Karen and David pushed out into the hot June sunshine. “Ice cream sounds like a really good idea, doesn’t it, bud?”
David carefully tucked his lollipop into the pocket of his shorts for later. “We haven’t had lunch yet.”
“I think we can have a little dessert before lunch today. What do you think?”
He smiled up at her. “If you say so, Mommy.”
“I say so,” Karen said, tucking the bag of lunch meat under her elbow next to her purse. They would have to get their ice cream and eat it quickly. In this weather the meat would spoil before they got home.
They had gone only a few feet when David stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.
“What’s the matter?” Karen asked.
David tilted his head to one side and then to the other, like he was listening to something coming from far away.
“Mrs. Schneider,” David said. “She’s screaming.”
“What?” Karen said. She crouched down so she could look into his eyes. They were focused on something but it wasn’t Karen. “David, what’s going on?”
His eyes seemed to come back from wherever they’d gone. He looked right at Karen.
“I told you,” he said. “It’s Mrs. Schneider. She won’t stop screaming. There’s so much blood.”
3
Mrs. Schneider had spent the morning peering through the curtains at her across-the-street new neighbors. She didn’t know just what the world was coming to when Mexicans could move onto a decent street where decent people lived without so much as a by-your-leave. They played loud music in Spanish and they shouted at each other in Spanish and they always seemed to be cooking something foreign.
If they wanted to eat strange food and speak a strange language, then why hadn’t they just stayed in their own country instead of coming here to take jobs away from good American folk? she wondered.
She knew that most of the adults in that house had jobs on the canning line at the chili factory and she didn’t think that was right, even though Mrs. Schneider didn’t know anyone who’d actually lost a job on account of these creeping Mexican intruders.
It was the principle of the thing, she decided. What if a real American wanted a job at the chili factory and couldn’t get one because of them? And one of them was actually a police officer! She’d seen a man that lived there—she couldn’t be bothered to remember all these foreign names—climbing into a Smiths Hollow squad car every morning. How could such a thing even be allowed?
She’d noticed Karen diMucci from down the street talking to one of the women who lived there, and their young children even played together. Mrs. Schneider had thought about warning her off but then decided that she’d better not. Karen might take offense. Everyone knew that Mexicans and Italians were practically the same, though Mrs. Schneider had to admit that the Italians made better food.
She wasn’t a racist, though. There were lots of black people in Smiths Hollow and Mrs. Schneider didn’t have a problem with any of them. They were all good and clean and hardworking—well, except for that Harry Jackson, who could be found in the Arena tavern at all hours of the day and night. Though even that was understandable. He just hadn’t been the same since his wife got cancer and passed on, so one had to make allowances.
She looked at the clock and decided it was time to take herself to the deli in town and pick up something for dinner. Since her husband died of congestive heart failure five years earlier Mrs. Schneider hadn’t bothered with cooking very much. She’d never enjoyed it, had only cooked for him because he liked home-cooked dinners. Most of the time she ate like a bird, anyway—just a half a sandwich or a cup of soup.
There wasn’t any point in driving herself all the way over to the next town to go to the large shiny supermarket, even though her next-door-neighbor Mrs. Walker said the supermarket had better sales. Besides, Mrs. Schneider liked to stand by the counter and chat with Frank and catch up on “all the news,” as she put it.
Mrs. Schneider collected her purse, double-checked to make sure the front door was locked (you really couldn’t be too careful with these foreigners in the neighborhood), and went out through the kitchen to the small back porch.
She noticed the flies first, a black swarm of them, many more than there ought to be even on a hot day like today. Her first thought was that a raccoon or a fox had died in her yard, which would necessitate a call to the town hall to have it removed by Animal Control. Like many yards in Smiths Hollow, Mrs. Schneider’s backyard abutted the woods and it wasn’t unusual for the occasional critter to wander through.
Her husband had put up high fences on both sides so “the neighbors couldn’t spy in”—Mr. Schneider had been a fastidiously private man, unwilling to have one of the neighbors spot him grilling and offer a beer that he might be forced to reciprocate—and sometimes animals got confused by the blocked-in lanes, the house and the detached garage, and the fences that enclosed it.
Then the smell permeated her irritated thoughts about calling for Animal Control—it always took them so long to come out, which she considered absurd in a town the size of Smiths Hollow—and she covered her mouth and nose, gasping. The smell was terrible, beyond terrible, and she wondered for a moment if a deer had died back there.
The cluster of flies hovered over the edge of the grass where it dipped down into a little ditch before the woods began. Mrs. Schneider couldn’t see clearly from the porch what the flies were picking at, and she sighed.
She was going to have to investigate, and she didn’t really care to get closer to the stink emanating from whatever it was. But if she called Animal Control with just a vague “I think something died in my backyard,” that smart-mouth dispatcher Christy Gallagher would tell her that she couldn’t dispatch Animal Control if they weren’t certain an animal was involved.
“That girl is fresh,” Mrs. Schneider said to herself, using a word her own mother had always used to describe young and disrespectful sorts.
She pulled a white cotton handkerchief out of her purse, then dabbed a little bit of her Estée Lauder perfume in the cloth before covering her nose and mouth with it.
