by Adam Selzer
Snip, snip, snip.
All the red that made up the lower part of my hair is gone now. I’m no longer two-toned.
“Know what would be really crazy?” she asks. “If Lillian Collier were actually still alive and living at the home and wanted to die.”
“There’s no way she’s still alive,” I say. “If she was nineteen or twenty in 1922, she’d be about the oldest woman in the country by now.”
“Yeah, we don’t have anyone quite that old. I think our oldest person is a hundred and two.”
“She’d be older than that.”
“Shame,” she says. “She’d be a perfect ghost to have on the tour, wouldn’t she?”
I shudder involuntarily, and she screws up a snip because my head moves, clipping a part she didn’t mean to.
“You shuddered.”
“Sorry.”
“There’s an old superstition that when you shudder involuntarily, it means someone just stepped on the place that will be your grave someday.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that.”
Punk Rock James is walking around in the living room now.
Fuck, is she going to bury me under the floor?
If so, isn’t Cyn worried that she’ll hear the beating of my hideous heart, interrupting right while she and Rick are doing it? Or at least that I’ll stink the place up?
She snips around the mistake and covers it up.
The next Stiffs, Inc. song turns out to be a song about marrying Mary Pickford, the silent-film star. One line goes “It doesn’t really matter that you’re dead. . . .”
Cyn grabs the sides of my head and I nearly panic, thinking maybe she’s going to break my neck or punch my brain, but instead she just runs her fingers through my hair and shakes it out, sending strands flying.
Sitting still is hard.
She picks the scissors back up.
“How old was Marjorie Kay Stone when she died?” I ask.
“I think two hundred and thirty-six.”
“Ho ho ho.”
Snip, snip, snip.
“Why do you ask?”
“You didn’t punch her in the brain, did you?”
Cyn laughs out loud, but doesn’t quite deny it. Instead she says, “Everyone has secrets. That’s why they call them secrets.”
Then she laughs again and says that bit of nonsense was something Marjorie used to say.
Snip, snip, snip.
“Rick and I got rid of a drunk at Death Corner the other night,” she says.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Way rid of him.”
Snip, snip, snip.
For a second I actually feel better. Rick’s not in on the brain-punching, as far as I know. I’d decided that maybe she could have hid Drunky in the bushes at Hull House, but there’d be nowhere to put a body at Death Corner.
Then I think of Punk Rock James, sitting out in the living room. A guy with an archaeology degree, covered in dirt.
He could have helped get rid of bodies. She could have texted him while the bus was stopped at Hull House, had him hiding behind the fence at Death Corner, and then had him help take care of things. Maybe.
Snip, snip, snip.
I think about all this while Cyn works, and while the song goes into a section where the guy sings, “We’re all quite sane . . . quite sane . . . quite sane . . .” again and again. It is obvious that the singer, or the character he’s playing, is not quite sane.
“Hey,” I say. “Did I tell you I heard Saltis say he’s the one who’s talking to Ghostly Journeys?”
“Him?” she asks. “Well, I guess we’re in the clear there, then. No one’s gonna meet with that doinkus and decide to go into business with him.”
Snip, snip, snip.
“Hey, you wanna go do a proper ghost investigation one of these nights?” she asks. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever done one in Bughouse Square.”
There it is. She’s luring me out to Bughouse Square.
Snip, snip, snip.
I try to stay calm.
“Maybe,” I say. “I sometimes forget that I don’t really believe in ghosts, you know?”
“Right.” Then she laughs, like the kind of laugh you laugh when you have a secret.
As the song ends, she snips off a few more strands of hair, then leans down so her face is next to mine in the mirror, blows a few stray hairs from the back of my neck, and says, “There.”
It looks good. Classic, yet stylish.
I go into the bathroom and change into a simple black dress that I brought in my backpack, and when I take out the lip ring and check myself out in the mirror, I look like a whole different person, from a whole other era.
Like I was a teenager long enough ago that I ought to be dead by now.
The next night I have a tour with Rick driving.
There’s a big crowd milling around on Clark Street, and they’re all looking for the DarkSide Tours bus. For every person who checks in to Mysterious Chicago, two or three come to ask us if they’re in the right place for DarkSide.
“You’re in the right place,” we tell them, “but I don’t see their bus yet. Just hang around. They’ll be here.”
Rick looks down in the dumps. Apparently he and Cyn were up arguing all night over whether we should still be pursuing the TV thing.
“I can see her point,” he says. “It would still probably be better with us doing it than any other company. But still. I don’t want to wreck all my credibility as a tour guide just to be on something that might only last one season anyway.”
“Well, once it’s canceled you can always go around saying it was fake,” I say. “Then you’ll have more credibility to tell everyone the TV shows are all phony.”
“That’s better than the points Cyn was making,” he says. “But they’d probably make us sign all kinds of forms saying we’ll never talk, or they can sue us back to the stone age. They’d probably own our asses. And they aren’t exactly going to make us rich for one season of a cable show.”
A middle-aged woman with chipmunk cheeks and a T-shirt with a puppy on it checks in with five friends. Each of them has more makeup on than a corpse who died with severe jaundice at an open-casket viewing. I guess by their accents that they’re a “Girls’ Week Out” group from somewhere down south.
