me a kiss on the cheek.

  “Upstairs window is leaking,” I tell him.

  “Your room?”

  “Guest room.”

  “I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

  He walks back over to the painting and stands before it. “You want to see something, Katie?”

  “What’s that?” I follow his trail.

  “I was removing the stretcher, peeling the lining, and look what I happened to find.” He’s got some crumpled sheets of something in his hands. I have no idea what they are or what they mean. “Notes,” he says, when I shrug and shake my head. “Notes the artist made about the painting.”

  “Well, that’s cool,” I say, distracted by the blast of lightning that just ripped open the sky.

  “Yes, it is cool,” he says. “Turns out this was no ordinary painter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Looks
like John Butler Everlast had himself a little hobby.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I say, and I shiver a little, get goose-bumpy arms, and not because of the rain.

  “These are his notes, and this is his painting,” Dad says, and his eyebrows rise so extremely high that they’re lost beneath his fringy hair.

  “Well,” I say. “I mean, like, oh my God. Are you kidding me? Are you serious?” Dad looks at me and laughs.

  “Thing is,” Dad says, “the notes are mostly in code. Chemical symbols, bits of shorthand. The guy was talking to himself.”

  “Or hiding something,” I say.

  “Or trying to figure something out.”

  “Or both.”

  “You know”—Dad sighs—“Mom would have loved this.”

  “Loved what?”

  “The riddle,” he says. “She’d have conducted a vigil right here until she figured the whole thing out.” I close my eyes so that I can conjure Mom, and I don’t open them for a while. When I look up, I see that Dad is lost behind his thickest spectacles.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The rain isn’t going to stop. There’s no sure line between darkness and dawn, and for all I know Dad slept on the studio floor or never slept at all once I came back to bed. The rain patter down the hall has slowed to a faucet-quality drip. I lie in my bed counting the drips, losing count, conjuring Mom, losing Mom, half dreaming, half expecting that bird. And then my dream turns into something else, and in my mind’s eye, I am seeing Miss Martine with her fleurs-de-lis in 1953. All dressed up for a party.

  What happened to Miss Martine with the pink diamond in her hair and the fleurs-de-lis in her arms? Why does Old Olson have us digging? I need to get back to the library today; I’ll ask Dad for his car, and he’ll say yes, but first I need at least two aspirin to fix the pain in my head. I hold my face with both hands as I climb out of bed. I take slow, extremely timid steps. I hear the languid drip from all the way down the hall, but now there is another kind of sound—this strange disorder behind the one locked door, the fluttering sound that birds make when they leave a treetop for the sky. It’s a rushing toward and a rushing away, and then a sudden silence. I stand for a long time perfectly still, but whatever it was is gone now.

  I take the long way to the library—loop around through my four-cornered town, past the drugstore, the bank, the theater, the ice-cream store and the sweet boutique, Pie in the Sky and Bread Basket. Then I swing a right into the old neighborhood, where the houses seem huge sitting up on their hills, surrounded by trees and soaked gardens. People say this place was built one hundred years ago by a crowd of Italian masons, and through the blur of the windshield it disappears, then comes back into view, vanishes and returns, the houses and the history are there, and now they aren’t. It’s so green back here, so big and un-perturbed, and I drive without the radio on, so that all I hear is the click and slosh of the rain and the wipers and the rain, and all I can do is remember the days my mom and I would go walking out here, she holding my hand, she pretending that we could have any house, any hill, any tree we might choose. “Just imagine,” she’d say, as if we’d gone shopping for shoes, and when she found something she really loved—a big, round room, a wraparound porch, a copper-finished turret—she’d stop on the sidewalk and stand, looking, saying, “Beauty endures, Katie. You try and remember that.”

  Back out on one of the winding roads I head toward the fox-chase grounds, which they’re cutting up and ruining now with butt-ugly developer houses. All this is fenced-in land, sliced into parcels, and on some parcels the new, half-finished houses stand wrapped up in their Tyvek, and in some places there are machine-dug holes, and in others the weeds are growing all over the place, waiting for some millionaire’s deposit. A little farther down there’s a soggy stretch by a stream, which is still farmer owned and cattle grazed, and after that lie the Geringer Stables, where for four generations the finest Hanoverians have been bred and where, in a fenced-in area behind, little kids get their first rides on horses. Olympic horses, my mother always said, though most actually show at the Devon Horse Show, held once a year every May. Like the soggy cattle land beside it, Geringer Stables defies the developers. It’s still standing and not going anywhere, though today, with the rain, it looks nearly abandoned. A couple of pickup trucks in the drive. Big cubes of hay stuck in rivers of mud. Somewhere back there Hanoverians wait for the sun to shine again, and somewhere back at her own estate, Miss Martine waits, too. Remembering what? I want to know. Watching for what through the rain?

