If I assumed that I was right so far, then I might need to figure out a motive. All three of my suspects had demonstrated some control of Celia—the last séance had convinced me of that, though the evidence wasn’t clear enough to determine who had done what. I could imagine some sort of motive for Ken or Ian—anger over the fakery, jealousy over the women—but not for Ana. Although she had said that it would be up to Celia to take revenge . . .
I pulled into a parking lot and looked for her phone number.
Ana wasn’t enthusiastic about meeting me again and this time she insisted it not be at her parents’ place. She was working downtown and reluctantly agreed to meet me in the building lobby after work, but she had an appointment and could only spare a few minutes.
The west lobby of the City Centre building poured light down from the two-story windows and focused track fixtures onto collections of glass objects housed in display cases on both levels. The light ran over the glass escalator and the brass trim, turning golden and breaking into sudden bright sparks that pierced the greenery pressing against the cluster of food kiosks at the street level.
I ascended the escalator to the mezzanine. Ana came around the corner from the elevators. I walked to meet her in front of the massive installation of Chihuly disks, floating like striped and spined jellyfish and Jackson Pollock splatters that flowered in the rich colors of Persia.
“Hi,” I said.
She raised her hand. The back was scored with cuts that matched a set of marks around the edge of her face and neck. Her hair had been cut to chin length, but still looked a little ragged where it had been clipped to remove glass shards from her scalp. “Hi,” she replied. She sounded tired and nervous.
Glass rattled. We both turned our heads to look at the display. The swirling colors of the “Persians” quivered, jittering and chiming as the glass shapes strained toward us.
With one mind, we moved away from the display, heading for the exit and casting quick glances up to the streaming, icy shapes of the chandelier that hung from the ceiling sixty feet above the escalator.
“I’m so jumpy,” Ana started. “Things like that keep happening. Some much worse.”
“What would be worse than having a million dollars worth of art glass fall on you?”
She shivered. “Don’t ask. I don’t have a lot of time to talk to you—I’m meeting someone for drinks. Can we walk?”
“Sure.”
She scrabbled around in her purse as we headed out the revolving doors. Just under the portico, she paused to light a cigarette. She stood for a moment, smoking and staring around as if she expected something to swoop down the streets and attack her. She hunched her shoulders and hugged her coat tighter. She looked at the cigarette and threw it on the ground with disgust, making a face and sticking out her tongue. “Ugh. I don’t know why I do that. I stop smoking long time ago.” She cocked an inquiring look at me. “You have any gum? I want that taste out of my mouth.”
I shook my head. “No. Sorry.” Her English, as well as her healthy habits, was breaking down a little from stress.
She shrugged. “Oh, well. Come on.” She walked up to the corner and waited for the light to change in our favor. “So, what did you want?”
“I wanted to ask you if you’d ever had any kind of relationship with Mark.”
Ana’s face pulled down into a questioning frown. “No. I met him in January. I don’t know him before then. You mean, like, did we ever go out? No.”
The signal changed and she stepped out into the street. I stayed beside her. “Not at all?”
“Not alone. I go out with Mark, sure, but with the others along, too. Ian and Ken and Wayne and Patricia. Sometimes just me and Ian and Ken. But not alone. I like Mark, but that’s all.” Her expression grew stormy as we paused on the next corner. “You think because I go out with one man, but I’m attracted to another, I’m a slut? I have a lot of boyfriends in the past, but most of them are not nice men. I just want to find a nice man. Someone fun, someone good for me. I don’t sleep around. OK?”
We crossed the next street together, heading south down Union.
“I’m sorry Mark died,” she continued. “I am. He was nice. He was good, but he’s not for me. I already said this to the detective from the police. Why anyone thinks I had anything to do with this?” she demanded, her English syntax shattering. Something rattled nearby.
“There’s a woman involved in this. There was a woman at Mark’s before he died.”
“Not me!”
