Shelly winds her hair into a loose bun, ready to pull it free if she sees her mother. Grandma wears her hair in braids, wrapped around her head like a crown. They walk hand in hand to the cemetery, where the urn that holds Shelly’s mother’s remains waits.
Grandma cries as the drummers sing a traveling song to guide Shelly’s mother on to her next destination—even though Shelly knows her mom isn’t going anywhere yet—and she and Shelly lower the urn into the earth.
Grandma and Shelly step away from the grave. Grandma cries and holds tight to Shelly’s hand. They stand and watch until the urn is covered in dirt and the song is done, until the other people at the funeral start coming up to offer their condolences and say how lovely it was—the song, the sweetgrass.
Shelly slips away from all the hugging and touching and walks to the outskirts of the cemetery.
“Little Shell,” Joseph says, looking at her with his black, blank eyes and his mouth that moves while his headphones emit the tinny sound of his voice. “Did you bring me a tape?”
“Do you want to learn French?” she asks, pulling her three stolen tapes from her pockets. “The thrift store had these.”
Joseph looks offended. “No music?”
“My mom died,” Shelly says. “I can’t find her.”
Joseph reaches for the tapes. He feeds them into his Walkman one by one. “Je suis désolé. That means I’m sorry. I’m dead. It’s not so bad.”
“Says you,” says Estelle K. J. Park, she and her fogged-over glasses suddenly appearing beside Joseph. “With your Walkman and your constant moping. Young lady, did you know my angel’s still not up? It should be up by now!”
Joseph lets out a world-weary sigh. “Oui, oui—je connais la musique. Estelle, Shelly’s mother just died.”
Estelle stops talking and leans back, crossing her arms over her chest. “Well, shoot,” she says. “Sorry, kid. What’d you go for on her grave—something classy or something a little bold like me? How big’s the tombstone?”
Shelly doesn’t really want to talk about what her mother’s grave is going to look like. She shrugs. “Grandma did that stuff.”
“You ask your grandma for me. You tell her, too—you tell her to see about my angel. It’s taking too long.” Estelle pauses, tilting her head as she looks down at Shelly. “You’ll be all right, kid. You’ll see her again before you know it. Not like the rest of us. Nobody visits and nobody could see me if they did.”
And message delivered about her angel, Estelle is gone and Joseph and Shelly are alone again.
Shelly can feel tears prickling at the corners of her eyes and words tugging at her throat, trying to worm their way out of her. She swallows them because she won’t weep on the dead. There’s no rule against it, but she wants to be strong—she wants to seem better at this than she is.
They come out anyway.
“I can’t find her,” she says. “I miss her. I can’t remember what her voice sounds like. Not exactly. What if I forget how she smells next?”
Joseph is a ghost, so he doesn’t really get what she means. Shelly can see that on his face.
Shelly also doesn’t know who else to talk to.
“You’re a ghost,” she says. “You live here. If you see her—”
“I don’t live anywhere,” Joseph says. He pauses, nods. “But if I see her, I’ll tell her Little Shell is looking for her mother. I’ll tell her you want to hear her voice again.”
Shelly doesn’t think to wonder how Joseph will know it’s her mother until after she finds Grandma and the rest of the funeral party getting ready to head back home, where there’s lots of food and more people waiting to say how sorry they are—her mom’s coworkers and Grandma’s clients, their other neighbors. Shelly hadn’t realized her mom knew this many people. Jenny Potts opens the door to the back seat of her Prius and Shelly crawls in. Shelly lays her head in Grandma’s lap and closes her eyes.
Nobody talks as Jenny starts the car. She pulls out of the parking lot and even though Shelly doesn’t have a seatbelt on, Jenny doesn’t say anything to her about sitting up straight or buckling up. Shelly’s mom would have said something.
Shelly watches the telephone wires through the window, black against the mottled gray sky, and thinks about seeing her mother again. “Do ghosts know things?” she asks.
