I looked at the streak of red lipstick on my thumb, the scars hiding beneath the cuff of my white school blouse. I was sick of hiding. Sick of letting my mistakes haunt me more than any ghost ever could. I could let my classmates force me back into invisibility, or I could go out there and demand their respect, whether Hiroki backed me up or not.
"I'll do it," I said.
CHAPTER TWO
There's an App for That
Let it never be said that I don't do my research, even if it is on a cell phone in the passenger's seat of a patrol car.
A fifteen minute drive from Millroad Catholic Academy, between pines growing close as the bristles on a hairbrush, is a sharp bend in the road. On the outside curve is a repair shop, which flanks the fantastical memorials locals call Acid Park.
Back in the sixties, a girl on her way back from prom missed her driveway and wrapped her VW Van around the tree beside her dad's roadside repair shop. She made it out of the wreck, but died in the undergrowth ten feet away, her dress a bloody cobweb of tulle between the rhododendrons.
Her father left the van as a warning, but it wasn't enough. In his grief, he erected an eerie memorial among the trees where she died. He suspended sheets of aluminum or tin to throw back headlights and warn drivers of the bend in the road, then used his mountain of accumulated scrap to build enormous, pinwheel-like structures he called whirligigs.
The first piece was a weather-vane, studded with bicycle reflectors and mounted on an old basketball hoop, sunk into the ground between the rhododendrons where he'd found his girl that terrible morning.
He stopped repairing cars, turned away customers with their tractors and backhoes, and hurled himself into work on his whirligigs. Within a few years, he was creating moving masterpieces larger than a state fair ride. Brightly painted whirligigs creaked and flashed in the night, propellers spinning on giant axles that swung like booms.
During the day, it looks almost like a junk-yard with the way the metal stands among the trees, getting rusty under its shawl of wisteria. But at night, it turns into acid park--a post-apocalyptic carnival of shimmering reflections to blow the chemically-altered mind. Though the father's work gathered artistic praise across the nation, the story's creepiness and the easy roadside access made the memorial site something of an acid-dropping destination for the local purveyors of fringe and free-love. Apparently, he was bitter about the unintended result.
Until pulling up the article online, I hadn't heard the father died. I had heard the Arts Council was disassembling Acid Park--meticulously moving and restoring each crazy whirligig for reassembly in a lot downtown, where they could be appreciated by more than urban legend-chasers and druggies.
Sheriff Archibald had left me in the care of Deputy Reid, who turned out to be both less formal and less fake than the Sheriff himself. She was a narrow-framed black woman in her twenties, and her short hair was cropped close and worn natural. The no-fuss set to her mouth convinced me to lay off the questions, so we drove in silence until the road took us around a sharp curve, and straight into Acid Park.
From the roadside, it looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. Dirt and gravel lapped at the the asphalt highway in a wide shoulder that funneled into a narrow side-road. Tall pines and deciduous brush grew in tangles along the edges, not quite obscuring the rusting structures turning in the breeze. A giant yellow windmill stood as tall as any pines on its kindergarten-blue stilts. Its sails had rusted through.
As Deputy Reed pulled onto the gravel, I squinted into the trees, at the morning glories tangled around corrugated tin sheets. The most prominent feature, however, was right at the edge of the gravel shoulder: a VW Van, wrapped halfway around a pine tree--the ticket booth to this abandoned carnival. Saplings grew in through the open driver's side door, and the magenta rhododendron blossoms littered the ground around it. The paint job would have been a bright butter yellow once, but now its paint was cracked, old, and flaking.
A girl had died in there.
I shivered and was glad when we pulled down the dirt drive and left the van behind. The road was only wide enough for one car, and we bounced along over roots and pine needles, crushing spiky sweetgum balls into the dirt. Soon, the tunnel of pines led us to an ill-kempt yard.
Straight ahead, a ramshackle building heaped high with scrap metal and car parts. On the left stood a farmhouse--a dingy thing that had once been white, with black shingled roof and black shutters.
There's a feeling you get when you look at empty houses. I can't really explain it, but you know they're empty, as if their darkened windows were the eyes of someone whose mind has gone.
