Haunted Heroine

by Sarah Kuhn

  “You got to be sad,” I’d snapped at her. “I didn’t.”

  It echoed through my head now, making me feel ashamed all over again. She was so far away and I missed her so desperately, but she was clearly relishing her new life and I couldn’t show her just how much I missed her . . .

  “Hey, sis,” I said softly. “Do you have everything you need out there—got enough chunky peanut butter?”

  “Yeah,” she said, cocking her head at me quizzically. “Um, Evie? Why are you crying?”

  “Just the hormones,” I said, brushing away my tears.

  “Okay, weirdo,” Bea said, rolling her eyes. “Talk to you guys later.”

  She winked out of sight. Aveda reached over and squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.

  I didn’t totally break down—but the warmth of her palm against mine told me that I could.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  AVEDA AND I rose bright and early the next morning. After a bit of bickering, we decided to dress more “professionally” for our visit to Horatio Morales, since we had no idea what we were getting into. So I donned the Sexy Professor costume—that was the only thing I owned that was anywhere close to business wear. Creamy silk blouse, black pencil skirt, thigh-high stockings, garter belt, skyscraper heels. I felt extremely unlike myself. Ironically, I was wearing my actual face.

  It was odd, after spending so much time as Eliza Takahashi, grad student and certified cool TA, to go back to being Evie Tanaka, superheroine and bad mom-to-be. I should have felt relaxed, comfortable in my own skin. Instead I couldn’t stop obsessing over all the problems Evie Tanaka kept causing in her supposedly perfect life: not speaking to her husband, still hadn’t solved her alma mater’s escalating ghost problem, still clueless about how to take care of her baby and handle all her responsibilities and make sure said perfect life didn’t turn into a flaming disaster.

  Hmm. Maybe I should stay Eliza Takahashi for a little while longer.

  At least Eliza Takahashi didn’t have to wear itchy blouses, feet-killing shoes, and constraining pencil skirts.

  “Here we are,” Aveda said, maneuvering us into a tiny spot in front of a squat cottage framed by brightly colored flower beds. The house was in a particularly quaint part of Berkeley, about twenty minutes from Morgan. It looked cute, idyllic. Not like the home of a grieving old man still mourning the death of his beloved granddaughter. “What do we think is behind that strangely adorable door?” Aveda continued, her expression turning trepidatious as she studied the house.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “What if it’s, like, another ghost? Like Horatio actually did die all those years ago and now haunts his former home and, um, sends money to the college that took the person he loved more than anything else in the world.”

  “I feel like that’s probably not what we’re going to find,” Aveda said wryly. “But you’re creeping me out with all this ghost talk—like, the very idea that they could have spread beyond Morgan . . .” She shuddered.

  “Your parents are going to be so stoked that their attempts to get you to behave as a child had such long-lasting effects,” I teased. “You’re actually scared of ghosts! See, you’re not that bad of an Asian daughter after all.”

  “Perhaps I can level up to mediocre Asian daughter,” Aveda said, rolling her eyes. “Come on, let’s go talk to Ghost Horatio. Who is apparently an excellent gardener.”

  We got out of the car, walked up the short path to the house, and rang the doorbell. Then we waited. I tugged at my itchy blouse, trying to hold it away from my skin.

  “Huh,” Aveda said. “Should we go around back? Or come back another time? Breaking into Provost Glennon’s office was justified, but if we start randomly breaking into people’s houses whenever the fancy strikes us, we might have to rethink our good guy status.”

  I tried ringing the doorbell again. This time, after a long pause, we heard rustling around inside, someone muttering. Then footsteps.

  Aveda and I both leaned in and held our breaths, waiting.

  “Who’s there?” a voice called from the other side of the door. Aveda and I exchanged a glance—the voice was deep, throaty, and sounded like someone who’d seen a lot in life. Was it the voice of a mourning grandfather? A ghost?

