Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  ‘There’s no statute of limitations on murder. That child deserves justice. I think’ – I nearly used the wrong pronoun, but caught myself – ‘I think she may need justice, and that’s why she’s so pissed off.’

  There were a few moments of silence before Cassie asked cautiously, ‘I don’t suppose we could leave that up to the police?’

  ‘Can you imagine trying to explain that picture to the police?’

  ‘Right. So what do you think will happen after the newspaper comes out on Wednesday?’

  ‘I have no clue,’ I answered honestly enough. ‘Probably nothing.’

  ‘I hope. You know I have a plane to catch Wednesday morning. Do you think we could possibly spend tomorrow doing something normal?’

  ‘I’m sure we can.’

  But I was wrong.

  TEN

  Tuesday morning, I let Cassie get up first and go check the studio for spiritous incursions. She came back and reported through the bathroom door to me, ‘Handprints. Bony little handprints in paint.’

  ‘On paper or on the walls?’

  ‘The walls and a few on the ceiling.’

  To me this sounded more cute than angry, but I asked anyway. ‘Did he’ – faking a cough, I caught myself – ‘did she ruin anything?’

  ‘No, she didn’t even make a mess. Are you looking for an excuse to cancel our plans?’

  ‘No, no, not at all!’ Cassie and I were going to the beach, the white sands of the Emerald Coast. We had packed beach chairs, beach umbrellas and beach towels, and a kite and tote bags full of sunscreen, sunglasses, sun visors, sun this and sun that in my car the night before. All we had to do was eat breakfast and go. It took me only my usual commando few minutes to get my khaki cargo shorts on and load their pockets. Then I went to have a quick look at the handprints brightening the studio’s boring beige walls. Smiling at their defiant colors forming rainbows and sunbursts up to and including the ceiling, I told Cassie, ‘Our little friend had fun.’

  ‘Ya think so?’

  ‘Sarcasm, sarcasm.’

  ‘How did she get up by the ceiling?’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘Well, how did she manage it without leaving drips and drops of paint everywhere?’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘There’s the rub. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—’

  ‘Oh, stop.’

  I stopped, and I actually cooked us bacon and eggs and raisin bread toast for breakfast, and if we’d just had cereal as usual, we would probably have been out of there before officialdom had time to ruin our day. But as it was, we were not yet finished eating when we heard someone knocking at the front door. Cassie got up to look out the front window. ‘It’s a cop.’

  It was, indeed, a cop I knew: Deputy Nick Crickens, as I discovered when I opened the front door. I beamed at him. ‘Why, hello! What can I do for you?’

  He didn’t smile back at me, and I noticed he had trouble facing me eye to eye. ‘I, um, Mrs Vernon, ma’am, actually I’m here as provided by the authority of the Baker Act to serve a seventy-two-hour notice of protective custody on you.’

  My life had been spent far from the world of officialdom; I simply didn’t understand at first. ‘What?’ The nice young man’s words seemed to float in the air like a big, bright orange Gulf fritillary that sailed by at that moment, and the butterfly seemed more important than what this doofus in uniform was saying.

  Cassie, who stood beside me, asked stridently, ‘Who is she supposed to be protected from?’

  ‘Um, herself, miss.’ Deputy Crickens held out a document that looked like one of those summonses you see on TV. Because my reactions had hit a speed bump, Cassie grabbed it and opened it.

  ‘You need to come with me, Mrs Vernon,’ said Deputy Crickens.

  ‘Come where?’ I asked reasonably enough.

  ‘The hospital, ma’am.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Please stop stalling, Mrs Vernon.’

  ‘I’m not. I just—’ I was having a delayed reaction, and I was going to explain that I just wanted to know what was going on when Cassie enlightened me.

  Actually, she yelped. ‘Mom, Wilma Lou next door got some sort of order saying you’re a danger to yourself and others, and they’re going to put you under psychiatric evaluation!’

  Realization, fear and adrenaline kicked in. My heart started to pound.

  Deputy Crickens said, ‘Mrs Vernon, come along now, and don’t make me handcuff you.’ He reached out to take me by the arm.

  I started to pull away, but Cassie ordered me in heightened tones, ‘Don’t resist!’

