Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense

by Julia Heaberlin

  How much time has passed since he kissed me? Two minutes? Fifteen?

  I’m arching my back. Andy’s mumbling something I can’t understand.

  Whoever bursts in the door will have to kill us, or wait.

  I want to deserve Andy’s forgiveness. When this is over, I want him to love me again.

  “This was never wrong,” I whisper.

  46

  When I wake up, Andy is gone, which seems more than fair. There were no promises, no free verse, no conversations about his role at the bar or about me going home, no questions about what I stole from him the last time or about what either of us plan as our endgame.

  Before drifting off beside him, I’d decided he could steal everything while I slept—the map, my phone, the boxes in the truck. My life, if he wanted it. Instead, he chose to simply leave, which seems even colder.

  I raise myself on an elbow. Barfly, at the foot of the bed, lifts his head. Last night, after a couple of rounds, Andy had found him hiding out in the bathroom. He’d scooped him up, thanked him for his discretion, and laid him down with us. It appears that Barfly hasn’t budged.

  Andy had left the magazine he took out of my gun on the bedside table. The motel pad next to it is a blank, hurtful thing. No note. Andy is always bursting with words. I’ve saved every one of them.

  An envelope in one of my boxes is stuffed with twenty-seven days’ worth of the notes and funny little drawings he would leave on a pillow, tuck by the dollar bills in my wallet, clip under a windshield wiper, place as bookmarks in my textbooks, tape inside the toilet paper.

  My keys are positioned exactly the way I left them on the desk. The one to my safety deposit box points north and the ignition key to the truck points west. My phone is still flipped on its back in the bathroom with a nearly invisible hair still in the same place.

  I didn’t know Andy was coming but these little paranoid quirks are now a force of habit. A quick inventory shows that he’s swiped nothing from the room. I find the die under the bed, knocked off of the bedside table.

  Except for that, it was like he was never here.

  I know better. Trained.

  I start my search in earnest, to see what he’s left behind. I discover a tiny tracker in the bottom of a plastic dental-floss box that looks almost exactly like the dental floss I brought with me, and another one under the sole of my Nikes.

  The black rubber is sliced and glued back together so perfectly I can barely see a line. The trackers crunch under my feet, their little body parts exploded on the white tile like roaches murdered after crawling out of the cheap walls.

  I throw on sweats and my panda T-shirt and go outside. The motel lot is still dark and crowded with parked vehicles. Someone could be watching me from any of them. I drop to my knees and rove the flashlight around the undercarriage of the truck and into the wheel wells.

  I find what I’m looking for under the back bumper—a little box that wasn’t there yesterday. I examine it closely. Nothing special. The magnetic case holds the kind of GPS tracking device that is an online click away. The one designed for life’s ordinary spying, so parents can simultaneously check on their alcoholic teenagers and watch Netflix, so divorcing husbands and wives can gather evidence to more efficiently slice their children in two.

  I attach the device in exactly the same place to the vehicle parked next to mine, which is, fortuitously, also a white pickup.

  I return to my room, throw the chain, set the alarm for eight. In case the one on the bumper was a decoy, I plan to check for trackers hard-wired into the car in the morning—under the hood and dashboard, near the sunroof, below the seats, in the carpets, all the usual places. This won’t be the only time I’ve checked, but I’m clearly not doing it often enough. I’d already removed the one installed by the rental car agency.

  I feel only moderately sure that I found all of the trackers. I feel even less sure that I know exactly who left them.

  I have to wonder if all the time I was making my plan about Carl, other people were making plans about me.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve called Daisy’s cellphone thirteen times, every call now dropped directly into voicemail. The veterinary office is letting the answering machine pick up. I leave the same message on both. If you see my father, please call the police immediately. He’s lost. He has dementia. A tendency to get violent.

  Fear for Daisy is grinding away in my gut. If she dies with all that sappy hope, all those Harvard dreams, it’s on me.

