Paper Ghosts_A Novel of Suspense

by Julia Heaberlin

  The country road is just as lonely as I imagined it would be. Endless, biting barbed wire. Neat round blocks of baled hay on flat land. A chilling, hot quiet, like everything is dead and the earth is done.

  “Go right at this next road,” Carl instructs. “It’s that ranch house up there on the hill.”

  As the truck steadily climbs the dirt drive, I’m not looking at the house. I’m focused on the red barn that sits beside it.

  I was numb when we left the motel. Now I’m afraid.

  “There’s a light in the window,” Carl observes, “but I did call ahead. If this road trip is about you being as brave as your sister, now would be a good time to prove it.”

  69

  I don’t want to beg Carl for answers anymore. I shut off the headlights as we crawl up the drive.

  The ranch house is ordinary, white brick, hugged close to the ground. The weathered red barn is the kind my sister leaned against for her senior portrait. It seems surreal to rap politely after we climb the porch steps, but that’s what I do.

  A sixtyish woman, dressed in a man’s faded T-shirt, Wranglers, and pale lavender Dearfoams slippers, opens the door. She’s clearly not surprised to see either of us. She reminds me of my mother—not so much her features or the Dearfoams as the weariness she wears like extra skin.

  “I’m Mrs. William Sherman,” she says. I don’t respond, or take her outstretched hand. Carl pumps it cheerfully and introduces himself.

  She ushers us into her living room—vacuum tracks on the brown carpet, couch patterned in colorful autumn leaves, a pair of recliners facing the TV. A pitcher of iced tea and three glasses sit on the glass coffee table beside a small plate of Lorna Doones.

  She gestures for us to sit on the swath of autumn leaves. I shake my head. Carl sits.

  That’s when I notice. Carl is clutching the photograph of my sister and the red barn—the one he snatched out of the hotel in Houston. When he reached around to the backseat a few miles ago, I thought he was settling Barfly; instead, he was retrieving this picture.

  Carl snatches a Lorna Doone off the platter and places my sister on the coffee table, facedown. I open my mouth but nothing comes out when I read the red rubber stamp on the back.

  A-Plus Portrait Photography.

  I hadn’t thought about this stamp for a very long time. Rachel had disappeared more than a year after this portrait was taken. A woman at church had recommended the photographer to my mother. Seven of Rachel’s friends had used him for graduation pictures, too. None of them disappeared.

  I had dialed the phone number on the back anyway. Three or four times, I got an answering machine with a woman’s sweet drawl. I was thirteen.

  I left messages that were never returned.

  Now the hairs on the back of my neck are standing. Because the stamp also includes an address. This address.

  “Somebody needs to tell me what’s going on.” My voice sounds calm. But the thirteen-year-old girl inside me is screaming. Carl has started to hum.

  He turns one of the picture frames on the coffee table toward me so I can see.

  The delicate face smiling out of the silver frame looks a lot like my sister. But I’ve never seen this girl before.

  “Don’t touch that,” Mrs. Sherman repositions the photograph exactly the way it was, facing the TV like the recliners, a happy little family.

  “We should just go on out to the barn,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  The barn is cavernous, almost empty. A raked dirt floor. A fluorescent light, buzzing. There’s the faint smell of dung. A rope dangles from a rafter in the far corner.

  “That’s where my husband hung himself after he killed your sister.”

  Mrs. Sherman points to the rope like a docent in a museum. “When he took your sister’s portraits, he couldn’t believe how much she looked like our Audrey.”

  My head is exploding with Carl’s humming, Steve Harvey guffawing, cicadas screeching. I need to pay attention to Carl. Are they in this together? He’s on the move, over at the rope now. Tugging, testing it out.

