As she delivers her well-rehearsed pitch, I’m thinking for the hundredth time since I started hunting Carl about how much pictures lie.
Trudy appeared a good thirty years younger on her website. Her face is coated with a pinky-tangerine powder that ends at the chin line. Her mouth is outlined in bright red, and when it puckers, as it does now, it’s hard not to stare. The collision of white-hot sun and the pandemonium of zebras and pelicans on her blouse makes me a little dizzy.
“Mrs. T liked Downton,” Carl says. “Had a big thing for Mr. Bates until he started criticizing his wife’s cooking.”
Trudy smiles at Carl dismissively. I’d told her on the phone that he had dementia and that my husband and I were looking for a place to fix up that would hold his consulting business, my dying father, and a growing family.
I’d pulled out the ring in my nose this morning and threaded two tiny silver cross posts into my ears. My hair is gathered in a long, suburban ponytail and the white Ann Taylor sundress ends primly above the knee. My mother’s gold wedding band, which I’d swiped from her jewelry box two months ago, is glinting in the sun.
I can tell Trudy is skeptical anyway; her eyes are focused on the tiny hole in my nose. Now she’s glancing past me to check out the car, which she apparently decides is nice enough to proceed.
“Do you have any paranormal devices with you?” Trudy asks.
“No,” Carl says.
“Do you work for a newspaper or magazine?”
“I don’t,” Carl says. “Can’t vouch for her.”
“We get a lot of lookie-loos,” Trudy says. “I don’t want to waste my time.”
“I understand the house has been on the market for fourteen years,” I say smoothly. “We know about the murder. My father…believes in ghosts. I want to make sure this house isn’t going to spook him before we pour my husband’s inheritance into it.”
Carl is nodding. “I will need to see the spot.”
“Well, that’s better than the stories I usually hear,” Trudy says, turning to the door. “I’ll be able to show you most of the ground floor, which includes an extra-large bedroom that would make a perfect suite for you, sir. On the ground floor, there is also a kitchen, dining room, two living areas, several nice nooks, and the back parlor, where the event occurred. All stains were professionally removed years ago so no need to look around for them. I have a scrapbook in my car with pictures of the second-floor bedrooms and baths and the third-floor servants’ quarters, but let’s just see if you are still interested after you see the state of things. You will have to sign a liability release to view the rest of the house because none of the stairs are up to code. I can still scoot under an automatic garage door in a pinch but I’m not crazy enough to put a heel through one of those rotting staircases. So it would have to be another day with my boss, who, I’ll be honest, is ready to unload this elephant. Murder only sells books and guns, he likes to say.”
“I’m very disappointed about a limited tour,” Carl says. “Were there a lot of stains?”
Trudy ignores him, punches in the code on the lockbox, and pops it open. She extracts a key, and glances at her watch. “I’m just going to take you straight to the room where the murder occurred. If you’re spooked, there’s no point in going further.”
“I won’t be,” Carl says.
* * *
—
We enter a foyer that’s velvet with darkness and dust. The only daylight streams along the bottom of two front windows where the plywood runs at least three inches short. “Watch where you step,” Trudy advises. “The electricity’s turned off. We show this one in the daytime.”
Two circles of filthy stained glass throw some muted color from the top of an ornate staircase. As my eyes adjust, I can make out an empty sitting room to the right and a fireplace with its mouth bricked up. Trudy is already moving briskly down a long hall that stretches in front of us.
Vickie might have walked this hall to her death. I nudge Carl along like he probably nudged her. Trudy is whipping a flashlight at the walls and ceilings in tour guide fashion. I can’t make out her muffled words.
“Did you just say original shit-ass walls?” Carl asks.
We’ve reached a thick paneled door at the end of the hall. I know this beautifully carved door. In pictures, it was bound with yellow tape. Carl and I are stacked closely behind Trudy while she flashes her light at her keys, finding the one she wants.