  I want to leave the motel room but it still smells like Andy. I keep going back to that empty pad by the bed like it is mistaken. I hold it up to the window and search for any imprint in case Andy jotted off a note and ripped it away after changing his mind. That happened once. The phantom message had said I love you.

  So why did Andy return? Why now? How long has he been following me? Could it be since I was nineteen and we broke up? Wouldn’t I have noticed? If true, wouldn’t his obsession be even scarier than my own? It’s been a year since his surprise call and request to see me. I’ve thought back often to that day at the café and what I revealed.

  While he’d drilled me about my sister and my latest research, I’d hidden myself in short answers, licked the sugar rim on my martini, and drifted into a pleasant alcoholic haze. He’d commented on the new muscle tone in my legs and arms, stirring both desire and a paranoia that he knew about my trainer and about how far gone I was into my plan. I simply said I’d joined a new fitness club.

  Are you finally moving on? he’d asked. Close, I replied. I didn’t tell him that the clock was ticking down, not because I was giving up on my sister, but because I wasn’t ever going to.

  I didn’t say that I sometimes holed up in my concrete cave at Uncle Fred’s Self Storage Units, where bright color-coded plastic containers sit with white IKEA file cabinets. The four walls are an exploded version of my old closet gallery.

  Two years earlier, I’d moved a desk in there from my apartment. A tattered lounger. A good floor lamp. A small refrigerator. The five guns I’d inherited from my dad. My sister’s things that my mother dumped in cardboard boxes, tossed in the attic, and never touched again. I even studied within those tight four walls for my master’s degree.

  I try to force Andy out of my head. I fill Barfly’s food bowl, pack up my clothes, brush on mascara. The questions pound on. Was Andy planning to arrest me but just couldn’t bring himself to do it? What would he arrest me for? Stealing Carl’s camera out of evidence? Sneaking into an FBI file on his computer? Kidnapping a dementia patient from the state welfare system?

  Not for the first time, I wonder if he left his laptop and phone wide open to me that day at the hotel on purpose, as a test of my willpower. I only gleaned a little new information before he’d snatched his passwords back—that Carl’s case was active. The FBI suspected Carl in the cases of Nicole, Vickie, Violet, and four other missing women, all on my list, too.

  Andy could be using me to get to Carl.

  TITLE: INVISIBLE GIRL

  From Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman

  Guadalupe Street, Austin, 2002

  Kodak disposable camera

  Photographer’s note—Amanda K., homeless at seventeen, told me she wrote I am invisible on a cardboard sign after no one on Guadalupe Street spoke to her for two weeks. “Maybe people think they can’t really change anything for me with a dollar, so they just ignore that I exist. They could change everything about my day by just saying hello.”

  47

  I have to dial in on finding Carl. Focus on his map.

  If Invisible Girl is his next clue, she’s the one I need to follow, even if he shot the picture more than fifteen years ago, even if I have doubts that he would remember which bare brick wall on Guadalupe Street held her up.

  Barfly and I are wandering along hip shops and college eateries with a parade of granola students, sorority girls, and ragged people speaking and gesturing to the air. No s
ign of Carl and Walt, but the two of them would fit right in. The loneliness and desperation that lurk in the shadows of affluence along this university drag force me to once again appreciate Mrs. T’s corrupt little care system and burned Eggos.

  Carl had snapped a number of homeless photos here. Not just Invisible Girl but another renowned series of tight, unflinching black-and-white portraits, so textured they could be charcoal drawings. Carl captured hollow, insane eyes, toothless smiles, angelic light on molten, sun-beaten skin. He captured humanity. With that lens, he fooled everyone.

  It was in Carl’s heyday, when critics were predicting fame and legacy. He titled the series Guadalupe’s People. He was referring to more than the street. Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico and the blessed virgin, had appeared first to a peasant.

