Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense

by Julia Heaberlin

  “Gus, throw the flower in the water. Then we’ll get some ice cream on the Strand.”

  “Thank you for coming,” I say. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Like hell you didn’t,” she snaps. “I hate when my husband’s right.”

  Gretchen’s already losing venom, though, I can tell. She wants to ask me something. She almost does, and then Gus tugs at her dress. Her hand runs lightly over his hair. She checks the shoreline for Carl. “Everything’s OK now, Gus. Go ahead. Pull the rose out of the sand and throw it in for Violet. I saw a mermaid flip her tail way, way out there by the bridge. She’ll swim in to get it.”

  Gretchen waits until the boy’s out of earshot before demanding: “Take off your cap. And your sunglasses.” She squeezes my shoulder. “Take them off.”

  I don’t know why, but I obey. Her fingers dig into my arm. My eyes are unprepared. Watering in the sun.

  “You really are just a baby.” She searches my face before releasing me to check on Gus, a little too close to the edge again. I slide my cap and glasses on while she heads for her son.

  I’m picking up Barfly’s leash when she stops abruptly and turns her head. “Don’t call me again. Get your shit together.”

  I nod. She’s the third person since I put Carl in the car to utter some kind of warning.

  “All right, then,” she says, a little more kindly. “God bless.”

  The two are about halfway up the beach—Gretchen bending down to carry Gus the rest of the way—when the rose tumbles back to shore. I pick up the stem and run my finger down its smooth surface, every thorn blunted.

  I think about stealing it, pressing it between the pages of Carl’s book. Except I’ve always found something very wrong about a faded, disintegrating flower representing a memory. I fling the rose as far as I can into the waves. This time, the petals separate, surfing like tiny chips of bone before being sucked under.

  Gretchen doesn’t want to believe the date in this book is a lie. It’s right there, printed in black and white.

  I want to scream at her that this is Carl.

  There could be a lie on every page.

  40

  I’m relieved to see the truck still parked along the seawall. I took a risk and didn’t bug Carl to return the extra set of keys. Carl, however, is not in the truck.

  I slide Barfly from my arms into the backseat and release an avalanche of wet sand. Our combined dog and person smell is overwhelming: fishy ocean, wet fur, sample perfume from the ZaZa bathroom.

  Carl has opened the Texas map wide and stuck it in the windshield as a sunshade. Not a bad idea. I wonder where he’s gone. I flip on the air conditioner to combat the hot, sticky humidity, lie back against the seat, and try not to feel discouraged. Six days in, just a little more than halfway. I don’t know where he’s run off to, but my gut after seeing him on the beach is that he didn’t crack wide open like Edna Zito promised in my dream.

  I can’t get discouraged. It’s a process. I always have a Plan B. And C and D and E and F, all the way to Z. The problem this time is, I have less than four days left.

  Plan B is East Texas. My research, the trial transcripts, his photographs—Carl haunted and stalked those woods. His camera transformed tree roots into scaly monster toes, sunshine into fairies dancing on a dirt floor, the faces of dirt-poor people into something profound and dignified.

  Everything, even the light, somehow doomed by his lens. Every picture, a little murder.

  Carl mentioned in a deposition that his family used to “keep a place.”

  When pressed, Carl had clammed up, refusing to reveal a location. The prosecutor asked for a local police search of the area, but what a joke. There are private land patches in Texas the size of Rhode Island. You’d need a very personal guide, and that’s exactly what I’m going to convince Carl to be.

  Where the hell is he? I yank the map out of the windshield and try to refold it. That’s when I see.

  In Cherry Oak furniture marker, Carl has drawn his own line on the map, a crooked scar that ends at least six hundred miles west in scorching desert. New Conditions is scrawled at the top, covering up the Panhandle. His line snakes in the opposite direction of the Piney Woods.

  Instead of dots, he’s marked three X’s, the first one squarely over the city of Austin, along with the words Invisible Girl.

