Ghost Girl in the Corner

by Daniel José Older

“I mean …”

  “Freak. Anyway, Lani Cortez missin’.”

  “I knew it!” Tee yelled. “I knew something was off when I heard she didn’t show at the game last night and —”

  “Congrats, Sherlock. Meanwhile, the whole neighborhood is out lookin’ for her, except the cops, of course, and we hit up the precinct with her fam and Uncle Neville and then the cops did their cop thing, aka nothing.”

  “So who was crying?”

  “No one was crying, it’s just Uncle Neville … After we hit up the precinct and they did their stupid little dance, he looked … I never seen him like that, Tee.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like someone had siphoned eight years of his life away. For a second he was really lookin’ like he might burst into tears.”

  “Gangsta-ass unmesswithable Uncle Neville the bossdawg of the universe? That Uncle Neville? Cry?”

  “Do we know any other Uncle Nevilles?”

  Izzy’s face lit up with a faint blue glow. Tee’s eyes got wide. She turned. The ghost girl hovered right behind her, her soft blue burn illuminating the cracks and imperfections of the basement ceiling.

  “What is it, babe?” Izzy said.

  Tee felt her heart fall a little. The secret, once a gift, now felt like a burden. Too much was at stake and she didn’t know what to do anymore. The ghost girl’s mouth hung open in a silent scream now, her arms stretched wide in a forever reach.

  Tee shuddered, turned back to Izzy. “Nothin’. This basement gives me the creeps sometimes, is all.”

  “Well, yeah, think about what happened down here.”

  “I have been, believe me.”

  “Anyway!” Izzy stood, brushed herself off, and extended a hand to Tee. “We got folks combing the neighborhood, but you know … what that really gonna do?”

  Tee grabbed her hand and heaved herself up. “True.” She took in Izzy’s face, the cool fire from the ghost girl illuminating that sharp jawline and drawing bright contours around her tightly wound braids. Her brow furrowed in determination.

  Izzy made her voice go all scratchy and dropped it a few registers. “Like Neville said: This ain’t Maine! We ain’t in the woods, and yeah, it makes people feel better to have something to do, searching, he right, but …”

  “The printing press!”

  Izzy nodded. “Why I came. You know how to work it?”

  The huge machine loomed in the darkness, its metal glinting in the ghostly glow. “Took a class last week at the center.” Tee narrowed her eyes at it. “Yeah, I got this.”

  Two hours later, Tee had set the lettering on the Linotype machine. Izzy had emailed her the pic of Lani she’d posted on Hoozit, and they’d printed it out on the laser printer. Then Tee applied the picture to the center of the page beneath the Bed-Stuy Searchlight masthead and the ghost girl’s plea: HELP HER. Below that, a couple sentences laid out the basic facts, with an additional note to call the precinct and demand they take action.

  Tee stood in front of the great metallic monstrosity and took a deep breath. “Babe! It’s ready to roll!”

  “Hold on,” Izzy said into her phone. “Comin’!”

  “I think it is anyway,” Tee muttered. Everything didn’t fit together quite like it had in the training. Tee wished Bennie wasn’t away at that stupid science camp — she was a whiz with this type of mess. The paper lay in the feed tray, great metal arms poised to swing; everything was set.

  Izzy walked up next to Tee, still on the phone. “Yeah, tonight. Well, you’re just gonnna haveta … yeah. Damn. Why is this complicated? A girl is missing, you pubic louse … Okay, see you in an hour. Peace.” She pocketed the phone and shook her head. “Men. Anyway, we good?”

  Tee nodded, let out another breath. “We good.”

  She flicked the switch; the press hummed to life. The lever came down and with a groan, the whole process leapt into motion. Shwoomp! The first paper slid out of the tray and a metallic fwiiing! rang out as the gears clicked into place and the ink pressers rolled forward over the plate with a rattling badda-badda-badda-badda-THWORP! Metal arms flung the paper against the flat plate with a CHA-chunk!, and then — ping! — slung it away, now printed, and slid it along into a netted holding tray. Then the whole thing started again with a shwoomp!