  Someone snatches my arm, digging in nails painfully. It isn’t Carl. The man appears to be a street fixture. It’s impossible to tell his age from the rough leather of his skin. Forty? Seventy? He’s wearing filthy jeans and old sandals. One toe is missing on his right foot and two on the left. He points to the empty space beside him and asks, “Isn’t she pretty?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Very. She’s beautiful.” I dig for some money and tug on the leash as Barfly tries to lick his feet. “Why don’t you buy her dinner?”

  He tucks the bills I offer in his pocket and drifts into the crowd.

  Walt, are you here?

  What if we could suddenly see all the invisible companions on Guadalupe Street? If we could stick our hands through these ghosts of the homeless, and they’d smile? The dead lovers who curl up with them in grimy sleeping bags; the childhood friends who once split their peanut butter sandwiches; the war comrades who died by their sides; the long-buried fathers who picked at every flaw; the articulate, funny characters who have sprung to life from the battered novels they haul around.

  Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain, the Lady of Guadalupe herself. If we could see for ourselves their imaginary world and the real one side by side, maybe we would be changed. No cup would be empty.

  I’m invisible, too. I could have been any summer college student strolling along with a dog. At least six of me passed us on the sidewalk. Oversize sunglasses, jean shorts, backpack, tank top, Birkenstocks. Bait for Carl, I can’t help thinking.

  Twice, I tap men on the back, hoping for Carl. As I apologize to the second one, it strikes me how anonymous Carl’s body really is, a slender, boots-and-jeans Texas stereotype—how he must have used this cloak and his camera to subtle and frightening advantage.

  After a couple of hours, I give up looking at walls and graffiti and stray onto the University of Texas campus.

  I blend in for a while, then duck into trees along the shady edge of Waller Creek. Judge Lamar Waller designed the downtown grid of this city in the 1830s, naming the north-south streets for rivers in exactly the order they were listed on the state map.

  Almost two hundred years later, Austin is the new Brooklyn and an explosion of construction, congested traffic, and narrow streets, seemingly impossible to fix.

  Would Lamar Waller be upset by his shortsightedness?

  He’d certainly be horrified at what happened where I am now standing, at the creek named in his honor, where a girl who liked to leap and fly in the air was murdered in 2016.

  She had nothing to do with Carl. Her name was Haruka, and her suspected killer was caught almost immediately. She’d made my memorial list like all of the women since I started keeping count. Young. A first-year dance major recruited from Oregon. One night, she called her roommate at the dorm to say she was on her way from the theater building. She never showed up.

  In the minutes after that call, police say that Haruka was attacked and murdered by a homeless teenage boy as she walked by the creek, hope and hopelessness intersecting in a random, brutal moment.

  The suspect was a seventeen-year-old runaway from foster care named Meechaiel. I wondered that he once had a mother who cared enough to think up that name and then let him go. His shadowy figure had been captured on a nearby street camera with a woman’s bicycle and an unidentified object he pulled out of his pocket.

  Haruka’s parents released paper bird lanterns into the sky at her vigil. I’d memorized their beautiful statement right after the young man was arrested, at a homeless shelter.

  We remain steadfast in our desire to honor Haruka’s memory through kindness and love, not violence. To the police officers, the UT community and all who have been impacted by this, we just ask that you hug your children, hug your parents TWICE, one from you and one from us.

  I want to be like them. Everyone should be like them. But we’re not.

  48

  I might find Carl through his nutty list of conditions.

  That’s my sugar-rush epiphany as I down a caramel, cream-cheese-stuffed, peanut-sprinkled donut called Salty Balls under a red umbrella at a decadent food truck called Gourdough’s.

  At noon, most of the college couples at the outdoor tables around me are ending their night, nursing hangovers, starting to think about unfinished papers. I’m thinking about how Guadalupe Street was a dead end, about the places on my body where I can still feel Andy’s touch, about those insidious GPS trackers.

  Carl didn’t plant the trackers. At no point on our journey together had he been out of my sight long enough to buy a device like that. Until he took off, he didn’t even have the hundred-plus dollars needed to purchase one of them, much less three.

