by Sharon Short
Still, maybe some of the techniques would be useful for tapping into spirits. I put my hands palms up on my knees. I inhaled slowly, then exhaled, while glancing around the room.
But there were no shadows other than the ones that should be there, no flickers of movement other than the hem of the curtain fluttering from the warm air huffing out of the heating unit. I didn’t sense a thing as I looked around the room. The room was just . . . the room.
I closed my eyes, inhaled and exhaled slowly again. Maybe I could tap into some connection if I weren’t distracted by mundane shadows and flutters. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
The back of my left calf started to itch. Attending to the physical wouldn’t necessarily get in the way of tapping into the spiritual, would it? Especially if I kept my eyes closed and left my hands palms up.
I wiggled my left leg. My calf still itched. I wiggled again. Tried to refocus. Wiggled again. And again. And—
Thud. My butt jolted into my spine, my spine into my neck, my neck into my jaw. My eyes opened wide and I looked around.
Room was the same. The only difference was that now I was off the bed, on the floor, and hurting. And my calf still itched. I gave it a good long scratch.
Just before her sister in Florida died, my Aunt Clara had the chill bumps one hot night as we sat out on the front porch, she and Uncle Horace on the porch swing, Uncle Horace snoring softly as Aunt Clara rocked them back and forth and fanned herself with her Rothchild’s Funeral Parlor fan in rhythm to the rocking. (The fan was free, and so fit nicely into her frugality plan.) I sat on the front porch steps, staring into the darkness of Plum Street.
All at once, Aunt Clara gave a shiver that was far more of a reaction than the funeral home fan could have generated.
“Lord-a-mercy,” she said. “The chill bumps. I’ve a mind to go call Jeanne. Something tells me that if I don’t, I’ll never have a chance to talk with her again. Leastways, in this life.”
“Well, what tells you that?” I asked impatiently.
Aunt Clara sighed. “You just don’t have a lick of the sight, do you child?” Though Aunt Clara didn’t care much for my daddy’s family—ignoring me as they did—she still revered my Great-Aunt Cora Lee’s gift of the sight, through her dreams. And she believed it ran in her own family, through sudden thoughts that seemed to come from nowhere.
I reckoned my efforts to tap into Ginny’s spirit—which resulted only in my butt thumping to the motel room floor—proved Aunt Clara’s observation. Fine with me. Back to the practical.
First, I called Stillwater and talked briefly to Don Richmond, who assured me that Guy was doing just fine—he was back into his regular routine—and that the staff was watching him closely for any symptoms of stress. I felt only mildly reassured, though. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the Stillwater staff. It was just that I was really worried about Guy.
My own voice hitched up as I relayed the fact that I was temporarily staying at the Red Horse, and why, and gave Don the Red Horse phone number and my room number.
Next, I called Winnie and was lucky enough to reach her at home. Before the water main broke, she told me, she’d been able to collect thirty-seven signatures on her bookmobile petition. Would I help circulate the petition when everything was back to normal on Main Street? Of course, I told her.
Then I asked her for a favor I knew she’d delight in fulfilling: researching Ginny Proffitt’s background. I brought Winnie up to date on what all had happened since I’d last seen her that morning in my laundromat—she was worried about Guy, too, and said she’d pray for him—and I made arrangements to meet her and Martin at the Bar-None. They went there on Saturday nights for line dancing, anyway, and while taking breaks, Winnie could fill me in on what she’d learn about Ginny.
And I had every bit of faith that between the Internet and a few phone calls, she’d learn a lot. Winnie is like a coonhound on a scent when it comes to research questions. She won’t rest until she’s explored every possibility. I’d learn way more than I needed to know about Ginny, but somewhere in all the facts Winnie would uncover, would be something that would help me solve Ginny’s murder.
The Bar-None would also be the best place to go over the details, away from the other psychics, who along with Dru were my top suspects (Dru being my favorite). Of course, Dru wouldn’t haunt the Bar-None’s door. He and his followers counted drinking and dancing as sins. If he hadn’t been so preoccupied these past few months with trying to run the LeFevers out of business, to put a stop to the psychic fair, and to protest Halloween celebrations, he’d probably be arranging a protest demonstration at the Bar-None.
