The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  13

  Why didn’t you find out?” I hear Ellen ask through Pratt’s telephone. “Go after it? Follow it down to the beach?”

  “Because a hunter isn’t the one who takes the bait. And the dead should never be in charge.”

  “So what now?”

  “Will you stay home today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Keep away. I’ll keep going.”

  Pratt’s wearing sturdier clothes this morning. Boots, a black muffler, and a wool jacket with buttons. He’s shaved and his skin is smooth now and younger-looking. He isn’t in a hurry, finishing his breakfast in the hotel dining room again, where the waiters have covered all the mirrors.

  But if he’s so sure of himself, then why didn’t he come to me last night, I wonder? Why should a hunter worry whether a ghost is in charge or not?

  He leaves the restaurant. Early on a Sunday morning, Benito’s streets are empty. The tourists who haven’t run away are still clutching their pillows in their beds. The faithful and trusting haven’t risen yet to walk to St. Clements Church. The constable’s deputies are still in their kitchens, drinking their coffees. The first of the shell-collectors have only begun their grave robbing on the beach. A visiting fisherman, curious, tries the door to Alice’s hut but finds it locked.

  Pratt’s boots cross the dampness of Main Street and stop at the edge of the cliff. He looks down at the waves and then turns and looks back at his hotel window, then down again—as if measuring where my trail led. He sees the rail put at the top of the path to the surf so that the tourists can hold safely onto it on the way down. He grabs the wood, tests it.

  The beach waits, skirted with foam and seaweed. I wait for him, too, in the cold sea, trailing my white skirt in the foam, like a piece of it. He’s made it down to the tide line now. He hops over a strand of kelp and looks to his left and then to his right and sees, in the shadows he couldn’t see from on top, the place where Alice’s shack has been anchored, so far back against the cliff it’s in a kind of cave.

  The waves tumble and push at his side. The clouds, high and far away, chase at nothing. He trudges through the wet sand, in no hurry, neither slow nor fast, with his hands in his warm pockets. Pratt the patient. Pratt the calm. Well, two can play at that game.

  At last he’s a few feet from her door. The hut leans back, built by Manoel to take the wind. It sits on a wedge of rock safe above the tide but its metal shutters are beginning to rust.

  I whisper, soft as a feather falling from a nest above:

  Come inside, now.

  No other sound but the clanging of the buoys.

  So I say again, mimicking Alice, her words to Manoel:

  Come, come to me now.

  “Be patient,” Pratt whispers back. “Everything in good time.”

  He’s heard, at least.

  He draws closer and sees I’ve unhooked the padlock from the door. He twists the band at his wrist. I know that preparation. I’ve seen it before. I stay safely back, outside, while he shoves the door inward, with a huff, and goes in, ducking as a trickle of sand falls on him from the roof. Now he can see her lonely easel and the skeleton of her chair left in the corner. But he can’t see what I’ve hidden just behind the door. Not yet.

  His breathing comes more quickly.

  “So. What is it, now, you wanted to show me? I would have chased you last night but you looked so white and weak.”

  Pratt the trickster. But I won’t be tricked or goaded. Not like that poor boy in the mine. I stay cold in the sun. He tries lifting his hand to his chest, in that gesture he makes that’s purely his own. I’ve seen no other hunter trust his beating heart more than his weaponry. It’s a brave touch, I’ll give him that. But it’s his heart I must somehow break, or trick. That buoy filled with blood and hope.

  In a moment, now, he’ll find it. The gift I’ve hidden, my fresh plan, waiting just by his side. The winking buoy my heart has dragged in for him, from the sea.

  “Mr. Dane?” Pratt, my gift in his right arm, is hurrying up the steps from the beach and speaking urgently into his device. “Philip Pratt. Yes. How is Mrs. Dane? Good. Good. Glad to know it. A progress report for you: contact has been made … Yes. It’s excellent news. No, it’s better if you don’t know too many details. For your own peace of mind. But you’re going to need to pay me a while longer for my services, I’m afraid. This is a more complex case than we anticipated … Yes. A new development. Circumvention. I’ve just texted you an explanation … Circumvention, it means the ordinary rules don’t hold. A getting around boundaries … Exactly. Just be patient. I know it’s difficult, but you have to imagine we’re being led through a kind of dance right now. What we don’t know yet is if we’re being led toward a conclusion or away from it. All I can tell you is that we’ve been given a kind of key. And now the trick will be to understand it …”

  He’s risen to the top of Main Street, and looks eagerly to his right and left.

