Grandghost

by Nancy Springer

  ‘Never mind. You have psychological problems?’

  ‘No more than most people. Do I seem like a psych case to you?’

  ‘Not at all. That’s what bothers me.’ Detective Tadlock leaned forward to give me a penetrating stare from her close-set eyes. ‘Something doesn’t feel right. Why haven’t you asked me whether the victim was really a boy? And why did you make the hair short on your picture? You already knew. How?’

  Oh, no. Aaaaak. She had homed in on the one question I had promised not to answer. Recklessly I hedged, ‘Detective Tadlock, do you know what brought about that psych hold?’

  ‘No. Enlighten me.’

  ‘A question of ghosts,’ I intoned, lowering my chin to look at her mysteriously askance. ‘Ghosts, or at least one ghost. And I swear I never used to believe in them. Before.’

  She stared at me for what felt like a very long moment before she shrugged, then reached for a pen. ‘OK, I’ll take a report and we’ll see whether it goes anywhere.’

  ‘Spending the night at your desk, Tee Jay?’ asked one of the other detectives on his way home.

  She answered with a shrug and a wide, wry smile, feeling her heart warm; these guys were her family.

  ‘Beer and pizza, Teej?’ invited another colleague and buddy.

  ‘Next time. Promise.’

  Left alone, Detective Tadlock block-printed BONNIE JO, BONNY JO on a pad of scrap paper made of discarded office memos clipped together with their blank sides up – T.J.’s way of recycling. She hated waste.

  BONNIE JO, BONNY JO were the only variants of the name she could think of. Next she wrote down LEE VON, LEEVON, LEVON, LEE VAUGHN, LEIGH VON, LEIGH VAUGHN, cripes. Those plus all the illiterate alternatives meant that any sort of attempt to put a last name together with that first name was not going to be easy. But what the hell; nothing was ever easy in old, cold cases.

  If she ended up grappling with this one all night, no problem. No one was waiting for her to get home to her little apartment, her Betty Boop poster, her collection of novelty salt-and-pepper shakers. She had been married once when she was just a kid, before she went to the police academy, but she’d found the good sense not to waste her life. She’d cut her losses. Now she was married to the job, a much better option.

  T.J. had run the license plate number of the vehicle Bonnie Jo had been driving, but it was registered to a deceased man. Inquiries related to him had yielded nothing, so he was a dead end, quite literally.

  Next, hoping to trace the phone from which Bonnie Jo had called Beverly, Detective Tadlock had begun the process of getting an administrative subpoena to access Mrs Vernon’s phone records. But if Bonnie Jo had used a borrowed phone or a public one – for a few public phones did still exist in Cooter Spring – then this might lead nowhere.

  Meanwhile, T.J. was contemplating the difficulties of doing a computer search of birth certificates in Skink County during … when? T.J. didn’t know Bonnie/Bonny Jo’s DOB and couldn’t even guess her year of birth, not knowing whether she was an older sister or a younger sister relative to the boy’s estimated birthdate. LeeVon’s DOB was vaguely pegged by the coroner as sometime between 1949 and 1951, but his name was too damn mutable.

  Little boy dressed as a girl. What the hell was that all about?

  Physically abused – the coroner had reported finding several bone fractures in various stages of healing – and malnourished – whether because of poverty or deliberate starvation was yet to be determined. He had been young and weak and he had died, probably from neglect or outright murder, and he had been buried in an unmarked grave, wearing a dress. T.J. had done some internet research on that particular anomaly, and she had learned that, in previous centuries, very young boys had routinely been put in loose dresses for practical purposes of potty training, because it was a lot quicker and easier to lift a skirt than to undo pants. But so what? The practice had not extended into the twentieth century. And LeeVon was a six-year-old, not a toddler; wasn’t that pushing it a bit?

  T.J. had also found out that the roots of the practice went back to more primitive times and reasoning. Because young children often died, and boys were valued more than girls, they had been disguised as girls so that the gods might not snatch them away. Or, to put it another way, girls were less valued than boys.

  That sort of thinking resonated bitterly with Detective T.J. Tadlock. It had taken her a long, long time to feel comfortable and respected as a female in her life, let alone her law enforcement career. T.J. felt one hundred percent certain that LeeVon’s abuser had put him in a dress for no purpose other than to humiliate him.