  Izzy gasped admiringly. “Babe! You did it!” She snatched the first printed sheet out of the tray and held it up. Lani Cortez’s face stared back at them off the page, her triumphant smile and big cheeks, curly hair held back by a striped headband. You could see a few teammates milling around behind her and the train tracks over Atlantic Avenue beyond them.

  Tee didn’t know Lani well, but the sight of her face, larger than life, detonated a wave of sorrow within her. “Damn. She really gone, huh.” Tee could see what Uncle Neville meant about doing something, anything, being an antidote for all that fear and sorrow. She’d been so caught up in the printing press, it hadn’t even occurred to her to feel anything.

  Badda-badda-badda-badda, the machine churned on, THWORP! The stack of papers grew. Even the ghost girl had slipped out of Tee’s mind for maybe the first time since she’d first appeared. The blue glow had faded again; she was gone.

  “You know,” Izzy said. “The beat is actually fire.”

  “Huh?”

  “Listen.”

  Shwoomp! Fwiiing! Izzy held an invisible mic up to her lips. “Uh … uh …” Badda-badda-badda-badda-THWORP! Her face morphed into that relaxed King Impervious gaze. “One two …” CHA-chunk! Ping! “One two …” Shwoomp! Fwiing! “Turn me up.”

  “Impervious on the mic!” Tee yelled. “You gotta do the rap, babe.”

  Izzy’s face came back, the King gone in an instant. “What rap?”

  “The one I … the one I missed.”

  A whole cycle of badda-baddas and shwoomps passed. Tee wondered if she’d crossed a line. “Too soon?”

  THWORP! CHA-chunk!

  Izzy lifted the invisible mic. Ping! Shwoomp!

  “I treat this / like Imma beat this,” she rapped, a sly smile growing on her face. “You just hors d’oeuvres / I’m the main meat, sis.”

  “Ohh!” Tee yelled. “The main … meat … sis. I can’t with you.”

  The printing press rolled on. Izzy gave a play-by-play of the already legendary Like a penis line and the audience’s reaction, and Tee fell out laughing as the holding tray grew heavy with sheet after sheet of posters with Lani’s smiling face.

  “Hey!” someone called from the door. “Whoa, you got it working!” Mina walked down the stairs and then just stood and gaped. “It’s beautiful!”

  Tee wiggled her eyebrows and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “So I guess you heard,” Mina said. “When I got to the Diamonds, folks were already organizing search teams. Tried calling, but …”

  “Yeah, my bad,” Tee said. “I was … caught up …”

  Mina shrugged. “It’s cool. I joined in with the Baker’s Dozen. We were swinging by this way, so I figured I’d check in.”

  “Perfect,” Izzy said, coming out of the darkness and pocketing her phone. “You can take a stack to ’em and start posting.” She passed a bunch of posters to Mina and picked up a stack for herself.

  “Where you going?” Tee asked.

  “Neville’s outside with the Caddy. We gonna run around town handing these out to the search teams and running interference for ’em if the cops come around.”

  “Oh.” Even Mina must’ve heard the disappointment in Tee’s voice. She smiled awkwardly and peaced out quick, posters in hand.

  “What is it?” Izzy asked.

  “Nothin’,” Tee said. “I just … nah, of course. Sorry. You gotta do that. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” The basement felt very empty and unendingly dark.

  Izzy squinted at her. “You sure?”

  Tee forced herself to rally. “Girl, I been here alone all damn day. I’m fine! Anyway, gotta get some more of these posters printed. Go! Sheesh!”

  “Aight
, babe.” Izzy didn’t look convinced, but she leaned in for a kiss anyway, then grabbed a few more posters and was out.

  Tee took a deep breath and faced the darkness.

  Izzy reached an arm across the front seat and craned her neck around to look at Sierra. “Any luck?”

  Voices warbled back and forth quietly on Neville’s police scanner; otherwise, the night was quiet. Sierra opened one eye. “I’d have a lot more chance having luck if folks didn’t keep interrupting me to ask if I’m having any luck.”

  Izzy turned around. “Fine. Sheesh.” They’d pulled up at the meeting spot about fifteen minutes earlier, and Sierra had gone into one of her transcendental-whatever states where she could see through the spirits’ eyes. Which was all well and good, but Neville was off smoking and Izzy was bored and anxious. She pulled out her phone to check Hoozit just as Neville poked his head in the driver’s side window.