We walked past a hat shop, our faces reflected for chopped instants under the fedoras and sun hats. A haze of yellow floated behind us like an impression of toxic fog.
“Do you think Celia would be capable of killing Mark?”
“What?” She stopped under the awning of a shoe repair shop and turned to stare at me. “Our ghost?”
I nodded.
“No.” Then she paused. “No . . . maybe. But it’s just us doing it. Why would any of us want to hurt Mark?”
“Why would any of you throw a table through a window or crack Ian’s ribs? Why would anyone do any of the things that happened on Wednesday? Why would they hurt any of you?” She’d been one of the least hurt and that raised my suspicions as much as anything. That we were being trailed by Celia only heightened them.
Her eyes got hard. “Because he faked Celia! He lied to us!” she spat.
“And Celia took revenge like you said she would?”
“Yeah! Maybe she did!”
“How do you know Mark faked the phenomena?”
She caught her angry breath and held it, huddling herself in her coat and gnawing lipstick from her bottom lip. Then she let her breath out slowly. She turned and started to walk toward the corner. “Ken told me.”
That brought my eyebrows up. I caught up to her. “How did Ken know?”
She shrugged, looking down the steeper incline on the other side of the street, toward First Avenue and Puget Sound beyond. “He used to do acting when he was a kid. He and Mark used to talk about it. I think he always knew Mark faked it.”
“When did he tell you?”
The light changed. “Wednesday. Wednesday night. I saw him at the hospital when I was waiting for Ian. Everyone was upset. We talked a lot.”
I stopped her again on the other side of Third in the clouds of fragrant steam that escaped from Wild Ginger’s kitchen vents. The light from the huge readerboard on the side of Benaroya Symphony Hall sent shadows scurrying around the intersection with the smell of garlic and ginger. “Did you ever go to Old Possum’s?” I asked.
Ana looked blank. “Huh? What’s that?”
“It’s in Fremont.”
She was about to shake her head when she got it. “Oh! Right, right! Mark’s bookstore. No, I never go there. Fremont’s hard to get to without taking two or three buses. We have the Kinokuniya and Elliott Bay near my house.”
She didn’t seem to know Old Possum’s was a used bookstore.
She cast a look over her shoulder. “I need to go,” she pled. Paranormal ribbons of yellow and blue wove around her and a slow flush pinked her cheeks. “I don’t have anything else to tell you. I have to go.”
I put my hands in my pockets. She gave me a strained smile and turned away. I stepped back into the shadow at the corner of the building and watched her scamper down the steep sidewalk to the Triple Door—the jazz club underneath Wild Ginger. The hazy smear of Celia’s sliced energy followed her, benign as a pet. Another thread twined and writhed toward the shape of Celia like an inquisitive snake. The thread was the same color, but was disconnected from Celia and moved like a blind thing seeking something.
I wanted a better look at that wandering thread. In the dark and the bustle of rush hour I took a risk and sank back into the shadow, into the Grey, feeling the slight jolt and nauseating slip of the worlds in transit.
The mist-world of the Grey was bright silver and knotted with tangled embroideries of energy moving and darting through the c
loudscape. I looked for the seeking thread and found it broken by the heavy bulk of a building and the cold blackness of a rail that guarded the edge of a pit. I sidled around, but couldn’t find a door through it to pick up the other side of the thread. Frustrated, I stepped back into the normal.
I got a stare from a panhandler and a squeak from a woman who had nearly trodden on my foot. I was still next to the Wild Ginger, but I’d moved out a bit onto the edge of the sidewalk that led down to the Triple Door. I put my hand on the wrought iron rail that rimmed the air shaft around the club’s frontage. Glancing down the street, I saw Ana, distinctive in her fluffy white coat, standing in front of the club and looking down the road when she wasn’t checking her watch.
