Not Quite Alive

by Lyla Payne

  Me, because I don’t expect to be wrong about the country, and Lucy because her hand goes right through the paper. She tries a second time, and then a third, before I can intercept. The look of horror on her face speeds up my heart and I clear my throat, tugging the page up and exposing the next one before she can think too hard about her failure.

  “This?”

  She stops staring at her hands for long enough to check the location, then gives me a tight shake of the head. I turn it again and she puts out a palm to stop me, this time not trying to touch the atlas herself.

  “This one?” I ask. She nods, and I glance down. It’s Pakistan and Afghanistan, side-by-side. “Which?”

  She points again, this time to Pakistan, and it occurs to me that I’ve gotten more helpful information from her pointing than I usually get from my ghosts this early on. Maybe I’m getting better about figuring out how to help them, or maybe it’s just not that hard to figure out that a woman who was kidnapped and killed in the Middle East might want to be found and brought home.

  “Okay, can you get me any closer?”

  She frowns harder and leans over the side of the bed to get a better look. I watch her knee bleed through the blankets, but Lucy doesn’t notice. When she extends a finger this time, she lets it hover over the atlas, not making an attempt to touch the spot underneath it. It trembles, as affected by her constant fear as the rest of her.

  I peer at the spot where she’s pointing, a mountainous region in northwestern Pakistan that doesn’t appear to be terribly populated. My mind shifts gears, back to the podcast I’ve been listening to while I run—the one about the military guy who walked off his base in Afghanistan and went missing. They found him in Pakistan, around the same area…I think. To be honest, my geography of the area isn’t terribly strong, so it’s possible I’m all turned around or even have the wrong countries.

  “There? You’re sure?”

  She gives me an impatient look, one hand on her right hip as she juts it out. Lucy nods and stabs her finger at the same region again, with more emphasis this time.

  “Okay. There aren’t any cities there or anything.” Now I’m the one chewing on my lower lip. I have to imagine that finding her body in the countryside won’t be easy.

  She shakes her head, then pinches her thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for little.

  “It’s a small town?”

  Lucy nods again and pinches her fingers closer.

  “Tiny, got it.” My mind races, trying to come up with anything else she might be able to communicate with our limited ability, and end up short. “I don’t suppose there’s anything else you can tell me.”

  Her frustration grows, tumbling into my own belly and pulling it tight. We’re both trying, but then she jumps a couple of inches in the air and whirls around as though she’s heard something. She disappears right in front of my eyes.

  “Sheesh, she’s fast,” I breathe to no one in particular. Since there’s no one here anymore.

  Instead of finding my socks, or going downstairs to needle my cousin about her late night, I pick up my cell phone and do something I never imagined I would do: start a group text message with all three Drayton kids. At least, the three of them I know.

  Their brother Bennett is a mystery for another day.

  Lucy was here. Says Pakistan, not Iran.

  I get a pen out of the nightstand and circle the region she pointed out when she was in the room, then take a picture.

  Pointed here, then told me it was a small—tiny—village. Hope this helps. Let me know what’s next.

  None of them respond, but it is Sunday morning. Maybe Brick and Birdie are still in bed, hard as it is to imagine them sleeping in. I know Beau’s working. They don’t get Sundays off when they’re in session, but they do have most of the summer free, plus longer at Christmas than I ever got in college.

  Downstairs, I get the second surprise of my morning: the sight of Brick cooking scrambled eggs in a pair of sweatpants that look suspiciously large, as though they may have once belonged to my grandfather.

  Amelia is nowhere to be seen, and without the buffer, I’m not exactly sure how to get into the kitchen for my coffee without one or both of us dying from embarrassment.

  I’m saved from having to decide when he spins around, the skillet in one hand and his spatula in the other, and sees me. He stops, staring, and we do that awkward bit for about thirty seconds while he turns red. Based on the heat creeping up the back of my neck, my own blush isn’t far behind.

  This is dumb. We’re all adults, and if he’s now sleeping with my nine-months-pregnant cousin, it’s truly none of my business.

  “Nothing happened,” he blurts. “We got home late and I was bushed, so I slept on the couch.”

  For some reason, his hasty explanation makes me laugh. “I’m not your mother, Brick. Or hers. You don’t owe me excuses or whatever.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He blows out a breath and lifts the skillet. “Eggs?”

  “Sure. Where’s Amelia?” I ask, grabbing three plates and forks, then sitting down at the table.

  “Still asleep, I guess.” Brick scrapes some eggs onto my plate, then goes back for the toast that’s popped up in the toaster in the meantime.

  “Normally she’s up with the sun, but she also hasn’t been out that late in months. I know you weren’t out walking until after midnight—what did y’all do?”

  “I may have talked her into stopping by a bar association get-together down in Charleston. I wanted to leave after some required mingling, but she was busy charming everyone in the room for the next four hours.” There’s a little smile on his face as he says it.

  “That sounds about right,” I tell him, for some reason delighted over the entire story. “You should have seen her in high school. Everyone thought she was this sweet, innocent thing because of her perfect hair and big eyes and good grades. They didn’t even realize when she was hoodwinking them because she can cast this kind of spell.”

