Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  “Tell me,” I say coolly, tapping the picture, “is this also the day you started stalking my sister?”

  Carl shoves his bowl away. “You have it all wrong,” he grumbles. “Don’t push.”

  A weird calm settles over me. You think I’d be boiling with frustration and rage, reaching across the table, curling my fingers around his neck. Even the farmer with his knotted arms should not be unable to pull me off of him.

  Instead, I don’t move. I press my hips harder into the wood bench.

  It is on my lips to ask Carl: What did you do with Rachel’s body?

  But now I know he wants me to.

  I know Carl has a lie all ready to go. So I don’t.

  Tomorrow will be different.

  Tomorrow, this is going to end.

  Carl is smiling at me across the table. “Did you sleep under a little bedspread with blue unicorns?”

  68

  It is one minute past midnight on my cheap watch.

  D-Day. The day I’m supposed to return Carl to Mrs. T’s or decide to kill him instead. The day I round up the final answers so I can bury my sister properly in the Weatherford cemetery where she twirled and flew and lived forever young just like Peter Pan. I’ve already bought her a plot that opened up twenty feet from Sophronia’s under a beautiful live oak tree. I’ve picked out her epitaph.

  The clock is ticking while Carl and I stand still. We’re laid up at a tacky motel named the Ten-Star, a little outside of Fort Worth. Carl is on the other side of the adjoining door, chattering away to Walt, to Barfly, to his wet lady ghost, who knows.

  He hasn’t spoken to me since right after we ate. I’d refused to take him on a hike at the nearby Big Thicket preserve so he could witness the work of a rare carnivorous plant called the Texas trumpet pitcher. He seemed to have completely forgotten our surreal to and fro over fried chicken minutes earlier. He wanted to shoot the trumpet pitcher with his new iPhone.

  “It’s such a clever damn thing,” Carl had enthused. At first, I thought he was talking about the phone.

  He was referring to the killer trumpet, which lures insects down a long, tall shoot that is like a vase for its sweet nectar. The insects either drown in the water that collects at the bottom or exhaust themselves struggling to climb out the slippery sides. “Their dead bodies are liquefied by enzymes,” Carl informed me. “Just wiped off the planet like they never existed.”

  It made me imagine the inside of his well in the Piney Woods, a basin of green soup with walls cloaked in slime, impossible to scramble up. It reminded me that serial killers have been part of evolution for millions of years.

  “It’s a condition,” he had demanded angrily when I said no.

  “Your conditions are closed,” I replied firmly, “until I know what happened to my sister.”

  In return for my threats, I get silence. I had turned the truck toward Fort Worth, not knowing what I’d do when we got there. In the end, I’d stopped short at this motel dump on the side of the road.

  I walk over and lock the adjoining door. There’s no chain. The Door Jammer is in the truck bed. I’m not sure I could shove it in place with one hand anyway.

  I tuck the Glock under my pillow.

  * * *

  —

  Carl is looming over my bed. Everything’s dark except for a spooky blue light dancing on his face.

  “Walt thinks he knows where your sister is. He wrote down the address for you.”

  I sit up and switch on the bedside lamp. The faint hee-haws of Family Feud are floating through the adjoining door, which is wide open.

  “Didn’t you hear me? Walt has an address for your sister. I thought you’d be more excited.”

  Carl is holding two things: his iPhone, which is what made him glow in the dark, and a piece of paper ripped from the motel pad. A row of red, white, and blue stars is stamped across the top of the pad. Below that, some scratchy handwriting that doesn’t look like Carl’s.

  I wonder how long Carl has been playing with his phone. How many minutes before Andy or his “guys” track us to this room.

  I reach for the paper Carl’s holding. I can tell by the way he grips it just a little longer than he needs to that he’s still furious with me.

  He wasn’t lying, though. The scribble is an address on a farm-to-market road near Burleson. Not that far out of Fort Worth. Maybe ten miles from the house where Rachel slept beside me, where I last saw her face.

