The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold

by Scott William Carter

  "Watching Frasier?" I asked.

  "I don't know," she said. "I guess, yeah."

  "I thought you hated sitcoms."

  "Yeah, well, maybe you don't know everything about me."

  "Jak."

  "What? I'm a prisoner in a cheap motel. What do you want me to feel?"

  "You're not a prisoner."

  "Pretty much. But whatever. I get why you're doing it. I do. And I guess, in a way, it's kind of sweet. But I don't have to like it."

  While she was talking, my hand drifted to my pant pocket, where the ring rested. I wanted to ask her right there, but what kind of story would that be for our children? And what a strange thought that was—children. The idea of having children with Jak had never crossed my mind, at least as far as I could remember, and I didn't even know if she wanted them. But suddenly I could imagine it, the two of us with a toddler holding our hands, swinging between us, all laughter and smiles. Ever since Billie's miscarriage, I'd mostly forced the whole idea of children out of my mind, but now the idea, the need, was back in full force. I wanted them. I wanted them with Jak.

  "Earth to Myron," Jak said.

  "Sorry," I said. "Just thinking."

  "About me?"

  "Oh yes."

  "About me naked?"

  "Always."

  "Good. They have a pool here, you know. I was thinking of going swimming, but I don't have a swimsuit. Do you think all the little kids would mind if I just went nude?"

  "Their parents might."

  "Yeah. You're probably right. Myron?"

  "Uh huh?"

  "I love you."

  She didn't say it often, and it always made me smile when she did. It wasn't because the words were hard for her, at least I didn't think so, but because she was one of those people who didn't want to cheapen the words by using them as a substitute for hello or goodbye. She used them when she meant them, not lightly, not commonly, but as an offering that should be cherished. Which I did.

  Me, on the other hand, I tended to say them frequently and often, perhaps more as a question than a statement, more about her love than mine. I was always afraid that one of these days I would say the words and not see the feeling mirrored back to me, if not by the words themselves, perhaps by expression or tone of voice. It was that way with Billie, too. It was that way with all of the women I'd been with—which, admittedly, had not been many. I did not fall in love easily, but when I did, I fell all the way.

  "I love you, too, Jacqueline."

  "Mmm. I do like it when you say my full name."

  "Jacqueline."

  I said it breathily, like an overacting porn star, and she giggled. Then, abruptly, she stopped giggling.

  "Hey, I have an idea for you," she said. "You should make Felicity come to you."

  "Excuse me?"

  "She likes ferrets, right? Well, why don't you ask if you can post a flyer on the pet shop doors? Say, 'Free Ferrets to Good Homes,' or something. Put your address down and I bet she couldn't resist. Put your phone number, too. That way the real people, they'll call and you can tell them they're all gone. But Felicity, being a ghost, she'll have to come see you in person."

  I smiled into the phone. "It's a good one."

  "You think?"

  "Yeah. I knew there was a reason I was with you."

  "Oh, I don't think that's the reason. I think it's because of my talents in another arena."

  "Well, maybe that, too. But you're also damn smart. Only a really smart woman would use the word arena like that. Okay, I gotta go. Call you later."

  "Sounds good—off to go skinny dipping."

  At the Safeway down the road, I bought some paper and a black marker, making up a crude sign at a table in their in-store coffee shop, pretending to sip an Americano even though it was too hot. An Americano, I learned long ago, was pretty much coffee for people who were too sophisticated to order simple coffee. The grocery store's copy machine was on the fritz, but I found a FedEx Office a few blocks over and made a dozen copies. Then I made a dozen more, just to be safe.

  The clerk in the first pet store was pretty reluctant, but when I explained that if I didn't find good homes for my beloved ferrets, I'd have to turn them over to the Humane Society and hope for the best, she relented and let me post my flyer. I always felt a little bad lying to people, even innocuous little lies about imaginary ferrets, but I consoled myself that it was lying for a noble purpose—the best kind, saving a little girl.