  She wished she had more aspects of this case to feel certain about.

  She especially wished she could feel more certain about Beverly Vernon. Both cop sense and common sense made T.J. suspect that the little artist woman was fabricating one whopper of a story. But a different, opposing, very uncommon sense had made T.J. listen to Beverly Vernon’s story with an inkling of truth that lay beneath and beyond. When the painter had held up the portrait, T.J. had seen beyond the artwork. She had seen, in Beverly Vernon’s eyes, the knowledge that has no name. Not since she was a very young child had T.J. seen that wise, secret look – in the eyes of her great-grandmother, her beloved Nana.

  The grownups had ignored Nana as much as they could, because Nana had said things that embarrassed them and sometimes frightened them. Nana had sometimes seen the future, had sometimes heard voices in the night. Only long after Nana was dead did T.J. realize her great-grandmother had possessed a gift or power that no one understood.

  No one including T.J.

  Sitting at her desk while the night shift cops came and went, T.J. blew out a puff of exasperation between her lips. More than once one of the guys had stopped to chat with her, but her investigation was taking a direction she couldn’t share with her colleagues.

  SEVENTEEN

  The next morning, Friday, I woke up annoyingly early as usual, but got out of bed with some alacrity and went to see what LeeVon had left me during the night. First, of course, I checked the studio, but I found no new creations there, and nothing out of place. I headed on into the front room, but found no sign of my spirit child’s activity there either. Increasingly alarmed, I searched throughout my little house, but there was no trace of anyone except me. Miffed, I flounced over to my Joseph chair, gave its colorful upholstery a punitive thump, then took stock of myself and had to smile. It had been barely a week since a paranormal presence had manifested in my home and made a babbling idiot out of me, I was so scared. But now look at me, acting like a child with no stocking on Christmas morning! If LeeVon had gone away, I should be relieved. Right?

  Nope. I felt absurdly upset.

  ‘Beverly,’ I muttered to myself, ‘it’s not as if someone died.’ Sheesh, he was already dead, so why had I come to care about him so much? Ridiculous.

  I got myself moving, bathed, dressed, had breakfast and tackled item number one on the to-do list I had jotted courtesy of my erstwhile lawyer: line up character witnesses. I left a message for Marcia Wengleman and one for Dr Roach, then hesitated, beginning to feel keenly how small my circle of acquaintance in little ol’ Skink County was; most people who lived here based their entire social lives on extended family and membership in a church, which were often the same thing. By comparison, I had no social life, but I did call the Skink County Public Library in search of someone who remembered me as a frequent reader. And I contacted a handyman who had done some work for me. Both said they would get back to me.

  Feeling lonesome and discouraged, within an hour I found myself in the front room again, sitting on the sofa and contemplating LeeVon’s portrait on the opposite wall.

  ‘Where are you?’ I grumbled. ‘I miss you.’

  Tears on his face.

  That reminder made me set my own feelings aside. This wasn’t about me. ‘Kiddo,’ I asked him gently, ‘what’s the matter?’

  Of course, he didn’t answer, but I managed a
few empathic thoughts. I had put his portrait up on the wall. His sister had seen it. He had been so affected when she called his name that he had wept. Validated as a person, he had crayoned a triumphant aureole around himself.

  Up until then, he had been most often an angry child.

  Underlying great anger, always, was great sorrow.

  And I had started to crowd him, knowing his name, seeing his tears, talking to him, trying to be his grandmother and savior. Realizing this, I felt a pretty clear intuition that he wasn’t gone. He was just withdrawn. Keeping to himself, moping. Sad.

  Heartbroken. Because children love their mothers, even when their mothers are abusive.

  ‘I’m a mom, too,’ I told him.

  LeeVon gazed back at me.

  ‘I’m not sure what I can actually do for you, to bring you peace,’ I told him, ‘but I’ll keep trying.’

  On Friday morning, Maurie phoned her sister. Again.