  “Sure, let’s go,” I say casually, as if it’s no big deal. As if we’re heading to the movies or to see a carnivorous plant. “Hand me your phone and I can map it.”

  “Check out of this crap place first,” Carl insists. “We’re not coming back.”

  * * *

  —

  The sky is light with wispy white cloud cover. Mood lighting, my dad used to call it when he got up early to go hunting. The kind of cool light that makes it easier to see where you’re going and harder to put a hole in a pretty animal without any guilt.

  Carl is navigating from the passenger seat, highly entertained by the friendly GPS arrow pointing the way to a red dot.

  The country road is just as lonely as I imagined it would be. Endless, biting barbed wire. Neat round blocks of baled hay on flat land. A chilling, hot quiet, like everything is dead and the earth is done.

  “Go right at this next road,” Carl instructs. “It’s that ranch house up there on the hill.”

  As the truck steadily climbs the dirt drive, I’m not looking at the house. I’m focused on the red barn that sits beside it.

  I was numb when we left the motel. Now I’m afraid.

  “There’s a light in the window,” Carl observes, “but I did call ahead. If this road trip is about you being as brave as your sister, now would be a good time to prove it.”

  69

  I don’t want to beg Carl for answers anymore. I shut off the headlights as we crawl up the drive.

  The ranch house is ordinary, white brick, hugged close to the ground. The weathered red barn is the kind my sister leaned against for her senior portrait. It seems surreal to rap politely after we climb the porch steps, but that’s what I do.

  A sixtyish woman, dressed in a man’s faded T-shirt, Wranglers, and pale lavender Dearfoams slippers, opens the door. She’s clearly not surprised to see either of us. She reminds me of my mother—not so much her features or the Dearfoams as the weariness she wears like extra skin.

  “I’m Mrs. William Sherman,” she says. I don’t respond, or take her outstretched hand. Carl pumps it cheerfully and introduces himself.

  She ushers us into her living room—vacuum tracks on the brown carpet, couch patterned in colorful autumn leaves, a pair of recliners facing the TV. A pitcher of iced tea and three glasses sit on the glass coffee table beside a small plate of Lorna Doones.

  She gestures for us to sit on the swath of autumn leaves. I shake my head. Carl sits.

  That’s when I notice. Carl is clutching the photograph of my sister and the red barn—the one he snatched out of the hotel in Houston. When he reached around to the backseat a few miles ago, I thought he was settling Barfly; instead, he was retrieving this picture.

  Carl snatches a Lorna Doone off the platter and places my sister on the coffee table, facedown. I open my mouth but nothing comes out when I read the red rubber stamp on the back.

  A-Plus Portrait Photography.

  I hadn’t thought about this stamp for a very long time. Rachel had disappeared more than a year after this portrait was taken. A woman at church had recommended the photographer to my mother. Seven of Rachel’s friends had used him for graduation pictures, too. None of them disappeared.

  I had dialed the phone number on the back anyway. Three or four times, I got an answering machine with a woman’s sweet drawl. I was thirteen.

  I left messages
that were never returned.

  Now the hairs on the back of my neck are standing. Because the stamp also includes an address. This address.

  “Somebody needs to tell me what’s going on.” My voice sounds calm. But the thirteen-year-old girl inside me is screaming. Carl has started to hum.

  He turns one of the picture frames on the coffee table toward me so I can see.

  The delicate face smiling out of the silver frame looks a lot like my sister. But I’ve never seen this girl before.

  “Don’t touch that,” Mrs. Sherman repositions the photograph exactly the way it was, facing the TV like the recliners, a happy little family.

  “We should just go on out to the barn,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  The barn is cavernous, almost empty. A raked dirt floor. A fluorescent light, buzzing. There’s the faint smell of dung. A rope dangles from a rafter in the far corner.

  “That’s where my husband hung himself after he killed your sister.”

