Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files)

by A. J. Aalto

  “For a while just a video recorder. Then other things. Voice recorders, funky readers, temperature gauges. Figured they were ghost hunters. I seen ghost hunters before, on account of the tunnel, eh? Even seen a TV crew once. They didn’t ask me nothing.”

  “They missed the Shecky Epp show,” I said with a knowing smile.

  Lennie had the grace to blush.

  “Aw, I was just fooling around. Had to make sure you guys really wanted to know. Most people don’t take me seriously, so I don’t take them seriously. Usually, if someone is legit, they stick around through the antics for the after party. Like my wife.” He smiled sadly at the messy Marilyn wig on a crowded counter top. “Breast cancer took her. 2009.”

  “Tina?”

  “Nope, Patty; she took much better care of her mustache.”

  I smiled, and he touched his mouth. Deep smile lines flashed around his eyes and they danced mischievously.

  “The ghost hunters,” Schenk prodded.

  “Oh, at least once a month, usually every couple weeks. Last time I saw them was…” He went to the wall where a Star Wars calendar was hung by a clip on a nail, unclipped it, and squinted below Jabba the Hutt. “November third.”

  One day before Britney went into the canal at Lock One. “And you marked it down?”

  “Yeah, it was strange because they showed up twice, and mid-week. First time, at the usual time, around nine o’clock, three of them, hauling their equipment bags. Second time, later, around midnight. Only this time, blondie was there. Loud Guy had a metal detector. They went out on the point, there. Mighty dangerous, that, what with the frost making all the weeds and rocks slick. Lucky they didn’t fall in. Oh…” Lennie seemed to remember that there had been a death recently. “Sorry.”

  “Could you tell if they found anything during either of those visits?”

  “Naw, just took their readings, made notes, laughed, talked. The usual. But after midnight, maybe even a little after one, I was up to drain the snake —ain’t getting old hell — and I saw them down there. I knew it was them because the tall boy, he’s got one of those fishing caps with the lights built right into the brim. That’s the only light they had all the way down to the point. Right out where you found that poor girl’s body.”

  Britney Wyatt’s dump site. They’d been there.

  If Batten had been here, there would be an intense barrage of questions, and I’d have seen him lean forward, vibrating — a bloodhound on the scent. In contrast, Schenk leaned back into the kitchen chair with a long exhale, looked away like the news bored him, inspected all the interesting things Lennie had scotch taped to his kitchen wallpaper, which skewed heavily towards pictures of bikini-clad chicks straddling Harley Davidson motorcycles. Schenk’s unbelievably long legs fell apart at the knees until he looked like if he got any more relaxed he’d fall asleep right there in Lennie’s kitchen.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Epp asked. “A beer or some water?”

  “Sure,” Schenk said easily. “Water’s good.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “So, Lennie, when the threesome was out there, which people were there?”

  Lennie took his head out of the fridge with a Brita water jug in his hand. “Uh, the girl with the black and blue hair and all the shit in her face—”

  Britney Wyatt. “Piercings?”

  “Yeah. She was with the tall boy with the fishing cap and the Asian kid with the Montreal Canadiens jacket whose volume doesn’t go below yelling. Beer only makes that worse. You know the type? Think everything they have to say needs to be heard.”

  I smiled as Lennie poured Schenk a glass of water in a cup that might have been clean. He continued, “They went to the pond then did some wandering around before coming back to the pond.”

  “And later that night?”

  “They were joined by the blonde chick, the one with the spiky hair and the big jugs.” He looked sheepish. “Excuse me, I should say big hooters when a lady is present. Boy, yup, Patty woulda cuffed me upside the head just now.”

  Ellie? My brain suggested this as a possibility, but how did she know Britney and the gang? My mind chewed this over while Schenk continued to question Epp about specific details: time, exact location, descriptions of the equipment, everything that Epp might have noticed about the group. When he was done Lennie took one of Schenk's cards and offered to call if he remembered anything else. He walked us to the front door. I noticed him rubbing his hands again, and glanced at the messy kitchen behind him.

  “How long have you been suffering arthritis, Lennie?”