  “They comin’,” he said.

  “Finally!” Izzy hopped out through her open window. Farther up Broadway, a half-dozen figures approached. The nasal drone of tiny revving engines got louder, and then Izzy could make out Trey and some of his boys riding itsy-bitsy motorcycles. The whole crew hopped the curb and squealed to a melodramatic halt in front of Neville and Izzy.

  “That was a lot,” Izzy said. “You really feel okay being an almost grown-ass man and riding around town on that thing?”

  Trey shrugged. “We here, ain’t we? You gonna re us up or you gonna roast us?”

  Izzy shrugged. “I mean, both, to be honest.”

  Neville chuckled, then walked around to the trunk and pulled out a tall stack of posters. “Here you go. Be careful out there. You got tape?”

  Trey nodded, shoving some posters in his shoulder bag and handing the rest off to his crew. “Yeah, Corey works at a hardware store and he got a key, so … yeah.”

  “Y’all good?” Izzy asked.

  Trey shook his head. “Nah, we worried. But we gonna find her. And Iz — thanks for this.”

  She waved him off. “No thing, man. Tee did all the work, we just handing ’em off.”

  “Sierra with y’all?” Trey asked.

  “She sleepin’,” Neville said with a glint of steel in his voice.

  Trey gulped. “Gotya. No problem.”

  “Peace,” Izzy called as the boys took off into the night. “Where we headin’ next?”

  Neville checked his pocket watch. “It’s damn near four a.m., kiddo. Lemme drop y’all off and catch some shut-eye myself.”

  Sierra was just blinking back to the land of the living when Izzy and Neville got in the front seat. She caught Izzy’s gaze in the rearview and shook her head. Izzy sighed. They pulled off toward Bed-Stuy.

  Twenty minutes later, they’d dropped off Sierra and were flying up Throop, past twenty-four-hour fried-chicken spots and shuttered bodegas and nail salons. It was a warm night, but the breeze rushed in through Izzy’s open window, sent her braids dancing behind her head, and made her smile in spite of everything going on.

  At least, it had been. The Caddy had started to slow a block ago, and now was barely crawling along. Up ahead, all the traffic lights shone bright green against the night sky.

  “What’s happening?” Izzy asked. “We low on gas?”

  Neville didn’t say anything. The car kept slowing, then finally came to a stop in front of a housing project.

  “Neville, what is it?”

  He just stared ahead, his jaw trembling ever so slightly.

  Izzy nodded. He would answer when he was ready, or he wouldn’t. But pestering wasn’t going to help. She settled into her seat. Neville cut the engine; a symphony of crickets filled the air. Not far away, some cats were either fighting or boning, letting out unholy shrieks in the night.

  Neville lit a Conejo, exhaled heavily. “Corinna Dutch.”

  “Who?”

  “My niece.”

  A delivery truck rattled past, then a skinny, bare-chested old man on a bicycle.

  “She was your age” — he glanced at Izzy — “edge of seventeen. And then …” Neville swallowed hard. “Halloween, eleven years ago. Her birthday. She just …” He threw his hands up, dropped them in his lap. “She never came back.”

  Izzy let a moment pass. “Did you —”

  “Everywhere.” His voice held whole continents of misery.

  “And the cops?”

  Neville pulled his lips in, his hands in prayer position against his chin. “That was the same week Jennifer Lorraine went missing.”

  “The white girl from that reality show? I heard about that.”

  “The reality show came after she went missing,” Neville said. “And by ‘went missing,’ I mean ‘ran off with a guy she met online and threw away her cell phone.’”

  “Papers covered it for weeks, huh?”

  “Front page, girl. You already know. Not a peep about Corinna.”

  “Damn.”

  “And the cops said the same shit they did just tonight … Maybe she ran off with a boy.”

  “I’m surprised you ain’t the one that had to be held back earlier.”

  “Oh, I was,” Neville said. “It just all happened inside.” He took a drag. “Out of sight.”

  “Gangsta,” Izzy whispered, more to herself than Neville, but he nodded slightly in acknowledgment.