  “I’m sure that was quite the sight.”

  “Don’t listen to Grace. She likes to exaggerate.” Amelia shuffles into the kitchen, looking unfairly adorable in pajama pants and a shirt that’s pulled tight over her belly. Her blond hair is thrown up in a perfectly mussed bun, as though she has a hair team upstairs to give her the “just out of bed glow.” “Either that or she has a terrible memory. I honestly haven’t decided.”

  My cousin plops down and accepts the scrambled eggs Brick nudges from the skillet onto her plate, then steals a triangle of toast and douses it in strawberry jam. We’re down to about three jars in the freezer, the last ones my grandparents ever made together. It’s going to be a sad day when they’re gone. Maybe we’ll leave one for nostalgia’s sake, but I know Grams would tell us not to let her hard work go to waste.

  Brick’s looking at his phone, and it’s not until his gaze snaps to mine that I remember what happened before I came downstairs to this strange scene. “You saw her?”

  “Oh, yeah. This morning.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Just what I put in the text. And I mean, she didn’t actually say anything.” It’s not technically true. Even though my ghosts don’t have verbal skills, they do communicate. Still, I don’t think it will help anyone if I tell Brick about her fear, or her horror over not being able to touch the atlas.

  “This is helpful. It means we’ve been looking in the wrong place.” He frowns at his phone, his thumb already scrolling up the screen. “I’ve got to call Abdul.”

  Within moments, he’s pulling open the door to the deck and greeting the man on the other end of the line in Arabic. His voice fades as he steps over the threshold and closes the sliding glass behind him. We had it repaired, but even though the spiderwebs of cracks are gone, I’ll never forget the way Mama Lottie tossed me into it in a fit of anger.

  Or the way my father made her go away.

  Maybe everything that
affects us in life is that way. We smooth over the damage, cover up the scars, but the memories are there, still attached to whatever was hurt in the process.

  “I’m guessing Abdul is the investigator over there?” Millie asks, eating her scrambled eggs like there’s nothing strange about waking up to Brick Drayton in our house.

  I raise my eyebrow at her. “Is that all you have to say for yourself, young lady?”

  “Oh, Grace, come on. Nothing happened. He was clearly exhausted after he drove me all the way back here so I talked him into sleeping on the couch.” She takes a dainty bite of toast and pretends she’s not blushing. “We really need to get that guest room in order for situations like these.”

  This is the first time we’ve had one of these situations since Gramps died, and we had agreed not to put the guest room together because it would mean Aunt Karen would stay overnight when she came to visit. We’ve turned the fourth bedroom, which used to be an office, into Jack’s nursery.

  “Okay, fine, so nothing happened, happened, but it still counts as something that you voluntarily spent more than an hour out of the house on a social excursion. How was it?”

  “It was fun, actually.” She stops even though it sounds as though she wants to say more, and wrinkles her nose.

  “What?”

  “It’s going to sound bad if I say it, and I don’t mean it that way, I swear.”

  “Just say it, Millie. I think we’re past insulting each other and taking it seriously.”

  “Okay, so it was nice to talk to people who don’t know everything about me. That’s all.” She frowns. “I’m not…I love you guys.”

  “I know, you dope. And I know what you mean. Living in a small town, it’s like, I don’t know... Like it’s hard to feel like you can change, or that people will believe you if you do.”

  “Or like everyone doesn’t think you’re a crazy murderer who’s an unfit mother.”

  I reach out and put my hand over hers, genuine shock making my movement jerky and fast. “No one thinks that. Literally. Everyone in this town loves you. They would have killed your abusive husband for you, given the chance, and you know the gun-to-human ratio in this town is at least three to one, so those aren’t empty promises.”

  That makes her laugh and shake off my hand. “It’s just the pregnancy hormones.”

  The fact that the hormones are her excuse for everything these days, from rage to tears and everything in between, is a private joke between us, and we both catch a case of the giggles as we finish our breakfast. It eases the sadness in the kitchen, but can’t erase the troubles outside.

  Which, as evidenced by the tension in Brick’s muffled tone, are way too close for comfort.

  Brick gave Abdul the updated parameters and expects a new report from him in the next two to three days. Birdie is ignoring everyone, which probably means she’s stalling about contacting her friend and doesn’t want to deal with her brothers’ shit, a sentiment I can understand regardless of whether I understand the situation.

  In the meantime, Amelia, Brick, and I are going to see Marcia Strickland again in Beaufort. Amelia slept most of the day on Sunday after her late night, so we agreed to head down the coast on Monday after we’re all off work.

  The time goes quickly, and before I know it, we’re walking up to her porch. Just like the first time we came to ask her about Lucy, we didn’t call first. Brick thinks the element of surprise will work in our favor. I argued that the element of surprise could get us booted without so much as a how-do-you-do. Amelia was the tiebreaker and, much to my chagrin, she sided with her friend.

  Which is why I’m currently being super mature and refusing to ring the doorbell, or to be the first face she sees when she opens the door. Normally, I’m not much for caring what people think, especially when I’m helping one of my ghosts, but this poor woman has been through enough.