  “It’s Evie Tanaka and Aveda Jupiter,” I said.

  “San Francisco’s premier superheroines,” Aveda added.

  “We’re investigating a matter pertaining to Morgan College and we thought maybe you could help,” I said.

  There was another long pause.

  Then the door creaked open, revealing a stooped old woman behind it.

  “Well, hello,” she said. “I see you’ve finally tracked me down.”

  I blinked twice, unable to believe what was right before my eyes.

  She was much older now, her face wrinkled, her already petite figure shrunk down to skin and bones. But the flip in her gray hair and the charming sparkle in her eyes was still exactly the same as when we’d first met her—as a ghostly bartender, asking if we wanted some punch.

  I didn’t know how it was possible, but somehow Victoria Morales was standing in front of us. Very much alive.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you ask me questions,” Victoria said, settling in at her dining room table. She’d served us tea with mint from her garden—which actually tasted good, not like Richard’s dirty water—and a generous plate of cookies. “I think that will be an easier way of telling my story. And that’s what you’ve come here for, isn’t it? My story.” She smiled faintly, as if this was a little joke she had with herself.

  “We can do that,” I said, leaning forward and trying to think of where to start. Hey, so we actually met earlier, but you were a ghost wasn’t the best icebreaker. “We found you thanks to Morgan’s confidential donor list,” I began, feeling it out. “It actually listed Horatio as the donor—that’s your grandfather?”

  “Was my grandfather,” she said, her faint smile still in place. “He passed years ago. I use his name for my donations because I thought not many people knew it. It’s my way of honoring him while still remaining anonymous. No one at Morgan knows I’m the one sending money, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “I think our main question is, how are you alive?” Aveda said, cutting to the chase. “Because these days, your story is legendary at Morgan. We heard the whole thing at a meeting of the ghost-hunting society the other night.”

  “Ghost-hunting society? Oh my.” Victoria chuckled and took a sip of her tea. “Times really have changed since I was there. I am guessing they told you a version of my story—the version I wanted everyone to think was the truth.” She grinned at us, her eyes twinkling. “The one where I died.”

  “You and Jocelyn,” I said. “Is she still alive, too—do you know?”

  Victoria’s smile widened. “Now that’s a very interesting story—”

  “Darling, I need to go down to the swap meet for more of that good metal scrap, I’m going to incorporate it into the section of the garden with—oh, hello.”

  Aveda and I turned to see another elderly woman—this one with long, snow-white hair—strolling into the kitchen. She crossed the room and laid a hand on Victoria’s shoulder.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked Victoria, her eyes turning guarded as she studied us.

  Victoria tipped her face up to the other woman and smiled. “Of course it is, my Jocelyn. Everything is perfect.”

  I snuck a glance at Aveda. Both of our jaws were basically on the floor.

  “You’re both alive?!” I blurted out. “And together? How does that . . . did that . . . just how?”

  “Perhaps Jocelyn should be part of this little story hour as well,” Victoria said, pulling out a chair for the other woman to sit down. Jocelyn sat, but never took her eyes off us. She was warier than Victoria, more suspicious. I supposed she h
ad every right to be.

  “You’re the superheroines,” Jocelyn said bluntly. “The ones who are always on the news. What do you want with us? We keep to ourselves, don’t hurt anybody.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” I said gently. “We’ve been tasked with investigating a matter at Morgan College. Students are in danger and people have gotten hurt—”

  “And you think we had something to do with that?” Jocelyn said, taking Victoria’s hand protectively.

  “Love, they just want to know what happened to us,” Victoria said. “That’s all.”

  “Truly,” I said, nodding vigorously. “And we don’t have to share whatever you tell us unless it ends up having bearing on the case. We found a lead we had to follow, and it brought us here.”

  Jocelyn and Victoria exchanged a glance—the kind of weighted look that came from knowing each other in the most intimate way for decades. It was like they were having a whole conversation without speaking a word out loud.