  The woman isn’t paying attention to anything but her story. “Our daughter had died a few years before that. He thought your sister was sent, you know. Asked her to visit us just once a week as a sweet reminder. She came a few months—out of pity probably—and then she wrote us a real nice letter that she couldn’t show up anymore. I thought my husband gave up. But turns out, he’d been following Rachel here and there when she was home from college. Told me later he’d just wanted to talk. When they showed up, she was in the back of the truck, already dead. Just a very, very little bit of blood. William said it was an accident.”

  The woman is now curling her arm around my shoulder. Carl is still messing with the rope. I shove her off.

  In my head, new pictures are flashing. So many, many pictures.

  “Mr. Feldman told me on the phone that you’re her sister,” she says brightly. “Rachel sure loved you. Talked about you every time she was here. Would you like to see her grave?”

  70

  Carl has been tossing the rope back and forth like a pendulum. Outside, the wail of a siren is traveling down the lonely country road.

  “Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth. That’s Dostoyevsky. Lots of shit happens in a barn. That’s pure Carl Feldman.”

  Carl is gripping my elbow, edging me away from Mrs. William Sherman, who still proudly carries the name of my sister’s killer. “She’s not going anywhere with you,” he tells her. “You’re a pure-grade lunatic. Get the fuck back to your house before I do something about it.”

  Carl releases my arm. I can’t help it—I bend over, hands on my knees, stare into the dirt, try to quiet the pounding in my head, my chest. Breathe. I hear the barn door click shut.

  When I pull myself back up, Mrs. Sherman is no longer there and Carl is chuckling. “I thought you’d believe it more from her. She was ready to spill. Still remembers that you left voicemails when you were a kid. Thought you’d figured it all out. Still expected you to show up any day. Look, get ahold of yourself. I’m sure you’ve got your gun. Those sirens sound like somebody’s coming. And I’m not going back to Mrs. T’s. I took the rest of your money stash. Didn’t you leave the keys in the truck?”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “For the most part, I’ve had a very nice time, whatever-your-name-is. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t mind you. And if it makes you feel any better, I’m not innocent of everything, you just didn’t pick the right things.”

  He’s standing in the barn doorway, bathed in morning light, the kind photographers crave and farmers barely notice. “I thought it was one of your little games at first. In that hotel room, showing me the picture of your sister. That you thought I shot it. Then I realized. You had no clue.” He places his hand on my chin and tilts it up, like he is posing me. “It was your sister’s face in that photograph that made me think. Her body language. She was looking at someone she didn’t like. Someone who made her squirm. Most people see whatever they want in a picture. But a photographer knows.”

  He pulls his invisible camera up to his face. Snaps off a shot. Grins.

  Carl, this man I’d hunted, hated, didn’t kill my sister. Instead, I’d handed him a photo and he took a lucky guess. He would say, an educated one.

  “My real name is Grace,” I say, but he is already gone.

  71

  I can’t see anything in that picture of my sister now except the fear in her face. I can’t glimpse red barns without thinking of swinging ropes, or live oak trees without remembering the one Rachel was buried under in the backyard of that ranch house on the hill.

  There was just a simple wooden cross under that live oak, painted white. It was a more respectful burial for Rachel than I’d ever imagined—except for the fact that Mrs. Sherman placed her in the ground two feet from her killer.

  Andy and his crew burst through the front door of the ranch house to find
me sitting in one of Mrs. Sherman’s recliners, the Glock in my lap. Mrs. Sherman sat in the other chair, cradling the picture of her daughter. Barfly was lying between us. I have no memory of what I was thinking or planning to do next.

  Every second since—in public, to the cops, to the lawyers—Andy has made me as invisible as possible. He has erased my sins.

  I’m the shadowy little sister in the stories about Mrs. William Sherman’s upcoming trial. Obstruction of justice, withholding evidence, concealing my sister’s body—I’ve stopped keeping track of what she’s charged with.

  I’ve been quietly subpoenaed in the grand jury trial of Marco and Fred, although Carl’s tape says it all. A headline in the Houston Chronicle read, Sweet Violet’s Redemption.

