Forgotten Spirits

by Barbara Deese

  “Are you kidding? If you have as many thoughts bouncing around in your head right now as I do, it’s going to be a long evening.”

  They sat together on the loveseat facing the Christmas tree. The sun had completely dropped from view.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” said Cate, leaning back, her long legs stretched out in front of her.

  Robin curled her legs under her and pulled an afghan from the back of the loveseat to drape over their laps. “That was quite a story,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s the whole story, do you?”

  Cate shook her head. “Nope. She’s holding something back.”

  “She talked about how terrified they were that they’d been seen, and yet they grabbed whatever the dead guy dropped. Did she really expect us to believe they never found out what was in the cooler? I mean, why even bring it up if she was just going to lie about it?”

  “I’m thinking the same thing. I’ve never thought of Foxy as a liar, but she’s definitely hiding something. Either she did something she’s ashamed of, or she really believes whoever killed that guy will track her down and kill her too.”

  “Or both.”

  “Or both. Does that even seem plausible to you?”

  Cate considered before answering. “It does seem far-fetched, but then who would’ve guessed any part of what Foxy just told us? Just because something sounds weird doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

  Robin nodded. “Life is weird. Just think about our last couple of years, Cate. Who’d have predicted the messes we got ourselves into?”

  Grinning, Cate said, “Yeah, but we get points for getting ourselves out of them, don’t we?”

  Robin chuckled. “Exactly what I told Brad.”

  The two of them spent the next hour cooking up scenarios, each one more outrageous than the last, to explain Foxy’s behavior, beginning with whatever was in the cooler.

  “I think it was jewelry,” Robin suggested. “They saw the cat burglar get killed by the man he robbed, and it took the victim-slash-murderer seventeen years to figure out who the witnesses were and now,” she said, lowering her voice ominously, “he’s picking them off one by one.”

  “Why would he kill the witnesses if he’s the one who got robbed?”

  “Because they saw him kill the thief. Maybe the killer isn’t really a victim. Maybe he’s part of a huge ring of international jewel thieves, who won’t quit until they find the, the—”

  “The Pink Panther diamond!” Cate said.

  “Exactly!”

  “No, I think it was a mob hit. I think the guy ran off with someone’s head in the bag.” Cate pulled the afghan up under her chin.

  Robin made a face, but eagerly added, “Yes! And they recognized the face! Foxy and her friends are the only ones in the world, other than the mobster who killed him, who know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa!”

  “Right! And now she’s in the witness protection program.”

  They stopped talking when Brad passed the open door.

  Robin lowered her voice. “Maybe it was money, lots of it, and they split it, but now one of them wants it all and is killing off the others.”

  Suddenly sobered, Cate said, “That’s actually possible. There’s a name for that, where you get a bunch of people to buy shares, and then as each investor dies, their share gets split among the survivors.”

  “Right! It was in that book by Robert Louis Stevenson.” Robin searched her memory. “It’s called a tontine.”

  “Yes! And you know what happened to the investors in The Wrong Box?”

  Chapter 6

  Before going inside, Foxy paused on her front walk. She saw tracks in the snow where the young men who rented an apartment next door routinely cut through between the buildings. She felt suddenly alone. With the upstairs renter gone and the landlord on a cruise, the house felt cavernous and a little spooky. But of course she had her pets. Molly Pat would let her know if something was wrong.

  She walked up the steps. Passing through the porch, she glanced to make sure the blue ashtray was empty. Sniffing the air, she detected no odor of cigarettes. She let out her pent-up breath and mounted the stairs. Even before she reached the second floor she could hear Elvis howling. He had a large repertoire of words, as far as cat vocabularies went, and what he was saying now was no pleasant greeting. She had a sick feeling as she unlocked the door and opened it. Elvis stood in the middle of the living room, his black tail bushed out like a Halloween cat’s. It was the feline equivalent of having the hair stand up on the back of the neck, which was exactly what Foxy experienced, looking at him.