  There are only four other cars in the library lot, and I’m soaked through by the time I’m up the steps and through the door. I let my hair fall loose out of Danny’s cap and fix my bangs with my fingers. “Morning,” I say to Ms. McDermott, who is stamping date-due cards with that gunshot-sounding machine.

  “Vacation day?” she asks.

  “Weather related,” I say.

  She pulls open a drawer and draws out a key. “For you,” she says. “Good luck.”

  I take my time going down, moving at slow-mo speed. In the study room, I buzz the lights on, and they go briitttt-britttt, like a mosquito zapper. The boxes are just precisely as I left them. I choose LOCAL LORE box number two—slide it across the table. Then I lift the lid on more paper soup, but this time it’s almost entirely newsprint, everything folded in quarters. Looks like the same old someone did overtime with the tea bag.

  Monster patience. Research demands it.

  Bit by bit, then, I flatten quarters into wholes and slowly turn the pages. The past is here, and most of it doesn’t make a difference. Gentlemen’s agreements, a face-lift for the local theater, a Fourth of a July parade. The photographs are yellow, grainy. I read the captions. By lunchtime I’m feeling dizzy. I lay my head down on the table and close my eyes to rest.

  Two hours later I’m startled awake by a tapping noise, and for the first thirty seconds I think that the finch has found me here. I scrape my face off the table, turn, see Danny standing on the other side of the glass door. Chances are horrifyingly high that I have drool spilling down one corner of my mouth and that half my face is a pancake. “God,” I say. “Danny. What are you doing here?” He’s got a goofy grin, a tease in his eyes, and I am never going to hear the end of this.

  “Ms. McDermott mentioned that you were down here,” he says. “I thought I’d stop by for a visit.”

  “How did I come up?”

  “I think I called the place a ghost town. She said, ‘No, not really,’ and identified you as another nonghost.”

  “Well, what are you doing at the library?” I ask, and I realize that it sounds like I’m accusing him of trespassing, as if this place were all my own.

  “I read too, you know,” he says, and now he crosses his arms and leans into the doorway, and I have to admit that when you take away the mud and sweat, Danny Santopolo is a not-half-bad-looking guy. “What about you?”

  “Research,” I mumble. I start massaging my cheek with my right hand, trying to erase the table tattoo I’m sure is there. My hair must look like a wet dog’s coat—ruined by rain, smashed by a nap.

  “Local Lore?” Looking past me, he reads the boxes.

  “Miss Martine,” I finally confess. “Just doing some digging.”

  “Digging? That’s a good one.” He smiles, and I feel my face grow hot, and when that happens I blush harder. Danny stands there just watching me. “Owen’s still ticked off about the bone, by the way,” he says at last. “Says he’s telling Old Olson that I stole it unless I hand it over to him.”

  “I’m thinking there’s more where that came from,” I tell him. “I mean, maybe not bones, but something more than dirt and bug shells.”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking so, too.”

  I look into his eyes and decide that he isn’t messing with me. “Why is that?” I ask, realizing, all of a sudden, that his eyelashes aren’t all the same color. Some are lemon like his hair. Some are dark as his eyebrows.

  “You
ever drive past Miss Martine’s at night?” he says. “Only ever the same light on, in the same exact room, always.”

  “Never noticed.”

  “Somehow doesn’t strike me as an heiress with a gazebo on her mind. I asked my mom last night if she has ever even seen Miss Martine. She thought about it for half a sec before she told me no.”

  “I’m not onto anything yet,” I tell Danny. “I mean, these are just some boxes. And I don’t even know why I care so much, except that I just do. I can’t see sitting like she does in one house all those years. I can’t understand it.” I don’t tell him the other half: that if I can solve the mystery of Miss Martine, maybe I can also solve the disappearing of my mom. Maybe I can get to the heart of fine lines and survival.

  “You need some help?”

  He smiles, and I don’t need convincing.

  “Sure,” I say, and he heads down the hall, comes back a few minutes later with his own metal library chair, sets it down beside mine. Sits, and we’re so close together that our elbows are touching.

  “So where are we?” he asks.

  “Newspaper clippings,” I tell him. “Just looking for her name in any story. Her name, also her father’s.” I slide some of the fished-out batch over his way. He smoothes the papers flat with his hand.

  “The magnate, you mean.”

  “John Butler Everlast,” I nod.

  “Imagine living your whole life with a stuck-up name like that.” Danny pinches his mouth together, turns up his nose, shakes the curls out of his face. “How do you do?” he says, bowing close.

  “Pleasure’s all mine,” I say.

  Chapter Fourteen