  In Calvert, Vickie Higgins’s husband is now the prime suspect in her death. His stick figure wife has left with the kids. Every scrap of evidence is being retested for his DNA.

  I’ve cleaned up my debts from the road—paying off the fake credit cards and closing out the accounts, fixing the damage to the rental truck, mailing an anonymous package of money to the Alpine emergency room.

  Telling my mother that she’d introduced her daughter to her murderer was one of the hardest things I ever did. I didn’t look at the glass of liquid amber she clutched. It was the first time I was glad she was holding one.

  Andy, my mother, my lawyer—they think I went to extraordinary lengths to get the truth. They only know the smallest bits of the story.

  * * *

  —

  Three days after he’d driven off in the truck, Carl tipped most of my money to an autistic woman cleaning tables at a Whataburger and the rest to the taxi driver who brought him back to Mrs. T’s at his request.

  “The world’s gone nuts,” he’d told me emphatically. “I’m hanging here for a while.” That was ten visits ago, and he still hasn’t said a word about leaving a place he swore he’d never return to.

  Now I’m back on Mrs. T’s porch steps, still trying to pull broken glass out of Carl’s mind, one splinter at a time.

  I hold one of the broken halves of the Time Travel book. The Marys are as lovely, as haunting as ever. I worry someday I will pick up this book and they will be erased, the forest cold and empty. Snatched out of the air, like Rachel. I imagine silly things like that even though I found Mary Fortson and Mary Cheetham in a 1946 registry of flu deaths.

  Carl is munching on the contents of a sack of Dairy Queen grease I brought, an old condition, and petting Baloney, a new condition. Mrs. T and Carl struck some kind of deal that involved him not telling lurid Discovery Channel stories to the woman with the wedding veil.

  I hold up the photo of the lady in the rain. I believe in my gut that Carl killed her.

  “I told you,” Carl snaps, “I don’t want to look at that damn picture again. I see her plenty. She’s sleeping with me this week. She’s so wet, Mrs. T thinks I’m peeing the bed.”

  “Let’s play your game,” I persist. “Truth or Nacho.”

  He shrugs, mouth full. His arm vibrates as he lifts a French fry to his lips. Mrs. T tells me the tremors are getting worse.

  “Do you know her name?”

  “You didn’t say Truth or Nacho.”

  “Truth or Nacho, do you know her name?”

  “Nope. Ask me something else. Ask me if I killed that girl in Waco.”

  “Did you kill Nicole Lakinski?”

  “Acquitted. Sorry. Double jeopardy.”

  Some days I think I’m just messing with an eccentric and mortally sick old man. Some days, I think he is messing with me. Mrs. T has shared the imaging from Houston. His brain is being eaten away. I don’t care. If there is the slightest chance to get any answers for Nicole’s young son, to find her body or anyone else’s, I have to try.

  Some days, I just let him drift. He’ll talk about the stories behind his favorite photographs. Giggle about how much Baloney likes baloney or quote Walt (or Dostoyevsky—usually hard to tell which). This is the way I found out that he stole the negatives for The Marys the day of his uncle’s funeral. He swears it was the only time. The other photos, he insists, are his.

  A year ago, I had attended a workshop on how to build a trusting relationship with a dementia patient. One man stood up to talk earnestly about his mother, who was brutal and demeaning to him as a child. What is the point of still being full of anger? My mother doesn’t exist anymore. How can I hate this sweet old lady who now loves me unconditionally?

  I don’t waver on an answer for that for a second. Even if Carl’s no longer a killer, there is still a witness buried inside him. Even if he can’t remember, he can’t be redeemed.

  There are just way, way too many coincidences with Carl. So I pick up a photograph. I keep up the game.

  “Truth or Nacho,” I say. “What was your pillow talk last night with the lady in the rain?”

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he mutters restlessly. “Let’s play chess. You don’t understand the concept of Truth or Nacho anymore. You don’t even have any damn nachos today.”