“We’re the fun ones,” one says.
I have already learned that this almost always means “We’re the drunk ones.”
“This is gonna be scary, right?” the woman in the puppy shirt asks.
“Terrifying,” I assure her.
“It better be,” says one of her friends. “I’m counting on wetting my pants.”
Her friends all crack up in the way that only drunken middle-aged idiots can.
“Y’all are the tour guide?” the first one asks, looking me up and down. “Are y’all supposed to be scary?”
“I’m terrifying, madam,” I say. “I pour the blood of Christian babies on my Cocoa Puffs.”
Half of her friends laugh and half of them make grossed-out disapproving faces, but all of them step onboard.
The DarkSide customers—enough to just about fill one bus—are still waiting around when we leave. The bus is there, but there’s no sign of Tweed or Saltis to check them in. Strange.
Puppy-Shirt Woman and her friends are not fun passengers. They spend the whole tour talking among themselves about how awful the city is.
“Everything is so expensive here.”
“The houses don’t have yards.”
“The buildings are too close together.”
“I haven’t seen a single Wal-Mart since we’ve been here.”
“Ugh, why would a Walgreens have a revolving door?” (I’m not sure why that offends them so much, but they all agree that it’s a crime against nature.)
Mostly they just ignore the fact that there’s a tour going on at all, but at one point when I get to a pause, one of them takes advantage and interrupts.
“Excuse me?” she asks
. “I have a question. How come no one in this town can drive? People drive so crazy here.”
“You saying I can’t drive?” asks Rick, who doesn’t even bother to cover up his annoyance.
“Well, if the shoe fits,” the woman says. “God, Donna, look how much gas costs here!”
Rick stews at the wheel.
They aren’t an uncommon kind of customer, really. I’d say we get the “People must be crazy to live here” speech at least once a week from tourists whose main goal on their trip is to assure themselves that they’re better off in their little hick town than they would be in a city. These ones in particular think they’re so great because they live in a land where houses are cheap, Wal-Marts are plentiful, and all the signs are in English.
I hear them making fun of my witch boots.
What a bunch of windfuckers.
But then again, I suppose that when you stay in your small town, you are probably safe from being killed for the sake of being an attraction on a ghost tour.
So there’s that.
When we get out of the bus to look around at the body dump, the Puppy-Shirt Woman notices a heavy blanket slumped against the fence, with a battered old suitcase lying beside it.
“That looks like a dead body,” she says.
“It’s probably some homeless guy sleeping,” I say.
“No, I think it’s a body,” she says. “Maybe the suitcase is full of money.”
I try to stop her, but she trots right up to the guy, like she has every right to wake him up, and lifts the blanket. When she does, she freezes for a second, then screams at the top of her lungs.
Rick, who’s been showing a couple which part of the vacant lot the “glass-bending factory” would have been in, runs over to the blanket as the woman backs away from it. He looks under it for himself, then shouts out, “All right, folks, let’s get on back on the bus.”
He personally escorts Puppy-Shirt back. She’s hysterical. I hang outside, wondering what the hell was under there, and he comes to join me when everyone is onboard.
“Is it a body?” I ask.
He leads me away from the bus and into the road.
“Uh, yeah,” he says. “It’s Aaron Saltis. From DarkSide.”
Puppy-Shirt is still screaming. She says she’s going to sue us.
That one woman she’s with is probably wetting herself, just like she always wanted.
Chapter Twenty
The blanket-covered body lies by the side of the road, brushing against the tall grass. A rat runs out from under the blanket and scampers into the weeds. I resist the urge to throw up. It’s not easy.
It takes me a minute to remember that I just told Cyn yesterday that Aaron was the one trying to bring Ghostly Journeys to Chicago. So she had a motive.
Rick and I stand outside while everyone else sits on the bus, looking at the covered body from across the road, as Rick calls the cops. When he hangs up, he says, “Well, this is a new one.”
“How did he . . .”
“Suicide, it looks like. You know the sonofabitch did it at a tour stop just to fuck with me, too. Goddamn. I thought we were cool, he and I.”
“Maybe he did it here as a favor, so we’d have a new ghost to look for.”
“He didn’t believe in ghosts. Not even a little. This could only have been to fuck with us.”
I tell Rick about how Aaron Saltis had been in talks with Ghostly Journeys. “You think maybe a meeting with them went badly?”
“Who knows? Maybe.”
“You sure it was a suicide?”
“There’s a gun by his hand, and it looks like maybe there’s a note. I’m not going near it, though.”
I nod, and the police car pulls in, with an ambulance in tow, seconds later. I hope to God, or whoever is out there, that the funeral isn’t at my house.
The cops talk to us first, and we tell them who we are, what we were doing on the dead-end street in a tour bus, and all of that. Basic stuff. The cop who does most of the talking, Officer Jackson, has a Clark Gable-type mustache right above his lip that leaves a lot of space under his nose. He agrees with Rick that it’s probably a suicide, but he can’t comment on the record.
“I didn’t think he hated us that much,” I say. “And he didn’t seem suicidal.”
