Last Impressions (The Marnie Baranuik Files)

by A. J. Aalto

“That’s a relief.”

  “I’m gonna croak, so I might as well enjoy some yummy stuff before I get clonked to death by Mama-Captain’s Super Spoon of Suck.”

  “Shit,” Schenk said, looking down at his phone, and then out at the parking lot at Malashock. “Shit.”

  The Blue Sense didn’t give any warning before slamming me with Schenk’s upset. “It can’t be Simon,” I said. “Simon’s in prison.”

  “Hospital for psych assessment,” Schenk corrected. “Seventy-two hour hold.”

  I demanded almost breathlessly, “Ellie?”

  He stood, tossing down cash for breakfast. “No. You just chill, don’t worry about it. Malashock needs me.” He glanced at the parking lot out the big windows. “Riding with her. Take my car and get home before this storm rolls in. I’ll pick it up later and catch you up.”

  “Storm?” I frowned, glancing outside at the blue sky, and then behind me at the flat screen TV on the wall. The sound wasn't turned up loudly enough to be annoying to the patrons, but the red severe weather alert was scrolling across the bottom of the news channel was hard to miss. “Damn, I thought that shit was clearing up.”

  “The calm before.” He shrugged into his leather jacket and dug out his car keys. He hesitated before giving them to me. “Listen, don’t touch the boxes in my trunk. Keep them sealed. Don’t open it, don’t touch it, don't anything. Just... don't.”

  “I'm not gonna fondle the junk in your trunk, Thag. Yeah, yeah, chain of custody,” I said, ignoring his glare. “No, this time I got it.”

  “No more sticky fingers.” He jingled the keys an inch from my gloved hand to make his point. “Behave.”

  I snatched the keys with a sigh. “Who do you think you’re talking to, constable?”

  “I’m fairly certain I know who I’m talking to.” He crammed on black leather gloves and adjusted his scarf. “No touching. Go straight home as soon as you’re done.”

  “Sure thing, Longshanks.” I ignored the punctuating jab of his thick forefinger in the air before he gathered his files in a flurry of papers and hurried out into the drippy morning.

  I changed chairs so I could see the TV, and watched the meteorologist animatedly explain how the coming storm was the biggest of the season, bigger than the last, bigger than any he’d seen in his career. He looked like a puppy when the package of Snausages got rustled, bopping from one side of the screen to the other, pointing out the causes of his excitement. I could practically see his tail wagging. Pictures and video of previous storms showed cars buried by drifts, men out pushing trucks, wheels spinning on ice, tree branches snapping under the weight, roof shingles scattering in the wind. I looked outside again at the blue sky. Icicles along the gutter dripped in the sun.

  I finished my coffee, and the dregs of Schenk’s, and the last bit of my toast. I wondered what kind of cool things I’d find if I snooped through Schenk’s car. My phone rattled against the table, and I slipped off a glove to do the swipe-and-pass-code thing.

  Schenk’s text read: Don’t you dare.

  I smiled down at my phone, and hoped, wherever he and Malashock were rushing off to, they’d be safe and successful. My phone buzzed again, and a little notification dot appeared beside Batten’s name. My heart gave an overeager jolt, and all the blood rushed to my cheeks.

  I checked the text. Binswanger sent flowers. A second later: I threw them out. And: You’re out of beer. And then: Your bed is lumpy and your pillows smell like bubblegum. Finally: You have forty pairs of underwear and all but two have frogs on them. Freak.

  The cabin had two guest bedrooms upstairs, but he’s sleeping in mine? Counting my underwear? I tried not to chortle out loud in the café, and looked up at the TV as if the meteorologist might hand out relationship advice with his warnings about the wind chill.

  I texted back: Why are you trying on my underwear? If you drew fangs on all my panties, I'll drag you balls-first through a belt sander.

  I saw little dots that indicated he was typing and then they stopped. There was a long pause, during which I could imagine him backspacing over something. I grinned at the phone and mentally challenged him not to be a wiener. What he sent was: I broke your vibrator. It was an accident.

  “What?” I blurted out loud, and then sent an apologetic smile at the people at the table beside me. “Sorry. My not-boyfriend busted my-” I saw them gape and remembered my black eyes and fat lip. “No! Not my face, my, uh… never mind.”

  I texted Batten: How the fuck did you manage that?

  He replied: I’ll never tell.

  I sent: Better replace it. I need that thing.

