Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  Instead of coloring my hair as planned, I pack the dyes. When I venture out of my room, the door to the half-bath in the living area is shut. I can hear Carl running the sink.

  The TV, on all night, is low-talking about the orchid mantis, a pretty, pink-petaled insect that captures its prey by pretending to be a flower. On-screen, the bug looks like a stem fresh from the florist. Carl must have won a battle with Walt for some Discovery Channel time.

  An encouraging sign: Carl has picked up everything but the mirrors, including the rocks scattered across the floor. Whatever room service tray I heard him clanking around last night is gone.

  I snap off the TV. Carl has folded the newspaper that was covering the table and laid it by the trash can. My finger snags as it runs over the scratches he made, deeper rivers than I thought. I glance around, but I can’t find the package with the new furniture marker anywhere to color them in. I’ll have to ask Carl. I tackle the rehanging of all of the mirrors instead. It’s a blinding task; when I’m done, halos of light hover in my vision.

  Carl is still camped in the bathroom. It’s been a long time, even for him. I knock lightly. “Carl, are you good in there? Did you eat breakfast?”

  No answer. Carl pretends to be a little deaf, or he actually is. I wander over to the mini-fridge to hunt for some $4 orange juice. It’s an easy search because half of the shelf is bare. The fairy-size bottles of Tito’s, Jack Daniel’s, and Don Julio, the cheap single-serve wineglasses with the rip-off tops, the Stellas, the Buds, the Sam Adams—all missing. I’d memorized every label so I’d know what he drank.

  My eyes whip back to the closed bathroom door. Carl could be drunk. Passed out. Dead, if he combined all that alcohol at once with his medication.

  I bang with my fist this time. “Carl, are you OK?”

  No answer.

  The knob twists easily.

  The room is empty.

  The faucet is running.

  So, I realize, is Carl.

  37

  The panic doesn’t begin to set in until I hit the lobby and see the disco show of cop car lights bouncing through the revolving door.

  I pick the youngest of the three valets on duty, the one whose eyes are already focused on the smooth white ribbon of belly peeking between my tank top and jeans.

  “What’s going on?” I ask sweetly.

  “Someone stole the longhorn skull that was wired to the hood of our guest shuttle,” he says. “Nothing for our guests to worry about. Our manager is real ticked. Hard to lose horns ten feet long.”

  He nods to a woman animatedly accosting the two police officers at the end of the drive. The cops appear sexist and bored.

  “I’d like the keys to my truck,” I tell the valet. “Here’s my ticket.”

  “If you give me a minute, I’ll bring it right down for you. Yours is the white Chevy with the Warrior Wheels, right? I explained our retrieval policy to your father when I helped him out last night. We like to bring up the vehicles ourselves. I’m sorry about his brain tumor. He asked me to pray for him. Gave me a super sweet tip.”

  Brain tumor? A lie or the truth? Did Carl get bad news I didn’t know about yesterday? “You pulled the truck up for my father? Last night?”

  “Yeah, he wanted to make sure his remote was working. Thought it might need a battery. Then I took the truck back to the garage, where it is safe and sound.”

  He must have stolen the extra remote from my makeup bag. Carl could be turning the ignition as we speak.

  My eyes are glued to the perfectly square yellow soul patch on the valet’s chin, definitely bleached, and his perfectly hip name tag with the Z.

  Warrior Wheels, he’d said. This guy had eyes. He could probably recognize my belly in a lineup. Not good.

  “It’s Harry, right? Give me my keys.”

  “It isn’t our policy.” Harry’s grumbling, but he turns to the overloaded hooks behind him. “Here. Space 317 in the garage over there.” He points right. “Third floor. You’ll have to walk up the stairs. Elevator’s broken today. I’ll have to let my boss know you’re going in there.”

  “You do that.”