  As night settled in, I spent the next couple hours running back to the various pet stores, fighting through snarls of traffic made worse by accident-infested roads. Not all of the clerks wilted under my sob story, but plenty of them did, allowing me to post enough flyers that I was pretty sure the mysterious Felicity Langford would see one of them before long.

  Then I went home to wait.

  I was plenty tired by the time I got there. A real weight in my bones, as Dad used to say. But it wasn't until I pulled up to my little house in Sellwood, and remembered the gunfight less than twenty-four hours earlier, that I really felt the full burden of exhaustion hit me. There was more work to be done, and it would be better to do it before Felicity arrived.

  I did want to want to make a good impression, after all.

  So after restoring at least a little bit of strength with a bowl of chicken noodle soup, I set to work cleaning the house. I couldn't do a whole lot about the splintered doorframe that had taken a bullet, or the shattered coffee table, but the rest was recoverable. I swept up all the black glass I could find. The worst of it were the yellow curtains behind the couch, splattered with blood. I scrubbed them for a while with a carpet cleaner, which seemed to only make the stain worse, so I just took the curtains down and tossed them on the washer in the garage. There was also blood on the rattan couch's cushion, but the cushion itself had been so destroyed by gunshot that it wasn't worth salvaging. Instead, I tossed one of Billie's art deco bedspreads over it. It looked hideous, but at least it wasn't a suspicious kind of hideous.

  Cursing the idiot for bleeding all over my house, I scrubbed away bloodstains everywhere, from the couch to the door. It was during this last stretch that I got my first phone call, a young woman in Tigard who said she wanted to get two ferrets for her son's birthday. Sadly, I told her, they were all gone. Two more calls followed, each person gravely disappointed when I delivered the bad news.

  My first in-person visitor came not long after that third call, but it wasn't Felicity. It was a clerk from one of the Petcos, still dressed in her snappy blue shirt with the store logo. I'd barely opened the door when she breathlessly told me that she'd come straight here because she was afraid someone else was going to get the ferrets before she did. Seeing the strange, feverish look in her eyes, I wondered if there was such a thing as a crazy ferret lady just as there was a crazy cat lady. When I told her that the last one had been given away moments ago, alas, she looked as if I'd shot her, lurching away holding her side, head bent low.

  I made a mental note to take those signs down as soon as possible.

  My next visitor wasn't Felicity, but I was very glad to see him. I was cleaning a few dishes in the kitchen, my hands wrist-deep in sudsy warm water, when I had a sense that someone was watching me from behind. Taking my time, rinsing the bowl and putting it on the drying rack, I turned, slowly, and peered over my shoulder.

  It was Patch.

  My black cat—or rather, the black cat who'd chosen to spend time around me, since I couldn't really call him mine—perched in the middle of the hardwood floor, staring at me. His tail wrapped around his lean, muscular body. The white starburst over his left eye seemed even whiter than usual, a glowing, phosphorescent white. It was probably because of the way the light from the hall happened to fall upon his face, but it gave him an otherworldly appearance. More so than usual, anyway.

  "Well, hello, you," I said.

  He blinked those peculiar yellow eyes at me, but didn't move. He didn't visit me at my house often, preferri
ng the office, and it was almost always a sign I was about to get a special visitor.

  After drying my hands, I knelt in front of him. I moved my hand slowly to his ears, seeing if he would deign to allow such an unworthy subject as myself to pet him. He did. He even purred a little. The sound was both soft and powerful, like the barely felt rumble of a far-off earthquake.

  "You want some tuna?" I asked.

  He held my gaze for a beat, then stared at the door. I followed his gaze. There was nothing there, but I felt a growing uneasiness. Was I being a fool? Was something else going to happen, something that would require a gun in my hand rather than a dishtowel? Maybe all those flyers I'd put up had just been a broadcast message to Gath that I was home and waiting for her to take me out. Maybe she'd decided that killing me was a better risk than letting me live.