We exited the car in front of the workshop. The scents of hot metal burned my nose, and I fought the urge to plug my ears against the shriek of a saw.
Deputy Reid scowled. "They're not supposed to be working right now," she called, motioning me under the caution tape alongside the workshop. My stomach flipped as we ducked beneath it.
I was in a crime scene. A real, fucking crime scene! It felt so badass.
That was, until I saw the pasture beyond. Late afternoon sunlight poured onto a field that would have been idyllic if not for the giant craters where half the whirligigs had been uprooted and carried downtown, as if by giant hurricane. Now, two officers walked the perimeter of those holes, half-dragged by German Shepherds.
The remaining devices stretched on grasshopper-long limbs, looking like grownup-sized tinker toys. Their whirling mechanisms and long boom-like arms would have been creepy and impressive, but atop each one sat a metal cutout. From this distance, the only one I could identify was a tractor, which wasn't terribly intimidating, even if it was atop a whirligig approximately the size of a water tower.
Deputy Reid marched to the shack's rear and shot an annoyed look at the dude wielding a saw. He was cutting into a metal sheet, thick gloves maneuvering the sparking blade in a slow curve. An enormous green pinwheel leaned up against the door behind him, missing one of its petals.
Deputy Reid waved, and the guy must have been keeping his eyes on us, because I swear he'd been staring too intently at his project to see that tiny little wave. He pushed up his goggles, revealing slightly bugled blue eyes, and wiped the back of a glove over his forehead. He had a whippet-like appearance to him. With his skin tight over his bones, he could have looked like the very kind of druggie the planned whirligig park was trying to avoid, but the "Bill Nye is my bro" tee shirt destroyed his street cred.
"I thought your crew wasn't allowed on site today," Deputy Reid said.
The man shrugged and nodded toward the K-9 unit. "They didn't say anything."
His accent was local, and when he talked, his teeth showed as tobacco stained nubs. I gave his shirt a skeptical glance.
"Your supervisor should have told you."
"Supervisor? Hon, I own the place."
Deputy Reid leaned back, looking him up and down. "You're the inheritor?"
"Ee-yup," he said, tugging off his gloves and tossing them onto a pile of scrap. "Mr. Weir didn't have no more family. Reckon I helped him out."
My fingers itched to pull out a notepad. "So why are you working on a whirligig?" I asked.
The man looked at me, taking in my school uniform and spending just a moment too long on my hair. I forced myself not to wince as recognition dawned on his face, which twisted immediately into a sneer.
"I think she's asking the questions here, missy," he said, nodding to Deputy Reid.
"So why are you working on a whirligig?" Deputy Reid asked. I bit back a smile.
Bill's Bro jerked his chin at the whirligig. "I made this one. Good long time ago. When I first started workin' for Mr. Weir. The Art Council don't want it, so I figured I might as well fix it up my own self."
He poked one the shiny blades, the lines in his face growing deeper.
Deputy Reid nodded, her hand resting on her belt.
"We're going to have to ask you to vacate the premises until the investigation i
s complete," she said.
I held up a hand. "Wait." I narrowed my eyes at the man. "You weren't here during the paranormal activity, were you? Did you experience any chills? Hear any strange noises or-"
"I was here when everybody went ghost-crazy cause of a breeze. It was fuckin' cold," he said. "And all the crap on the news got everbody ready to shout about ghosts. Can't fart without somebody think it's a spirit."
I would have laughed if he hadn't stabbed a finger at me. "An' you ain't helpin'. Ain'tchu sick of the spotlight yet, honey?"
My face warmed, but I kept my smile cool, imagining myself with my handheld recorder and a lariat bearing "PRESS". I was sick of the spotlight. That was precisely why I needed to control it.
"So there was a chill, and that monster whirligig moved?"
"Yeah. But it was-"
"Did the little ones move?"
He lifted both hands. For a moment, he seemed ready to deny it, but Deputy Reid was watching him closely. Finally, he whipped his safety goggles off his head and tossed them on the gloves. "I didn't see."