“They know lots of things,” Grandma says. “Things they knew when they were alive. All the things they’ve learned since they died. Ghosts have a lot of time on their hands.”
Shelly shakes her head. That’s not what she means. “Do they know things about other ghosts? Would a ghost know who another ghost was, before they became a ghost?”
“Ghosts are just like people, Shelly,” Grandma says, undoing Shelly’s bun and stroking her hair. “They don’t have a special connection to other ghosts just because they’re all dead.”
Grandma cradles Shelly to her chest the way her mom used to when Shelly was small and rubs her back when Shelly starts to cry. “It hurts now, but it’s going to be okay,” she promises. “I’m here and you’re here, and I’m going to take care of you. We’re going to be okay.”
Okay feels like it’s years and years away right now, so far away it might as well be the moon, might as well not exist, but the car keeps driving toward the house and Grandma keeps holding Shelly close. The world keeps moving.
“Your mom loved you very much,” Grandma says. “Remember that, Shelly. You were her world. We’ll do right by her memory, you and I. You’re going to make her so proud.”
Maybe she will—maybe she’ll get a chance to hear her mother tell her she’s proud of her. She hasn’t come to the house and she wasn’t at the cemetery, but that doesn’t mean her mother isn’t coming. She might be taking her time or caught up in the transition, but Grandma is right. Her mom loves her. She’ll come.
Grandma starts humming as she rubs Shelly’s back, singing the traveling song from the funeral under her breath, and Shelly falls asleep there, in Grandma’s lap, and for the moment things feel just a little bit better.
10
Shelly sleeps in her mother’s room instead of her own. Days pass. Grandma doesn’t make her go to school, but sometimes they go next door and Shelly gets to play with Mrs. Potts’s cats, and sometimes Grandma comes and sleeps in Mom’s room with her. The bed feels big and empty, even with Grandma there.
Any day now her mother’s going to walk through the door and apologize for being gone for so long, the way she did when she had to pull long shifts at work. Shelly will tell her it’s okay. That it doesn’t matter if it took a long time, it’s just nice to have her home.
Only she doesn’t come. They get visits from neighbors and Grandma’s clients, and every time someone comes by and it’s not her mom, Shelly feels a wrenching in her chest like she’s losing her all over again.
Two weeks after the funeral, the visitor is a friend of a friend of Grandma’s named Anna. She sits in their kitchen looking nervous and playing with her gold necklace. “I know it’s a bad time,” she says. “But I think my house is haunted.”
Shelly doesn’t feel much like dealing with a stranger’s ghost right now. The more days that pass without the appearance of her mother’s ghost, the more Shelly thinks maybe home isn’t where her mom thought to appear. But just in case, she doesn’t want to be somewhere else when her mom gets here. She lies in bed at night and thinks tomorrow and then maybe next week. Sometimes she closes her eyes and tries to will her mother’s ghost into the house, tries to summon it with just the power of wanting.
It’s not fair. Her mom should have come back right away. All these other people have ghosts they don’t want, and the one time a ghost would make everything better, Shelly’s mom is nowhere to be seen.
She’s coming. Shelly knows she’s coming, deep down in her bones, but Grandma hasn’t ever said anything about ghosts taking so long to sho
w up.
“Shelly, would you make our guest some tea?” Grandma says. Normally she likes meeting new clients, but she sounds tired, like maybe she needs the tea to get through the consultation. She turns to Anna. “We’ll have to take a look.”
Shelly turns on the electric kettle and gets out mugs for all three of them.
“Thank you,” says Anna. “I can pay you. I don’t mind. I just want to be sure it’s out of my house.”
“I think . . . two hundred dollars is our base rate.”
Shelly looks over from making tea. “Two hundred?” she asks. They’re not supposed to charge everyone money—and never before they’ve seen what the haunting is like.
“A base rate,” Grandma repeats. “It may change if the ghost is harder or easier to deal with.”
“That’s all right,” says Anna, looking grateful to be told yes, even if it comes with a steep price. “I’ll pay anything.”