  The reply was immediate. Get ya the biggest one I can find, Doom Chasm.

  My finger jabbed the phone with every letter. Got a thousand rabid wolverines to kill, so you'd better. Hate you so much, Kill-Notch.

  I was about to put my phone away, grinning like an idiot, when he sent one final thought: No you don’t.

  All at once, too much restless, happy energy swelled low in my belly and spilled through my veins, making my arms tremble. I snuck one bare finger to the begonias on the window ledge, checking to make sure no one in the café was looking at me. For a moment, nothing happened; I took a long, deep breath and settled my bones in the chair, relaxed, let the energy flow out, spilling heat in waves to calm myself. The begonia leaf nearest my finger trembled, and one pitiful red bloom popped open, and then another. Dread Aradia, Mother Mine / Keeper of the day, Divine / dull the spark and quench the fire / free me of my heart’s desire. Another deep, grateful exhale, and three blooms sprang open. The green on my side of the plant had deepened slightly, and the foliage fairly quivered, though I doubted anyone would notice.

  I gathered my backpack, pulled on my ski mask, yanked on my parka, took Schenk’s money to pay at the counter, and grabbed a coffee to go. I thought maybe I’d go home and rest a bit to recharge, research exorcisms, and then drop in on Father Scarrow for a plan of attack. Surely, if anyone knew what to do next, it was the sketchy exorcist. Or maybe I'd finally try to get that hot bath that Junior had interrupted. Or, better yet, get some more of what Harry had done to make up for it.

  The temperature had plummeted since I’d come in, and standing just inside the door, I saw that the icicles had stopped dripping. When I left the café, a pained squeak escaped my throat. I ducked my head against the renewed wind and pressed the unlock button on the key fob to make sure I was heading to the right car. The headlights blinked and I hurried to Schenk’s Sonata. The wind snatched the door when I opened it, and I had to struggle to close it, gasping once it shut.

  The clock on the dash told me “ten-fifteen” when I turned the key. I was very aware that there was a box of stuff I wasn’t allowed to touch in the trunk. Probably, if Schenk had never mentioned it, I wouldn’t have known it was there. A shadow fell over the car, and the warmth of the sun shining through the windows faded quickly. I leaned forward against the steering wheel and looked up. Conditions in the sky had taken a turn for the worse, bruising like my face. The first few flakes of snow began to dust across the windshield.

  I reprogrammed Schenk’s radio pre-set buttons from his assortment of Canadian and American classic rock stations to a single obscure channel that played nothing but manic electronica, and then turned down the volume down so it didn’t bug me while I drove home and pulled out of the Oh Yeah! Café parking lot for the last time.

  I didn’t make it very far.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE SNOW WENT from drifty to wild in under ten minutes, pounding down like a bully was dumping malevolent confetti by the bucket load. The headlights of the Sonata turned the blizzard into a fantastic show, spotlighting each and every flurry and gust, individual flakes dancing down and swooping up, lifted and tossed in crazy, haphazard plumes. I crept along the road going less than thirty kilometers an hour, steering around drifts until I hit a patch of road that was clear, where I thought I’d better pull over for a minute. My butt cheek vibrated, and that was
a good enough sign that it was time for a break.

  I dug out my phone, threw a glove off and answered with, “Yo.”

  “Is Father Scarrow with you?” Schenk asked.

  “You just left me alone in the café,” I said, flexing my sore fingers. I’d been clutching the steering wheel harder than I thought. “You know he’s not. What’s up?”

  “I’m at his place.” He lowered his voice. There was chatter in the background, other voices. “The dogs are dead.”

  “What kind of dead?”

  “Frozen solid in the living room,” he said. “Marnie, Scarrow’s not here.”

  “He better not be out in this. The storm is ridiculous.” There was a flash of lightning that lit the onslaught of snow, followed immediately by a crack of thunder. Thunder-snow. “Did you hear that?”

  “It shook the rectory.” There was a low growl in his voice. “Where are you?”

  “Ten-twenty,” the car’s clock reported.

  “Pulled over on the side of Thorold Stone Road not far from an exotic meats farm, if I’m reading that sign through the blizzard correctly. I can hardly see past the headlights. I’m going to give this a few minutes to pass.”

  “If you get cold, there’s…” He cleared his throat. “An extra hat in the trunk that might fit you.”