  “And they never …”

  “You know the one paper that covered my niece’s disappearance, Isake? I’ll give you one guess.”

  “Manny and them.”

  “You goddamn right. Day in and day out, the Bed-Stuy Searchlight ran updates, her picture, everything. Manny was out there every day, working the story.”

  Izzy shook her head. “Wow.”

  “And no … they never found who did it. They found … they found her body, though.” He put his face in his hands and shook silently. “In the Hudson. Not in the city, though, somewhere upstate.”

  Izzy scooted closer in the seat, then she put her arm around Neville’s heaving shoulders and rested her head against him.

  “Hello?” Tee felt stupid yelling into the empty basement, but the darkness and silence hung like infinite curtains over the place, chilling her somewhere deep within, and speaking was the only way she knew to break through it.

  No one answered, but the ghost girl’s hazy blue glow seemed to taint the dark. Or maybe that was Tee’s mind playing tricks on her, the fading afternoon light still burning across her retinas.

  She walked down the stairs, holding her hands out for the light chain. For a heart-plummeting moment, she couldn’t find it. All the holy terrors of her nightmares crouched in the shadows: who or whatever had snatched Lani, those things that had come at them in the Tower last month … then her fingers glazed the frayed string at the end of the chain and she pulled hard on it. The overheads flickered on; the place was empty.

  She’d been there till the late-late the night before, first printing as many posters as she could, and then, when the ghost girl had finally reappeared, trying her damnedest to get some more information out of her. But the ghost girl hadn’t been able to give much. Tee did manage to ’shape her into the Linotype again, but then nothing had happened, and the nothing extended on and on. When Tee started nodding off, she shook her head and shut everything down for the night.

  Now, walking toward the Linotype, she saw that brand-new slugs sat in the chamber. She blinked and ran to it.

  WHEREISFT

  For a few seconds, all Tee could hear was her own racing heartbeat.

  “Eff … tee,” she said out loud, and her voice, which just a few moments earlier had been a relief, suddenly unnerved her. She dropped her shoulder bag, took off her cap, and walked along the far wall of the basement, running her hands along the cool concrete. “Fra-aaank … Fred … Fitz …” She was weary of giving voice to the question itself. The echo of yesterday still shuddered through her: Help who on infinite repeat. She had lost herself, almost completely, as if the ghost girl and her riddle were a cr
uel tide she’d been swept away in. Almost swept away. If it hadn’t been for Izzy …

  Tee checked her phone. It had been almost sunrise when they’d texted their good-night kisses to each other. Izzy had mentioned something about Neville and it being quite a night but said she’d explain everything to Tee in the morning. Of course they’d both slept the hell in, and Tee had texted when she woke, but Izzy was a world-champion grand master of sleeping in.

  She was probably still asleep.

  Tee shook away the worries; they were relentless today, but she had to focus.

  She walked along the back wall, past Manny’s gallery of autographed celebrity photos, many of which included his own smiling face beside the actors and politicians.

  “Freemason … friend … frère.”

  The question lingered, heavy on her tongue, begging to be released.

  “Who —” she started, then almost choked on the word. “Father!” She stopped. “Father Thomas?” She spun around, as if saying his name would somehow summon him, Candyman-style, into the basement with her. “Father Thomas,” Tee whispered. “Shit … no.”

  The basement was still empty — no ghost girl, no Father Thomas. But she was in his house, technically, or his office anyway. Father Thomas had been the head priest at the church upstairs for as long as Tee could remember. There was no way he … Was there? She tried to shuffle through all her memories of him. There weren’t many: Father Thomas at various block parties and neighborhood events, smiling, shaking hands, waving at folks. Father Thomas gardening; Father Thomas passing in the street with grocery bags. Izzy had once said Father Thomas woulda been hot if he had tits and everyone had groaned, and the running joke that no one could tell what race he was extended another couple measures. “You think when cops see him running,” Izzy had asked, “they ask him what he is before they start shootin’?”

  More groans. “He’s white,” Sierra had insisted. “He has a tan. Dassit!”

  “But always?” Tee demanded. “He got a tanning salon behind the pulpit somewhere?”

  Izzy shook her head. “He’s white but he’s one of those borderline-type whites with the permatans, like Sicilian or something.”