Gram looked at Cliff, then at me and back at Cliff. “You won’t destroy the place?”
“Of course not. I’ll make sure of it,” Cliff said. He turned his glance to me. “Betts, can I talk to you out front a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Miz, grab your stuff,” Cliff said. “We’ll meet you outside.”
A heavy beat of hesitation filled the air. Cliff was here, telling us to leave the scene of a crime and telling Gram to get her stuff without an escort. I knew Cliff was better than that at his new job. Did he already have a strong suspect in mind?
Gram went one direction and I went the other with Cliff.
“Hey,” he said with a gentle smile once we were outside.
“Hey. So, what’s up? Is there something else going on here?”
Cliff rubbed his finger under his nose, looked out to the road, and then back at me. “Look, you might not believe this, but I’m here because Jim told me to come get you two out of the school. Well, at least that’s what I think he told me. He hinted emphatically.”
“Do you have a suspect in mind? You didn’t want us to further contaminate the scene?”
“Nope, no suspect, but we are both one hundred percent sure that Roger Riggins wasn’t poisoned by either you or Miz. If we’re wrong about that, we are really terrible cops, but I . . . we don’t think we’re wrong.”
“I see.” I smiled. It was good not to be considered a killer. An unreasonable wave of confidence swam through me, but I ignored it.
Cliff continued, “I . . . we just don’t want either of you to have to put up with the inconvenience of being questioned again right now. Get out of here, but don’t take a quick trip to St. Louis or anything. I’ll call you if we need you.”
I cleared my throat. “Thank you. That couldn’t have been easy on either of you.”
“That’s the problem. I think it might have been too easy. Your blood being on the rope is interesting enough, but we’re not focusing on that yet.”
“Oh, good,” I said with exaggerated relief.
We were silent a moment as we looked at each other. Our second go-around at romance was either so much better than the amazing first blush had been or we weren’t remembering everything correctly. This time, we’d transitioned from it’s weird to see you again to quick friends to dating to dating seriously in what felt like hyper-drive speed. I attributed the speed of the cycle to the fact that we’d known each other before and we had so many shared memories and shared experiences. Leapfrogging over some of the getting-acquainted phase was to be expected. I liked where we’d gone and I liked where we were headed.
Cliff might have come out to the school and got us out of there on his own, but I was glad he’d been prompted to by Jim.
“I have something that might help,” I said.
I told Cliff about Freddie’s references. Though he found our inability to track down what we thought was a good reference somewhat intriguing, he was not as bothered as Gram had been. It was important not to jump to any conclusions based solely on unanswered calls and someone who couldn’t hold an accent.
Gram joined us a few minutes later. She’d grabbed her big shopping bag–type purse and had put her sunglasses on the top of her head. She held her arms to her body a little tighter than normal. She was still shaken but was trying not to show it.
“You tell Cliff about the references?” she asked me as she walked toward the Volvo.
“Yes.”
“Good. Cliff, let me know when I can come back. I have some work to do and I’d like to get to it as soon as possible.” She paused with one hand on the car door, perhaps thinking she was sounding unsympathetic. I knew she was just coping in her own way. Cliff did, too. “I’m not sure when we should resume classes.”
“I’ll let you know,” Cliff said, but he glanced quickly at me as he spoke.
Gram cocked her head and then said, “You two belong together.” Then she looked directly at me and added, “And both of you are alive and well. Call me later, as soon as anyone knows anything.”
As she shut the door to the Volvo and backed out of her spot, Cliff said, “That’s an odd way to phrase healthy.”
“Well, Gram’s odd.” I shrugged.
When the Volvo was out of sight and no one could see, Cliff pulled me close and kissed me slowly.
“I realize this is even more unprofessional than telling you and Miz to get out of here for a while. I’ve got to go back to being professional in a minute, so I took advantage of the moment with no audience.”
“Mmm,” I said. “I’m so glad you moved back to this crazy little town.”
“Me, too.”
“How about more bad-cop activity later?” I said.
He laughed. “Sounds good to me.”
Disengaging was difficult. Okay, so our teenage hormones weren’t completely under control. Duty called, though, and Cliff had to listen.
As I drove the Nova out of the lot, I glanced in my rearview mirror. Cliff, his hands on his hips, was watching me leave. Just as I was going to lift my hand to wave, something else rolled across my field of vision.
I braked hard, skidding and then rocking the Nova. I thought I’d seen the whiff, perhaps only the memory or maybe just something from my imagination, of a cowboy hat roll across the ground at Cliff’s feet.
I got out of the car as Cliff moved quickly toward me.
“What is it?” he asked.
I looked around the lot, the cemetery, and the surrounding Missouri woods. There was no one there other than Cliff and me. There were no cowboy hats, either ghostly or in full form. There was no wood smoke smell. We were alone.
“Nothing. I just thought I saw something,” I said. “But I didn’t.”
Cliff scanned the same places I just had and then looked at me again. “You okay, Betts?”
I smiled. “I’m fine. Sorry, maybe I’m still shaken up.”
“Understandable.”
