Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files)

by A. J. Aalto

  “If you show him your cards, he won’t need you anymore, Marnie.”

  Instinct told me to correct him, to maintain a wedge of distance. “Miss Baranuik.”

  His eyes were hypnotizing, dark pools of salvation and sin, a cocktail of heavenly delights and devilish temptation. Soul savior, my mind teased. No rash today, eh, Marnie? “I need him to need you,” he said. “You’re my foot in the door. I need continued access. That means limiting his exposure to our work.”

  Our work. “I see.”

  “Do you, Marnie? This is a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore a real poltergeist.”

  Right case, wrong problem. “Britney Wyatt is missing.”

  “Britney Wyatt is already dead.”

  “Can you save her?” I said, alarmed at how soft my voice had gone, as though he and I were sharing secrets in the little office. I cleared my throat and sat up straight. “Her soul, I mean?”

  “I will try,” he promised. “But we must first release her from the clutches of the poltergeist.”

  “Why would a poltergeist want Britney Wyatt dead?”

  “That, you should ask Simon.”

  I cast a pointed look at the monitor. “Schenk's asking Simon. I’m asking you.”

  Uncertain thoughts marched behind his brown eyes in military fashion. I wanted to believe he was as he appeared, just an ex-holy man with a touch of kink, trying to do good deeds with the spirit world. “You understand, I cannot divulge what is told to me in confession.”

  My guts were still doing a happy jig and the invigorating zing in my veins tried to persuade me. Was this the Blue Sense trying to tell me something in a new way? “You're so full of shit, you squeak going into a turn. Priests take confession, not ex-priests. Some defrocked quack doesn't get to invoke the sanctity of confessional privilege,” I challenged. “So, tell me something, Ren Scarrow.”

  He leaned back, unruffled by my offensive. “Yes?”

  “Why did the church really boot you? Because you’re a perv, eh?”

  “I can’t save souls if I don’t know how,” he said. “The church does not want to learn and evolve. It does not want to challenge old beliefs. I was finding my research restricted, but I was willing to work together with them to find a middle ground. They were not.”

  “Will you…” Save my soul, too? Wait! No! “Would you…” Get him alone, Marnie. “Wanna go bowling?”

  His eyebrows twitched up together, soon followed by a curve of his lips. “Are you asking a priest on a date?”

  “Ex-priest,” I said. “And it's bowling. Unless we're on an episode of Roseanne or you're secretly the Big Lebowski, I don't think this qualifies as a date. I'm just going to pump you for information and smack you with some ugly shoes.”

  “I don’t bowl.” The Blue Sense caught the rank untruth, hitting me in the side of the brain the way a sour note on a violin hurts the ear.

  “Liar,” I said. “I spent too long getting lied to by a frigging Leprechaun, and I'm not above taking it out on your skinny-jeaned butt. Besides, you gotta see me in a bowling alley, I’m totally awesome. We can do what you said before: get drunk and discuss the afterlife, minus the naked bit.”

  “Fine. Tonight,” he said, moving to put his root beer can down.

  His aim was bad; the can hit the full mug of coffee, slopping it off the desk and into my lap. I yelped and jumped out of the rolling chair, which didn’t go so well for me, since the wheels were locked. The chair started tipping, wheels clattering, and I abandoned ship in a flurry of reports, files, and matching airborne slashes of hot brown coffee and root beer foam. Scarrow was quick to rescue several items from the desk, turning to set them variously around the room in safe locations. I grabbed at the soggy papers and flapped them, more concerned with saving Schenk’s paperwork than the liquid seeping into the lap of my jeans.

  Scarrow straightened and reached for a box of tissues on a filing cabinet. “Here. Sorry.”

  “Well, aren't you slick.” I snatched the tissues from his hand and began cleaning up his mess. The Blue Sense reported a shutdown of feelings, a shielding measure like the pulling of drapes against the glare of the sun. For a moment, I caught he meant to do that, followed by, to cloud the investigation? But that didn’t feel quite right. I couldn’t quite get a handle on his motives.

  “Slick as a handful of goobers,” I muttered, dabbing Schenk’s pencil work delicately, my giggle fit effectively squashed.

  “Then we make a great pair. Tonight,” he said, backing toward the door, laying one hand on the doorknob. “My place first. Come alone.”