  Then Felicity Langford stepped through the door.

  She stopped and gaped at me, the thick lenses of her black-rimmed glasses making her eyes enormous. Filled with fear. She was a big woman, very big, big enough that if she'd had to actually pass through the door in real life, rather than right through it, her hips might have come close to brushing against the doorframe. She wore a blue sweatshirt over gray sweatpants, the sweatshirt unzipped far enough that I saw a Winnie the Pooh T-shirt underneath. Her tennis shoes, which I imagined were once white, were now gray and worn, stained and scuffed with every shade of dirt and grime imaginable.

  "Oh," she said, backing up a step. "Oh my."

  "Don't run. Please."

  "You. I know you. You're … What's going on here?"

  "I'll explain," I said. "Just don't run. It's very important. A girl's life is at stake. A girl who has a very special connection to animals, just like you."

  She was still backing up, and may have fled had it not been for Patch. When her gaze fell upon him, she stopped. It seemed to calm her, seeing him. She was more attractive than her driver's license picture—which, admittedly, wasn't saying much, but it was still a reminder how much a person's demeanor could affect how people perceived them. The square face, the upturned nose, the bob of mud-brown hair, it was all still there, but she exuded a kind of warmth that few people possessed. I liked her immediately. I imagined most people did.

  "Who's this?" she asked.

  "This is Patch."

  "He's very special."

  "Yes."

  "He can see me. Do you know how rare that is?"

  "I've heard it's quite rare."

  "You've got that right. I've only met three animals in my entire life who can see me, and I've dealt with thousands. Has SISAH investigated him?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "That's good. Who knows what they'd try to do to him. I'd like to talk to him. Do you mind?"

  "It's up to him, really."

  "Of course," she said.

  She got down on her knees in front of him, a complicated effort considering her bulk, and one that made me worry she wouldn't be able to get back up again. Patch didn't move. She smiled at him, then removed her glasses. The red grooves on her nose were so deep I doubted she took off her glasses often. They certainly showed their years of use; the black frames bore plenty of scratches, but it appeared she had painted over them multiple times with different shades of black paint, the kind of shiny epoxy that might have been used on model airplanes.

  Leaning closer, she squinted her eyes. Deep furrows appeared in her forehead. Patch did not look away, nor did he seem to be reciprocating the intensity of her gaze. He merely regarded her as he would regard any passing interest: a fluttering of moth, a mote of dust, a particular slant of light. Rarely did he veer from his take-it-or-leave-it attitude, and this was not one of those times.

  "Hmm," she said.

  "Hmm?"

  "He says you're a good man," she said.

  "Oh. That's very nice of him."

  "He says I should trust you.

  "You should."

  She sighed and put on her glasses again, then reversed the complicated routine that allowed her to return to her feet. "Very special. Very special and very guarded, this one. He wouldn't tell me anything else. Most animals trust me innately. He wouldn't even tell me his real name."

  "Animals have names?"

  "Of course! Usually we can't pronounce them, but they all have ways of referring to one another, just as we do." She turned her attention fully to me, smiling, most of her apprehension gone, but not all of it. "The great Myron Vale. I've heard so much about you. I thought you'd be … taller."

  "Sorry."

  "You can really see all of us?"

  "I can."

  "And you can't tell the living from the dead?"

  "It's difficult."

  "That must be hard." She sounded genuinely sympathetic. Most people, when they tried to appear sympathetic, often carried an unintended pity along with it, but not Felicity Langford. "I know how hard it is when you have a, um, gift that you can't fully control. It took me a long time to control mine. The animal voices, they used to be so loud … Well, anyway, no need to get into that. I take it that the ferrets, that was just to get me to come here, right?"

  "Yes."

  "That's too bad. I do so like ferrets."

  "I heard."

  "You heard? From who?"