“Shiplap walls, sir. Ship-lap walls.” She throws open the door and ushers us inside a long shallow room that runs all the way along the back of the house. Enough light seeps through the cracks in the outside wall that I can see the raisins of rat feces on cheap linoleum, the broken ribs of two old wooden chairs, the graffiti of a pink fluorescent cross on one of the plywood windows, the letters ADIH spray-painted on another.
“What does this mean?” Carl, already at the window, is tracing a finger over the H.
“Another Day in Hell,” I translate under my breath.
Trudy has moved deeper into the room. “Teenagers. Have to change the lock on the door once a month. The cops still have to do a nightly swing-by. It’s every hour on Halloween.”
When she flips her face around, I catch my breath. There’s a reason I couldn’t hear in the hall. A white mask smothers her nose and mouth. Only her eyes are visible. More concerning, she has lifted her shirt to reveal a triangle of pale stomach fat and a holster with a gun.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. This is a special mask I’ve had made for my allergies. Who knows about the asbestos in these old places? I used to bring surgical masks for clients, but it got expensive and most are giving me the runaround. I haven’t sold a fixer-upper Victorian in five years.”
My eye is glued to her hand, now resting on a holster that looks a little like the one in my suitcase. This was not a time when I thought I needed to strap it on.
“My husband insists on the gun. You read the Internet, you know what happens to real estate ladies. There’s no need for you to be judgmental. You’d be lucky to have me sitting by you at a movie these days when a semi-automatic comes out of the dark.”
“I’m sure real estate…is a dangerous occupation,” I mumble. Carl is off in a corner, oblivious, in low conversation with a wall. I make out the word choke. And Art. He wants to choke Art?
“Well, he’s found the spot,” Trudy says, nodding at Carl. “You can’t imagine the weirdos and ghost hunters who’ve called and emailed. Vickie Higgins was a nice girl. She deserves every respect in death. She had a beautiful life ahead of her. Her husband still lives in the same house, on the next street over. I sold it to him the year before Vickie died. Vickie had fixed it up so cute, then his new wife came in and tore almost every bit of history out of that place. Did you know Vickie vanished on the first anniversary of their marriage? The steak was thawed on the kitchen counter and going gray when he came home for dinner. This house was empty. They didn’t find the scene for thirteen days.”
“She was stabbed right here, wasn’t she?” Carl asks from the far end of the room. “Blood sprayed all over. Sank right in the red wallpaper. It had an artichoke motif. You can see a little bit of it here, in this corner. All this texture would make an interesting photograph.” He draws his hands up to his face and clicks his tongue.
“OK, that’s it. We’re done.” Trudy’s weapon is out of its home. A Ruger. She’s gesturing with it toward the door.
Carl isn’t moving, mesmerized by the wall.
* * *
—
On the lawn, the sun splinters the spell of the house. Trudy ushered us out pronto. Now she is back to the practical matters of stripping off her mask and re-holstering the gun like she’s done this a hundred times. I turn to Carl. “Why don’t you give Barfly a bathroom break? The leash is on the backseat floor. I’ll finish up here with Trudy.”
/> Carl makes the cuckoo sign with his index finger and points at Trudy, whose head is down as she fiddles with her holster. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she is saying. “Don’t want to blow a hole in my lady parts even though I don’t use them much.”
When she looks up, I’m holding out a fifty-dollar bill. “Please don’t be insulted,” I say. “We didn’t come to waste your time. Maybe you and a friend can have a nice dinner on…Dad and me. It’s a beautiful house, but I can tell my father would be fantasizing all the time about what happened here.”
The money hangs in the air while she considers my motives and her teeth scrape at what’s left of her lipstick. Most of it is now a bloody smear inside the mask dangling off her wrist.
I’m sure she doesn’t believe me. It’s clearly a bribe.
“Oh, why the hell not? My sister and I might go into Marlin for dinner this weekend.”
“Terrific. Thank you again.”
“Wait. I don’t like to let inaccuracies go. There was no red wallpaper in that room. It was blue. And Vickie Higgins was shot in this house, not stabbed. They dug eight bullets out of the walls. And she wasn’t found here, she was never found. There was, however, enough blood to declare her dead pretty much on that alone. And then there was all that business near the Orviss Crypt where her parents put up a fancy stone and buried a coffin that’s waiting for a body that has never shown up. But I expect you know all about that.”