  * * *

  —

  My head is buried in the back of the truck. Carl’s casual destruction in the hotel garage of my meticulous filing system fills me with wrath. Papers, photos, magazine articles, research printed off the Internet—everything about his life I had labeled and deconstructed is scattered to all four corners of the truck bed.

  I turn out to be lucky. The magazine article I’m searching for is still sitting in one of the few boxes Carl left untouched. It’s tucked in a file titled “Austin” marked NR—my code letters for Not Relevant.

  I knew I remembered Carl’s Invisible Girl. She was part of a paid assignment for a Texas Monthly pictorial on the homeless teenagers who rove Guadalupe Street near the University of Texas. It made some industry and media noise because Carl shot the whole thing with four disposable cameras, his not-so-subtle way of saying society considered his subjects just as disposable.

  In the magazine photo, she’s sitting with her back against a brick wall, reading a battered physics textbook. An empty Starbucks cup has a one-dollar bill sticking out of it. A hand-lettered sign in angry black marker announces I am invisible. She’s brittle, thin, but pretty. Her dirty clothes and matted hair are all that differentiate her from the two girls in sorority T-shirts walking by, eyes averted.

  Invisible. Not Relevant. She didn’t make any of my lists. I don’t know whether she died or ran back to a home she hated. Nobody would have spent much time looking for her. Certainly not me.

  I’ve had to draw lines over the years. At one point, I was so tangled up in the hidden meaning of photographs, so infected with the grief of other families, that I couldn’t pull myself out of bed.

  Even with just three cases, my head is so full I mix up details: Was it Violet who played cello? Vickie who was addicted to orange jellybeans? Nicole whose eyes were two colors?

  The Invisible Girl is tugging on me now, though. I’m still relevant to Carl.

  I quickly stuff everything else back in the boxes and scan the seawall and the beach below.

  After walking two blocks, I don’t find Carl, just where he’s been. A group of homeless men are camped around a bench eating hamburgers and counting cash that I assume used to belong to me.

  When I describe Carl, one of them shrugs. “He said that if a cute white girl with a nose diamond came asking about him, tell her he was gone.”

  Back at the truck, I reopen the bed, climb up, and begin to shove things around with calm fury.

  I find the box quickly, at the back. Carl hasn’t disturbed it. I yank George out of the secret little nest I made for him. He’s a beauty, an old Hasselblad, with a lovely hand crank on the side. The Rolls-Royce of cameras.

  I think of all that George has seen and done.

  Across the road, the seawall stands, seemingly impenetrable, built way back before hurricanes were christened with nerdy boy-next-door names like Harvey.

  I feel like a reckless storm myself, dodging cars across the busy road, camera swinging around my neck. The drivers probably think I’m a stupid tourist crossing traffic, risking my life to snap a shot of the Gulf that will be lost in thousands of other vacation shots on a computer.

  When I make it to the wall, breathless, I stare down into the viewfinder. That’s the way the Hasselblad works. You see the world in front of you by looking down.

  All I see is concrete wall. Did Carl ever find my sister’s face in this hole? Was she smiling? Angry? Alive?

  I press the button. Carl’s right. It’s a very solid, satisfying sound. A gunshot.

  I lift the strap from around my neck.

  I’m so frustrated, so full of rag
e. I don’t care how stupid this is.

  I slam the camera against the seawall, again and again, watching it crack and shatter.

  A little murder, Carl.

  It feels good.

  * * *

  —

  For the next several hours I drive, scanning the side of the highway for a scarred, shirtless man with a dry-cleaning bag stuffed with belongings. There’s only one logical road out of Galveston, and Carl isn’t on it. A tiny fear is wriggling its way out—could he be skipping his way back to Daisy?

  I find an alternative station and let Cricket Blue’s lyric harmonies about myth and the ends of things blast everything else out of my head. I croon along. The wasps that live inside my chest build paper nests.

  The sun is sinking when Barfly and I land in Austin at a Motel 6. It isn’t the ZaZa but the rooms surprisingly take a few of the same eclectic cues. Bright sage walls and bedspread. Furniture with clean, modern edges. A warm laminate wood on the floor and a sleek photograph of Austin-proud Willie Nelson Boulevard on the wall.

