by Lisa Black
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t put the time to good use.
She went into her mother’s bedroom, at first held up at the doorway by a wave of grief and guilt. She shouldn’t be poking through her mother’s things, not that her mother had ever minded Ghost coming into her room. When she was a little kid she used to pull her mother’s clothes off the hangers to play dress-up, sure that she would look exactly like the beautiful woman one day. Her mother would patiently drag her vanity chair into the closet so that Ghost could hang all the items back up again, waiting for her daughter to decide the work wasn’t worth the fun. It took more than a couple of sessions.
Too old for that now, and her pale skin, boring brown hair and shapeless body didn’t resemble her mother in any way. She must take after her father. She checked his picture on the mirror again, the stiff smile, blond hair sticking straight up in the style of the time, a loud shirt threatening to come untucked from dress slacks that looked too big. The beginnings of a dimple in one cheek. He shouldn’t be too hard to recognize if she saw him. When she saw him.
She also needed to find the shadow man.
Her father could help her. He’s the only person who could, who would – he must have loved her mother once. She really needed him right now, which was why it would be the perfect time for him to reappear.
But of course he might really be dead like Nana said and like Mom usually said. Then she might really be on her own, except for Nana and that nice lady Theresa. Theresa was also looking for the shadow man and she had all those microscopes and technology and computers and stuff so she would be able to do it. Ghost knew that from watching TV, when she could coax the remote away from Nana and her reality shows.
So she had better stick close to Theresa. Theresa would find the shadow man and tell the cops and they would come and arrest him and tie him up and put him in a room with bars, where he would never ever get out. Maybe they’d even shoot him. That would be all right with Ghost.
But just in case, she should look for clues on her own, too. So she did a slow pirouette in her mother’s bedroom to see what she could see.
The police had brought back her car and handed Nana a brown paper bag with her mother’s purse and keys and other things from the car that they had examined. Nana hadn’t even looked inside, just asked Ghost to take it upstairs. Now she dumped it out on the floor. Keys – keys. No clue there. A box of cigarettes which had some black powdery stuff all over it. It came off on Ghost’s fingers and she wiped them on her shirt. Some papers with the name of the car and the insurance company and other boring stuff like that. Ghost turned to the purse. Her mother had bought it at Payless and loved the big slouchy thing even though the vinyl had worn off in spots. Inside she found two more boxes of cigarettes, two ropes of plastic beads (red and yellow), pieces of gum and a vial of hand sanitizer, four different lip glosses and one ChapStick, two bottles of perfume and one powder compact as well as mascara and a slowly leaking bottle of foundation, which meant Ghost had to wipe her fingers on her shirt again. Her mother’s wallet, which held twenty-two dollars and fifteen cents, her driver’s license, other plastic cards and a bunch of worn business cards. Some were restaurants, or grilles, or had people’s names on them. These were also covered in the black powdery stuff. None sounded familiar to Ghost. She put aside the money to give to Nana and separated out all the restaurant and bar cards. She made a third pile with the lip glosses, which she might want to use some day. Waste not, want not, Nana always said.
That just left her mother’s cell phone. Ghost ripped open the Manila envelope and let it slide out. She didn’t have a phone of her own but navigated the device with the same facility as any average American child. The last call made came to their house, probably Mom calling Nana about some little thing, which she did about a million times a day. Two prior calls to numbers Ghost didn’t recognize, and one before that to a cousin in Pennsylvania. Incoming calls didn’t help, either. The last one had been at 12:15 p.m. from a local number and lasted three minutes. Ghost picked up the phone and punched in the number and got ‘Dr Bashir’s answering service’. She hung up. Of the other two numbers, one didn’t answer and the other was the Cleveland Public Library. Ghost gave up on the phone numbers and paged through the rest of the menu.