  I fly down the drive and up the three flights to the truck. I open the stairwell door, then stop abruptly. Fifty yards away, Carl is on a tear inside the truck bed, throwing open my boxes and Tupperware containers. When he sees something he wants, he drops it directly into a hotel dry-cleaning bag with a large Z on it. Now he’s counting out bills from my $2,000 stash. He glances up when he hears my footsteps. A quirk of his lips, but he doesn’t seem all that surprised to see me.

  “I thought we had a deal,” I say.

  “I did, too, until your little science experiment yesterday. And your nasty mood last night.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you about the appointment. Do you…have a brain tumor?”

  “Where’d you get that? Are you trying to scare me?”

  “How about this, Carl: You go with me to Galveston. After that, you pick any condition off your list. Any of them.”

  “Walt doesn’t like Galveston beach. Hot. Depresses him.”

  “You two can wait in the truck…while I meet someone.”

  “Any condition at all? You’ll do anything.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll need time to think about it.” He eyes me meaningfully as he finishes tucking a little more cash into the ZaZa bag and zips it up. “Why is your hand always in your pocket?”

  TITLE: THE DROWNING

  From Time Travel: The Photographs of Carl Louis Feldman

  Galveston Beach, 2002.

  Gelatin silver print

  Photographer’s note—I can’t step on this stretch of bossy Gulf shore without being soaked in humidity and dread, even though it’s been more than a hundred years since the Great Galveston Hurricane. Children are building sandcastles where bodies are buried. The storm wiped out more than six thousand people in Galveston; estimates range up to twelve thousand casualties for the entire island. Many of the dead were weighted and dropped to the bottom of the sea, burned in city pyres, entombed in the sand where they were found. Housing contractors still run across their bones. I shot this photograph in front of the historic Hotel Galvez, where ghosts are known to roam the beach, including a suicidal bride and a saintly nun. In 1900, as the storm roiled, the sisters of St. Mary’s orphanage tethered themselves to the children with clotheslines. Some of them were still roped together when their bodies were found. A century later, I discovered this dress swirling in the seaweed where so many souls were sucked away. I didn’t see the face until I printed it in the darkroom.

  38

  Barfly and I are dipping our toes into the murky water of San Luis Pass on Galveston’s west end, where Violet is supposed to have slipped under in the dark. In old police photographs, a yellow stream of crime tape blocked off the beach behind us and beer cans and empty bottles stuck up in the sand like shipwrecked pirate trash.

  Violet. Girl No. 3. The final red dot. It’s OK to call her a girl today, I decide, because she was a girl to her parents. Only twenty-one.

  I’d wanted to meet Gretchen Mullins, Violet’s old college roommate, for more than a year. She was the closest thing I had to an adult witness in any of my cases. She said no, no, no. On the fourth try, I gave her a new fake name. I made up a better story. It worked.

  I wanted to ram Carl with this memory, so it wasn’t my first choice that he is hanging back in the truck with the air-conditioning and The Who blasting. On the plus side, now there’s no chance he will uncloak my identity in front of Gretchen. She thinks I’m a reporter hoping to get more warning signs posted on the beaches by posthumously profiling a few past victims of rip currents.

  Our rendezvous is taking place on a high-risk beach about twenty miles from the stretch of sand where Carl shot his most profitable and haunting image
of a scrap of fabric that he titled The Drowning.

  In his book, in interviews, he claimed the piece of fabric was a dress, some kind of ghostly ode to the lives lost in the great Galveston hurricane.

  I shiver, staring at the lapping Gulf, a monster at sleep. So little warning in 1900, unlike now. No technology. The day before it struck, the wind prowled. The sea swelled. The paper ran a one-paragraph alarm bell. Twenty-four hours later, the city swam with bodies.

  Carl says he let the dress in his photograph wash back out to sea. So who knows? It will forever be as he and his picture imagine it.

  I wonder now if it was a scarf. If Carl has a thing for scarves, like the one he stole at Mrs. T’s and curled up in my suitcase, then stole back. He could pull it out like a diabolical magician at any minute. Try to tighten those pink-and-white snails around my neck until I am a flat, airless balloon.