  For twenty-four minutes, I lie flat, staring up at a blinking smoke detector and imagine Carl out there doing the same thing. Making plans.

  I change tops and strap on the gun. It’s almost dark. I stroll the half-filled parking lot.

  No dark sedans. Lots of bumper stickers. Atheism Is Myth-Understood. Don’t Frack With My Water. Keep Austin Weird. Carl must be loving Austin right now. In Austin, natives are liberal, tacos are for breakfast, music is like breathing, and a million freaky bats fly at sunset. Hate is a devil you can smoke away with enough weed.

  When I push open the lobby door, the assistant manager is missing from his post. It wasn’t hard to surmise he was both gay and intelligent from our encounter at check-in. A rainbow flag wrapped his personal laptop. The intense hieroglyphics of math problems had lit up his screen.

  Never carry any accessories that aren’t the story you want to tell.

  Only one man sits in a chair in the lonely lobby—about sixty, in boots and a custom cowboy hat with the Gus crease, made famous by Robert Duvall in Lonesome Dove.

  There are immutable rules to wearing a cowboy hat in Texas. The kind of crease in the hat tells you a lot about the man. My grandfather wore the Telescope crease, a low crown and wide brim, which makes it easier to take the Texas sun.

  I’m guessing this man, intently listening to the chatter of CNBC, owns a closetful of creased cowboy hats and chose this low-end motel because he spends his money on blue stocks instead of cushy beds.

  He’s as genuine as it gets, so I decide to ask. Normally, I wouldn’t want to leave a trail. Carl has changed the rules. I want him to find me. “Sir, can you suggest a place close by where I can get a drink and something to eat?”

  “The Black Pony,” he says, without glancing up. “Ten minutes if you’ve got a vehicle. Good music. Taco truck across the street. Whiskey on tap.”

  “I’d call a cab.” The assistant manager is sliding back into his rolling chair. “And don’t use the bathroom there unless it is an emergency.”

  While I wait, I call Daisy’s cellphone. There’s no answer, just a never-ending ring.

  41

  I’m sandwiched tightly between two strange men at the bar. Their bodies are radiating like space heaters. They’ve taken turns, each buying me two golden fingers of the Knob Creek that drools out of the tap in front of us. It would have been rude to refuse.

  A puke smell slammed me when I pushed open the door of the Black Pony but that has evaporated so quickly I wonder if I imagined it. The gray-haired fellow to my left is an age I’d call near-death; the one to my right is no more than twenty-five, clean-cut, with short, straight-edged sideburns and rounded biceps, characteristics that always bode danger for me.

  The band is loud and good and raunchy, playing no-holds-barred get-up-and-dance country. On the crowded dance floor, hipsters are gyrating solo while mated-for-life couples two-step and twirl like conjoined twins. All of my disguises could melt in here. Carl could be melting in here.

  Beside me, danger is drumming his fingers, a sure sign he is going to ask either me or the wisp of a girl twirling on the barstool on his other side to dance. Onstage, The Beaumonts are singing a love song about an East Texas girl who still has her own teeth and a car “that don’t break down too much.”

  The guy’s hand on my shoulder, possessive and warm, says he’s chosen.

  So, now I have to choose. One is to make an enemy out of a drunk. The other is to lose a barstool in a place I will never get it back. He leans in closer, all breath and Jack Daniel’s and expensive cologne, intoxicating even though I don’t want it to be. One dance won’t hurt.

  He pulls me to the center of the dance floor, where polite space opens up for us. He checks me out, a honky-tonk pro, swinging my body away long and slow and then back in so tight and close I don’t know if it’s his heart or the drummer jarring my bones. He has to know two things at once while he holds me still against him, his hand commanding my waist. I’m carrying a gun. And this isn’t my first dance.

  Then I’m lost—in the pulsing of music, the rhythm of a hundred bodies, the comfort of being led.