  “The first part of our story, as passed down through generations of students, is true,” Victoria said, getting that serene little smile again. “Jo and I fell in love after dissecting a fetal pig together in Bio. Our fingertips brushed when we were pulling out the lower esophagus, our eyes met, and that was that.”

  “How romantic,” Aveda said, turning a bit green.

  “And as I’m sure you’ve heard, it disrupted the lives that had been laid out for both of us,” Jocelyn said, squeezing Victoria’s hand. “The things we were told we were supposed to do.”

  “We came up with the plan to run away,” Victoria said. “Leave everything behind. But I couldn’t leave Grandpa Horatio.”

  “At first, I was furious,” Jocelyn said. “We’d talked about this plan so much, I’d been envisioning our idyllic future together for so long. I didn’t see how Vic could throw all of that away.”

  “So you, ah, tried to poison her?” I said tentatively. It seemed like this would possibly still be a sore subject between them.

  They both turned to look at me. Blinked for a couple seconds. Then threw back their heads and burst into explosive laughter.

  “Oh my goodness,” Victoria said, wiping tears from her eyes. “No. That’s where fact ends and legend begins. Do you really think I’d still be with someone who wanted to kill me?”

  I shrugged. “Stranger things happen every day.”

  “You watch too much television, young lady,” Jocelyn said, shaking her head. “Vic and I had our fight. I cried, she cried. It’s true that I was very used to getting my way back then and didn’t have a good grasp on my own privilege. It was certainly not something my parents saw fit to educate me on. But eventually we calmed down and I made us some drinks so we could talk—not poisoned drinks,” she added hastily, lifting an eyebrow at us.

  “We decided not to run away,” Victoria said, smiling lovingly at Jocelyn. “Jo came out to her parents, gave back the money she’d taken, and told them she wouldn’t be marrying the high society man they’d picked out for her.”

  “They immediately disowned me,” Jocelyn said with a snort. “And told me they wouldn’t be paying for the rest of my education. I dropped out and moved in with Vic and her grandfather.”

  “We both took on a whole host of odd jobs,” Victoria said. “I stayed in school part time and eventually finished. Then Jocelyn went back. It took us a little longer than expected, but we both eventually graduated. Jo works as a landscaper and artist. And I was head biologist over at the Alameda Wildlife Conservation research center until three years ago, when I retired.”

  “Retired,” Jocelyn scoffed. “She’s still over there all the time, ‘just helping out’!”

  “They need mentoring, love,” Victoria said, giving her a patient smile. “What good is all that knowledge and expertise I worked so hard for if I don’t share it?”

  “And also, you can’t function if you’re not doing something at all times,” Jocelyn said, shaking her head. She turned to Aveda and me. “She can’t even take a vacation—we were in Hawaii last year and she somehow ended up teaching a weekend class on the biology of local wildlife. I don’t even know how that happened!”

  “It’s just how I am,” Victoria said with a good-natured shrug. “In any case, we’ve been married for thirty years now, living together longer than that, and we couldn’t be happier.” She smiled at Jocelyn again—a secret smile that made me feel like Aveda and I weren’t even in the room.

  “So why does this story persist, about the two of you plunging to your deaths in such dramatic fashion?” Aveda said. “Because this . . .” She gestured to them. “. . . seems like a happier story for incoming students.”

  “I’m not sure how it started,” Victoria said, toying with a cookie. “Perhaps it was a combination of things, misshapen facts that got repeated over time until they were taken as the absolute truth.”

  “I think it began with this,” Jocelyn said. “Vic and I were pretty popular in our class—we were both outspoken, young, charismatic. Vic especially.”

  “You were just as much of a star, sweetheart,” Victoria said.