“Hey,” says Officer Jackson. “People kill themselves because of some embarrassing moment that happened fifty years ago. They kill themselves because they find out they’re sick. Or some depression they beat years ago came back. It’s like cancer, you know. Depression. You never really beat it.”
“I know,” says Rick. “Still . . . this. God.”
“You say he was an actor, right?” asks Officer Jackson. “Drinking problem? I find that a lot of actors have one of those.”
Rick nods. “I’m guessing drugs, too, in this case.”
“I always got the impression he’d fried part of his brain years ago,” I say.
Officer Jackson nods. “It’s a shame.”
After they’re done with the two of us, the cops bring Puppy-Shirt off the bus to talk to her, since she was the one who found the body. I’m kind of amused when they seem more suspicious of her than they do of us—they don’t seem to believe that she’d just randomly see a lumpy form under a blanket and decide to lift the blanket, even after someone in authority (me—ha!) told her not to.
After that the cops free us to go, so we drive away, but no one wants to hear any more ghost stories after that, so we just head back to the Rock and Roll McDonald’s. We offer a refund to anyone who wants their money back, but only Puppy-Shirt’s party takes us up on it. The rest seem to realize that we didn’t personally plant a body there just to traumatize them.
For a minute, after they’ve all left, Rick and I just sit there on the empty bus. I’m feeling numb, like my brain just refuses to process one more bad thing. He’s been holding his emotions together, but once the customers are gone, he loses it. The blood drains from his face and he lets his head fall onto the steering wheel, like the effort not to break down in front of the customers took everything he had out of him.
“Jesus,” he says. “Not two nights ago Saltis and I were standing right there on the sidewalk, chatting and joking around. He didn’t seem like he was depressed.”
It’s dark now. The nightclub people are crowding the sidewalk. A couple of them try to sing along with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” as it blasts from the outdoor speakers at the Hard Rock Cafe across the street.
Rick and I share memories of Aaron for a bit, though I don’t have many, then he calls Cyn to give her the lowdown. I can’t hear what she’s saying, so I can’t parse her words for clues.
But this doesn’t look good.
Why the hell would Saltis have killed himself like that?
All of the stuff Cyn and I have done—all of the “ghosting”—was to get the company off the ground. It was a good deed for the volunteers, but our motives were, honestly, mostly selfish.
Would she have killed Aaron Saltis to protect our interests?
And maybe made him into a new ghost at the body dump while she was at it?
Rick drives me all the way home to Forest Park in the tour bus.
“Shit,” he says, as we merge onto the interstate. “I’m trying not to see upsides here. The guy died. That sucks.”
“Naturally.”
“Of course, this probably means no Ghostly Journeys coming to town, if he was their contact. It’ll set them back, at least.”
“Probably.”
“Won’t be good for Tweed, either.”
I don’t even mention that he could have left behind an imprint right on our tour route, too. I won’t be going to the body dump for a while. Maybe never again.
OED words fly through my head as I try to raze the troubles out of my brain to be replaced with strange words for bodily fluids and sex acts. It helps. A little.
When we get to Forest Park, we sit in the bus at the end of my block, just staring into space, look
ing at the funeral home.
“Well, weird day, little sis,” he says.
I don’t want Rick to leave. I don’t want to be alone.
“Wanna go to Brown Cow, get some ice cream?” I ask. “Or a bar? I could probably get in if I’m with you.”
He shakes his head. “I’d better call Edward. Offer condolences. No matter how much I can’t stand the guy. He might even need me to cover a tour or two. I’ll do it. Gotta put aside rivalries at times like this.”
“Right.”
When I get out I walk backward, watching him drive off, so I don’t feel alone until the last second, when the lights disappear.
As soon as I’m in my room, a feeling of abject dread flows over me. Envelopes me. It penetrates every pore and saturates me. I don’t want to turn around because I’m afraid I’ll see something behind me. I don’t want to look ahead. I don’t want to close my eyes.
I get into my bed and cover every inch of my body with my sheets, like I did when I was a little kid having nightmares. I would wake up from those and think that I was safe as long as no single part of me was visible to any monster or murderer or ghoul that may be in the room. If I let one toe out from under the covers, they could get me, but if I was covered I was safe.
I do the same thing now, and I wish I had five more quilts to cover me.
And late at night, when I have to pee, I notice that the toilet seat is up in the bathroom and run right back to my bed.
Mom’s boyfriend hasn’t been over, as far as I know. I cannot think of a single logical explanation for the seat being up.
I’ve never really believed in this supernatural stuff. I don’t think I do now, either. At least not intellectually. Emotionally, I believe in all of it right now. I tell myself that even if Cynthia did kill Aaron Saltis in just the right way to create a ghost, those brainwaves or whatever they are should have been stuck at the body dump, not capable of following me clear back to the suburbs to mess with my toilet, right?
But maybe this is a whole different kind of ghost.
God. I’m turning into one of those people. We get people on the tours all the time who worry about ghosts following them home, but they always seemed so nutty that I assumed they probably also went to the grocery store and were afraid that the guy from the Lucky Charms box would follow them home.