  I managed just enough self-control to obey her, and just enough sensible thought to yell at her, ‘Call Doctor Roach!’

  ‘Don’t you want a lawyer?’

  ‘Call Doctor Roach first!’ I hollered back over my shoulder as Nick Crickens towed me by the elbow toward his cruiser. I had seen the doctor almost weekly during the previous flu/bronchitis/viral pneumonia season and, while I considered him kind of a prick, I still hoped he might verify that I was as sane as the average patient.

  Cassie called Dr Roach first, and after shouting between her teeth at receptionist and nurse she got through to him, only to have him shout similarly at her. ‘Roach here! What is the matter?’

  To her astounded dismay, Cassie found herself sounding like a teenager. ‘Um, this is Cassie Vernon, and they just took my mother, Beverly Vernon, in for a seventy-two-hour hold—’

  ‘Chronic undifferentiated assholery!’ he barked, hanging up on her, leaving her unsure of whom he was speaking and lacking any sense of reassurance. Next, she searched her mother’s desk until she found the business card of a law firm in Cooter Spring, and she called them. A secretary picked up; no lawyers were available to consult at the moment, but the secretary herself was alarmingly knowledgeable, explaining to Cassie with relish that yes, anyone – family member, friend, neighbor, anyone – could go to the courthouse and fill out a form to Baker Act someone – she used it as a verb – or heck, the form could even be downloaded from the internet. Anyway, most times the judge would sign an ex parte order as a matter of routine, and then the person being Baker Act-ed could be involuntarily hospitalized.

  ‘But only for seventy-two hours,’ said Cassie, trying hard to find a bright side.

  ‘Actually, no.’ The secretary’s zest for misfortune audibly increased. ‘If the doctors decide the person needs IIP, then they have five days to come up with a treatment plan.’

  ‘Five days after the first three days?’

  ‘That’s right. In fact, if they want to, they can hold people indefinitely. That’s what IIP means: Involuntary Inpatient Placement. Civil commitment.’

  Having rendered Cassie temporarily speechless, the secretary then told her to have a nice day and disconnected.

  Have a nice day? Cassie considered, with a momentary sense of irony, that she had come here specifically because she feared that Mom might need mental health care, but so what? And some strange things had happened, but screw that! Wilma Lou had no damn business, and Maurie had bailed, meaning she had even less. What the—

  Suppressing the F-word, feeling incandescently pissed, Cassie phoned Maurie, who was sure to be busy tutoring or mentoring or something, and left a white-hot message for her. Finally, her mind sizzling with adrenaline and her muscles likewise, Cassie slammed out of her mother’s house and headed across the yard toward the stodgy brick place next door.

  She knocked on Wilma Lou’s front door so hard she rattled its cross-shaped fake-flower wreath, and she rang the doorbell, and kept on knocking and ringing until the door was opened by a woman very nearly as skinny and bent as a fishhook.

  ‘Why did you do that to my mother?’ demanded Cassie with volume she usually reserved for deaf people.

  Perhaps Wilma Lou was deaf. She peered back without replying and, Cassie realized, very likely without comprehension. Wilma Lou could have no idea who she was, as the two of them had never
met before. Duh.

  ‘I’m Beverly Vernon’s daughter,’ explained Cassie only slightly less loudly, pointing in the direction of Mom’s house. ‘And you are Wilma Lou Ledbetter, right? Why did you send the sheriff to take my mom away?’

  The old woman’s face shirred into an expression of righteous defense and she spoke up with twanging vigor, like a bluegrass band. ‘What I hear, she’s got bees in her bonnet and funny business in her brownies, what with her make-believe ghost and all, and worshiping animals and sleeping with the Devil.’

  Luckily, Cassie’s business experience, somewhat equivalent to survival training, had taught her mind to sort through a bombardment of data and seize upon the one thing that had to be taken care of first. ‘You heard?’ Cassie remembered quite clearly Mom saying Wilma Lou knew nothing about ‘any of this,’ meaning things that painted pictures in the night or went bump, whatever. Cassie stepped toward the rickety old woman, not exactly threatening but definitely pressing. ‘You heard? How?’