I spotted the curious yellow snake of energy I’d seen before uncoiling around the Second Avenue corner. Ana didn’t see it, but I did, and watched it coming. Limping a little, his jaw tight with each step, Ken George came around the corner at the other end of the questing yellow thread. Ana spotted him and bounded down the hill to meet him and put her arm around his waist. His blank planes of Grey fell away, the energy threads braided up together, mingling around the couple and the gleam-shot mass of Celia that hung close beside them. Sparks of pink, white, and blue fizzed like firecrackers around the couple, and red bolts shot across the reflective blades that thrust through the entity following Ken and Ana into the club and out of my sight.
The diminished size and the passivity of Celia left me scowling. The fake ghost had rattled the glass at us in City Centre, but took no other actions as Ana and I had walked down the street. And now it had floated behind them brilliant-colored, but passive. I wished I knew what the display meant, but I was still learning—I had avoided deeper knowledge of the Grey at times and now wished I hadn’t. Every time I thought I had eliminated something, or gained information, I came up against contradiction as dense as the sudden wall in the Grey.
I toyed with the idea of following the couple into the club and hanging out in the lounge to see what happened next, but I knew they would spot me. Sight lines in the Musiquarium lounge were short and broken, and if the two had gone into the main showroom, I’d have to take potluck on a seat—if the show wasn’t sold out already. I’d have to let it go and turn my energy to something more productive.
I called Mara Danziger.
TWENTY-FOUR
When I called, Mara was stuffing food into Brian and had to relay her answers to me through Ben. She made some guesses, but said she could only confirm them in my presence, so I was heading for another evening with the Danzigers. I hoped Brian would be in a calm mood, as I was already tired.
Mara let me through the door to wonderful quiet. I stood in the entry hall and blinked, looking around for signs of rhino. Mara grinned at me, her green eyes sparking with mischief.
I cast her a wary glance. “You’ve put him in a barrel in the basement,” I stated.
“No,” she replied, laughing, “though I’m sure he’ll be as hungover in the mornin’ as if we had done. His Irish nature is showin’ through—I’m afraid he snatched a whiskey glass and helped himself before we could stop him. He was as fluthered as a fiddler at a wedding, then out like the proverbial light.” She fairly skipped ahead of me to the living room.
“Brian didn’t have any help getting at that whiskey glass, did he?” I asked.
“Not a bit,” she replied, plumping down on one of the pale green sofas with a whoosh of breath. “The horrors’ll probably cure him of ever drinking another drop again. If the Children’s Services ever get wind, they’ll call me an unfit parent for letting him at the booze the once and I’ll never hear the end of what damage I’ve done my poor child. But it’s blessed quiet for once. Ben just took him up to bed.”
“How much did he get?”
“Oh ... not much—less than half an ounce, and that watered. He just grabbed the glass and took a drink, then made the most awful face! You’d have thought he’d swallowed fire. Then he dropped a perfectly good glass of Jamey on the floor and ten minutes later he was passed out on the rug. I finally understand why my aunt used to slip a tot into my cousin’s bedtime milk. He was a right monster.” She caught her breath, then blew it back out in a cheek-bulging gust. “My, I am blathering on. Now, let’s see what’s on with you. Oh.”
I stopped on the verge of sitting down as Mara stared at me with surprise. “What?”
“There’s somethin’ tangled on ya. Some magical thing.”
I looked down at myself. “It must be the damned poltergeist, though I don’t see anything.”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It’s rather like tryin’ to see the back of your own head without a mirror. Every time you look it moves around. I suppose I could snip it off. . . .”
I had an idea and I put up my hands to keep her back. “No. If I’m connected to it, it’s connected to me, and I can follow this line to it—if I can find the thread to follow.”
“Would you want to?”
I thought about it. “I might. Can you remove it later?”
“Well . . . yes. I don’t see why not. It’s not the same as that knot or whatever it is that monster stuck in you—though that might be why it’s caught on you. Attracted like to like. Grey things sticking together like Velcro.”
“I hope that won’t be happening a lot in the future.”
“Not likely. It’s never happened before this. Just a moment, let me get the mirror so you can see it.”