After I finished with Winnie, I tried Owen’s number again. Still busy. It was time to go see for myself that he was okay.
“Now, take a look at this one, Josie. Doesn’t he look great in his uniform?”
I looked at the picture of the twelve-year-old boy on Owen’s computer screen.
The boy had Owen’s offbeat but somehow charming good looks: the slight bend to the nose, the roguish grin, the wide-eyed expression, as if in amazement or anticipation.
The boy’s face also carried other qualities that I reckoned came from his mama: clear green eyes, a firmness to the chin, a spattering of sandy freckles.
The boy’s hair I couldn’t judge. He wore a red baseball cap and his hair was cropped so short that only a fine burr of light brown showed above his ears. The cap matched his red and blue baseball uniform, which boasted his high school team name: PANTHERS. Eagerness showed in how he held the bat, poised as if about to swing.
“He’s a pitcher. I was a pretty decent pitcher in my day,” Owen said. “Had a mean slider I liked to throw, you know.”
No, I thought, I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t even known that Owen played baseball in high school. Or that he had an athletic bone in his body. The past summer, when we’d gone riding on the bike trail that winds just past Paradise (one of the many bike and hike trails created from the old railroad lines and canal towpaths in Ohio), Owen kept losing his balance.
We’d played putt-putt golf, one of my favorite summer to-do’s, and he scored 202 to my 88 (two strokes under par.)
We’d gone to the park and played sand volleyball—I was an ace volleyball player in high school—and Owen kept serving the ball into the net.
So no, I had no idea he was in any way athletic. He’d never mentioned it.
But then, until the previous July, he’d never mentioned key elements of his past to me. Like the fact he’d been married. Fathered a child. Divorced. And on a trip to his troubled home for his brother’s funeral, gone into a bar, gotten into a fight with an old high school enemy, and in self-defense had knocked his knife-wielding foe to the floor, accidentally causing the other man to hit his head hard enough on a table corner that he died. Owen had then served time in prison for involuntary manslaughter and, upon his release, moved to Paradise, buying a house out in the countryside and taking a teaching position at Masonville Community College.
I’d learned all this only because I’d caught Owen in a lie about where he’d grown up. Then the truth came out. I’d often wondered whether Owen would have avoided telling me about his real past forever, if possible.
He’d added little to the story since then, except that Tori, his ex-wife, had gained total custody, including control of visiting rights, after Owen went to prison. And she’d denied him any contact with their son, Zachariah.
Until, it seemed, this past September. For the past month and a half, Owen had been corresponding with Tori through e-mail, he told me after I got to his house.
And just that morning, he said, after I’d left to go to work at my laundromat, he’d checked his e-mail and found a message from Tori. Their son had been asking more and more about his father. And after talking with her counselor, she’d decided to allow Owen to come visit them in Kansas City. He’d been on the Internet all day, shopping for the best air fare prices, or on the phone, arranging for other instructo
rs to substitute in his classes, getting permission from his dean to take off. He didn’t want to risk waiting until Christmas break to go to Kansas City. What if by then Tori had changed her mind?
He hadn’t left his house all day, hadn’t communicated with anyone other than Tori and his community college colleagues.
Which meant he hadn’t heard about Guy being in the hospital. I wanted to tell him about Guy, to seek comfort from him, but a coldness welled up within me, tightening my throat, and instead I found myself asking, “When were you going to tell me about all this, Owen?”
He looked confused. “I am telling you about this. It just came up this morning. I’m stunned by the turn of events myself.”
I shook my head. He just didn’t get it. The man had multiple PhDs, and at times he was still as dumb as a box of rocks when it came to practical matters of human relationships.
“When were you going to tell me you and Tori had started e-mailing each other? You’ve been in contact for almost two months, and it never occurred to you to tell me?”