  Mrs. Sherman points to the rope like a docent in a museum. “When he took your sister’s portraits, he couldn’t believe how much she looked like our Audrey.”

  My head is exploding with Carl’s humming, Steve Harvey guffawing, cicadas screeching. I need to pay attention to Carl. Are they in this together? He’s on the move, over at the rope now. Tugging, testing it out.

  The woman isn’t paying attention to anything but her story. “Our daughter had died a few years before that. He thought your sister was sent, you know. Asked her to visit us just once a week as a sweet reminder. She came a few months—out of pity probably—and then she wrote us a real nice letter that she couldn’t show up anymore. I thought my husband gave up. But turns out, he’d been following Rachel here and there when she was home from college. Told me later he’d just wanted to talk. When they showed up, she was in the back of the truck, already dead. Just a very, very little bit of blood. William said it was an accident.”

  The woman is now curling her arm around my shoulder. Carl is still messing with the rope. I shove her off.

  In my head, new pictures are flashing. So many, many pictures.

  “Mr. Feldman told me on the phone that you’re her sister,” she says brightly. “Rachel sure loved you. Talked about you every time she was here. Would you like to see her grave?”

  70

  Carl has been tossing the rope back and forth like a pendulum. Outside, the wail of a siren is traveling down the lonely country road.

  “Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth. That’s Dostoyevsky. Lots of shit happens in a barn. That’s pure Carl Feldman.”

  Carl is gripping my elbow, edging me away from Mrs. William Sherman, who still proudly carries the name of my sister’s killer. “She’s not going anywhere with you,” he tells her. “You’re a pure-grade lunatic. Get the fuck back to your house before I do something about it.”

  Carl releases my arm. I can’t help it—I bend over, hands on my knees, stare into the dirt, try to quiet the pounding in my head, my chest. Breathe. I hear the barn door click shut.

  When I pull myself back up, Mrs. Sherman is no longer there and Carl is chuckling. “I thought you’d believe it more from her. She was ready to spill. Still remembers that you left voicemails when you were a kid. Thought you’d figured it all out. Still expected you to show up any day. Look, get ahold of yourself. I’m sure you’ve got your gun. Those sirens sound like somebody’s coming. And I’m not going back to Mrs. T’s. I took the rest of your money stash. Didn’t you leave the keys in the truck?”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “For the most part, I’ve had a very nice time, whatever-your-name-is. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t mind you. And if it makes you feel any better, I’m not innocent of everything, you just didn’t pick the right things.”

  He’s standing in the barn doorway, bathed in morning light, the kind photographers crave and farmers barely notice. “I thought it was one of your little games at first. In that hotel room, showing me the picture of your sister. That you thought I shot it. Then I realized. You had no clue.” He places his hand on my chin and tilts it up, like he is posing me. “It was your sister’s face in that photograph that made me think. Her body language. She was looking at someone she didn’t like. Someone who made her squirm. Most people see whatever they want in a picture. But a photographer knows.”

  He pulls his invisible camera up to his face. Snaps off a shot. Grins.

  Carl, this man I’d hunted, hated, didn’t kill my sister. Instead, I’d handed him a photo and he took a lucky guess. He would say, an educated one.

  “My real name is Grace,” I say, but he is already gone.

  71

  I can’t see anything in that picture of my sister now except the fear in her face. I can’t glimpse red barns without thinking of swinging ropes, or live oak trees without remembering the one Rachel was buried under in the backyard of that ranch house on the hill.

  There was just a simple wooden cross under that live oak, painted white. It was a more respectful burial for Rachel than I’d ever imagined—except for the fact that Mrs. Sherman placed her in the ground two feet from her killer.

  Andy and his crew burst through the front door of the ranch house to find me sitting in one of Mrs. Sherman’s recliners, the Glock in my lap. Mrs. Sherman sat in the other chair, cradling the picture of her daughter. Barfly was lying between us. I have no memory of what I was thinking or planning to do next.