"Thanks," I said, sweet as his grandma's iced tea. "That's all I needed to know."
Bill's disgruntled bro shoved his way into the workshop, dragging a pack of Winston Salems from his pocket. Next to me, Deputy Reid was showing serious eyebrow game.
At least this time her eyebrows seemed to be on my team.
"You going to law school?" she said.
I smiled at her. "Journalism."
She gestured at the massive green whirligig blossom. "This is actually the one where we found the blood. DNA samples matched our missing C.I. It wasn't long after that the restoration staff reported strange activity. The big propeller moving, and none of the rest. What we really need to know is whether the paranormal part of the claim is true. If it is, we can use any information the revenant might have to help us locate the body."
My ribs had decided to shrink around my lungs at the mention of blood and DNA and actual police-type stuff, but I was determined to look like I was up for the job. I nodded. Anyway, Deputy Reid didn't seem to be a skeptic like Sheriff Archibald, just determined to investigate properly. That was kind of awesome.
"I'm still not following something. How did the blood...you know," I gestured to the whirligig. "...Get here? I mean, was he hurt or killed here?"
She shrugged. "We've only got speculation at this point. One of the Salvadoran gangs in the area has a habit of warning people. Ramirez was an informant. They take that seriously--probably wanted to teach other would-be informants a lesson by killing him." She gestured to the half-empty field. "This place is usually vacant. Could be the gangs thought all those open holes might make a convenient grave."
I grimaced. With all the activity, it would be tough for a dog to determine which scent to follow. "You said there was no body."
"Right. If that's true, they got scared off for some reason. Maybe our friend came home." She smirked. "Maybe they believe in ghosts."
I suppressed a shudder. "Well, my skill set is different from Hiroki's, so this could take a few minutes."
Deputy Reid pressed her lips. "You can at least determine whether there's paranormal activity, right? We can't afford to shell out three hundred dollars for an EMF."
I snorted, waving my hand to dismiss the concern, and pulled out my cell phone. "Nah, there's an app for that."
"Of course there is," she said, rolling her eyes.
"It's pretty accurate, too, according to Hiroki. Though he might have been screwing with me."
I pulled up the app, making certain the settings were calibrated based on Hiroki's responses, but before I could even take a reading, Deputy Reid stepped closer, her expression dark.
"You're serious? Look, we can use an app," she said. "We could even use an EMF, if we had one--we've got an officer with the training. Even if Sheriff Archibald thinks it's bull, it's standard now. But we can't definitively establish the existence of a spirit with that. It has to be an expert witness. You can communicate with it somehow, right? The reason we need you here is to question the victim."
My chest clenched, partly in annoyance, and partly from the dread of knowing I was about to disappoint her. "But that's...that isn't what I do," I said. "I told you what I did in the Nguyen statement. I've had experience with the paranormal, but I'm not the one who can actually talk to-"
"You talked to Aaron Nguyen. You were quoted in the police report, and we have audio recording of-"
"He was possessing Hiroki!" I said, horror working its way up my spine, sinking its teeth into the base of my skull. The hopeful flicker that this case might heal my reputation was starting to gutter. "I didn't talk to him when he was all-" I twiddled my fingers, looking for a word to explain it. I knew the word. What was the word?
The green whirligig rattled, then, all at once, fell with a crash into the scrap pile. Both Deputy Reid and I stumbled back.
The meter on my app gave a spasm of activity. My heart tripped over itself for just a moment as I realized that, while we'd been arguing, someone else might have been listening, trying to get the attention of the only person in the county willing to pay attention.
"Oh my god," I said.
Deputy Reid froze, all except her dark eyes, which swiveled as she took in the workshop, searching for whatever had caused the movement. My hands went clammy, and my fingers slid over the glass screen as I turned in a slow circle, watching the EMF app's line jump and flicker like a heart-rate monitor. It was strongest near the scrap pile, where the whirligig lay. Ice slid down my spine.
"Mr. Ramirez?" I said. There was a sound like scratching on metal. I imagined fingernails, dragging over the green-painted whirligig's petals. I swallowed. What would Hiroki do? He'd talk. "Mr. Ramirez, I'm here to help. If you're there, just-"
"Actually, I call her Julie."
