Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  ‘See ya. Bye.’ Maurie turned and headed toward the front door, but she couldn’t get away that easily, of course. Her sister intercepted her.

  ‘Are you taking the rental car?’ Cassie demanded.

  ‘Of course I’m taking the rental car! How else would I get to the airport? Move.’ Cassie stood in her way.

  Cassie stepped aside, probably only because Mom elbowed her to take her place. On Mom’s face was that infuriatingly martyred look mothers get when they are hurt, disappointed, stricken, but being ever so calm about it. ‘Maurie, honey, please don’t go. We can talk—’

  ‘No, we can’t talk! I am going to lose it if I have to stay here a moment longer!’ Every muscle clenched, Maurie felt herself starting to sweat.

  ‘Sweetie, that’s how I felt at first.’ Mom reached toward her to give an understanding pat.

  Maurie jerked back. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  For once speechless, Mom let her hand drop, and almost let her mask of maturity drop as well. Her face struggled.

  Cassie cried out in protest, ‘Sis!’

  ‘Never mind, honey.’ Mom transferred the calming touch to Cassie and stepped aside, taking Cassie with her, as she gave Maurie a smile, the dreaded strong-mommy smile, fit to break a daughter’s heart. ‘You go ahead then, sweetie pie. Consider yourself hugged and kissed.’

  Not trusting herself to reply, Maurie rammed out. She knew she looked and acted raving mad, and she hated that, yet felt she had no choice. She was angry. The alternative to angry departure was unthinkable.

  Of course it hurt when Maurie left that way. It would have hurt no matter what way she left; the going away of a child, even a grown child, leaves a painful absence, not to say abscess, in the parent. But her going away in a snit made it worse.

  Cassie and I stood there. Then she said, ‘If you need to cry, Mom, for gosh sake, cry.’ She hugged me.

  Hugging her back, I allowed myself a few sniffles, then said, ‘Howsabout if we both go back to bed for an hour, then start the day over?’

  ‘Nah. I’m hungry.’ Cassie let go of me and returned to her cereal.

  I bleated, ‘How long do you think she’s going to stay mad at me?’

  ‘Come on, Mom. It’s not you she’s pissed at, not really. Give her a few days, she’ll deal.’

  Comforted by Cassie’s pragmatism, I sat sipping my coffee and thinking. After a while, I said to Cassie, ‘Your sister has always been so logical about everything that what she saw here this morning scared her right out of her stringently academic mind.’

  ‘Yeah, well, what about my mind?’ Cassie stopped eating. With her spoon, she poked at her cereal as if it had turned against her.

  ‘Are you feeling a bit spooked?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I was, the first few days.’

  ‘And then?’

  I shrugged. ‘Then something in my head either clicked or snapped – it’s hard to tell the difference – and I got over myself.’

  ‘Clicked together or snapped apart, huh?’

  ‘The jury remains out.’

  Cassie leaned back, giving up on her cereal but not, apparently, on me. I saw a faint smile. ‘You said you had a plan.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ Then I shut my mouth quite decidedly.

  ‘But you’re not going to elaborate.’

  This was correct, as I indicated with a shrug. I did not care to talk about my plan, which was to get a good look at the skeleton found in my backyard in order to see whether the shape of its skull actually did match that of my weirdly begotten portrait of a child. What would I do if my eerie inklings were confirmed? I would worry about that later. First, just to get started, I needed the name of the nice woman who was the coroner. I got up from the breakfast table to peer around for it.

  ‘What are you looking for, Mom?’

  ‘Something I wrote down and put somewhere.’

  Cassie rolled her lovely amber eyes. ‘Could you be a bit less specific?’ She knew I could have scrawled information on anything from a Sudoku book to a clothes dryer sheet, and she started turning things over accordingly. Eventually, it was she who found the origami paper under the hummingbird magnet. ‘Is this it? Dr Marcia Wengleman?’

  ‘Yes!’ I pounced. ‘Now we need the phone book.’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’

  ‘It should be right by the phone.’ I found the book.

  ‘And the phone is right where it belongs, attached to the wall,’ said my daughter in sar-Cassie-tic approval.

