Dancing with a Ghost

by Angela Pepper

  The front door opened. Instead of Tilda, out stepped Marco, wearing a warm jacket but nothing on his feet except socks.

  His bright eyes were wide open, and his curly red hair had been neatly parted and combed. He smiled at Katie while ignoring Lee completely.

  “Hey, Katie.”

  “Good morning,” she said.

  He used the back of his hand to rub his bulbous nose. Katie's artistic perception kicked in, and she noticed how the relative smoothness of his hair made his cheeks look rounder, like squashed circles. He had a half circle under each eye, as though he hadn't slept well or was allergic to something in the air.

  Marco shoved his hands into his pockets and rotated his arms, rolling his shoulders in and rounding himself further.

  “Hey, man,” Lee said with a lift of his chin. “You wanna make a snowman?”

  Marco blinked in surprise. “Why?”

  “You're the sculptor, aren't you?”

  Marco chuckled. “Oh. Right.” He looked down at his socked feet and asked, “Have either of you seen my boots?”

  Lee replied, “What do they look like?”

  Marco kept chuckling. “Like boots. Brown. Boot-like.”

  Katie answered, “I haven't seen them myself, but I'll keep my eyes open.”

  “Me, too,” Lee said, his voice deeper than when the conversation had begun.

  “Don't be surprised if my boots show up in my mother's possession,” Marco said. “Her feet aren't much smaller than mine, and she likes having things that aren't hers.”

  “So we've heard,” Lee said.

  “Yeah, well...” Marco trailed off, and then turned and disappeared back into the house.

  Katie and Lee exchanged a look.

  Katie said, “Dude, that's his mother. Don't say stuff like that.”

  “That Tilda likes to sleep with her favorite students? It's the truth. Everyone knows it.”

  “She's somebody's mom,” Katie said. “Marco's.”

  “Have you got a thing for him? That guy smokes an awful lot of weed. He probably couldn't do anything for you in the bedroom, even if he tried. Drugs make a man lazy. That's why I'm straight edge.”

  Katie turned her back to Lee. She would pretend to be horrified at the thought of either of the young men being interested in her, but the truth was, she felt flattered. She hadn't gotten this much attention at her college, where she was one of countless girls exactly like her.

  She kicked at the snow and bit her lower lip. She wondered what it was, exactly, Lee thought he could do that other guys couldn't.

  The front door of the adobe house opened again, and this time Tilda Onassis came out. She wore a puffy down jacket with a bright-red scarf. On her feet, she wore red rubber shoes with thick wool socks showing at the top. If she'd taken Marco's brown boots, it wasn't to wear them.

  “At last,” Tilda said with a dramatic sigh. “I apologize for keeping you both waiting. Holly is in a tizzy about something and she won't spit it out. We might have to retire the ol' gal sooner than expected.” She marched past them and led the way toward the path they'd taken the previous day. There were boot tracks on the path, partially covered by fresh snow. She stamped through the tracks, dragging her feet.

  As they walked, Lee asked, “What happened to Holly? Was it a car accident?”

  “Not exactly,” Tilda said. “She was out riding horses with Clive, and...” She trailed off, lost in a thought.

  Lee said gently, “You don't have to talk about it if it's too painful.”

  “It's fine,” she said. “I just wonder sometimes, about the things I'm told by others.” She waved a hand through the air, slicing it with her triangular, lacquered nails. “The accident happened years ago. They were out riding, and something spooked the horses. Maybe it was Clive himself. I wouldn't know. Holly was thrown clear, but then she was trampled.” Her voice got soft. “Poor thing. She must have been so frightened. So confused. Fighting for her life.”

  Lee moved close to her and matched his walking stride with hers. “You're very kind to give your friend a job.” He pumped his arms cheerfully as he walked alongside her. “We humans of earth need to look out for each other.”

  “No one else will,” Tilda said. “I'm all she has left in this world.”

  “You and Mr. Kingfisher,” Lee said.

  “Ah, yes. The delightfully misanthropic Mr. Fish.”

