Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  The child.

  LeeVon.

  How had a portrait become so much more than just a portrait?

  The whole thing felt like a dream.

  And then it was. Exhausted by my own turmoil, I fell asleep on the sofa in the front room. Sometime much later I woke up, turned off the lights and went to bed.

  The moment I awoke the next morning, I hustled out of bed and went to see what LeeVon had done during the night. When I found the paints arranged on the studio floor just the same as before, not moved at all, I felt disappointed. But then I stepped into the front room. Stopped. Stared. Felt a toasty warm smile dawning on my face, and said to myself, ‘O frabjous day.’

  The child had been busy with crayons on the beige plaster of the front-room wall. There, in the brightest colors wax could convey, he had created so many things: airplanes, yellow dogs, firecrackers popping, pickup trucks, wedges of watermelon, speedboats, tree frogs, gum balls, ice-cream cones, tractors and more, and some objects I couldn’t identify, but all scribbled with such fervor, layer upon layer, that they shone.

  And, all together, they formed a big oval glory around the portrait of – of himself.

  Thursday morning, Maurie cancelled everything on her schedule because she was unprepared and needed to get in touch with her mother before she could focus on anything else. And she felt increasingly anxious, because she had tried to phone her mother several times the previous evening and Mom had not picked up. Frustrated, she had texted her sister, Phoned Mom ten times no answer. Cassie had replied, Me too maybe she went to bed already it is central time there, and Maurie had vented to Rob, denouncing time zones and her mother’s biorhythms. She had managed to sleep some, but the fact that she was dipping into a treasured package of Ghirardelli Squares for breakfast bespoke her state of mind as she tried, once again, to contact her mother. That, and the fact that she had seated herself on the pink-cushioned ledge of her favorite bay window – a turret window, in fact – looking out over Lake Cayuga.

  Mom picked up. ‘Hello?’ Of course she didn’t know who it was; she had no caller ID on that troglodytic phone of hers.

  ‘Mom!’ Relief, frustration. ‘I’ve been trying and trying to—’

  ‘Maurie! How are you, sweetie?’

  She sounded just the same as ever. Unbelieving, Maurie asked, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Of course. Maurie, I repeat: how are you? I take it Cassie told you about the psych hold?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m so sorry—’

  ‘Why? I know you weren’t the one who put Wilma Lou up to it. I told Cassie it couldn’t be you.’

  Hearing that, Maurie felt childishly close to tears. She blurted, ‘I blabbed to Aunt Gayle.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mom, in her voice the hush of epiphany. ‘Aha.’

  ‘Ah, aha, what?’

  Mom’s tone remained meditative. ‘I never said, because I thought I shouldn’t interfere if you and your father’s sister got along.’

  ‘Never said what?’

  ‘That I consider Gayle a shallow, selfish, materialistic woman.’

  Despite her excellent view and her Ghirardelli fix, Maurie began to feel annoyed. ‘It was pretty evident at the funeral, if not before, that you and she didn’t get along. So?’

  ‘So there’s a pretty fundamental lack of understanding between us. After your father died and I decided to move to Florida, Gayle wanted me to give her the Montclair house.’

  ‘What?’ Maurie yelped, thankful she was already sitting down. ‘Give it to her? Seriously, without her paying for it?’

  ‘Seriously, yes.’

  Often, when dealing with her mother, Maurie felt a humiliating sense that her PhD was a useless piece of paper. This was one of those times. ‘But that makes no sense,’ she bleated.

  ‘Actually,’ Mom elaborated, ‘she didn’t ask me to give it to her as such; she wanted me to give it back.’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘Give it back – those were her words. Because she, like your father, grew up in that house, she seems to think it rightfully belongs to her. As she told me repeatedly and at length less than a week after the funeral. She came clopping in when I was trying to pack a few boxes. Silly me, I thought she was dropping by to commiserate.’ As Mom spoke, Maurie imagined: Gayle, always in high heels with her hair in a vivid red wedge. Mom, sluggish from grief, trying to function; Mom had been an old woman when she lost Dad, much more so than she was now. Gayle reacting to her brother’s death by wanting his house.