  Ignoring her, I flipped pages, found what I wanted, then dialed Dr Wengleman’s office in the Skink County Courthouse. A secretary picked up. I was pleased but not surprised when Dr Wengleman accepted my call; I had thought she was my kind of person. Her voice sounded friendly. ‘Good morning, Mrs Vernon.’

  ‘Please, call me Beverly.’

  ‘Beverly, what can I do for you?’

  ‘I need access to my skeleton, please. Or not my skeleton, exactly, but you know what I mean.’

  She knew, and sounded distressed not to be able to oblige. ‘I’m sorry, but unless there’s some compelling reason—’

  ‘I need to give her collarbone back.’

  Marcia Wengleman’s voice skidded upwards. ‘You have the missing collarbone?’

  ‘Yes, but in all the commotion, I’d forgotten about it until now.’ This was true.

  ‘Could you please bring it to my office? Immediately? The medical examiner is transporting the remains to Tallahassee later today.’

  Aaak. I was just barely in time to see that skull. I took it upon myself to be stubborn, dense and eccentric. ‘I want to return it directly to the little girl herself, Doctor Wengleman. That child means a lot to me, and unless I can see her and explain to her, I prefer to keep the collarbone as a memento.’

  Sheriff Pudknucker, I’m sure, would have come after me with a warrant, and certainly the coroner could have threatened the same, but she only said plaintively, ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘Then let me see the girl, please.’

  I imagine she rationalized capitulation as an acceptable shortcut through what could have become a major legal hassle. ‘All right. Meet me at the morgue in an hour.’

  After getting directions, I thanked her, hung up and turned around to find Cassie staring at me. ‘You have the collarbone? In the house?’

  ‘In the breadbox, to be exact.’ It felt nice to know where something was for a change. I crossed the kitchen to lift the lid, peered and once again lost my faith in my own sanity.

  I was staring at an empty tin box.

  I said a few bad words, then, ‘I put it here, dammit! Collarbones don’t just walk off by themselves!’

  Cassie muttered something to the effect that in my world they might. Ignoring her, I yanked open a kitchen cupboard and started rooting. ‘Cassie, help me find it!’

  She did that for a while, climbing on a chair to inspect the high shelves and the top of the refrigerator for me. But when we had tossed practically everything in the kitchen on to the floor, she became impatient. ‘Mom, this is hopeless. I’m going to take a shower.’ She stalked off, and perhaps did not intend me to hear when she mumbled, ‘I should have bailed with Maurie.’

  Maybe she didn’t believe there had ever been a collarbone. But I knew there was, dammit! Lunging into the front room, I started pulling cushions off the sofa.

  From the back of the house, Cassie screamed, ‘Mom!’

  If anybody had asked me, I would have said I couldn’t run anymore, not at my age, and I would have been mistaken. When my baby girl called me like that, I dashed to her.

  She was standing beside the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her, staring at something in the bathtub – maybe a scorpion, I thought. They had been known to intrude.

  ‘I pulled the shower curtain back,’ Cassie said not very steadily, pointing, ‘and there it was.’

  I looked. No, it wasn’t a scorpion. In the middle of the empty bathtub lay the missing c
ollarbone.

  Cassie didn’t mind that her mother took the collarbone and left to meet the coroner without her. She had thought she wanted to go along, but when push came to shove, she felt as if she could do without any more weirdness for the next few hours. In fact, trying to calm down and relax, she prolonged her shower until her skin began to prune.

  And no matter how much she tried to space out, she couldn’t help thinking. How had the collarbone gotten into the bathtub? It certainly had not been there yesterday evening, when Maurie had showered. Cassie thought about maybe phoning Maurie – or, no, texting her to call back when she got off the plane – but decided against it. Maurie would almost certainly think Mom had put the collarbone in the bathtub herself. For the time being, until she’d had a chance to unbend a bit, Maurie was Cleopatra, the Queen of Denial. Maurie thought Mom was playing games. But whatever was going on at Mom’s place wasn’t Mom’s idea of fun, Cassie felt sure of that. She could tell this was not a laughing matter to her mother. Mom was dealing with it because she had no other choice.

  How the hell had the skeleton’s collarbone put itself in the bathtub?

  For that matter, how the hell were any of the weird things going on in this house happening?