The last photo taken featured Ghost, and she knew that had been several weeks prior when she spent dinner making funny faces, which amused her mother and annoyed her grandmother. Samantha’s text messages on the previous day had all been to and from a childhood friend who had moved to Detroit and centered on the friend’s impatience with her husband. Some of the shorthand mystified Ghost but didn’t seem relevant to what had happened that morning. Her mother’s last few texts did, however. The friend had apparently gotten bored with electronically bashing her spouse and asked: ‘Where R U?’
Samantha responded. ‘Tavern of crse. Slim pickins!’
The friend: ‘No1 good?’
Sam: ‘Losers cap L!’
Friend: ‘Go home.’
Sam: ‘Goin 2. Love U.’
Friend: ‘Bye.’ The last text had come at 2:28 that morning.
‘What are you doing up there?’ Nana shouted from below, startling Ghost’s entire body into a spasm from head to toe.
She recovered enough to shout, ‘Nothing!’
No further inquiry. Nana just wanted to make sure she hadn’t snuck out.
So her mother had been in a tavern a few hours before she died. Ghost knew what a tavern was, it was a bar. Her mother liked bars. Nana didn’t. Nana would always say a bar wasn’t a place where a young lady should be by herself, and Mom would always respond that she went with a bunch of friends and they had fun. Ghost couldn’t wait to be old enough to go to bars.
She went into her room to store the lip glosses in her pink vinyl jewelry box and got one of her school notebooks and a pen to write down the unidentified numbers. School would be letting out in two weeks and they would be having tests and things, but she couldn’t think about that now. She didn’t care much about school in general and wondered if she even had to go now that she didn’t have a mother. She probably did. Nana would make her.
But not tomorrow. Tomorrow she needed to retrace her mother’s footsteps. She plucked the picture of her mother with her two friends off the vanity mirror. She could show it to people and ask them if they’d seen her the day before. They did that on TV all the time too and always found out something important. After a moment’s thought, she took the one of her father as well, sliding them both carefully into her back pocket.
After that she poked through her mother’s laundry, even though the items were a day or two old. She didn’t find anything but some cellophane from a cigarette wrapper in a pair of jeans and a gum wrapper in a shirt. Nana always used to yell about her mother’s habit of leaving such debris in her clothing. ‘Disintegrates in the wash and gets all over, or winds up a lump of melted plastic in the dryer.’ And her mother would laugh. It occurred to Ghost that she would never hear her mother laugh again and suddenly she was crying, crying in great gasping sobs that choked her until she stopped just long enough to get a breath and start again. Almost more of screams than sobs, animal noises that echoed in her head long after she had fallen into an exhausted sleep, curled up among her mother’s dirty clothes at the bottom of her closet.
EIGHTEEN
When they reached the bottom, Frank told Novosek to take Theresa up one floor and wait there. Predictably, his cousin began to argue but Novosek seemed content, either to play her protector or to stay out of the cop stuff, and the lift ascended before Theresa could exit.
With a nod, Frank and Angela separated. She went outside into the relatively well-lit yard, and he moved through the pitch that was the building’s interior.
Anyone on the premises would have heard the lift mechanism, of course, but still he tried to move as quietly as possible. He kept his weapon holstered and instead took out his unlit flashlight. Couldn’t see a thing, but thought he hear
d someone. A scrape, a footstep, a soft clank.
He moved toward the sound, promptly grinding one toe into a five-gallon bucket. Only the distant openings to the outside were visible; the entire interior was one big ball of night.
He moved around an encircled area in the center – the bottom of the elevator shaft, he guessed – and caught a flicker of movement. Despite every box, barrel, pipe and beam in the place trying to trip him, he moved closer. The guy was in the south-east quadrant of the first floor, bouncing around with something shiny and accompanied by a steady sound Frank recognized but couldn’t place.
Three more steps.
Almost like water running through a pipe, or—
The man crouched, the sound came, he straightened again.
Spray paint.