Owen sighed. “Oh, come on, Josie. It’s not like I’m having some seamy cyber affair with someone I met in a chat room.” He studied me, then said, very slowly, “Tori is my ex-wife.”
I jumped up from the rocker, turned around—that was as much angry pacing as I could manage in the overstuffed spare bedroom he called an office—and glared down at Owen, who had pushed back from the sloppy desk and his computer. He was looking up at me, completely mystified. Which irritated me further.
“Don’t patronize me!” I hollered. “I know Tori is your ex-wife. But only because you were more or less forced to tell me last summer about her and about your son and about—about—’’
“Careful,” Owen said quietly. Something passed across his face, something that warned that he’d withdraw from ever connecting with me again if I didn’t choose my words carefully.
The fact he’d killed another human being, even in an act of self-defense for which none of the witnesses could fault him, had burdened him for life. The depth of his feeling about that had increased my tenderness toward him. More deeply than most, he knew from the central tragedy of his life—as I knew from tending to Guy—that life is precious and fragile and not to be taken for granted. It was a shared knowledge, born of different experiences, which had bonded us together.
But not, I thought bitterly, closely enough that he would open up to me about the essentials.
I took a deep breath, sank down into the rocker. I picked up the glass of sweet tea Owen had given me—I’d taught him the proper way to make sweet tea and knowing that it was one of my favorite beverages, right up there with Big Fizz Diet Cola, he kept a pitcher for me in his fridge. I took a sip. He’d made it well. He’d made it just for me. I tried to cling to that fact as I spoke carefully.
“I am happy for you that you will finally get to see Zachariah. I truly am. I am happy for you that you and Tori are able to communicate with each other. I truly am. I think that is best for you and for her and for Zachariah,” I said. “But you have been e-mailing with Tori for almost two months and you haven’t even once mentioned this to me.”
Owen groaned. “Oh, Josie, don’t tell me you’re jealous. My marriage to Tori was never good. The only good that came out of it was Zachariah. There’s nothing to be jealous of.” He gave me a big, goofy grin that I normally found endearing.
At that moment, I wanted to slap it off his face.
He held his arms open to me.
And I was supposed to put down my sweet tea, and accept his comfort, let him think I’d suddenly realized that I was being a silly little jealous thing, that we could just laugh all this off. That would be an easier game to play than not playing any game at all and facing the truth.
I wasn’t playing that game.
I sat, still, sipping the sweet tea, which suddenly seemed just a mite too sweet, and stared dead evenly at him.
Slowly his arms sank down to his sides. His grin started to fade. I waited until it disappeared completely before I spoke my final piece.
“I am not jealous, Owen, and you know that. If you don’t, then you’ve been dating some image of me—not the real me. What I am is angry. Something important has been developing in your life the past two months—a chance for a relationship with your son. And you haven’t shared a bit of that with me. I’ve been trying to trust—to believe—that you would always be open with me about your thoughts and feelings, about anything important to you, ever since this past summer.
“You’d tell me in great detail about a great antiquarian book find. How could you not tell me something like this?”
He stared at me for a long moment, bewilderment radiating from his gaze. My heart sank. He didn’t get it.
Finally he said, “I guess I just thought this was from my personal life and I’d tell you about it if something came of it. I was going to tell you when I’d confirmed my flight.”
I felt as if I’d been hit so hard my solar plexus had turned inside out.
I stood up. “Owen, do me a favor. Have a good trip and enjoy visiting your son. But find a few minutes to think about this—if you want a relationship with someone, you share your personal life with him or her. In fact, that’s the point of a relationship. Whether it’s with your son. Or with me. I don’t want just fun times, Owen.”
My heart panged as an image or two of the fun times from the night before—after we’d come back here, after finding Ginny’s body, needing to laugh and love to purge the sadness and horror from our hearts and minds—flashed across my mind.