  ‘That poor heathen woman needs help, what I heard.’ Just because Wilma Lou stepped back didn’t mean she was retreating. She stood arms akimbo, sharp elbows deployed, chin up and trembling with indignation. ‘I ain’t done nothing but my Christian duty, and the lady on the telephone agreed with me.’

  ‘What lady?’ Oh, God, Cassie thought, please let it not be Maurie – but who else could it have been?

  ‘Beverly’s sister, she said she was.’

  That made no sense. Mom had no sisters. Try again. ‘Somebody phoned you?’ Cassie asked a little more quietly, stepping into Wilma Lou’s house, which was dark, heavily blessed with prayerful cross-stitch in picture frames, crowded with Victorian furnishings and smelled like Pine-Sol.

  ‘The lady phoned me special because she don’t live around here, see, so I had to do it, get Beverly committed because she has clearly lost her mind or else got herself Satan-possessed, what with messing up her own house and saying a ghost did it and making nasty pictures and saying a ghost did that too, and all sorts of sinful lies ever since she found that skeleton in her backyard, which might have been some sort of trick too.’

  Cassie had several thoughts seemingly all at the same time. Wilma Lou hadn’t seen the messed-up house or the pictures; ‘the lady’ had told her. ‘The lady’ was the cause of Mom’s being driven away by a skinny, carbuncular parody of a deputy sheriff. How much had Wilma Lou done to make it happen? Was it just a matter of filling out a form, or did she have to know somebody? No problem if so; Wilma Lou knew or was related to nearly everybody in Skink County. Trying to connect the dotty people involved was no use in getting to the source.

  ‘What’s this lady’s name?’ Cassie demanded.

  ‘Well, you ought to know what her name is – she’s your mother’s sister!’

  ‘My mother doesn’t have a sister. What did she tell you her name was?’

  Wilma Lou’s scrawny hands flew to cover her mouth. Her old eyes, sunken in their orbits, tried to widen. She shuffled backward a couple of steps, bumping into a whatnot on top of which large porcelain figurines of Pinkie and the Blue Boy flanked her, standing blind guard.

  ‘Her name,’ Cassie insisted.

  ‘She – your mother – really don’t have no sister?’

  ‘I just said so, didn’t I?’ Hearing her own tone, Cassie warned herself to cool it before Wilma Lou called the cops on her.

  ‘She lied? The lady on the phone, she lied to me?’

  The frail old woman seemed so rattled that Cassie calmed down. ‘It looks that way. Do you remember what she said her name was?’

  ‘Um, no, not rightly. Maybe it was your sister she said she was.’

  ‘Maurie?’

  ‘Um, I don’t rightly recall.’

  ‘Berthe? Berthe Morisot? Maurie Vernon Madison?’ The old woman looked increasingly more blank as Cassie ran out of patience to wait for answers. Seemingly on their own, her fists clenched. Cassie felt a strong urge to hit something, break something, conk Wilma Lou’s wobbly head with Pinkie or Blue Boy or both. So she turned to get herself out of Wilma Lou’s claustrophobic house before she made things worse than they already were.

  Just before Cassie slammed the front door behind her, she heard Wilma Lou quaver, ‘No hard feelings.’

  No hard feelings? No problem, thought Cassie. She was reserving her hard feelings for Maurie, who damn well better return her phone call.

  ELEVEN

  I sat in the back of the cruiser trying hard not to act like a crazy person, allowing myself no hysteria, thank you very much. To distract myself from my frantic anxiety, I deployed my regrettable sense of humor, thinking, They’re coming to take me away, haha, hehe, hoho, to the funny farm … Separated from Deputy Crickens in the driver’s seat by a mesh barrier, I nevertheless could talk to him, desperately trying to joke. ‘How come they sent you instead of the little men in white coats?’

  As I might have expected, he took me seriously. ‘When we get one of these psych holds, I’m supposed to check it out, and if I need backup, I call for it.’

  I persisted. ‘And then they bring the wacky ward wagon with the straitjackets?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, ma’am. To tell the truth, this here is the first psych hold I ever been sent on.’ He sounded boneheadedly dutiful about it.