  The previous day, after talking with Mom, Maurie had settled at her desk and tried to work on the essay she was currently writing: ‘Inferences Regarding Mycenaean Civilization Prior to the Trojan War.’ She had hoped that searching the Iliad for the references she needed would help her crowd all other thoughts out of her mind. But intrusive worries about Mom, her putative ghost and Aunt Gayle, whose name rhymed with ‘betrayal,’ had shredded Maurie’s scholarly focus. Giving up, she had gone outside with a broom to attack the latest cobwebs festooning the gingerbread of her Victorian fixer-upper.

  It was a beautiful, sunny day, warm but not hot; there were too few such summer days in Ithaca. Soothed despite herself, leaving the spiders alone and choosing instead to sweep the wrap-around porch, Maurie admired the planks she and Rob had recently painted. Instead of the customary gray, they had chosen a subtle lavender to complement the railings, for which they had chosen a creamy honeysuckle-blossom color hovering between white and yellow. But what color they would paint the peeling house itself, or how they would afford to get the job done, Maurie had no idea.

  Still, she knew it would happen.

  Finished sweeping, she went down the lavender plank steps to weed the pansies and impatiens she had planted. Pansies symbolized pensive cogitations; that worked for Maurie, but impatiens … She felt all too much impatience in herself as her thoughts, rather than remaining pensive, insisted on returning to her mother.

  Stop footling around and own the situation, Maurie, she told herself; despite her doubts about Mom’s ghost, still she felt responsible for enabling Aunt Gayle to interfere. She had to do something.

  No. No, dammit, she didn’t have to do anything.

  And so on, back and forth in the brain. Maurie had resisted her uneasy conscience throughout Thursday’s gluten-free dinner and evening of reading, but found herself unable to sleep. Consequently, first thing Friday morning, once more sitting in her favorite bay window, she phoned her sister.

  ‘Berthe?’ Cassie sounded drowsy yet wide-eyed with alarm. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Probably, somewhere. Sorry to call so early, but I wanted to catch you before you went to work. Have you had your coffee?’

  ‘Think, Berthe. For me, going to work and having my coffee are the same thing. So no, I haven’t. I repeat: is something wrong?’

  ‘More or less, depending on relativity. Make that sorority. Are we finished fighting? You and I?’

  ‘Oh. That. Yeah, we’re good. I apologize for thinking you were trying to have Mom put away.’ A pause. ‘But I don’t understand. Why did Aunt Gayle do it?’

  Feeling a bit better already, Maurie explained Gayle’s motive, meaning the coveted house. She heard a clatter as Cassie evidently dropped her phone, then retrieved it.

  Cassie exclaimed, ‘I had no idea Aunt Gayle was like that!’

  ‘Shallow, selfish and materialistic were the terms Mom used.’

  ‘And here I always thought she was more normal than Mom.’

  ‘Which says trenchant things about normalcy.’ Maurie hesitated, then made herself ask, ‘Sis, what do you hear from Mom?’

  ‘You refer to the G-H-O-S-T?’

  ‘Of whom we’re trying not to speak? Yes.’

  ‘In my grammar, you mean that thing we’re trying not to talk about? No, I haven’t heard a word.’

  Silence. For a moment, Maurie listened to the phantom whispers in the darkness of cell phone cyberspace. Then something from her gut answered them with a burst of feeling. ‘Damn it all to perdition! I don’t grudge Mom her freaky ghost, but Aunt Gayle is insufferable. She’s predatory. I would like to hang her by the ears right in front of Saks Fifth Avenue. I—’

  ‘Berthe,’ Cassie interrupted, sounding pleased yet puzzled, ‘who are you and what have you done with my sister?’

  Maurie took pause. ‘Paraphrase?’

  ‘What made you stop being all bent out of shape about Mom and start defending her?’

  ‘Hello, she does happen to be my mother.’ Maurie hesitated, then added wryly, ‘OK, I confess, you know me. Mom’s current activities give me the heebie-jeebies and I didn’t want to get involved. But, empirically speaking, she’s not doing any harm, and anyone with the brain of a crustacean should be able to see that, so Aunt Gayle’s interference was totally uncalled-for. It was inexcusable; she needs to be dealt with, and I want you to know I plan to kick her fashionable ass.’

  With no idea what else to do with myself, I selected a sheet of cold press paper, soaked it with water at the kitchen sink, then carried it dripping to my easel, where I stretched and taped it in place. Then I needed to wait until it dried, but so what? I hadn’t the faintest notion what I wanted to paint next.