  Every second since—in public, to the cops, to the lawyers—Andy has made me as invisible as possible. He has erased my sins.

  I’m the shadowy little sister in the stories about Mrs. William Sherman’s upcoming trial. Obstruction of justice, withholding evidence, concealing my sister’s body—I’ve stopped keeping track of what she’s charged with.

  I’ve been quietly subpoenaed in the grand jury trial of Marco and Fred, although Carl’s tape says it all. A headline in the Houston Chronicle read, Sweet Violet’s Redemption.

  In Calvert, Vickie Higgins’s husband is now the prime suspect in her death. His stick figure wife has left with the kids. Every scrap of evidence is being retested for his DNA.

  I’ve cleaned up my debts from the road—paying off the fake credit cards and closing out the accounts, fixing the damage to the rental truck, mailing an anonymous package of money to the Alpine emergency room.

  Telling my mother that she’d introduced her daughter to her murderer was one of the hardest things I ever did. I didn’t look at the glass of liquid amber she clutched. It was the first time I was glad she was holding one.

  Andy, my mother, my lawyer—they think I went to extraordinary lengths to get the truth. They only know the smallest bits of the story.

  * * *

  —

  Three days after he’d driven off in the truck, Carl tipped most of my money to an autistic woman cleaning tables at a Whataburger and the rest to the taxi driver who brought him back to Mrs. T’s at his request.

  “The world’s gone nuts,” he’d told me emphatically. “I’m hanging here for a while.” That was ten visits ago, and he still hasn’t said a word about leaving a place he swore he’d never return to.

  Now I’m back on Mrs. T’s porch steps, still trying to pull broken glass out of Carl’s mind, one splinter at a time.

  I hold one of the broken halves of the Time Travel book. The Marys are as lovely, as haunting as ever. I worry someday I will pick up this book and they will be erased, the forest cold and empty. Snatched out of the air, like Rachel. I imagine silly things like that even though I found Mary Fortson and Mary Cheetham in a 1946 registry of flu deaths.

  Carl is munching on the contents of a sack of Dairy Queen grease I brought, an old condition, and petting Baloney, a new condition. Mrs. T and Carl struck some kind of deal that involved him not telling lurid D
iscovery Channel stories to the woman with the wedding veil.

  I hold up the photo of the lady in the rain. I believe in my gut that Carl killed her.

  “I told you,” Carl snaps, “I don’t want to look at that damn picture again. I see her plenty. She’s sleeping with me this week. She’s so wet, Mrs. T thinks I’m peeing the bed.”

  “Let’s play your game,” I persist. “Truth or Nacho.”

  He shrugs, mouth full. His arm vibrates as he lifts a French fry to his lips. Mrs. T tells me the tremors are getting worse.

  “Do you know her name?”

  “You didn’t say Truth or Nacho.”

  “Truth or Nacho, do you know her name?”

  “Nope. Ask me something else. Ask me if I killed that girl in Waco.”

  “Did you kill Nicole Lakinski?”

  “Acquitted. Sorry. Double jeopardy.”

  Some days I think I’m just messing with an eccentric and mortally sick old man. Some days, I think he is messing with me. Mrs. T has shared the imaging from Houston. His brain is being eaten away. I don’t care. If there is the slightest chance to get any answers for Nicole’s young son, to find her body or anyone else’s, I have to try.

  Some days, I just let him drift. He’ll talk about the stories behind his favorite photographs. Giggle about how much Baloney likes baloney or quote Walt (or Dostoyevsky—usually hard to tell which). This is the way I found out that he stole the negatives for The Marys the day of his uncle’s funeral. He swears it was the only time. The other photos, he insists, are his.

  A year ago, I had attended a workshop on how to build a trusting relationship with a dementia patient. One man stood up to talk earnestly about his mother, who was brutal and demeaning to him as a child. What is the point of still being full of anger? My mother doesn’t exist anymore. How can I hate this sweet old lady who now loves me unconditionally?