  Cassie had no answer and doubted she ever would.

  Maybe she was asking the wrong question. Maybe a better question would be: Why?

  Why had the collarbone ended up in the bathroom?

  No reasonable answer came to mind for that, either.

  Sighing, Cassie turned off the shower and got out. While she had been in there, the only thing she had decided for certain was that the water was ridiculously hot; the water heater had to be set way too high. Toweling herself dry, she made a mental note to help Mom correct that.

  Helping Mom. That was what this trip was supposed to be all about. Cassie could kind of understand why Maurie had bailed, but she was not going to. Not. She was staying until … until something made sense.

  Damn, she had to figure this thing out. Why had that bone been in the bathtub?

  After getting dressed, Cassie wandered into the studio and looked at the childish drawings again. Especially the one on the easel. Three girls, no hands, no mouths, and their powerful mother …

  Cassie had never been ‘whupped’ in her life, but just the same, it hit her like a whupping: the brown, snaky thing dangling from the mother’s hand was a belt.

  EIGHT

  Marcia Wengleman stood leaning against her official van, waiting for me as I pulled around the small local hospital into its back parking lot. Apparently, she was used to the heat; she made no effort to shade or fan herself. She was wearing a tank top, shorts and flip-flops; in other words, she was professionally attired by Cooter Spring standards.

  I grabbed my portfolio (in the bottom of which I had placed the bone of contention) as I got out of my boxy old Volvo. No purse; I detested dragging a purse around, and had ceased decades ago. I carried my wallet and keys in my pockets. In fact, I no longer would buy any clothing without pockets.

  Dr Wengleman met me with a smile. ‘Collarbone?’ Just asking, her tone said.

  ‘Not until I’ve seen the skeleton.’

  ‘Okey dokey. This way.’ She led me to the building, unlocked a featureless steel door, ushered me in, then escorted me downstairs into what must have been the hospital’s basement, where she unlocked another heavy-looking steel door. I stepped into a large room that felt refrigerated.

  ‘Not that our kiddo needs to be on ice,’ she remarked.

  The overhead lighting was bright enough to make me wince. And despite being chilly and looking spotless, the place reeked. ‘You need Febreze,’ I said.

  ‘Maintenance scrubs the place daily with Clorox and Lysol, and we’ve hung so many air fresheners it looks like Christmas, but it’s no use. Nothing puts a dent in the smell of death.’

  ‘Do you ever get used to it?’

  ‘Not really, although I’ve been told you can create a similar stench by burning human fingernail clippings.’ She walked over to one of the stainless steel lockers in the wall. ‘Ready?’

  I almost wasn’t. I almost thought Maurie was right – this was all ridiculous, this was the moment when I should say ‘Never mind,’ get out, go home and forget about the whole thing. I was cold, I was sweating and I couldn’t speak. But I nodded.

  She opened the locker, pulled out a sort of body drawer, and I found myself looking at the mortal remains of my imaginary grandchild.

  Laid out anatomically, the bones filled only half of the metal slab. The child’s proportionately larger skull made the skeleton of the body look stunted, starved, pitiful, and …

  And subtly wrong.

  ‘That’s not my skeleton!’ I blurted. ‘That’s a boy!’ I glared at Dr Wengleman, thinking she had tried to pull a fast one on me, but the horrified look on her face made me think again. This skeleton was that of a boy, but it also had a missing collarbone, and fragments of rotting posy-print fabric were laid out below its twiggy, ecru feet.

  Feeling pretty much the way Marcia Wengleman looked, I whispered, ‘She was a boy, but they dressed her as a girl. And killed her.’

  Marcia rushed toward me to place an imploring hand on my arm. ‘Shush. Please hush. Beverly, that’s information the police are holding back. How in the world did you know?’

  ‘I’m an artist. I know anatomy. I know female pelvic structure when I see it, and that is not it.’ Overdramatically, I pointed.

  ‘I never should have let you in here.’ Marcia clutched me with both hands. ‘If you blab about this, the shit I’ll be in, I might as well go flush myself down the commode.’