  “Yes. It could be a genuine effort to communicate with us. Or the whole point could be to confuse and mislead. Because—let me finish. Because some of them actually want to be found out. Others, no. And others might want to be found and laid to rest, but the part of them that wants that peace is hidden from them … Exactly. They don’t know that they want to be found out. It’s a delicate matter … Yes. I’ll keep updating you on progress. I’m doing some research right now that should—Because that’s—All right. Understood. Soon.”

  How easily he’s taken my bait.

  Pratt plants his feet and looks down and presses his device, sliding his thumb over it again and again, making its pictures flip like a deck of cards he’s sorting through quickly. At last he seems to find the card he’s looking for.

  “Perfect. Here on Main.”

  He hoists my gift higher into his arms, the bright blue ball of glass I’ve brought in from the sea still wrapped in its criss-crossed pattern of rope, and makes his way carefully across the street toward old Hannan’s shop. Of all the bright things that tourists like to buy when they come to Benito, it’s our bits of glass and crystal hanging from twinkling strings they favor the most. Mr. Hannan likes to tell people it’s like taking the sea home with you—and who wouldn’t want to do that? He’s behind his windows now, moving among his wares, getting ready to unlock the door to his shop, the Crystal Palace. He turns his sign around: OPEN FOR BUSINESS. It’s a good business, like every other one on Main. Mr. Hannan inherited it from his father before him, who kept it full of not only chimes but hand-blown lighthouses and delicately masted glass schooners until he passed from old age, going without a whimper up to Evergreen.

  Pratt sees the sign turn and walks even more excitedly, careful to balance what I’ve given him.

  Inside, brightness, brightness everywhere. I go into the shop just after Pratt and blend in with the crystals and sea glass dangling from the ceiling. So early, we’re the only customers, and so light and sparkling is Hannan’s that I can move around easily. The flutter and sway of the chimes seems only a natural dance with the rush of air blown in from the street.

  “Good morning, can I help you?” white-haired Hannan says from behind the glass counter he’s cleaning with a soft cloth.

  “Yes, good morning. Any chance you’re the owner here?”

  “Arnie Hannan. Welcome to the Crystal Palace. Wow. That is something you have there!”

  “I was hoping you’d say so.” Pratt nods, friendly. “It’s why I came in. Your website says you appraise antique glass. And I think this is … old? I found it down on the beach.”

  He didn’t find it down at the beach. I dredged it up, its glass scratched and gouged but still clear, and put it in Alice’s shack, along with all her feathers and sand dollars and bits of dead reef.

  “I hope you can take a look and help me, tell me exactly what it is.” Pratt wrestles my trick onto the velvet mat on Hannan’s counter. “It’s some sort of float, right?”

  “Yep. With the old hemp netting st
ill wrapped around it. Very rare these days.” Hannan wipes his hands on his cloth.

  “I was guessing right then.”

  “This here is an antique glass fishing float, Mr….?”

  “I’m Phil.”

  “Lucky you, Phil! And a beauty, too. Well, why don’t we get her a bit more centered on the … Now. There you go. Okay, so we’ll want to be extra careful with something like this. We just don’t see a lot of these around here, not anymore. This is a big one. A ten-incher.” He turns it like a globe in his wrinkled hands. “We call this blue-green color aquamarine. See all the scratches all over it? That’s how you know it’s not a fake, that it was out there for a long, long time. No seal”—he murmurs as he tips it to one side, to look at its flattened bottom—“on this glass button, here, which would usually tell us where it was made. They call it the button where the glassblower cuts it loose and you get this sort of smooshed place where they stamp the mark of origin. Nothing here, but I’m guessing China. I can’t get over there’s still this wet hemp rope around it. That’s awesome. There’s water inside, too, a lot of it. That’s what’s making it so heavy. It must be cracked somewhere—although I don’t see where. That’s odd. Water inside’s awfully dark. Did you find it near the mouth of the river, by any chance? Where it empties into our cove? That might account for the blood-red color.”