  “After my parents disowned me and we had to rethink things in order to survive, we kind of dropped out of sight,” Jocelyn said. “We lost touch with people. We weren’t on campus as much. My parents had threatened me, told me that they’d talk to the college board and have me kicked out if I continued to ‘flaunt’ my ‘lifestyle’ so flagrantly. And after the girls we’d been in class with graduated, not many people knew who we were. We faded from view a bit.”

  “That was the start,” Victoria said. “But I think the story about what happened to us really took off because people started . . . seeing me.”

  “Right, you were still on campus, trying to finish your degree, yes?” Aveda said.

  “I was,” Victoria said, her face going contemplative. She absently tapped the cookie against her teacup. “But what I mean is, people started seeing . . . a version of me. In places where the real me was not present.”

  “Like, say, in the Mara Dash rec room?” I said, my heart beating a little faster. It felt like we were on the verge of some kind of discovery—I just wasn’t sure where it would lead us.

  “Yes.” Victoria nodded. “There were all these stories about me appearing, trying to serve people drinks. Or leaving drinks all over the dorm. It was always the same version of me, as I’d been right before I had to temporarily withdraw from school. Hair in that old-fashioned flippy ’do, eager smile—”

  “—and a blue dress?” I said, my heart beating even faster.

  “That’s right!” Victoria exclaimed, nodding vigorously. “Oh, I loved that dress. It’s what I was wearing when Jo and I met.”

  “I loved that dress, too,” Jocelyn said, smiling at her.

  “Somehow we became part of the school’s ghostly lore,” Victoria said. “I was so busy at the time, trying to take care of Grandpa Horatio and working my way through school, and of course Jo and I had our own issues to work out as a young couple who’d just moved in together. So I only heard snippets of the story as it was starting to be passed around. I think perhaps it began unfolding because people had heard Jo and me arguing that night on the roof and started speculating as to what happened to us after we dropped out and disappeared.”

  “Do you happen to know: did Ghost Victoria ever try to, say, kidnap people?” I said, trying to follow the thread to a logical conclusion.

  “Kidnap people?!” Victoria said, looking incredulous. “Oh my, no. At least I don’t think so—like I said, I only heard snippets of the story here and there. But my understanding was that people’s encounters with the ghostly version of me were always very pleasant and left them feeling like they could be their truest selves. So whether it was actually happening or if it was just the fevered imaginings of overworked college kids needing some respite or someone to tell them it was
okay . . . well, I was glad to hear that my ghostly self didn’t seem to be doing any harm. Perhaps she was even giving these students something they needed—something I too had needed while I was there.”

  “Wow,” I said, turning Victoria and Jocelyn’s words over in my mind. All the pieces of their story—and the fake story that had been spread around for so many years—were swirling around in my brain, a gigantic puzzle that brought up more questions. “So is that why neither of you have been back to campus since you graduated? Why you’ve never returned and declared the truth of what happened? Because you want to preserve the myth of Ghost Victoria?”

  “I suppose our reasons are far more selfish,” Victoria said slowly, contemplating her tea. “We’ve built this lovely, quiet life for ourselves. It’s so much more than I ever dreamed of, and every day I look at Jo and think about how lucky I am.” Jocelyn smiled at her. “I think, over the years, we decided to leave the past in the past,” Victoria continued. “And Morgan has become the source of so many conflicting emotions for both of us.” Her mouth quirked downward, a veil of regret falling across her face. Victoria still thought about Morgan a lot—I could tell.

  “That’s right,” Jocelyn said, grimacing. “On the one hand, so many of the school’s administrators were so far up my family’s ass—they shunned me and Vic after I was disowned, made it harder for both of us on campus. We stuck it out, but it was never easy.”

  “It was tough,” Victoria agreed, her expression darkening. “Some of my favorite professors stopped speaking to me, grew cold, and graded me harder than anyone else. At times, it seemed like it would be so much easier to quit. I always had to remind myself that I was there for a reason.”

  “These emotions don’t sound at all conflicting,” Aveda said, frowning at the injustice of it all. “These just sound bad.”