  ‘Right off the top of my head, I can’t think of any reason I would tell anybody.’ Extricating myself from Marcia’s grip, I opened my portfolio, pulling out both the portrait and the other thing that was in there: the collarbone. Handing the bone to Marcia, I held the portrait at arm’s length, gazing, and from the paper an all-but-living child scowled back at me: a square-jawed, hard-faced boy – every contour of his face boyish; how had I not realized that all along, despite the dress? I felt well acquainted with him, as if I ought to apologize for not knowing his name. ‘Sorry,’ I murmured, and only then could I turn my head to look at his skull. I went over to stand right beside it, my focus darting back and forth.

  Meanwhile, Coroner Wengleman positioned the collarbone where it belonged in the layout of his remains, then looked at what I had in my hands.

  She was already upset, and the portrait didn’t help her any. ‘Oh my God, where did you get that?’

  Where, indeed? From a haunt? A stubborn spirit? A vengeful paranormal presence? In no way could I tell the truth, so I answered obliquely, ‘I told you, I am an artist.’

  ‘You painted that?’

  I only nodded, intent on comparing the portrait with the skull.

  ‘But … but it looks one-to-one. Are you a forensic artist?’

  The shape of the eye sockets looked right, and that of the jaw and of the skull itself.

  Marcia babbled, ‘The print of the dress looks just like hers. His. And the head—’

  ‘How old do you think she – the child – he was?’ I managed to ask.

  ‘The teeth are the most accurate way to tell, and they put him at right around six years old. It’s too bad his teeth are not showing in your picture.’

  ‘He had nothing to smile about.’

  ‘I just meant we could compare …’ The coroner let the sentence trail away into an awkward silence, then said abruptly, ‘We still can.’ Not quite steadily, she turned to a file cabinet, removed a couple of folders, took them to a photocopier along the wall and proceeded to use it, but not with paper. On to transparent plastic sheets, she copied several photographs of the skull taken from slightly different angles, then said to me, ‘Lay your picture down flat, please.’

  I did so, on the bare metal slab extending below the child’s skeletal feet. Marcia came, looked, chose among her plastic overlay
s and placed one on my depiction of the child’s face. She adjusted it slightly, stood back to scrutinize and said, ‘This cannot possibly be a coincidence.’

  I did not speak. I suppose I could not speak. Seeing the transparency atop my painting made me feel as if I were seeing the skull beneath the skin of one of my daughters.

  ‘The orbits align perfectly,’ said Marcia in heightened tones of incredulity, ‘and the lines of the mandible, and the shape of the nasal aperture, and the malar bones, and the curve of the frontal.’ She turned on me. ‘How did you do this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you even got the length and color of the hair right! You must know something!’

  ‘Really? The hair hadn’t rotted?’

  ‘No, hair resists decomposition, and the dress was still there because synthetics such as rayon—’ She cut herself off.

  I remembered the new, big-deal fabrics of the fifties. Rayon–cotton blends. Permanent press. Drip-dry.

  Marcia Wengleman repeated, ‘How did you do this?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t normal.’ I managed to shift my focus from the painting to her face, to her eyes suspiciously intent on me. ‘But I don’t know what happened to her. Him,’ I corrected myself. ‘I don’t know his name or who he was.’

  ‘So how in God’s name—’

  I interrupted her. ‘I’ll make a deal with you.’

  Silence; her stare softened to a thoughtful gaze.

  ‘You don’t want me to tell anybody about … him.’ I gestured toward the pathetic remains. ‘All right, I promise I will not reveal his secret gender, if you will promise not to tell anyone about this painting.’

  She looked down and took the transparency away. We both pondered the portrait for a moment.

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ she murmured.

  ‘And inexplicable. So, do we have a deal?’ I asked.

  ‘Deal,’ she agreed, and we shook hands on it.

  Flopped on the bed in Mom’s guest room, Cassie barely noticed the painted ceiling; she had grown up with painted ceilings. Mom, being Mom, had always painted them. This one depicted a blue-with-white-clouds sky, leafy branches as seen from below, plus robins and various other songbirds, also as seen from below, perched on the branches or flying overhead. It was a damn good thing Mom’s birds couldn’t poop, thought Cassie as she phoned Creative Java to stay in touch with the employee – a dependable employee, she hoped – the woman she’d left in charge during her absence.