  His knitting. “I’m not opening this car door for nothing,” I said. “I’ll never get back in; the wind is scary-cold, and I’ll blow away.” I had a mental image of me windmilling out in the storm until an errant gust took me cartwheeling through the sky.

  “Then stay put. There’s an emergency candle and lighter in the glove box if you need them,” he said. “Listen, I’m glancing at a few notes of Scarrow’s about the Briggs-Adsit family. They tell of Mama-Captain being something like a drill sergeant. She cared for soldiers deserting from the civil war alongside Johnny, opened her home to a whole bunch of them, but she was a high-iron bitch who treated them like slaves and wasn’t afraid to take a wooden spoon, switch, or broom handle to those who slacked off or displeased her.”

  “That jibes with what we suspected,” I said. “We need to find Scarrow, quick. If the poltergeist took out his dogs, that means this thing can go further than I thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I assumed that the poltergeist was limited in its ability to travel,” I said. “Ghosts haunt places, people, or objects, right? I mean, that’s the theory, but at this point, I’m no longer trusting theory.”

  He made an agreeing noise and a grunt for me to continue.

  “John Junior showed up at North House after I took the picture of the Briggs-Adsit family from Scarrow’s pocket. His mother was in Barnaby Nowland’s apartment with us, but I assumed, like Scarrow probably did, that she was haunting her mourning necklace, the lacrimosa. Similarly, John was in Barnaby’s place because his skull was there. They’ve not popped up anywhere randomly, only in relative closeness to an item that meant something to them, or near to their desecrated burial ground.”

  “Lock One, Britney Wyatt—“

  “She had the lacrimosa in her purse that night,” I reminded him, “which was in Simon’s car nearby.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Scarrow didn’t have the skull, or the lacrimosa, or the letters we found at Nowland's apartment in the rectory anymore.” I paused to let that sink in. Were those things in the trunk? My scalp prickled. Fully expecting two dead people to be sitting in the back seat staring at me, I glanced over my shoulder and double-checked the rearview mirror. There was no one visible, but that didn’t exactly reassure me.

  Schenk said, “So how and why was the poltergeist able to show up here to kill the dogs?”

  “And where is Father Scarrow, if not there burying his dogs? He may have bolted,” I said, “once he realized it wasn’t safe in the rectory and Ma—“ I stopped, wary of saying her name near her artifacts, the way Scarrow hadn’t wished to say John Junior’s name near the overflow pond. “Once he realized that the poltergeist can go wherever she wants?”

  “You think Father Scarrow has left town?”

  That’s not right, my gut told me. Father Scarrow doesn’t run away from trouble. Father Scarrow runs toward it with a battering ram. “No. He saw the dead dogs and decided to put an end to this on his own.” Without the skull, or the lacrimosa.

  Schenk made an apprehensive noise. “He wouldn’t be scared off.”

  “No. No, he wouldn’t.”

  “We can’t organize a search party in this, the weather is too hazardous. Get home when you can. I’ll call you when we find him.”

  “He’s in danger.”

  “I know.” He muttered something under his breath that sounded like he was reading aloud ritual incantations for exorcism. “Maybe he went to try and exorcise the Briggs-Adsits from the tunnel or pond.” Then quickly, “Don’t you go there without me. “

  “You either,” I warned. “And stop reading that shit out loud.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “What?”

  “Maps.” I could hear shuffling of papers and Schenk cleared his throat. “Graveyard maps. With plots. And names. He has the name Adsit circled on two, three, four copies here of the same map. Different handwriting, different pens, markers. Some have other names circles, notes jotted… oh, shit.”

  I was a second ahead of him. “The Adsit plot was located right where we found Britney’s and Barnaby’s bodies, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Longshanks? Who makes four copies of something? Normal people make two, or five, or ten. Not four.” The four is a lie, an unhelpful voice from my past insisted on reminding me. We shared an over-the-phone silence for a heartbeat before I stated the obvious. “He’s taken one copy of the map and gone to the pond.”

  “By himself.”

  “I’m closer,” I said. “I’ll head there first.”

  “Stay where you are, I’m on my way now.”

  “No. I’ll drive your car to New Red Hook. All the case evidence is in the trunk, right? We’ll need that.”

  “For what? We’re bringing Father Scarrow home. We’re not doing an exorcism.”

  “We may have to,” I insisted, “if we want to get Scarrow out of there alive.”

  He was quiet for a second before grunting; he wasn’t giving me permission, but that rarely stops me.