  The two of us left the Hotel ZaZa and its mirrors for good about an hour ago with an apology and a $300 donation on the credit card to repair the table. The hotel manager was distracted enough about the stolen longhorns that she probably would have let it go. I just didn’t want her rethinking things later.

  I originally suggested that Gretchen and I meet at a more famous spot in front of the Galvez, an old hotel nestled behind the seawall in a daring and tenuous love affair with the Gulf. It would make sense. Gretchen and Violet had stayed there once. So did Carl, at least twice a year.

  But Gretchen picked this spot, where she last saw Violet alive. She wanted to toss a bouquet of violets in the water in memory of her friend, claiming it was a yearly ritual. I didn’t believe her.

  How many florists sell violets? Could anybody even grow this delicate flower in Texas? And who actually follows through on this kind of good intention? Melodrama, I figured, in her hopes to make a better story for the newspaper I didn’t really work for.

  Today, San Luis Pass is scattered with just a few tan-seekers. It’s well-known as one of the trickiest places to swim in Galveston, an end piece on the long baguette of shore, where swimmers can drop off into uncharted nothing.

  No warnings have ever stopped college partiers like Violet and Gretchen from showing up, or from doing all the wrong things if they get trapped in a current.

  Even an Olympic swimmer can’t beat the time of a fast riptide.

  Don’t flail. Give in. It won’t pull you under; you’ll die from exhaustion while fighting it. Trust. Let nature bring you back to shore.

  My trainer shared his rulebook for everything, just in case. He had no idea about my motivations for hiring him or whether I would end up in the mountains or the sea. He knew nothing about my sister’s disappearance. We might have liked each other better if he did.

  I try not to imagine this churning water dragging me out while people turn to colorful polka dots on the shore.

  I glance at my cheap little watch and wonder if it and Carl’s bandaged book of photographs under my arm can withstand the spitting of the ocean. Only five more minutes before Gretchen is supposed to arrive.

  I told her I’d be wearing a red baseball cap and walking a brown dog. She told me she’d be wearing a yellow dress and bringing her little blond-haired boy, Gus.

  Violet Santana had blond hair, too, and a sweet, bare face that made my stomach hurt when her old case had popped up in one of my random searches two years ago. I’d missed it in earlier Internet hunts because her death was never declared a homicide.

  I opened up that terrible possibility to Violet’s parents on the phone: Could Violet possibly have been the victim of a killer? They wouldn’t consider it. Their daughter’s death was God’s will, a baptism of sorts. As part of the Master Plan, she stepped into the water and disappeared forever. It was written down before she was born.

  I had a better idea after communicating with them why their daughter liked to get drunk. When talking to police, the spring break partiers that Violet spent her last night with admitted to being so loaded up on Bud and Jack Daniel’s, switching rooms and partners nightly, they didn’t even miss her until a group breakfast at the Hotel Galvez two days later.

  Everyone had just assumed Violet had walked out of the ocean that night. I think she did, too. I think she dried off, put her clothes back on, and traveled a different path, one that led to Carl.

  Barfly is dancing along the waterline, claws biting the sand. His wound is still worrying me, even though I’d bought a waterproof bandage at Walgreens for the occasion. I pull a little overprotectively on his leash.

  I shade my eyes and glance back at the truck parked in the distance beyond the seawall. Maybe Carl’s gazing at me, a polka dot, wondering how much I know about that night. Maybe he’s mesmerized by the rippling Gulf, thinking about Violet and his famous picture of the drowning dress. I turn my back to him.

  Fabric and water, that’s what that picture is. Except what people see is a pretty face of terror in its folds, a spirit that knows it is being sucked under—a classier, spookier, artier version of Jesus in a piece of toast or Elvis in a potato chip.

  A framed copy of The Drowning photo hangs in one of the most ghost-infested suites at the Galvez. Shops on the historic Strand still hawk postcards of it. It’s one ghost and a thousand ghosts that walk this precarious slot of land. I wonder if Carl still collects royalties or if he just doesn’t remember where the check goes.