  What I really wanted to do was to find Bonnie Jo and – from LeeVon’s big drawing it looked as if he had at least one other sister – for whatever good it might accomplish, more than half a century late, I wanted to find his family. But I had not a clue how. That was the plain-Jane woman cop’s job. T.J. Tadlock. I wondered what T.J. stood for, but it would have been rude to ask.

  I phoned her.

  ‘Tadlock.’ She sounded curt.

  ‘Good morning, Detective. This is Beverly—’

  ‘I know, Mrs Vernon. Some of us have caller ID.’

  ‘Who pissed on your Cheerios?’ Aaak, it just slipped out, because she really sounded ready to morph into a junkyard dog.

  But I startled her into a laugh, or at least a sort of bark. ‘I’ve been up all night, Mrs Vernon, running the license plate and putting a BOLO out on the car and otherwise doing my job, and I am going home to sleep now.’ She sounded quite decided. ‘If there is any news, someone will contact you. Goodbye.’

  She did not tell me to have a blessed day, as some folks around Cooter Spring were wont to do, and I appreciated that. She did not even tell me to have a nice day, which was fine; sometimes that annoyed me too. I preferred days with a broad spectrum of unpredictability, and I despised pseudo-comforting platitudes, especially the pious ones my husband had been forced to listen to while dying of cancer.

  I missed him. But in a comfortable way. Jim had been pillowed in love when he died, and he was laid to rest, and I felt no sense that he would ever encounter LeeVon.

  LeeVon had not died gently at all.

  Somebody out there ought to miss LeeVon. Starting with his sisters. One of whom was Bonnie Jo.

  Sitting down at the kitchen table with Skink County’s thin phone book in hand, I began searching it, entry by entry, starting with Aaron, Abbott, Abrams, Ackerman, for anyone with the first name of Bonnie or Bonnie Jo. Common sense told me how futile this was. One look at Bonnie Jo’s car had suggested to me that she couldn’t afford a phone, probably not even a cell phone, which wouldn’t have been listed anyway. Nevertheless, I stubbornly scanned each and every first name, feeling more stupid by the page because I couldn’t come up with any better way to find her.

  And I had barely reached Campbell, Canal, Cannon when I started to see double. Eye strain. Obstinacy could no longer prevail.

&n
bsp; Mentally promising LeeVon I’d be back, I took a break and looked out the front picture window at the shaggy green yard I loved like a pet, at long-necked blue wildflowers that would close before noon, at crepe myrtle bushes in passionate pink sprawling bloom. Beautiful, but my yard couldn’t talk with me. Wistfully, I thought of women I could phone for a chat, some of whom had been my friends for years, people I should call – but I couldn’t, not without babbling about LeeVon and shocking the hell out of them. As if I had a skeleton in my closet, LeeVon was isolating me.

  I wandered through the house (since it was now too hot to wander outside) and, of course, I ended up in the studio, musing over my paints, selecting colors to suit my hue of mind before I consciously realized I was going to use the still-damp paper on the easel just to goof off. OK, whatever. An artist learns to go with the internal flow. Right now, my conscious mind had crawled off someplace to take a nap. As for colors, I found myself mixing a fascinating range of warm, wet grays, letting rose madder, yellow and cerulean blue blend on the moist paper into a really lovely sunset shadow, while terracotta and jade made something more like Arizona stone, and indigo plus burnt ochre grayed into a swirl of twilight … the fuzzy curls of gray building on the paper made me think first of stylized clouds, then of mice at a committee meeting, then of some grandmother’s poodle-permed hair, the grandmother being not me but maybe LeeVon’s grandmother, and if she had ever existed, I hoped she had been sweet to him, making up a little for his awful mother. If she was still alive, she must be very old. Wrinkled like a dried apple under her poufed hairdo … with rudimentary brushstrokes of ivory yellow and muted magenta, I shaped a granny face of sorts, kind of a caricature. I gave her eyes like tiny nightfall-gray fish swimming deep in their sockets, a nose growing longer by the day, a mouth getting smaller between jowl furrows, and thin, shirred lips, puce colored. There she was, narrowly eyeing me, so ancient she had actually known LeeVon when he was a little boy …