Finally she asked, “You got that writing all over you?”
“Not all over . . .”
“Well, then, where?” She tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Show me.”
I found myself squirming and feeling uncomfortable, batting at her hands rather than just pushing her away. “I’m not taking off my shirt in your shop. Stop it. I have pictures.”
Phoebe sat back and goggled at me. “You got what?”
“I took photos with my phone. They aren’t very good shots, but the marks are fading quickly this time, so it’s a good thing I took the pictures when I did.”
“What do you mean, they’re fading quickly this time?”
“It happened before but it was just a short message—on my arms. This time it’s all over my upper body and I can’t read it—it’s on my back, too.” I pulled the phone out of my bag and poked around until I got to the photo gallery. I handed it to her. “There. Take a look and if you can tell me anything it says, I’ll be thrilled. I can’t make much out of it.”
I’m not the most modest person in the world—after years spent in dance troupes, backstage in cramped conditions with dozens of other dancers, I’d shed any shyness about people seeing my naked body—but handing over those pictures to Phoebe felt strangely intimate and I found myself holding my breath, waiting for what she would say. She flicked through them, going back and forth, enlarging some, skipping past others with a snort of dismissal. . . .
She looked up and said, “You are a terrible photographer.”
I laughed in relief. “You try and take a decent picture of your own back.”
“I can’t hardly read any of this. And what’s this . . . like a picture here?” she said, pointing at a photo that showed part of my back below my left shoulder blade. The looping text had run up into an arc, like part of a large circle that had been cut off by the angle and the curve of my body under my arm. The circle appeared to be segmented like a pie by more lines of text.
I took the phone and enlarged the section of the photo to peer at the words. “‘ . . . Great Wheel where tribute comes to make a meal for . . .’ I can’t make out the rest. Then the lines say ‘Limos comes within . . . the mistress of death . . . hunger calls to hunger.’ Terrible grammar, but I can’t say it makes much sense. . . .”
“It does look a little like the Great Wheel, though,” Phoebe said.
“What does?”
She put out a finger and traced the shape the trail of words had taken. “This. It’s a Ferris wheel, with the spokes here, and the loops in the words make the—what do you call ’ems—the gondolas for people to ride in here.”
As she touched the image, I could almost imagine her touch on my skin and I shuddered. I put the phone down on the table between us.
“Harper? You all right? You look like a goose walked on your grave.”
“No, but . . . I’m starting to get a picture in my mind of this whole case and I don’t like it at all. I see these ghosts . . . and among them is Linda Hazzard, but she’s not quite like the rest—there’s something more going on with her and she seems to be more autonomous than the others. This writing talks about hunger calling to hunger. It says something about the Great Wheel and even makes the shape of it on my skin. . . . It’s all of a piece, but . . . too much of it’s still missing. Mistress of death . . . that’s got to be Hazzard, right?”
“I suppose. . . .”
I was thinking out loud, my brain just too frantic to contain my thoughts in silence. “How does all of this connect to the patients? They all have a connection to the tunnel project, to accidents associated with construction. . . . Wait,” I said, snatching my cell phone from the table.
Phoebe glared at me—she disapproves of cell phone use in her store—but she humored me as I called Lily Goss.
When my client answered I identified myself and asked, “Did Julianne’s job put her in contact with dirt from the tunnel project?”
“What? Dirt from the tunnel . . . ? I think so. The firm was designing a hotel that’s planned for one of the reopened lots under the current viaduct. She was on the team and they went down to the site to do some planning work. Julie went to photograph the area as a reference for the models. That was earlier on the day she was bitten by the mosquito—or maybe she was actually bitten then. . . . The site is down near the water and the tunnel site, so I guess it could have happened that way. Why?”
“I just had a feeling there was a stronger connection to the other patients. They all had contact with dirt from the tunnel project.”
“Is it a pathogen, then? Some disease . . . ?” Goss asked, excited for a possible solution that was so very ordinary.
“I don’t think so—the doctors would have found a virus or something like that. But this gives me more information to attack the problem with. How is Julianne doing?”
“Badly. She doesn’t seem to rest at all. If she’s not painting the same things over and over, she’s shouting or crying. It’s so awful. I—I had to get out of the house for a while. I’m just on my way back from church. I had to pray for her and I talked to Father Nybeck, but . . . he still can’t offer any more help. She just doesn’t get better and I’m . . . losing hope. When is this going to end? Can you send these horrible spirits away from her? Have you figured out how?”
“Not yet, but I think I’m close.” I hoped I was, though I really didn’t know what the animus of the possessions was. I felt like the answer wasn’t far away, but it was still only a dim and shapeless idea. I had to put the pieces together soon or Julianne and the others might never wake up, their living souls fading away while they were pushed aside. “I will have it very soon, though.”
I could hear her breathing raggedly, as if she were close to tears. Finally she managed to speak again. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you.” She disconnected abruptly and I was sure she’d lost her battle not to cry. I felt terrible for lying, but I couldn’t let her give up—I would find the solution in time because I simply had no choice.