  His big, ginger eyebrows twitched, and he looked at his hands as though just noticing he had any. “Boy, now, you got a good eye, young lady. They only hurt me some when the temperature drops, or I drank too much beer the night before. Don’t know why that’d be. Funny things. Knuckles and knees, them’s the crankiest bastards. Winter’s rough ‘round here.”

  “Would you accept a little help if it could be arranged?”

  Lennie grinned, showing off horse teeth. “Naw, it’s a waste of time to clean up after a crazy old bugger like me. Just get messed up again. Patty used to try, God bless her, but by the time she fell ill, she’d given up trying to keep up with ol’ Whirlwind Lennie, here. What she called me… Whirlwind.” His lips did a sad shrug. “‘Sides, I ain’t really rolling in the dough, you get me?”

  “I know some people who have to do volunteer work. And you could do them a favor by letting them putter around here for an hour a week, pick up some stuff that hurts too much when you try it. Just an idea.” I left that with him and gave him one of my new cards, the FBI ones, which were hopefully not soon to be my former business cards.

  This, I thought, was a perfect excuse to talk to my sister Rowena. If it wasn’t about us, or family, or me, or Harry, maybe I could sneak a conversation in. At least I could hear her voice just one time, and I wasn’t asking for anything for myself. Rowena had been cleaning homes for the elderly on a volunteer basis since she bumped an old man off his bike when she had been driving drunk at eighteen. The man had minor injuries, but Rowena had been so shaken that she had given up drinking completely, abandoned driving, and devoted her life to serving others. An extreme reaction, but Baranuiks go big or go home. In typical Baranuik fashion, my sister had overreacted and gone off the deep end.

  He took the card and whistled softly. “What’s ‘Director, UnNatural Biology Department’ mean?”

  “It means if your chickens sprout fur and start howling at the moon, or sucking the goats' blood,” I said, pointing up to the still-dark sky, “you feel free to give me a call. I’ll be on the very next flight back.”

  Lennie used my card to scratch his temple. “When you say have to do volunteer work, are you talking community service?”

  “More like guilty conscience.” I noticed Schenk pretending not to pay attention to this. He wasn’t as good at it as he thought. “Clean a house to clean the soul.”

  “That so,” Lennie murmured thoughtfully. “I mean, I hardly invited you here so’s you could help me. I meant to help you.”

  “And you did,” I assured him. “You change your mind, that number forwards to my cell phone. You give me a ring, okay?”

  Lennie waved goodbye to us and watched us trudge back through the snow to the car. The snow had gained a frozen crust since we had gone inside, and the temperature was dropping fast. I figured he would have shoveled the walk if he could.

  I thought Schenk was reading this all on my face, but when we got in the car all he said was, “Good job spotting the swollen knuckles.”

  “You saw them, too, eh?”

  “I did.”

  “It was more that he kept rubbing them, prodding the sore spots. Sometimes, we can’t help fiddling with our pain.” I did my seatbelt up and half turned to him as he warmed up the car. “I think I know where Britney got my old business card.” And why Ellie’s not answering my texts. “You don’t mind giving my pal a ride to work, do ya?”


  “This friend wouldn't happen to be blonde and have, and I quote, ‘big jugs?’”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Neither Nowland nor Hiscott ever mentioned her.” Schenk poked at the radio. The clock softly reminded us that it was seven fifteen. “Let’s go pick her up.”

  I texted Ellie: I’m on my way with coffee. Be ready.

  CHAPTER 17

  ELLIE WAS NONE too happy to have Constable Schenk pick her up for work in his Sonata, but when push came to shove and shit got real, she was an obedient woman; she slid into the back seat without expressing her displeasure. I had chosen to sit back there, too, so I could more easily study her face, and we wouldn't be interrupted by the clock's continued admonitions about the time. I’d taken off my gloves, but I put my bare hands in my pockets so as not to alarm her. She sat with her knees primly pressed together, angled away from me toward the door, and stared out the window at the hoary wasteland.

  I decided that to pussyfoot around would put Ellie through more anxiety than was strictly necessary, and got right to the point. “Ells, why wouldn’t you tell me you know Britney Wyatt?”