I nod. Texas ghost websites say Vickie’s wedding veil floats over her empty grave, sometimes in the sunshine. Ridiculous.
Trudy’s expression switches to pity. “Back there in the house, your dad might have been remembering anything. The time his grandmother lost control of her mixer and red velvet cake batter spattered all over the place. I feel for you, hon. I see all the warning signs. My mother got morbid at the end. Paranoid. Thought someone was following her. She opened a can of French-cut green beans and tried to go after my sister with the lid. My sister was a bitch. Never wanted a single dish or a potato peel left in the sink at any hour of the day. Grabbed the glass of tea out of your hand to wash it before you got the last drink out. That doesn’t change my advice on your dad. Watch your back.”
22
It’s a game of chicken, whether the real estate agent or I will drive off from Bloody Victoria first. I pretend to be settling Barfly in the backseat until she waves her hand like a white flag of surrender and pulls away.
I wait another five minutes before maneuvering the same street corner. Trudy’s yellow MINI Cooper is nowhere in sight when I park in front of the baby Victorian where Vickie Higgins used to live. One block over and two blocks down from where Vickie Higgins died.
Way too close, I think.
Yet this is still the address of Jon Higgins, once the newlywed husband of Vickie. I’d checked and then checked again. Trudy had basically confirmed it a few minutes ago. Most of the Victorian femininity of this house has been stripped away just like she said. Only a tiny gingerbread detail over the front porch survived. Fog gray siding, aluminum, let-no-scrap-of-air-in windows, a boxy addition—all changes that cheapen it.
There’s a Fisher-Price basketball hoop in the driveway and a fancy pink tricycle locked to the porch railing. The pristine St. Augustine yard is outlined with the three-inch-deep edging of an anal-retentive landscaper. Maybe a few blocks, a new wife, and two kids are enough to make Jon Higgins forget his ugly past is a short dog walk away. Or maybe he doesn’t want to.
There’s nothing to gain by jumping out of the car. Jon Higgins didn’t respond to my letters, email pleas, or calls to the secretary in his law office. It doesn’t appear that anyone is home anyway. I just want to see again for myself where Vickie left the steak to turn gray. I want to know whether stopping here will inspire Carl to say something. Whether the striking colors of the house when Vickie lived here are imprinted in some corner of his brain.
A year ago in a Dallas diner, Vickie’s mother had shown me a photo of her youngest daughter, smiling, right by this porch, perched on a ladder with a paintbrush in her hand. “Vickie was so proud of her Painted Lady,” she’d told me. “Painted it green with pimiento-colored shutters and named the house ‘Olive.’ She wanted every historical detail accurate to 1890s San Francisco. She couldn’t make up her mind at first. Should it be purple and peach? Aqua and gold? And on and on. She found California newspaper editorials from back in the old days that warned the trend in violent color clashes was going to incite neighborhoods to madness. Sometimes, I wonder if they were right. If the paint job drove somebody to kill my daughter.”
Vickie’s mother had revealed these details well into our two-hour conversation, when our eyes were already red. She’d shown me the photo of Vickie’s wedding dress that wound up stuffed by its lonely self in a casket in a hole in the earth because Vickie, like my sister, was never found.
Vickie’s mother hadn’t recognized Carl in a six-picture lineup I laid down on top of a paper placemat with word-cross games and tic-tac-toe.
We’d met fifteen miles from her house. She’d thought this would be a safe way for her to satisfy the strange young woman who dialed up and begged to meet because someone she loved disappeared into the ether, too. Of course, I already knew exactly where she lived: a brick ranch-style home in Plano that fit with her teacher’s pension, right next door to her oldest daughter, who had slammed her door in my face two years earlier.
After one cup of coffee, I wasn’t worried. Vickie’s mother wanted to talk about her daughter, no matter what my motive or how much of a liar I was, at whatever risk to herself.