Phoebe reached for the phone as I finished, and I handed it over, feeling grim, but at least I now knew the link. I just had to connect it to a driving force. I scowled a moment in thought.
Phoebe poked the phone until she found the photos and frowned expectantly at me when I looked up again.
I tried to explain as my mind tumbled it around. “All three had accidents, all three came into physical contact with dirt from the tunnel on the day they were injured and went into a coma. They’re all haunted by these ghosts . . . these strangely obsessive ghosts who try to say something we don’t seem to be getting. The patients—or rather, the ghosts speaking through the patients—write strange things about tribute and hunger and food. . . . Everyone connected to the patients and the ghosts is thin, too thin, and too hungry—even me. The ghosts come from the market and they are connected to Hazzard, who believed in extreme fasting. They keep showing me the market like it used to be—before the city grew up all around it—when the shore was right below the hills and bluffs, not buried under the seawall and waterfront. . . . I keep finding the phrase ‘beach to bluffs and back.’ That’s the tunnel route—from the edge of the original strand in the south end of downtown up into the bluff where the market is. And something about the Wheel . . . but there wasn’t any Ferris wheel when Hazzard was around. And I don’t see what the Great Wheel can have to do with three bedridden patients who can’t even wake up. Cannie Trimble said something about a wheel—she must have meant the Great Wheel—and I didn’t get it. I still don’t. I just don’t understand how the Wheel is connected to the ghosts! And now to Hazzard . . .” I slapped my palm against my head as if I could jar the puzzle pieces together and make out the whole picture, but it wasn’t coming.
Phoebe put the phone down and grabbed my wrist on the fourth smack, arresting my hand. “Stop that! It’s not going to solve the problem for you. You got to think, not beat yourself up. You take these books and you go home to that man of yours and you think it out with
him. He’s a smart one. He’ll help you figure it.”
I met her earnest gaze, biting my lip. “Phoebe, you believe me, don’t you?”
She scoffed. “Girl, what kind of lackwit you think I am? Of course I believe you. I can see it right here,” she added, tapping my phone as it lay on the table. “I could think you were crazy, but I know whatever crazy you are, it’s the good kind, not the psycho, lying kind. Now you go home before you knock your brains loose beating on your head like that.”
“I—” I started, but she cut me off, rising to her feet with the books bundled in her arms.
“No. No excuses, no thank-yous, no rattling on. You got work to do and you are going to go do it. Now,” she added, nudging my nearest foot with her own, “go on. What’ve I got to do, throw you out? Go on. You’re going to do it anyhow, might as well get on with it.” She prodded me to the door like a mother hen and loaded the books into a bag, which she shoved into my arms. “Now, out you go, Harper. And you come back for dinner next month. Poppy’s got to fatten you up for that man of yours.”
She winked at me and nearly pushed me out the door.
SEVENTEEN
It wasn’t raining, but it was thinking about it again. I hurried to the Land Rover with my bag full of books, not wanting them to get wet before I could look them over. Not to mention that Phoebe would skin me if they were damaged. I was troubled by the image of the Great Wheel, too. What we’d deciphered indicated some connection between it and the ghosts and the phenomena that the patients were experiencing, but it didn’t lie on the tunnel route per se, and damned if I could understand what the link was. It was on the waterfront and the accidents were all associated with the tunnel. The waterfront would be deeply affected by the construction and the tunnel, but . . . so what? How did that concern ghosts? What was Linda Hazzard doing in the mix—something about hunger, but what? Purlis was probably linked to all this, too, but that was another connection I hadn’t been able to discover yet. I just wasn’t seeing something and in the meantime I was chasing my thoughts in frustrating circles.
It was still early enough to ask a few more questions and going home would only remind me of Quinton’s absence. I headed back to the market to take another look at the bluff I’d drawn, above where Princess Angeline had lived and near where Linda Hazzard had killed her patients and had their bodies cremated without ceremony or tears.
It was sufficiently close to dinnertime that the streets were busy, but the parking lots were in flux, with the morning shoppers leaving and the evening revelers not yet arriving. I managed to find a parking place for the truck on one of the steep streets next to the market. The back-in angle parking was tricky and I almost thought the Land Rover would tip onto its side and roll down the hill to fall off the edge and onto the waterfront below, but it didn’t. I hurried down the sidewalk toward Steinbrueck Park.
I crossed the road to the park and sat down near the homeless memorial, imagining that this must have been almost directly above Angeline’s shack. I wondered what it was like to live at the edge of the city then, when ships lay at anchor to be unloaded by smaller boats and the goods hauled up the steep hills in carts.
“Bad clams,” said a voice beside me.
I turned my head sharply. “What?” The woman next to me wore a white garment that wrapped her in light. She wasn’t so much a ghost as a presence with a vague shape and a face hard to see in the luminance that shone from her.
“The city made the water dirty. Bad water made the clams bad. Not all the time, but enough.”
“Are you . . . Kikisebloo?” I asked.
She nodded. “You shouldn’t be here. The land is riddled like the timbers of old ships and the vileness comes with strangers. It rises, a tide to sweep away the new and the old. It will sweep you with it, if you cannot manage the ones you cannot love.”