  Giving up on him, I turned to another of my distraction strategies for scary times, watching through the car’s window for another butterfly, or a showy clump of mushrooms, or a mockingbird on the wing, anything bright and beautiful. There was always something, no matter how bad things got. There: we drove into town, and there were the cypress trees of Cooter Spring, standing up to their knobby knees in sleek water, and cooters (or perhaps sliders) sunning on logs, smaller turtles stacked on top of larger ones to resemble squat pagodas.

  Half in challenge and half in appeal, I asked Deputy Crickens, ‘Do you seriously think I am non compos mentis?’

  He didn’t answer. He probably didn’t understand the Latin phrase, right? Or so I reassured myself until he pulled up at the hospital door marked Emergency. A number of people in scrubs and, yes, white coats came hustling out to surround the cruiser or, more accurately, me. For a moment, my panic took over and turned me stupid, urging me to fight and break free and flee. Only Cassie’s remembered voice, ‘Don’t resist,’ kept me from making a mental patient of myself.

  They ‘helped’ me out of the cruiser, two of them flanking me to take firm hold of my arms, and escorted me inside, past all the people in the waiting room, toward the curtained cubicles in the back. Aaak. I looked mostly at the floor—

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a strident voice that in no way expected to be excused. Jerking my head up, I nearly choked on my own gulp of relief; Cassie had gotten through to Dr Roach, evidently, because here he came, all five foot nothing of him, striding toward us. Seeing him always reminded me of an inverted exclamation point because of his emphatic personality, plus his perfectly erect posture right up to and including his amazingly spherical bald head. Factor in his Napoleon complex sticking out all over him, and he took up so much space that his one-person presence in the corridor halted the little posse that surrounded me. I had often wondered whether Dr Roach abused energy drinks. Like a wasp, he packed dynamo clout into his comparatively small self.

  ‘I am this patient’s personal physician,’ he decreed with barely a glance in my direction, ‘and whoever initiated this farce might have had the courtesy to consult me.’ He directed his pit-bull glare up at a white-coated man who emerged from a nearby examination room.

  ‘Just let me get her examined and settled in a room, Doctor Roach,’ said this individual, a tall yet droopy medico, with admirable restraint.

  ‘No, she is not to be admitted. I am telling you as her primary care provider, she does not require treatment.’

  ‘That will be my call. I am the supervising—’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re the head bedpan! I am a founder of this hospital.’

  The docto
rs glared at each other, and the surrounding hospital personnel shuffled their feet, then disbanded, although I could barely hear their retreating footsteps because my heart thudded so loud. I very much appreciated how greatly Dr Roach was indeed a prick, as I had thought, and how lucky I was that his prickitude was directed at his colleague on my behalf, as I had hoped it might be.

  The supervising whatever-he-was, with his stooped shoulders, pendulous face and basset-hound eyes, was no match for Dr Roach in the face-off. He turned away first. ‘Let me call one of my colleagues, and—’

  ‘No, I’ll let you call the judge and arrange a hearing.’ For the first time focusing on me, Dr Roach said, ‘Mrs Vernon, I don’t suppose anyone bothered to inform you that you are entitled to challenge their jackass-wipe piece of toilet paper?’ He swung back to the other doctor. ‘I have not yet seen the so-called court order. Where is it?’

  The unfortunate man handed Dr Roach a folder from which he extracted the legal document, opening it to scan it.

  I remarked, ‘I haven’t really seen it either.’

  My hint went unacknowledged.

  ‘The original intention of the Baker Act,’ lectured Dr Roach to the hallway at large, ‘was to prevent the egregious imprisonment of unfortunate individuals in the name of mental health provision.’

  I squeaked, ‘Imprisonment?’ I heard a gurney rattle down a nearby corridor like something out of a Victorian novel, stealthy footsteps behind me and, not far away, someone gave an anguished scream. I hoped it was not a mental patient. The footsteps I disregarded; if there was someone standing behind me, it was probably just a returning member of the white-coat posse.

  ‘No, no, we don’t imprison patients here, not at all.’ With an eloquent sigh through his large nose, the doctor I knew as Head Bedpan turned to me. ‘Mrs, um, Vermin—’

  ‘Vernon.’

  ‘Mrs Vernon, do you wish to contest?’