Anna’s house is an old place on top of a hill. Shelly hears the ghost as soon as they step inside—a rattling squeak coming from the fireplace in the living room just off the entrance. The house is huge, with high ceilings and real wood floors. Anna’s couches are piled high with decorative pillows, and she has photos of her family all along the wooden mantle of the fireplace.
The sound that fills the living room makes it almost unbearable to stand in. Anna shivers as she leads them inside. Shelly wonders if the noise is as loud for her as it is for Shelly and Grandma or if she can hear anything at all.
“I see,” says Grandma. “Quite an active ghost, isn’t it?”
“So it is haunted?” Anna asks, tugging at her necklace. “Sometimes I hear sounds like someone is screaming in here —like someone’s being hurt. Can you fix it? Get rid of it?”
“Oh yes,” Grandma says. “This won’t be a problem at all. The basic package will more than cover it. Shelly?”
Shelly walks over to the rattling fireplace and ducks her head down so she can peer up the dark shaft. She can’t see much—it’s black with soot and there’s no light—but another squeak comes from above her and Shelly is glad her head is up the chimney so no one can see her laugh.
It’s an easy ghost. A raccoon that got stuck in the chimney. He looks furious about being stuck. When Shelly lets down her hair, he grabs hold of it eagerly, pulling himself free from the shaft and climbing straight into her arms.
There’s still a large part of Shelly that doesn’t want to be dealing with someone else’s ghost, but she can’t help feeling proud when she walks back over to Grandma and Anna. “I got him!”
“That was it?” Anna asks. “I thought there’d be more ceremony.”
“He didn’t want to haunt you. He just got wedged in the wrong place and couldn’t get loose,” Shelly says. “He won’t bother you again.”
“You should get a professional chimney sweep in before you try starting a fire this winter,” Grandma adds. “Just in case.”
Anna counts out $200 in twenties and Grandma tucks them into her purse. Shelly carries the chittering raccoon out into the daylight and he leaps from her arms, fading from sight as he hits the ground.
Shelly can’t help thinking a raccoon isn’t worth that much money. “We’re not supposed to charge everyone for their ghosts.”
Grandma looks down at Shelly. “We’re not,” she agrees. “Sometimes the rules are what you make of them. Sometimes they need to be bent—broken. Sometimes the world is made of hard choices.”
Shelly doesn’t like taking the money, but she thinks she knows what Grandma means—that Anna was someone who could afford to pay, and she and Grandma couldn’t afford not to charge. That even though Shelly didn’t really want to deal with a ghost for someone else, Anna really needed someone to help her get rid of the raccoon stuck in her chimney.
• • •
When they take the bus home from Anna’s house, Jenny Potts and her partner are waiting outside their house. Shelly freezes up beside Grandma, her heart rate spiking. Shelly likes Jenny, but she can’t help thinking about the night her mom died every time she sees her now. She can’t help worrying that there’s more bad news coming.
“Mom said someone came by for an exorcism.” Jenny gives Grandma a sheepish smile. “They beat us to it by an hour.”
Grandma raises her eyebrows. “Someone haunting the morgue?”
“No. We need a body found and you— I mean, if it’s not too much trouble, Louisa,” Jenny says. “I wouldn’t ask except nobody can find people as fast as you can.”
Grandma takes a long look at Jenny and her silent, vaguely disapproving partner then crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m going to have to charge a consultation fee,” she says. “If you want my services.”
Jenny and her partner exchange a glance. “A fee?” Jenny repeats. “We’ll have to ask.”
“It’ll have to be official,” her partner agrees. “Something through the department.” He looks at Shelly standing in the hallway behind Grandma. “The kind of official that means a crime scene is no place for a child.”
Shelly doesn’t think she’s a child anymore. She’s gotten older since her mom died. She can’t stop growing up and getting further away from her mom. She frowns at the officer and opens her mouth to tell him she’s Grandma’s assistant—that just because she’s young doesn’t mean the dead will scare her or that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.
Grandma speaks first. “Shelly will stay home this time.”