  Molly Pat rushed to lick her outstretched hand and whined. “What on earth?” Foxy muttered. “You two act like you’re possessed.”

  After a few minutes they were all a little calmer. Foxy grabbed a throw blanket and plunked down in her new, lime-green recliner. Closing her eyes, she did her best to shake off all thoughts of Sierra and her appalling death.

  Elvis jumped into her lap. As she ran her hands over the cat’s fur, she remembered the day she’d found the scrawny kitten almost nineteen years ago. More accurately, the kitten had found her one night when she’d stepped out the back door for a cigarette between sets. She’d watched him slither through the narrow opening of an overfull Dumpster and come out with something in his mouth. That cat was no bigger than the rats she’d seen hanging around the garbage. The next night she’d waited for him and tossed him some shrimp from the buffet. The black kitten waited at the back door for a handout each night for a week, and since she could hardly leave him there on her nights off, she took him home.

  Her husband, Vinnie, named him Elvis. Sometimes they called him the King. When it was time for her to leave Las Vegas, the alley cat was pretty much all she took with her, and although it seemed unkind to deprive Vinnie of the cat’s company, it was the way it had to be. She figured Elvis was as sick of life on the Strip as she was.

  The King was definitely in his Fat Elvis stage now. In cat years, he was much older than she was, and sometimes she looked at him and felt a pang, imagining the day he wouldn’t be around. Only recently, she’d noticed Elvis was sporting a few gray hairs on his face. As for her own gray hairs, she’d colored them with henna for so long she almost forgot she had any.

  Foxy turned on the TV for distraction, but the only words she heard were in her head as she played and replayed the phone call from Tina in an endless loop. Until Tina had called her during the book club lunch, Foxy could pretend her fears were unfounded, but now there was no such delusion.

  Replaying that call in her head, Foxy felt prickles of fear crawling up her neck. From where she sat in her recliner, her eyes played across her living room. She peered into the shadow made by her bookshelf. The flickering of the television as it flashed on the walls made her jumpy. She shut off the television and opened the refrigerator. Even though she’d had wine at Robin’s house, she decided to pour herself a glass of chardonnay.

  Sleep didn’t come easily to her that night, but after sipping a glass of wine and listening to music, Foxy finally succumbed, only to be wakened by Elvis pawing her arm and yowling. She opened one eye to look at the clock. It was three eighteen. “I’m not feeding you in the middle of the night,” she scolded.

  The cat’s ears perked up. He turned his head toward the back of the house. Foxy strained to hear whatever had caught his attention. “It’s just the guys next door, Elvis. Please let me sleep.”

  She shut her eyes and began to drift back to sleep. In that strange state between consciousness and unconsciousness, she sensed the cat staring at her from the foot of the bed. And then she remembered Sierra was dead. After getting hang-up calls. Paralyzed by the thought it might not be Elvis looking at her, she lay perfectly still, listening to the beating of her heart. When she was able to move again, she flung the bedding aside, l
eapt to her feet and snapped on her bedside lamp.

  She was alone in her room.

  * * *

  Waking from a fretful sleep, Tina held the phone to her ear and looked at the alarm clock on her nightstand before answering. When she heard who it was, she said, “Wylie, it’s after one in the morning.” She waited for him to say something and watched the rain coursing down her bedroom window.

  Wylie’s voice was heavy with despair. It was fair to assume he was taking Sierra’s death even harder than she was. He rambled on about how much he’d loved Sierra, and how guilty he felt that their last phone call had gotten ugly. “She even asked if I was stalking her. How could she actually think that, after all we’ve been through? I mean, for the love of God!”

  Wylie and Sierra had been crazy about each other once, but they could never stay together for more than a few months. And yet they hadn’t been able to live apart for more than a few months, either. “She didn’t really suspect you. She was just looking for any explanation other than—” Words caught in her throat. “Other than the mafia.”

  After a long pause, he said, “I know. Vinnie said something like that, too.”