  Oddly, when Marcia opens the door in one big swoop, she doesn’t seem all that surprised to see us. Her dark brown eyes are resigned, if a little suspicious, as they take in each one of our faces in turn. Amelia wasn’t here the last time, and as Marcia’s gaze sweeps over my cousin’s swollen belly, a light of recognition dawns.

  She says nothing about Amelia, or the reason we were here the last time, just stands aside and motions for us to pass her and enter the house. Brick leads the way, heading directly into the sunroom where she hosted us the last time instead of waiting for direction. Everything about him reads as impatience, and even the hand Amelia puts on his forearm can’t slow him down.

  Marcia follows. She doesn’t seem keen on playing hostess this time, not bothering to offer us anything to drink or ask us to sit. Brick helps Amelia onto the loveseat anyway, but he remains standing. I sit next to my cousin and Marcia sinks into one of the chairs, looking defeated but also kind of relieved. As if maybe she expected us to come back and has been waiting all of this time on pins and needles for the day to arrive.

  My assessment is quick, a reflex, and it gives me hope that perhaps she knows more about Lucy than she told us before—we were asking specific questions then, about the pharmaceutical company that was doing illegal human testing in Iran, and how Lucy had disappeared while she was having them investigated. We never asked whether she had any idea where Lucy might be, or who the company might have hired to kidnap her.

  Even if she doesn’t know anything specific, Marcia lived in the region. Her educated guesses are likely to be more on point than ours, although I can’t imagine that the investigator Brick has hired isn’t just as well informed.

  “Thanks for being willing to talk to us,” Brick starts.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I let you in. I’m willing to listen to you, and we’ll go from there, yeah?”

  “We want to know if you have any idea who might have taken Lucy Winters or where they might have taken her,” I say, tired of beating around the bush. “We’d like to find her and bring her home, if we can.”

  My blunt question is the first thing that seems to take her by surprise since she opened the door.

  “What do you mean, bring her home?”

  “Her…” Brick swallows. “Her body. For her family. It’s the least we can do.”

  She nods and sits back, looking shell-shocked but thoughtful. “I mean, I could put together a list of the terrorist groups and local guns for hire that were active in the area, and we always figured that Allied Pharmaceuticals paid one of them to do their dirty work. But I honestly have no idea which of them might have been behind it.”

  “What if we told you we think she was being held in Pakistan. Does that make a difference?”

  “Yes, but it would also be a surprise. Why would they take her out of Iran?”

  “I don’t know,” Brick replies, his tone growing thicker with frustration by the minute. “Maybe to throw investigators off the scent?”

  It’s as if he realizes what he’s said the same moment the truth hits my ears, too—could it be that Lucy was only recently moved to Pakistan after the Draytons started looking into her disappearance? But why would they have kept her alive all of this time? There were never any ransom demands, no one reached out to her family or the organization she worked for…it doesn’t make sense.

  Except it does, in one way. If she’s only been dead for a short time, it would explain why she doesn’t seem to realize she’s dead, like Daria suggested.

  “Maybe. They’re not exactly long-term thinkers, though.” Marcia chews on her bottom lip, her expression pensive. “Give me until morning, and I’ll get you a list, though I’m not sure how many of them have counterparts in Pakistan that would take an American hostage off their hands. Certainly not for almost four years.”

  “Thank you,” Amelia says when neither Brick nor I manage to form words.

  My brain is reeling, trying to figure out when Lucy might have been moved and what that does to our chances of finding her, and Brick, surely, is feeling like maybe, if they
’d left it alone or been more careful with their probes, that the woman they all cared so much about might still be alive.

  I don’t think it’s true, but I also know there will be no telling him—or Beau or Birdie—any such thing. I’ve been on their end of guilt often enough to know that it doesn’t have to make sense to cripple you. No matter how many people tell you something awful that happened isn’t your fault, nothing but space and time can help you truly start to believe it.

  Well, that and resolution. Even though this thing with Lucy isn’t going to have a happy ending, that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up on helping them heal, one way or another.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Brick wanted to be the one to share the news with Beau and Birdie, so the three of them can decide what, if anything, Marcia’s list and information can do to help them find Lucy. I assume he called Abdul, too, and gave him the list she emailed us after our unannounced drop-by.

  I’m back at work and so is Millie, and it’s Tuesday, which means another story time. Mel texted to say she’s taking a half day off from Daria’s, whatever she does there, and is bringing lunch. We can eat while Millie plays nice with the kids.

  I spend the morning researching the spiritualist movement in Europe. Apparently, it took place during the Victorian era, which had not quite officially begun when Carlotta the First wrote that entry in her accounting, or whatever she called it.

  That tidbit doesn’t mean much, except perhaps that the church at the time would have had no official stance against the seeing of or believing in ghosts. If her uncle and brother were opposed to her and her daughter for possessing the strange gift, like she thought, I think it’s safe to assume the zeal wasn’t based in religion, unless they were into some weird shit.

  Which, I suppose, no one should ever completely rule out.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Mel quips from in front of my desk, her arms full of bags from Debbie’s.