  During one of my Dark Web crawls, I stumbled across an original signed print of The Drowning for sale on a site that mostly specializes in ultra-gruesome serial killer trading cards. How does that kind of collecting even work? I’ll give you a Jeffrey Dahmer and a Ted Bundy for your Green River Killer? How would Carl rank if everyone knew the truth?

  A salty breeze rolls off the water, shivering over me. I feel more afraid of Carl right now when he is hundreds of feet away.

  I glance back. There’s a woman up in the dunes, shading her eyes, zoning in on me. A little boy with blond hair, carrying a white rose, is already running for the water.

  39

  “Do you mind if I tape this?” I hold up a small recorder, hoping to look reporter-like, while Gretchen’s eyes rove over my jeans, loose white top, Nikes, Ray-Bans, red baseball cap. From what I know of journalists, my fashion isn’t that far off the mark.

  Gretchen is still lovely in her thirties, with auburn hair dyed two shades lighter than mine, freckled skin, and twenty pounds of extra weight that, if she lost it, would make her less attractive. Her beauty is all in fresh appeal—soft, rounded edges, a light drawl rolling over me like a massage.

  “I’d rather you didn’t.” Gretchen’s eyes are laser-pointed on her son. A Superman cape billows off his small shoulders. He’s tossing the white rose about a yard into the water with every ounce of his miniature might, only to have the water roll it back to his feet every time. This constant rejection doesn’t seem to be bothering him in the slightest. I’ve already counted five throws. Now six.

  “You said this is about where Violet went in?”

  “As best I can remember. I always use the bridge as a marker. Gus! Come and try over here!”

  “What’s the very last thing you remember about that night?”

  “The round white moon of her butt going in the water. She was tan everywhere else. I was going to tease her about it later because it was funny. Fourteen kids were skinny-dipping and no one has the least idea what happened to her. She was with Fred and Marco, one on either side. They are good guys. You’d think they’d all stay together, right? But no.”

  “You changed your mind about going in the water?”

  “I never really planned to. Earlier that day, a lifeguard asked me out for a drink called Pop My Cherry. That kind of low quality opening line is all it took for me in those days. I left the beach early to meet him. I didn’t come back to the room for a couple of days.”

  Her shame is still a slow and steady burn. I sm
ile sympathetically although I’m certain this is part of a ceaseless confession she tells everyone. I decide to divert for a second. “Your little boy is really cute. Determined.”

  “Yeah, he’s my youngest. My hair used to look like that on the beach. Like the sun had set it on fire. This is his second trip here with me. He understands Mommy lost somebody. The fifteenth anniversary, but I guess you know that. I don’t want to say too much to Gus, or he’ll never go in the water. His dad has big plans to make him a sailing buddy. That rose isn’t cooperating, is it? The violets tend to melt into the seaweed right away and disappear. My own patch looked like crap this late in the season so we stopped off at the grocery store and got this white rose. Like Violet cares about a flower I buy out of a plastic bin near the bananas. It’s more about me. Gus! Try over here!”

  “How long were you and Violet in Galveston on your break?”

  “Six days at the Galvez. A present from my parents for being on track to graduate on time. They paid for the room. I talked Violet into coming with me. She couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. It’s a gorgeous old hotel. I’m glad Harvey didn’t take it.”

  Gus’s scream is so sudden and shrill it easily rises above the pitch of the gushing waves.

  * * *

  —

  Gus is chugging toward his mother at the fastest speed he can, little feet stumbling through the sand. Carl is close behind him, jeans rolled to the knees, barefoot. He’s wearing the Hollywood hat. His shirt is off, the necklace with the key glinting in the sun. A large white scar runs diagonally down his chest, like the beginning of an X in tic-tac-toe.

  “Gus!” Gretchen kneels and opens her arms protectively for her child, while I check that Carl has nothing in his hands.

  “Mom, this man says that when baby sharks wake up, they eat their brothers and sisters! He said one shark is called the Cookie Cutter, and if I go in the ocean, it will take a round bite out of my butt like I’m a chocolate chip cookie.”