  “Stay on the main roads as much as possible.” He said something rapidly to someone in the rectory, who replied sharply, and then someone else had words with him, then he was back. “And when you get there, wait in the car. Don’t trek out to the pond without me.”

  I squinted at the road through the snow. “Uh huh.” Not much of an agreement, and I honestly just said it to shut him up. He could easily be stuck in snow at the rectory for hours. I couldn’t wait that long. The exorcist was gonna end up in the water, covered in MUCE, staring unblinking at the snow as it covered his face.

  “Not on my watch,” I muttered, and hung up on Schenk. “You’ve got five minutes, officer. With or without you, I’m not losing another life to this bitch.”

  CHAPTER 28

  BY THE TIME I pulled into the small lot by the New Red Hook Cemetery the sky was churning with heavy black clouds, and I was very reluctant to leave the warmth of the car. The wheels sank in snow and I put the car in park and gave myself a long talking to. Schenk said to stay in the car. For how long? If you got here okay, so can he. If Father Scarrow is at the pond, he’s in trouble. Is he dying right this second? Maybe. Possibly. There’s only one way to find out. If you wait in the car much longer he could die. If I don’t, I could wander around lost in a blizzard and freeze to death. Or encounter the poltergeist alone. Shit.

  I did a quick inventory: evidence box in the trunk. Had Schenk kept everything together? Skull? Necklace? Had he already sent the skull to forensic anthropologists like he said he would, or was it still in there, staring blankly out of a plastic baggie? Were the pictures there? Did they matter? My eyes
fell on my backpack; the scrying board was inside it, painted by my sister Margot’s deft hand and jazzed up with gemstones. Would it work the way the Wee-Gee Fun Board had in the tunnel? Again, only one way to find out. I checked the rearview mirror for signs of Schenk. All I saw was snow. My own tire tracks had already ghosted over, blurred with new and blowing accumulation. I longed for that white puffy snowsuit, even half-charred. I would gladly be a toasty, singed S'more rather than a Gropesicle.

  “Okay, what’s the plan, Marnie?” I asked myself, pulling on my ski mask. “Just pop out there in the blizzard and attack the crap out of a poltergeist? Sure, that doesn’t sound anything like a giant clusterfuck. Spine breaker! Flying scissors! Top-rope moonsault, bitches!”

  Longshanks will be so pissed if he shows up and you’re off floundering in the white out. Then he’s got two dumbasses to rescue instead of one. That’s not cool. Be smart. I nodded at no one but myself, loaded up the GPS on my phone, and pinpointed my current position. I almost texted, then thought about it: I didn’t know Schenk well enough to know if he’d check it while driving, and with this weather, distraction could mean ending up in a ditch. I grabbed my Moleskine from my bag and ripped off the last page, took up one of Schenk’s always-present pencils from the cup holder, and wrote Fetching Scarrow from pond. Will text GPS coordinates ASAP.

  I popped the trunk, set my teeth, and launched out of the car, dragging my backpack with me. The cold wind dropped slightly and the snow seemed to increase, falling furiously straight down, less fluffy and more like ice pellets. I spat on the lower edge of the window, slapped my note to it, wedged the edges of the paper into the weather stripping, and waited a second for it to freeze there. Then I marched to the back of the car, still looking for Schenk’s headlights. The box of evidence was now sealed with a strip of red tape. I broke the seal with the pencil, and tucked it inside the box in case I needed it again. I spotted a first aid kit in a black bag in the corner. I rummaged through it and emptied the whole thing into my backpack. There was a crowbar along the right edge of the trunk. I hefted it in one gloved hand, feeling a bit like I was stalling, wondering if I’d survive if I actually needed a fucking crowbar to fight off a poltergeist. On one hand, a crowbar was good enough for Gordon Freeman to fight off an army of mutated horrors in Half-Life. On the other, I pictured Mama-Captain using it to clobber me the way she’d used the Twizzlers, or her Spoon of Doom. Reluctantly, I put it back, knocking a roll of something to one side: bright yellow reflective tape. I grabbed the tape and ripped off a long strip, slapping it on my chest. I tore several others, wrapping them around my forearms, and one more that I tried to slap to my back but ended up across my shoulders. Good enough. I’d be visible in the storm. Kind of. Or at least I'd be a half-assedly decorated and slightly more easily-found corpse. I slammed the trunk closed, knocking off a wedge of snow that had already collected on top.