by Carter
“Heaven forbid,” I said, and it wasn’t until she left that I realized I’d made my own little play of irony.
For heaven to forbid anything, it would have to be real first.
* * * * *
After Alesha left, I leaned back in the chair and debated a bit about my next move. On my way into the office after coming back from Forest Grove, I’d checked in with Elvis, who told me he hadn’t seen Billie. That meant she was either at home in her studio, hanging out at one of her favorite sulking places, or out wandering wherever she went when she needed to wander. Really, it didn’t matter. When she was pissed at something I’d done, I’d learned a cooling-off period of at least five hours was the absolute minimum.
I decided a visit to Karen Thorne’s place might yield some interesting information. I knew it would have been polite to ask her permission first, but she wasn’t due back at my office until Monday to see what kind of progress I’d made, and I had no way to contact her before then except by what ghosts called the SRS—the Spiritual Relay System. That was a fancy acronym that meant I would tell a ghost I was looking for her, who would tell a ghost, who would tell another ghost, and so on. Ghosts really had no way to communicate, living or dead, except by word of mouth. That system obviously left a lot to be desired when privacy was at a premium.
Besides, there was a good chance she was still living there, and if that was the case, I’d do her the courtesy of knocking first.
By the time I stepped outside, the rain had stopped and the sun was again flirting with making an appearance. Little rivers flitted along the edges of the streets to the drainage grates. Burnside was mostly deserted, both of the living and the ghosts, which I always found odd. There was no reason ghosts should have felt stymied by the rain, but it was rare to find one who didn’t go on pretending that was the case. I waved to Elvis and walked two blocks the other way, where my Prius was parked in a lot I paid for by the month.
Karen’s condo was in the Pearl District, an industrial blight of ramshackle warehouses and railroad yards until the late nineties, when the area underwent a significant urban renewal that turned it into a trendy area known for its art galleries and upscale residences. Her building, the Paragon, was a glass and white brick tower with a concave exterior that gave almost everyone a good view of the Willamette River and the distinctive steel tied arches of the Fremont Bridge.
When I parked the Prius on the street, it was going on three o’clock and the cloudy afternoon light was already slanting into the long fade of evening. Some of the street lamps had already brightened, soft, gauzy yellow bubbles on the thick air. Two clowns juggling a half-dozen bowling pins passed a group of black-clad goth teenagers on the wide sidewalk, neither group even glancing at the other. Some or all of them could have been ghosts. A MAX train rumbled past a block away, and traffic from the bridges was a constant background murmur, but the street was otherwise quiet. I navigated a maze of giant concrete planters with baby spruces in them to the double glass doors leading into the Paragon.
The doors were unlocked. Inside was a lobby with floor-to-ceiling windows, the dark-stained hardwood floor filled with Swedish Art Deco furniture, everything in muted earth tones. The air smelled faintly of whatever lemony cleaner they’d used to polish the floor. A bespectacled old man in a Mr. Rogers blue sweater sat hunched behind the counter, and a stocky woman in a gray pantsuit lounged in one of the chairs by the unlit fireplace. She was paging through Cosmo. Safely ensconced in his fortress of opaque black glass, Mr. Rogers didn’t look up even when I stopped at his desk.
I took out my wallet and opened it to my private investigator license. When he still refused to acknowledge me, I cleared my throat. It finally dawned on him that someone was standing there and he looked up.
“Hi, thanks for engaging,” I said. “I’m Myron Vale, a private investigator. I’ve been hired to take a look at Karen Thorne’s place, so if you could tell me … What’s wrong?”
The longer I spoke, the more his face paled. I’d thought his face was pale before, but it was nothing like the stark whiteness his skin became. His eyes, already large behind his glasses, bloomed even larger.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he whined softly.
“What?”
“I—I’ve heard of you. I haven’t done anything wrong. I mind—I mind my own business.”
“Oh, geez.”