  I didn’t agree, but he seemed to take my silence as acquiescence. He left, and I turned my focus back to cleaning up, half-listening to the voices coming from the left hand monitor. I bent to retrieve the evidence box from the dry spot on the floor where Scarrow had tucked it.

  The lid was on. Of course it is. He just tidied it when he put it down. Did he? What do you think, he stole something? He’s a priest. Ex-priest. I peeked in the box. Everything seemed to be there. Purse, wallet, lipstick, junk. I put the lid back on, feeling stupid and paranoid, and hoisted it onto the desk, putting it kinda-exactly where it had been. I’d have to mention all this to Schenk, of course, and apologize for his messy papers. If he needed me to do data entry later, I’d volunteer, although to be fair, Father Scarrow should get his skinny butt back here to do it. He was the klutz this time, not me.

  “I don’t know what else I can tell you,” Simon was saying in the interrogation room. Schenk’s ever-present pencil went taptaptap.

  “Let’s go through it again, from the beginning.”

  I sat back in Schenk’s damp swivel chair and sighed, tossing browned tissues in the garbage pail. It was going to be a very long morning, and I was going to have to let the wet spot on the crotch of my jeans dry before I snuck into the station’s lunch room for a refill. My gloves smelled like coffee and root beer.

  I loaded up the Seaway’s security video on the second monitor, and watched on repeat, in grainy detail, as Britney Wyatt stepped away from her boyfriend. Over and over, I watched as she stared down at the water for a good two minutes, ignoring him as he tried to get her attention, before diving head-first into the cold, black depths of the Welland Canal. I must have watched the clip more than a dozen times, each time wishing for a different ending, a happy ending. A last-minute rescue. Even a tearful proposal while medics treated Britney for hypothermia would have been better than the real outcome. Each time I watched, of course, it concluded the same way. Simon Hiscott crumpled at the edge of the canal.

  Britney Wyatt did not resurface.

  CHAPTER 12

  AFTER WHAT SEEMED like an endless session of looking through files, watching security videos, listening to Schenk grumble about the messy paperwork, and researching poltergeist theories and sightings, I went back to North House to try and relax. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Scarrow was hiding something more than a penchant for boinking short, dorky skeptics in funny hats.

  I’d just removed my parka, handing it to Mr. Merritt, and had started untying my frog hat when Schenk’s call came.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I was considering a prolonged and shameless pursuit of hedonism,” I told him, smoothing my frizzy ponytail.

  “Translation?”

  “Pizza, porn, and Dr. Pepper,” I said. “Not diet. I don’t do diet pop anymore. Aspartame melts magic herb-encrusted zombie hybrids, so who the heck knows what it does inside the living?” I gave Mr. Merritt a wink at heck. He returned it with a tolerant smile.

  Schenk silently digested this for a moment then asked, “This is your idea of an ideal afternoon?”

  “It sure beats spelunking in the hoary pus caverns of Hell’s fifth circle.”

  “I’ll take your word for that,” he said. “I need you at the Welland Canal Overflow Pond by the Twin Flight Locks. Park at New Red Hook Cemetery. Need directions?”

  “Nope. I
’ll be there, Longshanks.” I gave Mr. Merritt a long sigh and he held up my parka so I could put it right back on again.

  “Before you go, madam, your boyfriend called again on Skype. I told him I’d let you know.”

  “Whoa,” I said with a laugh, zipping my parka up to the neck. I gave the elastic on my wrist a preemptive snap. It didn’t work, and I allowed myself the briefest recollection of Batten’s long, deep, dizzying, après-sex kisses. “Agent Batten is not my boyfriend. As if Harry would let me have a real boyfriend.”

  Mr. Merritt opened his mouth to say something, and then decided against it. I lifted my eyebrows to prompt him, and he said, “Begging your pardon if this is not my place to say, but Mrs. Santonen had many admirers.”

  “Grandma Vi?” I felt my jaw hang open and snapped it shut. “Grandma was here? With Harry? And she had boyfriends? Didn’t it bother him?”

  “It certainly never seemed to, madam, but I shouldn’t like to presume to know Lord Dreppenstedt’s thoughts on the matter,” he said, “nor am I an expert on the workings of his Lordship’s heart. I only mention it because it was a regular occurrence. Mrs. Santonen often visited with a beau on her arm. As a pair, they were very… laissez-faire about such things.” The Blue Sense did not pick up on any condemnation in the little old man, only affection tinged with nostalgia.