She was going to place her purse down on the porch for a moment but then decided that she’d better not. Anyone could come in the yard gate while her back was turned and run off with her checkbook and wallet. After all, the neighborhood was not what it used to be.
With her purse tucked safely under her right arm and her left hand holding the perfumed handkerchief to her nose, Mrs. Schneider cautiously approached the black buzzing cloud of flies. Her mind had already leapt ahead to the inconvenience—she would have to put off her trip to Frank’s while she waited for Animal Control to get their bottoms in gear—and so she stepped in the blood before she realized it.
She felt the sticky pull on her shoe, lifted it up, and peered at the bloody sole. Her nose wrinkled again in distaste. Had this animal bled to death in her yard? She would have to throw these shoes away, and that was a waste of a perfectly good pair of tennis sneakers.
Her gaze was focused on her feet now, picking around the splashes of blood. Then something she didn’t recognize crept into her peripheral vision. Or rather, she did recognize it, but she didn’t really want to believe it was what it actually was.
Mrs. Schneider gasped, and raised her eyes, and when she saw what was there—what was everywhere, really—she dropped the handkerchief to her side and screamed and screamed and screamed.
4
Sofia Lopez clipped the top sheet to the line and then pushed the rope along so that she could attach the next one. There was nothing nicer, in her opinion, than bedsheets that had dried outside in the sunshine. She mopped her forehead with the inside of her arm. In this heat the whole load would be dried in no time.
“Mama?” Her older daughter, Valeria, stood at the screen door that led into the kitchen. “Can I have some marshmallows?”
> Sofia squinted at Val. The girl was eleven years old and obsessed with chemical reactions, so there was plenty of reason to suspect that Val was not going to eat the marshmallows that she’d just requested. More than likely the final result would involve a sticky mess on the floor of her bedroom or a plume of smoke coming out the window.
“What are you going to do with them?” Sofia asked.
“Um,” Val said, the toe of her sock tracing a pattern on the floor. “Just, you know, some experiments.”
“Experiments,” Sofia said flatly. “Do these experiments involve fire?”
“Um,” Val said again.
From inside the house Sofia heard her other daughter, Camila, arguing with her cousin Daniel. They were both eight years old and always seemed to want the same thing at the same time.
“Go and see what the problem is this time,” Sofia said, turning back to her sheets.
“The marshmallows . . .” Val said.
“When I’m done you can tell me exactly what you want to do with them and then I will decide,” Sofia said.
Val sighed and went to separate her sister and cousin.
Sofia liked to encourage Val’s interest in science, but she didn’t like worrying that Val was going to burn the house down. She wished there was someplace she could send Val where she could safely perform whatever experiments she liked, preferably under the supervision of someone with a chemistry degree.
But there wasn’t anywhere like that in Smiths Hollow. In Chicago, maybe, but they’d moved here from Chicago so everyone could have a better life, and that meant that Valeria could observe chemical reactions outside in a backyard rather than in their cramped two-bedroom apartment in the city.
Despite what the Old Bigot across the street thought, neither Sofia nor her husband Alejandro nor Alejandro’s brother Eduardo nor his wife Beatriz had been born in Mexico. They were all U.S. citizens, born and bred, and their parents had immigrated legally.
And I’ll never tell her that, either. Let her think what she wants about us.
Alejandro had served for ten years in the Chicago Police Department, while Sofia and Eduardo and Beatriz had all worked at the Nabisco cookie factory on the southwest side. Eduardo and Beatriz and Daniel had lived across the hall from Sofia and Alejandro in the same apartment building in the Blue Island neighborhood, and they’d all taken different shifts so they could care for the children.
But all four of them always felt like they would never get ahead in the city, where rising costs made it difficult to even think about buying a house. Even with all seven of them living in this house in Smiths Hollow, they still had more room than any of them had ever had in Chicago. Just having separate bedrooms for Camila and Valeria had saved Sofia’s sanity, which had been on the verge of cracking if she heard one more argument about “her stuff is on my side of the room.”
Most of the neighbors were friendly and welcoming, and the Lopez families quickly found their place in their new home. Beatriz and Eduardo got better-paying jobs at the chili factory, and Alejandro had no trouble joining the tiny police force. Most days he was able to come home for lunch and he was never late for dinner because, as he put it, “There’s really nothing resembling crime in this town.” The dark circles that he’d always had under his eyes in Chicago from working shifts that never ended cleared up. And Sofia was able to stay home with all the children because her income was no longer vital.
There was the Old Bigot across the street, Sofia conceded, as she hung up the last of the sheets. Mrs. Schneider was always peering through her curtains at them like she thought Sofia couldn’t see her. Whenever the Old Bigot went to the end of her driveway to get the mail she’d glare at the Lopez house like she thought one of them had stolen her social security check.
When the screaming started Sofia at first thought that Daniel had hit Camila again. Even though he’d been told repeatedly that he wasn’t supposed to hit his cousin, their arguments usually seemed to devolve into smacking and punching if an adult wasn’t there to supervise them. Camila would hit back, too, but she was a pro at making it seem like Daniel was the only one at fault.
