Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  I don’t waver on an answer for that for a second. Even if Carl’s no longer a killer, there is still a witness buried inside him. Even if he can’t remember, he can’t be redeemed.

  There are just way, way too many coincidences with Carl. So I pick up a photograph. I keep up the game.

  “Truth or Nacho,” I say. “What was your pillow talk last night with the lady in the rain?”

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he mutters restlessly. “Let’s play chess. You don’t understand the concept of Truth or Nacho anymore. You don’t even have any damn nachos today.”

  * * *

  —

  A tremor got Carl. He fell in the shower and hit his head. All of us were camped at his bedside the day he died: Walt, the lady in the rain, Mrs. T, me. In his last moments, he insisted the lady in the rain had tried to help him get up.

  It was a simple graveside service. Mrs. T and her priest were the only other people who attended.

  I felt torn about speaking, about eulogizing Carl. But it felt…necessary. I rambled a little about how a great photographer records both the seen and the unseen, the fragility of life and inevitability of death. Carl would have asked why I was putting him to sleep when he was already dead.

  I hesitated about which Dostoyevsky quote to use to finish the eulogy and almost chose one Carl loved about not depriving animals of their happiness. But I caught myself. I kept replaying that moment in the barn, when Carl said I just didn’t pick the right things he was guilty of.

  I see the violent scar drizzled down his chest. I hear the whip of his machete in the woods. I remember the expert way he roped two men to a tree and callously shot one of them. I summon up the terror I felt when he played with me in the dark using a simple motel door chain or placed two fingers on my throat to probe my heartbeat. I think about missing women, grief that hangs like smoke.

  So I ended with a compromise—a line from Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead.

  Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.

  * * *

  —

  Right after the service, I searched Carl’s room. He had duct-taped his five-line will, witnessed by Mrs. T, to the back of his headboard. There were two things stapled to the piece of notebook paper. A Ziploc bag that held Nicole Lakinski’s silver owl pinky ring.

  And a deed still in his aunt’s name.

  He left that dark, wild piece of woods to me.

  Epilogue

  “My name is Grace. I was twelve when my big sister disappeared. No one touched her unmade bed for ten days until I started curling up in it. I wouldn’t let them wash the sheets. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us. One month passed. One year. One less place set at the Thanksgiving table. One less toothbrush in the holder. One less birthday to celebrate. One less, one less, one less.

  “Two years passed. Five. Reminders of Rachel, every minute of the day. The Minnie Mouse juice glass she’d drunk out of since age three untouched in the kitchen cabinet. Any hint of musky shampoo. The chatter of Friends, Green Day crooning, fireworks, Shakespeare, the Christmas ornament with her first-grade picture, the smell of spearmint dental floss, wind chimes, the color blue. Clouds.

  “The stupid hope for years every time the phone rang. The ache when it turned out to be a telemarketer, or a cop preparing my parents because they’d found unidentified female remains in Mississippi or Oklahoma or Houston. Did you forget to tell us she had a mole on her back? A touch of scoliosis? We’d turn to each other: Did she have a mole we didn’t know about? Was her spine a little crooked? It was never Rachel.

  “I was a child obsessed. Then an obsessed adult. Six years passed. Ten. Rachel would have been thirty-one years old the day I buried her where she belongs. I don’t feel peace. But I think she does.”

  I sit down. Four women and one man are crowded into this tight circle. No one has touched the coffeepot. There are no cellphones, no chatter, no one but us in this anonymous room. They are assessing me. Each other. They know it is their turn to say as much as they want or as little, to use only first names.

  The youngest says she is twenty-one, which is the bare-bottom age requirement for the group. I’m guessing she’s eighteen. I like her. She’s exceptionally mature—a dreamer, a wannabe actress, a musical theater major at a community college, a mother to three of her younger siblings while her mother works nights. Despite her youth, I think it’s OK if she stays; I think the others will, too.

  Her father disappeared in Mexico a year ago without a trace, his car abandoned in the desert after visiting her grandmother in Juarez. She says way too many people vanish in Mexico for the government to bother with anything but the barest of paperwork. She bites her nails. I’m going to help her stop.

  The oldest claims to be forty-five. I’m guessing closer to fifty. Twenty-six years ago, her husband was shot to death in front of her on their San Francisco honeymoon. The cold case is listed in the files as a robbery-homicide. She doesn’t believe that. He was an ambitious assistant district attorney snuffed out by a single shot to the back of the head.

  The young man directly across from me piques my interest the most. He says he’s twenty-five. I believe that’s the truth. He says little else. His body is already lean and toned. A tattoo of a woman’s name snakes across the upper part of his right arm. He chooses not to explain it. Later, I will tell him why the tattoo is a mistake.

  I won’t ever tell these people certain, personal things—that I’m married to an FBI agent, that by day I’m a popular second-grade teacher, that mothers enthuse about my detailed classroom lists and skill at counseling the shyest children to stand up to playground bullies. My little students love that I own a dog named Barfly and a three-legged cat named Baloney. They wait eagerly for Monday to find out which photograph I will tape to the chalkboard so we can together imagine its story.