“A mirror—”
But she’d already jumped up and run out of the room. I shrugged and sat on the sofa in the comfortable creaking of the old house muttering to itself. Albert wafted in and circled around the room before fading away again, and as I relaxed and let the Grey flood in on me as it wished, I could see the curling, golden vines of Mara’s protective charms that lay over the house. Without the charge of the rhino-boy, the Danzigers’ home was serene and more restful than my own. The poltergeist didn’t seem to be able to penetrate it any more than most other Grey things.
Mara returned with Ben and a small silver hand mirror. She told Ben to sit down a moment and brought the mirror to me.
“Let me just get this charm back in place,” she said, muttering and fingering the edges of the mirror. She made a shape on the surface that glittered a moment in blue and gold before it sank into the mirror and vanished. “There now. It’s a silly trick, but it shows you the back of yourself.” She glanced into it. “Hm. My hair wants brushing. Here, you take a look and see if you can spot the thread.”
She handed me the mirror and I took it, looking into the surface and seeing only a patch of straight brown hair. “You may need to move it about a bit to see more of yourself. Hold it out farther,” Mara suggested.
I stretched my arms out and moved the mirror around slowly. It was strange seeing my own back from such an angle, like a weird camera. The reflection in the mirror moved like a regular mirror: in the opposite direction of my perceived motion. The small, weird view made me feel a little dizzy, but I spotted the thin yellow thread. It circled my head and neck, then spun away into the deepness of the Grey the same way I’d seen similar strands on the séance members. Now that I knew what to look for, I could catch a hint of it out of the corner of my eye.
“That’s going to be a real pain to try and follow,” I said.
“Why would you want to follow it?” Ben asked.
“To find the poltergeist and the person on the other end—the one who has control of the thing. I don’t know how I’ll follow something that’s behind me, though.”
“Just twist it around to the front,” Mara suggested.
I looked askance at her.
“Here, I’ll give it a go,” she said. She put her hands up on either side of my head and hummed a bit as she tried to get ahold of it. “Stiffer than I thought,” she muttered. “There’s something awfully strong on the other end, but it doesn’t actually care if it’s behind or before, so . . .” She gave a grunt, concentrating hard, and made a su
dden twist with her hands. “There,” she crowed.
I gasped as something wrenched across the back of my eyes. A ripping sensation like a hank of hair being yanked from the back of my head flooded my skull with a flash of pain that vanished as fast as it came. “Ow.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. It shouldn’t have hurt.”
“It did. Not much, but . . .” I rubbed the back of my head but felt nothing unusual. Another look in the backward mirror showed my head as it usually was, the yellow thread twisted now to leave its tail in front, though the loop around my head remained as it had been. I looked down my chest and saw a weak yellow gleam near my left arm.
“It’s a bit off to the left. . . .” I observed.
“I could give it another shove,” Mara suggested.
I was quick to nip that idea in the bud. “No. I can work with this. How am I supposed to chase after this thing, though? When I tried to take a look at it once earlier tonight, it was cut off by a building. Or I think it was a building.”
“Probably. You’re not a superhero, you know. Can’t see through walls.”
“You can’t?” Ben asked.
I frowned at him. “No.” Then I realized he was chuckling in his beard. The unexpected respite from their offspring seemed to have made the Danzigers goofy.
I had never discussed the deep Grey with them, the blaze of energy defining the shapes of the world like intelligent fire in a pit of cold blackness. It had been all I could do at the time to say that it was not what any of us had thought it was. I didn’t want to discuss it now, either, even if I thought I could have. I’d never had any luck before.
I gave them both a quelling glare. Ben looked a little sheepish, but Mara just made a face at me.
“I imagine once you’re in the Grey, some things remain as hard and opaque as they are out here,” Mara said. “But I suspect that getting around it’s a matter of finding a bit of a hole to go through. Once you’ve got a path you can follow the strand—or at least get a look at it.”
Poltergeist (Greywalker, Book 2) Page 24