“I want a close relationship with only the silences being comfortable ones,” I said. Like the sweet, comfortable silences Aunt Clara and Uncle Horace had shared on their front porch swing. I realized how much I wanted that with someone—with Owen?—myself. “Think about what I’ve said and if you want to talk about it, call me when you’re back.”
I walked out of Owen’s study, then out of his house.
I got in my van, taking care not to slam the door, taking care to pull out of his gravel drive casually and slowly.
I was almost back to Paradise before I realized that I had not told him a thing about Guy, or about the water main break, or about Ginny’s suitcase or anything else I’d learned.
Then I remembered something else, too.
The night before, he’d asked me about the dream I’d told Ginny about. And I’d told him the same little white lie I’d told Sally and Cherry—that I’d dreamed about drowning.
Maybe a small thing, compared to him withholding his renewed e-mail relationship with his ex-wife.
But, somehow, it made me feel worse, about both of us.
15
I love the names of apples. I have no idea who came up with them or how they chose them, but there’s something so poetic and earthy about them: Winesap. Rome Beauty. Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Jonathan. Even Granny Smith.
At Beeker’s Orchard, across from the Red Horse Motel, I took comfort in the apple names, pausing before each bin to carefully read the handwritten placards as if this were the first time I’d ever encountered appledom’s glorious variety.
The Red Horse Motel’s parking lot was full and overflow parking had been set up in the fields in front of Beeker’s Orchard. I’d parked my van on a grassy rise, being careful to set the parking brake.
The orchard was also busier than usual, even for a glorious Saturday afternoon in autumn. I selected two Winesaps—they would be good for a midnight snack in my motel room—and got in line and breathed in the sweet hay and apple air of the old barn.
The Beeker Orchard sells unpastuerized cider, impossible to get, except at a few roadside stands. Some folks worry that they’ll get sick if they drink unpasteurized cider, but generations of Paradisites and Masonvillians and folks from other villages and forks in the road in the county had grown up sipping the tasty beverage every fall, and I never knew of anyone to fall sick as a result.
Sometimes I think we just wor
ry too much. You can’t protect yourself from every possibility of ill health or disaster. After all, say you’re in line at a convenience store to get the pasteurized cider, which is as bland in comparison to the real stuff, as flat soda is to fizzy. A nut ball could come in and decide to rob the place and shoot you dead.
You just can’t predict everything, I thought. Owen couldn’t have predicted that walking into that bar years ago, just wanting a cold brew to help him past the hurting of losing his brother, would lead to a tragic outcome that would take his attacker’s life, and change his own forever.
The day before, I would have predicted that the weekend would be busy but pleasant. I’d never have foreseen Guy needing emergency medical help, Ginny’s murder, the water main break, my decision to investigate Ginny’s death, and Owen and I having a relationship-threatening fallout. If I had, I’d have crawled down between my field-of-flowers-fabric-softener-scented sheets and stayed there.
And maybe if any of these good folks knew what might await them in the next month . . . the next week . . . the next hour . . . they’d have stayed at home, too, also trying to avoid it. Maybe there was a good reason we couldn’t see into the future.
And yet it had always been part of human nature to try. As much as Dru might protest such “witchery,” it was part of the Bible, too: Joseph with his dream interpretations for the Pharaoh; the Old Testament high priests with their Urim and Thummin for getting “yes” and “no” answers about God’s will. Not that much different from flipping a coin, or jiggling a Magic 8 ball, or reading from a crystal ball or a pack of tarot cards. Who’s to say one is heavenly inspired, or directed by some psychic gift, and the other is not?
As I shuffled forward in the line, I refocused on the sights, taking comfort in the good scents from the barn, and in watching families pick out their fall goodies—bags of apples, cider, pots of mums, gourds, pumpkins, caramel apples, home-canned jellies and jams and relishes, apple pies.
Out front, kids clamored for the pony rides, one buck to go around the large flaming red maple tree three times on one of the four ponies, named Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Ernie, and Oscar the Grouch. Sonya Beeker Woods, who ran the orchard with her parents, had played with me on the volleyball team in high school. She had two kids now, ages three and four.