  “You could probably get tons of free help,” Lee said. “Plenty of students would love to work on the ranch, in exchange for mentorship.”

  Tilda leaned down, scooped a handful of snow from the side of the trail, and abruptly shoved it into Lee's mouth.

  “You looked thirsty,” she said with a sly smile.

  He spat out the snow and gave her a wounded look.

  “No more talking,” Tilda said, wiping the slush from her hand onto the sleeve of Lee's jacket. “No more mouth. Use your eyes and focus on seeing what you see. Try the squint technique. Squeeze your eyes until everything blurs, and you'll see the big shapes. The big picture.” She raised her arms skyward. “Freedom!”

  * * *

  The canyon looked different with snow on the red peaks. The rolling red mountains looked like sleeping giants, huddled in bed under white duvet covers.

  While Katie and Lee set up their easels, planting thin metal legs in the thin layer of snow, Tilda continued the lecture she'd started the previous day. It had been years since she'd handed over the bulk of the instruction time to her assistant, but she didn't seem rusty at all.

  “If you paint something enough times, it's as though God has given it to you.” She chuckled to herself as she set up her easel. “That's why my teacher advised us to spend twenty-five percent of our time painting bars of gold and buckets of diamonds.”

  Katie thought of the art books she had, and the images of Tilda's work. Many of the woman's paintings included strings of pearls. She made eye contact with Tilda, who reached up and delicately twisted the single pearl earring she wore in her left earlobe. Had the two women experienced the same thought at the same time? Tilda's eyes twinkled, as though she could read every thought Katie had, right on her face. And maybe she did. The woman saw what she saw, and it was more than most people.

  Tilda waved at the sky. “Think of the sun as a very bright light bulb, because it is. And what does a bright light do?”

  She looked at her pupils expectantly. Katie and Lee exchanged a wary glance. Did Tilda want them to break their silence, or was it a rhetorical question?

  “That's right,” Tilda said, despite the lack of verbal answer. “The sun does more than brighten the snow. It also makes your paint colors appear washed out. Don't be fooled. When you bring your work inside tonight, it will darken. Depending on how you look at something, it can always get darker.” She licked her lips, her tongue pointed like a lizard's. “Keep your palette light and fresh now, so it will stay vibrant when you bring the canvas indoors.”

  She gave them a few more pointers about the technicalities of the paints they were using, and they began to work.

  After an hour, Katie unzipped her jacket and hung it on a tree branch. The bright light bulb in the sky was heating her up, as well as melting her subject. At this rate, the snow would be gone before she'd captured its blanket effects on the sleeping red ridges. She ached to sneak out her phone and use it to take a reference photo, but didn't want to risk having it tossed in the canyon. She had no other choice but to paint quickly and force herself to truly open her eyes and see what was there and not what she expected to see.

  They'd been working quietly for over two hours without a break when Lee silently excused himself to take care of business.

  He came running back ten minutes later, waving both hands excitedly.

  “You may speak,” Tilda said. “Good heavens, you look like you've seen a ghost.”

  “The river,” he gasped. “I did see something.”

  “Don't tell me you saw el chupacabra,” she said playfully.

/>   He whipped his head back and forth vehemently. “It's a body. A person.” He fanned his reddened face with both hands. “A dead person.”

  “A person? Are you sure it's not a floating pile of garbage?”

  “No, ma'am. There's a body in the river, I swear.”

  Chapter 13

  The police revealed the identity of the man found floating in the mountain river.

  “Clive Kingfisher,” the male officer across the desk from Katie said. “There's no doubt in my mind it's him. I've been hiking with Clive a few times, so I was able to identify the body myself. I'd recognize that leather ponytail thong anywhere. Do you have any idea what he was doing up there last night?”

  Katie fidgeted in her chair across from the police officer. The two were seated inside a private interview room. The door was open, and she could hear people walking up and down the hallway. She'd been there for nearly two hours, first sitting with a female officer and now going over all the same questions with a male one.

  “He'd been in the water eight hours,” the man said. “Why'd he go up there in the dark?”