  “Just … on the beach.”

  “Imagine that.” Hannan shakes his white head. “Intact right on the beach. Haven’t had that happen since the days my father owned this shop. And never with netting still attached to it, like this. That should’ve rotted away a long time ago. But nature’s a funny thing. It might’ve been buried, somehow, and just washed up.” He strokes my gift lovingly, then pulls his hand away. “Um—you say you just found it this morning?”

  “On the beach, near an old shack. How old would you say this float is?”

  Hannan stares down, suddenly nervous. “If you found it down near that shack … that used to belong to an old woman around here by the name of Lambry. She used to collect things—or at least, people used to see her do it. She was a Lambry, so nobody got close to—or messed with … It’s a name that used to mean something in this town. No buildings were even supposed to be allowed anymore down in the cove, not after the docks were torn down. But Alice got it done.”

  “The float?” Pratt says, pushing him. “Its approximate age?”

  “Classic glass float from a long-line net. Would’ve been a ton of these, maybe even upwards of a hundred, threaded through the hemp to make a big fishing cast. Likely floated with the current from China. Or Japan. A hundred years old or more, I’d say. Before 1920, that’s for sure. The nets used to break away from the fishermen, and then these balls, they’d float around with the current or get tangled up in propellers. It drove the captains wild. My father said sometimes a whole string of these would float into the cove—but usually only just broken pieces. It’s not easy for something like this to last. You see how thick and heavy the glass is? It isn’t the thickness. It’s the circumference. And the quality of the glass itself. It’s got be the right size and the right strength to keep enough air trapped inside it. But what’s troubling me, is, this one must have a crack in it somewhere, but the water isn’t trickling out anywhere … Maybe a seep-crack? Don’t know. I do know people, collectors, who’d pay a good price for this. What I don’t know is, is it me, or is there something else inside it?”

  Pratt rests his palm on either side of the blue ball, steadying it. “Before 1920. Thank you. That’s very helpful.”

  “I could swear something’s inside the glass along with the mud. Am I going blind?” He crouches. “Do you see it? Something bobbing around in there? It looks like—like—a flower—” He straightens up. “Alice Lambry’s shack, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess that’s all I have to say about this.” The shopkeeper backs away.

  “Mr. Hannan, are you all right?”

  “No. It might be best if you take her—I mean it—away with you, now. Before it breaks, you know.”

  “Do you know something about Alice Lambry? I’m here to—”

  “I think I know why you’re here now. And I’ve done all I can for you. I don’t want to do anymore. Okay?”

  “Did you know Alice?”

  “We all knew her, and some of us even tried to help her, like poor Manoel. But no good deed goes unpunished, seems like.”

  “At least let me pay you for your time.” Pratt shoves his coat aside and digs for his wallet.

  “No. I don’t profit from the dead!” Hannan says loudly, as if he wants the street, the whole village—and the Lambry House—to hear. “My family never has!”

  Pratt stops, uncertain, and takes his money back. “I understand, Mr. Hannan. But don’t worry. You aren’t implicated in my work. Only I am. Thank you very much for your time. You’ve been very, very helpful.” He lifts my beautiful gift into his arms and presses it against his chest again.

  “Be careful,” the old man blurts. “It is a precious thing you have there. Rare. I didn’t mean to suggest it isn’t … worth …”

  “Thank you,” Pratt says. “I understand.”

  At the Lambry House, the gate is still tangled with yellow tape with the word CAUTION written on it again and again. It flutters in the breeze, and the flowers in the arbor weave, as if ducking all the trouble.

  Pratt unwinds the tape and goes through the gate and strides back into the column of roses where he stood on that very first day he came to me, beside the yellow rose I called out to scratch his skin. Alice’s thorned rose.