  Repeatedly and at length? ‘But that’s irrational!’ Maurie protested. ‘Grandpa left it to Dad, and you married Dad, so now it’s yours, isn’t it?’

  ‘Since I hold the deed to the property, yes, exactly. Gayle is arguably more out of touch with reality than I am.’

  That jolted Maurie, hearing her mother describe herself as out of touch with reality. Miserably unable to disagree, she sat with her mouth open but silent. It didn’t matter; her mother kept right on going.

  ‘Your aunt is used to getting whatever she wants.’ True, Gayle had scads of money, reaping the alimony of three failed marriages to three CEOs, each one obscenely wealthier than the last. ‘She couldn’t believe I stood up to her, and, wowsers, did she get bent out of shape.’

  ‘She yelled at you?’

  ‘For two solid hours. She cursed me out, she threw things, and her face got as red as her hair before she stormed out. It makes perfect sense that she would try to get me declared incompetent.’

  ‘She thinks she would get the house that way?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Mom’s voice conveyed a shrug. ‘Or maybe she’s just getting even. Either way—’

  Feeling no inclination to shrug, Maurie interrupted, ‘I would like to hang her by the thumbs.’

  ‘Settle down, sweetie. Don’t you have to get to work?’

  ‘I cancelled everything and I’m sitting here eating chocolate. What can I do about Aunt Gayle?’

  ‘Nothing! She’s not trainable, and, Maurie, it doesn’t matter. It’s very good news that you told Aunt Gayle about me. I was going to need to round up character witnesses, but now it sounds like all I have to do is tell the judge I was Baker Act-ed by a person who hasn’t seen me in nearly two years, and the whole psych hold thing will disappear.’

  In Maurie’s world, lawyers were a given, so even though Mom was using the first-person singular, Maurie failed to realize her mother was going to court without a lawyer. Instead, mention of the psych hold made her say, ‘Aaak.’ Suddenly subdued, uncomfortably reminded of the underlying issue, Maurie ventured to ask, ‘Mom, do you still have, um, paranormal phenomena happening in your home on a nightly basis?’

  ‘Yes. But you don’t really want to know all the woo-woo details, do you, honey?’

  It took Maurie only a moment to admit, ‘No, I guess I don’t.’

  After Maurie and I finished talking, I phoned Cassie just to say her sister and I were OK. In the background, I heard the atonal music of conversation and crockery; obviously, Cassie was at work and Creative Java was slammed. ‘I’ll let you go,’ I chirped, and hung up. Cassie had asked me to call every day, and I had called.

  I had not told her a thing about Bonnie Jo’s visit or LeeVon in tears. My daughters still did not even know LeeVon was a boy.

  Vaguely upset with myself for keeping that secret from my daughters, I went and had breakfast, then a second cup of coffee, and headed into the studio. Figuring the child was done with the cans and tubes of paint on the studio floor, I started picking them up and putting them away, rediscovering a few in the process. After musing over the child’s paintings, I hung most of them on the studio walls with Poster Putty. I didn’t usually put anything on the intentionally neutral-colored walls of the studio, but for the child I made an exception.

  Then, purposeless with no project to paint, I wandered back into the front room, slumped on the front-room sofa facing the image I had created for my grandchild, blew air out between my lips like a tired horse and said to LeeVon
, ‘Why do I have to be so damn maternal?’

  Paper and pigment, he looked back at me from the place of honor he had taken over from my testament to my art career.

  Still shaken from yesterday’s events, confronted by the tears on his face, I said, ‘I wish I could give you a hug.’

  I had chickened out when I was talking with my daughters. Not telling them I wanted grandchildren had always seemed noble, but not telling them about LeeVon felt cowardly, and I ached, heart and soul, because I couldn’t admit to them how grandmotherly I felt about the dead kid who lived in my house. How had everything become so very much all about LeeVon?

  But it was. I felt for that suffering child even more than I did, sometimes, for my own grown children. I terribly wanted to dry his tears. Because I was a mom and therefore a rescuer, nothing mattered more than saving him. I had welcomed him into my life with real sable paintbrushes and wistful dreams; he was my child now, and I had to help him somehow.