  “That’s not your scarf,” she said. “You weren’t wearing one. Whose is it?”

  “Mr. Merritt’s,” I said. “And don’t side-step my question. You knew why I was here. Why didn’t you tell me you know Britney?”

  I could see the reflection of her face in the window. She screwed up her lips to one side as she thought about her answer. “She’s a flake. We’re not friends. I barely know her.”

  “You gave her my business card,” I said. “Why?”

  “She had something she wanted you to Grope with your whaddyacallit, your touch psychic Talent.”

  “Yeah, I know all about it,” I bluffed, thinking about the bowling bag and the ball under the priest’s desk. “She took it to Father Scarrow.”

  “No, not the skull,” she said. “A necklace.”

  I bit down on my tongue hard to keep from yelping. A skull? It had rolled off her tongue like it was nothing, no big deal, just part of a dead person taken from a grave. I stared at the side of her face in wonder. Dark Lady above, who is this person? Is this my Ellie?

  “She was going to mail it to you,” Ellie continued. “The necklace. I told her she could trust you, but I honestly didn’t want you involved, and when it came time to give her your info, I …” She scrunched her mouth again, and balled her hands together. She was wearing fluffy, yellow knitted mittens, and it looked like she was holding the sun in her lap. “I figured if she couldn’t get in touch with you, she might drop it. It seemed harmless.”

  Grave robbing. Sweet Mother.

  “Tell me about the skull,” I said quickly, impressed that Schenk hadn’t started his own interrogation from the front seat yet. He seemed happy to let me take this one, though his eyes spoke to me in the rearview mirror, pressing me to continue. “Did you see it?”

  “No. She found it at the pond, with Simon and Barnaby. I wasn’t with them.”

  “And the necklace?”

  “That, too. At first, she figured some other ghost hunter or hiker just lost it, until she checked Google images for others like it. Turns out what she found was really old.”

  Found? “Ellie, Britney Wyatt robbed a two hundred-year-old grave.”

  “They’re not like that,” Ellie said, and finally turned her head to look at me. “Really, Marnie, I’m serious. They’re just curious kids goofing around. They weren’t digging stuff up. She said she found it in the mud.”

  It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger who was so familiar, seeing someone from your past in the line at the grocery store whose face you couldn’t quite place. I tried to sweep aside my anger and disapproval and stay focused on gleaning information from her, like she was just a source and not my best friend since kindergarten.

  “Where did she find it, exactly?”

  “There’s a spot along the south shore of the canal’s overflow pond where the land juts out a bit. There used to be some old Lutheran church there, ages ago, and a graveyard. I guess they moved some of the bodies up to the Old Red Hook Cemetery back in the twenties.”

  “Where is the necklace now?” I asked, remembering a necklace with a long, crystalline pendant in a plastic bag in the evidence box on Schenk’s desk.

  “Britney always had it in her purse. She was going to mail it to you if you agreed to examine it. Once she suspected it belonged to someone who had been buried there, she was obsessed with finding out exactly who it belonged to. She went to all the local museums, churches, genealogy groups, trying to find a map or layout of the old cemetery, the one that got moved.”

  “Did she ever find answers?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. I think she did. Because when she told me the phone number on your card didn’t work, she was okay with it. She said she didn’t need you anymore.”

  I wondered if Scarrow had given her answers, and how truthful they'd been, and whether he'd tried to give her anything else. “You gave her an old number, not my new one. Why did you mislead her?” That's me, an endless wellspring of trust.

  “Because there was no point. It was silly. I didn’t want her to bother you.”

  “You don’t get to make these decisions, Ellie. I still don’t get why you wouldn’t tell me.” I was pouting. It was unprofessional, and it wasn't showing off my positivity whatsoever. It might have qualified as a people skill if it had done the least bit of good in getting Ellie to open up.

  “It didn’t seem relevant.”

  “Relevant,” I repeated. “She went missing at the canal. She found the skull and the necklace at the canal’s overflow pond.”

  Ellie went back to staring morosely out the window.