  I gestured to the living room. She hesitated just a moment, then made her way over to it, taking her time settling into the couch. I took the love seat. Patch leapt onto the love seat's arm, then proceeded to clean himself. While I gathered my thoughts, the far-off laughter of children from down the street filled the silence, children who were probably playing in the snow and dreaming about what they were going to get for Christmas next week. Again, I was struck with the sudden desire to have children of my own. It was a growing hunger, recognizable but still foreign to me. I didn't understand where the feeling was coming from. Was I just displacing my sympathy for Olivia? Maybe.

  "Do you remember Lady Lavender?" I asked.

  "The psychic?" Felicity said. "Certainly. She was of great help to me when my sister was still alive."

  "She pointed me in your direction."

  "What? Why?"

  "Because of Olivia's ability with animals. She said you might be able to help me find her." When Felicity began to ask a question, I held up my hand. "Why don't you just let me spell it all out for you, then you can ask me as many questions as you want. There's a lot to unpack here."

  When she nodded, I went ahead and did as much unpacking of what had happened as I could. I didn't see any reason to hold back. I was so far out on a limb anyway, following one tenuous lead after another, that I figured there was nothing to be gained by being coy. Starting with John and Laura visiting my office, I told Felicity about everything except for my trip to the coast with Jak. No reason to take a chance there.

  Patch went on cleaning himself the entire time, stopping only when I finally finished talking. Felicity had bowed her head at some point along the way, chin nearly resting on her chest, and I thought perhaps she'd nodded off. But when I stopped talking, she immediately raised her head and looked at me again, blinking away the tears in her eyes. It caught me off guard.

  "I'd get you a tissue if I could," I said.

  "No, no, don't worry about it," Felicity said, sniffling. "Cruelty always makes me sad. That little girl, losing her parents like that. It would be terrible if it happened to anyone. But to someone like Olivia, who probably feels things even more deeply? I can't even imagine."

  "Can you help me find her?"

  "Olivia's abilities are a lot more powerful than mine," Felicity said. "I think you were right not to go the Department of Souls—or any other organization, including SISAH. Especially SISAH." It was the only time I heard even a hint of bitterness in her voice. "This Victoria Gath person may want to use Olivia for her own purpose, but everybody else would be the same. She'll never get a chance to live a normal life unless she gets away from all this. Maybe start over with another name."

  "I want to make that
happen," I said. "Can you communicate with her somehow? You know, through the animals? Maybe find out where she is."

  "I can try," Felicity said. "The problem is, talking with animals is not like talking with humans. The crows, the dogs—they might have some sense of Olivia, some feeling they're getting from her, but I don't know if they'll be able to point us to where she is."

  "It's worth a shot, though, right?"

  "Like I said, I'll try. It's all I can do. You can be reached here?"

  "Here, the office, one or the other. Unless I'm out trying to bang my head against a brick wall some more."

  "All right. I'll do my best to talk to as many animals as I can."

  I nodded. I know I was hoping for some kind of instant solution, maybe have her tell me that she could connect through the great animal hive mind and tell me where Olivia was right now. But of course it wouldn't be that easy.

  "Terrible, terrible thing," Felicity said, more to herself than to me. "Just terrible. And I imagine she hasn't found a way to control her gift yet? It will only get worse. As her mind gets more powerful, she won't be able to keep other people's thoughts from mixing with her own. For me, it was just animals, and that was bad enough. I can't even imagine how that must be for someone who can connect with people in the same way."

  "We don't really know what she can do."

  "No. You don't. Well, then. I best be going. I'll—I'll be in touch soon. If I hear anything, that is."

  I walked with her to the door. We were both sad, two sad peas in a pod, her because she was taking Olivia's story hard, me because I'd pinned so much of my hopes on what should have been obvious to me was a crazy effort, the cryptic ravings of a dead psychic based on the equally cryptic mutterings of a half-asleep girl. Make merry with Mary Rittles. The ghost, the girl, and the gold. What did it all mean? Nothing.

  But something gnawed at me. I had this odd sense I was missing something, some piece of the puzzle that was right in front of me but I wasn't seeing.