  “Are we crazy to think her death has anything to do with that night? It was so long ago.” Tina was now wide awake. She turned on lights. Padding into the kitchen for a glass of water, she shivered as she felt a gust of cold air.

  The night they’d witnessed a man get gunned down passed before her eyes, as it often did. She wanted to rewind the movie in her head, back to the moment they exited the casino. Wylie had made a joke about a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. She was still blonde, Foxy was still a redhead, and Sierra was dead.

  “Well, Vinnie took it seriously,” Wylie said. “especially when I said Sierra thought she was being stalked.”

  “Foxy thinks she’s being stalked, too!” Tina blurted out.

  A long pause. “You didn’t tell her about Sierra’s stalker, did you?”

  “Of course. I had to warn her.” Sitting at the kitchen table, Tina scratched her ankle, noticing a new varicose vein. Her toes, stuffed for too many years into all sorts of dance shoes, sported callouses and painful twisted joints.

  Wylie used his big, angry voice. “Didn’t you say she’s dating a cop?”

  “A sheriff,” she corrected. “I know, but maybe he can help us.”

  “Yeah? And maybe he can hurt us. If he starts snooping around, he’s just gonna stir things up. He asks a few questions of the wrong people, and pretty soon some mobbed-up cop in Nevada gets us all killed.”

  “I had to tell her about the stalker, Wylie,” she said again.

  There was a grunt on the other end.

  “Foxy warned us, way back then. Don’t you think we should warn her?”

  “Yeah.” His voice cracked. “I suppose you’re right. I told Vinnie too. He knows better than anyone what those people can do.”

  “I know.” Sierra remembered all too well.

  “They hurt him bad. Thing is, they didn’t get what they were after. You think they’re gonna let that go?”

  “They did let it go. For years.” Bare branches of her Pacific willow slapped against the kitchen window. The damp winter air seeped into her bones. “Even the mob would’ve given up by now!”

  “You got a better explanation?”

  Well, that was really the crux of it. Maybe Sierra really had committed suicide. Maybe she’d just picked up some small town stalker with a crush on her who killed her. Maybe it had nothing to do with the rest of them. And maybe Big Al’s death had been a simple hit and run. As long as Sierra had been the only one being stalked, there were explanations that didn’t involve her and Wylie and Foxy and Vinnie.

  But now, no matter how she looked at it, there was only one story that bound them all together. When they’d counted out the cash in the cooler bag, each of them had walked away with over a hundred thousand dollars. Not chump change to anyone.

  She still remembered the look on Vinnie’s face when she and Foxy tried to convince the others to turn the money in to the police. From the moment he’d laid eyes on all that cash, the gambling fever was in his eyes. Tina had seen it and so had Foxy.

  When all was said and done, Sierra was the only one who’d come out of it unscathed.

  Unscathed! Tina tried not to picture her beautiful friend the way her son had found her.

  It had taken Tina years before she’d put it all behind her, and now, with Sierra’s death, the fear and mistrust were back. “Listen, I’m going to pack up and go stay with a friend for a while,” she said. When Wylie asked where he could find her, she said, “You don’t need to know.”

  Chapter 7

  On Sunday morning, Grace lay in bed, sorting dream from reality and wondering if she’d concocted Foxy’s story about her days in Las Vegas. She opened one eye to see her bedside clock. She could go back to sleep another fifty-seven minutes until the alarm went off, but if she were to get up now, she’d have an entire leisurely hour before having to get ready for choir practice.

  If Robin was willing to get up for choir after throwing that lovely party yesterday, Grace figured she could drag herself out of bed. Grace’s eyelids were heavy and her body begged for more sleep. However, there was little hope of getting any sleep now, with Fred, dear Fred, lying on his side facing her, his mouth slack as he snored loudly. He used to snore only when sleeping on his back, but lately he could make an unbelievable racket in just about any position. She wondered, only for a split second, if he’d still be able to snore with a pillow over his head.