“Heads up,” Carl says.
* * *
—
One of the doors to the detached garage is beginning to scroll up. Someone either coming or going. The answer squeals into the driveway—a green Prius that slams short. A skinny, red-faced woman in black yoga pants and a tight pink top is barreling out of the driver’s side toward us. I’m guessing it’s DeeDee, Jon’s second wife, the woman who took a thoughtless gray eraser to Vickie’s house. She’d taken another eraser to the wrinkles on the Facebook profile picture I’d found. Like Trudy.
“Trudy just called to warn me about you,” she’s screeching. “Get the hell off our property before I phone my husband. Or get the cops.”
She’s already at my car window, leaning in, providing me intimate knowledge of every rough patch on her unmade face, the skunk of her yoga sweat, and the dutiful boiled egg she had for breakfast.
Several photographs of Vickie, blond and pale and pretty, lay sorted in one of the containers in the trunk. This woman is a lesser Vickie, a poorly sketched reproduction. Vickie’s mother told me that she’d met Jon’s second wife at the memorial ceremony after her daughter was declared dead in absentia. Jon deserves that woman, she told me bitterly. He always worked too late. The blame was subtle but furious.
“Technically, we are not on your property,” Carl announces to DeeDee. “We’re on the street. And we don’t know a Trudy.”
“You son of a bitch. Trudy told me the kind of car you drive.” DeeDee reaches into the car and clinches my ponytail in a painful hold.
“I’d let go if I were you,” Carl warns. “More for your sake. She’s tougher than she looks.”
The woman maintains her grip on my head. “I’m sick of Vickie being my fucking shadow.”
“Did you ever think that you are Vickie’s fucking shadow?” Carl says coolly. I try to shoot Carl a warning look, but I can’t turn my neck. DeeDee’s grip is unrelenting.
He is right about one thing. I know how to break her vise. I’m just not ready to do it. Carl’s mind has sprung to life again. Maybe he recognizes this house. Remembers Vickie. Maybe he did all along.
“You know that Nicole Lakinski, who went missing in Waco?” Carl asks her. I feel a warm drop of his spittle on my cheek.
“Are you listening
to me, old man? I don’t give a shit.” DeeDee’s shriek travels the street, quiet and still except for the merciless humming of air-conditioning units.
“Nicole and Vickie had an interesting personal connection,” Carl persists.
“What connection?” DeeDee and I ask almost simultaneously.
“It’s a detail not revealed at the Waco trial. My lawyer and the prosecutor didn’t seem to think it benefited either side.” Carl reaches over and seizes her wrist, still attached to my ponytail. “You might want to ask your husband why.”
The muscled knot in his forearm works like a twitchy nerve. He’s holding firm.
“I recognize you now,” DeeDee says slowly. “You’re that photographer who got off. The serial killer. I read that you were homeless. Locked up in some halfway house.”
Barfly is beginning to bark—one short yip and then a rapid-fire burst. I don’t want him to break open his stitches. I definitely don’t want a neighbor to call the cops. DeeDee’s eyes dart from me to Carl. She struggles against his clench. Every tiny hair at the top of my scalp is screaming.
“Tell anyone about me and I may pay you another visit,” Carl says. “Do you like having your picture taken?”
Enough. I hit the window button and watch it glide up. “Sorry,” I mouth as DeeDee yanks her arm free from Carl and stumbles back.
I really am a little bit sorry for her. A dead woman, no matter how sweet she was in life or how very dead now, is a tricky bitch.
DeeDee can paint the outside of her house whatever the hell color she wants, but dead Vickie is still making calls inside. She decides how good DeeDee’s sex life is and how often her husband will say I love you. How angry DeeDee might get at her kids, how ignored or spoiled they will feel, which toys will be broken and when and why.
Whether DeeDee will stop at one glass of wine or three, will sleep two hours or seven, will bother to put on makeup and make the bed and stack all the mindless pillows. No matter how much yoga DeeDee does, it will be Vickie who decides how deeply she is allowed to breathe.
Paper Ghosts Page 9