We repeated our good-byes, though with much less romance, and reiterated plans of hopefully seeing each other later. I got back into the Nova and pulled out of the lot.
“Calm down,” I told myself.
When I’d met Jerome, the first ghost in my life, I had a moment of doubt—was I losing my mind? But that fear had disappeared quickly, until today. Now, I really wondered.
So, I went to find the one live person I could talk to about what might be happening, about the hallucinations I was having, and why in the world I was having them.
Though we’d just left each other, and though she didn’t have much patience for my pining away for Jerome, I was still her granddaughter and she was required to love me no matter what.
I knew Gram would go directly home, and I needed some answers. There just wasn’t anyone else I could ask.
Chapter 9
“Betts, everything okay?” Gram said when she opened her front door. She looked behind me.
“I don’t know, Gram. I’m just not sure,” I said.
She squinted and then gave me one of her knowing looks.
“Having a hard time about Roger? Or the stuff that happened at the bakery, it bothered you, didn’t it?” Gram said.
“No, actually . . . well, I’m sad and scared about Roger, but that’s not it.”
“Come on in, sweetie. We’ll figure it out. There’s not a thing we Winston women can’t handle.”
A few moments later we were both sitting on Gram’s couch, sipping some of her fresh-brewed iced tea and snacking on some sugar cookies she’d baked recently.
Just sitting on the couch next to her, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies, had the same effect it always had. I felt better, perhaps even a little silly about my true concern, but I still had some questions.
“I know it’s possible for more than one ghost at a time to come back. I saw that when Sally was here,” I said. Gram nodded. “But . . . well, I have a sense that a ghost—Jerome, in fact—is partially here.”
“Partially here?�
�� Gram said, though her voice was surprisingly uncritical.
“Yes. Last night, I thought I saw the silhouette of a cowboy in one of the bakery windows as we were driving away. Today, just now as I left Cliff, I thought I saw the . . . well, the ghost, I guess, of a cowboy hat, roll across the ground. Could he be sort of back, or trying to come back, or . . .”
Gram looked at me as she thought. I braced myself for another get-over-Jerome lecture, but she surprised me again.
“Really, I can’t answer. You know how I’ve come to think of them all as a little flakey, not terrible to have around but not always welcome?” I nodded and she continued, “Their spotty memories and appearances and disappearances are sometimes inconvenient enough. When I was younger, of course I had questions for them, wanted to understand them. Who wouldn’t? But they don’t have answers, either. It was probably when I was about your age that I started getting all wound up about them not having those answers. They drove me crazy. I actually told them that they either had to stop visiting me when they were here, or they had to never come back.”
“Really? What happened?”
Gram laughed. “Nothing. They couldn’t remember that I’d told them that I didn’t want to see them, and even though they’re dead, I didn’t want to continue to hurt their feelings, so I decided I had to change me; either my attitude or the ways I thought about them. I also had to come to the conclusion that they have absolutely no control over where they are, except . . .”
“Except?”
“Just a sec. Let me grab something.” Gram left the couch and ventured toward the back of the small house, probably to one of the bedrooms. She returned soon with an overstuffed photo album. “Your brother wants to computerize all these things. He says I need to find a better way to save and store my photos. I told him he should have seen the shoe boxes I pulled them from so I could put them in the photo book.”
I’d seen the album many times before. Its blue burlap-wrapped cover had become more worn over the years and its insides had become even more overstuffed, the covers now resembling a wide-open mouth.
“Do you remember when you were little and people asked you what your favorite book was, and you said ‘Gram’s picture book’?” Gram said as she sat the behemoth on the coffee table in front of us.
“I do. I spent hours looking at these pictures.” I leaned forward.
The book held the only known photos of Gram’s parents, stern and stiff in their seated poses and uncomfortable clothes. Gram looked more like her father than her mother, though the black-and-white—or I guess they were now called sepia-toned—pictures didn’t show off his dark red hair. There were pictures of relatives whose names I either didn’t know or didn’t remember, pictures of Gram as she grew up, some of my dad when he was little, and some of his and Mom’s wedding. I was less interested in the pictures that followed the wedding. Those of me and my brother, Teddy, no matter how cute we were, didn’t interest me. When I was little I’d thumb through the book and try to see the differences and similarities between everyone. I’d concluded that there was a good dose of red hair and crooked smile genetics preserved on the pages.
“I imagine there are some things you didn’t notice.” Gram swung the cover back and turned to about ten pages in. “Here, here I am with my sweet and patient mother. I think I was only about three.”
I looked at the picture. “You were cute.”
“Yes, I was.” Gram smiled. “But that’s not what I want you to see. Look closely right here.” She pointed to the space next to her, a space that seemed to be filled with only a window behind them.
“Okay,” I said, but I had no idea what she wanted me to see.
“Jerome was my first ghost, too. You know that he saved me and my mother from a fire?”
“Sure.”
“Well, and you have to remember that this is all purely my own speculation. I’ve had lots of years to speculate. No one has given me any answers, but I think that Jerome is actually the reason all the other ghosts can get here, too. I think he opened the . . .”