  I officially changed my last name, so no one gets to decide who I am anymore before I tell them. I love Andy so deeply that sometimes it wakes up the pain for my sister.

  Andy is busy. Works weekends. I want to tell him everything, but I don’t.

  He knows I lead a support group for people who grieve for family members who died violently.

  He doesn’t know exactly how it operates. He doesn’t know how people find me. He doesn’t know about the equipment stored in the large lockbox in my truck bed.

  Andy knows I run a scholarship fund for the children of murder victims.

  He doesn’t ask where I got the money.

  Four years ago, right before the police finally invaded Carl’s woods, I hired two East Texas boys. They scoured Carl’s property with their hunting dogs. I trust hunting dogs to sniff things out and East Texas boys to keep their mouths shut. They didn’t find Nicole or anyone else. Neither did the police. Carl couldn’t make the game that easy. So I play on, without him.

  The only interesting thing the boys discovered was hauled up from Carl’s well. It took both of them to drag the heavy, muddy bag to the cabin porch. I didn’t cut it open until they left. I had to laugh. It was stuffed with gold bars.

  I still return to those woods.

  I almost always have company.

  Two little girl ghosts.

  And strangers who seek me out.

  I survey the room one last time.

  I ask: “Are you ready to train?”

  “Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.”

  —J. M. BARRIE, PETER PAN

  Epitaph on the grave of Rachel Lynne Barrett,

  Greenwood Cemetery, Weatherford, Texas

  FOR STEVE,

  WHO NEVER GAVE UP ON ME OR THE CUBS

  Acknowledgments

  First, there are spoilers in here. If you haven’t read this book yet, stop at this period.

&n
bsp; One of the killers roaming Paper Ghosts confounds me more than any I’ve written about. It steals someone for no reason. It taunts us with bits and pieces of the person we love like a kidnapper holding up a phone so we can briefly hear the voice. Dementia is like any other serial killer—except there’s no way to fight back. Not yet.

  In these pages, I let dementia play out like the dark comedy it can be. Laughing is sometimes a necessary part of the upside-down, imaginary world that both patient and caretaker live in. I thank everyone who has shared stories of beloved parents with me, particularly my friends Kirstin Herrera and Tommie McLeod and my editor, Kate Miciak.

  The “ghosts” in this book jumped to life with the help of Hallucinations, by the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. He shares the torrid history of hallucinations and points out that many of us will experience one at some point. He lets us know there should be no shame in that; it’s a common part of the human experience. The anecdote about Grace seeing the ghost of her sister at the stove is adapted from my own mother’s history. Shortly after my grandfather died, she saw him stirring his trademark chili in her kitchen. He grinned and said, “Fooled ya, didn’t I?” and disappeared just like the goofball he was.

  That same grandfather, who shot crime scene photographs and coal mines, inspired the deep love of photography that runs through these pages. Jill Johnson, one of my favorite photographers and journalists on earth, was the muse for the artistic side of Carl. I cannot thank her enough for her expertise and generosity. She shared stacks of well-thumbed photography books from her coffee table and talked passionately over bottles of wine. She created the otherworldly shots of the twins that appear on the cover and inside this book. She spent her summers just like Carl did, waking up at dawn on her grandfather’s West Texas farm. She turned me on to photographer Keith Carter’s beautiful, eerie eye (Holding Venus, The Blue Man, Mojo, Bones). His work inspired me more than I can say. Carter mostly lives and shoots in East Texas, proving his philosophy that you don’t need to travel much past your backyard to tell life’s great truths. If you haven’t seen his photographs, please do.

  One of the murders in this book sadly happened in real life. Haruka Weiser, a beautiful University of Texas dance and theater major, never made it back to her dorm on a spring night in 2016. A homeless teen was charged with her murder in the days after she was found near a creek on campus. Her death felt personal to me. My own son was a UT student who had walked the same path many times. Grief and prayers for her infused my writing at that time. I included Haruka in this book to honor her life and also her family, who set the tone for love in the aftermath. Their public statement after the suspect was caught is presented word for word in this book. It is remarkable in its quest for peace and understanding. The Haruka Weiser Memorial Fund is now set up at the University of Texas.

  All of my thrillers are an ode to Texas. In Paper Ghosts, two mysterious people drive from the gray beaches of Galveston to the existential desert town of Marfa and then back across the state to disappear into the Pine Curtain. A huge Texas map has been plastered to my kitchen wall for more than a year as I plotted. (Repair guys gave me very funny looks when I told them the crooked line I’d drawn was the path of a possible serial killer.) Texas travel writer June Naylor Harris was kind enough to double-check my facts and mileage. If there are any mistakes about real places, they are mine. I took only a little bit of license in this book. Hotel ZaZa, I love and recommend you; I imagine you do have a bridal suite of mirrors like that. Also, the Black Pony bar was inspired by Austin’s White Horse, but only the good parts.