Embarrassed at my mistake, I fled for the elevator. What kind of ghost hangs out at an empty reception desk? When I glanced back, I saw that he was crying and the woman reading Cosmo was staring at me just the way you’d expect someone to stare at you when you appeared to be flashing your license to an empty desk and talking to no one.
Karen’s condo was 2021, and there were twenty floors, so I used my amazing detective powers to deduce that she lived on the twentieth floor—the penthouse suites. The wait for the elevator took an eternity, and though I intently focused on the closed doors for the entire time, I still had to listen to the old man’s quiet sobbing.
I rode up in an empty elevator, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony playing faintly from the overhead speakers. The green carpet felt as plush as the greens on a top-of-the-line golf course. It deposited me in an empty hall with beige carpet and ferns in wicker pots. The hall was long and the doors were spaced very far apart. Karen’s was on the end, next to a window that looked out on the river far below. As Bernie had said, there was a lockbox on the door. It seemed out of place in such a nice building.
I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again.
“Karen?” I said.
After giving her a good thirty seconds, I entered the combination and took out the key. The door opened easily. Inside was a short hall with oak floors that led to a living room at the end, where a white couch and loveseat were situated in front of the spacious windows. The air smelled slightly musty. Heading to the living room, I called her name again. No answer. The living room, dining area, and kitchen all blended together into one big room, giving it a spacious feel, everything done in white and black. It was as spotless as a high-end hotel, fake flowers on the kitchen counter, architectural magazines spread neatly on the coffee table.
Not a speck of dirt anywhere. I had a hard time believing anyone lived like this. I also had a hard time believing that Bernie, or someone, hadn’t given the place a thorough cleaning.
There wasn’t much to find in the kitchen or living room. The refrigerator did have a couple of photos of Karen and Tony, at least, the same kind of glossy head shots as the one she’d shown me back at the office. Two were of them together, two of them separate, both of them wearing jeans and black turtlenecks. Very chic. The one of Tony by himself was similar to the one Karen had shown me, except in the one she’d shown me, he’d been wearing a leather jacket over the turtleneck.
I studied his picture for a long time. Even though there was little apparent similarity between this rakishly good-looking man, with the clean-cut face and the square jaw, to the bearded crazy person who’d shot me, I was even more sure that he was the same person. It was the eyes. I never forgot a pair of eyes.
“I’m going to find you, buddy,” I said.
Now I really was talking to nobody. I took the photo and put it in my inside pocket, right next to Billie’s drawing. The drawing was plenty good, but a photo was better.
After admiring the view—even though it was too overcast to see Mount Hood, the sweep of the river and the city was still plenty impressive—I proceeded to the master bedroom. Bed was the operative word, because there wasn’t much to the room but the bed; it was one of those low riders that was all mattress and plushy bedspread, no headboard, only inches from the ground. I’d expected black and white decor, and I wasn’t disappointed. Even the fake roses on the dresser were white.
A thorough search turned up nothing, except the clothes were more neatly packed in the drawers than seemed humanly possible. I kept expecting a perky blond saleswoman to step into the room and say, “All suites at the Paragon a
re of similar quality to this impeccable showroom.” Of course, then she’d take one look at the frumpy private investigator stinking up the place and call security.
Nothing in the end tables—not nothing of value, but nothing. The closet and the master bath were the same. Frustrated, I moved on to the second bedroom, which turned out to be an office. Here, at last, I was surprised by a change in style. Instead of black and white, the room was done in shades of gray. A bold choice! There was a light gray glass desk, a dark gray leather chair, and a rug checkered in every gray imaginable.
I stepped through the open door a few feet into the room, contemplating the desk and wondering if I should even bother searching the drawers. I was standing there, rubbing my chin, when I heard the floor creak behind me.
I started to turn, going for my Glock at the same time, but it was too late.
Someone knocked me on the back of the head with something heavy, and I dropped into darkness.