  He holds the beautiful glass float with the rose inside it and studies the arbor. He smiles. There. I can tell. He’s got it. Ellen, and Hannan, too, told him: Alice collected sea glass. He’s seen for himself how she painted with colored water and framed her creations in glass. And Manoel told him how much Alice tended to the roses. It’s plain to him, now, what rolls and bobs around in the red water.

  When one of the yellow petals floats against the glass, it looks just like the flat of a hand, doesn’t it, Mr. Pratt? Pressing, begging to be let out. So why don’t you let it?

  Pratt shakes the buoy like a toy and watches the cut rosebud swirl and whirl like a dancer.

  Hannan’s right: it’s a precious thing I’ve made for you, Mr. Pratt, and very rare. Not just any ghost could do it …

  “Talented,” Pratt whispers. “But understand and hear me, my friend. Nothing dead, no matter how interesting or difficult, is worth keeping.”

  He lifts my gift high over his head, to the roof of the arbor, and before I can close my eyes he smashes it down on the flagstone path, crushing it. As I wanted him to.

  I feel no anger. None. I don’t let it come. Still, it hurts so much, year after year, keeping the pain inside, keeping it from breaking free. I don’t know how I manage it. I feel lightheaded, watching this man do what I’ve asked him to do, because what I’ve asked him to do is learn from breaking a beautiful thing I made. Was this what Alice felt, I wonder, when she made her paintings and put them behind glass to protect them, so they wouldn’t hurt or fade?

  Pratt picks up the limp, dripping bud between his fingers, and steps around the puddle and shards he’s made of my gift, which he now must believe was Alice’s way of taunting him, and raises his hand. He holds the bud up to the vine that earlier cut him. He lifts it and sees where it’s been sliced, sees how the angle of the cut on the stem matches the angle of the cut to the wet flower. So easy it is, to put two and two together, if you want to. So easy to give a man what he wants, as my Da said. As long as you don’t care what gets mangled in the bargain.

  Pratt reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls a clear bag out, drops my rose into it, and zips it shut, sealing it again, this time in his own way.

  14

  At the Point, I did my very best work for the Foldes. I scrubbed their china and polished their silver. I dusted and oiled and rubbed the mahogany sideboard in
the dining room. I filled the lamps with kerosene, cleaned the grates, hauled out the trash. I cooked the meals while Mrs. Folde collapsed in her sewing chair, fanning herself with her knitting. When it got too warm, I was allowed to open the kitchen’s screen door and then I could look out to see if Quint was coming toward me through the cypress grove, as he’d said he would. After a week, nothing. I turned back to kneading the bread.

  I did everything Mrs. Folde asked of me. I stayed clear of the children, though they would come and ask me if I’d seen their sister in the grain room—I hadn’t, she was never there—and stare at the cleft in my chin and run off again. Behind the house, I washed their soiled clothes, hanging up the ghosts of their tiny bodies to dry, then took the stiffened arms and legs down and brought them to the ironing board. Mrs. Folde couldn’t manage an iron; her condition was too delicate. Yet she was nervous about Mr. Folde’s shirts and would snatch them away from me if I offered even to sew on a button.

  She gave the children their lessons in the morning after they came back from their walk with their father and, in the afternoon, knitted in the parlor until she fell asleep. Each day her stomach dropped lower on her body, like timber ready to unload, yet she still had two months to go. She was sure now it was twins. She felt two people kicking against each other, she said.

  “I don’t see how God could ask a woman to bear this twice,” she moaned.

  One day the ironing was finished, and I’d stepped out just for a breath of fresh air, and there was Quint, coming from the high road on a white-blazed black horse. I put up my hand to guide him toward the house. I tried to look peaceful and unsurprised. I’d thought he might come in one of the Lambrys’ new automobiles and had imagined us riding around without a care in the world, showing off to all the wagons. Instead he was wearing his riding best, his hat wide-brimmed and his boots shining. I tried to keep my heart from surging, looking at him. It drew up anyway, like a wave.

  Mrs. Folde and the children were already upstairs taking their naps. Mr. Folde was coming from the direction of the coal house and met Quint’s horse before I could. I went inside and wiped my hands on my apron and hung it up and came back out.