  Damn. Grandma got her some. “I, uh…” I made sure my frog hat was tied up tight under my chin and reached for the doorknob. “I don’t know what to say about that. Thanks. For the info. Kinda blowing my mind, Combat Butler.”

  “You have her spark,” he said warmly, “if you don’t mind me saying.”

  Again surprised, I gave my head a dazed shake, waved at him, and hurried back out to the garage.

  ***

  After a harrowing drive through increasingly strong and swirling winds — during which I had to contend with increasingly strong and swirling images of Batten as potential for-realsies boyfriend material — I reached the cemetery and parked behind a bunch of news vans. I took one last desperate slurp of my coffee, trying not to dump it down the front of my parka as I simultaneously lurched from the front seat and crammed the lid back on, leaving the empty husk in the console cup holder. The cops were vigilant at the perimeter, and had backed it off all the way to the entrance to the newer cemetery.

  The former town of Red Hook, once settled between what was now Thorold and Niagara Falls, no longer existed, but the two cemeteries remained, new on the hill, and old down below close to the overflow pond, connected by a road long forgotten by maintenance crews. The two graveyards served as the final resting place of Lutherans and Anglicans for more than two hundred years. Headstones here still had familial ties to names I’d heard my whole life growing up in this region; the cemeteries were littered with wobbly, broken, moss-covered limestone headstones dating back to 1790. Epps, Stones, Steeles, Ridouts, McKenzies and McClintocks, Donnellys and Adsits, Bundells and Bowens, all lay with their names slowly eroding under tall, spreading maple trees, now bare branched and coated with ice that clicked with every frigid gust of wind. I tied the green chin straps of my frog hat tighter and tucked my mouth into the neckline of my parka to keep my chin warm. As long as a couple of Italian plumbers didn't come bounding across the graveyard to land on my head, I felt fairly safe.

  A matching pair of Niagara Regional Policemen were maintaining the integrity of the scene, facing off against the media with stern faces. The Blue Sense stirred to the clamor of excitement in the reporters around me, buzzing like a swarm of blowflies on a corpse, voices lost in a chorus of questions and demands. The cops were carefully shuttered, hiding their tired frustration. It was easy to pick out Schenk’s towering form bobbing through the mess of officers inside the perimeter, headed in my direction. I didn’t move to meet up with him until he was at the yellow tape. He said something to one of the officers and they waved me through in unison.

  “In case you were wondering, Longshanks,” I said, tucking my gloved hands under my armpits for warmth, “This is exactly how I like to spend my Fridays.”

  “Hence my invitation,” he said. “Sorry to call you away from your hedonism. Let’s get away from the vermin.”

  I cast a curious glance over my shoulder at the media surrounding the yellow tape, shoving their cameras at arm’s length over the barriers. Schenk’s irritation hit me loud and clear.

  “I hate reporters,” I confided. And, oh boy, do they hate me. “I think it’s fun to give them the finger. Sometimes they print it, and sometimes they get in trouble.”

  Schenk didn’t audibly agree, but I thought the set of his brow did. The Blue Sense warned me he wasn’t in the mood for witty banter. We struck out through the cemetery, passing massive chestnut trees, stripped of their leaves but still clutching spiked nut cases. Winding our way along the paths plowed for the emergency vehicles, we crossed through the older section of the graveyard. There, the flagpole vibrated; frozen ropes clattered and pinged against the metal.

  I asked, “Found something down in the canal’s overflow pond?”

  “You’re gonna tell me what you think this gunk stuff is before the lab guys get their hands on it,” Schenk said as we picked our way carefully through the churned snow path. Here utility vehicles had plowed a slushy rut through the snow, but it wasn't doing much beyond keeping us headed in the right direction. The ground took several terraced drops toward the pond, and while they were no doubt picturesque during the greener and autumn months, they were nothing but frost and treachery this time of year. Schenk indicated with a thumb over his shoulder that I should stay behind him and let him go first. I was tempted to just rappel down the embankment with my scarf thrown over his elbow, then remembered that the media horde could probably still see us, and I had a growing soft spot for Schenk's dignity.