Her younger daughter was a born actress, and the slightest bump, bruise, or whack resulted in waterfalls of tears and the kind of melodramatic accusations that would be better suited to a Joan Crawford film—or rather, that movie about Joan Crawford, what was it called? There had been a lot of histrionics in that movie, and Camila seemed to be taking her cue from the same director. Sofia was immune to these performances, but Camila still managed to snow her father, who never believed that his little princess was exaggerating.
Sofia took one step toward the screen door, then stopped. The screaming wasn’t coming from inside the house but outside it. Had the kids gone out on the front lawn? Alejandro had left the sprinkler attached to the hose up there so they could play in the water on days like today, but Sofia hadn’t heard any of them turn the faucet on the side of the house.
Val came to the back door, eyes round, and Camila and Daniel crowded behind her. “What’s that?”
Sofia shook her head. “I thought it was you kids.”
As soon as she said it, she realized it was an idiotic thing to say. The noise wasn’t anything like the sounds the kids made, short bursts of raucous joy or just as raucous arguing. This scream was a long sustained thing, almost impossible in its breadth and length. How could one person scream for so long and never take a breath?
“Stay here,” Sofia said.
Camila immediately tried to push past Val to follow her mother—Camila had a nosy streak a mile wide—but Val snagged her around the waist before she could escape.
“Hey!” Camila said, and kicked her sister in the shin with the heel of her shoe.
“Ow!” Val shouted, dropping Camila to the ground.
Camila collapsed and immediately started howling like her ankle had broken upon landing.
“Enough,” Sofia said, slashing her hand through the air. Her mother’s tone was firm enough that Camila ceased the fake crying immediately and stared up at her in astonishment. “All of you will stay right here while I see what’s happening, and you will not put a toe outside unless you want to lose all your privileges for the rest of the summer.”
“Yes, Mama,” Val said.
“Yes, Mama,” Camila repeated.
“Yes, Aunt Sofia,” Daniel added.
“I will be back,” she said. “If I’m gone more than fifteen minutes, call Papa at the police station.”
Val glanced over her shoulder at the clock, starting the countdown from that moment.
Sofia knew the children would be fine—if anything, the younger two would forget where she’d gone in a few minutes and resume their normal activities.
She went around the left side of the house and down the driveway. The Lopez home didn’t have a garage, just an open strip of blacktop that ran alongside the front yard and then the house and stopped once it reached the back porch. Alejandro and Eduardo had already discussed putting up some kind of cover for the cars, even if it was just a canopy roof. The summer heat beating inside the cars made them unbearable.
Sofia stopped when she reached the mailbox at the end of the drive, trying to pinpoint the location of the screams. Their house was in a little cul-de-sac, and sometimes sound echoed strangely through the space.
None of the other neighbors appeared to be home—or if they were, they were singularly incurious about the source of the noise. Sofia was the only person standing out in the street, perspiration beading on her forehead.
“Is that the Old Bigot?” she murmured to herself. She started across the street, the heat making the soles of her sneakers feel sticky.
Halfway there she was sure it was, in fact, Mrs. Schneider. What could have the old woman in such a state? Sofia felt vaguely annoyed that she had to ride to the rescue of a person who held her and her en
tire family in contempt. She knew that Jesus said to forgive, but it was hard to feel the warmth of Christian love toward the woman.
Still, Sofia knew that she wouldn’t leave Mrs. Schneider in such obvious distress, even if part of her would like to do just that. She was fairly certain the Old Bigot wouldn’t spit on her if she were on fire.
Once she was standing on Mrs. Schneider’s front lawn it was apparent that the screaming was coming from the backyard. The screams hadn’t diminished in volume or length, although Sofia thought the old woman’s voice was getting hoarse. As she unhooked the gate to the backyard Sofia felt the first stirrings of alarm. This wasn’t just some wild hair of the old lady’s. Something was really wrong.
The gate clattered shut behind Sofia. Mrs. Schneider stood on the downslope of her yard, close to the edge of the woods that abutted the neatly trimmed grass. The old woman was ramrod straight, her hands down at her sides. Her purse had fallen at her feet and a white handkerchief fluttered weakly in the grass, like a halfhearted surrender.
“Mrs. Schneider?” Sofia called, approaching her.
Mrs. Schneider stopped screaming then, all of a sudden, like she was a tap that someone had switched off. She spun around, saw Sofia standing there, and then raised one stiff arm toward the bottom of the yard.
“Look!” she shouted. “Look what you’ve done. This neighborhood used to be safe before your kind came here! Look! Look!”
Sofia felt her temper shoot up into the stratosphere. She had always been quick to anger, something she hated because she felt it just played into people’s prejudices about hot-blooded Latinas.
“What are you talking about, you old . . .” Sofia said. She’d been about to say you old bitch, because that was exactly what Mrs. Schneider was, a hateful old bitch, but then the smell finally permeated her anger and she staggered. “What on earth?”
She covered her mouth and nose with her hand, but that just seemed to hold the smell closer and she coughed, gagging a little.
The Ghost Tree Page 3