“I don’t understand. Do you know how this all goes together? The ghosts and the patients and the tunnel and the Wheel? And my not-quite-father-in-law?”
She gazed at me as if looking inside my soul. “What stands may fall like the great forests fell before the ax. Look to your own. The answers you truly want are there. This moment passes. The Wheel may turn or it may fall into the sea. Who knows?”
“I think someone must know. What’s the connection between the Wheel and the ghosts who are haunting the sick people?” I demanded.
“I cannot say. There was a way here, long ago. Up through the pines from stony shore and mucky strand. Up from the boats, up from the hoardings of men who are blind to what they do.”
She began to dim and age before my eyes, becoming the old woman in the photo taken in 1907. “I do not like the future that I see. The worms have eaten till the wood is rotten with them. It is like my old shack and cannot stand much longer if they remain. I miss my father and mothers. I miss my brothers and sisters and my little daughters, my Mary and Enie. You should not miss them. But you must look in the graveyard. Look to the graves. Look to your own, to your husband, for answers. It is a dark thing to be alone and hungry.”
She shimmered away and left me on the bench, looking back toward the market. I wasn’t sure I had anything more than I’d started with, except she seemed worried and she wanted me to ask Quinton something—something about his father, I imagined.
I muttered under my breath, annoyed with the obtuse conversation of spirits. Graves . . . There were graves—or at least a cemetery of sorts—in the market. What if Angeline had meant the secret cemetery in the Soames-Dunn courtyard where Lois “Mae West” Brown was buried—among others?
It took me a little while to figure out which building I wanted—the names on old historic buildings are sometimes obscured by newer signs and additions, like awnings. But I found it nearby and went through the arcade, lured by the watery sunlight visible at the end of the hall. I stepped out into a deep courtyard, a high wall in front of me scaled by a staircase that led to Post Alley. I could barely see the sign for Kells hanging in the alley above. Those iron balusters were the rails that Carlos’s assistant, Inman, had pushed me against and nearly tipped me over. I stared at the distance from the rails to where I stood and shivered at the idea of falling from there to this flagstone courtyard, already stained with fist-sized blotches like the remains of small homicides. I doubted I could have survived that fall headfirst, Greywalker or not.
The stairs were partially wrapped around a large sort of planter with a low, rambling plum tree growing from it up against the wall. I laughed, suddenly understanding Lois Brown’s joke—she’d said she was “plumb” sure she was dead—dead and buried under a plum tree. This was the secret cemetery—this quiet little courtyard with its tiny tree. I started up the steps to where I could swing over the rail and get onto the earth beneath the tree.
That was when the rain came. I could hear people dashing along the alley overhead and a few shouts and squeals of dismay as shoppers and tourists scurried to get under cover. I thought of backtracking into the building behind me—better that than the haunted bar up the stairs—but I was already getting wet, so I just zipped up my jacket and tucked my hair under the hood and down the collar to keep it from falling into my eyes.
I climbed the rest of the steps and over the rails to crouch on the soft ground beneath the tree. A few other plants had started up on a bit of grass, but for the most part it was barren except for an array of small objects strewn randomly across the ground. I crept around, looking at the objects. Some had plainly been put there by other people—the remains of a bunch of flowers, a cheap plastic ring with a note tied to it that read “Forever,” a handful of coins—but others seemed to have dug themselves from the dirt and wisps of ghost-stuff clung to them.
I carefully collected the Grey-touched things. I found another key much like the one that had fallen from the ceiling in Kells, two more buttons, a bit of old jewelry chain, and a funny little tool with a dull point at one end and the other end flattened into a disk a little larger than the end of my thumb.
> There was also an old “flair” button with a rather naughty suggestion on it. I picked it up and rubbed some of the dirt off it. “One of yours, Mae?” I asked, looking it over. She didn’t respond, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had.
The ground under me shifted and I scrambled a little to stay on my feet, lurching closer to the railings and clutching them to keep from falling off the planter. For a moment, my Grey-sighted left eye showed a flicker of ghostly hands reaching from the soil, but they faded as I moved away.
A man stepped out into the courtyard, shielding his face from the rain with one hand. “Hey,” he called, “get out of that! It’s not safe up there—the planter almost collapsed a few months ago!”
I put my collection of odd treasures into my pockets and scrambled back over the rails and down the stairs.
The man scowled at me and shooed me inside, saying, “What the hell were you doing up there?”
“I dropped my key,” I said. “I didn’t know there’d been any problems with the planter.”
“It was months ago, but they had to shore up the wall afterward and I’m not sure it’s going to hold if the tunnel people keep on poking around. They buried some kind of sensor to monitor the tunnel there. Just making more messes than fixing them so far,” he muttered.
“It’s quite a project, isn’t it?”
“It’s a pain in the butt. Kind of like you.”
“Me?” I objected.
“I need to run my shop, not go climbing around saving tourists from being foolish.”
“I’m not a tourist.”
He gave me a cool look. “Then you should know better than to go climbing over rails around here. Now, go on. You’re dropping dirt on my floor.”
Possession g-8 Page 21