  Andy wouldn’t use the very common GPS device I’d found on the truck. I’d seen the sophisticated devices casually strewn in the drawers of his apartment; he’d be the shoe-and-dental-floss guy. So who, then?

  My donut, half-finished and melting on its cheap, floppy paper plate, looks like something I threw up. I turn on my phone.

  This time, there’s a message. My throat constricts. I recognize the number. Daisy’s. My fingers fumble to find voicemail. It feels like a fifty-fifty shot that I will hear Daisy’s voice. I expect Carl’s. He might tell me he’s taking Daisy out for a Whataburger. He might tell me she’s already buried.

  I think she would have fought.

  When Daisy begins her cheerful ramble, the pounding in my ears is so loud I have to replay the message. She’s at Disney World. A family reunion. Sorry she didn’t get back to me sooner. She sure hopes I find Mr. Smith soon. How’s Barfly?

  Solace, but it’s fleeting. Already I’m picturing other, faceless girls straying into Carl’s path. Red dots I put into play as soon as I walked into Mrs. T’s and told a lie.

  The physical warning signs are sudden, like always. The dread gathering like a biker gang in the center of my chest. The deep, surging flush. My right temple, pounding. It’s been happening at least three times a year since I was fourteen.

  Every table around me is full. No one looking my way. No one cares. Just Barfly knows. He is whining softly at my knee. “It’s OK,” I whisper.

  My high school counselor, the stupid therapist, my mother, my trainer, Andy, know-it-all Google—they all offer a comforting, scientific explanation.

  As for me, I’m certain that for a few minutes, four tops, I live Rachel’s terror.

  We breathe together, shiver together, sweat together. When it’s over, I almost wish it weren’t.

  * * *

  —

  The interlude with my sister took three minutes and five seconds.

  Barfly and I begin the trek back to the side street where I’d had to park the truck. A hundred feet away, I see pieces of paper fluttering under the windshield wipers.

  My heart begins an idiotic dance. I think of Andy, deciding to leave a goodbye note after all, or Carl, laying out a more specific route after deciding I was a less agile opponent in our game than he’d thought, or maybe someone else.

  I pull Barfly’s leash a little tighter and sweep my gaze. Aging fences lean on both sides of the street. Big teeth gaps to wriggle through and hide. Knotholes for spying. Beater cars are parked
nose to butt on the curbs. I feel for my gun before I remember I left it in the console.

  The only thing moving is a lithe figure in UT burnt orange running steadily away from me. Alone in broad daylight, just like my sister on the day she was taken. Bright sun, every corner exposed, is never a comfort to me.

  “Stay,” I order Barfly. I have to stand on the running board to reach the first piece of paper. It tells me that a local band is debuting tonight at a bar on Sixth Street. I stretch for the other—a flier for a three-legged fat black cat named Baloney who is “free to takers, declawed, and hits the cat box.”

  The papers are just windshield litter. Ironic for a town that outlaws plastic grocery bags and wants to fine anyone who won’t compost.

  I don’t know what I’m feeling more—relief or disappointment—as I settle Barfly in the back and slip into the driver’s seat. At straight-up noon, the truck is broiling. Once more, I flip the air conditioner to full blast.

  Perspiration sticks like apple juice behind my knees and stains the back of my shirt. Like always, my sister left me soaked, with the slightest of headaches. Carl liked to keep his conditions in the glove compartment, within easy reach. I pull them out. The single piece of yellow legal paper is folded, creased many times. At various intervals, Carl had manipulated it into a paper airplane, a paper football, and a little yellow sailor hat, which he had managed to balance on his head once for two hours while he napped in the car.

  It concerns me that he left something so freakishly important to him behind. I have to gamble that Carl’s brain hasn’t erased this. I know by now that the things he cares about remain in his head on a loop. He’d bugged me relentlessly about his conditions—new ones, old ones—at least ten times a day.