Frank unclipped his weapon but did not remove it, right hand resting on the butt. With his left he raised the flashlight and flicked it on. ‘POLICE! DON’T MOVE!’
The guy didn’t listen. In one smooth twist he threw the metal object at Frank and dashed for the south edge.
Frank tried to dash, stumbled over something, regained his balance, shouted again, picked up some speed and tripped over something large and heavy. Couldn’t recover, went down hard on his left shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t wind up speared on a piece of rebar or anything else . . .
‘STOP!’ he heard Angela shout, but he was too busy turning his face to avoid getting a small cylinder in the eye, and still getting a large object to the kidney. Then he was up and moving again, part of his mind wondering how these workers ever got anything done with all this crap in the way. The man’s silhouette stood out clearly against the outside light, finally coming to a stop and raising his arms. It took all the self-control Frank had not to draw down on him, but felt fairly sure that a paint can versus a Glock 40 would not be considered comparable force. Besides, Angela had drawn on the guy, and the street lights glinting along the length of her barrel now provided more than enough incentive for immobility. The man stayed completely still – except for his mouth.
‘Jeez, guns? Don’t you think that’s a bit of an overreaction?’
Frank pulled back one of his hands for a cuff, and then the other. ‘She saw her partner go down,’ he said in what he considered a reasonable tone. ‘You’re lucky you don’t have three to the center mass right now.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Anybody else here with you? Tell me straight, or I’ll turn my trigger-happy partner loose and whatever happens will be on your head.’
‘No. Just me.’
Frank believed him only because he had seen him come in, but then, it was a big site. He’d leave the gun unclipped for now. He marched the guy out to Angela, then went back in to retrieve the paint can, picking it up with two fingers on the edge. His cousin had drilled proper techniques for the preservation of fingerprints into everyone she knew.
Then he scouted the area with the flashlight, listening to Angela collect the guy’s vitals: Name, Scott Crain. DOB: 7/30/84. Address—
‘Little old to be tagging buildings, aren’t you?’ Frank called, having found the man’s handiwork. ‘We Ire Not Dogs. What does that mean?’
‘We Are Not Dogs.’
‘It says Ire.’
‘It’s dark in there,’ Crain said with a pout. ‘Do you know what they’re going to do in this building? Keep people in cages—’
‘It’s a jail,’ Frank heard Angela say in disbelief as he returned to the lift to give Novosek and Theresa the all-clear. Theresa went off to get her camera to photograph the damage and Novosek, without comment, went with her. Frank wondered how foolish it might be to let him, technically a suspect in Sam’s murder, serve as Theresa’s escort, but at the moment Crain and his allies were the more unknown threat, and Novosek would hardly attack one of the investigating parties while in proximity to other investigating parties.
Still, he didn’t like it, watching his cousin’s body disappear through the gate in the fence. He didn’t like anything about this whole case.
He returned just as Angela asked their prisoner if he knew Samantha Zebrowski. After a pause that lasted one half-second too long, he said no. Angela showed him the picture taken from the dead girl’s photo ID.
‘I can tell you one thing,’ Scott Crain said.
‘And that is?’
‘She won’t be the last.’
He drove past the house, slowly. It hadn’t been hard to get the address from the records. All dark, no sign of the kid, although he hadn’t really expected her to be waiting for him on the porch holding a sign reading: I’m the one who saw you. Come and silence me or you’ll go to jail forever and ever.
That’s if the kid even existed. He still couldn’t be sure she hadn’t been some sort of an angel, Samantha’s soul incarnate or a truer form of the hopeless demon that bitch had actually been.
Could he really do that? Kill a child? He didn’t have anything against little kids, and she might be all right, might grow up to be an easy-going sort and not a frickin’ tease like her mother. Though it wouldn’t be physically hard: just bash her in the head or strangle her. He could probably choke her with one hand, that tiny little neck.
Or he could take her up the building? Go even higher this time, all the way to the top? Toss her down to the same spot as her mother. The bones would scatter for twenty feet, easy.