“Door? Portal?” I said.
Gram laughed. “That sounds so science fiction-y, but I guess that’s what I mean.”
She pulled the plastic cover up from the page and lifted the photo from the sticky surface. “Look right here.” She pointed again. “You might need to turn it a little.”
I took the picture and turned it a little more toward the light. There might—might—have been something there.
“I’m not sure but there could be a shadow here that forms something similar to . . . well, similar to a cowboy hat. But it’s just a shadow, Gram. I get what you’re saying, but it’s not defined at all. It could be anything.”
“I agree, and I’m not saying that you are definitely seeing a cowboy hat. Besides, and think about this, Betts, Jerome’s a ghost. Shouldn’t he be unphotographable? Like vampires, or some such thing. I’m just saying that I want you to look closely here and then I want you to look at some of the other pictures in the album. Pictures of me. I’ll get us more tea.” She stood and took the two moisture-beaded glasses from the coffee table and made her way to the kitchen.
Doubtfully, I watched her go. Nevertheless, I stood from the couch, hoisted the heavy book over to the chair beside the window, and sat it on my lap. I opened the curtain so that a stream of light from the late-afternoon sun hit the pages perfectly.
There were many pictures of Gram. Her family didn’t have a lot of money, but they did spend some on a small Brownie camera that Gram’s mom seemed to enjoy.
Though I was told how much I resembled Missouri Anna Winston when she was my current age, I didn’t see the same sort of resemblance when we were little girls. As a child, Gram was skinny, scrawny, with short hair that stuck up in all directions. My mom called it her ostrich hair phase. When I was that age, I was skinny, but not scrawny and though my hair was unruly and difficult to handle, I wore it long and at least started each day with a ponytail.
First, I flipped through some of the front pages quickly, watching Gram grow from about the age of five up to thirteen or maybe fourteen. As I looked at the pages again, more slowly this time, I focused on each individual picture. In one, I thought I saw a swirl of something that could be interpreted as a brim of a hat, but it could have just been a trick of light, or some sort of exposure problem with the camera.
But then I saw similar images in the other pictures. All of them. Each and every picture of Gram contained an anomaly of sorts.
I hadn’t noticed that she’d come back with the refilled iced teas when I muttered, “No, that could be so many things.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too, Betts, but look at the pictures without me.”
I switched my focus to those pictures. I turned the album every which way, I pulled pictures out and held them up to the window, I double-checked, I triple-checked, but there were no strange images or swirls in any of the other pictures. Not even in one.
“Gram,” I said. “I don’t understand at all. In fact, if I was confused before, I’m even more confused now.”
Gram made a pshaw sound as she sat back on the couch. “That’s only because you think you should be confused or—what is it you young people say—freaked out. Look, Betts, you’ve heard all the sayings about life never being what you expect it to be?” I nodded. “Of course you have, and you’ve lived it firsthand—no one could have predicted how you and Cliff would have ended up back here the way you have.” I lifted my eyebrows and nodded again. “This is just another instance of that. That’s how you have to look at it. It is what it is. It could probably drive anyone bonkers if they spent too much time dwelling on it. Instead, just accept that it’s part of your life. It’s easy to distinguish the differences between real stuff and ghost stuff. Roll with it, go with it and just see what happens. I’m certain they can’t hurt us. If they could, it would be a different story.”
Her words and attitude sent a thread of comfort through my system. She
was right—but she still hadn’t answered my real question.
“So, I need to accept that a part of Jerome will probably always be around?” I said.
“Again, I’m just not sure, but don’t let it bother you either way. Don’t let it stop you from living your life. He got to live one, so should you. Fair’s fair.”
“I just don’t know . . .”
It wasn’t that I had a simple crush on the ghost. It was that I thought I had real honest-to-goodness deep feelings for him, something more than a crush, and something that wouldn’t go away easily if he was around all the time. And something I couldn’t easily ignore so I could put my focus where it belonged, on Cliff.
And how stupid was that?
Gram took a sip of her tea and then set the glass on a coaster on the coffee table.
“You need to figure it out for yourself. Do you want to be with Cliff or wait around for the ghost of someone to appear every now and then, with no schedule except that his hat might be hanging around here and there? Talk about a long-distance relationship.”
It was all so absurd, but bottom line, I didn’t like that I didn’t have a firm answer to that question.
“Think hard, Betts. You already ruined what you had with Cliff once. Do you want to do it again?”
So, she’d saved the harsher words for last. But she was correct. Dammit, she was right on target. I had been the one to “ruin” our relationship, no matter how much I hadn’t intended to.
I closed the photo album and we both moved back to the couch. I felt better, truly less confused. I knew I had things I needed to think about, but I was suddenly not interested in spending any more time focusing on me and my strange dilemma.
“Thanks, Gram,” I said. “Let’s talk about how we’ll transition back into the classes. I’m sorry about Roger, but we have to remember what we’re here for.”
Gram smiled. “That’s my girl.”
Chapter 10
If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion Page 9