  “Yo, Thag, can I get a lift?” I arched my eyebrows and gestured towards one of his arms. He rolled his eyes and braced his feet, but as soon as I began twirling my scarf like a lasso he held up a hand that looked like it could stop a bus. When he was sure the footing was solid he offered his arm for me to steady myself against as I stepped down. I'm pretty sure I wasn't grinning, but my chin might have frozen to the inside of my collar. I put my scarf back on.

  “So, Constable Clarity, ‘gunk stuff?’” I said. “Someone found something gooey and you thought, 'Hey, I should call Marnie'?” I stared up at the side of his face sourly. “Can’t tell you how flattered I am.”

  “I can’t wait for crime scene tests,” he said. “That could take days. Weeks, depending on the backlog. If you can identify it by sight or touch, I can at least move forward.”

  “Dear Diary: I got called on to I.D. and potentially fondle some gunk. Countdown to pudding boycott in T-minus five, four...”

  Schenk was cat quiet as he we rounded a copse of snow-capped pine and walked toward an area of brightly lit activity, studying the ground on either side of the path, missing nothing in the storm-darkened evening. The crowd had thinned considerably by the time we reached the inner cordon; this perimeter had a single officer manning it, but after glancing at Schenk, he didn’t pay any attention to me.

  “I like that you assume I’m an expert on ooze and slime,” I continued. “That means a lot to me.”

  “You’re my weird stuff scientist, right?”

  “Hell, yes.” I flexed my brain at him, but since that happened in my head, I’m fairly confident my powerful display went unnoticed. “Stand back. I’m about to science the pants off this case.”

  “Did you just use science as a verb?”

  “Don’t make me science you too, dude.” Again, I flexed my brain ominously but ineffectually at him. “I will Nye-DeGrasse-Sagan you like your momma never warned you about.”

  He didn’t share my humor, and when we got closer to the warm, glaring ring of floodlights, I saw why. Schenk stopped to talk to one of the crime scene techs. I carried on without him, drawn forward by morbid curiosity, scanning the water with fascinated disg
ust.

  Something that looked like a mannequin, but almost certainly wasn’t, lay covered in a filmy gossamer sheet, floating in the water at the shore. The back of its head was caught up between two rocks, mooring it to land. Its legs bobbed with the subtle undulations of the pond. Its arms hung down in the shallow black water, stirring up the soft muddy bottom. Tendrils of the diaphanous coating spread out like a hovering jellyfish. Every gust of wind made the silk ripple. A slimy edge had slipped up one pale, bloodless leg; the flesh looked like that of a frozen turkey, permanent goose bumps standing out in sharp relief. I’d seen a lot of bodies in my line of work, bodies that were down for the count and bodies that got up and walked again after death. I had never seen a frozen one covered in a blanket of gelid ooze before. If I hadn’t been cold before, I was now.

  “I hate being the gunk expert,” I said sadly under my breath, mostly to myself.

  Heavy boots crunched frosty gravel behind me; Schenk’s even stride. I waited until he got closer, then got out my mini Moleskine diary and read aloud as I wrote, “Dear Diary: I don’t like Canada anymore. I quit, eh.”

  “Well, expert? What's this gunk stuff made of?”

  “Silken ectoplasmic fibers,” I said. “It’s not dangerous by itself; it’s a harmless residue.”

  He blinked. “Ectoplasm?”

  “In this case, MUCE: micro-unified chain ectoplasm. Groovy.”

  “So now you’re telling me this is the work of a ghost?”

  I repeated my mantra. “Ghosts don’t kill. But…” I cocked my head and frowned at the silken sheet. “There’s obviously been an entity here. In fact… that’s an awful lot of ectoplasm for one ghost. Unless it was the ghost of a moose or a polar bear or something. You got any were-moose around here?”

  The coroner’s assistant, a pale young woman with an old woman’s untroubled gaze and a whole lot of naturally-curly, Little Orphan Annie orange hair crammed under a black hat, triple-gloved and steadied her footing as she crouched on the slick rocks close to the head. Without pause or grimace, she peeled the corner of the silken residue off the body's face. It hung like thick phlegm and tried to escape through her fingers. She pinched with her other hand, using both of them to draw the sheet back for the coroner – a short, black man with a trim beard, whose close-cropped grey hair was frosted with both snow and age – as he stood nearby in a black suit and trench coat, reminding me of an old-timey undertaker. Schenk moved two steps closer, said something quietly to the coroner, and exhaled unhappily when the corpse’s face was finally revealed.