  But save him from what? Help him how?

  Sunshine streamed in the picture window behind me, but through it flew a large raptor of some sort, casting a hawk shadow as it passed.

  ‘LeeVon,’ I said, ‘is it all right for me to call you LeeVon? I’m scared,’ I admitted. ‘And clueless. I feel like I’m in a foreign place where I don’t know the language or the rules.’

  Face it: I was blundering around in the country of the dead, and what did I know?

  ‘I know you’re angry,’ I whispered. ‘I know you’re sad. But what can I do about it?’

  Even if he hadn’t been dead, he was a young child, and to parents and other adults, the thoughts and actions of small children are a mystery. Cognitive aliens, the shrinks called them. Trapped in their own worlds, centers of their own universes, taking credit for everything but also taking blame.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I guess I can start by telling you it’s not your fault. Nothing that happened when you were a child was your fault.’

  I listened to the silence following that little speech of mine, silence so vast and hollow I could hear only the faintest echo. Fault … fault … fault …

  ‘It was her fault,’ I said. ‘The big one with the belt and the boiling water – it was all her fault. And you want somebody to punish her, don’t you.’ This wasn’t even a question. It was the answer.

  SIXTEEN

  It was also a considerable problem.

  It took me hours to figure out how to proceed. For me, the best way to get a handle on things is usually not to think, so I went outside and wandered around my yard, where I knew I would be incapable of paying attention to anything except the way the morning light played on every single leaf, the touch of a moist breeze, the latest mushrooms – resembling crepes this time – and the snail tracks etched on my mailbox, the pastel lichens impasto on the tree trunks, and the celadon green froth of deer moss looking so deceptively delicate but feeling like lava to the touch as I collected some to take inside. And, of course, lizards, songbirds, a moth flattened on my door in a brindle half-circle – I saw that, and admired it, on my way back in.

  Feeling much more steady and resolute, I phoned the woman I was coming to depend on as my closest local ally. ‘Hi, Marcia, it’s Beverly.’

  ‘Beverly! Has something happened?’

  ‘Is the coast clear?’

  ‘Yes, I’m closeted in the john.’

  ‘OK. I had a response to the ad—’

  ‘Wow! Really?’

  ‘Really. A woman named Bonnie Jo. She positively identified the child as her brother LeeVon.’

  Silence, except for an audible gulp. Then, rather inanely for such a professional, Marcia said, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure she was for real? Yes. She knew where the house was. She knew LeeVon was a boy. She had a very strong reaction when she saw the portrait.’

  ‘She came to your house?’ Evidently, Marcia was having trouble keeping up.

  ‘Yes, but then she got scared and ran away.’ I saw no point in straining Marcia’s credulity with details concerning the portrait’s tears. ‘I’m calling you first, before I call the police, to promise you I will not get you involved.’

  ‘What?’ Her voice had gone up an octave. ‘Beverly—’

  ‘Marcia, trust me, please. Could you tell me the name of the homicide detective handling the case?’

  ‘Beverly, you’ve got to be kidding! How are you going to explain the painting?’

  ‘I saw the skull when it was in the ground in my backyard. I saw the dress fabric. I painted a, um, whatchacallit—’

  ‘Forensic facial reconstruction.’

  ‘Right. I didn’t really expect any response to the ad. I’m surprised, astounded, dumbfounded that my visitor said it was a boy and I feel the police ought to know she knew.’ Pause for breath. ‘As a wise person once told me, I can pull it off.’

  Marcia did not answer right away, but finally she said, quietly enough, ‘I believe you can.’

  ‘Of course I can. I’m a harmless little old lady and if I had any eyelashes left, I would bat them. Which cop should I contact?’

  She gave me a name: Tadlock. State Police Detective T.J. Tadlock.

  I didn’t like to drive after dark anymore, now that I was old enough for my eyes to spaz out when confronted with oncoming headlights. However, for LeeVon’s sake, I did it anyway, peering at the shoulder of the road when my eyes wanted to panic, eventually finding my way into a strange parking lot without accident. State Police Detective T.J. Tadlock had asked me to come in to headquarters that evening to talk with her. Yes, her. T.J. Tadlock was a woman, as Marcia Wengleman had explained to me. ‘Like “padlock,” but with a T. T as for tadpole.’