  Readjusting her ear plugs, she covered her own head with a pillow. His snoring managed to penetrate even that. It was like sleeping with a chainsaw!

  Last week when she’d floated the idea of separate bedrooms, Fred had looked at her with a bemused smile, and said, “Sweetheart, you may not realize it, but I’m not the only one snoring.” She’d said it couldn’t possibly be as bad as the noises he made, and he’d responded, “I should record you some night. You would not believe the sounds you make.”

  It had been embarrassing. If what he’d said was true, she not only had to put up with his noise, but would be too self-conscious about making unladylike sounds in her sleep to get any sleep at all. Last night, she’d decided to borrow Fred’s own idea. She’d dug up his digital recorder, put new batteries in it and hung it on their bedpost. Fred had never even noticed it.

  She glowered at him now as he slept, lips puffing out with each exhalation—Puh, puh, puh, followed by a pause and then a loud snort, over and over. Snatching the recorder from the bedpost, she threw on robe and slippers and shambled into the kitchen. Measuring coffee into the filter, she couldn’t believe she was upright. She felt like she could sleep through anything, and yet, obviously, she simply couldn’t sleep through Fred’s one-man percussion concert.

  As the coffee brewed, she took the recorder into the family room, pressed a button and listened. She heard a bit of rustling, which sounded like her adjusting her pillows, and then silence. She fast-forwarded, and this time she heard labored breathing. She advanced the recording some more, and there it was, a remarkable cacophony of noises, all produced by the resonating chambers of just one man. Had she not heard him herself, she would have thought she was listening to a herd of wild boars. Hearing the flush of the toilet upstairs, she turned off the recorder. Looking for someplace to stash it, she saw her open purse and slipped it in.

  Yawning, she poured two mugs of coffee and emptied a sugar packet into his and handed it to him. They read the Sunday paper while they ate their oatmeal. The Star Tribune was fat with Christmas ads, which Fred deposited in a messy pile in the middle of the table. Grace took a pen and marked various offerings in the Variety section, anything that might remotely appeal to her boys when they spent time at home for the holidays.

  The Twin Cities of
Minneapolis and St. Paul offered an impressive number of cultural events on a daily basis—theaters, galleries, music, museums, visual arts, lectures—basically anything you’d find in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Boston. For years, Minneapolis had been second only to New York City in the number of either theaters or theater tickets sold per capita.

  Brett was in an a cappella group in college, and so she circled some choir concerts he might enjoy. Chad’s tastes ran more to graphic arts and history. She highlighted a play at the History Museum and an exhibit at the Walker Art Center.

  Her husband looked over the top of the business section. “You got up early.” There was an edge to his comment, and she reminded herself he’d been under a lot of work pressure.

  “I had trouble sleeping.”

  He grunted. “You’ve been looking awfully tired lately. Maybe you should have your thyroid checked.” He gulped the last of his coffee and stood to refill his cup.

  She tried to keep her tone light. “Nope, my thyroid checks out just fine.”

  They swapped newspaper sections. After a few minutes, Fred said, “Did you ask the doctor about sleep apnea? You were kind of noisy again last night.”

  “I was noisy?” She shook her head wearily. “As a matter of fact, I did ask the doctor, and she thought I should do a sleep study. I set it up for January, but the clinic called yesterday and there’s an opening Tuesday night. I said I’d take it.”

  He nodded, smiling. “Good.”

  She wanted to chip away at his smugness. Smiling back at him, she said, “When I told her your snoring was keeping me from sleeping, she said we both need to do a sleep study.”

  He looked at her over his glasses for a long moment, and said, “Probably not a bad idea,” before he resumed reading the paper.

  * * *

  Foxy woke to the sound of her phone and remembered her creeping fear last night when she sensed someone in the room. She didn’t think she could deal with another hang-up call today. She rolled over and groped on the nightstand for her reading glasses, so she could see who the caller was before answering. With relief, she saw it was Bill Harley.