I fumbled my phone in my haste to turn around. For just a moment, I thought Mr. Ramirez had spoken to me. Then I realized the shop's back door was once again open and standing framed inside it was Bill's Bro. He stared at me with his eyebrows raised, a cigarette cradled between two fingers.
"Call...who?" I said, just as Deputy Reid said, "Who's Julie?"
Bill's Bro took a pull off his smoke and blew it out in a soft laugh. He jabbed the lit end toward the scrap pile. "The possum." He grinned. "I call her Julie."
"But-" I pointed at my flickering app. "But the EMF-"
Deputy Reid's sigh cut me short. She massaged her forehead with one hand, the other resting on her wide, shiny uniform belt, just above the little slot for handcuffs.
My face went scarlet as I realized what a total idiot I must look like.
"Well I can't see them," I said. My voice had shifted higher in defensiveness, and I forced it back down, trying to sound authoritative. Cool. "The app must need to be calibrated differently. Or maybe it's all the metal around here causing-"
"Miss Collins, you pulled out a cell phone app," she said, then turned back to Bill's Bro. "Excuse us a minute." He lifted his cigarette in salute and slid back into the shop, pulling the door shut after him.
"Look," Deputy Reid said. "We can't put this in a report. We can't use county resources to follow up on a lead based on the product of some chem-trail chaser with an associate's degree in programming."
I pressed my fingers against my lips. "But you were willing to follow a lead based on the word of someone who claims to see ghosts?"
She fixed me with a frustrated glare. Her eyebrows had clearly switched teams. "We take statements from witnesses," she said. "Those with confirmed Spectral Sight are considered expert witnesses or translators in a court of law. There is nothing official or confirmable about a cell phone EMF, no matter how close it gets to the truth. We can't use it, except as a basis on which to get in expert, which we thought you were."
I put my phone back in my pocket, swallowing hard. Heat crept up my neck. I needed to get out of this situation as fast as possible, preferably without doing any more damage to my already s
haky social status.
"Okay," I said, and then, as if consoling myself, I repeated it. "Okay. I think there's been a miscommunication about my capabilities."
Deputy Reid glanced to the side, then back at me, as if this were such an obvious statement it shouldn't have needed saying. "Miss Collins, this 'miscommunication' has resulted in a waste of county time and resources."
My face went cold, and somewhere inside, that guttering hope succumbed. At the same time, I was getting frustrated. "I worked with Hiroki on Aaron Nguyen. I have genuine experience with the paranormal. What I do isn't what Hiroki does. I'm more of a...a..."
But that was the problem. Hiroki and I had searched for weeks to figure out what I was, but we couldn't find anything. I was a stairway to heaven, a bridge to the beyond, the touch of death for the dead. But the only one who could confirm it was Hiroki.
I unclenched my fists. "I'm not sure what I am, but I can get rid of spirits without needing an exorcism." I swallowed, because her dark look wasn't changing. "I guess...that isn't much help to you, is it?"
She didn't even need to shake her head.
CHAPTER THREE
Fact or Flush
I was certain there was no ghost-informant now. There had been a feeling in the air when Aaron was around--a thickening of air molecules, a pressure on my arms that made it shrink into goosebumps. I'd just been so desperate to be helpful, I'd convinced myself there was something where nothing existed.
It was a miracle I made it out of my room the next morning, let alone to breakfast, mass, and first period Latin. I regretted skipping my usual stop by Higher Grounds, though, because I needed caffeine not only to handle the major shade my classmates tossed at me, but also to write down anything significant about today's lesson on conjugating the Dative of Agent.
My brain had turned against me, making all sorts of stupid connections to remind me of my shame. Dative of Agent made me think of agents in general, which made me think of the FBI, which made me think of my most recent run-in with the law. Let's just say Deputy Reid hadn't let me ride in the front of her patrol car on the way back to school, and I would find myself lucky not to be on Principle Brown's shit list until the Second Coming.
The Girl in Acid Park Page 2