  * * *

  —

  A tremor got Carl. He fell in the shower and hit his head. All of us were camped at his bedside the day he died: Walt, the lady in the rain, Mrs. T, me. In his last moments, he insisted the lady in the rain had tried to help him get up.

  It was a simple graveside service. Mrs. T and her priest were the only other people who attended.

  I felt torn about speaking, about eulogizing Carl. But it felt…necessary. I rambled a little about how a great photographer records both the seen and the unseen, the fragility of life and inevitability of death. Carl would have asked why I was putting him to sleep when he was already dead.

  I hesitated about which Dostoyevsky quote to use to finish the eulogy and almost chose one Carl loved about not depriving animals of their happiness. But I caught myself. I kept replaying that moment in the barn, when Carl said I just didn’t pick the right things he was guilty of.

  I see the violent scar drizzled down his chest. I hear the whip of his machete in the woods. I remember the expert way he roped two men to a tree and callously shot one of them. I summon up the terror I felt when he played with me in the dark using a simple motel door chain or placed two fingers on my throat to probe my heartbeat. I think about missing women, grief that hangs like smoke.

  So I ended with a compromise—a line from Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead.

  Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.

  * * *

  —

  Right after the service, I searched Carl’s room. He had duct-taped his five-line will, witnessed by Mrs. T, to the back of his headboard. There were two things stapled to the piece of notebook paper. A Ziploc bag that held Nicole Lakinski’s silver owl pinky ring.

  And a deed still in his aunt’s name.

  He left that dark, wild piece of woods to me.

  Epilogue

  “My name is Grace. I was twelve when my big sister disappeared. No one touched her unmade bed for ten days until I started curling up in it. I wouldn’t let them wash the sheets. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us. One month passed. One year. One less place set at the Thanksgiving table. One less toothbrush in the holder. One less birthday to celebrate. One less, one less, one less.

  “Two years passed. Five. Reminders of Rachel, every minute of the day. The Minnie Mouse juice glass she’d drunk out of since age three untouched in the kitchen cabinet. Any hint of musky shampoo. The chatter of Friends, Green Day crooning, fireworks, Shakespeare, the Christmas ornament with her first-grade picture, the smell of spearmint dental floss, wind chimes, the color blue. Clouds.

  “The stupid hope for years every time the phone rang. The ache when it turned out to be a telemarketer, or a cop preparing my parents because they’d found unidentified female remains in Mississippi or Oklahoma or Houston. Did you forget to tell us she had a mole on her back? A touch of scoliosis? We’d turn to each o
ther: Did she have a mole we didn’t know about? Was her spine a little crooked? It was never Rachel.

  “I was a child obsessed. Then an obsessed adult. Six years passed. Ten. Rachel would have been thirty-one years old the day I buried her where she belongs. I don’t feel peace. But I think she does.”

  I sit down. Four women and one man are crowded into this tight circle. No one has touched the coffeepot. There are no cellphones, no chatter, no one but us in this anonymous room. They are assessing me. Each other. They know it is their turn to say as much as they want or as little, to use only first names.

  The youngest says she is twenty-one, which is the bare-bottom age requirement for the group. I’m guessing she’s eighteen. I like her. She’s exceptionally mature—a dreamer, a wannabe actress, a musical theater major at a community college, a mother to three of her younger siblings while her mother works nights. Despite her youth, I think it’s OK if she stays; I think the others will, too.

  Her father disappeared in Mexico a year ago without a trace, his car abandoned in the desert after visiting her grandmother in Juarez. She says way too many people vanish in Mexico for the government to bother with anything but the barest of paperwork. She bites her nails. I’m going to help her stop.

  The oldest claims to be forty-five. I’m guessing closer to fifty. Twenty-six years ago, her husband was shot to death in front of her on their San Francisco honeymoon. The cold case is listed in the files as a robbery-homicide. She doesn’t believe that. He was an ambitious assistant district attorney snuffed out by a single shot to the back of the head.