  “The view is beautiful,” Katie said. “He was talking about going for a moonlight stroll last night.”

  “What time?”

  “About ten or eleven.”

  He wrote something down in a notebook. “Ten or eleven, mmm?” He tapped the desk with his pen. “He must have been stumbling around in the dark for a few hours before he suffered his mishap, even if he left the ranch as late as eleven.”

  “Actually, I heard him talking in the hallway around midnight, so I guess he didn't leave until later.”

  The cop fixed her with a steely gaze. “Was that when he left your room? Midnight?”

  Katie was so horrified, she stopped breathing for a moment. “Clive Kingfisher wasn't in my room,” she said evenly. “He was in the hallway, talking to Tilda.”

  “About what?”

  About her getting rid of something, she thought. “I don't know,” she said. “I had the door shut.”

  The police officer continued to stare at her.

  She kept her expression calm. If she'd learned one thing from her interviews with the detectives regarding her missing roommate, it was that you didn't toss out any loose seeds. In the beginning, she thought she'd been helpful by telling the investigators any details she could think of. But the conversations hadn't helped anyone. They'd just led to even more conversations, more scrutiny, several of them ending in tears. At one point, the police had a theory that Katie had killed her roommate over some bizarre sex cult ritual. She'd been fortunate that the anonymous caller who'd given them the tip admitted to making the whole thing up. Twenty-year-old Katie Mills had come very close to becoming the next sensationalist newspaper headline. THE DORM ROOM KILLER, headlines might have read, or SINGLE WHITE FEMALE MURDERS SEXY COED RIVAL IN BIZARRE HAZING ACCIDENT. Or something even worse.

  She kept her mouth shut. The officer across from her hadn't checked her name yet, or he'd have brought up Darlene's case. Or maybe he did know, and he was waiting to break her, seeing how long it would take her to volunteer the information. But why would she? The disappearance happened several states away, and had nothing to do with today's discovery.

  “A moonlight walk after midnight,” the officer mused. “I don't see the appeal. At least not alone. But I can understand why a fellow would take a young woman up there.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  She shrugged and didn't take the bait. “He might have gone up there before first light to see the snow at sunrise. That same view is in several pieces of famous art, but rarely with snow.”

  The cop snorted. “Doesn't sound like the Clive Kingfisher I know. He appreciated art the way a banker appreciates gold. Not for its aesthetic beauty, if you know what I mean.”

  Katie nodded. She had barely known the man a full twenty-four hours. They'd met on Sunday night at dinner, shared another meal and a nightcap drink with everyone on Monday night, and now it was Tuesday and the guy was dead. Just like that.

  The cop grabbed a fresh pen to tap on the desk. “When Mr. Kingfisher mentioned going for a walk last night, did he invite anyone else from the lodge?”

  Katie's mouth went dry and sticky. The cop meant her. Had Clive invited her, the young student, out for a moonlit stroll?

  “Not me,” she said.

  “Are you sure about that?” More pen tapping. “Clive had a thing for pretty young art students. In fact, he'd start arguments with his wife and get himself kicked out of the house at the exact time a fresh young batch arrived at the ranch.”

  “I don't know anything about that,” she said. “We barely said two words to each other last night.” She wanted to add that she found the older man unattractive, anyway, but it seemed like a cruel thing to say about someone who'd died. Plus she just wanted this interview to be over as soon as possible. That was why she didn't mention how Clive had annoyed everyone else at the house the night before. He'd insulted Lee, argued with Marco, and belittled Holly. He'd been mildly sexual toward Tilda as well. And as for Katie, he'd called her a mousy housewife, among other things.

  Katie had to wonder if there was anyone in Clive's life who didn't want to push him off a cliff. Of course she would never say such a thing.

  The male officer leaned in, eyebrows raised. He had a shaved head and a thick but narrow build.

  He looked like a human bullet.

  “Are you absolutely sure you didn't go for that moonlight stroll yourself last night?” His eyes were trained on a single one of Katie's eyes, not flicking back and forth between both eyes like a normal person's.