  Alyson Ward, a lovely, funny writer and my dear friend, helped this book along by introducing me to the haunting places of Waco, Texas. We stood under the 17th Street bridge by a mysterious cross with no name; wandered through the beautiful, sprawling Oakwood Cemetery; marked the approximate spot of one of history’s most terrible lynchings; stared out at the lonely ruins of the Branch Davidian complex, where eighty-six people died when hell exploded on earth in 1993. Because of Alyson, I will forever remember the children and the sad poetry of their names engraved on brick and stone in a barren field.

  Many, many more thanks to:

  —Kate Miciak, my editor at Ballantine, for her magic pen and all she continues to teach me; Kara Welsh for believing in Ghosts; Jennifer Hershey and Gina Centrello.

  —Maxine Hitchcock, my fairy godmother across the ocean at Michael Joseph/Penguin Random UK, who waved her wand over me long before we met in person. I’m grateful for all of your efforts on my behalf, and that of Louise Moore, Lee Motley, and the rest of the team.

  —Kimberly Witherspoon, my agent, for her fire, humor, creative advice, and for caring so much about everything.

  —My husband, Steve Kaskovich, who does endless, loving things to make my books happen, and for my son, Sam, who inspired me with his passion for The Brothers Karamazov.

  —My parents, Chuck and Sue Heaberlin, on the other side of eighty-five—still begging for the first loose-page copy of my manuscript and still volunteering at the library. Dad, thanks for dreaming up titles in your sleep.

  —My brother, Doug Heaberlin, for coming up with Barfly’s name, which makes me happy every time I write it.

  —Amy Rork, my social media guru, for adding joy and Instagram to my life. I love you as much as I love London.

  —Timothy Bullard, who shot an inspirational and iconic image of a mysterious lady running in the rain for the Houston Chronicle in 1993. Google it.

  —Michael Hall, for the Texas Monthly article “The Truth Is Out There,” a terrific, timeless piece on the mythic lights of Marfa.

  —Alex Coumbis, my enthusiastic Ballantine publicist, and Gaby Young, her first-class UK counterpart, who inspired the first line of this book, and always wears the best skirts.

  —All of the people behind the scenes who worked so hard to catch my mistakes and package this book so beautifully: Loren Noveck, production editor; Pam Feinstein, copy editor; Dana Leigh Blanchette, interior designer; Angela McNally, production manager; Caroline Johnson, jacket designer; and Paolo Pepe, cover art director.

  —Allie Honeck, for advice on Grace’s quick-changes and for the phrase “Toy Story clouds.” Good luck on your own writing adventure.

  —J. R. Labbe, for her diligent efforts to teach me about guns. Anyone who knows J.R. knows that any mistakes in this book on that topic are my own.

  —My extended complicated family and friends again for their rousing support—with special citations to Jennifer, Emme, Morgan, and Isaac Bennett, and Cara Clark, for their artful photography and promotion; Stephanie Heppenstall, Rhonda Roby, and Laura DiCaro; Rob, Paul, Val, and Chelsea Kaskovich and Pablo Croissier; Seth and Sean Stapf; Mike and Mikie Haney; and Kate, Michele, and Laura Heaberlin. You can find Laura at the Flying Pig bookstore in Burlington, Vermont, where she will hand-sell you my book. You can listen to her fantastic indie folk music (which Grace and I love!) at www.cricketbluemusic.com. You can blame Kate and Michele for introducing me to Family Feud.

  —Miguel Suarez, for spouting funny country music lyrics, and his wife, Judy, for always buying my books.

  —Pam Ahearn, always, for both our continuing professional and personal relationship, and for seeing something in my writing from the very beginning.

  —The readers, book clubs, booksellers, tweeters, Instagrammers, Facebookers, neighbors, friends, and librarians who have embraced my books here, in the UK, and elsewhere abroad: You bring the sun.

  —And finally, Sarah Grace and Elizabeth Marie Claire, the lively, incandescent Texas twins who modeled for this book’s eerie photos in the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, and to their parents, David and Tanya Claire, who shared their daughters’ spirits. Someday, I hope to meet the ghost that makes that cold spot in your house.

  By Julia Heaberlin

  PLAYING DEAD

  LIE STILL

  BLACK-EYED S
USANS

  PAPER GHOSTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JULIA HEABERLIN is the author of the critically acclaimed international bestseller Black-Eyed Susans. Her psychological thrillers, including Playing Dead and Lie Still, have sold to more than fifteen countries. Heaberlin is also an award-winning journalist who has worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Detroit News, and The Dallas Morning News. She grew up in Texas and lives with her family in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, where she is at work on her next book.

  Juliaheaberlin.com

  Facebook.com/​juliathrillers

  Twitter: @Juliathrillers

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