Chapter 12
The call from Dad came in when I was doing my best to drink myself into oblivion at Oliver’s, a trendy little bar a few blocks from my house that was always packed with the type of people who liked trendy bars—more important, the living kind. Generally, I hated crowds. Generally, I also hated trendy bars, so this was a toxic combination. But a bar crowded with living people was a good place to be if you wanted to avoid the nonliving kind of people. If there were no tables or bar stools available, most ghosts went elsewhere.
The place smelled of sweaty bodies, salty peanuts, and microbrews. If Oliver’s had an air conditioner, it wasn’t doing any good against the merciless August heat. The steady beat of some horrible techno music coming from the jukebox was like someone tapping their fingers on my temples. The girls next to me, and they were so young they couldn’t be called anything but girls, were shouting to be heard over the music—something about some guy on Twitter who tweeted something nasty to some girl about something she snarked about on Facebook over a lewd photo her friend posted to Instagram. Or something.
It took me a moment to hear my cell phone’s chime over the wall of noise. When I did, I took the phone out of my leather jacket and set it on the counter, blinking with my bleary eyes at my parents’ number.
The time was just after midnight. Suddenly, a rope jerked me out of my long slow slide into the abyss of nothingness I’d been venturing into with such abandon and with such frequency. My parents never called so late.
Plugging my left ear, I held the phone to my right and answered it.
“Hello?” I said.
“Son?”
It was Dad, not Mom, which was almost as big a surprise as the time he was calling. Dad never called. Worse, there was something off about his voice, something strained.
“Dad, what’s wrong?”
“Is that you Myron? I can’t hear with all the—”
“It’s me, it’s me! What’s wrong?”
It took him a few seconds to respond. I looked up into the mirror behind the bar and saw a black woman in a frilly white wedding dress sitting at a table along the wall. She had a noose around her neck and her eyes bulged in an unnatural way. Even here, I wasn’t safe from them. There really was no place on earth I was safe. I would know. I’d spent the last year looking.
I got up and headed for the door. It was already obvious there was an emergency. I just didn’t know what kind.
“Hello?” Dad said.
“I’m still here,” I said.
“Is this the hospital?”
I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it was the first inkling I had that my problem was going to be much worse than I’d even imagined. “Dad, it’s me, Myron. What happened?”
“Please,” he begged, “send an ambulance. Something’s wrong. Eleanor—she’s fallen. I keep asking her to get up, but she won’t.”
“Dad, what do you mean?” I asked, pushing through the door into a wall of heat that was still punishing, even as the sky had melted into lavender. “What happened to Mom?”
“Please,” he begged.
“Dad, have you called—”
But he’d already hung up.
* * * * *
I called 911 and hopped in the Prius, pushing my little hybrid so hard I thought the doors might fly off. The gasoline engine, which usually took a backseat to the electric one at low speeds, roared the whole the way. Even with fairly deserted streets and an even more deserted I-5, it still took twenty minutes before I pulled into their white Cape Cod–style house on the lake. The paramedics beat me there, of course, probably by a good while, and when I saw that the ambulance’s lights were not flashing, an icy blanket wrapped itself around my heart.
A police cruiser, lights also off, was parked next to it. A couple of gladiators, in full Roman garb, were sparring in the front lawn, metal swords clanging against metal shields.
The front door was open, and the first confirmation I received that what I’d feared had indeed come to pass was the sound of my father sobbing. I’d only heard Dad cry twice in my life, once when Mom had her miscarriage and the other time when he retired from the force, and neither had sounded like this—an outright, no-holds-barred, bellowing wail. They were in the living room, all of them, the paramedics lifting Mom onto the gurney, Dad on the couch with his head in his hands, the big, cathedral-like window that looked out on the lake as black as a shroud.