  “Ellie, they found her body in that overflow pond yesterday. Britney Wyatt is dead.”

  I didn’t expect any emotion; Ellie had always been very good at hiding her feelings. The choked-off sob that came out of her was a surprise. “Well, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was ever involved. I just want to stay out of it.”

  Too late for that, Ellie. “Why were you ghost hunting if you don’t believe it at all?”

  “Barnaby works with me. Barnaby Nowland. He works in the kitchen at the hospice. He thought the spirits of the dead patients were hanging around, haunting the place. He was always coming to me with stories and stuff he thought was proof. When I told him I didn’t believe in ghosts, he got even more determined to show me they existed.” She squeezed the mittens into a tighter ball. “He’s a loud, goofy kid. It was just for fun. We went all over the place. To the cemetery, to haunted houses, to the Blue Ghost Tunnel.”

  “Britney wore the necklace to the tunnel?”

  “She said she brought it there with the skull and an Ouija board to try to contact whatever spirit owned the necklace. They invited me to go along, but I was working. I met with them afterward. At eleven-thirty, on the third, at the south shore of the pond. They told me there had been a ton of activity in the tunnel, lots of voices on their recorders, answers to questions, spirit orbs on photographs, all that. Then she put the necklace on the planchette on the Ouija board right there by the pond. She called to the person by name.”

  I could picture it perfectly: a hokey party game, a two-centuries-old necklace, and four idiots bumbling around with shit they didn’t fully understand. I suddenly understood Scarrow’s reluctance to speak to us near the pond, where Britney’s body had been.

  “What name, Ellie?” I prompted.

  “She called the spirit Mama-Captain.” Ellie’s chin fell, and she crumpled. A soft squeak of a sob came from within the shelter of her chest. “I should have told you. I heard it. I heard Mama-Captain. I saw her. I swear to you.” She hiccupped and sniffled. “Her anger. Rage. She howled at us. In our faces. Howled.”

  I caught Schenk still looking at me in the rearview mirror, and I would have doubled-down on my swear jar that we both had the spectral librarian from Ghostbusters going from “Shhhhhhhh,”
to “GRRAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!” in mind. We had pulled to a stop in front of the hospice, but Ellie didn’t notice.

  Her words, now released from their prison, tumbled over each other in a jumble. “Barnaby fell over. I felt something shove past me to get at him. All this ice, shards of it, flew at us. It didn’t seem to come from the water, but it must have. Ice doesn’t form in the air from nothing. I had to cover my head with my arms. The sleeve of my other winter coat, the black one, is shredded. Imagine if that was my face, my cheeks. Britney was so excited, but we kept telling her this was bad. It was really bad. She was on cloud nine, she wouldn’t hear it. She kept promising Mama-Captain that she’d return the necklace, but only if Mama proved some things to her. It was almost…” Ellie choked on a sob and then shook it off, violently, before continuing, “Like Britney was holding the necklace hostage until the spirit behaved the way she wanted. But that can’t be what killed her. Can it? Marnie? It just can’t be. It makes no sense!”

  “I don’t understand, Ellie,” I said softly. “What does ‘Mama-Captain’ even mean? Who is Mama-Captain?”

  “I don’t know,” Ellie said, lifting her teary-eyed face. Her nose was bright red and her cheeks were pale. “But whoever she is, she’s really fucking pissed off.”

  CHAPTER 18

  ELLIE TOOK A few a moments to collect herself before she fled the car. When she’d disappeared beyond the glass doors of the hospice, I moved to ride shotgun. Schenk had his file out, but next to a few small notes, he’d scribbled abstract shapes. After shading them in, he began to tap his pencil, taptaptap, as he stared out into the distance.

  “Eight forty-five,” the car helpfully informed us. I was already exhausted. Schenk had a glassy-eyed, wired look on his face.

  “What are you thinking?” Schenk asked me.

  “Not much.” I pulled on my gloves. “I’m thinking I want to try that Balkan donkey cheese. Also, I’m slowly adjusting to the realization that I might never be crowned Lord of the Dance. And I think you need to Google how to shut the frigging clock up, eh?”