  Four dances in, he breathes in my ear, “What’s your name?”

  * * *

  —

  After two Buds and several rounds of partner switching, apparently a friendly tradition at the Black Pony, I’ve lost him. This seems like a good thing since I can’t remember what name I gave him or whether he ever told me his. Also, because I’m furious with myself. Too many of my body parts intimately grazed his.

  This is how my frustration usually reveals itself, in some act of bad behavior. The Buds are sloshing with the whiskey and the chorizo-pineapple-cilantro Bomb Taco that I bought from the food truck out front two hours ago. I’m considering throwing up every bit of it into a toilet. I start for the bathroom and then remember the warning of the Motel 6 manager.

  A couple whose tongues are marrying lets me push by them toward a dim exit light. As soon as the monster metal door chunks shut behind me, I realize my mistake. I reach back for the knob. Locked. Not an Entrance is sloppily hand-lettered in fluorescent white on the door.

  I’m stuck in the back parking lot with an army of stinking trash cans, a fence lined with scraggly bushes, and a single bulb above the outside door that barely illuminates either.

  Two shadows are taking long, aggressive strides out of a dark patch along the fence. Coming for me.

  Muggers. Rapists. Rednecks.

  It takes a split drunk second to decide to run, not toward them, because they seem determined, but the other direction, into the gloom behind the building. I want to get my bearings. Maybe I can go around the other side. Maybe I’m overreacting.

  “Jesus,” one of them whines as I take off.

  Halfway around the building, I realize there is no exit.

  I’m kneeling behind a dumpster, the very first place they’ll look. My options are climbing a ten-foot wooden fence or pulling out my gun. Neither appeals to me.

  Bad things happen when you point a gun. Three-fourths of the decision is already made. There has to be another option. Still, my hand falls back to the holster.

  I remember the day my father presented me with my own Glock. His agony that he didn’t save his other daughter. I don’t want to disappoint him, even dead. I pull out the gun.

  Where are they?

  Music is leaking out of the bricks behind me. The Beaumonts are crooning about jumping in the hay.

  The men should be on top of me by now.

  I slowly edge back to the corner of the building and peer around. Now there are three shapes in the dark. Two to one. The new guy swings a sharp punch, and one of the men falls to his knees. The other one instantly raises his arms in surrender and backs away, dragging his injured companion with him. All of this happens in deep silhouette, like I’m watching a violent cartoon.

  I hear the chirp of a remote. See the brief flash of headlights.
>
  The third man watches until he’s sure they’ve pulled out.

  Then he turns back. He stares so intently into the dark that I think he must see me. And then he’s gone.

  I’d only heard one clear word since that door slammed shut behind me. Jesus. I’m thinking, maybe Jesus heard.

  42

  Carl stole my sister’s picture. The senior portrait posed by the red barn. This sudden realization floats up while I steam myself to death in a hot shower at the Motel 6 and try to forget the entire night at the bar.

  Last night, I left my sister’s picture under the lamp in the ZaZa hotel suite. When I got up this morning, I was so distracted searching for an escaped Carl, I forgot about it. It bothers me, even though I can find it online in a hundred places with a few simple clicks on my keyboard.

  I lean my face into the hot water and strip it nude. After an hour-and-twenty-minute hike back to the motel, this fiberglass rectangle feels more luxurious than the two-seater stone waterfall in the ZaZa bathroom.

  I’d waited by the dumpster for half an hour before easing my way out of the parking lot to the front of the building.

  “You sober?” the bouncer had yelled out as soon as he saw me round the corner. “Need a ride?”

  I said yes. I had wanted to ask him where the hell he was when I needed him. He was way too tall and wide to be my savior in the parking lot.

  While he was distracted, calling me a cab, I’d slipped away. I’d needed to walk fast, to filter the whiskey and fear out of my pores. It wasn’t hard to remember the route back, which was an unpleasant hike near a buzzing, chaotic highway. I clung to all the ruts and dark places. I’d had plenty of time to think about those men in the alley—all three of them.