As I came into the room, me in the kind of fog I hadn’t been in since I’d been in the hospital drugged up on morphine, a burly police officer with an outlandish handlebar mustache approached me. In the cavernous room, Dad’s nonstop crying echoed off the high walls, creating a surround sound of sorrow. The house, in all its air-conditioned glory, was as cool as an icebox, just the way Mom liked it.
“Sir,” he said, “are you Myron?”
“What happened? Why aren’t you doing something?”
“I’m sorry, sir. She was gone when they got here. Apparently, she … Well, she’d been gone for a long time.”
“What?”
“Sir—”
I pushed past him. Dad, face still buried in his hands, hadn’t even looked up. What little of his face I could see was flushed red. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and red plaid pajamas, his hair disheveled. The paramedics, two young guys with buzz cuts and the kind of build that you could only get from spending long hours in the weight room, were starting to roll the gurney toward the door. They hadn’t looked at me either. Seized with rage at their obliviousness, I grabbed the gurney.
“Just hold on!” I cried. “Just hold the fuck on!”
The paramedics gaped at me as if I’d suddenly materialized out of thin air. The police officer, gripping me firmly by the arm, said something in a soothing voice, something to placate me, but it was a jumble of words. I just wanted to look at her. She lay motionless, her eyes closed, her face more peaceful than it had ever looked in life. Dressed in a flowing white nightgown, an exquisite combination of silk and lace, there was an almost angelic quality to her. It was the kind of nightgown that was indistinguishable from an evening dress, but she still would have been mortified to be seen this way by anyone other than her husband.
Dad’s sobbing had finally subsided into something like a soft keening, a sound even more pitiful and disturbing, especially the way it was muffled by his hands.
“How—how long …” I began.
“Probably eighteen hours,” one of the paramedics said.
“Why didn’t—why didn’t Dad …”
The cop, dropping his voice to a whisper, leaned in close. “Your father seems very confused.”
“What?”
“Does he have someone else who can watch him?”
“What are you talking about?”
The cop regarded me with sympathy, which only enraged me further. Yet some part of me knew, even then, what he was talking about. Some part of me knew, even as I’d denied it to myself, that Dad’s ever-increasing forgetfulness and absentmindedness the past few y
ears wasn’t just the usual minor age-related mental deterioration that any man might suffer as he approached his seventieth birthday.
My rage dissolved into a kind of impotent sorrow. I felt myself sinking away from them all, down the rabbit hole into my own grief, the world receding tunnel-like until it was happening far away. One of the paramedics said something about getting my mother to the morgue. There was a conversation. I heard my own voice, but it wasn’t me. The cop said something. They rolled my mother toward the open door, where I saw that the two gladiators, faces dripping with sweat, were peering curiously into my house.
“Get out!” I screamed at them. “Get the hell out!”
Alarmed, the gladiators fled. The paramedics, ashen-faced, retreated almost as fast as the gladiators. The cop said something about them just doing their jobs. Through it all, Dad went on moaning and rocking like a small child. The cop was still talking, explaining where I needed to go, the people I needed to talk to about my mother, words that broke apart into meaningless bits as soon as they hit my brain.
As soon as the gurney rounded the corner out of sight, the wheels still rattling along the paved stone walkway, I heard another sound, a distinctive one I knew all too well—the forceful click of heels on the hardwood floor.
I turned toward the hall, the one that led to the bedroom, and there she was, my mother, dressed in charcoal gray slacks and a beige cardigan over a white shirt buttoned all the way to top, her black heels giving her another couple of inches of height. It was the kind of outfit most women would wear to an office or to church, but it was too casual for Mom to wear anywhere but around the house.
“Well,” she said, with all the indignity only she could muster in a single word, “I hope you’re not expecting any dinner, Vinnie, because we ate hours ago.”
I felt sweat break out on my brow. A cold chill rippled down my spine. She looked just as alive now as she’d looked dead on the gurney. I’d been seeing ghosts for nearly a year, but never like this, never someone I loved so soon after dying. “Mom,” I said, and the word came out a gasp.