  ‘So like a tadpole plus a padlock.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Marcia went on to opine that, because of qualities innate in T.J. Tadlock’s gender, she was less likely than the other detectives to stonewall me.

  Wondering whether I dared hope so, I saw the detective through an opening doorway as I stood at the bulletproof-glass window awaiting my turn. Glimpsing the cloistered squad room on the other side of the security-coded buzz-in entry, I picked out the one female among a group of plainclothes cops clustered around the coffee pot. I saw a stocky woman in a blouse, knee-length skirt and sensible one-inch heels. But my artist’s eye approved of her in a way that would never occur to most males. Her body was thick but perfectly proportioned, as if classically sculpted in accordance with a Platonic norm. She would never be a fashion model, but at least she could buy clothes off the rack and they would actually fit her.

  When she came to escort me in, however, I saw that she would never be a beauty either. Nodding to me and offering her hand, she surveyed me with wary tan eyes minimally enhanced by mascara. Hers was an unfortunate face with a low center of gravity, the features larger and heavier as it progressed downward. A smudge of lipstick attempted to center a mouth that was clownishly wide, especially given her thick neck and hefty body. As bad boys of my generation used to say, she was ‘built like a brick shithouse.’ Not fat, just solid. Strong. A middle-aged woman, T.J. Tadlock was not pretty, probably never had been pretty, but wore her very pretty blouse-and-crochet-vest outfit with confidence.

  From behind her battered metal desk she watched and listened as I launched into my routine much as I had described it to Marcia: I had seen the little girl’s dress and skull when I had first uncovered them in my backyard; as a professional artist, I had attempted a facial reconstruction of the victim; I had advertised in the Skink County Observer, receiving a response and, very much to my bewilderment, the little girl’s sister had identified her as a boy named LeeVon. My witness had then fled; I had snapped some photos of her car, and by enlarging them on my computer I had been able to come up with a license plate number – see?

  T.J. stopped me with a gesture as I started to hand her the printouts. ‘Let’s go back.’ Her voice was as husky as her build, but not ungentle. ‘Please describe this Bonnie Jo person.’


  ‘About the right age, sixty-ish, and looked like she’d never been to a hairdresser or a dentist. Big hands like a manual worker, no nail polish. Long hair the color of putty with split ends. Her face …’ I hesitated, then said it. ‘The shape of her face reminded me a lot of the child’s.’

  ‘Is that why you’re so sure she is the victim’s sister?’

  ‘Partly that, and partly the simple fact that she showed up at my house. Question: how did she know where I lived? Answer: she had been raised there, at least for a while. A long time ago, she probably saw whatever happened to LeeVon.’

  Detective Tadlock neither smiled nor frowned, but her homely face hardened. ‘Mrs Vernon, can you understand why I feel skeptical about your story?’

  I lied, answering stoutly, ‘No.’

  ‘Well, for one thing, having come forward, why did this purported Bonnie Jo then run away?’

  I sighed. No way was I going to tell her how LeeVon had wept when his sister called him by name. But I reached down and pulled his portrait out of a large tote bag in which I’d been carrying it in case I needed it. ‘This,’ I said, propping it up so it faced the detective on her desk.

  At first just glancing at it, she then did a genuine double-take and studied it intently. I hoped that maybe in the artificial light, with overhead lamps glaring off the glass, she didn’t notice the tears. I certainly did not intend to point them out to her.

  ‘Cripes,’ she said, ‘you really can paint.’

  Call me rude, but I didn’t feel like thanking this woman for observing the obvious. I simply nodded agreement as I put the portrait away.

  The detective’s wide mouth turned out to be flexible, quirking into a quizzical smile. ‘Mrs Vernon, didn’t you get pulled in on a psych hold a couple of days ago?’

  I should not have been surprised, of course; Cooter Spring is a small town. But I was so surprised that I laughed, joyfully amused; life has that effect on me sometimes. ‘How in the world did you hear that?’