Shelly feels like she just got dunked in cold water. She might not have wanted to help with the raccoon, but she doesn’t want to be left out, either. “What?”
Grandma reaches out to touch her shoulder. “Your mother didn’t like you going to crime scenes anyway,” she says. “You can still come with me to other jobs, Shelly. Just not these ones. Will you be okay by yourself or should I call someone to come and stay with you while I’m gone?”
Shelly scowls. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m not a kid.”
Grandma looks like she disagrees.
“Mom’ll look after you, Shell,” Jenny says. “She’d be happy to have you for dinner, you know that. You can play with the cats.”
It’s like nobody even heard Shelly. Or more likely nobody cares about her opinion. “Okay,” she says. “Sure.”
Jenny smiles at Shelly and then her attention is back on Grandma, on what Shelly’s mom used to refer to as Jenny convincing the RCMP to pay an old Native lady to find bodies for them. Shelly can see, now, why her mom didn’t like it. She doesn’t want Grandma to go with them, either.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” Grandma says to Shelly, pressing a kiss on the top of her head. “Mrs. Potts will be happy for you to visit. Don’t let her wring any more mouse exterminations from you.”
Shelly stands in the driveway and watches Grandma leaving her behind. This time, she gets into the back of the police car when they ask to drive her—breaking another one of her own rules. She waves at Shelly as the car starts and then makes a shooing motion in the direction of Mrs. Potts’s half of the duplex.
Shelly waves back until the police car is out of sight then turns around and takes out her key to open the door to their house. She makes herself a peanut butter sandwich for dinner and eats it in the kitchen, alone.
11
Grandma opens the front door all tense—like she’s worried Shelly might not be in either side of the house—and although her shoulders relax, she frowns. “Shelly, I thought we agreed you were going to go next door. Edna said you never came over.”
“I didn’t want to go to her place,” Shelly says. “I’m not a kid. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You don’t need to be alone, either,” Grandma says. “I’m sorry I had to leave you, Shelly. Rent is going to be due soon. We need the work.”
It feels silly for Grandma to say we when it’s clear she m
eans her. Shelly looks down at the parapsychology book she’s been trying to read all evening. She didn’t find anything useful in it before, but maybe this time she’ll find something she missed. Maybe she’ll find something that will help her find her mom. She doesn’t want to sit with Mrs. Potts and her cats while Grandma works. It just makes her think more about what she’s missing. She’s tired of feeling sad all the time. She wants to do something. Helping with ghosts would be her top choice, but if her grandma’s going to cut her off from some of the work, maybe Shelly needs to look elsewhere.
“When can I go back to school?”
Grandma gives her a surprised look. “Do you want to go back? You can go back whenever you want to.”
Shelly’s not entirely sure she wants to go, but right now school sounds better than home. It’s something to distract her from the way she feels, like she’s a ghost in her own home, waiting for something to happen.
“Yeah,” she says. “I want to go back.”
“I’ll call the school tomorrow,” Grandma says. “I’ll ask them about Monday.”
• • •
Shelly sits in her own bedroom and listens to the call—Grandma talks about Shelly wanting to get out of the house and get her mind off things. She tells whoever’s on the other end—the principal or Ms. Flores, Shelly assumes—that she’ll be home and they can call if Shelly needs to leave early.
She tells Shelly, too, on the bus to school Monday morning. Shelly’s in sixth grade. She doesn’t need Grandma to come with her to school in the morning, but she’d insisted on taking her. “You don’t need to push yourself, Shelly. You can go to the office and tell them you want to call me. I’ll come get you.”
“I’m okay,” Shelly says. “I’ll be okay.”
“But if you’re not, for any reason—”
“I’ll call!” Shelly stands up as soon as the bus reaches her stop. “I’ll be okay, Grandma. I know how to use a phone.”
Shelly wouldn’t have gotten away with snapping before. Her mother would’ve said, Shell, what’s that tone of voice? and Don’t speak to your grandma like that.
The Ghost Collector Page 5