Then what kind of angel would come to weep for her? An even smaller one? If she had represented Samantha, who would embody the child’s soul . . .? Trying to picture even the question much less the answer made his head swim. But the image of the girl falling backward from the top of the building, plunging into the dark night air, filled his brain with a growing brightness that eventually blinded him, so that he had to step on the brakes to avoid hitting some idiot who stepped out into the street.
He took a better look at his surroundings. People came and went from the drug house next door, but those kind of people would not interfere unless he threatened their trade. The house across the street and slightly south of the kid’s place had grass two feet high, three broken windows, and not a trace of internal illumination. Vacant.
Perfect.
He pulled into the drive and up next to the house. Then he got out, locking the vehicle securely, and waited for some response from the place.
Nothing. Perfect again.
It might even be a good place to hide the body, should he choose to go that route. Throwing the girl from the building would be delightful but possibly – what, impractical? Too showy. The cops would go crazy. But if she simply disappeared, well, any one of a million things could have happened. She might have run away. She might have run into the wrong wino during one of her walkabouts. Sam would be written off as a suicide and he’d be free to soar on to his next adventure.
But dropping her over the side of the forty-first floor . . .
As usual, his romantic side warred with the sensible half. The eternal struggle. Besides, would she really be able to identify him? Would anyone even listen to her? She was just a kid.
It occurred to him that the cops hadn’t been walking around with any composite sketches, so obviously she hadn’t been able to describe him too well.
He pushed open the gate in the rickety fence; it made no noise, the hinges well-oiled. Ah, my little Ghost. You’ve made things so easy for me. We’re more alike than you might think.
Climbing up the steps to the porch took a lot of the perk out of his attitude, however. For one thing, the steps creaked. For another, the door seemed nowhere near as rickety as the fence, and was locked. He pulled out his knife, tried to fit it into the keyhole and turn. He could do this without making any noise but it also didn’t open the door.
Stumped. Whatever else he might be, he had never been a thief. He had no idea how to break into an apparently secure household.
Of course, what self-respecting thief goes in the front door anyway?
He got back down from the porch without alerting the media by stepping
on the furthest side of each riser where it connected to the frame. Then he circled the house. No one raised a hue and cry. Not a sound from the drug house, though a glowing dot on the back porch indicated a cigarette-smoking sentry. A dog rustled in a yard a few houses over, but it merely whimpered a bit. People in this neighborhood had been trained to mind their own business.
The basement windows were glass block. No love there.
The back door proved as sturdy as the front. He could break one of the panes and open it, but that would alert the grandma and maybe the kid. He wasn’t even sure what he planned to do once he got inside and so couldn’t decide on a blitz attack or a more stealthy approach.
Then he circled into the north side of the yard, a grassy area about eight feet wide, with a tree. A huge tree with one huge limb that led right on to the half-roof outside the second floor. He had to back all the way up to the neighbor’s fence to see it, but the north wall had two windows on the second floor. One of them had been left open. Only an inch or two, but open.
And now he knew why the kid oiled the gate but didn’t care that the steps squeaked.
Damn, kid. You really did make it easy for me.
Thank you, my little angel, my little demon.
NINETEEN
Theresa called her daughter on the way home, using the voice calling feature on her cell phone so as not to endanger those driving in the other lanes of I-71 as she squinted at tiny digits on the keypad. The phone felt cooperative that night and only made her repeat the name twice. ‘Call Rachael. Call Rach-ael.’
Rachael’s roommate answered, a sweet girl from Maple Heights who was thinking about pre-med. The prior month she’d been thinking about pre-law, and before the Christmas break, elementary education. The phone must have been moved to her desk as Rachael herself never answered any more, and now, though Kia promised to hand the phone ‘right over’, she took an inordinate amount of time to move six feet across the room to pick up the receiver. ‘Hello.’