  “I'm sure,” she said, though her voice wavered from tension.

  The bald cop's nostrils flared. He smelled her apprehension. “Maybe it was an accident,” he said in a friendly, casual tone. “Anyone would understand. Clive invited you out for a moonlit stroll, and you were elated that he was taking an interest in your budding art career. But then he got fresh with you. It all happened so fast. You didn't understand what was happening. He wouldn't take no for an answer. You pushed him. All you meant was to push him away from you, push him off of you, to make him stop. You didn't mean to push him so hard, but then he was slipping, falling over the edge.”

  Her voice came out as a croak. “No!”

  The bullet-shaped man crossed his arms. “But you saw something.” He nodded slowly. “You have the haunted eyes of someone who's seen something.”

  She looked away, at the shining doorknob. It was brass and reflected the whole room.

  Haunted eyes? Well, he wasn't entirely wrong.

  “You heard something,” he said. “How much did Clive drink last night?”

  “I wouldn't know,” she said. “A glass or two of brandy.”

  “How late did everyone stay up partying?”

  “We left the social room at around eleven. I went to bed right away, since we had a session this morning.”

  “And yet you were still awake a full hour later, hearing conversations in the hallway.”

  She gave him a wry smile. He was grasping at straws. “Sometimes it takes a while to fall asleep.”

  More pen tapping. “And who else was there at the house last night?”

  She'd told them already. First the female officer, and now this bullet-shaped man. He was clearly testing her.

  She answered slowly, carefully. “Myself, plus the other art student, Lee Elliot, and then Tilda Onassis, plus her housekeeper, Holly.”

  “You didn't mention Mark Onassis. Is there a reason you left him out?”

  Katie stiffened in her chair. “N-n-no,” she stammered. Was Marco in trouble? He was such a sweet, gentle young man.

  This interview had to end soon, or it was going to end badly. Did the guy want her to cry? She could cry, or pretend to, if it meant getting out of there and putting this police station behind her.

  Katie blinked rapidly while fluttering both hands. She tightened her throat so her words squeaked out. “I just...
I've never seen anyone dead before. I saw my grandmother, but she was in a coffin, and I was expecting to see her. I can't believe this is happening.” Again.

  The bald-headed bullet man leaned back in his chair, looking satisfied that he'd broken her. “I understand the day has been quite a shock for you, Miss Mills. We're going to send you back to the ranch now.”

  “What about—”

  He stood and cut her off. “Miss, you're perfectly safe at the ranch. Mr. Kingfisher had an accident. You're perfectly safe.”

  That was an answer, all right, but not to the question she'd been about to ask.

  She tilted her head to the side and gave the cop a steely look of her own. “If it was an accident, why are you interrogating me?”

  He smiled, which didn't soften his hard looks at all. “If you were being interrogated, you'd know. We're just being thorough.”

  “So, it was an accident?”

  “We won't know for sure until we get the coroner's report. Our best guess is he must have slipped and fallen while trying to get a better view. Or maybe he was taking a leak. I don't know. Sometimes you never find out.”

  “Oh.” She looked up at the ceiling. Two fly-catching strips hung from the ceiling, both dotted with dead bugs. “What about our art supplies?” That was the question she'd been asking before he'd interrupted to assure her the ranch was safe. “We left all our stuff up there on the mountain. Paints, canvas, everything.”

  “Of course you did.” He rubbed his chin. “I'll have someone gather your personal effects and drop them by the ranch, so you don't have to go back up there again.”

  “But are we allowed to go back there?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  For the view, she wanted to say but didn't. Now the view was fixed in her mind, and she'd see it whenever she looked at the paintings of the famous view. Red mountains over a valley with a meandering river and a dead body.

  She ducked her head and studied the room's carpet. It was stained. A potted cactus stood in the corner. Someone had hung a red ball cap on the arm of the cactus, as though it was a hat rack. The cactus had been getting either too much water or too little. It was sagging, about to drop the ball cap from its arm.